In the Nanjing Massacre, a large number of Chinese were massacred by the Japanese army and their bodies were turned into white bones in the gutters. In Nanjing, the corpses of the murdered Chinese filled the streets and the gutters became red with blood. The Japanese were forced to refine the massacred bodies to prevent the spread of disease. Groups of Chinese civilians were rounded up and herded into mining camps for slaughter.
The Japanese army had already occupied and annexed the Manchurian region of China (1931) and the province of Hot River (1933). In July 1937, on the pretext of invading and occupying the whole of China, tensions between Chinese and Japanese troops in occupied Chinese territory drew from firing near Beijing. Japanese troops invaded the northern provinces of China and soon occupied the Chinese capital, Beijing. The Japanese forces deliberately carried out a savage invasion to destroy the resistance of the Chinese army.
While fighting continued in northern China, the Japanese broke out a second front in the city of Shanghai on China's east coast. Despite the determined resistance of the Chinese Nationalist forces, the Japanese occupied Shanghai in November 1937. The Japanese took hundreds of Chinese prisoners of war to the Bund or the riverbank and slaughtered them with machine guns from boats anchored in the river. After capturing Shanghai, the Japanese crossed the Yangtze River and invaded the Chinese Nationalist capital of Nanjing. The Japanese inflicted genocide, rape, and looting on the Chinese. The atrocities committed by the Japanese in China were well documented by Western witnesses.
In December 1937, the Japanese army fell Nanking, the capital of the Chinese Nationalist Party, enraged by the intense resistance of the Chinese troops. Murders, rapes, looting, and arson by Japanese troops broke out. The Japanese immediately massacred thousands of Chinese soldiers who surrendered. Later, the Japanese captured some 20,000 young Chinese men, transported them on trucks outside the city walls, and massacred them. Japanese troops were encouraged to sack Nanking and massacre and rape the city's Chinese population.
For about six weeks, life for the Chinese in Nanking became a nightmare. Groups of drunken Japanese soldiers roamed the streets, killing, raping, looting, and setting fires on a whim. They stopped in the streets and quickly slaughtered any Chinese civilians they deemed worthless. During the first four weeks of the Japanese occupation, at least about 20,000 Chinese women were raped in Nanking, and many more were murdered later.
The Japanese military executed a horrific means of massacring the Chinese in the city. The bodies of the murdered Chinese filled the streets and the gutters turned red with blood. The Japanese were forced to refine the massacred bodies to prevent the spread of disease. Groups of Chinese civilians were rounded up and herded into mining camps for slaughter. Smiling Japanese soldiers either buried the Chinese alive, chopped them to death with swords, stabbed them to death in bayonet forges, or poured gasoline on the victims and burned them alive. Thousands of corpses of the massacre victims were dumped into the Yangtze River until the river turned red with blood.
Japanese soldiers shot and posed with the dead victims at the slaughterhouse. They were happy to be photographed with their swords raised beside their intended victims. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in Nanjing were widely publicized by foreign witnesses, including newspaper correspondents. When the Japanese main camp realized the truth of the horror, much of the evidence of the atrocities disappeared.
Despite the photographic and eyewitness evidence, the Japanese government still denied the full extent of the massacre, rape and pillage that took place in Nanking in 1937. The Japanese government explained the atrocities of the Nanjing Massacre as the Nanjing Incident in history textbooks. The neo-nationalists complained that this concession to historical truth went too far and that school textbooks should be censored to remove everything. The Japanese military instilled the crimes and atrocities of war as a matter of national pride, not shame.
