Category: war
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The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was a mass murder, and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city of Nanjing (Nanking), the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this period hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Widespread rape and looting also occurred. Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. Several of the key perpetrators of the atrocities, at the time labelled as war crimes, were later tried and found guilty at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, and were subsequently executed. Another key perpetrator, Prince Asaka, a member of the Imperial Family, escaped prosecution by having earlier been granted immunity by the Allies.
Eyewitness accounts of Westerners and Chinese present at Nanking in the weeks after the fall of the city state that over the course of six weeks following the fall of Nanking, Japanese troops engaged in rape, murder, theft, arson, and other war crimes. Some of these accounts came from foreigners who opted to stay behind in order to protect Chinese civilians from harm, including the diaries of John Rabe and American Minnie Vautrin. Other accounts include first-person testimonies of the Nanking Massacre survivors, eyewitness reports of journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel. American missionary John Magee stayed behind to provide a 16 mm film documentary and first-hand photographs of the Nanking Massacre.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women were raped, including infants and the elderly. A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped. The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation or by stabbing a bayonet, long stick of bamboo, or other objects into the vagina. Young children were not exempt from these atrocities, and were cut open to allow Japanese soldiers to rape them.
On 19 December 1937, Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary:
I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet … People are hysterical … Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases.
Pregnant women were a target of murder, as they would often be bayoneted in the stomach, sometimes after rape. Tang Junshan, survivor and witness to one of the Japanese armyâs systematic mass killings, testified:
The seventh and last person in the first row was a pregnant woman. The soldier thought he might as well rape her before killing her, so he pulled her out of the group to a spot about ten meters away. As he was trying to rape her, the woman resisted fiercely … The soldier abruptly stabbed her in the belly with a bayonet. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, with its umbilical cord clearly visible, and tossed it aside. (read more)
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This is something I have pursued for more than twenty-five years. The kind of story that raises the hackles on the back of your neck. There’s an immediate urge to dismiss it as preposterous, impossible.
Because it is preposterous and impossible. Yet the records are there. A document that tells what happened in deliberately cold and official terms. A field in North Africa during the war. An event that took place that was so impossible the commanding officer at the airfield demanded, and got, the signatures of hundreds of witnesses who saw the whole impossible incident. This is what happened. As it happened. As it was seen and sworn to by hundreds of ground crewmen and pilots, enlisted men and officers.
A flight of P-38s had gone out on patrol. They left to cross the Mediterranean. They mixed it up with German fighters and there was a brief scrap. When the P-38s reformed one airplane was missing. No one could recall, in the furious melee, watching him go down. They looked around, then they started home.
They arrived back at their field in North Africa. The one pilot who failed to return was listed as missing in action. Not yet, though. Not until his fuel ran out. Not until there wasn’t even a glimmer of a chance.
The clock ticked slowly. Then, beyond the point of any fuel. Another two hours went by. They put his name on the list of the missing.
It happens. That’s war.
Then the air raid sounded. Radar picked up a single aircraft, unknown, coming in toward the field at fairly low altitude and high speed. Anti-aircraft guns started tracking. Some pilots ran for their planes.
Then they saw the intruder. A P-38, alone. Coming in along a shallow dive, engines thundering. It failed to respond to radio calls. There was no response to flares fired hurriedly into the air.
A strange approach; that flat and unwavering dive. The P-38 crossed to the center of the field.
Suddenly the airplane seemed to stagger. It fell apart in midair, a tumble of wreckage falling toward the ground. No flash of fire, no explosion. Just that startling breakup of machinery.
They saw a body fall clear of the wreckage. Pilots muttered, called aloud their thoughts without thinking. Then a parachute opened. Silk blossomed full. But the body hung limp in the harness.
Close to the wreckage, the pilot collapsed. No one saw him move. The crash trucks raced to the scene.
Those who came later saw their friends stunned, disbelieving, shaking their heads. They talked about it through the night. The next morning the light of dawn hadn’t changed a thing.
It was impossible.
The fuel tanks of the P-38, the same airplane that was hours beyond any possible remaining fuel, were bone dry.
They had been dry for several hours.
The pilot whose parachute opened, that lowered him to his home field, had a bullet hole in his forehead. He had been dead for hours.
Impossible.
But it happened.
And no one knows how.
Fork-Tailed Devil: The P-38 by Martin Caidin.