Nanjing Falls to Japanese, something ensues. (南京事件 - “The Rape of Nanking” either does or doesn’t begin.)
December 13, 2006
On this day in 1937, Nanjing (formerly known as Nanking in English), the ancient, walled capital of China, fell to the Japanese Imperial Army. The Chinese Nationalist Army apparently offered a feeble defense and were routed. After that, what happened becomes much, much, much less clear.
No matter what I write next, it will draw the ire of one side or the other. (Deep breath.)
What is known and generally agreed upon is that the Japanese Imperial Army believed Chinese Nationalist soldiers were hiding among the civilian population and continuing to fight. This is what led the Japanese to execute Chinese men of fighting age. They could have been soldiers, some perhaps weren’t.
It is also generally agreed that the chain of command and oversight weren’t what they could have been. Officers in the field operated with little clear instruction from their superiors and without what would now be called “rules of engagement.” Their superiors seemed to get even less direction from Tokyo than they gave to their subordinates. The fog of war lay heavily over Nanjing.
A number of historians seem to agree that what happened in Nanjing was at least partially the result of the confluence of a directive from Tokyo concerning the Battle of Shanghai and the bloody hand-to-hand nature of that conflict.
Since invading Manchuria and setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo under the “Last Emperor” of the Qing Dynasty, Puyi (known as the Kangde Emperor in Manchukuo), the Japanese Imperial Army had procured demilitarization agreements for parts of Northern China, although Manchukuo was not recognized internationally. Japan also enjoyed relatively free reign in Manchukuo and Northern China, as the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-shek was embroiled in a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party.
In December of 1936, though, after the Xi’an Incident, when Chiang Kai-shek was arrested by the Japanese-supported Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang, the KMT and CCP decided to join forces to fight the growing threat from the Japanese Imperial Army.
The Japanese met increasing resistance until August 1937, when Chiang’s forces’ harassment of encroaching Japanese forces turned into a three month battle of attrition fought in the streets of Shanghai and the surrounding neighborhoods. Hand-to-hand combat was widespread, the vastly superior Japanese forces, while victorious, took heavy casualties and were surprised by the strength of the Chinese resistance, into which Chiang had put his energies in the vain hope that he would be able to attract support from sympathetic Western powers.
Fearing fierce resistance and unconventional tactics from the Chinese, Japanese officers
proposed lifting the constraints of international law in dealing with Chinese combatants and had their wishes granted in a directive ratified by the Showa Emperor, Hirohito, which also advised that officers not use the term “prisoner of war,” on August 5th.
Knowing they would be defeated by the superior Japanese forces, the Chinese Army enacted a scorched earth policy as villagers and many residents of the city fled the approaching Japanese Imperial Army.
The Japanese broke the last lines of Chinese resistance on December 9th, just two days
after, concerned with its prestige in its unprecedented occupation of a foreign capital, the Japanese Army issued a directive threatening their own soldiers with severe punishment should any of them dishonor the Japanese Imperial Army, commit illegal acts, loot, or cause fires, either by arson or by accident. Upon reaching the city wall, the Japanese dropped leaflets demanding the city’s surrender within twenty-four hours. The leaflets read:
The Japanese Army, one million strong, has already conquered Changshu. We have surrounded the city of Nanking… The Japanese Army shall show no mercy toward those who offer resistance, treating them with extreme severity, but shall harm neither innocent civilians nor Chinese military personnel who manifest no hostility. It is our earnest desire to preserve the East Asian culture. If your troops continue to fight, war in Nanking is inevitable. The culture that has endured for a millennium will be reduced to ashes, and the government that has lasted for a decade will vanish into thin air. This commander-in-chief issues bills to your troops on behalf of the Japanese Army. Open the gates to Nanking in a peaceful manner, and obey the following instructions.
Twenty-five hours after the leaflets were dropped, having received no Chinese envoy, General Matsui Iwane ordered an attack. The Japanese heavily shelled and bombed the city for two days, after which Chinese General Tang Sheng-chi ordered a retreat that immediately resulted in chaos as some Chinese soldiers attempted to blend in by stripping civilians of their clothing and others shot their fleeing comrades in the back; still others drowned attempting to swim across the frigid Yangtze River. When the Japanese entered the city on December 13th, they faced scant resistance.
