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The Rape of Nanking: “A Brief History”

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The Rape of Nanking: “A Brief History” The Rape of Nanking: “A Brief History” Date December, 1937-February, 1938 Location Nanjing, China Key Figures • Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), president of China, 1948-1949, and military commander in chief who rejected negotiations • Iwane Matsui (1878-1948), overall commander of the expeditionary force that captured Nanjing, later executed for war crimes • Yasuhiko Asaka (1887-1981), commander who succeeded Matsui at Nanjing and presided over the atrocities but was not prosecuted • Akira Muto (1892-1948), officer who ordered troops into Nanjing and was in closest contact with the atrocities • Kingoro Hashimoto (1890-1957), officer who ordered the sinking of the USS Panay and other vessels Summary of Event Japan had begun absorbing parts of China in 1895 with the annexation of Taiwan, followed by Manchuria in 1932, Jehol Province in 1933, and Inner Mongolia in 1935. In the latter three, a pattern was established: Local Japanese field commanders initiated military action, after which the Tokyo higher command would debate but finally back up their actions, and then the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek would submit to a local settlement to avoid major confrontation. The Japanese attitude toward the Nationalist government and the Chinese people came to be contemptuous. In July, 1937, a clash occurred outside Beijing and, when the Chinese did not back down, the Japanese army was forced to choose between withdrawal and full military assault. Dismissive of Chinese military capability, they chose the latter course, hoping that a quick defeat would topple Chiang, neutralize China, and free Japanese troops for expected confrontations with the Soviet Union. The key to rapid conquest was Shanghai, the gateway to the Yangtze Valley and central China. Once Shanghai was taken, the passage to Nanjing, the Nationalist capital 170 miles inland, would be easy. Chiang committed the cream of his officer corps and best-trained troops to the battle for Shanghai, but he lost the majority of them in a suicidal stand against naval and air bombardment that began in August and lasted into November. With the Japanese forces bogged down in street fighting, the higher command formulated a strategy that would outflank the Shanghai fortifications and expedite the drive on Nanjing, which many in the Japanese army and government expected to be the final campaign. The overall commander of the expeditionary force was General Iwane Matsui, a slight, tubercular man pulled out of retirement by the emperor himself. He had been a pan-Asian idealist earlier and, although he advocated the drive on Nanjing, there is nothing to indicate that he held any enmity toward the Chinese, whose language he spoke fluently. The flanking forces he drove toward Nanjing, however, were hard to control. Indications of their mood were shown in the bombing, strafing, and looting of cities and villages along the way. Many in the Japanese high command, including Matsui, believed that negotiations for a cease- fire should have been initiated before attacking Nanjing. Chiang had indicated willingness to negotiate, although at the same time he issued orders that Nanjing was to be defended to the last, despite its indefensible position and its lack of military value. In any case, Japanese moderates were overridden and no terms were offered. The assault began on December 9, with a creeping artillery and air barrage that shattered all resistance by December 13. On December 17, with the Nanjing atrocities already beginning, Chiang, who had moved his government inland, issued his historic address rejecting all negotiations and calling for a people’s war to the bitter end. As the attack on Nanjing began, General Matsui was removed from personal supervision of field operations and confined to theater command. Emperor Hirohito’s uncle, General Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, was appointed to the Nanjing operation. His headquarters issued secret orders to kill all captives, referring presumably to the Chinese troops trapped in the besieged city. Under him were the field commanders whose troops perpetrated the Nanjing outrages: Lieutenant General Kesago Nakajima of the Sixteenth Division, General Heisuke Yanagawa of the Nineteenth Corps, Lieutenant General Hisao Tani of the Sixth Division, and Colonel Akira Muto. Muto was in charge of billeting troops, and he moved soldiers from encampments safely outside Nanjing into the city, where the holocaust took place. The Chinese never formally surrendered the city. Their retreat was unplanned and disjointed, and about seventy thousand troops were trapped inside. About three-fourths of the city’s population of one million fled, with Japanese firing on boats in the Yangtze, killing thousands as overloaded junks capsized. Many people were trampled in the confusion. As the Chinese authorities departed, they turned over supplies and effective authority to a self-appointed committee of twenty-seven foreign residents—American, British, German, and Danish missionaries, academics, and