“August 1937: War and the death en masse of civilians”

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August 1937:
War and the Death
en masse
of Civilians
Christian Henriot
University of Lyon

060
On 14 August 1937, Shanghai awoke to the threat of a powerful
typhoon sweeping along the China coast. For days, its trajectory
had been uncertain, but by 12 August it was moving in a north-
northwesterly direction, seemingly headed for the city. A week earlier,
the city had suffered from another typhoon, with a deluge of rain and
brutal winds that threw people on the Bund to the ground. The second
typhoon came close, but failed to hit the harbor. It continued its
course on the northern bank of the Yangzi River where it eventually
dwindled. Yet clouds were not the only threat hovering over the city.
War was in the making between the Chinese and Japanese
armies. On this fateful morning, despite the strong winds, Chinese
pilots started dropping bombs on enemy lines. The Japanese had
headquartered their command on the Izumo, a floating fortress with
little military capability, moored in front of the Japanese consulate.
As Chinese planes swooped over the Huangpu River in an attempt to
hit the Japanese vessel, thousands of watchers crowded on the Bund
hoping to see a fatal blow delivered to the Japanese flagship. They
cheered and yelled each time a bomb exploded in the river around
the ship. At 4:27, however, the short epic turned into a tragedy. Three
bombs fell at the corner of Nanking Road and the Bund, followed by
two more bombs in front of the Great World building in the French
Concession, instantly killing 1,200 people and leaving hundreds of
wounded on the ground. On the first day of the war, in a single stroke,
Shanghai experienced its highest civilian war casualty. Worse, the
Chinese pilots had killed their own people.
The history of civilian war victims is a topic historians have
shunned in China beyond the conventional trope about the suffering
of the Chinese people in the hands of the Japanese aggressor. Western
historiography on war violence in China pales in comparison with
the numerous studies on war violence in European wars or colonial
wars in Asia.1 If we except the path-breaking work of Diana Lary
and Stephen MacKinnon on the “scars of war” and, more recently,
1 For a comparative overview, see Christopher Goscha, “Bringing Asia into Focus:
Civilians and Combatants in the Line of Fire in China and Indochina,” War &
Society 31:2 (August 1, 2012): 87-105.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
061
Beyond Suffering by James A. Flath and Norman Smith, the literature
concentrates mostly on displaced populations.2 The issue this paper
attempts to raise is the fate of civilian population caught in the line
of fire. More specifically, it examines several instances of mass
killings that resulted from the indiscriminate use of aerial bombing.
A major challenge in writing the history of death en masse is the
lack of documentation as only operating administrations were in a
position to document these events. In the Chinese municipality, the
authorities just crumbled in the early phase of the war. Yet even in
the foreign settlements, the archives often offer only short and terse
reports that fail to convey a sense of what actually happened. Most
of these documents are not yet available to the public at the Shanghai
Municipal Archives. Fortunately, there is a way around this difficulty,
which this paper fully explores. The foreign administrations produced
many photographs that, combined with images from various sources
(war correspondents, newspapers, private collections), constitute an
invaluable visual record. Thus photographs provide the backbone
of this paper, which I have supplemented with archival sources, to
recapture the massive loss of civilian lives that occurred in the city
and to recover the memory of events long dismissed and forgotten.
The August 1937 bombing represents a unique case of modern
mass carnage among civilians in the history of the city. It presented
the civil authorities and medical institutions with an unprecedented
challenge in an already seriously strained situation. I shall examine
the circumstances that led to the tragedy, the extent of the human
disaster, and the ways in which the authorities coped with the sudden
and unexpected mass of dead and wounded bodies. I will also address
the sensitive issue of perception of this event by the local actors, both
Chinese and Western, as well as its subsequent erasure from memory.
2 Diana Lary and Stephen R MacKinnon, eds., The Scars of War: The Impact of
Warfare on Modern China (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2001); James A. Flath and
Norman Smith, Beyond Suffering Recounting War in Modern China (Vancouver;
Toronto: UBC Press, 2011). See also Edward McCord, “Cries that Shake the Earth:
Military Atrocities and Popular Protests in Warlord China,” Modern China 31:1
(2005): 3-34.

062
The death of hundreds of Chinese civilians under Chinese bombs on
the first day of the war was not – it could not be – a fact that fit into
the strongly nationalistic narrative of the time, even today. When
mentioned in local history books, the August 14 bombing of civilians
is remembered as an incident, an unavoidable part of warfare,
something worth a passing mention. I have never come across a text
that addresses this event seriously to the full extent of its significance
and its ramifications within the master narrative of war in Shanghai.
These were non heroic “bad deaths”, yet they were also deaths that
fit into a long sequence of violence against civilians, from 1932 to
1937, causing loss and trauma that remained subdued in the political
discourse.3
War in the City
Up until the beginning of the month, the prospect of war in
Shanghai seemed thousands of miles away. In early July, Chinese
and Japanese troops had fought in the vicinity of Lugouqiao (Marco
Polo Bridge) after a Japanese private went missing. There had
been previous skirmishes and even frontal attacks between the
contending armies in North China. The Chinese central government
had heretofore opted to avoid full-scale war and accepted successive
3 Although China suffered as much as Russia, for example, during the 1937-1945
period, addressing the issue of death, trauma, and memory like Jay Winter for
Europe, remains largely an open field. On China, see Lary and MacKinnon, The
Scars of War. On Russia, see Catherine Merridale, “Death and Memory in Modern
Russia,” History Workshop Journal 42 (October 1, 1996): 1-18. On war trauma on
combatants and civilians, see Nigel C. Hunt, Memory, War, and Trauma (Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the sequels of W.W.I., the
reference works are Jay M. Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between
Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006); Jay M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in
European Cultural History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press,
1995).

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
063
compromises (loss of territory, demilitarization of large areas, etc.). In
1937, however, public opinion was highly incensed by the continued
encroachment on Chinese sovereignty by the Japanese military. The
central government under Chiang Kai-shek had run out of options.
The regional armies in the North, only nominally under Nanjing’s
command, were prepared to take a stand and attempt to repulse any
renewed Japanese invasion. Armies throughout the country were also
ready to move north and join the patriotic defense of the homeland.
In all the major urban centers, students, merchants, professionals,
trade unionists, artists, and many common people voiced their anger
against the Japanese attack. Anti-Japanese associations to save the
nation (Fanri jiuguo hui) sprang up again after their demise under
government pressure in 1932.
In Shanghai, feelings ran high. The city was home to a large
Japanese civilian community – more than 26,000 residents –
concentrated mostly in the Hongkou district of the International
Settlement and northern Hongkou, the adjacent area that extended
north into the Chinese municipality. Organized wholly under a single
association, the Residents' association (Shanhai kyoryū mindan),
the community and its leaders were unequivocally and extremely
vocal against Chinese nationalism.4 They resented the anti-Japanese
movements and boycotts that had punctuated Sino-Japanese relations
since the infamous Twenty-one demands in 1915: the 4 May 1919
movement, the 30 May 1925 movement, the Jinan incident in 1928,
and the movements of protest that followed the 18 September 1931
invasion of Manchuria. In 1932 when the Japanese Navy launched its
first attack on the city, the Japanese civilians had been instrumental
in helping the soldiers through the city, taking advantage of their
position of superiority to brutalize ordinary Chinese citizens. In 1937,
even if this was not their call, the local Mindan leaders were adamant
in asking for Japanese army protection from Chinese nationalist
4 Christian Henriot, “Little Japan in Shanghai: An Insulated Community, 1875-1945,”
in New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842-1952, eds.
Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000), 146–69.

064
associations.5
On the Chinese side though, the city was not without military
defense. Since soldiers were not allowed, the Chinese authorities
partly circumvented the terms of the agreement by posting regiments
of “peacekeeping forces” (Bao’andui). These were not strictly
speaking military forces. In July 1937, the peacekeeping corps
received reinforcements. The Japanese consulate protested, to no
avail. While the military effort was concentrated on the northern front,
the central government also started moving troops in the direction of
Shanghai, short of the thirty- kilometer radius. This was a preventive
move more than actual preparation for war. The over-extended
Chinese military apparatus could not seriously afford to open a
second front, especially in a city from which the government derived
a substantial part of its revenue. Nor were the foreign powers present
in Shanghai inclined toward a repetition of the 1932 incident, even
if they had suffered far more lightly than the Chinese districts. War
meant the stoppage of business and communications for all. In view of
the rising tensions, the British, French and American consulates had
called for a reinforcement of their military contingents in Shanghai.
Yet, perhaps because war in Shanghai was still unthinkable, there was
no advanced preparation for the safety of the civilian population and
the large-scale disposal of the dead and wounded.6
In early August 1937, although there was no sign of direct
military threat, the military build-up was unmistakable. Under
diplomatic advice, the Japanese community throughout the lower
Yangzi area regrouped in Shanghai from where, along with their
local compatriots, they traveled back to Japan. The Japanese Navy
reinforced its presence in the harbor with ships and more troops from
5 Mark R. Peattie, “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China, 1895-1937,” in
The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937, eds. Peter Duus and Myers
(Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1989), 206.
6 On British organization on the eve of war, see Julie Rugg, “Managing ‘Civilian
Deaths due to War Operations’: Yorkshire Experiences during World War II,”
Twentieth Century British History 15:2 (January 1, 2004): 152-73.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
065
the Third Fleet and from Japan.7 The strident anti-Japanese propaganda
and calls to support the fighting armies in the north by Chinese
associations created a tense atmosphere which the Japanese chose to
interpret as a direct threat to their interests and local community. As in
1932, a minor incident was enough to trigger military violence. Five
years earlier, the Japanese Navy had engineered an attack on Japanese
monks by a paid Chinese mob. On 9 August 1937, Japanese marines
drove to the Hongqiao airfield, an area protected by Chinese soldiers.
When the car refused to stop, the Chinese military guards opened fire,
resulting in two Japanese deaths. The incident caused an immediate
uproar in the Japanese headquarters.
Threatening military action, the Japanese consul demanded
the withdrawal of the Peace Preservation Corps and the demolition
of the defense works erected by the Chinese.8 The local foreign
authorities immediately jumped in to prevent the row from
degenerating into an armed conflict.9 Since the shooting had
occurred in the Extra-settlement road area, a portion of territory
under Chinese administration, but actually policed by the Shanghai
Municipal Council, the Shanghai Municipal Police took charge of the
investigation. The consular body met in emergency to seek a solution
that would appease both parties. Their initial efforts seemed to calm
the mounting tension and reduce saber-rattling on both sides. This
temporary lull was not to last. It only served to give a little more time
for each party to get ready for a military confrontation. There were
sporadic skirmishes around the North train station on the morning
of 13 August, and then more serious conflict broke out later in the
7 Bradford A. Lee, Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1939: A Study in the
Dilemmas of British Decline (Stanford University Press, 1973), 36.
8 Tianshi Yang, “Chiang Kai-shek and the Battles of Shanghai and Nanjing,” in The
Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-
1945, ed. Mark R. Peattie, et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011),
146.
9 On Western involvement in diplomatic efforts, see Lee, Britain and the Sino-
Japanese War, 1937-1939; Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1985).

066
afternoon. The Japanese Navy headquarters ordered a flag to be raised
signaling war. Japanese marines launched several excursions from
Hongkou while cannon from Japanese warships bombarded Zhabei,
causing an immediate response by the peacekeeping forces, soon to be
joined by regular troops. The Nationalist government itself had finally
made the decision to stall the Japanese assault by opening a second
front in the city.10
The Refugee Crisis
Shanghai was not one city. It was several cities in the same
territory. The existence of two foreign settlements – the International
Settlement proper and the French Concession, as well as that of the
“External road areas” to the north (“North Hongkou”) and the west of
the International Settlement beyond its official boundaries – defied
any attempt to make Shanghai a single urban space. Shanghai was
fragmented. The experience of war was not totally new to Shanghai,
nor was the sudden and massive arrival of a destitute population a
novelty. Over the past century, the city had received various waves
of refugees due to natural disasters or, more often, human conflict.
The foreign settlements had in the past been protected, since their
extraterritorial status made them an island of relative protection in
times of upheaval. To an area of less than six square miles, normally
with a population of close to two million, war in 1937 brought utterly
destitute refugees by the hundreds of thousands within just a few
weeks. As one district after the other, within and on every side of the
city felt the scourge of war, there was an almost total evacuation into
the foreign settlements.
War started on 13 August 1937 in Shanghai, but the movement of
population actually started well before and, as far as Zhabei, Hongkou,
and even Yangshupu were concerned, it was almost complete by
the time fighting eventually began. These populous districts were
10 Van de Ven, War and Nationalism, 197-199.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
067
the primary military targets, along with Yangshupu, the city’s large
industrial district. In the 1931-1932 conict, the population had been
caught by surprise and stranded in the fighting areas. The foreign
settlements had closed access to their territories as soon as the conict
had begun to prevent the inflow of the Chinese population, while
the Chinese municipal authorities had organized the evacuation of
civilians from the areas affected by fighting to the war-free districts
of the municipality.11 In 1937, the general conguration was radically
different. The population was keenly aware that local tensions
anywhere could easily escalate into a full – fledged conflict. Even
a small local incident could trigger the instant departure of terrified
residents. In late July, the disappearance of a Japanese marine – he had
actually escaped to avoid sanctions after a night of drinking – caused
thousands of Chinese to seek refuge in the International Settlement.12
It is estimated that more than 50,000 left Zhabei between 26 July and
5 August 1937.13 This was the rst stage of a massive movement of
population affecting all the Chinese-administered districts.
All the interventions of goodwill and mediation by the foreign
authorities notwithstanding, the residents of the previously targeted
districts did not miss the first signs of military build-up. The
wealthier residents began to relocate goods and family to the foreign
settlements. When the Chinese mayor decided to abandon the Civic
Centre in Jiangwan, panic prevailed and the flow of refugees-to-be
quickly swelled and clogged the streets leading to the International
Settlement. The displacement of population was not prepared or
planned in any way, whether on the side of the residents or that of
the authorities. The Shanghai Municipal Council and the French
Municipal Council had no valid reason or pretext to stop the flow,
as it unfolded before the beginning of hostilities. The population
simply anticipated what was about to happen. That the movement
was massive is quite clear from the well-known picture of the Garden
11 Henriot, Christian, Shanghai 1927-1937. Municipal Power, Locality, and
Modernization (Berkeley: The University Press of California, 1993), 87-91.
12 North China Herald [NCH], 26 July 1937; 29 July 1937.
13 NCH, 9 August 1937; 11 August 1937.

