Bloody Saturday (photograph)
Encyclopedia
Shanghai south railway station
Shanghai South Railway Station, also Shanghai South Station , is a railway station in the city of Shanghai, China. Located in the Xuhui District, its importance is second only to the Shanghai Railway Station...
, the photograph became known as a cultural icon
Cultural icon
A cultural icon can be a symbol, logo, picture, name, face, person, building or other image that is readily recognized and generally represents an object or concept with great cultural significance to a wide cultural group...
demonstrating Japanese wartime atrocities in China. Taken a few minutes after a Japanese air attack on civilians during the Battle of Shanghai
Battle of Shanghai
The Battle of Shanghai, known in Chinese as Battle of Songhu, was the first of the twenty-two major engagements fought between the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China and the Imperial Japanese Army of the Empire of Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War...
, Hearst Corporation
Hearst Corporation
The Hearst Corporation is an American media conglomerate based in the Hearst Tower, Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. Founded by William Randolph Hearst as an owner of newspapers, the company's holdings now include a wide variety of media...
photographer H.S. "Newsreel" Wong, also known as Wong Hai-Sheng or Wang Xiaoting, did not discover the identity or even the sex of the injured child, whose mother lay dead nearby. One of the most memorable war photographs ever published, and perhaps the most famous newsreel
Newsreel
A newsreel was a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs and entertainment for millions of moviegoers...
scene of the 1930s, the image stimulated an outpouring of Western
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
anger against Japanese violence in China. Journalist Harold Isaacs
Harold Isaacs
Harold Robert Isaacs was a historian and one-time Trotskyist historian of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. Isaacs went to China in 1930 and became involved with left wing politics in Shanghai...
called the iconic image "one of the most successful 'propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
' pieces of all time".
Wong shot footage of the bombed-out South Station with his Eyemo
Eyemo
The Eyemo is a 35 mm motion-picture film camera which was manufactured by the Bell & Howell Co. of Chicago.-Background:Designed and first manufactured in 1925, it was for many years the most compact 35 mm motion-picture film camera of the hundred foot capacity...
newsreel
Newsreel
A newsreel was a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs and entertainment for millions of moviegoers...
camera, and he took several still photographs with his Leica. The famous still image, taken from the Leica, is not often referred to by name—rather, its visual elements are described. It has also been called "Motherless Chinese Baby", "Chinese Baby", and "The Baby in the Shanghai Railroad Station". The photograph was denounced by Japanese nationalists
Japanese nationalism
encompasses a broad range of ideas and sentiments harbored by the Japanese people over the last two centuries regarding their native country, its cultural nature, political form and historical destiny...
who argued that it was staged.
Capturing the image
During the Battle of ShanghaiBattle of Shanghai
The Battle of Shanghai, known in Chinese as Battle of Songhu, was the first of the twenty-two major engagements fought between the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China and the Imperial Japanese Army of the Empire of Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War...
, part of the Second Sino-Japanese War
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany , the Soviet Union and the United States...
, Japanese military forces advanced upon and attacked Shanghai, China's most populous city. Wong and other newsreel men, such as Harrison Forman and George Krainukov, captured many images of the fighting, including the gruesome aftermath of an aerial bombing made by three Chinese aircraft against two prominent hotels on Nanking Road on Saturday, August 14, 1937, called "Bloody Saturday". Wong was a Chinese man who owned a camera shop in Shanghai. The National Revolutionary Army
National Revolutionary Army
The National Revolutionary Army , pre-1928 sometimes shortened to 革命軍 or Revolutionary Army and between 1928-1947 as 國軍 or National Army was the Military Arm of the Kuomintang from 1925 until 1947, as well as the national army of the Republic of China during the KMT's period of party rule...
began to retreat from the city, leaving a blockade across the Huangpu River
Huangpu River
The Huangpu River is a -long river in China flowing through Shanghai...
. An international group of journalists learned that aircraft from the Imperial Japanese Navy
Imperial Japanese Navy
The Imperial Japanese Navy was the navy of the Empire of Japan from 1869 until 1947, when it was dissolved following Japan's constitutional renunciation of the use of force as a means of settling international disputes...
(IJN) were to bomb the blockade at 2 pm on Saturday, August 28, 1937, so many of these gathered atop the Butterfield & Swire
Swire Group
The Swire Group is a transnational corporation headquartered in the Swire House in the City of Westminster, London, England. It controls a range of wholly owned businesses, including deep-sea shipping, cold storage, road transport, and agricultural activities. The current chairman is James...
building to take photographs of the bombing attack. At 3 pm, no aircraft were to be seen, and most of the newsmen dispersed; all except H.S. "Newsreel" Wong, a cameraman working for Hearst Metrotone News
Hearst Metrotone News
Hearst Metrotone News was a newsreel series produced by the Hearst Corporation, founded by William Randolph Hearst.-History:...
, a newsreel producer. At 4 pm, 16 IJN aircraft appeared, circled, and bombed war refugees at Shanghai's South Station, killing and wounding civilians waiting for an overdue train bound for Hangzhou
Hangzhou
Hangzhou , formerly transliterated as Hangchow, is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern China. Governed as a sub-provincial city, and as of 2010, its entire administrative division or prefecture had a registered population of 8.7 million people...
to the south.
Wong descended from the rooftop to the street, where he got into his car and drove quickly toward the ruined railway station. When he arrived, he noted carnage and confusion: "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 never discovered the name of the burned and crying baby, whether it was a boy or a girl, or whether it survived. The next morning, he took the film from his Leica camera to the offices of China Press, where he showed enlargements to Malcolm Rosholt, saying, "Look at this one!" Wong later wrote that the next morning's newspapers reported that some 1,800 people, mostly women and children, had been waiting at the railway station, and that the IJN aviators had likely mistaken them for a troop movement. The Shanghai papers said that fewer than 300 people survived the attack. In October, Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
magazine reported about 200 dead.
Publication
Wong sent the newsreel footage on a U.S. Navy ship to ManilaManila
Manila is the capital of the Philippines. It is one of the sixteen cities forming Metro Manila.Manila is located on the eastern shores of Manila Bay and is bordered by Navotas and Caloocan to the north, Quezon City to the northeast, San Juan and Mandaluyong to the east, Makati on the southeast,...
and from there, the film was flown to New York City aboard a Pan American World Airways
Pan American World Airways
Pan American World Airways, commonly known as Pan Am, was the principal and largest international air carrier in the United States from 1927 until its collapse on December 4, 1991...
airliner. Beginning in mid-September 1937, the newsreel was shown to movie theater
Movie theater
A movie theater, cinema, movie house, picture theater, film theater is a venue, usually a building, for viewing motion pictures ....
audiences, estimated a month later to number 50 million people in the U.S. and 30 million outside of the U.S. and the still image of the crying baby was printed in Hearst Corporation
Hearst Corporation
The Hearst Corporation is an American media conglomerate based in the Hearst Tower, Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. Founded by William Randolph Hearst as an owner of newspapers, the company's holdings now include a wide variety of media...
newspapers and affiliates, some 25 million copies. A further 1.75 million non-Hearst newspaper copies showed the image in the U.S., and 4 million more people saw it as a matte reproduction in other newspapers. Some 25 million people saw it internationally. It first appeared in Life magazine on October 4, 1937, at which point it was estimated that 136 million people had seen it. On the facing page in Life magazine, another photograph showed the baby on a stretcher receiving medical care.
Reaction
The "unforgettable" image became one of the most influential photos to stir up anti-Japanese feeling in the United States. A "tidal wave of sympathy" poured out from America to China, and the image was widely reproduced to elicit donations for Chinese relief efforts. Catalyzed by the image, the U.S., the United Kingdom and France protested Japanese bombing of Chinese civilians in open citiesOpen city
In war, in the event of the imminent capture of a city, the government/military structure of the nation that controls the city will sometimes declare it an open city, thus announcing that they have abandoned all defensive efforts....
