An Atrocity Far Away

In 1937, another train station was attacked, with enormous consequences

The news that Russia fired missiles into a train station packed with fleeing civilians in the Ukrainian town of Kramatorsk is heartbreaking but hardly surprising. Russia has made it clear it has no regard for the laws of war. Or basic human decency.

Another fascist government did something remarkably similar almost 85 years ago. It’s worth recalling because that atrocity ultimately had enormous consequences — including the destruction of those responsible.

In 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army continued its assault on China with an attack on its most populous city, Shanghai. By late August, Chinese forces were falling back. Refugees struggled desperately to get out of the city. At the best of times, the Japanese treated Chinese civilians as barely human; at their worst, they saw them as vermin.

On August 28th, the Shanghai South railway station was packed with refugees when Japanese bombers levelled it. A cameraman named H.S. Wong, who worked for Hearst Metrotone News, an American news service, rushed to the scene. Here is his account of what followed:

It was a horrible sight. People were still trying to get up. Dead and injured lay strewn across the tracks and platform. Limbs lay all over the place. Only my work helped me forget what I was seeing. I stopped to reload my camera. I noticed that my shoes were soaked with blood. I walked across the railway tracks, and made many long scenes with the burning overhead bridge in the background. Then I saw a man pick up a baby from the tracks and carry him to the platform. He went back to get another badly injured child. The mother lay dead on the tracks. As I filmed this tragedy, I heard the sound of planes returning. Quickly, I shot my remaining few feet [of film] on the baby. I ran toward the child, intending to carry him to safety, but the father returned. The bombers passed overhead. No bombs were dropped.

Wong sent his film and photos back to the United States. By mid-September, the images were in Hearst newsreels across America, seen by anyone who went to a movie. A still image of the crying baby was published in Hearst newspapers, and later in Life magazine.

America was shaken.

Japan’s war in China had been widely reported but in a deeply isolationist America, which was in its seventh year of grinding economic depression, it was mostly dismissed with a shrug. For most Americans, it was one bunch of foreigners doing something awful to other foreigners, and it was all far away. It had nothing to do with America.

But now Americans saw the reality. More importantly, they felt it. A baby in agony. That’s what Japan’s war meant.

American opinion swung hard against Japan, prompting even isolationist politicians to advocate sanctions and other measures, including material support for China.

In 1940, when the United States was still neutral, Japan attacked French Indo-China (Vietnam) in order to cut China off from its flow of supplies, including American munitions. The United States, then the largest producer of oil in the world, responded by embargoing oil to Japan.

For Japan, which had no ready access to oil, it was a devastating move. A year later, desperate to seize oil supplies elsewhere in South-Eastern Asia, and fearing American intervention, Japan settled on a pre-emptive attack at Pearl Harbor — a move that would ultimately precipitate the total destruction of the regime.

The guilty can pay a terrible price when cruelty is caught on camera.