The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) was the mass rape and murder, between December 1937 and March 1938, of Chinese civilians, noncombatants, and prisoners of war by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China. It took place immediately after the Battle of Nanjing and retreat of the National Revolutionary Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.Chang, Iris. 1997. The Rape of Nanking. p. 6.
After the outbreak of the war in July 1937, the Japanese had pushed quickly through China after capturing Shanghai in November. As the Japanese marched on Nanjing, they committed violent atrocities in a terror campaign, including killing contests and massacres of entire villages.
By early December, the Japanese Central China Area Army under the command of General Iwane Matsui reached the outskirts of the city. The Japanese had also planned to use mustard gas and incendiary bombs to annihilate the capital and its population should the fighting have grown too intense.
Prince Yasuhiko Asaka was installed as temporary commander in the campaign, and he issued an order to "kill all captives" before the city's capture. Matsui and Asaka took no action to stop the massacre after it began.
The massacre began on December 13 after Japanese troops entered the city after days of intense fighting and continued to rampage through it unchecked. Japanese soldiers murdered civilians, including children, women, and the elderly. Japanese units also summarily executed thousands of captured Chinese soldiers in violation of the laws of war, as well as male civilians falsely accused of being soldiers. They raped women and girls, their ages ranging from infants to the elderly, and destroyed one third of the city with arson. Rape victims were often murdered afterward. In addition to civilians, Japanese units indiscriminately murdered tens of thousands of Chinese POWs and men who looked of military age.
Many scholars support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which estimated that more than 200,000 people were killed, while newer estimates adhere to a death toll between 100,000 and 200,000. Other estimates of the death toll vary from a low of 40,000 (confined just to the city itself) to a high of over 340,000 (encompassing the entire Shanghai-Nanjing region), and estimates of rapes range from 4,000 to over 80,000 (with estimates around 20,000 being most common). Other crimes included torture, looting, and arson. The massacre is considered one of the worst wartime atrocities in history.
Traditional historiography dates the massacre as unfolding over a period of six weeks beginning on December 13, 1937, following the city's capture, and as being spatially confined to within Nanjing and its immediate vicinity. However, the Nanjing Massacre was far from an isolated case, and fit into a pattern of Japanese atrocities along the Lower Yangtze River, with Japanese forces routinely committing massacres since the Battle of Shanghai. Furthermore, Japanese atrocities in the Nanjing area did not end in January 1938, but instead persisted in the region until late March 1938.
An International Committee of Westerners, including Nazi German citizen John Rabe, created the Nanking Safety Zone in an attempt to protect civilians. The Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives.
After the war, Matsui and several other commanders at Nanjing were found guilty of war crimes and executed. Some other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried only because by the time of the tribunals they had either already been killed or committed ritual suicide. Asaka was granted immunity as a member of the imperial family and never tried. The massacre remains a contentious topic in Sino-Japanese relations, as Japanese nationalists and historical revisionists, including top government officials, have either denied or minimized the massacre.
Military situation
The Second Sino-Japanese War commenced on July 7, 1937, following the Marco Polo Bridge incident, and rapidly escalated into a full-scale war in northern China between the Chinese and Japanese armies.Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), 145–147 The National Revolutionary Army, however, wanted to avoid a decisive conflict in the northern region and instead opened a second front by launching offensives against Japanese forces in Shanghai. In response, Japan deployed an army led by General Iwane Matsui, to fight the Chinese forces in Shanghai.Hattori Satoshi and Edward J. Drea, "Japanese operations from July to December 1937," in The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, eds. Mark Peattie et al. (Stanford University Press, 2011), 169, 171–172, 175–177.
In August 1937, the Japanese army invaded Shanghai, where they met strong resistance and suffered heavy casualties. The battle was bloody as both sides faced attrition in urban hand-to-hand combat.1937 Japanese Field Commander's Map of the Battle of Shanghai, China geographicus.com Retrieved April 22, 2020 Although the Japanese forces succeeded in forcing the Chinese forces into retreat, the General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo initially decided not to expand the war because they wanted the war to end. However, there was a significant disagreement between the Japanese government and its army in China.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 43, 49–50 Matsui had expressed his intention to advance on Nanjing even before departing for Shanghai. He firmly believed that capturing Nanjing, the Chinese capital, would lead to the collapse of the entire Nationalist Government of China, thereby securing a swift and decisive victory for Japan. The General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo eventually relented to the demands of the Imperial Japanese Army in China by approving the operation to attack and capture Nanjing.
