(See front cover)
While violent jingos in the Japanese Army have been controlling the country for years and keeping it on the verge of bankruptcy, the Japanese Navy by & large has played conservative. Worried Japanese businessmen have generally been able to count on the navy's support in efforts to moderate army extravagance and truculence toward China. It was largely the quiet influence of the navy that saw proper punishment meted out to the hysterical young army officers who last year murdered famed Finance Minister Korekiyo Takahashi and captured Tokyo's magnificent Metropolitan Police Building (TIME, March 9, 1936, et seq.). In the 1931 invasion of Manchuria Japan's navy did its duty but tepidly. Yet last week in Shanghai the Japanese Navy was fighting one of the greatest battles since the World War, and fighting it almost alone. Many times during the week Japanese army reinforcements were reported on their way to Shanghai but almost all the Japanese reinforcements actually seen were on their way north to strengthen the forces around Peiping where bullet-headed General Fu Tso-yi, Chairman of Suiyuan Province, has been holding up the Japanese advance for nearly the past fortnight in the narrow gorges of Nankow Pass. With other northern warlords coming to help him last week, a general Chinese offensive was about to be attempted.
In Shanghai, however, the navy was not only doing most of the fighting but at least half of Japan's navy was in it. Flagship of the combined fleet was the 37-year-old British-built Idumo with lynx-eyed Vice Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa in command. The Idumo was moored opposite Shanghai's International Settlement, and ten days of bombing, shelling and one attempted torpedoing had so far damaged her but slightly. Sixteen miles downstream, where the Whangpoo River joins the yellow muddy estuary of the Yangtze lay the mass of the Japanese fleet, over 50 warships, including four battleships, six battle cruisers, 38 destroyers and one of Japan's four aircraft carriers. Most were slowly steaming back & forth to avoid almost constant sniping from Chinese on shore. At times there were as many as 20 Japanese warships in the Whangpoo which discharged and reloaded swarms of airplanes, swung their heavy guns to shell first one section of Shanghai and then another, and ferried every available sailor and marine ashore, for in such a battle, as the Japanese soon found, even the navy fights in town.
Shanghai. At the mouth of the Yangtze is commercially and financially the New York City of China. North of Shanghai coolies eat wheat and speak an approximation of Mandarin. South of Shanghai coolies eat rice and speak Cantonese. Until 1842 the Manchu emperors refused foreigners the right to trade at Shanghai, but in that year a British fleet sailed menacingly up the Yangtze and by a treaty signed at Nanking five Chinese cities were opened for trade and settlement. Subsequently most important of them was Shanghai.