I
On the night of July 7, 1937, the Japanese troops, which had been stationed outside Beijing according to the 1901 Boxer Protocol, alleged that they were shot upon while conducting a military exercise near the Lugou Bridge (Marco Polo Bridge). By the end of the exercise, a roll call revealed that one of the soldiers was missing. The Japanese demanded to search Wanping, a small walled city by the bridge, for that missing soldier. Fighting ensued when the Chinese denied the accusation and the Japanese shelled and attacked Wanping. The incident, thus, served as the prelude to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). The following weeks witnessed fierce battles and Japanese capture of Beijing, Tianjin, and other cities in North China.
After the war broke out in the north, tension mounted down south in the Shanghai area, as well. On August 9, two Japanese marines and a Chinese Peace Preservation Corps soldier were killed in a skirmish near Hongqiao Airfield in a Shanghai suburb. After rounds of unsuccessful negotiation, the incident, which escalated into crisis as both sides concentrated a large number of forces around Shanghai, eventually led to war when ferocious street fighting occurred on August 13.
War went on in Shanghai for nearly three months, with aerial combat above, Japanese warships shelling Zhabei, Jiangwan, Pudong, and other areas, and infantries engaged in bloody battles. Confronted by Japanese superiority in weaponry and training, Chinese troops put up a stubborn resistance and held their shrinking positions, in spite of heavy casualties, until November 5, when Japanese reinforcements landed at Jinshanwei in the Hangzhou Bay in the south, and at Baimaokou on the Yangtze in the north a few days later, to threaten the flanks of Chinese positions and force Chinese troops to abandon Shanghai and retreat westward. Shanghai fell to the Japanese on November 12, 1937.
Meanwhile, the Japanese fought their way swiftly in chase of the fleeing Chinese troops westward. Under the command of General Iwane Matsui, Central China Expeditionary Forces Commander, Japanese troops advanced toward Nanjing along three routes. While Japanese troops swept through the lower Yangtze delta area, atrocities were reported to have occurred in such cities as Suzhou, Wuxi, Danyang, Zhenjiang, and other towns. A typical example was the "Killing Contest" between two Japanese second lieutenants, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tuyoshi. One killed 106, the other 105. The war conditions and atrocity reports created wave after wave of refugee exodus from the war ravaged cities and surrounding regions. Millions of civilians were fleeing westward into mountainous regions and interior cities and towns. Trainloads of refugees passed through Nanjing, and many of them sought refuge in Nanjing, as well.
Soon after the war broke out in Shanghai, Japanese bombers came to conduct air raids over Nanjing. First bombs were dropped on August 15. For the following months, the city had been subjected to frequent air raids. Residents were constantly awakened at midnight by sirens to rush to dugouts, trenches, or other shelters, and hundreds of them lost their lives as a result of aerial bombings. On August 20, the U.S. embassy in Nanjing was rocked by the explosion, when Japanese planes dropped bombs at the Central University, killing ten people and damaging the university's library. September 22 saw the worst air attacks ever. About fifty Japanese planes participated in the two-hour bombing in the morning, and fourteen bombers came for raids in the afternoon. Several targets, including the Nationalist Party Headquarters, the Xiaguan railway station, and the train-ferry landing facilities, were bombed, with more than 200 killed or wounded. Scores were burned to death as incendiary bombs hit the straw huts in a poor neighborhood along the Yangtze River front. A few days later, on September 25, a large fleet of Japanese planes flew over Nanjing in successive waves. Bombardments seemed almost continuous for seven hours, inflicting greater material damage than the city ever sustained during the previous raids. Power plant, water, and transportation facilities were reduced to ruins, while the National Health Institute and Central Hospital were bombed and damaged.
With Japanese troops getting closer to Nanjing and aerial bombing escalating, residents found it advisable to evacuate the city. The movement started with wealthy families with every truck and car employed in transporting people and luggage, while tens of thousands were on the move up river to Hankou or beyond into interior locations westward. Then the middle class followed and evacuated to wherever their means could carry them to. Finally, for days and days, rickshaws were seen going past loaded with poor families' boxes, rolls of bedding, and family members. All those who could possibly get out of the city evacuated, with the poor going into the country nearby, taking young women and children, and leaving the old folks behind to take care of the homes. Consequently, before the Japanese arrived, three quarters of the city's population evacuated. Only those of the destitute class, who had no means to make the evacuation, remained in the city.