Strategy for the defense of Nanjing In a press release to foreign reporters, Tang Shengzhi announced the city would not surrender and would fight to the death. Tang gathered a garrison force of some 81,500 soldiers, many of whom were untrained conscripts, or troops exhausted from the Battle of Shanghai. The Chinese government left for relocation on December 1, and the president left on December 7, leaving the administration of Nanjing to an International Committee led by John Rabe, a German national and Nazi Party member.
In an attempt to secure permission for this ceasefire from Chiang Kai-shek, Rabe, who was living in Nanjing and had been acting as the Chairman of the Nanking International Safety Zone Committee, boarded the on December 9.
On December 11, Rabe found that Chinese soldiers were still residing in areas of the Safety Zone, meaning that it became an intended target for Japanese attacks despite the majority being innocent civilians. Rabe commented on how efforts to remove these Chinese troops failed and Japanese soldiers began to lob grenades into the refugee zone.
March to Nanjing and atrocities
Although the massacre is generally described as having occurred over a six-week period after the fall of Nanjing, the crimes committed by the Japanese army were not limited to that period. Numerous atrocities were committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing, including rape, torture, arson, and murder. Many were committed as part of a systemic terror campaign meant to undermine the will to resist amongst the Chinese population.
Japanese war crimes in the countryside
Japanese commanders ordered their troops to treat all Chinese outside Shanghai as belligerents, to kill them, and to destroy their homes. Advancing Japanese forces transformed the 170 miles between Shanghai and Nanjing into "a nightmarish zone of death and destruction". Japanese aircraft frequently strafed unarmed farmers and refugees "for fun". Civilians were subjected to extreme violence and brutality in a foreshadowing of the upcoming massacre.
In one example on November 23, the Nanqiantou hamlet near Wuxi was set on fire, with many of its inhabitants locked within the burning houses. Two women, one a 17-year-old girl and the other pregnant, were raped repeatedly until they could not walk. Afterwards, the soldiers rammed a broom into the teenager's vagina and stabbed her with a bayonet, then "cut open the belly of the pregnant woman and gouged out the fetus". A crying two-year-old boy was wrestled from his mother's arms and thrown into the flames, while the hysterically sobbing mother was bayoneted and thrown into a creek. The remaining thirty villagers were bayoneted, disemboweled, and also thrown into the creek.
In another case on November 29, the Japanese 3rd Battalion from the 16th Division rounded up eighty civilians in the village of Changzhou. The Japanese then massacred the villagers with heavy machine guns. According to army doctor Hosaka Akira, "The people were all gathered in one place. They were all praying, crying, and begging for help. I just couldn't bear watching such a pitiful spectacle. Soon the heavy machine guns opened fire and the sight of those people screaming and falling to the ground is one I could not face even if I had had the heart of a monster."
According to Kurosu Tadanobu of the 13th Division: "We'd take all the men behind the houses and kill them with bayonets and knives. Then we'd lock up the women and children in a single house and rape them at night... Then, before we left the next morning, we'd kill all the women and children, and to top it off, we'd set fire to the houses, so that even if anyone came back, they wouldn't have a place to live."Chinese civilians often committed suicide, such as two girls who deliberately drowned themselves near Pinghu, an event witnessed by Japanese First Lieutenant Nishizawa Benkichi.
Japanese war crimes in urban areas As early as November, Japanese forces had been committing atrocities against urban regions and cities. Jiading was shelled by Japanese forces, then 8,000 of its civilian residents murdered. Half of Taicang was razed to the ground, and then half the salt and grain stores looted.
On December 8, the Japanese Shanghai Expeditionary Army captured the city of Zhenjiang between Shanghai and Nanjing. They then set Zhenjiang on fire and executed anyone attempting to douse the flames. Zhenjiang burned for ten days. The Japanese also burned wounded Chinese soldiers alive and raped women and children. According to a city resident who survived the blaze, the city was burned as a deliberate attempt to destroy civilian property.
According to one Japanese journalist embedded with Imperial forces at the time:Cummins, Joseph. 2009. The World's Bloodiest History. p. 149.The reason that the [10th Army] is advancing to Nanjing quite rapidly is due to the tacit consent among the officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wish.In his novel Ikiteiru Heitai ('Living Soldiers'), Tatsuzō Ishikawa vividly describes how the 16th Division of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force committed atrocities on the march between Shanghai and Nanjing. The novel itself was based on interviews that Ishikawa conducted with troops in Nanjing in January 1938.Honda, Katsuichi, and Frank Gibney. "The Nanjing massacre: a Japanese journalist confronts Japan's national shame." pp. 39–41.
Massacre contest