Secret War in Shanghai : An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II

by Wasserstein, Bernard

• ISBN13: 9780395985373
• ISBN10: 0395985374
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-09-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Summary

Shanghai during World War II was a killing field of brutal competition, ideological struggle, and murderous political intrigue. China's largest and most cosmopolitan city, the intelligence capital of the Far East, was a magnet for a corrupt and bizarrely colorful group of men and women drawn to the "Paris of the East" for its seductive promise of high living and easy money. Political and sexual loyalties were for sale to the highest bidder. Allied and Axis agents, criminal gangs, and paramilitary units under various flags waged secret, savage warfare. Espionage, lurid vice, subversion, and crime came together in a lethal concoction. Nowhere on earth was the twilight zone between politics and criminality better exemplified than in this glittering and dangerous place. Secret War in Shanghai is the first book-length account of the little-known story of Shanghai in the war years. The widely respected historian Bernard Wasserstein has researched it entirely from original sources and uncovered startling new evidence of collaboration and treason by American, British, and Australian nationals. This remarkable depiction of complicity and betrayal is history at its most exciting and surprising.

Author Biography

Bernard Wasserstein's books include Vanishing Diaspora and The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, which won the Golden Dagger Award for nonfiction. His is president of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and has been chairman of the History Department and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University. The author resides in Oxford, England.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	vi	(1)
List of Maps	vii	(5)
Who Was Who	xii
Introduction	1	(14)
1 Solitary Island	15	(14)
2 Bad Hats	29	(20)
3 Phony War in the International Settlement	49	(33)
4 Waiting for the Barbarians	82	(15)
5 Dark World	97	(19)
6 Oriental Mission	116	(13)
7 Eagles Mew'd	129	(28)
8 Collaborators	157	(38)
9 Shanghailanders in Exile	195	(21)
10 Wars Within Wars	216	(24)
11 Endgames	240	(25)
12 Twilight of Old Shanghai	265	(25)
Conclusion	290	(3)
Notes	293	(38)
Bibliography	331	(12)
Acknowledgements	343	(2)
Index	345

Excerpts

IntroductionThe Second World War began in the Far East on 7 July 1937 with the Japanese onslaught on China. The battle of Shanghai in the autumn of that year marked the bloody climax of the first phase of the conflict. Britain and the United States were not drawn in formally until December 1941, the Soviet Union only in the final days in 1945. Yet in reality all the major powers found themselves embroiled from the outset in one way or another in the struggle for mastery of the Asiatic mainland. All had vital economic or strategic interests there. All maintained significant intelligence establishments there. Between 1937 and 1945 all sought to advance their interests, at times by applying brute force, more commonly by subtler, undercover means. The cockpit of this war was the intelligence capital of the Far East -- Shanghai. This book tells the story of that secret war. It is an enquiry into the interstices of espionage, subversion, deception and terror; into a murky political netherworld that produced strange, cross-cutting alliances and enmities, that evoked both heroism and treachery, and that reflected in microcosm the global war of nations. With its lurid vice, savage criminality and conspiratorial politics, no place on earth in the 1930s and 1940s better exemplified the twilight zone of clandestine warfare than Shanghai. The wealth and sophistication of China's largest, most cosmopolitan and most dangerous city rendered it a killing-field of brutal economic competition, ideological struggle and murderous political intrigue. Shanghai's ever-open door attracted an extraordinary agglomeration of ill-assorted foreign communities: 'White' and 'Red' Russians imported their fierce mutual animosities from their homeland and perpetuated them in their exotic exile; German businessmen dutifully celebrated Hitler's birthday at the German Garden Club but found to their dismay that they were outnumbered in Shanghai by thousands of 'non-Aryan' German-speaking refugees from Nazi persecution; upper-crust 'Shanghailander' Britons rubbed shoulders with Baghdadi Jewish property tycoons; Korean gangsters, Filipino musicians, low-life cardsharps, pickpockets and assorted con-men plied their various trades. So too did demi-mondaines of various nationalities who preyed on tourists at the Park, the Metropole and the Cathay hotels as well as on naval and military men of half a dozen countries in other, more questionable, haunts. Even in superficially respectable areas of the city meretricious glamour and horrific poverty, filth and squalor intertwined symbiotically. At Ciro's night-club, the first in the city to enjoy full air-conditioning, British taipans and Chinese mobsters tangoed with their wives or mistresses into the small hours. Outside, uniformed Russian doormen -- self-appointed ex-Tsarist 'generals' whose spurious medals could be purchased by the dozen in the Hongkew market -- held at bay importuning hordes of deformed Chinese beggars.

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Excerpted from Secret War in Shanghai: An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II by Bernard Wasserstein
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