Today in History....

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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On December 13th, 1937, Nanking, the capital city of Nationalist China,

fell to the Japanese. For Japan, This was to have been the decisive

turning point in the war, The triumphant culmination of half year

struggle against Chiang Kai-Shek’s armies in the Yangtze Valley For

Chinese Forces, whose heroic defense of Shanghai had finally failed,

and whose best troops had suffered crippling casualties, the fall of

Nanking was a bitter perhaps fatal defeat.

On this day, December 13th, 1937, Nanking fell to the Japanese. In the

next six weeks, the Japanese committed the infamous Nanking Massacre,

or the Rape of Nanking, during which an estimated 350,000 Chinese

soldiers and civilians were killed, and 80,000 women were raped.
On December 13th, a large number of refugees tried to escape from the

Japanese by trying to cross the Yangtze River. They were trapped on the

east bank because no transportation was available; many of them tried

to swim across the river. Meanwhile, the Japanese arrived and fired at

the people on the shore and in the river. A Japanese soldier reported

that the next day he saw an uncountable number of dead bodies of adults

and children covering the whole river. He estimated that more than 50,

000 people were killed at this tragic incident of the Nanking massacre.

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**Let us have a 2 minute silence, for the 50,000 men women and

children that died on this day, 66 years ago.**

Can you imagine 50,000 people in the Yangstze River Yellow River ? The blood of these victims would change the Yellow River into the Red River.

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Yellow River != Yangstze, if thats what you’re implying Rampage.

4

Actually, Rampage, you might want to do a little more digging. Not to belittle the tragedy, but 350,000 seems to be quite an exageration based on sources at the time. Sources at the time included western missionaries, businessmen and consular officials. Certainly it was a horrendous tragedy but the dead probably number less than 100,000. Simon Leys wrote an excellent piece about this.

The stuff about the historic defense of Shanghai sounds like KMT propaganda. You might want to cite where you cut and pasted the above.

Why is it important to be more accurate? Because there are Japanese right wing nationialists out there that will take any gross exaggeration as an excuse to say none of it occured. I think your point is to make more people aware, so you might want to get your facts a little more together.

BTW, I took my 72 year old mother to the Nanking memorial about 2 years ago. It was a well known event in the US when it happened.

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It ranged from 260,000 to 350,000 masscred victims.
I got my information directly from the book Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang.

No way it was below 100,000. I think your talking about 100,000 got raped? It was between 20,000 to 80,000 women who forcefully lost their virginity to Japanese invaders.

35 million Chinese Lost their lives to the Japanese.

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Rampage, check you Simon Leys. I’m not sure what book. He is probably the best China watcher ever.

Iris Chang isn’t a historian.

Maybe we are arguing over semantics and how long a time period was considered part of the ‘rape of Nanking’. At the time and in the 50’s and 60’s, 300,000 was not the figure used. Check both KMT and Communist sources.

I really can’t remember, but when I went to the memorial in Nanjing a couple of years ago, I don’t remember anywhere near the 300,000 quote.

It was certainly a horrible massacre. Exaggerating the number does not help convince the Japanese it happend. Actually, it has the opposite effect of discrediting.

Ditto with your 35 million Chinese lost their lives to the Japanese. How many of those 35 million died because the KMT blew dykes on the yellow river, flooded massive amounts of land, cause starvation, disease, etc.

Throwing out random numbers has some good shock value. Throwing out reasonably accurate numbers makes more sense IMHO.

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Theres Proof, Wheres Your proof of “simon Ley”

I think the Chinese would know more about China and the Chinese Wars, then a Foreigner.

Don’t you?

Such a large scale attack on population, and your trying to down grade the Massacre of Nanking?

There is a huge visual difference from 100,000 dead bodies and 300,000 dead bodies.

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Not necessarily, actually. There are real reasons why some Chinese might be more inclined to support a high-end estimate, just as there are reasons why some Japanese might lean towards a low-end estimate. Emotions can run high.

There is no downgrading, no matter what number you go with. The total is only important to bean counters ( of which I am occasionally one, truth be told - but I can seperate impact from minutia ). What matters is that it was a horrific massacre in which many tens of thousands were slaughtered and raped.

