preface
On September 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army shelled the North Camp of the Northeast Chinese Army that night on the grounds that the Chinese army blew up the South Manchuria Railway (to blame the Japanese army), and the 918 Incident broke out in shock. Soon after the outbreak of the September 18 Incident, the international community was very concerned about this, and Chiang Kai-shek, who was worried about internal and external difficulties, also hoped that the international community could give Up Certain Pressure on Japan, but Japan, which had been coveting the northeast for a long time, would not easily give up this treasure land.
Therefore, the Japanese government conspired to launch a war in Shanghai to divert the attention of the international community, which was the outbreak of the 1.28 Songhu War of Resistance on January 28, 1932, which Japan called the first Shanghai Incident!
The Chinese army that waited in a tight line
The fuse of the incident
After agreeing on a strategy to launch a war in Shanghai, the Japanese government called the Japanese legation in Shanghai and ordered the young Saka Tatsuyoshi to plan the incident in Shanghai, so Tanaka Takayoshi instructed the Japanese female spy Yoshiko Kawashima to provoke and create Sino-Japanese friction.
On January 18, 1932, Kawashima Yoshiko sent several Japanese monks to the Sanyou Industrial Society General Factory to provoke, and clashed with the volunteer army in the factory, Kawashima Yoshiko hired thugs to dress up as workers and mixed into the volunteer army to fight the Japanese monks, which eventually led to the death and injury of the Japanese monks, and afterwards the thugs fled, and the Japanese authorities accused them of being the work of the factory volunteers.
After the incident, the Japanese side was interested in expanding the incident, so it sent people to set fire to the Sanyou Industrial Society factory at night to kill and injure the workers who came to fight the fire; Tanaka Takayoshi secretly organized a demonstration in Shanghai and Japanese overseas Chinese, so that Japanese expatriates demanded that the Japanese Marines in Shanghai intervene in this matter, and the Japanese Navy took the opportunity to increase troops to Shanghai on the pretext of protecting overseas Chinese.
Image of Yoshiko Kawasaki
On January 21, Japanese Consul General in Shanghai Murakura Matsu asked Wu Tiecheng, then mayor of Shanghai, to arrest the murderers of the Japanese monks and the Sanyou Industrial Society, and put forward four demands: First, let the mayor of Shanghai publicly apologize on this matter; second, arrest and set off the perpetrators; third, make economic compensation for the victims; and fourth, ban and dissolve all anti-Japanese organizations and groups in Shanghai headed by the Anti-Japanese Salvation Association.
The next day, Yukiichi Shiozawa, commander of Japan's First Foreign Fleet in Shanghai, also issued a statement saying that the Japanese Navy would take action if the mayor of Shanghai did not agree to Murai Kuramatsu's request.
In the face of the aggressive attitude of the Japanese side, Chen Mingshu, commander of the Beijing-Shanghai garrison, Jiang Guangnai, commander-in-chief of the 19th Route Army stationed in Shanghai, and Cai Tingkai, commander of the army, advocated waging war against Japan and said that "there is no way to save the country without resistance." However, the Nationalist government in Nanjing had just ended the Central Plains War, the warlords in various places were divided, and the government's manpower and financial resources were not rich, so Chiang Kai-shek was not willing to go to war with the Japanese side on this matter.
However, the Japanese government basically deliberately launched a war, so the conditions put forward were very harsh, and there was not much time left for the Chinese government; at the same time, the strategy of the Shanghai Incident was approved by the Japanese Emperor, and the Japanese army once again increased its troops in Shanghai.
The incident broke out
On January 24, 1932, Japanese agents sent people to set fire to the residence of the Japanese minister in China, Shigemitsu Aoi, in Shanghai, and slandered it as the work of the Chinese (the usual Japanese trick of grafting). On January 27, Murai Kuramatsu issued a so-called ultimatum to the Shanghai Municipal Government, that is, the Shanghai Municipal Government must respond satisfactorily to the Japanese side's request by 18:00 on the 28th, otherwise the Japanese side will take military action.
