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

Bernard Wasserstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Before World War II, Shanghai was China's leading commercial center and the most vital and glamorous of Asia's great cities. Against the background of civil war, Shanghai was administered by a consortium of international powers intent on exploiting a defenseless China. The city's seizure by the Imperial Japanese Army in December 1941 ended much of its glitter but not its role as a den of espionage, corruption, and vice. Bernard Wasserstein deftly sets the complex scene as the different powerbrokers, from ambassadors to gangsters, accommodated to the occupying Japanese. The cast of characters is bizarre, ranging from master spies such as Richard Sorge, whose coup was to warn Stalin of Germany's impending invasion, to imposters and petty secret agents living on their wits. People were not what they seemed: the author reveals the often sordid realities behind his protagonists' masks as they struggled for survival and each others' secrets. Richly researched from original sources, Secret War in Shanghai is particularly successful in painting vivid pictures of the different national groups that found themselves caught up in the city's vortex: destitute White Russians, refugees from Hitler's Germany, British taipans trying to hang onto their business interests. The story moves as fast as a racy novel, yet it is all meticulously documented fact. --John Stevenson

From Publishers Weekly

On the eve of WWII, Shanghai contained two foreign enclaves, a French Concession and an International Settlement, each ruled by a small minority of foreigners for their own economic advantage. These enclaves, which sheltered a melange of entrepreneurs and rogues, adventurers and self-promoters, are the setting for Wasserstein's account of the war years in Shanghai, a city rife with violence, vice, colonial hauteur and espionage. Wasserstein's ability to ferret out long-forgotten information from obscure archives shows on every page of this close examination of the behavior of Shanghai's foreign community under the pressure of the Japanese occupation. There are no persons or events of high importance, no battles of consequence, no intelligence breakthroughs. Paradoxically, it is exactly this absence of momentous historical drama that gives the book its charm. This is a study in microcosm of local conditions in Shanghai, where a rag-tag collection of professional survivors adapted to shifting circumstances as the war progressed, and where the intelligence services of many nations labored with equal energy and futility. Wasserstein recounts the careers of many of the more colorful and, in some instances, sinister of Shanghai's spies and opportunists. If the canvas is a bit too crowded, it should still appeal to those who find irresistible the lifestyles of the eccentric, the raffish and the villainous. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 13, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395985374
• ISBN-13: 978-0395985373
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #675,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Truth is seamier than fiction., December 5, 1999

By 

S. R. Schwankert (Beijing, China) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Secret War in Shanghai: An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II (Hardcover)

Bernard Wasserstein's look at the cloak-and-dagger side Shanghai in the 1930s and during World War II casts an even seamier light on pre-Liberation city than is usually seen.

Secret War exceeds the reader's expectations in several ways. First, the level of spying that was carried out by the various powers in the International Settlement against each other and their own citizens is nothing short of shocking. Sexual habits, personal histories, and suspected involvements were all part of the records kept by the Shanghai Municipal Police, a largely Anglo-Saxon coalition empowered to keep order in the Settlement.

Not a single nation is spared in Secret War. Just when the reader believes that Wasserstein may be favoring the British, he slams them for incompetence or outright treachery. The French, Germans, Americans, and Japanese all come under fire for treating their concessions in Shanghai as their own little fiefdoms.

Wasserstein introduces us to an eclectic cast of charlatans, murderers, and thieves. There's Eugene Pick, the Russian-born gangster who collaborates with the Japanese and, when not spending his evenings at the theater, is conspiring to have his rivals bumped off. There's "Count" du Berrier, a bogus aristocrat and genuine arms dealer available to the highest bidder. "Princess" Sumaire, another false member of a royal family, this social-climbing Indian imposter lived the high life and traded sex for influence, first among Western expatriates, and later, the Japanese.

After the outbreak of the Pacific War in the late 1930s, intelligence gathering in Shanghai turned from a broad activity aimed at foiling communism and social disruption to top-level spying. As the war deepened, two surprising details emerge: not only were citizens of the Allied nations prone to passively or actively collaborating with the Japanese, but both the Allies and the Axis powers spent as much time and resources spying on each other as they did on the enemy. Because Britain wanted to avoid dragging Japan into the larger conflict, instructions given to British citizens were never exact in stating what constituted collaboration, and therefore Shanghai continued, in some ways, to do business as usual even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when war was officially declared.

In between its various stories of intrigue, Secret War presents an account of expatriate life in Shanghai seldom documented elsewhere. The description of Shanghai's various newspapers and radio stations operated by the Settlement's nations and entrepreneurs is by itself short but fascinating.

Missing from this fine work of research is a single map of old Shanghai that would show the reader the lay of the land and the location of the various concessions. Without it, the reader has no idea which concessions abutted one another nor the proximity of one to the other, or the relation of the Chinese city to the International Settlement. The only other outstanding fault of the book is Wasserstein's propensity to use French and German phrases without offering a translation, even in the book's copious notations. Only those fluent in both languages will not be forced to seek the assistance of a dictionary.

Overall, Secret War in Shanghai is a great cold-weather read, a narrative that reads like a novel but with a story that is all too true.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A strugle for power by any means necessary., December 20, 1999

By 

Kenneth S. Smith (Goleta, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Secret War in Shanghai: An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II (Hardcover)

If you are a scholar, serious student, or avid reader of World War II History, this book is for you. This book is exhaustively researched, meticulously crafted, and written with flowing style.

Prior to World War II, Shanghai was a major trading hub in Asia. The city was populated by Americans, British, Japanese, Italians, Nationalist and Communist Chinese, French, Australians, Indians, Germans, Jewish Refugees, Russian Refugees, and other minor national players. Add to the population rogues, spies, soldiers-of-fortune, adventurers, Chinese gangsters, con men, thieves, murders, and low lives of other callings. Mix all of these elements together and start a major world war and the intrigues begin.

This is a tale of treason, collaboration, bravery, propaganda, and maneuvering for power, prestige, and money. Businesses wanted to continue operation and ignore the consequences. Torture, murder, extortion, imprisonment, and blackmail were tools of the day. Numerous intelligence organizations competed against each other and all had to rely heavily on the Chinese for information. One fact I found interesting was the Japanese distrust of the Germans because they were racists. I find this ironic. Another interesting fact was the Allies used 100,000 Japanese soldiers in and around Shanghai at the end of the war to keep order. The book is filled with excerpts from intelligence reports, newspaper articles, and the eventual demise of some of the more colorful characters. There is also a section of fascinating pictures.

After the war, Shanghai made an attempt to recover some of her previous glory, but much of her business moved on to Hong Kong and Singapore. The final blow was the defeat of the Nationalist forces by the Communists in 1949. The city has never been the same since.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sordid tale of espionage and collaboration, November 4, 2002

By 

Bill O'Chee (Surfers Paradise, QLD Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Secret War in Shanghai: An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II (Hardcover)

In Asia as in Europe, World War II consigned to the waste bin any number of territorial claims, and reordered the face of the world. Looking back over fifty years later it is easy to be fooled into thinking that the pre-war world was essentially the same as that we inhabit today. Of course that was not the case.

Too many forget, for example, that Shanghai, rather than Hong Kong or Singapore, was the Britain's commercial jewel in the crown in East Asia. In the 1930's Shanghai was the world's sixth largest city, and cleared over half of China's foreign trade. Major British companies like Jardine Matheson, Swires, and the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank were based there, and the government of the International Settlement was firmly in British hands.

Shanghai was also a seething pit of human corruption. Crowded with opium godowns, Chinese warlords and gangsters, and White Russian émigré "taxi-dancers". Such was the venality of the place that it was estimated that one in every thirteen women worked as a prostitute.

It was also a place where the intelligence services of half a dozen nations vied for information and influence. It is this world, and what became of it under Japanese occupation, which has been chronicled by Wasserstein in his very interesting book.

As Japan flexed its muscles in China in the late 1930's Britain felt itself increasingly powerless to protect its interests in the International Settlement. The collapse of France and Italy's entry into the war in 1940 left it with only the US as a friend in the International Settlement. The city capitulated within days of Japan's entry into the war.

The intelligence war had been going on for much longer of course. While the extensive apparatus maintained by Britain to gather intelligence during the interwar years is interesting, what is of more focus for the book is the efforts of the Axis powers, but particularly Japan, to build and maintain intelligence networks, and the targets of their collection activities.

The Japanese and Germans also undertook extensive propaganda operations, which would not have been possible without cooperation and outright collaboration by Allied nationals, and others such as Indians and White Russians.

Indeed, it is the broad tale of cooperation and collaboration which is the centerpiece of this book. Wasserstein identifies and analyses the people who assisted the occupying powers, and their motives for so doing. Some, like the Australian Alan Raymond, were opportunistic members of the criminal underworld of Shanghai. Others, like the Eurasian sometime Briton Lawrence Kentwell, were motivated by a mix of manic obsession with perceived injustices and a claimed racial bias. There were also Chinese and Russian gangsters and even a nymphomaniac Indian "princess" described in postwar intelligence reports as "physically intimate with both sexes concurrently....[and known to] run the gamut of perversion, since she has also been known to be both sadistically and masochistically inclined."

Wasserstein also looks at the efforts of the Allied powers to run intelligence and sabotage operations in Japanese occupied territories, and examines the reasons for their failure. Many of these revolved around poor organisation, and the nefarious ploys of their Chinese allies.

All in all, this is a well researched work, but with a highly readable, almost racy style. It does much to shed light on the motives and methods of cooperation and show what happens when a city becomes subject to occupation.

Events elsewhere overtook all the participants in Shanghai's secret war, but Wasserstein ensures their exploits are not forgotten.