The Horrific Nanking Massacre

It was December of 1937, a year before the Holocaust really started gaining steam. China was engaged with a massive civil war, and were distracted from noticing the Japanese threat invading their land. After receiving their asses on cute little silver platters in Shanghai, the Chinese army decided to accept defeat and evacuate so as to defend the next city on the Japanese radar: Nanking.

Keep in mind that the Chinese army at this time was mostly untrained peasants, and were using weaponry like kung-fu grip, swords and grenades against tanks, navy fleets and aerial bombardment. With this in mind, and the Japanese soldiers felt fairly confident in their odds. Also reassuring: the droves of civilians fleeing Nanking as the Japanese approached.

After dropping leaflets announcing a 24-hour evacuation period for those not wishing to be brutally slaughtered, the Japanese recieved no response. Pure carnage ensued. It took a little under two days for the Chinese to be so badly beaten that the soldiers were stripping the clothes from civilians so as to blend in. having scared off or killed practically every Chinese soldier in the city, the mop-up efforts consisted of finding the soldiers dressed in civilian clothes and killing them.

What followed in the next six weeks will be hotly disputed among those historians with the stomach to talk about it. The Japanese got a little blood-crazy. The more or less offical body count was around 300, 000noncombatant civilians.

And there's a reason why this event is also called the Rape of Nanking. The Japanese got a little rapey. There were about 20,000 women raped, and not the good kind of rape, which, surprisingly, I just typed. We're talking infants. Elderly. And once these classy gents had had their way with the lady, they would often finish them off to with a bayonet to the crotch.

John Rabe, the leader of the poorly-named Safety Zone outside the city, kept a diary of that period. He witnessed the Japanese forcing incest on the survivors. He witnessed celibate monks being forced to rape women. One gang-raped pregnant woman gave birth to a kid, which was then killed. The best sentence he used that sums up the massacre was "What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers."

The best big band concerts end with a trumpet solo. Perhaps with this in mind, the Japanese army trumpetist played a nice little ditty that meant "Kill all Chinese who run away". Thousands were led to a mass-execution trench known as the "Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch". Most historians agree that the number of victims was more than 12,000.

Since we all know Japan to be slightly obsessed with concepts like pride, honor and shame, it's easy to see why many Japanese officials openly deny the event ever occurred.


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