But this is no ordinary murder mystery. It is the opening to a serious historical work, “Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze,” and the turf war between Chinese and Japanese police over the victims from both countries is symbolic of a much larger conflict that is set to explode a few days later.
The 1937 Battle for Shanghai can be seen as many things: as when the Sino-Japanese War started in earnest, the beginning of World War II, a precursor to the Nanjing Massacre and even as the forerunner of Stalingrad.
For Harmsen, all these aspects are important, and not just to pique the interest of a Western audience largely unfamiliar with a war that claimed as many lives as Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.
“By saying that the war started in 1937, I hope to persuade readers to abandon some of the usual Eurocentric ways of looking at history,” Harmsen told Taiwan Today in a July 15 email. “What we have is a gradually escalating conflict between two rather fluid camps that began little by little in the late 1930s before gradually morphing into Armageddon in 1945, the worst slaughter in human history.”
From one perspective, “Shanghai 1937” has all the elements of a fabulous historical novel. There is a missionary blown up by a bomb as he gets out of his car in a traffic jam; a half-Jewish German advisor whose father is in Dachau concentration camp; foreign journalists watching dogfights and shelling from rooftop penthouses; Japanese soldiers giving matter-of-fact accounts of atrocities they witness or even commit themselves.
Yet from another angle it is a historical minefield. A proper study presupposes not only fluency in Chinese and Japanese, but eyewitness accounts and reportage were written in all the languages of Shanghai’s International Settlement. On top of this, former ROC President Chiang Kai-shek’s foreign military advisors, who played a crucial role in the battle, were Germans, and Chiang entertained serious hopes of securing military aid and intervention from the Russians.
Despite fluency in a plethora of languages, Harmsen’s task was tough. “The biggest difficulty was to translate the diaries and memoirs of the Chinese and Japanese soldiers of the time into acceptable English prose for the 21st century.”
Harmsen is disarmingly modest about the difficulty of the task he faced. “There wasn’t really anything that was particularly hard about writing the book. Once all the material was there, it really wrote itself. The battle was a self-contained story, with a clear beginning and a clear ending, lending itself fairly easily to a coherent narrative.”
But he adds that he spent 15 years researching the book, including interviewing veterans of the battle. “Since I’m a journalist, I also interviewed veterans whenever I could. I had the privilege in 2005 of talking to the last known survivor of the so-called ‘Lost Battalion,’ a Chinese unit that was left behind in downtown Shanghai in the fall of 1937 after the rest of the army had withdrawn.”
The seamless way in which Harmsen weaves Chiang’s international political maneuvering into battlefield strategy, combining the perspectives of regular privates and commanding generals, along with civilians and combatants, suggests his narrative was of long gestation. Comparisons by online reviewers to Anthony Beevor, author of “Stalingrad” and “Berlin: The Downfall 1945,” are justly deserved. But Beevor only had to deal with two foreign languages, and had much more accessible source material.
One of the really remarkable features of “Shanghai 1937” is the huge collection of high-quality photographs, all of them in-period and directly relevant to the action, in three 16-page inserts. Also, one cannot help noticing that many of them are credited to the “author’s collection.”
“Some of the photos I obtained in antique shops and second-hand bookstores in mainland China,” Harmsen said. “But such items have become vastly more expensive as people there have become more interested in the war and also have become more prosperous and able to pay serious money for collectors’ items. So recently I have obtained most of the photos from Japanese collectors.”
Another obstacle for the author was maps. “There is no shortage of historical maps of downtown Shanghai, but even the best of them often lack details crucial for understanding the battle. Many Chinese historians claim that the battle started with a skirmish in mid-August 1937 at a place called Bazi Bridge, or ‘Eight Character Bridge.’ But exactly where was this bridge? I looked over dozens of maps, and none of them showed the bridge, until I finally had luck and purchased a map via eBay indicating the exact location. It was a Japanese map produced in late 1937.”
The Battle for Shanghai was also an ominous prelude to the Nanjing Massacre, which occurred just a month later. “I did have the Nanjing Massacre in mind in the sense that I wanted to show that, as horrible as it was, it did not come out of nowhere,” Harmsen said. “Rather, it was the culmination of a gradual accumulation of ever-worsening atrocities, beginning with the Japanese army’s often senseless torture and summary execution of civilians in downtown Shanghai during the battle, followed by the even more brutal treatment of the population in the countryside on the way to Nanjing.”
It seems few who have read the book have failed to be gripped by the narrative, and its success has encouraged Harmsen to contemplate plugging other gaps in the historical record. “I’m currently considering three separate topics, all related to the military in Asia in the 20th century. Outside of the US participation in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, it’s an area that has really been neglected by Western historians and writers.” (SDH)