At 13:00 on January 28, 1932, the Shanghai Municipal Government replied to the Japanese side at the behest of the National Government, indicating that it would accept all the conditions proposed by the Japanese side. The Japanese side once again proposed the withdrawal of the Chinese Nineteenth Route Army stationed in Zhabei, Shanghai, but before the Shanghai Municipal Government could respond, the Japanese army launched an attack on the garrison in Zhabei at midnight on the 28th, when the 156th Brigade of the 78th Division of the 19th Army stationed in Zhabei rose up to fight back after being attacked by the Japanese army, and the 6th Regiment of the Gendarmerie, which had changed its defense, immediately joined the battle, and the 1.28 Songhu War of Resistance broke out!
After the outbreak of the war, Jiang Guangnai, commander-in-chief of the Nineteenth Route Army, and Cai Tingkai, commander of the Nineteenth Route Army, set up a temporary command post in Zhenru, Shanghai, commanded the 78th Division of the Nineteenth Route Army to fight the Japanese army in Shanghai, and ordered the 60th Division of the Nineteenth Route Army stationed in Suzhou and Changzhou and the 61st Division of the Nineteenth Route Army stationed in Zhenjiang and Nanjing to immediately march east to Shanghai to reinforce.
On the 29th, the Japanese army, under the cover of armored vehicles, aircraft, and artillery, began to attack the Chinese defenders. All the officers and men of the 78th Division regarded death as a homecoming, and engaged in a fierce battle with the Japanese army, and without effective weapons to attack the armored vehicles, they tied together with grenades and organized death squads to blow up the vehicles, and the battle was very tragic.
At the beginning of the war, the Air Force of the Nationalist Government was stationed in Nanjing and Guangdong, and the Chinese defenders did not lack effective weapons to strike aircraft, so the Japanese fighters seemed to enter no man's land in Shanghai, bombing wildly in the Zhabei area, blowing up countless houses, killing and injuring countless Chinese defenders and innocent civilians!
Cai Tingkai and others inspected the position
But the Nineteenth Route Army held its position, vowed to resist to the death, and repelled the first fierce attack of the Japanese army! In order to wait for reinforcements, Japan pretended to make peace, and although the Nineteenth Route Army knew that it was the Japanese army's strategy to slow down the troops, it also suffered serious losses and needed to rest, so under the mediation of the American consul, the two armies ceased war!
The National Government in Nanjing still pinned its hopes on the help of the international community, and the Chinese representative asked the League of Nations to stop the Japanese side's aggressive behavior at the meeting of the International Joint Council held on the 29th, and the League of Nations said that it would mediate in the middle!
However, the war had already begun, and under the high anti-Japanese appeal of the military and the people of the whole country, the National Government had to recognize the reality and prepare to fight against Japan!
Chen Mingshu, commander of the Beijing-Shanghai garrison
On the 30th, Chiang Kai-shek issued a "Letter to the Generals of the Whole Country," declaring that he would resolutely fight against Japan to the end, preferring to be crushed to pieces rather than be completed, which won a strong response from the military and the people of the whole country, so the National Government began to comprehensively deploy its war strategy against Japan!
On the 31st, the first reinforcements of the Japanese Navy arrived in Shanghai, including dozens of aircraft carried by the Japanese aircraft carriers Kaga and Fengxiang, as well as several torpedo boats and cruisers, and the Japanese Navy Special Forces also sent thousands of additional personnel to Shanghai.
On February 1, Yu Jishi, commander of the 88th Division of the Nationalist Army, took the initiative to ask Chiang Kai-shek for approval, and then reorganized the 88th Division, the 87th Division, and the Central Military Academy Teaching Corps into the Fifth Army, and reinforced the 19th Route Army under the leadership of Commander Zhang Zhizhong on the 16th. (The Fifth Army fought in Burma after the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, so it was also known as the Chinese Expeditionary Force, and became one of the five main forces of the Nationalist Army after the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.)
