Yang Yangzheng has a story to tell, and he knows it has to be told now or be lost forever. At 91, he is one of the last few to remember the fierce fighting that broke out when the Imperial Japanese Army launched an all-out attack on China in 1937, directing one of its main thrusts against the industrial hub of Shanghai.
"We were 3,000 men in my regiment when the battle for Shanghai started," he says, sitting in his damp living room on the outskirts of south-west China's Chongqing municipality. "When it was over, there were 300 left."
The massive casualty figures resulted because Yang's unit, part of the 88th Division, was ordered to defend the Sixing Warehouse along Shanghai's Suzhou Creek, at all cost.
"The battle lasted four days and five nights. We didn't get a minute of sleep," says the former platoon commander, his Mandarin Chinese still bearing the distinct mark of his native Hubei province.
Driven near madness by exhaustion, Yang and his fellow combatants also had to cope with dwindling food supplies.
Whatever provisions they received were transported to them by civilians during rare lulls in the fighting.
"We were like fish in the water," Yang says, quoting a Mao Zedong adage about the friendly relationship between soldiers and a sympathetic civilian population around them.
Even so, in the end Yang's platoon was ordered to retreat, as part of the overall withdrawal of Chinese forces from Shanghai under the massive weight of the modern Japanese war machine.
Although the battle was a strategic disaster for China, the fighting in the warehouse area soon took on almost mythical proportions.
It became part of Chinese wartime propaganda, and as early as 1938 a movie named "Eight Hundred Heroes" about the battle was released to boost Chinese morale.
For Yang himself, Sixing Warehouse is not associated with heroics, but rather with a life-long handicap.
He lost his left eye to Japanese shrapnel during the battle, making him one of China's 35 million casualties in its eight-year war with Japan.
As a result, over the ensuing nearly seven decades, he has never been entirely able to forget the immense human cost of war.
For four years after the battle for Shanghai, Yang's unit was holed up in the Foreign Concession, a part of the city inhabited mostly by Europeans and Americans that escaped Japanese occupation.
But in December 1941, when the Japanese empire launched its full-scale offensive against the United States and other Western powers in the Pacific, the Foreign Concession was overrun, and Yang went into captivity.
He and his fellow prisoners were marched off to a coal mine in eastern Anhui province, being exposed to episodes of Japanese brutality on the way.
One morning they were gathered and watched in horror as a man was decapitated in front of them.
"We didn't know who he was, or what he had done, or why he had to be punished," he says. "But to our Japanese captors it didn't matter. It was all about intimidation."
Using Yang and millions of other Chinese as forced labour was part of Japan's vast scheme for the exploitation of the mainland - a relationship that overwhelmingly benefited the Japanese economy.
After months working at the Anhui coal mine, Yang decided to escape along with 30 others.
"We had enough to eat, but we didn't want to work for the Japanese any longer," he says. "So we stole a Japanese gun and marched off."
Although the fugitives that escaped from the coal mine numbered about 30, they easily slipped across the thinly-guarded Chinese countryside to enter into an area under the firm control of Communist forces.
After months of recuperation, Yang eventually made it to Chongqing, China's war-time capital, for treatment on his injured left eye, which had been allowed to fester.
Even here, deep behind the frontline, he was not allowed to forget the war, due to incessant Japanese air raids. The mere thought of the shrill sound of sirens still sends a shiver down his spine.
It was also while in his Chongqing hospital that he met the woman he was later to marry, Zhao Xiaofang, and with whom he was to have five children. But first there was a war to be won.
"We decided we wouldn't arrange the wedding until after the war was over, and victory was secure," says Zhao.
Today his smiling wife fills in the blanks in her husband's reminiscences, as if she's heard it all a hundred times before.
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