Book Review - Eight Hundred Heroes: China’s Lost Battalion and the Fall of Shanghai
Written by: Stephen Robinson
Exisle Publishing, 2022, 304 pp
Hardcover ISBN: 9781922539205
Ebook ISBN: 9781991001313
Reviewed by: Tim Gellel
Every army has its Thermopylae. One of modern China’s is the story of Lieutenant Colonel Xie Jinyuan’s four-day defence of the Sihang Warehouse against Japanese attacks during the 1937 Battle of Shanghai. Stephen Robinson’s Eight Hundred Heroes, which examines that story, studies that action as an information operation as well as a tactical, unit-level fight.
The Second Battle of Shanghai was already more than two months old when Xie’s battalion was sent to the Sihang Warehouse. Tactically the site was chosen because the building afforded a strong defensive position. Its concrete and brick construction offered protection from direct and indirect fire. At six stories high, it held commanding views over approaches from the west, north and east. And the building’s southern flank was protected by the 70 metre wide Suzhou Creek. It was this latter feature that contributed to the action’s tactical and strategic significance.
The information operation began almost immediately. Xie’s 1st Battalion, 524th Regiment numbered closer to 420 than the 800 men of a complete battalion, but the latter figure was exploited to conceal his unit’s true strength from Japanese forces. The battalion was drawn from the National Revolutionary Army’s German-trained 88th Division—one of three such divisions at the time. Xie’s soldiers were specifically chosen for a desperate and dangerous mission intended to achieve a strategic information operations aim that outweighed its tactical value.
At the strategic level, only the Suzhou Creek separated the warehouse from Shanghai’s International Settlement, where 14 mostly European nations enjoyed extraterritorial rights under treaties with Beijing. Observing from building rooftops, foreign journalists and officials had a ringside seat as they documented the battle on the opposite bank. The Chinese Nationalist Government hoped that Western reports of the Eight Hundred’s valiant stand would rouse international sentiment to influence an international conference that was considering ‘peaceable means’ of hastening the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Unfortunately for the Nationalists, while the defence of the Sihang Warehouse generated much support, it did not translate into the international pressure needed to halt the Japanese invasion.
That didn’t stop the Eight Hundred’s story developing into legend. And around one-third of Robinson’s book explores the mythos surrounding the battle at the Sihang Warehouse, including how it was exploited by the Nationalist Government and (after China’s 1947 Civil War) by Taiwan. This included the release of four movies: two wartime productions, both titled 800 Heroes (and both released in 1938), Eight Hundred Heroes (1977), and The Eight Hundred (2020).
A real strength of Robinson’s book is that he uses Chinese-language sources to provide an English-speaking audience with access to this episode of bitter, close-quarters urban fighting reminiscent of battles like Stalingrad which are better known by English-speaking audiences. In doing so, Robinson reminds the reader that the war in China tied up more Imperial Japanese Army divisions than were committed to the Indian, South-East Asian and Pacific theatres, right up to the end of the Second World War. Here Robinson follows a similar path to the one established by the linguist-historian David Glantz, who, from the 1990s onwards, introduced accounts from Soviet records to English-language audiences to contextualise accounts of the Eastern Front that were based mostly on German records.
The Eight Hundred Heroes dust jacket strikingly captures another aspect of the Sino-Japanese War’s complexity. English-language readers would normally associate soldiers wearing the distinctive German ‘coal-scuttle’ helmet as being on the ‘wrong side’ of history. While Nazi Germany’s military support to the Nationalists dried up in favour of support to Japan with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, it points to the shifting allegiances that characterised the Second World War, which too often evade accounts of this tumultuous period.
Robinson’s Eight Hundred Heroes complements several works released over the last decade that focus on higher level operations in the Sino-Japanese War. Of particular note are Peter Harmsen’s Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate Publishers, 2015); and Mark Peattie, Edward Drea and Hans van de Ven’s The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2010).
For modern historians and strategic analysts, it is interesting to reflect that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was initially reluctant to embrace the Eight Hundred Heroes’ story because Xie’s battalion was part of the Nationalist Army. However, from the 1990s onwards, the tale entered mainland China’s education system and consciousness, including as a fourth motion picture, The Eight Hundred—one of the highest grossing films of 2020. The stand taken by Xie’s battalion against the Japanese is now commemorated both in the People’s Republic of China and in Taiwan. Much as the Australian Army has its own mythos (Gallipoli and Kokoda are two key examples), understanding the Eight Hundred Heroes’ story and legacy helps understand part of modern mainland China’s identity.
Eight Hundred Heroes reminds the reader that long before the Vietnam War became the ‘television war’, or the current war in Ukraine became the ‘social media war’, battles have often been conducted within the sights of the press. What is unique about the defence of the Sihang Warehouse is that it was planned with exactly that intention in mind. And while it ultimately did not deliver the result sought by the Nationalist Government in 1937, 85 years later the Eight Hundred Heroes’ story is increasingly embraced by one of the Nationalist Government’s former adversaries, the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army. Eight Hundred Heroes offers the reader an engaging introduction to the complexity of modern Chinese identity, as seen through the lens of a unique, battalion-level information operation.
Disclaimer: While MAJ Robinson is a part-time member of the Australian Army History Unit, this work was undertaken outside of his Army duties.
About the Reviewer
Mr Tim Gellel is the Head of the Australian Army History Unit, responsible for preserving Army’s heritage through a nationwide museums network, and promoting Army’s History through programs such as the Army History Publishing Scheme and the biennial Chief of Army History Conference. Prior to taking up this appointment, he was a serving Army Officer. He holds a Master of Arts through Deakin University.
