Shanghai 1937 Quotes

“CHAPTER 4 “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“The battle for 203-Meter Hill had been one of the bloodiest episodes of the entire Russo-Japanese War,”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“Many Japanese soldiers also carried cameras into battle, and as was the case with the Germans on the Eastern Front, their snapshots came to constitute a comprehensive photographic record of their own war crimes.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“wrote U.S. correspondent Haldore Hanson, “that when bloodstained Japanese soldiers break into their compounds during a ‘mopping up’ campaign, the easiest way to pacify them is to present each man with a flower.”91”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“August 17, an unregistered Portuguese man was beaten to death by a mob because he was thought to look Japanese.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“Even though most of the Germans were in China on short-term contracts and could have left once the shooting started, they felt an obligation to stay at a key moment when their host nation’s survival was at stake. “We all agreed that as private citizens in Chinese employment there could be no question of our leaving our Chinese friends to their fate,” Alexander von Falkenhausen, the top advisor, wrote later.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“Eleanor B. Roosevelt, the wife of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was in Shanghai at the time of the bombing and was horrified by the loss of innocent life.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“For a brief period, nationality did not seem to matter. A Japanese girl in high heels stepped carefully among the injured, alongside a Chinese nurse in a snow-white dress that gradually turned a deep scarlet.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“The victims—men, women and children—had been thrown up against the walls of the buildings. Many were stripped completely naked after the intense gas pressure from the bombs had torn off their clothes.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“This did not deter any of the other refugees, who kept pushing towards the bridge and what they believed to be the safety of the International Settlement.35 They could not know it, but they were moving in the wrong direction, towards the most horrific slaughter of innocent civilians of the entire Shanghai campaign.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“You better move,” he told Zhang Zhizhong’s chief of staff. “Otherwise you’ll get bombed.” Shortly after his visit, Feng left for Shanghai in a car. He had not even got two miles before a swarm of Japanese planes appeared over his head, flying in the direction of Suzhou. Seconds later he saw clouds rise over Zhang Zhizhong’s command post. Zhang survived the bombing, but he had received a lesson. “The Japanese knew right from the start where Zhang’s headquarters was,” Feng said.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“General Huang Meixing, the 41-year-old commander of the 88th Infantry Division’s 264th Brigade, was leading an attack in the vicinity of the marine headquarters. His divisional commander Sun Yuanliang tried to contact him on the field phone, but was forced to wait. When he finally got through to Huang, he cracked a rare joke. “It took so long I thought you were dead,” he said. Just minutes afterwards, as if fate wanted to punish Sun Yuanliang for this bit of black humor, Huang Meixing’s command post was hit by an artillery grenade, killing him instantly.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“thousands of soldiers dressed in the Chinese Nationalists’ khaki colors, with German-style helmets and stick grenades swung across their chests.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“It appears that Zhang Zhizhong did not expect to survive this final showdown with the Japanese arch-foe. He took the fight very personally and even ordered his daughter to interrupt her education in England and return home to serve her country in the war.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“The Italians had set up a separate flight school near the city of Luoyang in central China which, Chennault said, “graduated every Chinese cadet who survived the training course as a full-fledged pilot regardless of his ability.” This had deadly consequences. The American airman watched how “fighter pilots supposedly ready for combat spun in and killed themselves in basic trainers.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“The expansion of the air force had mainly been overseen by Italians, which was a mixed blessing. Mussolini’s Fascist government had sent a large number of pilots to China as advisors”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“Chief of the German advisory corps was General Alexander von Falkenhausen, and it is hard to think of anyone more qualified for the job.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“Of the 385 Japanese and Koreans residing in Tongzhou, altogether 223 lost their lives. It appears that no one bothered to count the Chinese casualties, but there is little doubt they reached a comparable number. As horrific as it was, the violence in Tongzhou would quickly pale in comparison with the astonishing atrocities Japanese soldiers proved capable of as they entered China’s great population centers further down the east coast.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“Chinese loyalists at heart, had been waiting for. In the early hours of July 29, they sent their men spilling out into the streets. Long swords glimmered in the faint moonlight as the chilling chant of “Kill! Kill!” echoed down the narrow alleys. Most Japanese men had departed, and what followed was not so much a battle as a massacre. Years of pent-up anger was released in an orgy of blood. The Chinese police officers cut off the arms of old women and raped the young ones, before stabbing their genitals with bayonets. They decapitated others and lowered their heads in wicker baskets from the parapets.22 Japanese soldiers rushing to Tongzhou after the massacre encountered a horrific spectacle. “I saw a mother and child who had been slaughtered. The child’s fingers had been hacked off,” said one of them, Major Katsura Shizuo. He went on to describe the grisly scene at a Japanese store near the south gate of the city: “The body of a man, probably the owner, who had been dragged outside and killed, had been dumped on the road. His body had been cut open, exposing his ribs and his intestines, which had spilled out onto the ground.”23 A survivor told the Asahi Shimbun of the torture inflicted on some of the Japanese civilians before they were killed: “I chanced to see a man being dragged along by a wire. At that time I thought that he was only bound with it, but now I know that it was pierced through his nose.”24 After Tongzhou”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“was recaptured, more carnage followed, but the tables had been turned. Japanese soldiers bent on revenge beheaded all the men they managed to capture, whether rebels or not, and raped the women. When they were done with Tongzhou, they swept the surrounding countryside searching for anyone who looked like a fleeing police officer, hard to determine at a distance, and gunned them down too. Finally, they set the town on fire.”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

“but Shanghai made “the Chicago of Al Capone appear a staid, almost pious, provincial town,”
― Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze