Fighting the Last War: The 1937 Battle of Shanghai Through the Prism of WWI

TY - CONF

T1 - Fighting the Last War

T2 - The Impact of World War One on China's Modern History

AU - Harmsen, Peter

PY - 2014/7/5

Y1 - 2014/7/5

N2 - Today the conflicts of the 1930s are generally seen as preludes to World War II, but for the contemporaries they were late echoes of the Great War. Few could have knownthat they lived not in the “postwar era” but the “interwar years”, and that an even bigger cataclysm was approaching. The battle between Chinese and Japanese forces for Shanghai from August to November 1937 is a case in point. It took place just 19 years after the end of World War I, reflected in a widespread tendency to look at the hostilities in China’s largest city through the prism of the global conflict two decades earlier. Many of the German advisors to the Chinese Army had been through the war in the trenches and took the tactics they had honed there with them to Shanghai. This resulted in near-impregnable Chinese defenses in and around the city, and it also manifested itself in the introduction of shock tactics designed to bring about an early decision rather than being bogged down in a costly war of attrition. Among Chinese combatants, cultural references to World War I abounded. One officer described a period of relative peace as reminiscent of All Quiet on the Western Front. A young pilot found inspiration in the memoirs of Eddie Rickenbacker, an American fighter ace of the Great War. Foreign spectators of the Shanghai battle, too, used World War I as a frequent metaphor. Many had seen active service in Europe during the earlier conflict and tried to make sense of the events unfolding around them by contrasting them with their own experiences. The Japanese belligerents, on the other hand, had little interest in the example of World War I, using the Russo-Japanese War as their main point of reference, and perhaps they benefited from that. Those who lived through the battle of Shanghai and actively looked for parallels with World War I failed to appreciate aspects of the fighting that were truly new and would come to characterize World War II: Mobile tank warfare, amphibious tactics and air power as key determinants, and above all an offense-dominant rather than a defense-dominant outlook.

AB - Today the conflicts of the 1930s are generally seen as preludes to World War II, but for the contemporaries they were late echoes of the Great War. Few could have knownthat they lived not in the “postwar era” but the “interwar years”, and that an even bigger cataclysm was approaching. The battle between Chinese and Japanese forces for Shanghai from August to November 1937 is a case in point. It took place just 19 years after the end of World War I, reflected in a widespread tendency to look at the hostilities in China’s largest city through the prism of the global conflict two decades earlier. Many of the German advisors to the Chinese Army had been through the war in the trenches and took the tactics they had honed there with them to Shanghai. This resulted in near-impregnable Chinese defenses in and around the city, and it also manifested itself in the introduction of shock tactics designed to bring about an early decision rather than being bogged down in a costly war of attrition. Among Chinese combatants, cultural references to World War I abounded. One officer described a period of relative peace as reminiscent of All Quiet on the Western Front. A young pilot found inspiration in the memoirs of Eddie Rickenbacker, an American fighter ace of the Great War. Foreign spectators of the Shanghai battle, too, used World War I as a frequent metaphor. Many had seen active service in Europe during the earlier conflict and tried to make sense of the events unfolding around them by contrasting them with their own experiences. The Japanese belligerents, on the other hand, had little interest in the example of World War I, using the Russo-Japanese War as their main point of reference, and perhaps they benefited from that. Those who lived through the battle of Shanghai and actively looked for parallels with World War I failed to appreciate aspects of the fighting that were truly new and would come to characterize World War II: Mobile tank warfare, amphibious tactics and air power as key determinants, and above all an offense-dominant rather than a defense-dominant outlook.

M3 - Paper

Y2 - 3 July 2014 through 5 July 2014

ER -