For what it’s worth Edward L. Dreyer does cite a figure of 200,000 to 300,000 in China at War:* 1901-1949* ( 1995, Longman Group Limited ). But it is not likely we’ll ever see a definitive answer and the most accurate response to the number of people killed in the Rape of Naking may simply be ‘lots’. I did find this article that debates the casualty estimates across a couple of pages:

http://journalism.missouri.edu/~jschool/nanking/Table/table.htm

However you misstated your source slightly, which doesn’t say flat-out that 35 million Chinese were killed, but that 'as many as 35 million Chinese killed or maimed - i.e. that is total casualties, dead and wounded, and a high estimate at that. Most figures for civilians killed in the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 seem to run in the 12-15 million range ( a horrendously large number anyway you slice it ). While indirectly you can blame the Japanese for most of them ( but not all - the ongoing internal Chinese fighting would have produced some regardless ), directly the largest death toll may actually belong to the Chinese KMT, as China Guy pointed out ( in particular one incident in 1938 ). To quote:

‘Fighting witdrawal’ meant rout and ‘guerilla war’ meant disintegration in the Chinese communiques of this time. Chiang Kai-shek compounded the collapse by ordering ( 31 May ) most of the troops of the 1rst War Area to move west of the Peiping-Hankow railway. The forces assigned to defend Kaifeng thus were actually outnumbered by the Japanese attackers. Shang Chen’s 32nd army fought hard for six days, but Kaifeng fell on 6 June, and two days later Japanese calvary reached Hsincheng, on the railway line south of Chengchow. Chinag then ordered the Yellow River dikes north of Chengchow to be blown open by explosive charges. Shang Chen stalled to evacuate his troops, but eventually carried out the order. The course of the Yellow River then shifted, to flow southeast into the Huai, accompanied by the flooding of much of Honan, Anhwei, and Kiangsu provinces. Millions of people were either killed outright or died because the floods deprived of their already marginal means of subsistence. Catastrophic shifts in the bed of the Yellow River had occurred many times, due to natural causes; Chiang was exceptional in using flooding as a deliberate strategy. In the long run his evident disregard for peasant life contributed to the communist case against him, but in the short run, Chiang’s strategy was successful; the flood caused the Japanese to retire to the east in a haste that bordered panic.

From Dreyer as above, pg. 228.

Anyway, as I stated earlier in this post, exact figures are not the most relevant part of any of this. The fact and rough scale of the deaths, is.

  • Tamerlane
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Your linked page works but the links on that page do not, so no comment. However, a casual internet search can pull up a lot more detailed information. If you¡¯re willing to do some old fashioned research, you can check what the estimates were at the time, at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, what the KMT had to say about it, etc.

Simon Leys pre-dates the internet and unfortunately all of his resources are pre-internet and I don’t have a copy of his book with me (IIRC it is The Burning Forest, This collection of essays, now out of print, includes an excellent piece on Chinese aesthetics, amusing critiques of “China experts” and Edward Said, and some of the most scathing moral critiques of the Mao regime written by a western Sinologist. A fine prose stylist, Leys is worth reading, and re-reading, even if you have little interest in China. )

I think that good investigators and historians are colorblind. Chinese historians under the auspices of the communists or the KMT do not have a good track record for impartiality or accuracy. Pop writers trying to sell books have a vested interest in making the worst case possible and not necessarily the best case.

If you re-read my comments, I think it should be clear that I’m not trying to down grade the Massacre of Nanking. In fact the opposite as having lived in Japan, I do know the first “logical” Japanese refutation that the event occured is showing that 350k is such a high number that "the whole thing is a fabrication."here is an example

We disagree over the huge visual difference. Whether it was tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, it was a horrible masscre. By exagerating to make a huge visual difference (80,000 virgins raped versus tens of thousands raped) can have a counter effect. I think you are trying to highlight or exaggerate the horror. I believe it is a horror that does not need to be exaggerated and is more effective not exaggerated.

This is what is officially reported in the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall
In December 1937, Nanjing fell to the Japanese Imperial Army. The Japanese army launched a massacre for six weeks. According to the records of several welfare organizations which buried the dead bodies after the Massacre, around three hundred thousand people, mostly civilians and POWs, were brutally slaughtered.
Over twenty thousand cases of rape were reported.

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Incidentally CG, if you get a chance and feel like it, drop me an e-mail. I was asked to pass something of no great importance on to you, but I either lost or never had your e-addy.

  • Tamerlane