Witnesses to a war crime: the Nanjing Massacre - the British and US reports

摘要

The 1937 Nanjing Massacre (traditionally known in the West as the 'Rape of Nanking') remains the most infamous incident in the troubled history of Sino-Japanese relations. The Nanjing Massacre witnessed an unspeakable orgy of brutality as mass murder and mass rape were committed by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing (the then capital of the Republic of China and General Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang (GMD)) on an industrial scale. This 'dark page in history' took place during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45)1 and has soured relations between China and Japan ever since. The atrocities, which began on 13 December 1937, went on unabated for six weeks and even now the exact number of victims is unknown. Japan's records of the incident were, unsurprisingly, top secret and many were destroyed as Japan faced defeat in 1945. The postwar International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo estimated that over 200,000 Chinese died at Nanjing (p.x), although the official Chinese estimate was fixed at 300,000 at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal in 1947. The refusal of many Japanese politicians and historians to admit to a death toll anything like this has, naturally, been a bone of contention between Beijing and Tokyo to this day. Such disputes only inflame a dispute already rendered poisonous by the memory of the wholesale slaughter of large numbers of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war.