Nanking

There are some stories that historians approach with a little more hesitation, not because the facts are unclear, but because they are so painfully clear. The Second Battle of Nanking and the massacre that followed sit in that uncomfortable space where human behavior sinks so low that even the Hitchhikers Guide would probably close itself and ask for a long vacation. Yet history does not give us that option. The events that unfolded in and around Nanking in December of 1937 were the result of choices made on battlefields, in political offices, and in the minds of men who believed that their cause lifted them above ordinary restraint. Those choices produced one of the worst episodes of violence in modern history. The story remains difficult, but difficulty is not an excuse for silence.

People often hear the shorthand first. Nanking Massacre. Rape of Nanking. Six weeks of terror. Those phrases sit in textbooks like labels on jars, but jars can be misleading. The boundaries of this tragedy were not six neat weeks and not limited to the old walled city. Modern research shows that atrocities began before the city fell and continued into March of 1938. The violence spread across six neighboring counties and left a mark so deep that national memories still revolve around it. The sheer scale of the suffering has produced decades of argument, denial, and painful efforts to piece together the truth. What happened in Nanking was not an accident of war or a moment of battlefield chaos. It was the predictable result of a chain of decisions that dismantled the rules of armed conflict and encouraged soldiers to behave as if their enemies were something less than human.

The path toward the capital began months earlier in Shanghai. In August 1937 Japanese and Chinese forces clashed in a brutal urban battle that ground on for three months. The Japanese expected a quick triumph and instead found themselves in a house to house struggle that cost thousands of casualties. It shocked the officers who believed that Chinese resistance would crumble under modern firepower. When Shanghai finally fell, the soldiers who marched west carried exhaustion and anger. The mindset that shaped the advance was already poisoned with the belief that Chinese troops had fought dishonorably by refusing to break. By late autumn General Iwane Matsui, the commander of the Central China Area Army, decided that the only way to crush Chinese resistance was to seize the capital. He did not have formal approval for the pursuit. He simply acted on the assumption that a decisive blow would end the war. History rarely rewards such confidence.

The march from Shanghai to Nanking stretched roughly one hundred and seventy miles. Much of the journey was a rolling trail of destruction. Japanese forces burned towns, killed civilians, and treated the countryside as an enemy to be subdued rather than a land to be occupied. Violence occurred not only in moments of battle, but in moments of boredom, opportunity, and contempt. Newspapers in Japan celebrated a grotesque competition between two lieutenants who attempted to see who could kill one hundred people with a sword first. The contest was reported as if it were an athletic achievement. Even if the exact numbers were inflated, the fact that such a story made print speaks volumes about the atmosphere inside the Japanese military. Soldiers who read those articles received a clear message about what kind of killing would be celebrated.

Inside Nanking, Chinese leadership faced a choice that combined political calculation with military hope. Chiang Kai shek understood that the city could not be held indefinitely, but he also believed that abandoning the capital without a fight would shatter morale across the country. He appointed General Tang Shengzhi to command the defense and announced that the city would be held at all costs. At the same time, the government quietly retreated to Chongqing. Soldiers, civilians, and local officials remained behind, trying to prepare a broken defense for a battle they could not win.

By early December the Japanese army reached the Fukuo Line, the last major defensive line outside the city. General Matsui issued a summons to surrender on December 9. The Chinese government ignored it. The Japanese prepared for the final assault. The collapse came with alarming speed. On December 12 General Tang ordered a retreat, but he did not coordinate the withdrawal or notify all his units. Thousands of soldiers fled toward the gates and the river in a panic. Civilians were swept into the tide. At the Yijiang Gate and at the Xiaguan wharves, people were crushed, trampled, or shot as they tried to board boats. Some drowned in the Yangtze while attempting to escape. The Chinese military dissolved into a mass of terrified men who threw off their uniforms to blend into the population. That act, driven by desperation, gave Japanese soldiers the justification they claimed to need for what followed.

When Japanese forces entered Nanking on December 13, they found a city already stripped of order. Commanders had been freed from international legal constraints months earlier when the Emperor removed restrictions on the treatment of Chinese prisoners. Prince Yasuhiko Asaka arrived to assume temporary command. Testimony after the war suggests that an order, whether spoken plainly or implied clearly enough, circulated among officers. The order instructed that captives were to be killed. Prisoners slowed operations. Prisoners required food and guards. Prisoners were also Chinese, and many Japanese soldiers had been taught that Chinese lives carried little weight. In such an environment, the command to eliminate captives did not require detailed explanation.

The scale of the executions defies imagination. Japanese units conducted systematic mopping up operations throughout the city and its outskirts. Men suspected of being soldiers were seized from alleys, houses, and even the refugee filled Safety Zone. Hair length, callused hands, a frightened look, or the accusation of a patrol was enough to mark a man for death. Some were marched to the riverbank, forced to kneel, and machine gunned in long rows. At Mufushan between seventeen and twenty thousand POWs and civilians were killed in one operation. At Straw String Gorge thousands more met the same fate. The victims were buried in mass graves or pushed into the water. The Japanese army reported these actions as security measures. The reality was extermination.

Violence against civilians spread across the city. Rape occurred openly in the streets and inside homes. Conservative estimates place the number of victims at twenty thousand. Many scholars believe that the number may have exceeded eighty thousand. Women of every age were taken. Families often witnessed the assaults. In some cases soldiers forced relatives to commit acts of incest under threat of death. After the assaults, victims were commonly murdered. Some were mutilated. Diaries from the time record scenes that no novelist would dare to invent. One Japanese soldier wrote in his journal that he had grown used to the idea that a day without killing felt incomplete. Another described his participation in executions without a trace of moral hesitation. It is difficult to read such entries without wondering what combination of indoctrination, fear, and personal choice allowed a human being to sink into that state.