Japanese troops made a rapid advance toward Nanjing and captured a series of cities and towns along the Nanjing-Shanghai railway line and in the lower Yangtze Valley. In the course of their advance and attacks toward Nanjing, Japanese planes bombed and damaged HMS Ladybird and other ships on December 5 at Wuhu and later, on December 12, bombed and sank USS Panay near Hexian, Anhui Province.
On December 5, the Japanese captured Jurong, a strategic city about twenty-five miles east of Nanjing. During the following days, Chinese defenders lost most of their positions outside Nanjing city walls. By December 9, Japanese troops reached the city gates, surrounding Nanjing on three sides. Japanese commander-in-chief Iwane Matsui issued an ultimatum, urging Chinese Nanjing Garrison Commander Tang Shengzhi to surrender unconditionally by noon the next day. The Chinese offered no response to the ultimatum. By 2:00 p.m. on December 10, the Japanese launched the final assault. Fierce bombardment, shelling, and fighting continued for two days before the city walls were breached at several points. Japanese soldiers swarmed into the city late December 12, engaging in street fighting with Chinese defenders. Nanjing was completely under Japanese control on December 13, 1937.
II
No sooner had Japanese troops entered Nanjing city gates than atrocities were committed against disarmed Chinese soldiers and civilian residents in the city and its vicinity. Japanese soldiers were turned loose and indulged themselves in wanton killing, violation of women, wholesale looting, and widespread burning. American vice consul James Espy, who arrived in Nanjing on January 6, 1938, to reopen the American embassy, gave a summarized description of what had happened to the Chinese capital after its fall:
The picture that they painted of Nanking was one of a reign of terror that befell the city upon its occupation by the Japanese military forces. Their stories and those of the German residents tell of the city having fallen into the hands of the Japanese as captured prey, not merely taken in the course of organized warfare but seized by an invading army whose members seemed to have set upon the prize to commit unlimited depredations and violence. Fuller data and our own observations have not brought out facts to discredit their information. The civilian Chinese population remaining in the city crowded the streets of the so-called "safety zone" as refugees, many of whom are destitute. Physical evidences are almost everywhere of the killing of men, women and children, of the breaking into and looting of property and of the burning and destruction of houses and buildings.
It remains, however, the Japanese soldiers swarmed over the city in thousands and committed untold depredations and atrocities. It would seem according to stories told us by foreign witnesses that the soldiers were let loose like a barbarian horde to desecrate the city. Men, women and children were killed in uncounted numbers throughout the city. Stories are heard of civilians being shot or bayoneted for no apparent reason.
The Japanese rounded up a large number of prisoners of war and civilians around Nanjing, in particular along the Yangtze River, for tens of thousands of soldiers and refugees attempted to cross the river-in vain, owing to a lack of vessels. They roped or bound the victims and took them to a spot nearby to mass execute them. Most of the large-scale mass executions took place outside the city walls along the Yangtze River at Yanziji (Swallow Cliff), Caoxiexia (Straw Shoe Gorge), Yuleiying (Torpedo Depot), Zhongshan Wharfs, Yijiang Gate, Jiangdong Gate, Shangxin Riverfront, and other locations. Wu Chang-teh, who survived on December 15 a mass execution that laid 1,600 male civilians dead outside the city's main western gate, lived to tell the fate of the 1,600:
These persons in groups of over one hundred at a time were forced to go through the gate at the point of bayonets. As they went outside they were shot with machine guns and their bodies fell along the slope and into the canal. Those who were not killed by the machine gun fire were stabbed with bayonets by the Japanese soldiers. About sixteen groups each containing more than 100 persons had been forced through the gate ahead of me and these persons were killed.
When my group of something over 100 was ordered to go through the gate I ran as fast as I could and fell forward just before the machine guns opened fire, and was not hit by machine gun bullets and a Japanese soldier came and stabbed the bayonet in my back. I lay still as if dead. The Japanese threw gasoline on some of the bodies and set them afire and left.
Meanwhile, there were numerous small-scale mass executions in and around the city. A. T. Steele, a Chicago Daily News correspondent in the fallen city, described one such mass execution: "I witnessed one mass execution. The band of several hundred condemned men came marching down the street bearing a large Japanese flag. They were accompanied by two or three Japanese soldiers, who herded them into a vacant lot. There they were brutally shot dead in small groups. One Japanese soldier stood over the growing pile of corpses with a rifle pouring bullets into any of the bodies which showed movement."
