Generalissimo by Jonathan Fenby

Author:Jonathan Fenby [Fenby, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2015-02-11T23:00:00+00:00

PART IV

BROKEN JADE

Shanghai, August 1937

Chungking, October 1944

CHAPTER 17

The Most Dreadful Nightmare

ON SATURDAY, 14 AUGUST 1937, as a typhoon blew through Shanghai picking up people bodily, five American-made planes from the Chinese air force flew in a tight V formation towards Japanese navy ships moored off the Bund. They had been meant to conduct a high-altitude bombing mission, but the bad weather made this impossible, so they swooped low in a shallow dive 1,500 feet above the water. This boosted their speed, but they failed to adjust their sights. Missing the Japanese ships completely, two of their bombs skimmed above the North China Daily News building on the Bund, falling towards the main shopping street of Nanking Road by the Cathay and Palace hotels.1

An Australian journalist from the paper, Rhodes Farmer, ran down to the street to see what had happened there. ‘On the corner a decapitated Sikh policeman lay with his arms outstretched as though against oncoming traffic,’ he wrote.

Yellow high-explosive fumes exposed a terror scene in Nanking Road. Flames from blazing cars were incinerating the bodies of their riddled occupants. In grotesque heaps where they had been huddling in doorways and annexes of the Cathay and Palace hotels were heaps of refugees whose blue coolie clothes were turning red. Heads, arms, legs lay far from mangled trunks . . . Across the tramlines was a tall European. His suit of white flannel was unspotted so cleanly had his skull been sliced off.2

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