You are going to be shocked, but this is war
UNCENSORED
This brief caption, flashed on the screen, was all the warning U. S. cinemagoers had last week before the usually innocuous newsreel plunged them into such a bloodbath of visual horrors as few of them had ever imagined. Shown throughout the U. S. these were the first frankly gruesome newsreels of the Shanghai shambles to reach the U. S. Hundreds of feet of this hastily, dangerously made record had been ground out by cameramen under fire or within a few minutes after shellburst or bomb-explosion. They tell, as pitilessly as only the camera can, what war means to the flesh it tortures. Mobs stream to shelter from an air raid. After a shellburst in a crowded street, corpses bright with blood and rows of grimy bodies, barely distinguishable from the dusty wreckage, clutter the smashed sidewalk. Stinking human garbage (the street-cleaners have tied handkerchiefs around their mouths and noses), big chunks of it insufficiently wrapped, is dumped on open trucks. Later, as the trucks are unloaded, the still-warm, flexible dead are flopped out like a big catch of fish. . . .
Strong stuff for even a medical audience, these newsreels were, from the stand-points of both horror and history, in many respects the most remarkable ever shown. For if the utter freakishness of the new usage of fighting wars in town instead of in the country has vastly increased the peril of noncombatants, it has at the same time advanced the efficiency of news coverage of the hostilities a hundredfold. For instance: on the afternoon of Aug. 14, three Chinese bombers flew over Shanghai's Bund, accidentally or intentionally slipped two bombs out of their bomb-racks and blew in the fronts of both the Cathay and Palace Hotels, which face each other across teeming Nanking Road. Two hundred and twenty people were killed and mangled. And had the ghastly scene been directed in a Hollywood studio, the cinematography could scarcely have been handled better. The MARCH OF TIME'S Cameraman Harrison Forman, an aviator, explorer and author just down from Tibet, was sitting inside the Cathay when the terrifying explosion took place. The Hearst News of the Day's, Shanghai man, a daredevil called "Newsreel" Wong, was behind the counter of his camera shop, two blocks away. Universal's, George Krainukov, who had just had his camera shot out of his hand in the Chinese evacuation of Peiping, was also almost within hailing distance of the tragedy. As a consequence, the films these three got of the Cathay-Palace Hotel tragedy—most horrifying of last week's collection—have all the historic immediacy of the Hindenburg fire films.
Judged by the progressive destruction of a Lincoln Zephyr which, rammed head on into the curb, burns throughout Forman's, Wong's and Krainukov's films, Wong was the first man on the scene. (Presumably Forman lost time by having to rush upstairs from the Cathay bar to get his machine.) But, according to the best guesses of U. S. newsreel people, Wong must have been turned back by the police after making his first shots, for it is Krainukov whose camera turns in the most gruesomely inclusive report of the bombing.