A horrible tragedy for which the perpetrators have never expressed full remorse:
…Late on Tuesday morning, when Nanking had been in Japanese hands for thirty-six hours, former Tokyo secret police chief Nakajima and his 16th division rolled in to town through the Water Gate in trucks and armored cars. he had been delayed by the capture of some 10,000 prisoners at the last moment. All through night his men has been busy herding the prisoners drove by drove to the edge of the Yangtze. They had worn their fingers to the bone pressing machine-gun triggers. At least 6,000 of the prisoners had died. Now in the flat drear light of the next noon, Nakajima’s men began a systematic search inside Nanking for Chinese soldiers who had run away, taken off their uniforms, and vanished. The orders from Prince Asaka, the Emperor’s uncle, were explicit: kill all captives…
…The 80,000-odd soldiers turned loose in Nanking by Muto, Nakajima and Prince Asaka would have raped, killed, stolen, and burned if left to their own devices. In the event they acted under the guidance of their officers; they worked at being drunk and disorderly; they ran amok, but systematically. Their rape of Nanking began when Nakajima entered the city on December 14; it continued for six weeks; and it was not stopped, despite world-wide protest, until Prince Konoye admitted to Hirohito that there was no longer any hope of unseating Chiang Kai-shek…
…In all, according to figures accepted after two years of hearings by a panel of eminent jurists from many lands, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East which sat in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948, 20,000 women were raped in Nanking and its vicinity and over 200,000 men, a least a quarter of them civilians, were murdered. – David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, Volume 1
Kind of puts that atomic bomb thing in to perspective, doesn’t it? As William Manchester once wrote, while time has blurred the jagged edges of Japan’s Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere it should be remember that the Japanese were a savage foe. After 14 years of Japan committing crime after crime and resisting our advance with fanatical determination even after it was clear the war was lost, it is no surprise that America’s leaders in 1945 opted for the atomic bomb.
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