Pictured: Chinese bodies are strewn about as Imperialists are looting Nanking. Click here for more (sometimes NSFL) photographs.

Once again I must say that it is, sadly, timely that I should talk about this, and not merely because today in the People’s Republic of China it is National Memorial Day for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre.

Quoting Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, page 65:

For the next few months Nanking would endure dozens of [Imperial] air raids, forcing residents to hide in basements, trenches, and dugouts in the ground. [Imperial] pilots bombed the capital indiscriminately, hitting schools, hospitals, power plants, and government buildings and prompting thousands of people both rich and poor to flee the city.

Page 72:

On December 9, [Imperial] airplanes began dropping leaflets near Nanking written by Matsui Iwane, one of the three [Imperial] generals. The best way to “protect innocent civilians and cultural relics in the city,” the message read, was to capitulate. The message promised that the [Imperialists] would be “harsh and relentless to those who resist” but “kind and generous to noncombatants and to Chinese troops who entertain no enmity to Japan.” It demanded that the city surrender within twenty‐four hours, by noon the next day, “otherwise all the horrors of war will be let loose.”

Page 73:

On December 10, the [Imperialists] waited for the city to surrender. At midday two [Imperial] staff officers stood outside the Mountain Gate in the eastern wall to see whether the Chinese government would send out a delegation with the flag of truce. When none arrived, the [Imperial] high command ordered a furious bombardment of the city.

The next few days saw intense fighting between the Chinese and [Imperial] troops around Nanking. The [Imperialists] dropped bombs on the city and pounded the walls with heavy artillery fire.

Pictured: ‘Chiba corps, who crosses the river in front of the Nanking castle wall, is going to enter the castle from the Gate of China.’ (Source.)

Page 42:

When the [Imperialists] smashed through the walls in the early predawn hours of December 13, they entered a city in which they were vastly outnumbered. Historians later estimated that more than half a million civilians and ninety thousand Chinese troops were trapped in Nanking, compared to the fifty thousand [Imperialists] who assaulted the city.

General Nakajima knew that killing tens of thousands of Chinese captives was a formidable task: “To deal with crowds of a thousand, five thousand, or ten thousand, it is tremendously difficult even just to disarm them. […] It would be disastrous if they were to make any trouble.”

KILLING THE PRISONERS OF WAR

Because of their limited manpower, the [Imperialists] relied heavily on deception. The strategy for mass butchery involved several steps: promising the Chinese fair treatment in return for an end to resistance, coaxing them into surrendering themselves to their [Imperial] conquerors, dividing them into groups of one to two hundred men, and then luring them to different areas near Nanking to be killed. Nakajima hoped that faced with the impossibility of further resistance, most of the captives would lose heart and comply with whatever directions the [Imperialists] gave them.

All this was easier to achieve than the [Imperialists] had anticipated. Resistance was sporadic; indeed, it was practically nonexistent. Having thrown away their arms when attempting to flee the city as the [Imperialists] closed in, many Chinese soldiers simply turned themselves in, hoping for better treatment. Once the men surrendered and permitted their hands to be bound, the rest was easy.

Page 44:

A welter of emotions filled Azuma. He felt sorry for the Chinese soldiers, thirsty and frightened men who constantly asked for water and reassurance that they would not be killed. But at the same time their cowardice disgusted him. Azuma suddenly felt ashamed for ever having been secretly afraid of the Chinese in previous battles, and his automatic impulse was to dehumanize the prisoners by comparing them to insects and animals.

They all walked in droves, like ants crawling on the ground.
They looked like a bunch of homeless people, with ignorant expressions on their faces.
A herd of ignorant sheep, with no rule or order, marched on in the darkness, whispering to each other.
They hardly looked like the enemy who only yesterday was shooting at and troubling us. It was impossible to believe that they were the enemy soldiers.
It felt quite foolish to think we had been fighting to the death against these ignorant slaves. And some of them were even twelve‐ or thirteen‐year‐old boys.

[…]

The next morning Azuma and his comrades received an order to patrol another area; they later learned that while they were on patrol the Chinese prisoners had been assigned to companies in groups of two to three hundred, then killed.

Probably the single largest mass execution of prisoners of war during the Rape of Nanking took place near Mufu Mountain. The mountain lay directly north of Nanking, between the city and the south bank of the Yangtze River; an estimated fifty‐seven thousand civilians and former soldiers were executed.

Pages 45–7:

According to Kurihara Riichi, a former [Imperial] army corporal who kept diaries and notes of the event, the [Imperialists] disarmed thousands of prisoners, stripped them of everything but their clothes and blankets, and escorted them to a row of straw‐roofed temporary buildings. […] Sometime between 4:00 and 6:00 P.M., the [Imperialists] divided the prisoners into four columns and marched them to the west, skirting the hills and stopping at the riverbank.

