Shanghai’s “Bloody Saturday” #3 – August 14, 1937 – Troop Deployment to China – “Shanghai or Bust”

Saturday, August 14, 1937 – that summer Shanghai was expecting to be hit by a typhoon of ‘violent intensity’. The typhoon passed, but what did strike Shanghai was a man-made typhoon of bombs and shrapnel that brought aerial death and destruction such as no city had ever seen before. The clock outside the Cathay Hotel stopped at 4.27 p.m. precisely as the first bombs landed on the junction of the Nanking Road and the Bund; the second wave of explosions struck the dense crowds outside the Great World amusement centre in the French Concession. Bloody Saturday reconstructs the events of that dreadful day from eyewitness accounts. Read my Penguin Special on the events of that day – amazon.co.uk or amazon.com

in the aftermath of the Japanese attacks on Shanghai and the dreadful bombings of Bloody Saturday the foreign concession powers upped their troop numbers. Here in late August US Marines deploy from San Diego to Shanghai – “Shanghai or Bust”