In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Nanking, China. They killed 300,00 out of the 600,000 people in China’s capital city. The six-week rampage by the Japanese is now known as the Rape of Nanking and the single worst atrocity during WWII era in either the European or Pacific theaters of the war.
Before Nanking was invaded a tough battle in Shanghai began the war in the summer of 1937. The Chinese put up a shocking battle against japan. This was slightly embarrassing to Japan because they predicted that the would conquer all of China in only three months. The battle in Shanghai alone lasted a little over five months. This infuriated the Japanese and increased the appetite for revenge that was led up to Nanking.
After defeating the Chinese in Shanghai in November, 50,000 soldiers of the Japanese army marched toward Nanking. In Nanking the soldiers were poorly led and unorganized, while Shanghai had a well led and tightly organized group of soldiers. Although they outnumbered the Japanese and had plenty of ammunition, they crumbled under the ferocity of the Japanese attack. Chinese were forced to rapidly retreat as they could. After just 4 days of fighting Japanese troops smashed into the city on December 13th, 1937, with orders to “kill all captives.”
The first concern of the Japanese was to eliminate any threats, which included all of the 90,000 surrendered soldiers of Nanking. To the Japanese, surrendering was an unthinkable act of cowardice and the ultimate violation of the code of military honor pounded into their mind from childhood onward. Because of this they looked at the Chinese POWs with utter disgust, viewing them as animals not worthy of life.
The extermination of the Chinese POWs began after trucks t...
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...ernational safe zone, using red cross flags to mark the areas. These Westerners became the unsung heroes of Nanking, working day and night to the point of exhaustion to aid the Chinese. They also wrote down their impressions of the daily scenes they witnessed, with one describing Nanking as "hell on earth." Another wrote of the Japanese soldiers: "I did not imagine that such cruel people existed in the modern world." About 300,000 Chinese civilians took refuge inside their Safety Zone. Almost all of the people who did not make it into the Zone during the Rape of Nanking ultimately perished.
Works Cited
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York, NY: Basic, 1997. Print.
"Rape of Nanking 1937-38." The History Place. The History Place™, 2000. Web. 18 May 2014. .
Some people died when the Allies continuously bombed the railway, unaware that their own people were working on it and creating more work for them to do. The Burma-Thailand Railway was a place where prisoners were sent to work during their time in captivity. The Japanese treated the prisoners they held captive horribly. In doing this they ignored the rules of the Geneva Convention set up many years previously and they forced most prisoners to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway where they were starved, diseased or beaten to death.
Japan’s defeat was seen as a relief to some Japanese citizens and hard to swallow by others. Some individuals were even willing to kill their entire family and commit suicide after learning of Japan’s defeat . Japanese citizens, especially in Manchuria, faced hostility from Russians, Korean, and Americans who came and occupied parts of Japan . The defeat of Japan brought with it humiliation the country had not been prepared for. After World War II, the Imperial government had ended which made way for a new, peaceful era in Japan .
Japan's actions from 1852 to 1945 were stimulated by an extensive aspiration to elude the providence of 19th-century China and also to overtake as a great power. When Japanese soldiers stormed into Manchuria in 1931, Japan commenced the first in the succession of
...ce of ordinary people, fear of retribution from the Japanese underground they still believed to be in existence… (Yamamoto p. 190).” Even after the war, the Chinese were so traumatized by the vile actions that they were still afraid that the Japanese army would return to treat as livestock once more.
The Rape of Nanking started on December 13, 1937. This was the day the Japanese invaded Nanking (now Nanjing), which was then the capital of Nationalist China (Cook). The Japanese Army faced little resistance as the Chinese Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, evacuated his troops before the invaders advanced. After seven weeks of Japanese atrocities, the killings ended in early 1938 (The Rape of Nanking). Japanese soldiers finally left Nanking in early February when they needed to continue the attack on China.
Because of the desperation felt by the Japanese forces leading up to the battle and American forces making steady advances toward Japan, the Japanese forces felt the battle could not be won. They were ordered to by time for Japan to build its defenses around the homeland. Japanese were not only dying for their county but taking their own lives as ... ... middle of paper ... ... 6 wounded.
In July 1937, the second Sino-Japanese War broke out. A small incident was soon made into a full scale war by the Kwantung army which acted rather independently from a more moderate government. The Japanese forces succeeded in occupying almost the whole coast of China and committed severe war atrocities on the Chinese population, especially during the fall of the capital Nanking. However, the Chinese government never surrendered completely, and the war continued on a lower scale until 1945.
...he So-Called Mischlinge.” The Holocaust and History. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 155-133.
"Perpetrators." A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust. University of South Florida, 1 Jan. 1997. Web. 19 May 2014. .
In Daqing Yang’s “The Malleable and the Contested”, he gives a detailed explanation on when and how the Nanjing Massacre became such a controversial issue both in China and Japan today. He primarily focuses on the publications that brought awareness of the incident. He also signifies how politics can be a factor in these memories. Right after Japan’s defeat, Japanese atrocities were brought up to the Tokyo War Trials. During the early post-war period, the Nanjing Massacre was acknowledged in Japanese textbooks. It was not until the conservative Liberal Democratic Party’s establishment that the focus on the massacre was lightened in textbooks. On the other hand, the People’s Republic of China brought up the massacre by portraying the communist as the winner who fought against the Japanese in the war, and also focused more on how the United States was the key factor that caused the massacre instead of the Japanese. Yang points out in his article “As China continued its internal struggles to weed out domestic enemies, class conflict, rathe...
We were looking through the topics for this year’s theme on the NHD website. While we were scrolling through, we came upon this topic. Even though we were born here, our parents and their ancestors were born in China. We don’t know much of our family history except that we are Asian. We thought it would be interesting to learn more about our background and so the Nanking Massacre stuck out to us and became our NHD topic.
The Japanese were fearless and willing to fight until every soldier was dead.... ... middle of paper ... ... One blessing of the event is the massive fires, which prevented epidemics by acting as a disinfectant (Wikipedia).
Levi, Neil, and Michael Rothberg. The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Print.
Dwork, Deborah, and R. J. Van Pelt. Holocaust: a History. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.
The Rape of Nanking, also known as the Nanking Massacre was a six week period when mass numbers of Chinese men and woman were killed by the Japanese. Embarrassed by the lack of effort in the war with China in Shanghai, the Japanese looked for revenge and finally were able to win the battle. The Japanese moved toward the city of Nanjing also known as Nanking and invaded it for approximately six months. Even though the people of Nanjing outnumbered the 50,000 Japanese, they were not as masterful in warfare as their opponents. Chinese soldiers were forced to surrender to the Japanese and the massacre began in which around 300,000 people died and 20,000 women were raped. The Japanese leaders had different methods of killing that were instructed to the soldiers. However, the prisoners of this “City of Blood” soon found their liberation and their justice was served.