068
Bridge (Fig. 1). This bridge was the main avenue through which
Zhabei, Hongkou, and Yangshupu residents could move into the
International Settlement. It was also the most favorable spot, since the
Bund and its garden offered enough space to accommodate the large
influx of population.
Fig. 1
Réfugiés de Hongkew sur le Garden Bridge
For the vast majority of refugees, the escape was made on foot.
In groups, in families, or alone, these residents marched toward
the foreign settlements with little more than what they were able to
carry. Whatever else they possessed they left behind at home. What
the photographs show us are people with small “bundles,” such as
a woman with her child or a son with his elderly mother. There is
no need to stretch our imagination to guess that they carried only
clothing and very basic necessities. When refugees started to pour
into the International Settlement, the authorities there were adamant
about keeping some areas clear, especially in the evening. Spatial
order had to be maintained at all times. It made little sense under

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
069
the circumstances, but the police had instructions to clean out the
Bund where refugees had congregated and to push them into the back
streets. The North China Herald published a picture showing people
who had been compelled to settle in a small street for the night.14 The
following morning, the Bund would be occupied again. It remained a
major concentration point for refugees in the early days of the war.15
Yet the massive arrival of refugees required emergency
arrangements to accommodate them in surroundings with the minimum
facilities for survival. Daytime temperature averaged 29.6 degrees in
August 1937, with peaks at 36 degrees. The establishment of camps
was initially the result of a proliferation of initiatives by all kinds of
institutions and associations. The press noted that most conspicuous
in mobilizing to help the homeless refugees were the provincial guilds
and the benevolent societies.16 Vacant land and unoccupied buildings
like guildhalls and schools offered temporary shelters for the refugees
in search of a place to rest and protection from the summer heat.
Among the large premises that could house refugees were the movie
theaters and amusement centers. The Embassy Theater on Bubbling
Well Road was turned into a refugee camp, as was as the Great World,
one of the largest and most impressive entertainment complexes in
Shanghai.17 It would become one of the main killing grounds on 14
August 1937 when two bombs exploded at its doorstep.
14 NCH, 25 August 1937.
15 Christian Henriot, “Shanghai and the Experience of War: The Fate of Refugees,”
European Journal of East Asian Studies 5:2 (October 1, 2006): 215-45; Christian
Henriot, “Wartime Shanghai Refugees: Chaos, Exclusion, and Indignity: Do
Images Make up for the Absence of Memory?,” in Images in History: Pictures and
Public Space in Modern China, ed. Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh (Berkeley:
IEAS Research Monographs, 2012), 12-54.
16 Feng, Elites locales et solidarités régionales, 92-93.
17 NCH, 25 September 1937.

070
War in the Air
The use of airplanes in warfare was not new to Shanghai. Since
the 1920s, regional warlords had acquired planes from abroad, which
they had used for transport, reconnaissance, and more rarely actual
fighting.18 After the establishment of the nationalist government
in 1928, Chiang Kai-shek initiated a policy of modernization and
unification of the Chinese armies under his command. As part of this
effort, his German military advisors urged him to start building a
small air force.19 Yet the lack of funds and the persisting competition
with regional armies failed to secure the development of a unified and
substantial air force, a fundamental weakness for which the Chinese
army paid dearly in 1932 in its first encounter with the Japanese.
While many factors came into play in the military victory of the
Japanese during the first Sino-Japanese conflict in Shanghai in 1932,
the use of aircraft proved to be immensely instrumental in the Japan’s
overwhelming military superiority.
In 1932, the central squadron of the Chinese air force consisted
in eighteen planes. In Canton, the military authorities also had a small
force, but they failed to send their planes to assist the 19th Army
despite repeated pleas by its commander.20 Unfortunately, their small
number as well as their pilots’ lack of training limited their use to a
couple of sorties. Moreover, a Japanese combined military and naval
flying corps launched two bombing raids against the Chinese airstrips
(Hongqiao, Suzhou and Hangzhou) that practically destroyed the
three centers.21 There was no further attempt by the small Chinese air
18 On early military air force and aviation in China, see “Chinese aircraft and aviation
facilities”, May 1927, AIRS5/865, National Archives (U.K.).
19 Bernd Martin, Die Deutsche Beraterschaft in China 1927-1938: Militär, Wirtschaft,
Aussenpolitik (The German advisory group in China: military, economic, and
political issues in Sino-German relations, 1927-1938) (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1981).
20 Donald A. Jordan, China’s Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932 (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2001), 108, 117.
21 NCH, 1 March 1932.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
071
force to engage their adversaries. Chiang Kai-shek chose to save them
from inevitable destruction. As a result, the Japanese had a free rein
in aerial combat. The sky was theirs throughout the conflict and they
took full advantage of this tactical supremacy.22
The Japanese maintained a rolling thunder of aerial bombing
which, in its effects on the population, could not have been far
different from the experience of Londoners during the Blitz.23 Aware
that the Chinese did not possess the required weaponry for aerial
defense, the Japanese aviators made frequent rounds of reconnaissance
before attacking.24 The Japanese Navy had the Notoro seaplane carrier
from which it launched navy bombers for reconnaissance flights over
Chinese positions and of course actual bombing.25 By the end of the
battle, around 200 planes, half of the total Japanese air force, was
present in the theater of operations. Total dominance in the air and
on the water gave the Japanese military a considerable advantage. It
could decide when and where to concentrate its strikes and launch
decisive operations.26
The lessons of this experience were not lost. In the 1930s, aircraft
manufacturing companies, mostly American or European, vied for
foreign markets. China was a potentially lucrative market. In 1933,
James H. Doolittle, the representative of a large American aircraft
manufacturer went on a tour around the world to promote the sale of
the Curtiss Hawk. He arrived in Shanghai in April where he put on a
number of demonstration flights. According to Xu Guangqiu, Doolittle
startled the Chinese by his skills and exploits above the rooftops of
Shanghai. The Curtiss Hawk was equipped with a powerful 700-horse
22 On the Japanese use of the air force in Shanghai in 1932, see “The Japanese air
force and the invasion of China”, WO106/5566, National Archives (U.K.).
23 Amy Bell, “Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London, 1939-1945,” Journal of British
Studies 48:1 (2009): 153-175.
24 NCH, 2 February 1932, “The Bombing of Chapei” (30 January1932).
25 Jordan, China’s Trial, 46.
26 This was one of the major lessons drawn from this conict by a military ofcer.
Juewu Zhang 張覺吾 , Song Hu kangzhan suo de zhi jingyan yu jiaoxun 淞滬抗戰
所得之經驗與教訓 (Nanjing: Shoudu zhongyang lujunguan xuexiao, 1933), 31.

072
engine and could fly at a top speed of 200 miles an hour. It was the
fastest pursuit plane in Asia. Doolittle’s demonstration paid off.
The Chinese central government placed an order for 50 aircraft that
were delivered six months later. China finally had the nucleus of a
technologically advanced air force.27
Eventually, China acquired 120 planes altogether in 1933 and
215 more the following year. American manufacturers managed to
build close and useful contacts with Chinese high-level officials. They
proved capable of matching the requirements of the Chinese military
and garnered most of the purchase orders. Each year, between 80 and
90 per cent of aircraft purchases were from American companies.
The build-up of a national air force proceeded at a forced pace. By
mid- 1935, the Nationalist air force already had about 500 airplanes.28
The Chinese government also decided to start its own aircraft-
manufacturing factory. After prolonged bidding and negotiations,
it settled for a proposal by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. The
factory opened in October 1934 and produced various models based
on American designs. By the end of 1936, the factory had managed
to manufacture a total of 127 airplanes.29 On the eve of the Sino-
Japanese war, the Chinese air force consisted of nine groups and four
independent squadrons and possessed about 600 aircraft, although not
all of them were serviceable.
At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 the
Hawks were the primary fighter in the Chinese Air Force. They
served as multi-purpose aircraft and were considered the Chinese
Air Force’s frontline fighter-pursuit aircraft. Of a total of about 600
combat aircraft, 300 were fighters and the remainder light bombers
and reconnaissance aircraft.30 The Hawks III equipped the 4th and 5th
Pursuit Groups involved in the ghting in Shanghai. They were ghter-
bombers manned by a single pilot. They could y at 12,500 feet and at
27 Guangqiu Xu, War Wings: The United States and Chinese Military Aviation, 1929-
1949 (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001), 65.
28 Xu, War Wings, 66.
29 Xu, War Wings, 70.
30 Yang, “Chiang Kai-shek and the Battles of Shanghai and Nanjing,” 153.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
073
a maximum speed of 240 miles/hour at 11,480 feet. They were armed
with Browning machine guns in the fuselage for attacks on other
ghters or bombers. They could carry a 500-pound bomb on an under-
fuselage hard point or two 116-pound bombs under each lower wing.
This point will have a particular importance in the analysis of the
dreadful bombing of August 14 in the foreign settlements.
When war erupted in Shanghai, the Chinese Air Force was active
on the front line in North China. The central government had ordered
all units to get ready to fly ground support missions for the army in
the North, with the Zhoukou Air Base in Henan Province as their rear
base. With the Japanese attack on Shanghai on 13 August, the Chinese
high command realized that a full-scale war was in the making. On
Chiang Kai-shek’s orders, the Shanghai area replaced North China
as the major battlefield for the Chinese Air Force. The 2nd Bomb
Group, 4th Pursuit Group, and 5th Pursuit Group were ordered to
move to Jining, Qianqiu and Yangzhou before noon on August 14. The
Central Aviation School near Hangzhou was also ordered to establish
new provisional squadrons. Instead of fighting a defensive war, the
Chinese command immediately directed all the air units in the Eastern
China bases to launch attacks on the Japanese positions in Shanghai.
Besides fighting the Japanese, the Chinese pilots had to face
strong winds and unstable weather from the typhoon that was closing
in on the city on the same day. The grim weather, however, played
in favor of the Chinese pilots. The Japanese planned to launch
bombing raid attacks on Shanghai and Nanjing from Taiwan, but
the passing typhoon made it impossible for their fighters to take off
from the carrier Kaga. The turbulent winds actually grounded all
the Japanese planes in the Shanghai harbor. The Japanese bombers
were hardly operational against the type of aerial attacks the Chinese
pilots were launching. Moreover, they soon became prey to the more
maneuverable pursuit aircrafts in the hands of their opponents. The
Curtiss Hawks III clearly outperformed their Japanese counterparts.31
For the first wave of attacks, except for a couple of Japanese
31 Hagiwara Mitsuru, “The Japanese Air Campaigns in China, 1937-1945,” in The
Battle for China, ed. Mark R. Peattie, et al., 240.

