Defense of Sihang Warehouse - Aftermath

Aftermath

After the retreat the remaining soldiers set forth to regroup with the rest of the 88th Division. However, British troops seized all their weapons and placed the soldiers under arrest. The reason was that the Japanese threatened to invade the concessions if the soldiers were allowed to leave the area. They were herded into the Italian area of the concessions and fenced off.

Chiang Kai-shek promoted every defender by a rank and awarded Xie Jinyuan and Yang Ruifu the Order of Blue Sky and White Sun.

After their incarceration, citizens of Shanghai would often visit the troops, giving them performances and entertainment. The officers opened classes for the soldiers, teaching foreign languages, mathematics, and even Christian theology. Chen Wangdao, the Chinese translator of the Communist Manifesto, would also visit the camp from time to time. The soldiers spent their day doing military drills and kept their fighting spirit high. Their practice of singing the National Anthem of the Republic of China every day was continuously disrupted by the foreign authorities, until it was violently put down by White Russian mercenaries.

Faced with defeat in the Battle of Shanghai and the loss of a third of the National Revolutionary Army's best-trained troops, the failed but morale-boosting defense of Shanghai proved to the Chinese people and foreign powers alike that China was actively resisting the Japanese. The media capitalized on the defense of the warehouse and lauded the Eight Hundred Heroes, embellished from the original 414, as national heroes, and a patriotic song was also composed to encourage the people to resist Japanese aggression. However, the foreign aid that Chiang tried to canvass for did not arrive; none of the European powers delivered anything more than verbal condemnation of Japan. Only Germany and the Soviet Union provided substantial aid to China before the outbreak of war in Europe, and Germany withdrew its advisors in 1938 because of Japanese pressure.

Within the "Lost Battalion Barracks", the Heroes languished for more than three years. The Japanese had offered to free the soldiers, but only if they disarmed and left Shanghai as refugees. Xie did not agree to these terms, and after refusing numerous offers from Wang Jingwei's collaborationist government, Xie Jinyuan was assassinated on 24 April 1941 at 5 a.m. by Sergeant He Dingcheng and three others of his own troops, who were bought over by Wang Jingwei's government. He died at 6 a.m. More than 100,000 people turned up for his funeral, and he was posthumously made a brigadier general of the National Revolutionary Army.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese forces occupied the foreign concessions and captured the soldiers. They were shipped off to Hangzhou and Xiaolingwei to do hard labour. Part of the group sent to Xiaolingwei escaped, and some rejoined the Chinese forces. Thirty-six officers and soldiers were sent to Papua New Guinea to do hard labour, and in 1945 when the war went against Japan, they overpowered their captors and took them prisoners instead.

At the end of the war, some one hundred survivors of the battalion returned to Shanghai and Sihang Warehouse. When the Chinese Civil War broke out, most of them wanted to fight no more and returned to civilian occupations. Later, some of them, including Girl Guide Yang Huimin, retreated to Taiwan with the Kuomintang government, while some of those who remained were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution because they were Kuomintang soldiers.