. Senator George W. Norris was influenced by the image, being convinced to abandon his longtime stance of isolationism
Isolationism
Isolationism is the policy or doctrine of isolating one's country from the affairs of other nations by declining to enter into alliances, foreign economic commitments, international agreements, etc., seeking to devote the entire efforts of one's country to its own advancement and remain at peace by...
and non-interventionism
United States non-interventionism
Non-interventionism, the diplomatic policy whereby a nation seeks to avoid alliances with other nations in order to avoid being drawn into wars not related to direct territorial self-defense, has had a long history in the United States...
—he railed against the Japanese as "disgraceful, ignoble, barbarous, and cruel, even beyond the power of language to describe." Americans used terms such as "butchers" and "murderers" against the Japanese. Subsequent to Shanghai's surrender, IJN Admiral Kōichi Shiozawa
Koichi Shiozawa
-External links:* - Notes :...
said to a reporter from The New York Times at a cocktail party: "I see your American newspapers have nicknamed me the Babykiller."
The image was voted by Life readers as one of ten "Pictures of the Year" for 1937. In 1944, Wong's newsreel sequence was used within the Frank Capra
Frank Capra
Frank Russell Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s...
film The Battle of China
The Battle of China
The Battle of China was the sixth film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series. It follows an introduction to Chinese culture and history with the modern history of China and the founding of the Republic of China by Sun Yat-sen, leading on to the Japanese invasion...
.
Allegations of falsehood
At the time, Japanese nationalists called the photograph a fake, and the Japanese government put a bountyBounty (reward)
A bounty is a payment or reward often offered by a group as an incentive for the accomplishment of a task by someone usually not associated with the group. Bounties are most commonly issued for the capture or retrieval of a person or object. They are typically in the form of money...
of $50,000 on Wong's head: an amount equivalent to $ in . Wong was known to be against the Japanese invasion of China and to have leftist political sympathies, and he worked for William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...
who was famous for saying to his newsmen, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war" in relation to the Spanish–American War. Another of Wong's photos appeared in Look magazine
Look (American magazine)
Look was a bi-weekly, general-interest magazine published in Des Moines, Iowa from 1937 to 1971, with more of an emphasis on photographs than articles...
on December 21, 1937, showing a man bent over a child of perhaps five years of age, both near the crying baby. The man was alleged to be Wong's assistant Taguchi who was arranging the children for best photographic effect. An article in The Japan Times and Mail
The Japan Times
The Japan Times is an English language newspaper published in Japan. Unlike its competitors, the Daily Yomiuri and the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, it is not affiliated with a Japanese language media organization...
said the man was a rescue worker who was posing the baby and the boy for the photographer. Wong described the man as the baby's father, coming to rescue his children as the Japanese aircraft returned following the bombing. Japanese propagandists drew a connection between what they claimed was a falsified image and the general news accounts by U.S. and Chinese sources reporting on the fighting in Shanghai, with the aim of discrediting all reports of Japanese atrocities.
In 1956, Look magazine's Arthur Rothstein
Arthur Rothstein
Arthur Rothstein was an American photographer.Rothstein is recognized as one of America’s premier photojournalists. During a career that spanned five decades, he provoked, entertained and informed the American people...
supported his earlier opinion that Wong borrowed the baby and staged the photograph. In 1975, Life magazine featured the famous photo in a picture book, and wrote in the caption, "It has been said that this is staged, but it is evident from various points that this is no more than a fabricated rumour."
In 1999, the nationalist "Association for Advancement of Unbiased View of History", a group founded by Professor Fujioka Nobukatsu of Tokyo University, published an article entitled "Manipulation of Documentary Photos in China: Fanning Flames of Hate in the USA" in which Nobukatsu and Shūdō Higashinakano
Shudo Higashinakano
is a professor of intellectual history at Asia University who maintains that the 1937 Nanking Massacre committed by Japanese troops during the Second Sino-Japanese War is a hoax....
argue that the photograph shows a man setting first one then two children on the railroad tracks for the purpose of making a "pitiable sight" for American viewers, to ready American citizens for war against Japan. The Japanese professors argue that Wong added smoke to make the image more dramatic, but Rosholt wrote that the train station was still smoking when Wong arrived. The Japanese nationalists do not say that the bombing did not happen, nor that Chinese civilians were not killed and wounded, but the presentation of the photograph as a fake allows for the easy interpretation that there are further falsehoods in the historical record. In the article, Nobukatsu and Higashinakano do not mention the additional Wong photo published in Life magazine which shows the baby crying on a medical stretcher as it is given first aid by a Chinese Boy Scout
Scouts of China
The Scouts of China is the national Scouting association of the Republic of China, and is a member of the World Organization of the Scout Movement...
.
Wong filmed more newsreels covering Japanese attacks in China, including the Battle of Xuzhou
Battle of Xuzhou
The Battle of Xuzhou was fought between Japanese and Chinese forces in May 1938 during Second Sino-Japanese War. In contemporary accounts in English, the event was usually referred to as the "Battle of Hsuchow", using the Chinese Postal Map Romanization....
in May 1938 and aerial bombings in Guangzhou
Guangzhou
Guangzhou , known historically as Canton or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of the Guangdong province in the People's Republic of China. Located in southern China on the Pearl River, about north-northwest of Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a key national transportation hub and trading port...
in June. He operated under British protection, but continued death threats from Japanese nationalists drove him to leave Shanghai with his family and to relocate to Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
.
Legacy
While in art school in the late 1940s, Andy WarholAndy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
painted a version of the photograph, the earliest of his many paintings based on photographs; the original artwork has not been located and may be lost. Warhol's Disaster Series in the 1960s was a return to that format, to interpretations of the highly visible works produced by photojournalists. In 1977, Lowell Thomas
Lowell Thomas
Lowell Jackson Thomas was an American writer, broadcaster, and traveler, best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous...
, journalist and narrator for Hearst rival Movietone News
Movietone News
Movietone News is a newsreel that ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States, and from 1929 to 1979 in the United Kingdom.-History:It is known in the U.S. as Fox Movietone News, produced cinema, sound newsreels from 1928 to 1963 in the U.S., from 1929 to 1979 in the UK , and from 1929 to 1975 in...
, set the photo's influence in America as high as two of the most iconic World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
images: a French man grimacing in tears as his country's soldiers abandon France in June 1940, and Joe Rosenthal
Joe Rosenthal
Joseph John Rosenthal was an American photographer who received the Pulitzer Prize for his iconic World War II photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, taken during the Battle of Iwo Jima. His picture became one of the best-known photographs of the war.-Early life:Joseph Rosenthal was born on...
's Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five United States Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.The photograph was extremely...
shot in February 1945.
Wong retired to Taipei
Taipei
Taipei City is the capital of the Republic of China and the central city of the largest metropolitan area of Taiwan. Situated at the northern tip of the island, Taipei is located on the Tamsui River, and is about 25 km southwest of Keelung, its port on the Pacific Ocean...
in the 1970s and died of diabetes at his home at the age of 81 on March 9, 1981. In 2010, Wong was honored as a pioneering Asian-American journalist by the Asian American Journalists Association
Asian American Journalists Association
The Asian American Journalists Association was founded in 1981 by several Asian American journalists who felt a need to support greater participation by Asian Americans in the news media.Its goals are:...
.
In 2000, artist and journalist Miao Xiaochun
Miao Xiaochun
Miao Xiaochun is an artist and photographer based in Beijing.He is best known for his digital photographs, often assembled panoramas, of modern Chinese cityscapes. His signature element is the presence of "He", a figure in ancient Chinese costume...
projected the famous image against a white curtain, using the faintness of the projection to signify the diminution of its impact over time. The photograph appeared in the Time–Life book 100 Photographs that Changed the World, published in 2003. National Geographic included the photograph in their Concise History of the World: An Illustrated Timeline in 2006. The "searing image" was said by National Geographic author Michael S. Sweeney to have served as the "harbinger of Eastern militarism".