074
floatplanes, the Chinese planes had a field day.
The Chinese air force launched its attacks despite the bad
weather. About forty planes arrived over Shanghai, which was covered
in thick cloud. The first air raid by Chinese airplanes took place in
midmorning, when twenty-one Northrop Gamma bombers attacked
the Japanese ships at Wusong. Using Curtiss Hawk III biplanes
as both bombers and fighters, another eight planes (each with one
500-pound bomb) of the 5th Pursuit Group took off from Yangzhou
to launch the second wave of attacks against the Japanese ships near
Nantong, on the northern bank of the Yangzi River. Few people in
Shanghai realized the extent and unforeseen scale of operations that
had begun in the city. In the afternoon, the Chinese Air Force attacked
again. This time, three Hawks III from the 24th Squadron (5th Group)
provided air support for the Chinese 87th Division to attack the
Gongda Cotton Factory.32
The Curtiss Hawk fighters began bombing the Japanese Marine
headquarters at the Gongda textile mills, the Japanese cruisers and
supply ships at Wusong and the Japanese warship Izumo, moored next
to the Japanese consulate on the Huangpu River. The Izumo, a former
Imperial Russian warship captured during the Russo-Japanese war of
1905, served as the headquarters of the Japanese Navy in Shanghai
(Fig. 2). It was toothless as a fighting unit but useful as a monument
to commemorate the country’s victory over a Western power. As the
pilots dropped their lethal cargo over the Huangpu River, they met
with a barrage of sustained anti-aircraft projectiles from the Izumo
proper and nearby Japanese vessels. Despite the potential danger,
thousands of people had gathered on the Bund to watch the war
show. The rooftops and terraces of the buildings along the Bund were
crowded with expectant observers.33
The bombs missed their intended target, the Izumo, and exploded
in the river, creating huge geysers of water and tidal waves that
32 See the visual reports by French policemen, Louis Fabre, Rapport sur la
catastrophe du 14 août 1937 (Shanghai: Service de police, December 23, 1937),
Annexe X, 635PO/A-87, Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes.
33 See the photographic reportage, NCH, 15 September 1937.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
075
showered on the enthusiastic Chinese spectators watching from a
distance of less than 2,300 feet. It was not just water, however, that
fell from the sky. Shrapnel from the shells shot by Japanese anti-
aircraft guns also rained over the heads of the audience. People
ducked and ran for cover. Yet this failed to deter most from remaining
close to the scene of operations. Moreover, due to the inflow of
refugees from the districts north of Soochow Creek, the Bund and
its open spaces were crowded by a mass of powerless humanity who
probably did not take in the full measure of the risks and, on the
contrary, may have experienced the attempts to sink the Izumo not just
as a show, but as symbolic revenge against the Japanese whose actions
had plunged them into sheer misery.
Death from the Sky
The first tragedy occurred at 4:27 as recorded by the clock of the
Palace Hotel, stopped by the explosion. A group of airplanes appeared
in the sky heading down the Huangpu River. Immediately, the Izumo
Fig. 2

076
let loose a barrage of anti-aircraft shells that soon dotted the sky with
rings of smoke as the guns tracked the progress of the small air fleet.
Shrapnel started raining over the city. Six of the airplanes escaped
Japanese firepower by vanishing into the thick clouds. The four
machines that made up the rear, however, dropped their bombs as they
flew over the Bund. Two exploded in the river, creating a tidal wave
that swept far into the Bund. The other three fell on Nanking Road.
The rst bomb struck the roadway right in front of the entrance of
the Cathay Hotel, opening a crater four feet deep and ve feet large.34
The second went through the roof of the Palace Hotel across the street,
crashing through about three floors. A third one damaged the seventh
floor of the Cathay Hotel (Fig. 3). The deafening explosions created
an indescribable scene of carnage and death. For ten minutes after the
bombing, people just ran for shelter as planes roared overhead while the
Izumo kept firing anti-aircraft shells. Some sought refuge in the most
awkward places, as under cars parked nearby. As the explosive fumes
slowly lifted, all along the full stretch of the two hotels, the pavements
and roadway were littered with gravel, splintered wood, and stones
detached from the facades. The most hideous spectacle, however, was
that of dismembered bodies of passers-by struck in their tracks, heads,
legs, and arms lying far from smashed torsos.35 Damage from bomb
splinters was registered within a radius of 500 feet. Wooden parts of
buildings, rickshaw and cars within a radius of 300 feet caught re.36
The arcade of the Cathay Hotel was blown to pieces far inside the
building, the windows of even the farthermost interior shops smashed
to fragments. Crushed masonry swayed, broke loose and eventually
34 « Palace and Cathay Hotels, Nanking Road (C) 2 », Works 55/23, National
Archives (U.K.).
35 Visual sources h ave bee n a major s ource to write t his paper. M ost of the
photographs are extremely graphic. Only a few were ever published. Most stayed
in ofcial documents or archives. All the material used in this paper is available on
the Virtual Shanghai platform [hereafter quoted as “Virtual Shanghai - Images,”
accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.virtualshanghai.net/Photos/Images.+ ID
number], though most images are under restricted access due to their nature.
36 Report (undated [1938]), Work 55/23, National Archives (U.K.).

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
077
crashed upon the pavement, carrying along windows and plate-glass
doors as they fell. The blazing cars let out smoke that swirled over
twisted bodies. Most were empty parked cars, but a couple of them
carried passengers who were instantly incinerated in their vehicles.
The Nanking Road bombing, however, was not the sole disaster
that struck the city on that fateful day. A few minutes later, at 4:30
pm two more bombs fell at a major intersection between Boulevard
de Montigny and Edward VII, in front of the Great World amusement
center, right on the boundary between the two foreign settlements (Fig.
4).37 The intersection between Montigny and Edward VII was usually
a very busy place. It marked the beginning of one of the city’s busiest
commercial districts in the city, with numerous, shops, restaurants,
37 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 1366.
Fig. 3

078
and entertainment facilities. It was hardly one block away from the
racecourse and its recreation grounds. At any time during the day, a
constant flow of traffic went through the intersection. On 14 August, it
was packed with people attending to their business or shopping, even
more than on a normal day (Fig. 5-8). As mentioned above, tens of
thousands of residents from the threatened districts north of Soochow
Creek had flocked to the foreign settlements. The French Concession
had received a large share of these refugees. The Great World itself
had been turned into a huge refugee camp. The size of the building
notwithstanding, the high concentration of people made it almost
unbearable to stay indoors on a hot summer’s day. Cords ran along
the balconies of the buildings and served to hang washed clothing and
sheets (Fig. 9). A large population of about 10,000 refugees made idle
just loitered around the Great World to escape the stuffy and crowded
building.38
38 NCH, 1 September 1937.
Fig. 4

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
079
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

080
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
081
The first bomb dropped almost at the center of the intersection.
The second bomb, a report noted, exploded in mid-air a few feet
above the ground thereby causing destruction over a far wider area
than if it had struck the roadway.39 The first bomb opened a gaping
crater approximately 20 feet long, 10 feet wide and 6.5 feet deep.40
The large intersection was reduced to shambles within a split second.
Glass and wood splinters were strewn over the entire intersection (Fig.
10). Several vehicles, most with their occupants, were hit as they were
making their way around the police traffic post in the middle of the
intersection. Only the charred skeletons of their passengers remained,
petrified in death. Altogether, eleven cars were destroyed, leaving
thirteen dead, two grievously wounded, and five lightly injured.41
39 Report (undated [1938]), Work 55/23, National Archives (U.K.).
40 Letter, R. Jobez (chief of French police), 24 May 1938 in Report (undated [1938]),
Work 55/23, National Archives (U.K.).
41 Report, police detective, 19 August 1937, U38-2-1153, SMA.
Fig. 9

082
The tramway coming up Boulevard de Montigny was stopped on its
tracks not ten meters away from the entrance of the Great World, its
travelers fortunately safe from the shock wave from the explosion.
Yet many received fragments from the bombs and exploded buildings.
The traffic post in the middle of the intersection was still standing,
but was totally wrecked. The policemen who monitored the traffic
were all killed. The facades of several buildings facing the crossing
were badly scorched, with the building facing the Great World, next
to the Qingxuguan Daoist temple, seared by fire. The blast blew away
all the windows in the Great World itself up to the fourth floor. The
advertisement boards on the first row of balconies just disappeared, as
did all the shades that protected the ground-floor shops from the sun
(Fig. 11-12).
The official explanation for the accidental bombing was that
there had been a malfunction of the bomb racks due to Japanese
antiaircraft fire, and that the pilots had been injured and incapacitated.
I shall discuss this issue below. The likelihood of two planes, or even
more, being shot and damaged at the very same time is debatable. The
Fig. 10

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
083
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

084
Chinese planes that maneuvered over the Izumo flew at such a height
that accurate bombing could hardly be expected. Given their speed,
the pilots had a short window of opportunity in which to drop their
bombs. An experienced pilot, Claire Lee Chennault, who then served
as an advisor to the Chinese Government to help it develop its air
force, stated that the Chinese pilots were trained to bomb from 7500
feet, but with the thick clouds blocking their vision in the sky, they
were forced to drop the bombs from a lower altitude. The Chinese
dropped their bombs at 1500 feet without adjusting, or perhaps in
misadjusting their bombsights. The young Chinese pilots were simply
too inexperienced to make the kind of adjustment needed for accurate
bombing under difficult circumstances, given the haste with which
they were sent to the front.
Reports on similar attack flights reveal a discrepancy between
the trajectory followed by the bombers and the sequence of bomb
dropping. Chinese pilots came from the west, from their air bases
inland, and flew over the city in an eastward direction. They first
passed over the foreign settlements before reaching the Huangpu
River, not the other way around. In the case of the Great World
bombing, the pilot was flying westward indeed, but banked sharply
to the north as if intending to return to the Bund. French policemen
assumed the pilot was attempting again to drop his bombs either on
the Japanese ships or on the Racecourse.42 The Chinese pilots also
favored horizontal tactics conducted in a gradual descent rather than
steep dives, which would have made them more vulnerable.43 The
pilots or the bomb racks could of course have been hit by antiaircraft
shot from a distance by the Izumo, as claimed by Chinese officials,
causing the bombs to fall accidentally. The issue with this explanation
is one of timing, distance, and number of bombs. The distance
between the targeted Izumo and the corner of Nanking Road and the
Bund was a mere 2,300 feet, and from the Great World to the warship
it was 1.4 miles. At the speed at which the bombers were flying, it
would have taken them 10-12 seconds to cover this distance (Fig. 13).
42 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, 12 and Annexe X.
43 Mitsuru, “The Japanese Air Campaigns in China, 1937-1945,” 244.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
085
Fig. 13
Without all the relevant details on flight conditions (speed,
altitude, and wind), it is quite a challenge to determine the extent to
which the accidental bombing of the foreign settlements was due to
damaged bomb racks or to a miscalculation of the timing for dropping
the bombs.44
Bombs may leave quite a long trail before hitting the ground
depending on the altitude at which the pilots release them. From
20,000 feet, a 500-lb bomb would travel approximately 6,500 feet
forward before impact with a regular wind (less than 50 miles/
hours).45 The trail would decrease with altitude. If the planes that
44 Even with relevant data, calculating the course of a bomb requires elaborate
mathematical skills. Crystal Pepper and Chris Wilson, “Aerial bombing
techniques”, unpublished paper, 30 March 2009.
45 Terminal Ballistic Data, Vol. 1 Bombing, Office of the Chief of Ordnance
(Washington D.C., 1944), 10.

086
attacked the Izumo flew at 1,500 feet, their margin was quite narrow
– with a trail of probably less than 3,000 feet – and it may explain
the gap between their intended target and the actual bombing site at
a distance of 2,300 feet. After all, some bombs did explode in the
Huangpu River during the attack. But had the pilots flown at 7,500
feet, as they were trained to do, they would not have been quite on
target, except for the bombing of the Great World. The distance –
7,545 feet – is quite close to the trail (6,000 feet) from this altitude.
It is almost impossible to make a final judgment on this as we clearly
have two parallel cases, one a fairly accurate sighting, though with a
mishap, one probably a mishandled maneuver. It was definitely more
likely that human error caused the bombs to be released prematurely.
The last point that needs to be raised is that of the number of
bombs dropped and their size. The Curtiss Hawks III were equipped
with hard points to carry either a 500-lb. bomb under the fuselage
or two 100.lb bombs under the wings. There is an absolute certainty
that three bombs were dropped at the corner of the Bund and Nanking
Road. In the case of the Great World, the French police claimed with
little doubt that two bombs fell, one of which exploded before hitting
the ground.46 This issue is fundamental because if the explanation of
bomb racks being damaged on two different planes is hard to believe,
that of bombs racks being damaged on three or four different planes
would constitute an impossible coincidence. From the size of the
crater opened in the ground by the bomb near the Great World, there is
little doubt that it was a 500- lb bomb, whereas the bombs dropped in
Nanking Road were more probably in the 100-250 lb range.47 We also
know the radius within which the bombs killed people and projected
pieces of everything around. The killing range of a 500-lb bomb was
46 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, 12.
47 Terminal Ballistic Data, Vol. 3 Bombs, Artillery & Mortar Fire & Rockets, Ofce
of the Chief of Ordnance (Washington D.C., 1945), 34. In the aftermath of the
bombing, the agents of the Bureau of Public Works in the French Concession
collected ten pieces of rocket and ve steel fragments on the scene of the Great
World.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
087
140 feet.48
While two of the bombs hit buildings (Cathay and Palace
Hotels), one exploded in the street. While this bomb sprayed rubble
all over, the buildings absorbed a large part of the energy and bomb
fragments. Not so near the Great World. The bomb neatly fell right
in the center of the intersection. It could not have been dropped with
more efficiency in terms of killing power. If there were two, the
lethal capacity was magnified as the shock wave from the blast and
the hundreds of fragments traveled freely through the air, toppling,
smashing, and killing every unlucky passer-by within a 300-feet
radius. The U.S. Army has produced detailed technical studies of the
impact of the various types of bombs used in W.W. II. A 500-lb bomb
would project 13,600 effective fragments within a 100-foot radius.49
Given the high concentration of people near the Great World at the
time of the bombing and the short distance of most from the point
of impact, the killing power of the bomb was tremendous. If two
exploded, the mid-air burst was even more lethal.
The number of casualties was considerable. Near the Great World,
the rescuers picked up 435 dead bodies on the spot, on the French
Concession side. Another 139 injured died on their way to hospital.
Finally, 87 injured succumbed to their wounds while under treatment.
There were 563 men, 51 women, and 47 children among the victims.
On the International Settlement side, on the northern part of Edward
VII and Yu Ya Ching Road, the rescuers picked up 425 dead bodies.
Of those who were injured and survived, there were 534 on the French
Concession side and 305 in the International Settlement. Most of the
victims were Chinese. Only seven foreigners died in the Great World
bombing.50 Altogether, the misguided bombs left 1,106 dead and 830
wounded. In Nanking Road, the bombs had killed about 150 people
and wounded more than 430 others. Altogether, on a single day and
within minutes, the two accidental bombings killed more than 1,200
48 Terminal Ballistic Data, Vol. 1 Bombing, 72.
49 Terminal Ballistic Data, Vol. 1 Bombing, 88.
50 Report (undated [1938]), Work 55/23, UK National Archives; Fabre, Rapport sur
la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, 10-11.