Looting spread across Nanking like a fever. Houses were stripped of furniture, jewelry, food, and tools. Soldiers competed for valuables. Fires consumed entire neighborhoods. Roughly one third of the city burned during the weeks after the fall. General Matsui toured the ruins in late December and was reportedly moved to tears. He scolded his officers. They laughed. Commands delivered without consequences rarely alter the behavior of men who believe themselves victorious.

One place inside the city managed to hold a fragile line against the worst of the violence. The International Safety Zone was created by a group of foreigners who refused to abandon their posts. The committee included missionaries, professors, and businessmen. Among them was John Rabe, a German national and member of the Nazi Party. His political affiliation made him an unlikely protector, but his party badge allowed him to challenge Japanese soldiers who respected the German alliance. Rabe and his colleagues mapped out an area of roughly four square kilometers and filled it with two hundred and fifty thousand refugees. The Japanese army did not officially recognize the zone, but they rarely challenged it directly. They preferred to enter the zone under the pretext of searching for disguised soldiers.

Inside Ginling College, Minnie Vautrin sheltered thousands of women. Her diary entries describe sleepless nights spent answering the cries of terrified refugees. She walked the grounds each day, trying to give the appearance of confidence to women who had none left. She wrote of turning away soldiers at the gate and pleading with officers to spare those inside. Her efforts did not save everyone, but they saved many. Tsen Shui fang, a Chinese worker in the zone, recorded the anguish of women who had lost families and still feared being dragged away. John Magee used a hidden camera to capture scenes of mutilation and suffering. His film became part of the evidence used during war crimes trials. The Safety Zone did not stop the massacre, but it prevented a complete annihilation of the civilian population.

As the months passed and the Japanese command worked to normalize the occupation, the killings tapered. The memory did not. The city endured the kind of suffering that leaves a stain across generations. In the years that followed, the question of how many people died became a bitter argument among historians and governments. The official Chinese position places the number above three hundred thousand, drawing on postwar tribunal findings and burial records. Many scholars argue that the most defensible range lies between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand, including the surrounding counties and the full three month duration. Conservative estimates place the number near forty thousand, a figure criticized for relying on early burial data that did not account for mass graves and bodies destroyed by fire or water. A small group of denialists claims that the massacre was exaggerated or fabricated. Their arguments collapse under the weight of testimony, diaries, photographs, film, and physical evidence.

For years after the war the story received uneven attention inside China. Maoist ideology prioritized class struggle, not national victimhood. Only in the nineteen eighties did Nanking become a focal point of national memory, partly in response to Japanese textbook revisions that softened the portrayal of wartime atrocities. Iris Chang’s book brought the story to Western audiences in the nineteen nineties, creating widespread awareness and renewed debate. Her work sparked both praise and criticism, but it succeeded in forcing many people outside Asia to confront a history they had never learned.

Justice, when it came, was incomplete. At the Tokyo Trials General Matsui and several other leaders faced prosecution. Matsui was executed for failing to control his troops. Foreign Minister Koki Hirota was also executed, a decision that remains controversial. Members of the imperial family, including Prince Asaka, were granted immunity by General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur believed that stability in postwar Japan required the preservation of the imperial institution. As a result, key figures who oversaw the capture of Nanking were never charged. Asaka was questioned. He never faced trial. Survivors and their families viewed the decisions with a mix of resignation and anger.

In the decades that followed, the legacy of Nanking became entangled with Japanese domestic politics. The enshrinement of Class A war criminals at Yasukuni Shrine in 1978 ignited diplomatic conflict with China and South Korea. Japanese politicians who visited the shrine faced criticism for honoring men associated with atrocities. Nationalist groups continued to deny the scale of the massacre or the intent behind the violence. Scholars, journalists, and survivors responded with evidence. The argument continues today. The past remains close for those who lost family, identity, or childhood to the winter of 1937.

Some survivors expressed a view that seldom fits neatly into political narratives. They did not see the Chinese Communist Party as ideological liberators. They viewed the CCP as a force capable of defending China from foreign invasion. Their memories of wartime suffering did not align with later propaganda that framed the era purely through class struggle. Their personal nationalism was shaped by what they experienced, not by political theory. This tension reminds us that history is messy, personal, and often at odds with official memory.

Nanking continues to shape discussions about international law, command responsibility, and the ethics of war. The massacre stands as one of the clearest examples of what happens when military leaders reject the laws of armed conflict. It also reveals how easily ordinary men can commit extraordinary cruelty when ideology and authority remove moral guardrails. The event is a reminder that atrocities do not arise spontaneously. They require structure, permission, and intent. They unfold when systems break and when people choose silence over resistance.

The people who lived and died in Nanking deserve more than statistics. They deserve recognition as individuals whose lives were cut short or altered by forces far beyond their control. They deserve honesty. They deserve the careful work of historians who resist the temptation to simplify or sanitize. They deserve to be remembered without slogans or convenient lessons. Their story is a warning, but also a testament to the human instinct to survive even in the darkest conditions.

As a historian, one walks through this chapter of the past like someone moving through a building that has survived a fire. The walls still stand, but the air carries the smell of what has been lost. There is no triumph here, no comfort, no tidy conclusion. There is only the truth, and the responsibility to tell it. The massacre at Nanking remains one of the most painful reminders of how quickly civilization can fracture, and how long it takes for memory to mend.

If there is any hope to be found, it rests in the fact that nations still wrestle with this history instead of burying it. The arguments, the archives, the public debates, and the survivor testimonies all show that the world has not forgotten. Forgetting would be easier. Remembering is harder. Yet remembering is the closest thing to justice that many victims will ever receive.

This is not a cheerful ending. It is simply the ending that history provides. It is enough.