EIGHT HUNDRED HEROES

The Battle of Sihang Warehouse

Shanghai, Republic of China
October 26–November 1, 1937

We will fight the enemy with our last bullet, and will punish him with our last drop of blood. Defend to the death.

—Colonel Xie Jinyuan, Chinese Nationalist Army

THE CONSTANT CRACK OF RIFLE FIRE AND THE HE CRACK RIFLE FIRE AND THE rumbling of armored cars echoed through the black smoke hanging in the night air. Shanghai, the fifth-largest city in the world, was burning. It had once been known as “the Queen of the Orient,” a glitzy metropolis of high fashion, luxurious nightlife, bustling harbors, and towering skyscrapers. It was now rapidly being reduced to a mixture of bloody hand-dug trenches, empty bullet casings, and coiled tangles of barbed wire. The city of Shanghai had been home to three and a half million civilians. Now it was the front line of what would become the biggest and most destructive war in human history.

Amid the chaos and epic horribleness, Colonel Xie Jinyuan of the Chinese Nationalist Army calmly walked toward the imposing headquarters of his shattered division. The steel-and-concrete rectangular building known as the Sihang Warehouse was one of the few surviving structures amid the rubble of northern Shanghai. It was sturdy and secure; it backed against the Suzhou River and would be the perfect defensive position. Exhausted from three months of non-stop combat against a determined, unrelenting enemy, Xie Jinyuan decided that he and the surviving members of his command would make their last stand here.

A lot of uptight, pipe-smoking historians like to go on and on about how World War II started with Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, mostly because they don’t think it’s cool to pay attention to any history that didn’t happen in Europe or the United States. In reality, the first shots of World War II were fired in 1937 when the swiftly growing empire of Japan decided to flex its bulging muscles by conquering everything around it. Fueled by its people’s fanatical devotion to their emperor, their unequaled ferocity in battle, and some of the most advanced military technology this side of a science-fiction movie, Japan defeated Russia in a war in 1905, annexed Korea in 1910, and captured the province of Manchuria from China in 1932. In 1937 the Japanese war machine surged forward once again, this time with a full-scale attack into the heart of China itself.

The Chinese were in the middle of a civil war at the time, making it really inconsiderate of the Japanese to start bombing them while they were busy trying to kill one another. The uncoordinated, unprepared frontline armies of China were churned into mulch and lost their capital city, Beijing, to the Japanese pretty much immediately. By October, what remained of the Chinese military was falling back toward the Yangtze River and the important port city of Shanghai.

Chinese soldiers defending Shanghai, 1937

With more than a hundred thousand elite Japanese troops storming toward them, the Chinese prepared to dig in and defend their city at all costs. They had way more fighters than the Japanese, but they were not nearly as well trained or as well equipped. Shanghai quickly became a war zone, with defenders digging five-foot-deep trenches in the middle of streets while Japanese bombers reduced skyscrapers to smoking ruins. Homes were flattened, factories were gutted, and the biggest battle to grip Asia in over a century swept the economic heartland of China with fire and bullets.

By the time Xie Jinyuan moved his troops into the Sihang Warehouse on October 26, 1937, it was pretty much all over. The Chinese had fought bravely, but they were outmatched in every way. A few days earlier, a flotilla of Japanese warships had pulled into the harbor, rained gunfire on the city, and then deployed hardcore Japanese marines right behind the main lines of the Chinese troops, all but cutting off their escape route. The command came down for the Chinese army to retreat from the city and evacuate as many civilians as possible in the process.

The specific orders given to Colonel Xie were simple: Hold the warehouse until someone kills you. Buy the civilians and soldiers of Shanghai time to get the heck out of there before the Japanese level the city into a giant pile of smoking misery. Make the invaders pay for every step.

Sihang Warehouse was the perfect spot to defend. Standing out like a beacon amid the destruction of the Battle of Shanghai, the six-story warehouse was made of bulletproof concrete and had plenty of good spots for sniper rifle hide-and-seek. Better yet, it was positioned across a narrow river from a part of Shanghai known as the International Settlement—a neighborhood that was home to British, French, and American embassies and citizens. The Japanese couldn’t bomb the warehouse to cinder blocks with artillery and airplanes, because if just one little bomb missed its target and accidentally landed on some British guy’s house, the Japanese would have an ugly international incident on their hands. They were going to have to take this warehouse the old-fashioned way if they wanted to get rid of Xie and his battalion.