Paul French

On August 14, 1937 Chinese planes began bombing Shanghai. It was the early days of the Second Sino-Japanese war and Beijing had recently been taken by the Japanese; the invasion had begun. In Shanghai, Japanese forces moved to seize the city, with dogged Chinese resistance. Aiming to hit the Japanese Navy’s flagship cruiser, the Idzumo, the Chinese pilots missed their marks and rained devastation upon the city’s civilian population.

In his latest nonfiction narrative, historian and author Paul French marks the 80th anniversary of what came to be called Bloody Saturday by reconstructing accounts of the attack from those who lived through it in the city’s International Settlements.

To set the scene for our readers, what happened in Shanghai on August 14, 1937?

Just over a month previously, after a staged provocation at the Marco Polo (Luguo) Bridge, the Japanese had attacked and occupied Beijing and most of northern China. In early August, after another series of provocations, the Japanese began attacking the Chinese-controlled portions of Shanghai – what today are known as Zhabei, Baoshan, and Jiangwan – adjacent to the International Settlement. The Japanese ordered their Third Fleet to the Huangpu River, led by the flagship armoured cruiser, Idzumo. With the Japanese shelling northern Shanghai from Hongkew Park (now Lu Xun Park) with the Idzumo, the decision was taken to bomb the battleship from the air. Idzumo was moored up opposite the then-Japanese Consulate – close to the Garden (or Waibaidu) Bridge and the Bund. A tough target at the best of times and, with a typhoon having passed close by Shanghai leaving low cloud, Saturday August 14 was far from ideal conditions.

The Chinese pilots missed the Idzumo but did strike factories in Pudong as well as, disastrously, hitting the Palace and Cathay Hotels (now the Swatch Art Peace and the Peace Hotels, respectively) at the junction of Nanjing Road and the Bund. A second tranche of bombs struck the street outside the Great World Amusement Palace in the French Concession (which had just reopened after a refurbishment). At the time it was the most deadly example of aerial bombing of a civilian population and the media rapidly called it “Bloody Saturday.” This year is obviously the 80th anniversary of the tragedy.

What sources did you use in recreating this "Bloody Saturday" for your book? How did you track down eyewitness accounts 80 years after the fact?

My writing, both fiction and nonfiction, concentrates on the foreign communities in China between the World Wars – their lives and experiences. Therefore my recreation of the tragic events in Shanghai that August 14 in 1937 is largely from the perspective of foreigners living in Shanghai – “Shanghailanders.” Some years ago I published a history of foreign correspondents in China from the time of the Opium Wars to 1949, so I knew there were a lot of journalistic accounts in both newspapers and memoirs of the period. Other Shanghailanders recorded it in their diaries and memoirs too. As an International Settlement, Shanghai was, of course, well known at the time; foreign troops (including the U.S. Fourth Marines) were stationed there. The attack was seen as a possible threat to Western interests in China and so was big news round the world.

Eyewitnesses are now in their late 80s and 90s, though I did speak to several people who were young children at the time. Naturally they just remembered the chaotic scenes around the city afterwards and their parents’ nervousness rather than any of the politics leading up to the event. Former Shanghailander families are now scattered around the world, but tales have been passed down. For instance, Con Slobodchikoff is a prominent animal behaviorist at an American university, a leader in his field. He also happens to have been born in Shanghai, the son of Nicolai Slobodchikoff, a Russian émigré who joined the French Concession police force and was one of the first officials to arrive at the scene of the bombs outside the Great World. Con was able to confirm some facts about his father and his experiences in Shanghai that both corrected some details that had been published before and added to what we know.

What role did the aerial attack play in the larger Battle of Shanghai, one of the first major engagements in the Second Sino-Japanese War?

The Battle of Shanghai, that was fought from Bloody Saturday through to the end of November, was effectively the first major engagement of the war between the Nationalist Chinese Army and the Imperial Japanese Army. In general the Chinese were not as well armed or trained as the Japanese, while the Japanese air force was superior to China’s and the Japanese still had the Idzumo and other battleships moored up on the Huangpu, guns bristling. The historian Peter Harmsen has described the battle as “Stalingrad on the Yangtze” and I’d recommend his excellent book, Shanghai 1937, as essential reading for anyone interested.

My major concern, though, is the International Settlement and French Concession and while the street fighting for Shanghai did encroach into the Settlement, north of the Suzhou Creek, in and around what is now Hongkou (including the area of large Japanese settlement known as “Little Tokyo”), Tilanqiao and the large Yangpu district to the east, it didn’t cross into the central portion of the Settlement. Refugees spilling over into the Settlement (Chinese and Shanghailanders) had to cross the Garden Bridge, which became a dangerously congested funnel onto the Bund. The Fourth Marines patrolled the southern bank of Suzhou Creek prepared for any Japanese attempt at incursion. Britain, America, France, and Italy all moved additional naval craft and soldiers to protect the foreign Settlements. The Settlement imposed nighttime curfews, prepared a full-scale evacuation of foreign citizens and bunkered down for some time.

