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. .
In 1937, Japan started a war against China, in search of more resources to expand its empire. In 1941, during World War II, Japan attacked America which is when the Allies (Australia, Britain etc.) then declared war on Japan. Before long the Japanese started extending their territory closer and closer to Australia and started taking surrendering troops into concentration camps where they were starved, diseased and beaten. When they were captured, one survivor reports that they were told
Thousands of individuals, including women and children, were murdered, stores and other properties were plundered and burned, and countless of women were raped . The Japanese government regarded sex as a way to keep the soldiers obedient and focused so rape was a device used to maintain good, Japanese warriors . Not only did human experimentation occur in German concentration camps, but also in Japanese prison camps. The 731 Unit conducted experiments dealing with plague, cholera, typhoid, frostbite, and gas gangrene . American prisoners of war were treated especially cruel during these human experiments. In one incident, an individual had his skull sliced open while Dr. Fukujiro placed a surgical knife inside of his skull cavity
The war itself was filled with many battles, deaths, and decisions. Although the state of Japan in 1945 was a defeated nation, they refused to surrender, which was a key reason why Truman dropped the Atomic bombs. There are many important events and reasons as to why President Truman decided to drop the Atomic bombs on 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 it as a great power. When Japanese soldiers stormed into Manchuria in 1931, Japan commenced the first in the succession of annexations and conquest throughout the 1930’s that positioned the phase of the war.
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: BasicBooks, 1997. Print.
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...
The Rape of Nanking, also known as the Nanking Massacre, was a six-week period when mass numbers of Chinese men and women 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.
Levi, Neil, and Michael Rothberg. The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Print.
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.
Dwork, Deborah, and R. J. Van Pelt. Holocaust: a History. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.
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).
Japan's attacking China in 1937 is a crime against humanity. On July 7, 1937, Japan attacked Beijing using a missing soldier as an excuse, without no official declaration to war against China. On December 13, 1937, Japan started a series of massacre in Nanking, which resulted in a casualty of 300,000. During the three-month-long massacre, Japanese army kill for pure fun, and their crime include brutal rape of innocent women, beheading civilians as competition, and murder newborn babies. Unit 731 of Japanese army used Chinese people as human test subjects to develop chemical weapon to win the war. They performed amputation and poison gas test on innocent Chinese civilians. When the war reached stalemate, and Japanese troops suffered from hunger, they kill war prisoners and eat the bodies. Japanese officers forced Chinese women to be "comfort lady" for the troops. While the name sounded great, reality was that these "comfort ladies" ended up raped by Japanese soldiers over and over again until death. (Yoshimi 146) These were all crime against h...