088
persons and seriously injured about 1,400. This is the mayhem that the
unprepared civil authorities and medical facilities in the two foreign
settlements had to deal with. The challenge was totally unexpected.
A disaster of this magnitude was never on anybody’s watch list, even
with war looming over the city.
Rescue Operations
In Nanking Road, after the loud explosion a heavy silence fell
as the reality of the carnage hit the dazed spectators who had been
spared. From the lobby of the hotels, people gazed with horror on the
instantaneous annihilation one of the city’s most popular corners. The
bombs had just mowed down 580 people. For an instant, there was the
complete stillness of bewilderment and disorientation. Then people
turned their attention to those who had survived the blast and started
to provide assistance. They dragged victims into the lobby of the two
hotels. The wounded had been stunned by the intensity and violence
of the explosion, but as they awoke to their wounds and mutilations,
cries of agony and calls for help filled the tense atmosphere.
Voluntary helpers provided first aid. Some filled their car with
the wounded and drove them to hospitals with the dim hope that their
badly injured passengers would make it. Soon, all were covered in
blood. The police and fire brigade rushed to the scene in minutes.
The Shanghai Municipal Police barred the entrance to Nanking Road
at both ends. At Szechuen Road, a large truck blocked traffic into
Nanking Road. A detachment of the Shanghai Volunteers Corps also
helped during the latter stage. Rescue work proceeded at a faster
pace when the police and ambulance workers arrived on the scene.
The wounded received medical assistance in situ or were dispatched
to hospitals. The priority was to sort out those who could be helped.
Then all that needed to be done was to evacuate the dead: “the living
received all the attention for the first hour and then the dead were

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
089
piled into household moving vans and carried off”.51 It took about two
hours to clear the street of mangled and disjointed human remains. To
reach the victims caught in the upper floors of the Palace Hotel, the
Fire Brigade elevated a tall ladder because the bomb had destroyed
the stairs.
More than 400 people were carried to the Chinese Lester
Hospital on Shantung Road. The physicians on duty were expecting
the massive inflow of wounded. On 14 Saturday, they were standing
on the roof of the hospital when the bombs were dropped in Nanking
Road and near the Great World. They had been at tea when the roar of
aircraft engines had brought them out to watch the aerial maneuvers.52
Soon the place was overflowing with injured and mutilated bodies.
All the waiting rooms, outpatient department, corridors and space
available, even out in the courtyard, were packed with people awaiting
medical treatment. The place was strewn with people sitting and lying.
There was blood everywhere. It was difficult even to move among
the wounded to pick out those to be prepared for the operating tables
and the medical staff chose the likeliest candidates at hand. No less
than twenty-one physicians were kept busy at seven operating tables
crowded into the four operating theaters. It was emergency surgery,
with the wounded made ready for operation on the spot with no time
for preparation. “It was a ghastly business”, noted one physician,
but there was hardly any choice. By 10:30 pm, all the more severely
wounded people had been attended to.53
By 7 pm, about 50 had died of their wounds. By the following
morning 105 more had died. There were only ten foreigners among
the wounded, most of them Russians who were lightly injured and
transferred to the Country Hospital where all foreign cases were
treated. Beside the permanent staff of the hospital, many doctors
volunteered to tend to the wounded. Four operating theaters were in
full swing until late in the night.54 Running against time, the doctors
51 North China Daily News [NCDN], 15 August 1937.
52 NCDN, 22 August 1937.
53 NCDN, 22 August 1937.
54 NCDN, 15 August 1937.

090
simply could not attend to all those who required medical attention.
They had to turn away many that were but slightly hurt and had to
wait until the following day to have the bits of shrapnel and splinters
taken out. To give proper medical treatment to the more serious cases,
the medical staff moved all those that could be moved, dispatching
them from the Lester Hospital to the Rue Montauban Hospital, the
Moulmein Road Hospital or the main Red Cross Hospital on Avenue
Haig.55
The news of the second bombing at the Great World reached the
authorities within minutes. A British fireman and assistant station
manager happened to reach the intersection right after the explosion.
Although not fully aware of the extent of the disaster, he jumped out
of his car and ran to a nearby shop to call the central fire station and
ask for as many ambulances and other vehicles as were available. He
later reported that all the people in the shop had been killed, except
for a man with both legs cut off and one arm in shreds who managed,
despite his condition, to pull out the 5-cent coin that allowed the
fireman to make the phone call that set in motion the massive rescue
of the surviving victims of the bombing. The critically wounded man
died soon afterward.56 On the French side, the policemen who were
on watch duty on the roof of the Mallet police station were immediate
witnesses to the dropping of the bombs in the Great World area. The
firemen were the first to reach the site of the explosion, arriving
within minutes.57 The chief of police arrived about thirty minutes later
and at once took in the inadequacy of the rescue operation under way.
He immediately made a phone call to mobilize the largest number
of vehicles possible and even commandeered all passing vehicles.
Removing the wounded with a few ambulances would not do.
Eventually, twenty-six official cars, vans and trucks rushed to the site
and made rounds to the various hospitals.58
Quite strangely, the fate of the wounded in terms of rescue
55 NCDN, 22 August 1937.
56 NCDN, 22 August 1937.
57 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, Annexe I.
58 Report, Chef de la Garde, 14 August 1937, U38-2-1153.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
091
and delivery to a medical facility depended on where they had been
standing or walking at the time of the explosion. Since the bombs
had hit exactly at the boundary between the two settlements, the
rescuers each attended to their own side of the intersection. The dead
were removed and placed in different sites depending on which side
of the street they had been picked up. By virtue of the invisible but
real jurisdictional boundary that existed between the International
Settlement and the French Concession, the north-south divide at the
crossroad of Edward VII and Montigny/Yu Ya Ching created two
autonomous spheres of intervention by uncoordinated policemen,
fire brigade personnel and teams of rescuers. The fact the bombs fell
right at this intersection made the fragmented political geography of
Shanghai more obvious and its absurdity even more manifest.
Near the Great World, bodies could be seen all around, scattered
on the pavement along the buildings, dozens crammed around the
traffic light, rickshaw pullers still holding their bars.59 More than 300
bodies were piled up at the entrance of the Great World, another 100
on the opposite corner. The shrapnel killed people in the Montigny
Avenue 650 feet away from the point of impact.60 The sheer number
of dead and wounded raised an extraordinary challenge to the
rescuers. From the photographic record, it seems the rescuers chose
to evacuate first the hundreds of bodies packed before the entrance
of the Great World, which they sorted out to look for survivors.
Firemen also worked to stop the fires in the vehicles and buildings
nearby.61 The more dispersed dead bodies were taken away at a later
stage. The rescuers were literally soaked in blood as they worked for
hours collecting the wounded, then all the dead bodies. The task was
daunting. Some men covered their face with a handkerchief to avoid
the stench of burnt flesh and torn bodies. From the visual record,
it appears that the police checked the bodies before rescuers were
allowed to remove them.62
59 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 59, 982, 15139, 27623, 27626.
60 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, 4-5.
61 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 26627.
62 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 25219.

092
Blood filled the road and gutters, especially in front of the Great
World where about three hundred bodies lied in a pool of blood,
amid their few precious belonging, boxes, bundles and birdcages.63
The police paid its own toll. Near the Great World, four Chinese
policemen were killed and six – three Chinese, two Vietnamese, and
one French – were seriously wounded.64 Even many in the protection
of their homes were mowed down.65
The rescuers carried out house-to-house searches looking for
victims buried in debris and extricating the survivors and the dead.
Firemen, police, Red Cross workers, Chinese Boy Scouts and many
other rescuers searched for hours for victims in the ruins. The bodies
were most horribly mangled, some without heads, or limbs and
otherwise mutilated. As in Nanking Road, but magnified by the extent
of the carnage, horror set in as the cries of hundreds of the wounded
pierced the air acrid with bomb smoke and the smell of burned flesh.
In front of the Great World, a man sat, wholly naked but alive, his
clothes gone with the blast.66
Some of the victims, mostly those bodies that remained in
enough good condition for it, were put into coffins before removal.67
The two major associations involved in the management of death in
the city, the Shanghai Public Benevolent Society and the Tongren
fuyuantang, brought in several hundred coffins. Yet the number of
victims far surpassed the number of coffins available. The authorities,
concerned primarily with the speedy removal of the dead bodies had
no option but to have them taken away en masse. It was a grizzly
job. There was not even enough appropriate equipment to pick up
the dead and wounded. Doors blown free from their hinges were
turned into stretchers. Bodies were picked up by hand and placed
into bamboo matting or a thick tarpaulin rescuers used to lift them up
63 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 15140, 25218, 25220, 25234, 27615.
64 Rapport annuel 1937, 2. Service de police, U38-2-2090, SMA.
65 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 25760, 27727.
66 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27729.
67 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 15141, 27629.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
093
onto the trucks.68 Victims were taken away literally by the truckload
and remained uncovered in broad daylight. There was no time for any
dignified treatment of the victims.69
In the French Concession, the Bureau of Public health had
established an emergency plan as soon as fighting started in Zhabei
and set up a crisis office to serve as a contact and coordinating
point in case of an emergency.70 All hospitals and medical staff
were duly registered, each with their phone number, to be called in
any emergency. Facing a major humanitarian crisis, the authorities
implemented the emergency plan they had just prepared. The wounded
were sent to the sixteen hospitals commandeered under the emergency
plan (Fig. 14).71 The largest facility, the Sainte-Marie Hospital,
received about 450 seriously wounded, while the Orthodox Russian
Hospital also received a group of 35 badly wounded persons. At the
Jesuit-run Aurora University, the staff organized a temporary hospital
to accommodate 200 patients. The small Sisters’ Hospital provided
treatment to a group of more lightly wounded victims. The Red Cross
had established an emergency facility at the corner of rue Montauban,
in the Saint Joseph parish.72 About 250 wounded underwent treatment
by a team of Chinese physicians from the Chinese municipality.
The main Red Cross Hospital on Avenue Haig accommodated 200
wounded. Finally, all eleven Chinese small hospitals in the French
Concession contributed their share of treating the wounded.73
As can be seen from the various reports, the capacity of the
local hospitals was stretched to the limit. Even in peacetime, their
rate of occupancy was quite high. The sudden influx of hundreds
of wounded requiring immediate treatment strained the medical
68 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27735.
69 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27736, 27737, 27614, 27622.
70 Report, Bureau de l’hygiène publique et de l’assistance, 16 August 1937, U38-5-
1667, SMA.
71 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, Annexe VI.
72 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 15142.
73 Report, Bureau de l’hygiène publique et de l’assistance, 16 August
1937, U38-5-1667, SMA.

094
resources available. Moreover, many of the wounded required heavy
surgery, for which only few hospitals could provide adequate facilities
and qualified surgeons. The medical staff worked non-stop to operate
when necessary or to dress wounds for the more lightly wounded.
At the Sainte-Marie Hospital, all eight French and Chinese surgeons
treated patients until two a.m. by which time all in-patients had been
treated. At the Russian Hospital, physicians worked through the
night.74 In view of the massive number of wounded, the seriousness
of the injuries to be treated, and the limited size of available staff,
especially for war surgery, the fairly quick pace at which the wounded
were treated – within 10-12 hours – is a testimony, first to the
efficiency of the evacuation and distribution of the victims among pre-
determined hospitals. It is also a testimony to the unlimited courage
74 Report, Bureau de l’hygiène publique et de l’assistance,16 August 1937, U38-5-
1667, SMA.
Fig. 14

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
095
and dedication of the medical staff and all the volunteers who helped
in the rescue and transportation of the wounded. Yet, all the medical
reports emphasized the terrible physical damage wreaked on the
victims, which explains why so many did not survive despite medical
treatment.75
In the French Concession, the 1,400 victims of the bombing near
the Great World were evacuated and transported to hospitals or to the
cemetery in less than two hours. In terse administrative language, the
French police report noted: “The bomb had fallen at 4:45 p.m. and by
7:00 traffic had returned to normal”.76 The Director of Public Health
was less positive, even if he too pointed out the speed with which the
municipal services had dealt with the disaster. Traffic was not the only
or even the main issue. The bombing had left all sorts of debris, but
also body parts, fluids, blood, etc. The main concern of the Bureau
of Public Health was to sanitize the place and prevent any risk of an
infection. The staff worked hard through the day and night, and by
1 a.m. the authorities declared the place safe.77 Within less than two
days, the road was repaired, electric wiring was reestablished and
all traces of the tragedy, except on the facades of the buildings, had
nearly disappeared for a paltry cost of 2,300 yuan.78
Disposal of the Dead
In the days that followed, the police worked to identify those
who had been killed near the Great World, at least in the French
Concession. The Shanghai Municipal Police did the same for all the
foreigners killed on Nanking Road or near the Great World, but for
lack of proper archives we do not know whether their investigation
included the Chinese victims. The process of identification of
75 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, Annexe IV.
76 Rapport annuel 1937, 4. Service de police, U38-2-2090, SMA.
77 Report, Bureau de l’hygiène publique et de l’assistance, 16 August 1937, U38-5-
1667, SMA.
78 Report, Bureau des travaux publics, 16 August 1937, U38-4-2476, SMA.