Zhang Zhizhong
On February 3, the supported Japanese naval special forces, under the cover of their air force, once again launched an attack on the Chinese defenders everywhere! The war situation expanded from Zhabei to Jiangwan and Wusong! However, the Chinese defenders were superior in numbers at this time, desperately resisting, and finally resisted the Japanese attack again. The Japanese authorities, who had suffered several setbacks, revoked the authority of Yukiichi Shiozawa, commander of the First Fleet, and put the commander of the Navy's Third Fleet, Yoshizaburo Nomura, in command!
On February 5, the Ninth Division of the Nationalist Army, under the leadership of division commander Jiang Dingwen, also rushed to the Shanghai Theater to participate in the battle, and the Nationalist Government mobilized the Central Air Force to take off at the Nanjing Ming Palace Airport to reinforce the Shanghai defenders, and then the Guangdong Air Force also went north to resist the enemy!
Commander of the Nineteenth Route Army, Cai Tingkai
On February 7 and 11, the Nationalist government dispatched an artillery battalion and an artillery platoon to reinforce Shanghai, directly commanded by the 19th Route Army, and the Chinese defenders, with the support of all sides, had their garrisons slightly strengthened, but in the face of the elite Japanese troops armed to the teeth, they still had a drop in the bucket, but the Chinese defenders still relied on strong willpower and fearless spirit of sacrifice to use their flesh and blood to repel the fierce attacks of the enemy again and again!
Since the Japanese Marines were invincible for a long time, the Japanese government sent a stronger army to Shanghai, and the first Japanese army to arrive was the Mixed 24 Brigade in Shanghai, which attacked the Chinese defenders in three ways on February 8, but they were all repelled by our defenders!
Shanghai after aircraft artillery bombardment
The Japanese government then urgently sent the Ninth Division of the Japanese Army to reinforce Shanghai, the unit docked at the Huangpu River pier on the 13th, and on the 18th all the Japanese troops gathered to land, and its division commander Kenkichi Ueda took over the command of Nomura Yoshizaburo!
After the troops were assembled, the arrogant Ueda Kenkichi issued an ultimatum to the Nineteenth Route Army, asking the Nineteenth Route Army to immediately withdraw from Shanghai and dismantle all fortifications, otherwise the consequences would be borne by themselves!
After receiving this so-called ultimatum, the commander-in-chief of the Nineteenth Route Army, Jiang Guangnai and the commander Cai Tingkai, directly ordered the defenders on the front line to shell the Japanese positions and responded to him with guns!
Ueda Kenkichi used a central breakthrough and a two-wing encirclement strategy to launch a frantic attack on our defenders. The Japanese army attacked Jiangwan and Miaoxing in the center with the 90th Regiment, and then divided its troops to attack Wusong in the north and Zhabei in the south. The Japanese army used aircraft to cover in the air, and the ground troops bombarded our defenders' positions with naval naval guns and army cannons, and then charged with tanks and armored vehicles, followed by infantry, our defenders were seriously damaged, but still fought against the Japanese army according to the favorable terrain, laying mines or blowing up enemy tanks with human bombs, and the battle situation was very tragic!
On February 21, Chiang Kai-shek also transferred the 10th and 83rd Divisions of the Wei Lihuang Department of the 14th Army of the Nationalist Army from Zhejiang to Shanghai. The next day, he secretly ordered Hu Zongnan's First Division, which was stationed in Henan, to rush to Shanghai to assist in the battle.
On the 22nd, the Japanese Ninth Division all participated in the battle, ready to suppress and take the Miaoxing position held by the Eighty-eighth Division of the Fifth Army with strong firepower! Zhang Zhizhong, commander of the Fifth Army, personally commanded the battle, and under the siege of Sun Yuanliang's brigade, Song Xilian's troops, and the Sixty-first Division of the Nineteenth Route Army on three sides, the Japanese Ninth Division suffered heavy casualties and lost one after another, so it withdrew from the Miaoxing position, which was later called "the great victory of the Temple"! The morale of our defenders was high, and in the following days they repelled the Japanese attack several times!
