Shanghai’s “Bloody Saturday” #4 – August 14, 1937 – Marines Remember Bloody Saturday

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

Almost eighteen months after Bloody Saturday, in December 1938, American newspapers ran a series of reminiscences of the events with US 4th Marines stationed in Shanghai at the time with accompanying photographs of the devastation of that day…