096
unnatural deaths was part of the regular work of the French police, for
instance in the case of suicides. The police used to make a thorough
investigation, even checking on the whereabouts of the victims after
their admission to hospitals. After the bombing, detectives were
assigned a number of cases for which there was some hope of finding
and notifying the families of the deceased.79 Yet, the task at hand was
of another scale. In terms of sheer numbers, the identification process
would have taken days. Mostly, however, the policemen had little to
start from, except the documents or objects they could find on the
dead bodies. This is what they actually did as every piece of belonging
and clothing was collected, disinfected and given to the associations
in charge of refugees.80 Yet, out of hundreds of corpses, they were
able to collect useful items for only fifty bodies. The police actually
identified no more than thirty-six individuals and found a relative or
institution for only nine people. The other bodies carried nothing or
all their belongings had been lost in the blast.81 All the foreigners,
however, were identified through their cars, their documents or their
occupation their uniform.82
On the following day, the authorities in the French Concession
became deeply concerned about the disposal of the dead. At 9:30 am,
Marcel Chaloin, French vice-consul, Dr. Rabaute and his assistant,
Dr. Palud, heads of the Bureau of Public Hygiene and Assistance,
Robert Jobez, deputy director of the French Special Branch (Services
politiques et Sûreté), Wang Rendong (王任董), district attorney of the
2nd District Court, a representative of the Jiangsu Superior Court, and
two Chinese coroners undertook the grim task of visiting all the places
turned into temporary mortuaries for the victims of the bombing.83 The
largest concentration was located in the Zikawei Cemetery where 451
corpses – 400 men, 23 women, and 26 children – had been lined up in
79 Report, police detective, 19 August 1937, U38-2-1153, SMA.
80 Report, Service de police, 17 August 1937, U38-5-1667, SMA.
81 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, Annexe IX.
82 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, Annexe V & Annexe VII.
83 Shenbao [SB], 16 August 1937 [355:280].

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
097
a vacant space.84 Only three were identified. The other locations were
mainly hospitals where the injured had died during or after medical
treatment: Sainte-Marie Hospital (48), Red Cross Hospital (54),
Tongren fuyuantang (29), Maresca Hospital (3), Medico-legal Institute
(5).85 The distribution of the victims by sex and age revealed a ratio
seriously skewed towards adult men. That there were only 65 children
is not surprising. The bombs fell in a location where few children
would be outdoors. The low proportion of women (41), however, is
more difficult to explain. There was a substantial imbalance of the sex
ratio in the Shanghai population. Men outnumbered women due to the
influx of large numbers of male migrants, but in the last population
census in 1935, the sex ratio in the International Settlement and the
French Concession were 156 and 141 to 100 respectively. Most of the
people killed near the Great World remained unidentified. Aside from
the uncertain origin of the dead themselves, most victims were people
who had been uprooted from their homes and had crowded into the
amusement center-turned-refugee camp, or dislocated families and
persons lost in the exodus. Many dead bodies were disfigured beyond
recognition even by those closest to them. By joint agreement, the
French and Chinese authorities decided to have the corpses buried
without delay.
It would appear that the authorities in the International Settlement
were in less of a hurry than the French to have the bodies from the
two bombings buried. After actual removal from the site, the dead
bodies were entrusted to the Shanghai Public Benevolent Cemetery.
The open coffins of those killed and encoffined in situ were lined
up for public view near the Racecourse where the Shanghai Public
Benevolent Cemetery maintained a temporary mortuary. It is not clear
whether all the dead collected both around the Great World or near
the Palace Hotel found their way to this place. It is highly unlikely.
The sheer number of bodies– 600 altogether – meant that they could
hardly be displayed in a single place. A number of the bodies were
84 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 25222.
85 Minutes, Vice-consul Marcel Chaloin, 15 August 1937, U38-5-1667, SMA; Fabre,
Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, Annexe II.

098
badly mangled, and the authorities would not place them on public
view. From the pictures taken by the North China Daily News, the
number of coffins presented to the public looked far more limited
than the hundreds of actual victims.86 The display of the bodies also
caused protests. Two days after the bombing, a foreign resident who
lived in the Race Course Apartments wrote to the Public Health
Department about the “very large accumulation of corpses” around his
building. Although he noted the praiseworthy efforts of the Shanghai
Public Benevolent Cemetery, the embarrassed resident felt that the
work was done “in a somewhat leisurely manner”. The Public Health
Department, while acknowledging the exceptional circumstances
that interfered with the normal routine of the benevolent society, also
directed the association to bring in additional staff to cope with the
additional work.87 Yet, handling the dead bodies of the Great World
bombing was just one small part of the grim job performed by the
Shanghai Public Benevolent Cemetery. Fighting in the city and the
mass of incoming refugees just pushed the number of dead to be
collected to unprecedented levels.
There were pressing constraints that made it necessary to dispose
of the dead bodies without delay. There was no facility to preserve the
corpses from decay in the hot and humid Shanghai weather. Only a
few, mostly foreigners and municipal employees, were sent to a proper
funeral home. Those who were encoffined in situ through the service
of the Shanghai Public Benevolent Cemetery received light and cheap
coffins, but they were buried individually. By way of expediency,
however, most corpses were loaded onto trucks and delivered to a
cemetery pending further processing. Nothing has come up, in the
archives, on how the Shanghai Municipal Council eventually disposed
of the dead bodies found on its territory. In the French Concession, the
authorities had the victims of the Great World bombing buried in two
large mass graves in the Zikawei Cemetery.88 Altogether, 560 corpses
86 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 2409.
87 Letter, foreign resident, 17 August 1937; Letter PHD-SPBC, 17 August 1937, U1-
16-2457, SMA.
88 Report, Bureau de l’hygiène publique et de l’assistance, 16 August 1937, U38-5-

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
099
were buried, a sad and dehumanized pile of bodies thrown pell-
mell into a pit.89 There was no authority, organization or collective
action, unlike in Blitz-struck England, to prevent their undignified
burial in mass graves.90 A few days later, the French Bureau of Public
Hygiene and Assistance issued a note to define clear procedures for
handling cases of people killed or injured through collateral damage
in the settlement. The unidentified dead took two different roads.
The Chinese were sent to the Zikawei Cemetery pending further
identification, while foreigners were sent to the mortuary on Route
Delastre.91 Ethnicity drew a clear line when it came to war casualties.
The Carnage in Print
The massive loss of life that resulted from the accidental
dropping of bombs on Chinese civilians generated two very different
strands of reaction in the press and among officials. The main English
newspaper, the North China Daily News (NCDN), made it the headline
of its Sunday edition on 15 August: “600 persons killed in air raids on
Shanghai”. The paper was far off the mark, but even the authorities
had not yet a full count of the victims. Its main sub-titles conveyed
the extent of the disaster: “Chinese bombs dropped in foreign areas”,
“Nanking Road corner and Great World turned into shambles by
missiles of death”, “Hundreds are rushed to hospitals”. The following
day, the event was still on the first page with more news about the
incident and its consequences. Its parent review, the North China
Herald posted similar titles: The main focus of the argument in these
papers was first the horror of war on innocent people: “modern aerial
warfare with all its terror descended on Shanghai yesterday when the
Chinese for the first time used airplanes to bomb the Japanese cruiser
1667, SMA.
89 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 25221.
90 Rugg, “Managing ‘Civilian Deaths due to War Operations,’” 163-168.
91 Service memo no. 39, 19 August 1937, Bureau de l’hygiène publique et de
l’assistance, U38-5-1667.

100
Izumo”.92 The China Weekly Review published its own account of the
events under “Shanghai experiences horrors of modern warfare to a
pronounced degree”.93
The NCDN also printed four large pictures of the bombing on
Nanking Road. Two showed the entrance of the Cathay Hotel and
the extent of material damage. In one, an officer of the Shanghai
Volunteers Corps stepped over the rubble, with two burned cars
behind him, while in the other several officers made their way into the
hotel lobby. The next two pictures showed the same scene taken from
a slightly different angle, looking west into Nanking Road. The two
shots were taken from the side of the Palace Hotel and show parked
cars, one still burning. Yet the most striking features on the three
pictures was the obvious display of corpses and body parts all around.
These were ghastly views meant to convey the horror of the day to the
readers. They were plain and graphic pictures of the brutality of war.
The second line of reasoning in the press stemmed from the
need to protect the sanctity of the foreign concessions and keep the
fighting at a reasonable distance. The NCDN published a strongly
worded editorial. Expressions like “Shanghai mourning”: “ghastly
first act”, “horror-stricken population”, “horrible slaughter of
peaceful civilians”, fearful holocaust”, soul-wracking”, “crime against
civilization” peppered a text that denounced the failure of the foreign
governments to perceive the dangers hovering over Shanghai in the
previous two weeks. The paper extended its “deepest sympathy” to
the relatives of the victims with the hope it would not be ‘too empty
a gesture”. The editorial went on to note that Shanghai had not learnt
the lessons of 1932. It called all the authorities to bring their influence
to bear on the Japanese and Chinese governments to avert a further
extension of the war. The following day, the NCDN still gave the
priority to the aftermath of the bombing. The head title read “Death
roll mounts in Air Raid,” followed by a sub-heading “Nearly 1,200
killed in Saturday’s tragedy.”94
92 NCH, 15 August 1937.
93 China Weekly Review [CWR], 21 August 1937, 423.
94 NCDN, 16 August 1937.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
101
The British ambassadors in both Nanking and Tokyo made
representations to the Chinese and Japanese governments to express
their concern about Shanghai being turned into a theater of war.95 The
British, French, and American governments lodged a vigorous protest
with the Chinese Foreign Office against the bombing in the foreign
settlements. The authorities in the International Settlement asked the
residents to turn off all unnecessary lights at night and to keep away
from doors, windows, and outer wall in the event of air raids. All
radio stations, newspapers, and cinemas relayed the message.96 In the
French Concession, a curfew was enforced requiring all residents to
stay indoors from 10 pm to 5 am, unless they obtained passes from the
police.97 The Shanghai Municipal Council adopted a similar measure
only three days later.98
To prevent the repetition of such a dreadful accident, the
Shanghai Municipal Council pressed the Japanese authorities for the
removal of the Izumo from her position near the Japanese consulate-
general. The commander-in-chief of the Japanese Third Fleet, vice-
admiral, Hasegawa Kiyoshi, rejected all demands to move the Izumo
and blamed the “blind bombing” by Chinese air forces for the damage
done. He steadfastly maintained that his sole responsibility was the
protection of Japanese nationals and properties. To perform his duties,
he was entitled to carry out independently and at his own discretion
all necessary operations. Since the lives of Japanese nationals
remained under the threat of Chinese attacks, which no other foreign
power would have condoned, Hasegawa regretted that he was unable
to comply with the proposals to shift the Izumo to a more remote
location.99 On September 8, the three admirals present in Shanghai,
Jules Le Bigot, commander of the French naval forces, Charles Little,
commander of the British China Fleet, and H. E. Yarnell, commander
of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet jointly addressed a memorandum to the
95 NCDN, 15 August 1937.
96 NCDN, 15 August 1937.
97 NCDN, 15 August 1937.
98 NCDN, 18 August 1937.
99 NCDN, 15 August 1937.

102
belligerents asking them to refrain from fighting in the city and to
evacuate their respective vessels, including the Izumo, and batteries.
They emphasized the prominent risks to civilians and properties in the
foreign concessions in a general conflict.100
Despite all these pressures, the Japanese command resisted the
idea of moving the Izumo. On the contrary, it argued that the “overt
bombing of the Settlement by Chinese aircraft […] was evidence
of the ruthless Chinese determination to destroy Japanese lives and
property in Shanghai”. It claimed that, in view of the 50,000 Chinese
troops massed near the city that threatened Japanese lives, Japan
could not cease “invoking her right to self-defence”. The Japanese
communiqués, in Shanghai as in Tokyo, put the responsibility squarely
on the shoulders of the Chinese government which was described as
being in violation of the previously signed military agreement. The
Japanese government blithely ignored past compromises and China’s
fundamental right to assert her sovereign rights. All the Japanese
authorities deigned to offer was a lame promise to do their “best for
the protection of foreign interests in China.”101
Failing to hit the Izumo from the sky, an attempt was made from
the river. All day long, Japanese seaplanes had been raining scores
of bombs on the Chinese troops concentrated in Pudong. On 16
October, at around 9:00 pm, as heavy shelling was aimed by Japanese
vessels against the Chinese positions in Pudong, a small Chinese
vessel tagged along a group of commercial launches, then suddenly
veered away to close in on the Izumo. It fired at close range several
torpedoes that exploded in the river near the Bund. It also hit the
Izumo and inflicted serious damage to its hull, even if it failed to sink
the Japanese cruiser. Yet the message was heard this time and the
Japanese command eventually decided to move the Izumo downriver
where it would receive better protection from Japanese warships.102
It was a minor victory, but a symbolically significant one for the
100 NCH, 8 septembre 1937, 380 ; Lettre, Vice-amiral Le Bigot-Consul de France, 17
août 1937, 635PO/A/84, ADN.
101 NCDN, 16 August 1937.
102 NCDN, 17 August 1937; CWR, 21 August 1937, 425.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
103
Chinese.
For the Chinese authorities and opinion leaders in Shanghai, the
involuntary massacre of Chinese civilians was a huge embarrassment.
Whereas the English-language press splashed huge headlines about
the bombing and its terrifying consequences, the Chinese newspapers
in Shanghai went almost mute. They could not completely ignore the
issue, but they chose to focus on the great battle being fought between
the valiant Chinese soldiers and the villains of the Japanese army. The
Zhongyang ribao, the official organ of the central government, made
no mention of the bombing in its 15 August issue, whereas a week
later it was quick to report the bombing of the Sincere Department
Store which it attributed to Japanese aircraft.103 The Shenbao,
the major local and national newspaper, headlined the presumed
destruction of three Japanese gunboats by the Chinese Air Force, a
major achievement in its very first engagement. Further down the
page, under “Shanghai local news”, it reported that a stray bomb had
hit and wounded “several hundreds of pedestrians.” The Nanking
Road and Great World bombings were not singled out but reported
as part of various cases of bombings that had struck civilians in the
city, “with no less than 300 victims”. The source of the bomb was
not made explicit, but the newspaper. pointed the finger at Japanese
planes. The paper reported on the organization of rescue, though in
few details, then went on to report on fighting in Pudong. In its inside
pages, the newspaper gave a fuller account of the Great World tragedy
(canju 慘劇), acknowledging that two bombs – given at 100 lbs each
had unexpectedly dropped from the Chinese planes engaged in a
fierce battle. The Shenbao also endorsed the official explanation of
the accident as being caused by the pilots’ injuries and a dysfunctional
bomb rack. On the following day, it reported the number of dead and
their burial by the Tongren fuyuantang in the French Concession.104
The famous journal, Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany),
published its first issue after the event on 1 September. It was a double
103 Zhongyang ribao, 15 August 1937; 24 August 1937.
104 SB, 15 August 1937; 16 August 1937; Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14
août 1937, 14-15.

