While sailing to Shanghai Matsui adopted a plan drawn by the Japanese Navy to divide the SEA between two landing sites north of Shanghai, Wusong and Chuanshakou, and then use the former force to attack Shanghai directly and the latter force to encircle the Chinese Army.Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2013), 93–97. On August 23 Matsui oversaw the landing operation from aboard his flagship the Yura.Toshiyuki Hayase, 将軍の真実 : 松井石根人物伝 (Tokyo: Kōjinsha, 1999), 54, 58. The initial landings went well, but increasingly intense fighting ensued on land and casualties mounted.Hattori Satoshi and Edward J. Drea, "Japanese operations from July to December 1937," in The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, eds. Mark Peattie et al. (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011), 169–176. Matsui had never believed that he had been given enough soldiers to handle the job and was continuously pressing the high command for more reinforcements.Toshiyuki Hayase, 将軍の真実 : 松井石根人物伝 (Tokyo: Kōjinsha, 1999), 19, 22, 58–59. He himself was not able to go ashore in Shanghai until September 10, but that was the same day on which the Army General Staff informed him that three additional divisions would be deployed under his command.Toshiyuki Hayase, 将軍の真実 : 松井石根人物伝 (Tokyo: Kōjinsha, 1999), 61–62. Still, even this infusion of new troops proved insufficient to dislodge the Chinese. He had mistakenly judged at the beginning of October that the Chinese Army was about to withdraw from Shanghai and had ordered concentrated infantry charges on the Chinese positions in the expectation that the campaign would be wrapped up before November.Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2013), 161, 176–178, 210–211, 214–215. In fact the SEA was still battering Chinese defensive lines at Nanxiang and Suzhou Creek at that point. The turning point of the campaign did not come until November 5 when an entirely new army, the 10th Army led by Heisuke Yanagawa, landed south of Shanghai and forced the Chinese Army to make a hasty retreat. Shanghai had finally fallen by 26 November.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 43.