The commander-in-chief of the Nineteenth Route Army, Jiang Guangnai
On the 23rd, the Nineteenth Route Army took advantage of the low morale of the Japanese army's successive defeats, and decided to beat the falling water dogs, so it organized a death squad to blow up the flagship of the Japanese Navy's Third Fleet, which was anchored near Shanghai, Izumo, which shook the Japanese government, and the Japanese cabinet meeting agreed to formally establish the Shanghai Dispatch Army Headquarters, revoke the command of Ueta Kenyoshi, and be replaced by Army General Shirakawa Yoshinori.
In addition, the Japanese Army's Eleventh Division, the Fourteenth Division, and more than a hundred aircraft were sent to reinforce the Japanese army in Shanghai, preparing to organize a larger-scale war of aggression in Shanghai, so far the Japanese army has gathered nearly 100,000 troops in Shanghai, eighty warships, and three hundred aircraft, while our defenders at this time have less than 50,000 troops, and most of the weapons and equipment are far worse than the Japanese army, which is bound to be a bitter and fierce war for our defenders!
On the 28th, Gloria, commander of the British fleet in China, invited Chinese diplomatic representative Gu Weijun and Huang Qiang, chief of staff of the 19th Route Army, as well as Japanese representative Navy Commander Nomura and Japanese Prime Minister's representative Matsuoka Yoseki matsuoka to meet with the British ship Kent, hoping to mediate between the two countries. The conditions put forward at the meeting were not excessive, so the next day, the National Government agreed to the conditions of the meeting, but the Japanese side did not respond! Therefore, the Council of the League of Nations also held a meeting to mediate the war, and this time the Japanese representative Sato Naotake expressed most of his consent!
Shanghai fell
But the Japanese attack on Shanghai did not end!
The new Commander of the Japanese Army, Yoshinori Shirakawa, having learned the lessons of the previous japanese frontal attacks and was ready to land on the left side of the defenders in the Taicang Liuhe area, thus attacking the Chinese defenders on both sides with the Ninth Division.
On March 1, Shirakawa Yoshinori ordered the Ninth Division of the Army to launch an offensive against our defenders, and at the same time sent the Navy's Third Fleet to transport the 11th Division from the mouth of the Yangtze River to enter and forcibly land at Liuhe and other places, so our defenders fell into the predicament of being attacked by the enemy on their backs, and could only retreat to the second line of defense!
On the same day, the main force of the 47th Division of the Nationalist Army was assembled in Kunshan, and on the same day rushed to Jiading, Taicang and other places to reinforce our defenders.
On March 2, the Japanese army captured Shanghai, and the next day, the Japanese army captured Zhenru and Nanxiang, and this victory made the Attitude of the Japanese side hardened, and put forward more stringent requirements to the Chinese side, that is, the unreasonable demand that the Chinese army must first retreat and the Japanese army should not fully retreat for the time being, which was directly rejected by the Chinese side!
Post-war negotiations
On March 3, the Japanese army launched another attack, but was accused by the US Secretary of State StephenSon, at this time Japan's purpose of diverting the attention of the international community has been achieved, so under the coordination of the League of Nations, Japan announced an armistice, and China and Japan began post-war negotiations!
The Sino-Japanese negotiations lasted for dozens of days, and the draft negotiations were only adopted on April 30, and the representatives of China and Japan signed the "Sino-Japanese Armistice Agreement" on May 5, after which the Japanese army withdrew from Shanghai in batches, and a small number of them remained in the Hongkou area of Shanghai, while the Chinese troops had to withdraw to the front line of Kunshan and Suzhou, and could not garrison troops in Shanghai.
Shanghai Songhu Anti-Japanese War Memorial Hall in Baoshan District
In this War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Chinese army heroically resisted the Japanese aggressors, did not fear sacrifice, dared to charge forward, and killed and injured more than 10,000 Japanese troops; the whole country fought with the same enemy, carried forward the national spirit of the Chinese nation of not fearing a strong enemy and daring to resist, and aroused the patriotic enthusiasm of the people of the whole country!
Finally, I would like to conclude this article with a sentence made by Premier Zhou Enlai:
"Chinese people love peace, but in order to defend peace, they have never been and will never be afraid to resist the war of aggression"!