104
issue as the journal anticipated difficulties and reduced its periodicity.
As in previous issues, it opened with photographs. On the war in
Shanghai, the pictures showed Chinese soldiers in combat, wounded
Chinese civilians, and four pictures of the bombing of the South
Station on 28 August by Japanese planes. There was no photograph,
nor any mention of “Bloody Saturday” or even the bombing of the
Sincere Department Store on 23 August. In the captions, the journal
referred to “hundreds of deaths” in the South station bombing and
similar incidents in Beixinjing.105 Yet there was no report about the
war in Shanghai and the various instances of misguided bombings.
In the following issues, the journal published pictures of fighting
in Zhabei and of Chinese soldiers in the Baziqiao Cemetery.106The
Dongfang zazhi never mentioned the bombing incidents in its
subsequent issues, even when it provided a summary of the war in its
November issue.107
In the initial official report of the Chinese authorities about the
bombing, the squadron commander explained that when the Chinese
bombers had attempted to attack the Izumo, they had met with a hail
of shells from anti-aircraft guns. One airplane had gone missing, while
two bombers had been damaged, with their pilots wounded. They had
barely managed to land in Zhabei. There must have been a mistake
in communication here as landing in Zhabei was impossible. It could
only have been Hongqiao. The same report stated that the bombs
had been dropped accidentally due to the bomb racks being damaged
by anti-aircraft guns. General Chiang Kai-shek himself ordered a
thorough investigation and promised punishment if it was found that
the bombing was due to poor marksmanship.108 On 15 August, in a
Central News Agency dispatch the Chinese authorities admitted the
accident. They “expressed deep regret that such an accident should
have helplessly occurred and resulted in the death of several innocent
105 Dongfang zazhi, 34, 16-17 (1 September 1937).
106 Dongfang zazhi, 34, 18-19 (1 October 1937).
107 Dongfang zazhi, 34, 20-21 (1 November 1937).
108 NCDN, 15 August 1937.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
105
people”.109
In reply to a telegram from the Eleanor Roosevelt, the U.S.
First Lady, leading that the foreign concessions in Shanghai be
spared the dreadful impact of war, Song Meiling replied in soothing
terms that “no one deplores more than we do the terrible and tragic
accidental dropping of bombs from two damaged airplanes”. She
said that Chiang Kai-shek was shocked at the news and had ordered
an investigation as he had specifically ordered that no bombs should
be dropped south of Soochow Creek.110 Nevertheless, the Chinese
government’s official was made clear in an editorial in the Zhonyang
ribao. The killing of Chinese and foreign civilians in the foreign
settlements was very unfortunate, but it was an unavoidable sacrifice
given the way in which the Japanese were using the protection of the
foreign settlements , despite the 1932 precedent and warnings about
their subsequent military build-up, which the Shanghai Municipal
Council had never objected to. The Chinese authorities promised to
do their best to protect foreign interests, but said that such accidents
could happen again.111
The Chinese government never wavered on this line of
explanation, which most Western newspapers in Shanghai also
adopted.112 Nothing more was heard of the investigation, if it was
ever carried out. The national Air Force needed all its pilots and the
accidental bombing was better forgotten. This was not the time for
self-pity, even less for self-castigation. The need of the hour was to
mobilize the Chinese people and all the military might the Chinese
military could muster. Indeed the Chinese pilots fought bravely in
the subsequent weeks and months against a vastly superior opponent
in terms of training, maintenance and production. The Chinese lost
a large part of their air force in the early month of the war over the
Shanghai area. On 18 August, Chiang Kai-shek commended the
Chinese pilots for the excellent resistance they had put up against
109 Fabre, Rapport sur la catastrophe du 14 août 1937, 14.
110 NCDN, 17 August 1937.
111 Zhongyang ribao, 18 August 1937.
112 CWR, 21 August 1937, 423.

106
Japanese onslaught. He ordered that the salaries of the pilots taking
part in the defense of the country be doubled, and that monetary
awards be disbursed to the injured and pensions given to the
families of pilots killed in action.113 In the immediate aftermath of
the bombing, the Japanese authorities informed the Consular body
that they would refrain from flying aircraft carrying bombs over
the International Settlement, south of Soochow Creek. The Chinese
authorities refused to agree to the same procedure. Yet, as we shall
see, the Japanese air force actually continued to fly planes with their
lethal cargo over the area.114
Civilians under Fire: the Bombing
of the Sincere Department Store
There was hardly anything the authorities could do to protect
the civilian population. Danger came from the sky, sometimes
unexpectedly. Aside from curfew – a measure aimed mostly at
controlling the population and avoiding the disruption of public order
– the main disposition was the production of sandbags to block up
alleys, street corners, windows and erect barricades for protection
against the impact of exploding bombs or shells. The ability of
sandbags to absorb shock proved far superior to any other material
against surface deflagration, even if they did not provide bombproof
shelters.115 Sandbags became a standard feature of Shanghai streets
and buildings.116 The Public Works departments of both municipal
councils produced almost all the sandbags used to protect properties
and lives. In the International Settlement, the Public Works
Department filled no less than 114,000 bags for the protection of
113 NCDN, 19 August 1937.
114 NCDN, 17 August 1937.
115 The China Press, 9 September 1937.
116 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 15147, 15149, 15185, 25209, 25226, 25646.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
107
civilians and 31,000 for the British and American forces.117
The people killed and wounded near the Great World or on the
Bund, however, were not the only victims of the fighting. Throughout
the morning and the afternoon of 14 August, projectiles hit a number
of persons although they were located in areas remote from direct
fighting. Stray bullets, pieces of shrapnel, and even smaller misguided
missiles hit the territory of the two settlements, both in areas where
fighting was actually taking place as in Yangshupu and Hongkou,
and in parts of the city remote from the fighting. The French police
counted several cases of collateral damage to buildings and persons.
The wounded were taken to hospitals.118 In the days that followed,
aerial attacks by the Chinese Air Force continued unabated. Anti-
aircraft and machine guns welcomed the Chinese planes whenever
they came within range. Fragments of anti-aircraft ammunition fell
in various parts of the city and caused the death of three Chinese
and serious injury to nine others at the corner of Moulmein and
Weihaiwei. A woman was killed and six others injured at the corner of
Albert du Roi and Joffre. Minutes later, shrapnel cut short a rickshaw
puller on the move on Bubbling Well Road, near Moulmein.119 Sixteen
Chinese were killed on Pudong when bombs exploded over the S.S.
Suiting (China Navigation Company) at the Watung Wharf. Four more
were wounded.120
With a much clearer sky, the Chinese planes attacked from a
greater height. On 16 August, when two flights of bombers came over
Shanghai, still intent on sinking the Izumo, crowds of spectators still
turned out in the streets to watch them until showers of shrapnel from
the firing put up by the Japanese warships began to fall in the streets.
The 14 August accidental bombing did not change the approach taken
by the Chinese attackers. The bombers crossed the International
Settlement from the direction of Hongqiao, swinging northward on
reaching the river, and began to unload their cargo near the Izumo.
117 The China Press, 9 September 1937.
118 NCDN, 15 August 1937.
119 NCDN, 16 August 1937.
120 NCDN, 16 August 1937.

108
The bombs missed their intended target, but inflicted damage on a
Japanese submarine and two other gunboats as the bombers continued
down the river dropping more bombs on Japanese positions.121 Even
after it had been moored further down river, the Izumo remained a
target of choice for the Chinese pilots, with repeated attempts to sink
it from the sky.122 Four Russian were killed on Broadway, between
Minghong and Boone, during a heavy bombardment. They were struck
by fragments of antiaircraft missiles from the Izumo in the vicinity of
the Savoy Hotel. In addition a large number of Chinese were killed on
the same road. Although the Chinese planes missed the Izumo, they
hit the Japanese consulate, causing several light casualties among the
consular staff.123
Indirect victims did not all result from bombings. Feelings
against the Japanese ran high. On the morning of the fateful 14
August, a party of seven Japanese that had landed on the jetty on the
Bund were vilified, then chased by the Chinese crowd. While most
managed to escape or find protection in nearby taxis that sped off, one
Japanese was cornered and badly beaten. When a policeman rushed
to the scene, his efforts to save the man proved fruitless against the
attackers. Only with the arrival of a contingent of policemen did the
crowd start to disband.124 A few days later in the French Concession,
Sakanishi Takaichi, the Japanese employee of the Magasin Franco-
Japonais went out to buy bread for his colleagues. When Sakanishi
failed to return, one of his co-workers, Baba Toraji, went out in search
of him. Both were surrounded by a crowd of angry Chinese at the
intersection of Joffre and Cardinal Mercier, near the Cathay Theater.
In the course of the beating that followed Shakanishi was critically
injured, his skull fractured by blows from his attackers. Baba was
found dead nearby. Both young men, 19 and 21 respectively, fell
victim to the pent-up anger of the mob just a few feet away from their
shop. In other parts of the settlements, the beating of alleged traitors
121 NCDN, 17 August 1937.
122 The China Press, 9 September 1937.
123 NCDN, 17 August 1937.
124 NCDN, 15 August 1937.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
109
or Japanese residents continued. An unlucky Portuguese and one
Filipino met the same fate as they were mistaken for Japanese. Many
instances of mob attack were registered in the foreign settlements
during these days, with the police opening fire on crowds to stop
beatings. Most victims ended up in hospital in serious condition.125 At
the Lester hospitals, doctors reported that at the time of the bombings,
the hospital received daily an average of 15 Chinese, mistaken as
spies or Japanese, who were badly beaten up by angry crowds. Several
died of their injuries.126
The extent of civilian casualties in the very early part of the
hostilities in Shanghai cannot be fully measured. Most aerial attacks
and their related victims were not accounted for, except in broad terms
in the press. Many instances of smaller-scale killing went unreported.
Yet, in the French Concession alone where the police dutifully
recorded each and every case of death or injury, the first week of
fighting in the area most remote from the theater of operations
produced a death roll of 2,214 people. Even if we subtract the
victims of the Great World bombing, more than 1,000 residents fell
victims to air raid and shrapnel wounds. Many hundreds more were
injured.127 When Japanese troops landed south to attack the Chinese
position in Nanshi, the exchange of fire caused many projectiles
to land in the settlement. In the few weeks of fighting in late 1937,
36 residents were killed, while 117 were wounded.128 Sapajou, the
Russian cartoonist of the North China Daily News, summed up most
eloquently the absurdity of the war fought over the head of Shanghai
residents, the anxieties it created while the world (and even onlookers
from the relative safety of the foreign settlements) watched.129
Shanghai had barely recovered from the frightful bombing of the
Palace and Cathay hotels and that of the Great World when another
125 NCDN, 19 August 1937.
126 NCDN, 22 August 1937.
127 NCDN, 29 August 1937.
128 Rapport annuel 1937, 7. Service de police, U38-2-2090, SMA.
129 NCH, 16 August 1937; 30 August 1937; “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27804,
27807.

