"The Second Battle of Shanghai, known in Chinese as Battle of Songhu, was the first major engagement in the Second Sino-Japanese War. General Zhang Zhizhong was the commanding officer in charge of the defense of the region, and for some time had been training men for such an attack. He established several defensive lines under the guidance of German military advisers; the construction was able to be completed prior to the battle, but very few units were actually instructed on how the fortifications were to be used in various situations.
The Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kaishek had been focused in northern China, and in fact had pulled troops from the Shanghai region to counter Japanese advances to the north. He believed that while the Japanese wanted Shanghai, since it was the Japanese Army leadership that had been planning this war, the Japanese would likely take a land route marching from north to south (and not by a amphibious landing which would require support from the Japanese Navy), and he was correct in his determination. In Moscow, Russia, however, Soviet Union (USSR) leader Joseph Stalin had a different design for the short term. He wanted to expand the Second Sino-Japanese War as quickly as possible in order to mire the Japanese Army in the vast Chinese interior, thus reducing the chance that Japan could divert its resources to attack Russia. Through the 1930s, USSR had been planting agents in China, and what Chiang did not know was that Zhang Zhizhong was among them. To Chiang Kaishek, Shanghai was strategically important, for it guarded the mouth of the Yangtze River, upstream of which lay the capital city Nanjing, and it was a major industrial center. Chiang's first attempt at safeguarding this city was to prevent the war from escalating to that location. Stalin, however, ordered the opposite, demanding Zhang to provoke the Japanese. Obeying Stalin's orders, Zhang repeatedly sent Chiang plans for invasions into the Japanese zone in Shanghai, which was guarded by only 300 Special Naval Landing Forces troops with no sign of being reinforced in the future. Chiang rejected every request, and Zhang knew that the only way to achieve his orders from Moscow was to create a situation in which the Japanese would fire the first shot, so that he could advance without disobeying Chiang's orders.
Oyama Incident
9 Aug 1937
On 9 Aug, First Lieutenant Isao Oyama of the Japanese Naval Special Landing Forces attempted to enter the grounds of the Hungchiao Airport in Shanghai, which was illegal under the terms of the 1932 ceasefire at the end of the first Shanghai battle. Oyama was fired upon by Chinese policemen and was killed. The next day, Japanese consul general in Shanghai publicly apologized for Oyama's action, but demanded the Chinese police force, the Peace Preservation Corps, to disarm. While this demand was obviously a pretext in preparation for the Japanese Army troops marching southward from the Beiping area, it also gave Zhang the perfect opportunity to move in to clash with the Japanese. In Nanjing, Japanese and Chinese representatives met, with the Japanese demanding all Chinese troops as well as the Peace Preservation Corps be removed from Shanghai, and the Chinese refusing to meet this demand. The continued clashes in Shanghai prompted Japan in dispatching reinforcements to Shanghai, and with this intelligence, Zhang finally was able to convince Chiang to order troops to match for Shanghai on 11 Aug…"
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Amicalement
Armand
