The Nanking Massacre

The Start of the Second Sino-Japanese War

In December 1936, Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped by his own generals and only released on a promise to end the encirclement of the Communists and to unite to defend against Japanese aggression.

The Japanese army continued its moves on China.  By July 1937, about 7 months after the Chinese leader’s release from house arrest, there was the Marco Polo Bridge incident by Beijing.  At that point, because Beijing was not China’s capital and Nanjing was the Nationalists’ capital, Beijing was known as Beiping. 

At that time, in the West, Nanjing was then known as Nanking. Beijing was known as Peking or, when it wasn’t the capital, Peiping.

Japan’s army had perhaps 17,000 soldiers in this area, which was far more than anything allowed under the terms of the international treaties signed at the end of the Boxer Rebellion.  The Chinese national garrison involved in the incident had perhaps only about 100 soldiers.  So, the Japanese army on Chinese territory was far larger.

The event that started the Second Sino-Japanese war was really about nothing.  During the evening of July 7, 1937, a Japanese soldier did not return to his barracks on time.  There was no foul play.  He did return later that night and it turned out that he had stomach issues, had relieved himself and then gotten lost.

But the Japanese commander insisted that because his man was missing, that his troops be allowed to search the Chinese base for him.  This order was refused and somehow or another, a shot was fired between the Japanese and the Chinese.  Historians are unsure of exactly what happened.  It doesn’t seem to have been a deliberate incident manufactured by the Japanese Army.  It might just have been the loose trigger finger of one side or the other.

In any event, the two sides fired upon each other.

Within days, the Japanese sent reinforcements and they quickly had 180,000 troops in the area.  That is a staggering number considering the 100 of so Chinese garrison troops involved in the incident.  This then became a full-scale invasion by the Japanese.

Because of the new Chinese national policy regarding Japan, Chiang Kai-shek did not capitulate.  Instead, the Chinese resisted the Japanese as best they could.  From this incident, started virtually 8 years of continuous fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops.  This can be considered the start of World War 2, at least in the Pacific: July 7, 1937. 

In English, it is often called the Marco Polo Bridge Incident because an earlier version of the same bridge had been described in Marco Polo’s book about his travels to Kublai Khan’s lands during the Yuan Dynasty.  In Chinese, it is sometimes called the Luguo Bridge Incident or referred to by its date: the July 7^th Incident.

Later that month, Japan attacked Shanghai as well.  As in 1932, the Chinese Army defended the city fiercely.  Even though the Japanese Army had studied the campaign from 1932 in great detail and had learned from that experience, it still struggled to take the city.  Despite air superiority, naval supremacy and well supplied troops (as seen by the images of Japanese attackers wearing gas masks), it took Japan three months to take this largest Chinese port city.  It was bloody urban combat, of the type that is perhaps better remembered by Stalingrad.  It was street by street fighting.

The Chinese defence, under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s strategy, was fortified resistance, using urban buildings and defensive positions to resist the Japanese advance.  While the Japanese were trying to land thirty-five thousand fresh troops, hidden Chinese artillery opened fire and killed hundreds.  One of the dead was the cousin of the Japanese Empress.  Japanese wishes for a speedy victory were frustrated. 

Because of the French Concession and the International Settlement in Shanghai, the battle drew international attention.  The Japanese did not, at this time, attack those concessions.  So, foreign nationals and journalists were able to observe the fighting and expressed concern over the scale and brutality of the battles.  Many were caught in the crossfire. 

Casualties on both sides were high.  But with air and sea supremacy, the Japanese did make methodical progress.  The Japanese navy and its marines were very important in seizing territory along the rivers outside of the city’s boundaries.  Unlike in 1932, there was better coordination between the Japanese Army and Navy in 1937.  That seems to have been one of the lessons from their trial run 5 years earlier. 

After the Japanese had taken control of Shanghai, they turned their attention to the Chinese capital of Nanjing, just 300 kilometers up the Yangzi River.

The Japanese advanced along the south bank of the Yangzi River in three columns, a northern, southern and middle group.

Now, the rest of this story will become gruesome.  This was a difficult topic to research.  This will not be easy listening and may be disturbing.

Each had its own commander, but each Japanese group was brutal in its advance.  Farmers were clubbed and bayoneted.  Villages and small cities were razed to the ground.

The beautiful and historic city of Suzhou, known for its silk embroidery, palaces and temples, was on the route and the Japanese 9^th division murdered and plundered there for days.  Ancient landmarks were burned down, and thousands of women abducted for sexual slavery.  The population dropped from around 350,000 to less than 500.  Dogs were seen feasting on corpses.

Refugees streamed inland, away from the Japanese attackers.  Some went past Nanjing, but others crowded into the nation’s capital.  It was to be the next Japanese target.

Chiang Kai-shek decided both to defend the city and to abandon it.  Government officials and national treasures, including some originally from the Forbidden City, were packed up and moved west.  Many civilians, perhaps half the city’s population, fled.  Soldiers, some as young as 12, were brought in to defend the capital.  Movements were challenging because Japanese bombers had destroyed most bridges and the Japanese fleet was by the city minesweeping.  Others decided to wait and see.  Many of those that stayed thought that the Japanese invaders, if they succeeded, would be civilized and retore order and repair railways quickly.    

Emperor Hirohito placed his uncle Prince Asaka as commander of the entire Nanjing front.  This city was then known as Nanking in English, just as Beijing was known as Peking.  (Southern and northern capitals, respectively).  What the Imperial Japanese Army then did has been documented as some of the worst war crimes in human history.  It has been called the Rape of Nanking.

The Chinese forces evacuated farmers and villagers outside the city walls and tried to burn anything that might be useful to the invaders.  The defenders dug trenches and laid barbed wire.  They installed machine guns on top of the city walls and gates, which were sealed except for three, which were tightly controlled.  One gate was walled up with concrete.  Sandbags were laid.  But the small Chinese air force was pulled back and the Nanjing Commander lacked air reconnaissance as he prepared for the inevitable attack.  The defenders were not cohesive.  They came from different provinces and could not understand each other.  Some were exhausted veterans from Shanghai, who had no chance to rest. 

First the Japanese attacked from three directions, while the Yangzi River curved behind the city to its north and west.  The Japanese planes dropped leaflets on the city, offering good treatment if they were welcomed and brutal retribution to those who resisted.   Civilians and non-combatants would be treated well, it was promised.  The best way to “protect innocent civilians and cultural relics in the city” was to capitulate, the message said. 

The Chinese commander believed the situation was hopeless and wanted to negotiate a ceasefire and orderly retreat but was overruled by Chiang Kai-shek.  When a few days later, Chiang relented and allowed a retreat, it was too late.  There were few ships left and the Japanese would not permit them to leave.  A hasty retreat out a northern gate was arranged for some lucky soldiers and escapees, including the commander.  The rest were to suffer the Nanjing Massacre.

The 77^th wing of the Japanese Army realized that about 300,000 Chinese soldiers were cut off from retreat.  The Japanese had fewer troops, and insufficient food for so many captives.  So, the Japanese Army never tried. It systematically and secretly went about killing Chinese prisoners in small batches of no more than 1000 at a time.  The Japanese 66^th Battalion, for instance, was ordered to execute all Chinese prisoners.

The Japanese troops, facing minimal resistance, engaged in widespread looting, arson, and mass rape. The scale of these atrocities is hard to fathom. Death toll estimates range from forty thousand to over three hundred thousand innocent lives lost, with most credible estimates being well over two hundred thousand.   Rape cases reported number between twenty thousand to over eighty thousand.

Anyone who might have been a soldier was taken and murdered.  Girls, women, even old women, were raped, often gang raped and usually killed afterwards to stop them from talking.  Victims were brutalized and there are photos of objects having been stuck in the victim’s private parts.  Family members were sometimes forced to watch and there are examples where after seeing their daughters raped, fathers were ordered to rape their daughters in front of Japanese soldiers.  The scale of the violence was staggering.

Not all the victims during the Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, submitted without a fight.  One notable case was Li Xiuying.  She was 18 years old and 7 months pregnant.  Her husband had left before the attack, but she had stayed behind because she was afraid to travel with her advanced pregnancy.  She and her father fled to the Nanjing Safety Zone, which I’ll discuss more shortly.  Japanese soldiers broke in and one day, took away young men.  Then the next day, they returned and took away women.  Li decided to slam her head against the wall.  When she regained consciousness, she was on a small cot in the basement.  She wasn’t sure what to do.  She decided to stay and, if the Japanese came, she would fight them to the death.  Sure enough, they did return.  One soldier noticed her, told the others to leave the room and approached Li.  When he got close, she then jumped up, grabbed the bayonet from his belt.  He grabbed her wrist, but she bit his arm.  The commotion brought in his comrades from the hallway and they aimed their bayonets at her.  But she used her attacker as a shield. They did manage to slit her face, pierce her eye and knock out her teeth.  They bayoneted her belly and she went black and she was left for dead.  Her father found her but sensed no breath.  He asked someone to dig a grave for her.  But before burial, someone noticed her breath.  So, they rushed her to Nanjing University Hospital.  Doctors stitched up her thirty-seven bayonet wounds and she lost her baby in a miscarriage.  For the rest of her life, she was scarred, but she did live.  She credited it to the fact that her mother had died and Li had spent the previous five years surrounded by brothers and her father.  She regretted that her father had never allowed her to learn Kung Fu.  She believed that if she knew Kung Fu, she would have killed those Japanese soldiers that day. 

The horror of the Nanjing Massacre is vividly documented through the testimonies of survivors and international observers. Foreigners who remained in Nanjing during this period, such as diplomats and missionaries, provided harrowing accounts of the atrocities. The international community was horrified, leading to condemnation and demands for accountability.

One incident, directly impacting the foreign community was the Japanese air force attack on the USS Panay.  That ship was carrying diplomats, western refugees and diplomatic property, up the Yangzi River away from the fighting.  It was bombed and strafed, even at deck level, by Japanese aircraft.  That attack and sinking was filmed and the evidence is clear that the attack happened even though the pilots knew that the ship was American.  There are records of aviators informing their superiors of the US flag and being ordered to attack.  Some believe the Japanese forces wanted to test the American reaction to such an attack.  Journalists and camera men were on the ship and filmed damning evidence of the sinking, some of which made its way to newsreels around the world.  The Japanese brutality and disregard for the norms of war helped harden world opinion against Japan.  Before Nanjing, many international observers and even many Chinese had more respect for Japanese civility.  But after the Nanjing Massacre, it was clear that in this war, Japan was behaving brutally and without regard for others.  It treated non-Japanese people not as humans, but as insects or beasts. 

Iris Chang, in her book, the Rape of Nanking, goes into detail, including about the training the Japanese soldiers and officers had received before the war.  They were indoctrinated to stop regarding the enemy as humans and forced to decapitate and kill victims to get them used to the process and to desensitize them.

People who, in other circumstances, would be normal and humane, were cold blooded killers during this war.  For example, one man who later was a Japanese doctor, built a shrine in his medical office to his victims during the war.  He admitted to having killed 200 himself and tried later, with his shrine and confessions, to atone for his acts in China.

Amid the chaos, there were glimmers of humanity. The Nanjing Safety Zone, led by German citizen John Rabe, managed to save at least two hundred thousand lives.  It was inspired by the neutral zone that had been set up in Shanghai by the French priest Father Jacquinot de Bessage. 

About two dozen foreigners worked to set up a safety zone in Nanjing around Nanjing University, the American Embassy, a Women’s Arts and Science College and some government buildings.  It was under four square kilometers.  Most of the foreigners then chose to evacuate on the USS Panay, which was attacked and sunk by the Japanese planes, rather than risk staying in Nanjing.  John Rabe, a German who had lived the previous 30 years in China, did stay and was made head of the Safety Zone.  He was a tireless defender of everyone in it, including the more than 200,000 Chinese who sought refuge in its small territory.  He and his volunteers worked to get food and to protect its inhabitants from the Japanese soldiers who continually tried to take people from it, either for execution or rape and murder.  Japan did not officially recognize its existence, but nevertheless, through the force of will of Rabe and others, perhaps two hundred thousand lives were spared by the Safety Zone’s existence.

Rabe was a leading Nazi in Nanjing and used his Nazi armband to intimidate Japanese soldiers into leaving the inhabitants of the Safety Zone alone.  Since Germany and Japan were allied, ordinary Japanese soldiers usually left as soon as Rabe came, which he did almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week when he heard of any mistreatment.  Rabe also sent letters and evidence to German authorities about what was happening in Nanjing and urged them to intervene with Japan.

Later in the war, he was transferred back to Germany and he gave lectures during the war about the Nanjing Massacre and attracted quite a bit of attention to it.  He also wrote to Hitler about it and included copies of a video of the atrocities.  About two days after that, he was taken by the Gestapo and interrogated.  He was only released when his employer, Siemens, promised that Rabe would stop speaking publicly about Japan.  After the war, he was unemployed and his family had to turn acorns and weeds into soup to keep fed.  His wife was down to 44 kilograms at one point, which is under 100 lbs.  Word got back to Nanjing and the people who he had saved were so moved that donations were collected and the KMT administrators forwarded it on to Europe, where care packages, including sausages and other foods were purchased.  The survivors of the Nanjing Massacre helped the Rabe family survive during their time of hunger after the war in Germany.  John Rabe has been called the Oskar Schindler of China.  Both were Nazis who saved thousands of lives.

He wasn’t the only one.  Robert Wilson was a surgeon who had been born in Nanjing, educated at Princeton, and was the only surgeon who refused to leave Nanjing during the invasion.  He worked for free and tirelessly, refusing any days off.  His Methodist faith kept him working to help the wounded, sick and vulnerable.  It cost him his health and by 1940, he was wracked by violent seizures and mental collapse.  He was forced to travel to California and he never did recover or return to China.   

Minnie Vautrin worked at the Women’s College and helped turn it into a place of refuge.  She hid wounded Chinese soldiers and Chinese girls and women there and did all she could to feed those refugees, even giving up her own porridge, and suffering beatings as she tried to protect the Chinese against the aggression of the Japanese soldiers.  More than once, they threatened her life.  She also tried to raise the spirits of the Chinese.  At least once, she told a woman she was feeding, “Don’t you people worry.  Japan will fail.  China will not perish.”  When she saw a Chinese boy wearing a rising sun armband, she scolded him.  “You do not need to wear this rising sun emblem. You are a Chinese and your country has not perished.  You should remember the date you wear this thing and you should never forget.”  To others, she said “China will never perish.  And Japan will definitely fail in the end.”  But she too suffered and by 1940 found she was at the end of her energy.  On a return boat ride to the US, she tried repeatedly to kill herself and finally did in Michigan in 1941. 

The diaries and correspondence by these witnesses has been important.  John Rabe’s detailed diaries are considered important evidence that corroborates other sources about what Japan did around Nanjing.  The fact that a proud German, itself an ally of Japan, was so meticulous in his criticism, is seen as particularly damning.  Unlike Americans, who by 1941, had reasons to be anti-Japanese, there was never any patriotic reason for Germans to be critical of Japanese actions in the Pacific.  It was his interest in his fellow humans that motivated him and perhaps his misplaced faith in his own government.

Of course, Japan did fail in the end.  It was defeated in 1945.  After World War II, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, commonly known as the Tokyo Trials, was convened to address war crimes committed by Japanese military and political leaders. The Nanjing Massacre was one of the atrocities that came under scrutiny during these trials.  Several individuals were prosecuted and held accountable for their roles in the Nanjing Massacre and other war crimes. Notably, General Matsui Iwane was found guilty of Class B war crimes, including atrocities committed during the massacre. He was actually ill during the march on Nanjing and Prince Asaka was in more direct command.  But the Japanese Royal Family was granted immunity from prosecution by the Allies, especially the Americans, after the war and Matsui considered it an honour and a duty to die for the Emperor.  He was sentenced to death and executed on December 23, 1948.

Some trials occurred in Nanjing itself.  Some Japanese officers and soldiers were sent back, tried, convicted and executed by firing squad for their involvement in the Nanjing Massacre.  The locals in Nanjing considered their death to be much more humane than the way they had killed locals during the first weeks of the occupation.

At the Tokyo Trials, some received prison sentences, while others were executed.  One Class A War Crime prisoner went on to become Japanese Prime Minister.  Former Prime Minister Tojo was one of the Japanese War Criminals who was hanged.  So too was former Japanese Prime Minister Kōki Hirota, whose crimes included failing to stop the Japanese atrocities at Nanjing. 

In 1985, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall was established.  It stands as a somber reminder of what happened and is dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims as well as educating future generations.

The campaign against Nanjing and the subsequent atrocities remain deeply significant and have impacted Chinese-Japanese relations.  Many survivors of the Nanjing Massacre and rape were shocked and re-traumatized when the People’s Republic of China invited the then Japanese Prime Minister in 1991 to visit China.  Some felt that it was like being raped a second time.  Today, the government in Beijing is more hostile towards Japan.  Chinese people have been attacked on social media and stopped by police if they were Japanese style clothing in public.  The Nanjing Massacre and the Chinese War with Japan continue to shape perceptions and discussions on war crimes, justice, and reconciliation in the region.

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