There were a large number of Chinese soldiers who, trapped inside the walled city, discarded their weapons and uniforms, changed into civilian clothes, and mixed with the civilian population. The Japanese, however, conducted systematic house-to-house searches to comb the population for Chinese soldiers. They rounded up able-bodied male civilians and checked them individually for a cap mark on their heads, knapsack and rifle butt marks on their shoulders, and calluses on their palms to identify former soldiers. Any of the marks would be a sure death warrant. Consequently, rickshaw coolies and other laborers were frequently marched away and executed.
Hsu Chuan-ying, who got his PhD in economics from the University of Illinois in 1917 and served as the vice chairman of the Red Swastika Society in Nanjing between 1937 and 1938, had an opportunity to make an inspection around the city three days after the Japanese entered. He saw "dead bodies lying everywhere, and some of the bodies are lying there as they were, shot or killed, some kneeling, some bending, some on their sides, and some just with their legs and arms open." John G. Magee, an American Episcopal missionary, indicated in a letter that the Japanese "not only killed any prisoners they could find but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages. Many of them were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets," and there were "dead bodies all over the city from the south city to Hsiakwan."
Streets were littered with bodies. Sometimes, bodies had to be removed before motor cars could drive through. C. Yates McDaniel, an Associated Press correspondent who stayed in Nanjing to cover its siege and fall, reported his last impression of the city before his departure on December 16, 1937: "My last remembrance of Nanking: Dead Chinese, dead Chinese, dead Chinese."
While the killing was in progress, Japanese soldiers searched in the city for girls and women to violate them. During the early days of Japanese occupation, over a thousand rape cases a night were believed by foreign residents to have occurred, and one American counted thirty rape cases in one night on one piece of American property alone. Girls of tender years, as well as old women, were reported to have been raped throughout the city. Death was the penalty for signs of resistance on the part of a victim. Family members were murdered while attempting to protect the victims from assault. Many women were killed after being raped. Ernest H. Forster, an American Episcopal missionary in Nanjing during the massacre days, described to his family in a letter the situation of rampant raping: "Cases of rape are daily occurrences, and the treatment given some of the women who were carried off by the soldiers is too terrible to tell." Lewis S. C. Smythe, professor of sociology at the University of Nanking, told his wife in a letter that any young women and a few old women were susceptible if caught by Japanese soldiers. Pastors' wives and university instructors' wives were treated the same, with no distinction of person, only that the prettier ones were preferred. One woman was raped by seventeen Japanese soldiers at the Nanking Theological Seminary.
Apart from the killing and raping that occurred, Nanjing was completely culled over by the marauding Japanese soldiers, who entered almost every house and building, and ransacked and looted whatever articles they preferred. It was reported that hardly a single piece of property in the city escaped entry and looting by Japanese troops. All the buildings, regardless of their nationalities of ownership, foreign or Chinese, were entered without discrimination and, to a certain degree, were ransacked and looted. Without exception, every piece of American property was entered repeatedly by Japanese soldiers in search of loot and women. This occurred even to the residences in which the Americans were still living. M. Searle Bates, professor of history at the University of Nanking, who remained in the city throughout the massacre days, told his friends in a letter that practically "every building in the city has been robbed repeatedly by soldiers, including the American, British, German Embassies or Ambassadors' residences, and a high percentage of all foreign property. Vehicles of all sorts, food, clothing, bedding, money, watches, some rugs and pictures, miscellaneous valuables, are the main things sought."
However, the worst physical damage Nanjing suffered was destruction by fire. Widespread burning started on December 19 and continued for weeks until mid-January. Business and commercial sections sustained the worst damage. Japanese soldiers were seen to have commodities emptied from stores and shops and trucked away before they set the stores on fire to cover their looting activities. The southern end of the city, where the business and commercial section was located, was severely ravaged by fire, with blocks after blocks of buildings and houses burned down. Rampant burning occurred throughout the city. Every day and night, fires could be seen in the city. Homes of many residents were burned, while church buildings and YMCA facilities were engulfed in flames. Many of the villages outside the city were burned, as well. W. P. Mills, an American Presbyterian missionary in Nanjing, indicated that he did not "think there has been a day since the Japanese entered the city that there has not been a fire somewhere, and usually more than one." Another American missionary, James H. McCallum, recorded in his diary on December 29, 1937: "Two of our boys' school buildings were set fire to, one a complete loss. Nanking presents a dismal appearance. At the time the Japanese Army entered the city little harm had been done to buildings. Since then the stores have been stripped of their wares and most of them burned. Taiping, Chung Hwa and practically every other main business road in the city is a mass of ruins."
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Excerpted from Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing by MINNIE VAUTRIN Copyright © 2008 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission.
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