Did Shanghai's unique status as an international business center – with a sizable expat population – factor into war planning on both the Japanese and Chinese sides? 

Japan, of course, wanted to control Shanghai for the same reason that it had become an international treaty port at the end of the First Opium War by “unequal treaty” – access to, and control of, the Yangtze trade. Take Shanghai and Tokyo would control the major artery to China’s hinterlands as well as the major routes to Chiang Kai-shek’s capital at Nanjing. And that’s just what Japan did – moved inland from Shanghai up the Yangtze, fighting brutally as it progressed, including the horrific Nanjing Massacre in December 1937. Japan avoided invading the foreign concessions as Tokyo knew this could potentially mean going to war with Britain, France, the United States, and the other concessionary powers. It was not ready for that in 1937. Additionally, Shanghai was a very profitable business center for many Japanese companies involved in everything from international shipping and engineering to silk and tobacco. It wanted to retain that access.

But this meant that after the Battle for Shanghai the foreign concessions were effectively cut off and isolated – the Japanese on three sides and also in effective control of the Huangpu River and access to the sea. This period – from Bloody Saturday until the final Japanese invasion and occupation of the International Settlement in December 1941 immediately after Pearl Harbor – became known as Gudao, or the “Solitary Island” time. Many foreigners sought to leave on evacuation ships, or however they could, but many stayed either out of choice or because (like the Russian émigrés and the increasing number of Jewish refugees arriving from Europe) they had nowhere else to go. The Solitary Island period also happens to be the setting of my next book, City of Devils, published by Penguin in Asia in November.

Are there any visible scars from the aerial attack that can be seen in Shanghai today? What about historical markers in remembrance of the attack or the general Battle of Shanghai?

A couple of years ago Shanghai opened the Sihang Warehouse as a museum. The warehouse – which miraculously, given Shanghai’s determined redevelopment over the last quarter century, has survived – was the scene of a final defense in the Battle of Shanghai. As well as exhibits and a repository of documents concerning the Battle of Shanghai, there are physical markers such as bullet holes.

Not many tourists get on the subway and visit the northeastern Jiangwan district, sadly, but it’s well worth the trip. Jiangwan was to be Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Greater Shanghai dream – a planned modern civic administration for the Chinese portions of the metropolis that would replicate the economic dynamism and success of the International Settlement. The planners studied European and American garden city designs, embraced modernism and art-deco “with traditional Chinese styles” and created some amazing buildings. Most are still standing – the former Municipal Museum, City Hall, Municipal Library, a modern hospital, and the very impressive Civil Aviation Building. Walk around Jiangwan, admire the architecture, imagine what might have been if not for the Japanese and look closely at the buildings – you’ll see bullet and shrapnel damage still evident from the Battle for Shanghai.

How does “Bloody Saturday” factor into Chinese historical memory? Has it attained the same historical cachet as other tragedies during the war, such as the Nanjing Massacre? 

Obviously we’ve had some big anniversaries recently and China, at a central government level, decided to make a big deal of the 70th anniversary of Victory over Japan Day in 2015 with a major parade. As far as I know the authorities in Shanghai are not planning any official events to commemorate Bloody Saturday – indeed, to be honest, I am not even sure what the decision making process is for such potentially sensitive commemorations and who exactly would make that call.

The Battle of Shanghai was one of 22 major confrontations during the war. However, it was a major one and should be better remembered. But it’s problematic in many ways and doesn’t serve a wider national narrative of suffering that events such as the Nanjing Massacre do. Bloody Saturday and the Battle of Shanghai just have too many tricky things to explain – the seeming lack of preparedness in Shanghai after the occupation of Beijing; the existence of the foreign concessions; the fact that it was Chinese bombs that accidentally fell on the International Settlement and Frenchtown; and that the Chinese army ultimately lost the battle. There are also arguments over Chinese tactics that perhaps led to higher than necessary casualty rates.

In terms of the overall history of World War II, though, Bloody Saturday is important. Aerial bombing was a much-feared new phenomenon in 1937 – several years previously Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had told the British Parliament that “…the bomber will always get through.” Fears were heightened in April 1937 with the fascist bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica. Somewhere between (historians still argue) 200 and 800 civilians died at Guernica. While historians also argue over the number of victims of Bloody Saturday, it was certainly more than 2,000. Before the European Blitzes, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this was a staggering number of people.