User:Blueshirts/draft
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Battle of Shanghai was the first of the twenty-two major engagements fought between the National Revolutionary Army, Republic of China and the Imperial Japanese Army, Empire of Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the entire war.
Battle of Shanghai | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Part of the Second Sino-Japanese war | |||||||
A National Revolutionary Army machine gun nest in Shanghai | |||||||
| |||||||
Belligerents | |||||||
National Revolutionary Army | Imperial Japanese Army | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Chiang Kai-shek, Chen Cheng, Zhang Zhizhong |
Heisuke Yanagawa, Iwane Matsui, Hasegawa Kiyoshi | ||||||
Strength | |||||||
600,000 troops in 75 divisions and 9 brigades, 200 airplanes |
300,000 troops in 8 divisions and 6 brigades, 500 airplanes, 300 tanks, 130 naval ships | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
~200,000 | 40,672[1] |
Since 1931, China and Japan had been embroiled in incessant, smaller conflicts, often known as "incidents," that saw China lose territories piece by piece. By August 1937, following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7 and the ensuing Japanese invasion of North China, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek decided to lead China into total war with Japan, though without a formal declaration of war. Dogged Chinese resistance at Shanghai was aimed at stalling the rapid Japanese advance, giving much needed time for the Chinese government to move vital industries to the interior, while at the same time attempting to bring sympathetic Western Powers to China's side. During the fierce three-month battle, Chinese and Japanese troops fought in downtown Shanghai, in the outlying towns, and on the beaches of the Jiangsu coast, where the Japanese had made amphibious landings. The Battle of Shanghai was essentially a story of Chinese soldiers, who, relying only on their small-caliber weapons, courage, and patriotism, defended Shanghai against an overwhelming onslaught of air, naval, and armored striking power from Japan.[2] In the end, Shanghai fell, and China lost a significant portion of its best troops, while also failing to elicit any international intervention. The resistance of Chinese forces, however, came as a massive shock to the Japanese invaders,[3] who had been indoctrinated with notions of cultural and martial superiority, and dramatically demoralized the Japanese army. The epic defense of Shanghai and the ensuing atrocities inflicted by the profoundly shocked Japanese troops inspired Chinese nationalistic resistance in what was to be a brutal eight-year conflict.
In Chinese, the Battle of Shanghai is known as the Battle of Songhu (Chinese: 淞滬會戰; pinyin: Sōnghù Huìzhàn). Song (淞) comes from Wusong (吳凇), an alternate name of Suzhou Creek, which runs through Shanghai. Hu (滬) is the abbreviation for the city itself. In Chinese literature, the battle is also referred to as 813, denoting August 13, the date when battle began. In some Japanese sources, the battle is known as the "Second Shanghai Incident" (Japanese: 第二次上海事変), alluding to the First Shanghai Incident of 1932. However, the 1937 Battle of Shanghai was a full-scale battle signifying the beginning of an all-out war between the two countries. The term "incident" traditionally has been used to downplay Japanese invasions of China. The battle can be divided into three stages, and eventually involved nearly one million troops. The first stage lasted from August 13 to August 22, during which the Chinese army attempted to eradicate Japanese troop presence in downtown Shanghai; The second stage lasted from August 23 to October 26, during which the Japanese launched amphibious landings at Jiangsu coast and the two armies fought a Stalingrad-type house-to-house battle, with the Japanese attempting to gain control of the city and the surrounding regions; and the last stage, lasting from October 27 to the end of November, involved the retreat of the Chinese army in the face of Japanese flanking maneuvers, and the ensuing combat on the road to China's capital, Nanjing.