110
disaster struck the major commercial thoroughfare of the city. On 23
August, two bombs fell from unidentified planes. The first one hit the
Sincere Department Store at the corner of Chekiang Road, while the
second one pierced through the three floors of a US Navy warehouse
behind the I.C.I. building on Szechuen Road, but harmlessly fractured
upon the hard concrete ground floor. More damage was caused
by the sprinklers against fire than by the bomb itself. A sickening
detonation, however, shook the Sincere Department Store, which let
a large spout of smoke and threw debris all around. The three lower
floors of Sincere and adjacent Wing On took the full force of the
blast.130 The timing of the bombing was perhaps the only element
that prevented the explosion from causing a greater massacre than
the one that actually happened. It was a few minutes before 1:00 pm
when the planes let loose their lethal cargo. Many people had gone
out for their lunch break, while the number of customers must have
been smaller than usual due to the wartime impact on spending. Even
then, Nanking Road remained a busy street at all times. Scores of cars
and buses actually lined the street at the time of the explosion, whose
passengers fell victim of flying pieces of metal and other projectiles.
The bomb that struck the Sincere Department Store turned
Nanking Road into a charnel house. 173 people died instantly in the
street, in the bombed building, and in the shops nearby. Another 549
people were wounded.131 The No. 1 bus was just passing Chekiang
Road when the terrible explosion occurred. The windows of the bus
were shattered and the bus itself was severely damaged. The bus
driver never stopped, despite the shock, and managed to steer the bus
away from the site of the explosion. While many passengers escaped,
many more lay on the ground, killed by the objects projected by the
deflagration.132 A rickshaw puller struck by shrapnel just crumbled
into his vehicle, as if resting, but dead on the spot.133 The Sikh
policeman who monitored the traffic light at the corner of Nanking
130 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 1070, 15157.
131 CWR, 21 August 1937, 442; 25 August 1937 ; 4 September 1937.
132 NCDN, 24 August 1937.
133 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27793.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
111
Road and Chekiang Road was killed in his booth.134 The full width of
the show windows of the Sincere Department store was a confusion
of bloodstained merchandise and mutilated bodies. Shop assistants
and customers killed in the instant of buying lay on each side of the
smashed counters. When the time came to take stock of the extent of
the damage, the ghastly horror of the bombing was evident all around.
Within a radius of more than 100 yards, Nanking Road and the three
streets that converged on to the intersection were littered with glass,
window splinters and shell fragments. Tens of bodies lay in widening
pools of blood. Human remains, pieces of men and women who had
been walking a moment before, were plastered against the nearby
vehicles.135
The police immediately threw a cordon at Fukien Road on the
east and Wing On Road on the west so that traffic, both vehicular and
pedestrian, was stopped to facilitate rescue work. Within five minutes,
the Fire Brigade, ambulances, police, the Shanghai Volunteer Corps,
boy scouts and the coolies of the Public Works Department were
again throwing themselves into the piles of wreckage, which covered
the street and the heaps of mangled bodies.136 The task of providing
rescue was made far more difficult than a week earlier because of the
enormous amount of materials under which the dead and the wounded
were trapped.137 Smoldering embers threatened to burst into fire. The
crumbled stairs also made it impossible to reach people trapped on the
upper floors. The rescuers used ladders to reach the victims.138 The
shattering of the building by the blast showered dust over everything
and turned bodies into mummy-like figures. It made it harder to
discern human bodies, unless they moved or called for assistance. The
rescuers listened for moans and hurled debris aside to free the victims
and give them first aid as can be seen in a picture of a policeman
134 Ibid., ID 27792.
135 CWR, 28 August 1937, 442.
136 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 15159.
137 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27632.
138 NCDN, 24 August 1937; “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 15161.

112
helping a woman in shock.139 The lightly wounded were dressed up
and taken away to hospitals for further treatment.140
The victims of the bombing were barely distinguishable and
could hardly be sorted out. Truck and ambulances filled with the
dead, the dying, and the wounded made rotations between the site of
explosion and the various hospitals and mortuaries. All the Chinese
dead were placed in coffins (although the visual record show bodies
removed on trucks and transported to the Kiaochow Park (Jiaozhou
gongyuan) pending identification by relatives.141 Those who were not
taken away by their families were entrusted to charity organizations
for proper burial.142 Altogether 137 bodies were removed to the
temporary mortuary arranged on Kiaochow Road. Yet we do not know
how the authorities eventually disposed of the remaining bodies.143
While the rescuers took care of the victims, the fifty coolies of the
Public Works Department began to clear the wreckage.144 There was a
considerable amount of materials of all kinds on the street around the
department store.145 By 3:30 both the buildings had been boarded up
to prevent shattered concrete from falling onto the street, the streets
had been washed free of blood, and the wiring of the tramway had
been repaired. Nanking Road was open again to traffic, though only to
public transportation.146
The Lester Hospital received 200 bloody victims, many of whom
were quickly disposed of in the mortuary when diagnosed as dead.
The lightly wounded were sent out to emergency hospitals while
the medical staff concentrated on the seriously wounded. There was
less frenzy than on 14 August, as the number of victims paled in
comparison with the bloodbath of a week before. Somehow, too, the
139 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID15160.
140 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” 27638, 27640.
141 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27636, 27637.
142 Zhongyang ribao, 25 August 1937.
143 NCDN, 25 August 1937.
144 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27633, 27634, 27790.
145 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27789.
146 NCDN, 24 August 1937.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
113
medical staff had learned, though unwillingly, to cope with a large-
scale emergency situation. The four operating theaters were again
working at full speed. Throughout the afternoon, more victims came
in as more bodies were found in the rubble at Sincere or Wing On.
Chinese streamed through the corridors in search of lost relatives or
friends. When they failed to find their loved ones, the next step was to
pay a visit to the mortuary. The NCDN reported with sympathy about
the grief-stricken and fearful faces of all those who ran from one place
to the other with the hope of finding a friend or a relative.
In view of the increased demand on hospital beds, the Shanghai
Municipal Council made arrangements to collect information every
morning about the number of vacant beds in the hospitals in the
International Settlement. The information was distributed among
its various services and all those concerned in order to secure more
rapid admission and a better distribution of casualties. Fortunately,
there was no other opportunity to test the scheme as no mass deaths
happened again in the foreign settlements. Hospitals remained under
high pressure due to the high number of people under the stress of
war, especially refugees, and the victims of stray bullets and other
projectiles. Compared to 1932, too, regular civilian hospitals no
longer admitted Chinese soldiers who were sent to field or rear
military hospitals or to emergency Red Cross hospitals in the city.
There was much at stake in the proper identification of the bombs
dropped on the Sincere Department store. Since one had remained
almost intact, a clear verdict was expected. Yet China and Japan made
contradictory claims, each accusing the other. American and British
naval officers pieced together the collected fragments. The projectile
was of considerable size, almost four feet long with a 16-inch
diameter at its base. A preliminary examination by the naval officers
produced a unanimous view that the aerial missile weighed 1,000
lb.147 Yet a later expert assessment by British officers brought the size
down to 750-lb.148 The bomb was taken to the Central police station,
147 NCDN, 24 August 1937.
148 « Nanking Road and Chekiang Road – Glancing hit on façade of Sincere building
(C) 1 », Works 55/23, National Archives (U.K.)

114
pending its transfer to the US Navy as “Exhibit A” of the incident.
The bomb had fallen just yards away from the center of the British
and American governments in Shanghai, the location of the Japanese
embassy press bureau, the Central police station, and the headquarters
of the Shanghai Volunteers Corps.149 The Japanese authorities denied
any responsibility in the bombing. Two of their experts examined the
fractured bomb the same afternoon at 5:00 pm and found it to be not
of Japanese origin. The weight was much less than originally claimed,
about 500 lb., while the size was ascertained more accurately as being
forty inches and its diameter as being seventeen inches. It actually
came closer to the most standards bombs used by both contending
armies. The Japanese experts pointed out an inscription “SSTN”
which, according to them, ruled out any bomb used by the Japanese
army. They also observed that the bomb was of an obsolete type no
longer in use by Japanese planes.150
The Chinese Central News Agency issued a lengthy statement
giving the official assessment of the projectile. It declared that the
bomb was definitely Japanese. There had been no Chinese planes
flying over the International Settlement at the time of the bombing,
whereas Japanese aircraft had been seen bombarding Chinese
positions in Pudong. The Chinese experts also claimed that despite
the distortion from the fragmentation of the bomb, they identified an
inscription with two English letters “SS” followed by a trademark
sign, which they identified as inverted Japanese characters. Moreover,
they also pointed out two yellow lines around the inner part of the
bomb. They claimed that ‘yellow’ was a favorite color with the
Japanese while the Chinese bombs, as a rule, were painted red.151 A
“Letter to the Editor” by a Chinese reader later pointed out that at the
time of the bombing, no antiaircraft had been heard from the Japanese
warships, whereas any approach by Chinese planes was always
greeted with a volley of intense firing.152
149 NCDN, 24 August 1937.
150 NCDN, 24 August 1937.
151 Zhongyang ribao, 25 August 1937; NCDN, 24 August 1937.
152 Zhongyang ribao, 28 August 1937.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
115
The Shenbao provided a lengthy report of the bombing, sparing
no details about the human disaster. It was the first report in which
the newspaper provided a thorough account of the mass killing of
civilians, with lots of statistics, locations, etc. For the first time also, it
published photographs of the scene, including one showing blown off
hands and arms on a truck.153 The newspaper also went to great length
about the origin of the bombs. On the unexploded one, it followed the
expert assessment made by the Chinese government.154 It followed
up on this issue with a full article, asserting with certainty that the
bomb was Japanese.155 The Chinese press went along the Chinese
official interpretation. The Japanese were deemed to be indisputably
responsible for the accidental bombing. The China Weekly Review
also published five very graphic images of the victims of the Nanking
Road bombing. The images illustrated a text that denounced the
extreme violence to which ordinary Chinese were being subjected.
The first two weeks of fighting had left more than 2,000 killed and an
equal number more or less seriously injured, many crippled for life, in
the foreign concessions, an area supposed to be “outside” the zone of
hostilities.156
There was no further discussion of the origin of the bomb,
although it is unlikely that military experts would not pursue the
issue, if not to distribute blame, at least for their own knowledge
about the impact of bombing on buildings. All through the war in
Shanghai, British military officers examined bombed buildings and
wrote reports about their findings precisely on such issues.157 The two
department stores remained closed for five full days, but on 29 August
both reopened their doors as other official institutions started to move
back to their premises on the Bund, a sign that they no longer felt in
harm’s way. As business resumed throughout the foreign settlements,
large crowds gathered again in Nanking Road and the Bund, open
153 SB, 24 August 1937 [355:324].
154 NCDN, 24 August 1937.
155 SB, 25 August 1937.
156 CWR, 4 September 1937, 3.
157 Work 55/23, National Archives (U.K.).

116
again to rickshaws.158
Civilians under Fire: the Bombing
of the South Station
The last major instance of mass deaths took place at the end
of August, when Japanese planes bombed the South train station in
Nanshi. Although the Shanghai Municipal Police had reported an
easing of tension after a fortnight of fighting and the apparent removal
of military lines to the north of the city, the Japanese launched a
carefully planned assault south of the city. To assist the progress of
their troops, they started bombing the whole southern part of the
city. This last incident is the least documented of all the cases of
bombing of civilians in Shanghai, even if it produced a most famous
photograph.
On 28 August in the early afternoon, as hundreds of people
cluttered the platforms waiting for the next train to take them out of
the city, twelve Japanese planes circled over the South station before
dropping eight bombs.159 The South station was the main gathering
place for refugees seeking transportation to the interior since the
outbreak of hostilities. The North station was clearly in the middle of
the fighting zone and all trains had been suspended. Many refugees
had been patiently waiting for days for seats on the Hangzhou-bound
trains. A large number of refugees crammed the office to purchase
tickets and a larger crowd was gathered on the platform in hope of
their impending departure from the war-torn city. Death put a final
stop to their fateful journey. Although the main building itself was
only slightly damaged, all its windows and doors were shattered to
pieces. One of the bombs struck a nearby warehouse, causing a huge
fire, soon amplified by an incendiary bomb that struck a transportation
158 NCDN, 30 August 1937.
159 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27821.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
117
company and set the surrounding houses on fire.160
The station was worst hit as four bombs landed in and around
the main building and the railway tracks. One of the bombs exploded
a short distance from the station, wrecking a water tower close to
the tracks. Another one struck and tore down the overhead bridge
that ran above the tracks.161 Heavy smoke went up high into the sky
when the station caught fire, along with houses all around. Four other
bombs struck other places on Guohuo Road, two blocks to the north
of the station, Sanguantang Road, and the Luojiabang area.162 Blood,
mutilated bodies and wreckage strewed the whole area around the
station. Many would-be travelers were killed by shrapnel or pinned
down by debris. At the same time, terror and panic reigned in the streets
nearby as additional bombs exploded one after the other. Fortunately,
no bomb fell directly on the station building in which hundreds of
terror-stricken refugees had sought shelter.
Despite claims to the contrary by the Japanese military, Chinese
spokesmen emphasized that the area was devoid of any Chinese
troops and denounced the bombing as nothing but the wanton killing
of innocent civilians. Neutral foreign observers who toured the
streets of Nanshi also confirmed that there was not a single Chinese
soldier in the area. The Chinese authorities accused their enemies
of a deliberate action aimed at terrorizing the civilian population or
as sheer retaliation for the considerable loss of soldiers in Hongkou
during the previous weeks of fighting. The Japanese had warned of
an impending raid in the morning to blow up a Chinese blockade on
the Huangpu River. Reporters and photographers had congregated on
the roof of the Butterfield and Swire Building. By 3:00 pm, however,
no attack had materialized and most had given up and left when the
unexpected bombing of the South Station occurred. One of them,
H. S. “Newsreel” Wong (Wang Haisheng), a Chinese photographer
with the Hearst Metrotone News raced to the scene and filmed the
160 NCDN, 29 August 1937.
161 “Virtual Shanghai - Images,” ID 27818.
162 NCDN, 29 August 1937.

118
carnage, taking the picture that would make him world famous.163 Life
Magazine, which published the picture in its 4 October issue, claimed
that more than 136 million people saw it (Fig. 15). The baby received
first-aid assistance on site before being rushed to a hospital.164
Fig. 15
163 John Faber, Great News Photos and the Stories behind Them (New York: Courier
Dover Publications, 1978), 74.
164 Life Magazine, 4 October 1937. For a discussion of the famous image, see Paul
French, Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium
Wars to Mao (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 192.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
119
The students of the Datong College were the first on the scene
to provide first aid to the victims and help them on to the trucks that
arrived shortly after. The wounded were rushed to nearby hospitals,
but a large number came into the foreign settlements to seek medical
treatment. Rescue work was made hard by the obstacles resulting from
the bombing. Blazing fires consumed scores of houses around, while
the electrical and phone wires dangling from broken poles constituted
impassable barricades until removed. The dead were placed in
coffins provided by charity organizations pending their removal
and burial. Yet again the amount of available coffins in a context
of near continuous mass deaths had strained the resources of these
organizations to the limit. Two days later, sixty corpses were still
lying on the station platforms. By the end of the day, however, they
had all been evacuated. Piles of luggage, never to be claimed, were
lying on the platform in front of the booking office where refugees
had congregated to purchase their passage to safety.165
One significant difference in rescue work between the Chinese
municipality and the foreign concessions was the lack of proper
institutional organization. The municipal authorities were either
absent or overwhelmed, and assistance to the dead and wounded relied
almost entirely on charity organizations. Soon after the outbreak of
hostilities, the municipal government had drastically reduced its staff
to 25 percent of its original size, with salaries limited to a living
allowance.166 The municipality was in financially dire straits. There
was no medical assistance scheme for the wounded. Most victims
were taken to the foreign concessions for treatment. The Lester
Hospital received about 100 patients, mostly women and children,
which kept the operating rooms busy well into the evening. Yet due
to the sheer number of incoming victims, about a half were sent to
the Police Hospital, Saint Elizabeth’s, Saint Luke’s, and the Russian
Hospital. Several patients eventually succumbed to their wounds.167
A foreign resident who happened to be living in the Lester Hospital
165 NCDN, 30 August 1937.
166 SB, 16 August 1937 (355:280).
167 NCDN, 29 August 1937.

120
recalled seeing “men, women, children, even babies […] being
brought in blood-soaked, some of them disemboweled, legs and arms
torn to pieces”. He bitterly denounced what amounted to the mass
murder of innocent civilians for which, in view of the past accidents,
there was no longer any excuse. It could only be a deliberate and
intentional action.168
According to the Shenbao, 112 people were killed and 170
were wounded in the bombing of the South Station.169 The wanton
violence brought upon powerless refugees stirred strong indignation
among foreigners. The Shanghai Evening News published an editorial
describing the event as murder.170 All missionary organizations
joined hands to make strong representations to their respective
governments, especially in the United States. While there are no
figures, it appears that the number of women and especially children
was especially high compared to the previous bombings in the foreign
settlements. The bombing of the South station produced the single
iconic image that electrified public opinion all around the world and
tarnished the image of the Japanese army for the rest of the war. The
crying baby on the devastated platform, made the cover of the next
issue of Life Magazine. It was bound to become the very symbol
of Japanese military brutality. Still today, with many unfortunate
misuses, it remains an unavoidable visual representation in textbooks,
photographic histories and of course web sites related to the Sino-
Japanese war.
After two weeks of intense fighting over the city, the sense
of immediate danger receded. Although fighting continued much
longer in Zhabei and Hongkou, the most massive military effort had
moved to the region north of Shanghai and closer to the Yangzi River.
Air raids were no longer expected. The authorities of the foreign
settlements released the men who had acted as volunteer drivers with
168 NCDN, 30 August 1937.
169 SB, 30 August 1937 [355:357]. The Chinese authorities later claimed 700 dead, but
the high gure is unlikely in view of corroborating information from independent
press sources. Zhongyang ribao, 29 August 1937; CWR, 2 October 1937, 92.
170 Shanghai Evening News, 30 August 1937.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
121
the ambulance service or the truck brigade that transported the dead
and wounded during the previous two weeks. While returning to
their respective occupations, they remained on “reserve” to be called
by phone in case of necessity. The Fire brigade carried out the same
streamlining of its volunteer staff since fires had decreased in number.
The press reported the return to business of Chinese shopkeepers
and merchants in the Central district, even if bigger companies were
still struggling to get going.171 Soon, the terrifying events that had
punctuated the initial two weeks of the war would pass into memory
and, for lack of some form of official recognition and commemoration,
slip into obscurity. In the event, no official acknowledgement of the
fallen civilians was ever granted.
Yet fighting continued for many more weeks, near or in the city.
The Chinese withdrew to a new strategic line on 13 September five
kilometers behind their original positions, forming a straight line from
the North train station to Luodian. Nevertheless, air raids and shelling
would occasionally cause the destruction of lives and properties in
the settlements. On 10 September, a heavy shell from Pudong landed
at 5:30 am at the corner of Kiangse and Foochow Road, not far from
the entrance to the Shanghai Municipal Council. The early hour,
however, prevented a massive loss of life. Only two Chinese and one
Indian were hit.172 Zhabei, Pudong, and the southernmost part of
Nanshi remained the targets of bombing or the source of shelling for
weeks. Antiaircraft fire flew over the foreign settlements, occasionally
running short of its target and causing more or less serious damage
where it fell.173 On 18 September, the sixth anniversary of the
invasion of Manchuria, the Chinese Air Force carried out a series
of spectacular and destructive raids by moonlight on Hongkou and
Yangshupu.174 The air raids persisted well into October, with sustained
shelling from anti- aircraft guns whenever the Chinese bombers
171 NCDN, 31 August 1937.
172 CWR, 18 September 1937, 42.
173 CWR, 18 September 1937, 43.
174 CWR, 25 September 1937, 56.

122
appeared in the sky.175 The North train station, in particular, remained
a major magnet for bombing and shelling as the Japanese failed to
dislodge the Chinese troops bunkered in the area.176 It was not until
the Chinese troops withdrew from Zhabei on 26 October that war
effectively left Shanghai for good thus almost completely removing
the risk of further collateral damage from shelling or bombing.177
All around the city, civilians fell victim to Japanese bombings,
some fully unrelated to military targets, some due to the presence
of Chinese military installations in the vicinity. For the Japanese
command, any area where Chinese troops were concentrated, where
military supplies were gathered and distributed, or where military
communications were centralized, was a hostile base.178 Chinese
civilians often paid the price for actual or perceived Chinese military
presence in and around Shanghai. On 5 September, a formation of 20
Japanese planes bombed two villages, Beixinjing and Zhoujiaqiao,
near the western border of the International Settlement, leaving 49
dead and 130 injured.179 Train stations could easily slip into the
category of “hostile bases” and many became the target of repeated
attacks. On 8 September, 300 refugees lost their lives in an air raid
that destroyed their train in the Songjiang station.180 Unfortunate
locations, like the refugee camps outside the city, met with similar
fates in part because of the movement of troops in their environs. On
6 September, heavy damages were inflicted on a refugee camp west of
Shanghai, leaving 50 dead and more than 100 wounded.181 One month
later, another camp near met the same fate, with high casualties.182
There is no way to know how many civilians fell victim to the war
around Shanghai. The count was not made or when it was made, it
175 CWR, 9 October 1937, 101.
176 CWR, 16 October 1937, 129.
177 CWR, 30 October 1937, 186.
178 CWR, 11 September 1937, 25.
179 The China Press, 6 September 1937.
180 The China Press, 9 September 1937.
181 CWR, 11 September 1937, 25.
182 CWR, 16 October 1937, 129.

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
123
was for propaganda purposes as in the list established by the China
Information Service.183
Conclusion
The sequence of bombings that struck and created havoc in the
very heart of the city in August 1937 had no precedent in Shanghai,
although five years earlier the Japanese Navy had used aerial bombing
on Zhabei to dislodge the Chinese troops. The civilian population had
fled, but many had remained trapped in the battle zone. Over three
weeks of fighting, about 4,000civilians had lost their lives in the
affected districts (Zhabei, Hongkou, Yangshupu) and the surrounding
towns and villages.184 This was of course a terrible human disaster,
with an even larger number unaccounted for, but it was a population
stranded in the middle of a battle zone, with hardly any hope of
receiving help from outside, except for volunteers who drove up to
these areas to collect all the living. Medical assistance was just not
feasible.
In August 1937, war broke out again in the same areas, north of
the foreign settlements. The foreign authorities, although seriously
concerned, expected that as in 1932 the conflict would be limited
to the Chinese districts. They proclaimed the strict neutrality of
the territories they administered with the clear intention to remain
immune from the war about to rage over the city. Yet in 1937
the military configuration had changed drastically. The Chinese
government made it clear that its army would take all necessary
measures to battle with the Japanese, especially in view of their use
of the International Settlement and the Huangpu River as a rear base
for their operations. Furthermore, in 1937 the Chinese Air Force had
grown to a very substantial size and become an instrument of choice
183 CWR, 2 October 1937, 92.
184 Christian Henriot, “Beyond Glory: Civilians, Combatants, and Society during the
Battle of Shanghai,” War & Society 32:2 (2012): 106-135.

124
in the confrontation with the Japanese. Even if the foreign settlements
were never targeted as such, the air space over the city became a
single battleground.
The series of disasters that struck in the first weeks of battle
posed an unparalleled challenge to the authorities in terms of crisis
management. Within minutes on 14 August they had to deal with
major physical damage in the most central areas, with destroyed
buildings, disrupted traffic, and tons of wreckage to remove. Yet the
highest challenge was the number of victims – by the thousands –
calling for immediate medical assistance for those who had survived
and ways to dispose of the bodies and human remains of those who
had died in the bombings. The strategic choice made by the authorities
was to have everyone and everything removed as quickly as possible.
For the wounded, the issue was of course to provide them with
medical treatment as early as possible to lessen their suffering and
give them a chance to survive. To move the wounded, the rescuers had
to make do with whatever mode of transportation was at hand. Trucks
carried more people than did ambulances.
Shanghai offered the best medical infrastructure in China, with
a concentration of most hospitals in the foreign settlements. Even if
they were overwhelmed by the sheer number of patients requiring
assistance almost all at the same time, the medical staff was able to
attend all patients in about six hours. Of course many died for lack
of timely medical assistance. Yet, somehow, the surviving victims
of the bombings in the city were the “lucky” ones as they benefited
from rapid and efficient rescue services and received proper medical
attention, even under duress. No such conditions existed in the area
around Shanghai. There, scores of villages were bombed and shelled,
leaving hundreds or thousands of victims for whom there was no
hospital and no medical assistance. They perished miserably in their
burning homes. Only a few were taken to overflowing Red Cross
units.
Yet, despite all goodwill, many victims succumbed to their
wounds. Hundreds had died in the very moment of the blasts. In a hot
summer day, dead bodies could not be left in open air to decay and
increased the risks of epidemics. The authorities had no qualm about

August 1937: War and the Death en masse of Civilians
125
the means of removing the dead. What mattered was speedy removal
from the scene and the restoration of normal conditions in the city.
The bodies were gathered in remote places like the Zikawei cemetery,
the Kiaochow Park and the rather centrally located Racecourse. Here
the lack of documentation does not allow us to examine how each
foreign authority eventually disposed of the dead bodies. While in the
French Concession, the municipal officers lost no time in having them
all buried the very next day, the Shanghai Municipal Council seem
to have delegated the grim task to the Shanghai Public Benevolent
Cemetery, which caused delays in the burial of the victims. The
difference in treatment clearly reflected the nature of power in each
foreign settlement, with a system of command that was much more
assertive in the French Concession.
The civilians who died in the first bombings were quickly
forgotten and left hardly any significant trace in the collective
memory. As C. T. Wang, the Chinese ambassador in Washington
stated, “Civilian lives had been sacrificed for the good of the
defense of democracy against Japanese militarism.”185 The bombing
of Chinese civilians by Chinese pilots was a blemish that made
the events of 14 August 1937 something that could not fit into the
official war narrative, then and now. Only a limited number of people
witnessed the various sequences of massacre. As soon as the bombings
occurred, the police cordoned off the areas. The municipal staff in
both settlements were mobilized to wipe away the consequences of
the bombing. Those who passed through these areas only the day after
could hardly imagine the extent of the carnage. The Chinese press, as I
discussed, chose to publish very little on the August 14 bombings and
failed to relay a real sense of the tragedy to the population. It became
more vocal with the bombing of the Sincere Department Store and the
South Train Station, but even here the ongoing battle between Chinese
and Japanese troops largely overshadowed these events. The bombing
incidents probably paled in view of the enormous casualties of the
Shanghai Battle – some 260,000 soldiers – even if the latter never
received an appropriate recognition of their sacrifice. These civilian
185 NCDN, 17 August 1937.

126
deaths, however, are also part of the untold misery of the Shanghai
people during the war. There was nothing spectacular or heroic about
these deaths. They were “accidents” that killed and maimed thousands
of people whose voice was never heard. National War at
the Grass Roots Level:
Zouping County, Shandong