Introduction to the Nanking Massacre
The fall of Nanking in 1937 sparked a seven-week campaign of terror that permanently altered global history. Japanese troops slaughtered and raped tens of thousands of civilians in plain view of the world. Iris Chang brought this tragedy to light by uncovering the diaries of foreign observers who documented horrors that rivaled the Holocaust but remained largely forgotten in the West.
While many date the start of World War II to the attack on Pearl Harbor or the invasion of Poland, for Asia, the war began much earlier with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. In 1937, the Japanese military launched a massive assault on Nanking, the capital of the Republic of China. What followed was an intense period of violence resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war.
The scale of this massacre is difficult to grasp through numbers alone. Experts estimate that between 260,000 and 350,000 people were killed in a very short time. The death toll in this single city exceeded the total civilian casualties of many European nations during the entire war and surpassed the combined deaths from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Iris Chang first learned of these horrors as a young girl from her parents, who had survived the war in China. They told her stories of the Yangtze River running red with blood and of soldiers slicing babies into pieces. When she looked for information in her local library, she found nothing, prompting her to investigate how one of the worst instances of mass extermination could be virtually unknown to the Western world.
The silence surrounding Nanking was a direct product of Cold War politics. After 1949, the United States wanted Japan as an ally against communism, while Chinese leaders competed for Japanese recognition. Consequently, Japan escaped the intense scrutiny that Germany faced after the Holocaust, allowing a culture of denial to take root in Japan where references to the massacre were systematically purged from public records.
True history requires looking at an event from multiple angles to understand its full impact. To understand Nanking, one must examine the Japanese military’s planned invasion, the Chinese victims' struggle for survival, and the brave Westerners who stayed behind to create a safety zone. Confronting these painful truths is the only way to ensure that the thin veneer of social restraint does not strip away to reveal such horrors again.
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