Today's selection -- from Chiang
Kai-Shek by Jonathan Fenby. The so-called
"Rape of Nanking" witnessed atrocities that were among the most
horrifying in the history of war. It was part of the Second Sino-Japanese War,
which began in 1937 when Imperial Japan invaded China under Chiang Kai-Shek.
Casualties in that war were estimated at between 20 and 35 million people.
Nanking was the capital of the Republic of China and was upriver from Shanghai,
China's wealthiest and most important commercial city, which had already fallen
to the Japanese:
"The Rape of Nanking was unique as an urban atrocity not
only for the number of people who died but also for the way the Japanese went
about their killing, the wanton individual cruelty, the reduction of the city's
inhabitants to the status of subhumans who could be murdered, tortured, and
raped at will in an outburst of the basest instincts let loose in six weeks of
terror and death. The death toll was put at 300,000 -- some
accounts set it even higher, though one source for the former figure, Harold
Timperley of the Manchester Guardian, used it to refer to
deaths in the Yangtze Valley as a whole.
The corpses of massacred victims on the shore of the Qinhuai River with a Japanese soldier standing nearby.
"On the first day, a Japanese division killed more than 24,000
prisoners of war and fleeing soldiers. On the wharves by the river, coolies
threw 20,000 bodies into the Yangtze before being killed themselves. Behind its
white flags and Red Cross symbols, the foreign Safety Zone proved weak
protection: indeed, by concentrating refugees there, it inadvertently provided
a big target for the killers; the 'good Nazi of Nanking', the German John Rabe
could only roam the streets trying to rescue individuals in his path.
"There were no imperial orders, as such, for the Rape of Nanking,
and General Matsui gave senior officers a scathing rebuke after he entered the
city for the victory parade on 17 December. But the general left for
Shanghai two days later and, though he insisted there that misconduct must be
severely punished, his words had no discernible effect. Any Chinese was liable
to be a target. People were roped together and machine-gunned, doused with
kerosene and set on fire. Thousands were buried alive -- or put in holes
up to their necks and then savaged by army dogs. Others were frozen to death
after being thrown into icy ponds. Japanese soldiers used Chinese for bayonet
practice. Civilians were nailed to boards and run over by vehicles, Mutilation,
disembowelling and eye gouging took place before executions. People were
sprayed with acid, or hung up by their tongues. Medical experiments were
conducted in a former hospital where Chinese, known as 'logs', were injected
with germs and poisons. Women, young and old, pregnant and ill, were raped in
enormous numbers, and then killed, some with sticks rammed into their ******s.
Foetuses were ripped from the bodies of expectant mothers. Other women were
taken to so-called 'comfort houses' set up for the soldiers, who called the
inmates 'public toilets'.
"Japanese newspapers recorded a competition between two lieutenants
to behead 100 Chinese with their swords. When they both passed the mark,
it was not clear who had got there first, so the contest was extended
to 150. One of the lieutenants described the competition as 'fun',
though Japanese newspapers noted that he had damaged his blade on the helmet of
a Chinese he cut in half. Revelling in their savagery, Japanese soldiers took
photographs of the massacres and sent them to Shanghai to be developed; Chinese
staff in the photographic shops passed copies to Rhodes Farmer who forwarded
them to Look magazine in America in evidence of the horror.
"As the Nationalist capital, Nanking was obviously an
important target where the Japanese wanted to achieve maximum humiliation of
their adversary. But the sustained mass bestiality can better be explained --
if it can be rationally explained at all -- by the tensions that had built up
in the army since the Shanghai battle erupted, by the knowledge of the Japanese
troops that they were heavily outnumbered by the Chinese in the city, by the
callousness bred in the previous four months -- and, above all, by the
dehumanisation of the Chinese which had become part of the psyche of the
Imperial Army. The invaders saw the people around them as lower than animals, targets
for a bloodlust which many, if not all, their commanders felt could only spur
their men on to fight better. In his diary, one soldier described the
Chinese as 'ants crawling on the ground ... a herd of ignorant sheep'. Another
recorded that while raping a woman, his colleagues might consider her as human,
but, when they killed her, 'we just thought of her as something like a pig'.
"It seems certain that the Emperor in Tokyo knew at least the
outline of what was going on. His uncle was in command, and
Japanese newspapers reported the execution contests among officers as if they
were sporting events. Hirohito still hoped that China could be defeated with
one big blow, which Nanking might provide."
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Publishers
Copyright 2003 by Jonathan Fenby
Pages: 307-309