Many Westerners had been in Nanjing, however, all but twenty-two fled the city, returning to their home countries, in the face of the Japanese advance.
The twenty-two who remained formed the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, which was established in the western quarter of the city. The Japanese government had agreed not to attack parts of the city unoccupied by the Chinese military and the International Committee managed to persuade the Chinese government to move its troops out of the Zone. While stray Japanese shells hit the Zone during the attack, the Japanese Army did not directly attack the western quarter and killings and other atrocities committed in the Zone were fewer in number and severity than those committed in other parts of the city.
The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone elected Siemens businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe, who apparently felt safe to remain in the city due to the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact, as their leader. It is from his diaries and letters to officials in Germany, including Hitler, that much of what is known comes. Rabe was not the only Western diarist or letter writer in Nanjing, though.
Robert Wilson, in a December 15, 1937 letter to his family:
The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital.
And from December 18th:
They bayoneted one little boy, killing him, and I spent an hour and a half this morning patching up another little boy of eight who had five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen.
James McCallum, in a December 19, 1937 letter to his family:
It is a horrible story to relate; I know not where to begin nor to end. Never have I heard or read of such brutality. Rape: We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval there is a bayonet stab or a bullet.
John Magee, in a December 19th letter to his wife:
They not only killed every prisoner they could find but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages…. Just the day before yesterday we saw a poor wretch killed very near the house where we are living.
The American missionary Minnie Vautrin, who saved many lives at the Gingling Girls’ College, in her diary on December 16th:
There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night—one of the girls was but 12 years old. Food, bedding and money have been taken from people. … I suspect every house in the city has been opened, again and yet again, and robbed. Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out “Ging ming! Ging ming!”—save our lives. The occasional shots that we hear out on the hills, or on the street, make us realize the sad fate of some man—very probably not a soldier.
Manchester Guardian correspondent H.J. Timperley, in a telegram blocked by Japanese censors in Shanghai and intercepted and decoded by the Americans when it was forwarded to the Japanese Embassy in Washington on January 17, 1938:
Since return (to) Shanghai (a) few days ago I investigated reported atrocities committed by Japanese Army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts (of) reliable eye-witnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility (is) beyond question afford convincing proof (that) Japanese Army behaved and (is) continuing (to) behave in (a) fashion reminiscent (of) Attila (and) his Huns. (Not) less than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians slaughtered, many cases (in) cold blood.
The Japanese Army started by killing the Chinese soldiers, generally by shooting them on the banks of the Yangtze, so the bodies would fall into the river, but also by using them for live bayonet practice, decapitation (reportedly popular), nailing to trees, hanging, hanging by the tongue, immolation, and live burial, as well as summary executions on the streets of the city.
As many Chinese soldiers had attempted to hide amongst the civilian population, the execution of sodiers extended to any man of fighting age on the pretext that he may have been a soldier.
Exactly how much of what was done by the Japanese Imperial Army is a highly charged and highly controversial topic, but instances of everything soldiers were supposedly ordered not to do are well-documented. It is the extent of these crimes that forms the more legitimate portion of the controversy.
Soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army looted, robbing rich and poor alike and, facing no Chinese resistance, dividing the booty as they saw fit, with the theft reaching all the way up to General Matsui himself, who received an art collection, stolen from a Shanghai banker, valued at approximately $2 million.
Arson was equally rampant, with estimates of the damage ranging from a third to two thirds of the entire city, including new government buildings, private residences, and other buildings of all sorts.
The atrocities that cause us to recoil even to this day, though, are the instances of rape and
murder, often occurring as complementary acts, and carried out in unfathomably depraved manners.
Women, from infants to the elderly (reports of as old as 80) were raped and gang-raped, often in public during the day, and occasionally with family members forced to watch. The victims were often murdered through mutilation afterwards. Sons were forced to rape mothers, fathers were forced to rape daughters, there were even reports of men being forced to rape corpses.
Other women were sent to become “comfort women” in the Imperial Army’s brothels.