businesspeople—who established a safety zone of about two square miles in the northwest part of the city. Working tirelessly to protect a refugee population that reached a total of one-quarter million, they protested to Japanese authorities without result and restrained countless acts of individual brutality by their sheer presence, although they were never formally recognized by the Japanese. It was their diaries, letters, reports, film, and reminiscences that provided the four-thousand-page record of the atrocities in Nanjing for history and for the Allied war crimes trials. Systematic looting began as soon as Japanese troops reached the city. Evidence of command complicity lay in the organized nature of the looting and the fact that army trucks were used. Later, even refugees were stripped of their pitiful possessions. Arson was also systematic; efficient thermite strips were used to burn whole sections of what had been one of the loveliest cities in China. Tricked by notices promising good treatment, disarmed Chinese soldiers, and later virtually all males of military age, were bound and murdered by machine gun or bayonet. Many were staked and used for bayonet or sword practice. Prisoners were roasted over fires, doused with kerosene and set on fire, burned with chemicals, disemboweled, or buried up to the neck before torture. Rapes occurred more and more frequently and increasingly flagrantly, often on the street in broad daylight. Pregnant women, girls as young as nine, and women as old as seventy-six fell victim. Some women were gang-raped, were raped and then murdered, or saw their children murdered. Others were rounded up and kept for months in sexual bondage at camps. The grisly statistical totals for the seven weeks from December, 1937, to February, 1938, when the carnage finally subsided, are difficult to determine; official sources are often biased and the eyewitnesses were unaware of the bigger picture. Many deaths went unrecorded because of the difficulty of keeping wartime records in China. A high estimate of the death toll is 300,000; the true number is almost certainly more than 150,000. There were more than twenty thousand rapes. The overall economic loss was impossible to determine. Japanese army warehouses were filled with looted valuables. Some officers, including Nakajima, retained small fortunes in plunder, but most items were sold to defray army expenses. A study on a limited sample of individuals estimated that the average farmer lost the equivalent of 278 days of labor and the average city dweller lost 681 days. Nanjing would take more than a year to begin its economic revival. On December 12, as Nanjing was falling, Japanese forces under Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto bombed and sank an American gunboat, the USS Panay, twenty-five miles upriver from Nanjing. Lifeboats were strafed and the craft was machine-gunned from a nearby Japanese gunboat. Two American tankers, two British gunboats, and two British-flag steamers were also bombed. Four American crew members were killed and sixty were wounded; two British crew members and countless refugees were also killed. Hashimoto, an ultranationalist zealot, had done this on his own initiative in defiance of standing policy to avoid provoking the West. In contrast to the Nanjing outrages, the Japanese government apologized officially and privately and offered indemnities, which were accepted by the United States and Great Britain with little protest. Significance The attitude of the Japanese army and government at first was to ignore the events at Nanjing, treating them as a matter for the army and accepting the army’s bland fictions minimizing the horror. Later, however, Nanjing veterans on leave boasted openly of their depredations. In December, newspapers had even reported a grotesque sort of contest between two lieutenants racing to see who could cut down the most Chinese with their swords, referring to the race as “fun.” The authorities were forced to suppress virtually all mention of atrocities. Even decades later, Japanese school texts avoided the subject, and prominent officials have asserted that it never happened. The Imperial Japanese Army almost never punished a soldier for excesses (punishment was reserved for lack of aggressiveness), so punishment had to wait for the war’s end. Matsui, who had scolded his subordinates for their complicity (they laughed at him), retired after Nanjing, built a temple, and held services for the dead of Nanjing. Even though he was less guilty than most, he offered no defense and so was the only prominent officer executed specifically for the Nanjing atrocities at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal. Muto was executed for war crimes in the Philippines, Hashimoto was given a life sentence, and Prince Asaka, protected by his royal connections, escaped prosecution. Nanjing had a crucial effect on the course of the war. Japan might have won the war either with an acceptable offer of terms or with an immediate drive past Nanjing into the interior. Instead, the brutal tactics at Nanjing clearly failed to shock the Nationalists into negotiating and allowed them time to reorganize to carry on the war.
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