12 - The Rape of Nanjing

Context

As China struggled with internal division between a number of regional warlords, the growing Nationalist (Guomindang) Party under Sun Yatsen and Chiang Kai-shek, and the resilient Communist Party under Mao Zedong, Japan began to extend its power from Korea and in to northern China. Japan had effectively controlled Manchuria by 1931 and continued to seize territories in the 1930s as the Nationalists focused solely on fighting the Communists. It was not until Chiang was kidnapped by his own generals did he seek a truce with the Communists to create a united front against the Japanese.

What proved to be a life and death struggle soon broke out between China and Japan. The opening engagement was a minor clash between Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge, not far from Beijing on July 7, 1937. The conflict quickly ceased to be localized. The Japanese came to feel that since Chiang and the Nationalist government would not yield to their wishes they must be eliminated. To the Japanese, the rising tide of nationalism in China—directed, as much of it was, against them—had become intolerable

By July 1937 practically all Chinese regional military and political groups had rallied to support the Nationalist government and Chiang Kai-shek in their decision to oppose Japan by every means. The communists, who had urged a united front against Japan since 1935, pledged their support and put their armies nominally under command of the government.

From a strictly military point of view, however, Japan was so much better prepared than China that its armies achieved rapid initial success. Within the course of two years Japan obtained possession of most of the ports, the majority of the chief cities as far west as Hankou, and the larger part of the railways. Beijing and Tianjin were occupied in July 1937. After fierce fighting, the Chinese armies were driven out of the Shanghai area by the middle of November 1937. Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, was the next target.

Mao Zedong (left) and Chiang Kai-shek (right) toast to a truce between the Nationalists and Communists

The Event

Chiang Kai-shek could not decide whether to defend Nanjing or abandon it without a fight. The city was indefensible, and yet, to abandon such an important symbol would be a humiliation. His generations could not agree. In the event the worst of both worlds was achieved, with an incomplete defense which simply angered the attackers. Japanese commanders were in fact planning to use mustard gas and incendiaries on the capital if the fighting was likely approach the intensity of what they had experienced in Shanghai.

The Chinese certainly had an idea of their enemy's ruthlessness, but even then could not imagine the degree of cruelty to come. On 13 December, Chinese forced evacuated Nanjing, only to be trapped outside in a sudden encirclement. Japanese troops entered the city with orders to kill all prisoners. A single unit in the 16th Division killed 15,000 Chinese prisoners, and just one company slaughtered 1,300. A German diplomat reported to Berlin that "besides mass executions by machinegun fire, other more individual methods of killing were employed as well, such as pouring gasoline over a victim and setting him afire." Buildings in the city were looted and set alight. To escape the murder, rape and destruction civilians tried to shelter in the designated "international safety zone."

Japanese soldiers in Nanjing, 1937.

Japanese soldiers had been brought up in a militaristic society....soldiers...tended to fight for the honor of their family and local community. ... Recruits were constantly insulted and beaten by the their NCOs (non-commissioned officers) to toughen them up and to provoke them...to take their anger out in turn on the soldiers and civilians of a defeated enemy. All of them had been indoctrinated since elementary school to believe that the Chinese were totally inferior to the "divine race" of Japanese and were "below pigs." In a case-history of postwar confessions, one soldier admitted that although he had been horrified by the gratuitous torture of a Chinese prisoner, he had asked to be allowed to take over to make up for a perceived insult.

At Nanjing, wounded Chinese soldiers were bayoneted where they lay. Officers made prisoners kneel in rows, then practiced beheading them one-by-one with their samurai swords. Their soldiers were also ordered to carry out bayonet practice on thousands of Chinese prisoners bound or tied to trees. Any who refused were beaten severely by their NCOs. ... A Corporal Nakamura, who had himself been conscripted as a soldier against his will, described in his diary how he and his comrades made some new Japanese recruits watch as they tortured five Chinese civilians to death. The newcomers were horrified, but Nakamura wrote: "All new recruits are like this, but soon they will be doing the same things themselves." ... [Private] Shimada Toshio...recounts the following:

"A Chinese prisoner had been tied by his hands and ankle to a pole on each side of him. Nearly fifty new recruits were lined up to bayonet him. My emotion must have been paralyzed. I felt no mercy on him. He eventually started asking us, 'Come on. Hurry up!' We couldn't stick the right spot. So he said, 'Hurry up!' which meant that he wanted to die quickly." (Private Second Class Shimada Toshio, 226th Regiment)

The group ethos of the Imperial Japanese Army, instilled by collective punishment in training, also produced a pecking order between experienced troops and newcomers. Senior soldiers organized the gang-rapes, with up to thirty men per woman, whom they usually killed when the had finished with her. Recently arrived soldiers were not permitted to take part. Only when they had been accepted as part of the group would they be "invited" to join in.

"You can't breathe for sheer revulsion when you keep finding the bodies of women with bamboo poles thurst up their [privates]. Even old women over 70 are constantly being raped." (John Rabe, German businessman who organized the international safety zone in Nanjing)

The furia japonica shocked the world with its appalling massacres and mass rapes in revenge for the bitter fighting at Shanghai, which the Japanese army had never expected from the Chinese they despised. Accounts of civilian casualties vary widely. Some Chinese sources put them as high as 300,000, but a more likely figure is closer to 200,000. The Japanese military authorities, in a series of inept lies, claimed that they were killing only Chinese soldiers who had put on civilian clothes and that the death toll was little more than a thousand. The scenes of massacre were hellish, with corpses rotting on every street and in every open space, many of them chewed by semi-feral dogs. Every pond, stream and river was polluted with decomposing bodies.

The destruction of Nanjing—which had been the capital of the Nationalist Chinese from 1928 to 1937—was ordered by Matsui Iwane, commanding general of the Japanese Central China Front Army that captured the city. Shortly after the end of World War II, Matsui and Tani Hisao, a lieutenant general who had personally participated in acts of murder and rape, were found guilty of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and were executed.

Source(s): Encyclopedia Britannica, Anthony Beevor's The Second World War, Time Magazine