Mao: The Unknown Story

At this point Japan did not aim to extend the fighting beyond northern China. Yet, within a matter of weeks, all-out war had broken out 1,000 km to the south, in Shanghai, a place where neither Chiang nor Japan wished, or planned, to have a war. Japan had only some 3,000 marines stationed near Shanghai, under the 1932 truce agreement. Tokyo’s plan until mid-August remained: “Army to North China only.” It added specifically: “There is no need to send the Army to Shanghai.”

The well-informed New York Times correspondent H. Abend wrote afterwards:

It was a commonplace … to declare that the Japanese attacked Shanghai. Nothing was further from their intentions or from the truth. The Japanese did not want and did not expect hostilities in the Yangtse Valley. They … had so small a force there even as late as August 13th … that they were nearly pushed into the river on the 18th and 19th.

ABEND REALIZED that there were “clever plans to upset the Japanese scheme for confining the hostilities entirely to North China.” He was right about there being “clever plans”—he was only wrong about one thing: the plans were not Chiang’s (as Abend thought), but almost certainly Stalin’s.

Japan’s swift occupation of northern China in July posed a very direct danger to Stalin. Tokyo’s huge armies were now in a position to turn north and attack Russia anywhere along a border many thousands of kilometers long. The year before, Stalin had publicly identified Japan as the principal menace. Now, we believe, he activated a long-term Communist agent in the heart of the Nationalist army, and detonated a full-scale war in Shanghai, which drew the Japanese inextricably into the vast heartland of China — and away from Russia.

The “sleeper” now wakened was a general called Zhang Zhi-zhong (whom we shall refer to as ZZZ), commander of the Shanghai — Nanjing garrison. In 1925 he had been a teacher at Whampoa, the Russian-funded and Russian-staffed military academy near Canton. From the day of its founding, Moscow made a determined effort to plant high-level agents in the Nationalist military. In his memoirs, ZZZ acknowledged that: “In summer 1925 I was completely in sympathy with the Communist Party, and … was called ‘red teacher,’ ‘red regiment commander’ … I wanted to join the CCP, and told Mr. Chou En-lai.” Chou told him to stay in the Nationalists and collaborate “covertly” with the CCP. During the mid-1930s, ZZZ kept in close contact with the Soviet embassy.

At the time of the Marco Polo Bridge clash, ZZZ held the pivotal job of chief of the Shanghai — Nanjing garrison. He tried to talk Chiang into launching a “first strike” against Japan — not in northern China, where the fighting was, but 1,000 kilometers to the south, in Shanghai, where the small Japanese garrison was not involved in any military action at this stage. Chiang did not reply to this proposal, even though ZZZ repeated it many times. Shanghai was the industrial and financial heart of China, an international metropolis, and Chiang did not want to see it turned into a battleground. Moreover, it was very close to his capital, Nanjing. He had even transferred troops and artillery away from the Shanghai area, to give Japan no excuse for war there.

At the end of July, right after the Japanese occupied Peking and Tianjin, ZZZ cabled Chiang again, arguing strongly for “taking the initiative” to start a war. After ZZZ said he would only do so if the Japanese showed unmistakable signs of attacking Shanghai, Chiang gave his conditional consent, stressing: “You must wait for orders about when this should happen.”

But on 9 August, at Shanghai airport, an army unit hand-picked by ZZZ killed a Japanese marine lieutenant and a private. A Chinese prisoner under sentence of death was then dressed in Chinese uniform and shot dead at the airport gate, to make it seem that the Japanese had fired first. The Japanese gave every sign of wishing to defuse the incident, but ZZZ still bombarded Chiang with requests to launch an offensive, which Chiang vetoed. On the morning of the 13th, the Generalissimo told ZZZ not to launch a war “on impulse,” but to “study and discuss” all the angles again, and then submit his plan. ZZZ pressed the next day: “This army is determined to start the offensive against the enemy at 5:00 PM today. Here is the plan …” On the 14th, Chinese planes bombed the Japanese flagship Izumo, as well as troops and navy planes on the ground, and ZZZ ordered a general offensive. But Chiang stopped him: “You must not attack this evening. Wait for order.”

When no order arrived, ZZZ outflanked Chiang by issuing a press release next day, claiming, falsely, that Japanese warships had shelled Shanghai and that Japanese troops had started attacking the Chinese. With anti-Japanese feeling running high, Chiang was put on the spot. The following day, 16 August, he finally gave the order: “General assault for dawn tomorrow.”