Iconic Image 12

Welcome back viewers

This month's Iconic Image is...

Bloody Saturday

Intro

This photograph was taken on August 27, 1937, in the city of Shanghai. It shows a badly injured baby crying while surrounded by debris. This photograph would become a symbol brutality and barbarity during the time of war. It would cause international outrage and horror around the world. It would also come to signify a new type warfare, one that would take the lives of millions of people.

Part I

On August, 13, 1937, the Japanese army launched an attack on the city of Shanghai. The attack began with a ferocious bombing by Japanese planes. Three planes had concentrated their attack on two hotels located on the city's Nanking Road. The attack left thousands of people dead or wounded across the city (most of the dead were unarmed civilians). It was new type of warfare that had just come into practice with the development of bombers. It was called, mass aerial bombing.

The first official incident of mass bombing occurred nearly four months earlier on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. That day, the German Luftwaffe launched an attack on the Spanish town of Guernica. This attack (which would become the precursor for the Blitzkrieg) was aimed directly at the town's civilian population. For approximately three hours, the bombers and fighters of the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion dropped hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs on Guernica. These bombs caused raging fires that reduced the town's structures to rubble. Civilians who attempted to escape were strafed (machine gunned by aircraft). When it was finally over, more than 1,600 (one third of the population) were dead. 

Part II

There were a handful of journalists and photographers who documented the attack on Shanghai. One of them was a photojournalist named, H. S. Wong (AKA: Wang Xiaoting). Wong was shooting footage of Chinese civilians attempting to board a train that was leaving Shanghai, when nearby bombs forced him to dive for cover. When it was over, Wong looked around and saw thousands of dead bodies around the terminal. He later recounted, "It was a horrible sight. Dead and injured lay strewn across the tracks and platform. Limbs lay all over the place. When I stopped to reload my camera, I noticed that my shoes were covered in blood". He estimated of the 1,800 people that were crowded around the terminal, less than 300 survived the attack.

Wong noticed an infant child by the smoldering debris. The child was severely burnt and its clothes had been ripped to shreds. The mangled body of its mother was laying just feet away. Wong quickly snapped a few photographs before taking video footage of the child as it was crying. A few moments later, a man arrived on the scene (presumably the child's father), picked the child up, carried him/her away, and disappeared into a crowd of people.

Part III

Wong quickly developed his photographs and video footage the following day. He then showed them to a Chinese newspaper (China Press). They were then smuggled to an American warship that was departing from Shanghai's harbor. After sailing to the Philippines, the ship then brought the footage to the United States. In mid-September, the footage was first shown in a movie theatre in New York City. Soon after, it began appearing on almost every American television set. By the end of the month, more than 25 million American citizens had seen the footage of the crying baby in Shanghai. The reaction was one of shock, horror, and outrage across the nation. Nebraska senator George Norris called it, "a disgraceful and barbarous act of cruelty by Japan". 

The Japanese government began to receive international condemnation for the bombing of Shanghai. It was quick to declare that the photograph was a staged piece of Chinese propaganda. They even put a bounty of $50,000 on the head of H.S. Wong, who was forced to move into hiding in the city of Hong Kong. Shanghai eventually fell to the Japanese on November 6, 1937. Less than a month later, the Japanese captured the capital city of Nanking and committed a horrific massacre against its population. 

Epilogue

Despite the outrage that was caused by the bombing Shanghai, the United States did very little to stop the latter's army from taking the city and pushing further into China. It wasn't until the Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, that the United States finally declared war on Japan. Ironically, Japan (and also Germany) would be subjected to the very same mass aerial bombing that they had used before and during the early years of World War II. And both nations would suffer massive casualties directly because of it.

The Allies (chiefly the United States) not only used aerial bombing throughout the whole war, they even introduced a far more devastating method. This method was called, "Carpet bombing" (AKA: saturation bombing). This tactic took the lives of millions of people during World War II and wiped numerous cities and towns off the map. In 1977, carpet bombing of civilian targets was labeled a war crime by the Geneva convention. Unfortunately some nations (namely Russia) still practice the carpet bombing of towns and cities.

Although a bounty had been placed on his head, H.S. Wong survived World War II. He continued to work as a photojournalist until his retirement in 1970. He lived the rest of his life in Taipei (the capital of Taiwan) and passed away on March 9, 1981. Wong never learned the name or gender of the baby that he had photographed in Shanghai. The child's identity and ultimate fate remain unknown to this day. Today, the photograph of the injured baby is considered a tragic symbol of a horrific new type of warfare. It also symbolizes how wars change with new technology and new methods of fighting (often for the worse). It truly deserves its iconic place in the history of photography.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/bloody-saturday-a-crying-chinese-baby-amid-the-bombed-out-ruins-of-shanghais-south-railway-station-1937/

https://medium.com/history-through-the-lens/bloody-saturday-1811076e63e0

https://militaryhistorynow.com/2016/04/15/the-shanghai-baby-the-true-story-behind-one-of-historys-most-dramatic-photos/

https://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/guernica/glevel_1/1_bombing.html