Gruesome modes of murder were not limited to men, in addition to the methods mentioned above, a three-hundred meter by five meter “Ten-thousand Corpse Ditch” was dug and was used as an execution site for as many men, women, and children as its name stated. (While estimates range from 4,000 to 20,000, many historians agree on a figure of somewhere between ten and twenty-thousand.) The bellies of pregnant women were prime targets for bayonets, often after the women had been raped, and there were even reports of babies being thrown into the air and caught on bayonets.
How much of the reports are true is difficult to gauge, although evidence of widespread theft, arson, rape, and murder were numerous and varied, even coming from Westerners who had expected the Japanese occupation of the city to be a positive step.
The body count seems to draw the most controversy. John Rabe estimated the city’s population prior to the its being taken by the Japanese Army at 200,000 to 250,000, but the atrocities occurred both within and without the city walls, in a greater Nanjing that had a population estimated at as much as 635,000 and also throughout the six-county “Nanjing Special Municipality.” While the Chinese government touts 300,000 as the official death toll and has offered estimates as high as 400,000, the consensus in Japan is generally between 100,000 and 200,000, with the International Military Tribunal for the Far east placing the death toll as being between 200,000 and 300,000 and the number of women raped at at least 20,000 and possibly as many as 80,000. (In cases where women were raped and murdered, then mutilated, burned, or buried, it can obviously be difficult to determine what happened conclusively.)
In addition, the dates that constitute the Nanjing Massacre are interpreted differently, with some historians considering the fall of Nanjing on December 13th and the Army’s entry into the Safety Zone in December 14th to be the starting point and some considering the fall of Suzhou on November 19th and the Japanese Army’s entry into Jiangsu province to be the beginning. Likewise, conservative estimates place the end of the massacre in early February, thus making it six weeks long, whereas others say it lasted into March 1938.
An Editorial Note
While I have endeavored to give as objective an account of what happened on this day in 1937 as possible, I am fully aware that there is nothing of the sort that will be universally regarded as such. What happened in Nanjing in December, January, and early February of 1937 (yes, something did happen), is as controversial a subject as any regarding the events of the wars of the 1930s and ’40s, culminating in World War II.
The issue of what exactly happened in Nanjing is particularly frustrating, as the people who spend the most time, money, and energy on the issue, and get the most publicity are those who have no interest in the honest academic study of history and, instead, represent one of the most egregious cases of the politicization of the field in modern events. This is true on both sides.
The fact that there are two distinct sides, with the middle being the quietest, least heard from section, and that the issue is most accurately discussed in terms of sides is deeply troubling as it leaves us with two extremes, neither accurate, neither interested in anything other than supporting their own agenda, and a middle, arrived at for the layman through taking the middle ground between two extremes, which is neither accurate not enlightening.
On the Japanese side, the most prominent figures seem to be those who seek to downplay or even deny the very existence of the Nanjing massacre. They are masters of distraction at best and laughable ultra-rightists at worst. The worst claim either that nothing at all happened, which is untenable, or that the Japanese Imperial Army was in fact a positive force in the city at the time, which is despicable. The deception comes in the form of shifting the focus from the actual issue at hand. Claiming that 143 photos of the massacre predated the event or were doctored is compelling evidence of Chinese propaganda and sows seeds of doubt, but it is not tackling the issue head-on. It is shifting the focus away from the events and onto the publicizing of the events, which is a separate issue. Moreover, the photo analysis technique is taking an essentially our-word-against-theirs approach, which is feasible now only because it pits current authors against journalists active 68 years ago. It is banking on the fact that people will not be so rude as to tell a man he’s spewing shit in public. Horseshit. Taisho Higashinakano, judging by his television appearances, chops logic with the best of them.
The other saddeningly effective distraction technique used is the tossing out of random, unsubstantiated, straight out of an uyoku’s ass, low figures, such as 26,000, or even 43. This is crude, but more effective than it should be. As people are inclined to think the mean of the two extremes must be the truth (which is logic worthy of Higashinakano), all one need do to change the “fair” figure is alter one of the extremes. Toss “43″ out and all of a sudden, you have not a debate between 100,000 and 300,000, but a debate with 43 as the lowball figure. Again, horseshit.
Calling for evidence is the right thing to do, but it is disingenuous to imply, or even explicitly state that the falsification or misuse of photographs proves a negative or does anything more than cast doubt on the issue. Is it not possible that the erroneous photographs mask atrocity as much as exaggerate it?
