The prelude to _yester afternoon's ghastly bombing of Shanghai began about 10 am. as local Sino-Japanese hostilities moved to the air and Chinese fighting planes bombed the Whangpoo waterfront irom the Garden Bri¢ge, neighbourhood of the Japanese Consulate and the flagship Tdzumo, to the Jukong Wharf anchorage where three warships were Gealing long range destruction to the Chinese military zone at Kiangwan.
For half an hour the Yangtszepoo District endured a reign ci terror as the deafening explosions of aerial torpedoes threw' building debris high to the air and splinters from the ward, sighted their infinitely faster enemies and retired, Off Jukons Wharf a Japanese cruiser and two gunboats had been mopping up snipers in the Shanghai College liding with machine-gun fire, and felling the Chinese Jockey Club building half a mile away. Anti-aircraft batteries on the' warships and ashore fusiladed the enemy aircraft as they swooped over the coolie gangs labouring on the work of forming a Japanese military aerodrome on the golf links near Jukong road and the adjoining agricultural fields. Three torpedoes missed their mark and the flight wheeled westward and disappeared into the clouds, having done little but spread terror amongst thousands of their own nationals, At 10.30 o'clock yesterday the last of the Point Island residents were evacuating. Shot and shell, they said, had been flying all night. One of the die-hards declared that the objective of the Chinese bombers was not so much, the aerodrome as a Japanese cotton mill off Point Road into which had seen lorry load after lor load of ammunition and other wa other avenues of escape across the Hongkew Creek blocked by barbed wire and Japanese sentries. Vehicular traffic was held up for two hours by the phalanx of people on a journey that normally would have taken five minutes. The bridge over the Hongkew creek became the vortex of a multitude, maddened by the humour that Japanese aircraft were about to retaliate. Children were lost and trampled; personal belongings were wrenched away and pulped to debris underfoot in a pathetic carpet as people fought for the ridge. Law ud some sort of order of traffic was gained at last thanks to magnificent work by the S.MC, police and their allies, the Shanghai Volunteer Corps.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.