“After three or four hours waiting and not knowing what was going on, the prisoners could not see any preparations for crossing the river,” the corporal wrote. “It was then growing dark. They did not know […] that [Imperial] soldiers already encircled them in a crescent formation along the river and they were in the sights of many machine guns.”

By the time the executions began, it was too late for the Chinese to escape. “Suddenly all kinds of guns fired at once,” Kurihara Riichi wrote. “The sounds of these firearms mingled with desperate yelling and screams.” For an hour the Chinese struggled and thrashed about desperately, until there were few sounds still coming from the group. From evening until dawn the [Imperialists] bayoneted the bodies, one by one.

Body disposal posed a mammoth problem for the [Imperialists]. Only a fraction of the total number of men who perished in and around Nanking were slaughtered at Mufu Mountain, yet the cleanup there took days. Burial was one method of disposal, but General Nakajima complained in his diary that it was hard to locate ditches large enough to bury heaps of seven to eight thousand corpses.

Cremation was another, but the [Imperialists] often lacked sufficient fuel to do a proper job. After the Mufu Mountain massacre, for instance, the [Imperialists] poured large drums of gasoline on the bodies to burn them, but the drums ran out before fires could reduce the remains to ashes. “The result was a mountain of charred corpses,” [an Imperial] corporal wrote.

Many bodies were simply dumped into the Yangtze River.

THE MURDER OF CIVILIANS

After the soldiers surrendered en masse, there was virtually no one left to protect the citizens of the city. Knowing this, the [Imperialists] poured into Nanking on December 13, 1937, occupying government buildings, banks, and warehouses, shooting people randomly in the streets, many of them in the back as they ran away. Using machine guns, revolvers, and rifles, the [Imperialists] fired at the crowds of wounded soldiers, elderly women, and children who gathered in the North Chungshan and Central roads and nearby alleys.

They also killed Chinese civilians in every section of the city: tiny lanes, major boulevards, mud dugouts, government buildings, city squares. As victims toppled to the ground, moaning and screaming, the streets, alleys, and ditches of the fallen capital ran rivers of blood, much of it coming from people barely alive, with no strength left to run away.

The [Imperialists] systematically killed the city dwellers as they conducted house‐to‐house searches for Chinese soldiers in Nanking. But they also massacred the Chinese in the nearby suburbs and countryside. Corpses piled up outside the city walls, along the river (which had literally turned red with blood), by ponds and lakes, and on hills and mountains. In villages near Nanking, the [Imperialists] shot down any young man who passed, under the presumption that he was likely to be a former Chinese soldier.

But they also murdered people who could not possibly be Chinese soldiers—elderly men and women, for instance—if they hesitated or even if they failed to understand orders, delivered in the Japanese language, to move this way or that.

During the last ten days of December, [Imperial] motorcycle brigades patrolled Nanking while [Imperial] soldiers shouldering loaded rifles guarded the entrances to all the streets, avenues, and alleys. Troops went from door to door, demanding that the doors be opened to welcome the victorious armies. The moment the shopkeepers complied, the [Imperialists] opened fire on them. The imperial army massacred thousands of people in this manner and then systematically looted the stores and burned whatever they had no use for.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

It is important to understand the architects’ motives. The destruction of Nanjing was not a well intentioned attempt gone awry to weed out Chinese terrorists, but the inevitable consequence of the Empire of Japan’s long‐term colonial project. For example:

Only fourteen month[s] after the Nanjing massacre in December 1937 to January 1938, the Japan Tourist Bureau opened a representational office in March 1939 to promote the city as a tourist destination and published a short, inexpensive travel guide touting Nanjing’s attractions. A convenient bus tour of the city’s sights was operating eight attractions, presenting beside temples and mausoleums, two gates where [Imperial] troops had poured into the city identified by wooden markers placed on top of the wall.⁴

Of course, ordinary troops did not necessarily have such goals in mind: what usually motivated them was payment, mindless patriotism, mind‐numbing propaganda, or even enjoyment. The planners’ colonial goals, in contrast, were more sophisticated.

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Click here for other events that happened today (December 13).

1919: Hans‐Joachim Marseille, Axis pilot, came into existence.
1938: The Neuengamme concentration camp opened in the Bergedorf district of Hamburg, and the Third Reich enacted a law to exclude Jewish doctors.
1939: The Kriegsmarine’s Deutschland‐class cruiser (pocket battleship) Admiral Graf Spee engaged with three Royal Navy cruisers: HMS Ajax, HMNZS Achilles and HMS Exeter.
1943: The Axis forces in Greece committed the Massacre of Kalavryta.
1945: Elisabeth Volkenrath, Irmgard Ilse Ida Grese, and Josef Kramer, Axis concentration camp personnel, all suffocated.