Finally, despite its noted unreliability, most criminal courts in the world still permit and even rely on eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony that could exculpate certain individual Japanese soldiers is accepted, even touted by deniers, even as they claim that testimony of survivors is insufficient proof of what happened, that harder evidence is needed. What is being asked of survivors, though, is not the sort of detail necessary to a criminal trial - what brand of cigarettes Lieutenant So-and-so smoked or what exactly the General said to his underling. Such details are on the points on which eyewitness testimony breaks in criminal trials. What is being asked, though, is not detail to be used in prosecution, but the memory of whether or not a large-scale event occurred. An elderly Chinese woman may have forgotten a particular soldier’s name, if she ever knew it. She may not remember exactly what time of day she was stabbed, but whether or not she was ever raped or stabbed, whether or not her family was killed in front of her is not something she is likely to be mistaken about.
Those who were not there and write books, calling such testimony into question in the pursuit of their own defensive agenda, should at least have the honesty to face the witnesses directly and call them liars to their faces.
The “Japanese” side, or perhaps the “denial” side is not alone, though. The Chinese side, so-called here because its main proponent is the government of the PRC, is equally culpable in this massacre of historical and historiographical discipline.
That the Nanjing Massacre, the “Rape of Nanking,” has long been a lynchpin of Chinese propaganda, nor is such use of historical events necessarily contemptible. What causes the Chinese Communist Party to deserve the opprobrium of those interested in an attempt to understand events is that they are no more able to resist the temptation to spout exaggerations of their own extreme views than the Japanese.
It seems to have been the CCP that turned the Nanjing massacre into a quantifiable event, with body count being the measure of horror. The Nanjing Massacre Museum is an example of the ways in which the Chinese side is undermining its own arguments by shifting the focus from the type of actions to a body count and of diluting the truth on display with gratuitous lies.
The debate shouldn’t even be about how many were killed as that is an important, but ancillary point. The focus should be on, and the horror engendered by the very idea that a conquering army would attack and kill civilians at all, much less use torture and sadistic execution methods at all. The Chinese government is to blame, though, for making the number the important point, for making the amount of corpses the thing we should be concerned about, for turning an incidence of abject inhumanity into an accounting squabble.
The Nanjing Massacre Museum lists the number of dead at 300,000 and claims this is among the more conservative estimates, citing the apparently grossly exaggerated figure of 400,000 to demonstrate this. This is foolish, but to be expected of a Communist government. Everything in Communist propaganda tends toward the literal and what could be more literal than a number? To drive the horror home, just inflate the number. This is the same game the denial side plays when absurdly low numbers are pulled out of thin air. It obfuscates on both sides and is not the most relevant point. The deniers argue as though being able to show that the actual number of dead was a mere 100,000 would be a victory; the CCP’s numerical inflation has created this situation.
The Nanjing Massacre Museum illustrates CCP propaganda’s lack of subtlety or respect for 
the recipient’s intelligence and the unfortunate side effect that has of allowing trivial things to mitigate the force of arguments put forth on unequivocally serious topics.
In addition to the blatant lie that 300,000 is among the more conservative numbers given, the Museum spews cheesy canned haunted house music over what would be a stark memorial rock and sculpture garden, gives stage directions to visitors, telling them when to feel somber and so on, editorializes on every fact presented, telling us how awful the Japanese were, depicts all of the Japanese as remorseless, chortling killers, and ends with a display on how the Chinese Communist Party defeated Japan and forced the Emperor of Japan to surrender to the might of the Communist Party. Oh, and it goes without saying that the visitor is reminded at every step that the only way to prevent such tragedies in the future is to be united in socialism under the Chinese Communist Party.
All of this nonsense and unnecessary melodrama detracts from the memorialization of an event that needs no showmanship. Sadly, this ham-handed handling of history makes it possible to cast doubt on Chinese claims without drawing the derision that Holocaust deniers receive. China’s exaggeration and melodrama are undermining their own arguments and dragging the whole debate down into the morass of hyperbole where it wallows today.
A request
If I anticipated no response to this article, I would not have written it. All points of view are welcome and encouraged. Keep it civil, though. I also highly recommend that claims made, especially extraordinary ones, be substantiated.
Related Posts:
