Bloody Saturday (photograph)
Bloody Saturday (Chinese: 血腥的星期六; pinyin: Xuèxīng de Xīngqíliù) is a black-and-white photograph taken on 28 August 1937, a few minutes after a Japanese air attack struck civilians during the Battle of Shanghai in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Depicting a Chinese baby crying within the bombed-out ruins of Shanghai South railway station, the photograph became known as a cultural icon demonstrating Japanese wartime atrocities in China.
[2] One of the most memorable war photographs ever published, and perhaps the most famous newsreel scene of the 1930s,[3] the image stimulated an outpouring of Western anger against Japanese violence in China.
"[6] 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.
[11] Wong sent the newsreel footage on a U.S. Navy ship to Manila and from there, the film was flown to New York City aboard a Pan American World Airways airliner.
[13] A "tidal wave of sympathy" poured out from America to China,[14] and the image was widely reproduced to elicit donations for Chinese relief efforts.
[12][16] Senator George W. Norris was influenced by the image, being convinced to abandon his longtime stance of isolationism and non-interventionism—he railed against the Japanese as "disgraceful, ignoble, barbarous, and cruel, even beyond the power of language to describe.
Subsequent to Shanghai's surrender, IJN Admiral Kōichi Shiozawa said to a reporter from The New York Times at a cocktail party: "I see your American newspapers have nicknamed me the Babykiller.
[20] In 1977, Lowell Thomas, journalist and narrator for Hearst rival Movietone News, set the photo's influence in America as high as two of the most iconic World War II images: a French man grimacing in tears as his country's soldiers abandon France in June 1940, and Joe Rosenthal's Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, shot in February 1945.
[28] Another of Wong's photos appeared in Look magazine on December 21, 1937, showing a man bent over a child of perhaps five years of age, both near the crying baby.
[30] 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 rumor.
"[30] In 1999, the Association for Advancement of Unbiased View of History, a nationalist and denialist group founded by Fujioka Nobukatsu, a former professor at 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 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.
[6] Aforementioned Japanese revisionists do not deny the bombing, nor that Chinese civilians were killed and wounded, but claim the presentation of the photograph as a fake allows for the easy interpretation that there are further falsehoods in the historical record.
[30] 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.
[11][30] Wong filmed more newsreels covering Japanese attacks in China, including the Battle of Xuzhou in May 1938 and aerial bombings in Guangzhou in June.
[31] 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.
