China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  One consequence of the fighting was that China went on the move. The best estimate is that some 60 million people – a seventh of the population – took flight. Many became refugees for just a short time, but others for much longer. Chi Pang-yuan was one of those caught up in the Nationalist retreat inland; we shall follow her as she makes her way to Chongqing, a journey that would take her more than a year. In narrating the Battles for Nanjing, Xuzhou and Wuhan, Chen Kewen’s diary provides us with insight into the atmosphere at China’s political centre, first in Nanjing and then in Wuhan.

  Nanjing

  ‘Again an important day in my life’, Chen Kewen wrote in his diary on 26 November 1937. ‘I had to say a temporary goodbye to my beloved Nanjing. Who can say when we will be able to return or whether the city’s gorgeous walls and lakes will survive the Japanese jackboot.’5 His forced departure pained Chen Kewen: ‘the prospect that the enemy will seize this ancient city, derelict ten years ago but now modernised: it is as if robbers have seized a beautiful daughter just when she has grown up.’6 The previous day Chen had a conversation with his mentor, Wang Jingwei. Wang counselled endurance, resolve and unity, despite believing that the future was bleak: ‘We are defeated militarily, and internationally too our position is very bad. The Japanese will be free to slaughter the country.’7 In the case of Nanjing, that assessment proved prophetic.

  On the same day that Chen Kewen left Nanjing, Chiang Kaishek travelled to Purple Mountain and climbed up the stairs to the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum to bid farewell to the Father of the Country. At this time, Chiang was wrestling with the question of whether to defend Nanjing: ‘Nanjing is not defensible, but we also cannot just walk away from it.’8 No one believed that the Nationalist military could hold the city, but to abandon the symbolic heart of the new China without a fight would suggest a lack of commitment with unforetold consequences. A reluctance to abandon ‘millions of dollars’ worth of equipment’, such as the anti-aircraft guns and artillery pieces scattered throughout the city and its suburbs, without ever putting them to serious use, may also have affected the decision-making.9

  In the end Chiang Kaishek concluded that he had to at least make a show of defending ‘our capital and Sun Yatsen’s resting place’.10 Ten days before his visit to the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum, the Supreme Defence Council had already ordered the relocation of KMT headquarters and the government to Chongqing, with all offices needed to direct the war moving to Wuhan. The retreat to Chongqing guaranteed, or so the argument went, ‘the survival of the government’ and hence ‘resistance to the end’.11 But fighting the Japanese at Nanjing still made sense, in Chiang’s view, because of the possibility that the Soviets might enter the war. A Nationalist emissary to the Soviet Union reported that they were considering this. Via the Soviet delegation in Nanjing, Marshall K. Y. Voroshilov made it known that if the situation in China reached crisis point, the Soviet Union would intervene.12 On 30 November, Chiang sent a personal message to Stalin requesting military intervention.13

  On 5 December, Stalin scotched the idea.14 Nonetheless, the battle for Nanjing went ahead on the same day. The population had been expecting it. Even before Chen Kewen’s departure, ‘the city had become desolate as the roads filled with people fleeing danger and seeking safety. Carrying their household goods on their shoulders and with their children in tow, they headed out of the city, not knowing their destination.’15 In command of the city’s defence was General Tang Shengzhi, who ‘vowed to live or die with Nanjing’16 and, to underscore his determination, ordered all transport ships at its port district, Xiaguan, to be withdrawn.

  General Tang declined a Japanese demand on 10 December to surrender Nanjing. The next day, Chiang Kaishek instructed him to continue to defend the city, arguing that ‘any additional day that Nanjing can be held, the greater the glory of our nation; and if you can fight on for half a month or more, then no doubt great changes will happen in the domestic and international situation.’17 Already by the next day the situation had become hopeless, Japanese forces having surrounded Nanjing on three sides, leaving only the Yangzi shore to the east of the city open as a possible escape route. As the Japanese troops neared the city’s high walls, with only a few gates allowing passage in or out of them, it became impossible for Nanjing’s residents and defenders to melt away into the countryside. In addition, Japanese forces were nearing Xiaguan to the east, while the Japanese navy had crashed through barriers on the Yangzi downriver and were about to appear off Nanjing, too.

  On 12 December, General Tang concluded that any further resistance was hopeless and ordered his forces to fight their way out through Japanese lines. This retreat turned into chaos when General Tang gave an oral instruction that ‘the 87th and 88th Division, the 74th Army, and the Training Regiment may cross the Yangzi river if there is a steamer’.18 Tens of thousands of troops turned on their heels and headed for Xiaguan. ‘Not just cars could not move, even people could not do so … everybody fought to get on board a ship, shouting and firing their rifles. When a boat headed into the river, troops fired at them from the shore, sinking them. Others sank because they were overcrowded.’ It is not clear how many people died in the stampede. A ‘Third War Zone General Report on the Battle for Nanjing’ put the number at over 100,000. Being based on the idea that ten divisions tried to make their way to Xiaguan, this figure is probably an overestimate. Most divisions, and certainly those who had just fought at Shanghai, were under strength, often woefully so. Nonetheless, the number of deaths will have been very great indeed.

  General Tang was one of the lucky escapees. Despite his vows, he left Nanjing at 8 p.m. on the night of 12 December, without, so later reports claimed, informing even his own staff.19 He made his way to Wuhan, apologised to Chiang Kaishek and asked to be punished for his failures. Chiang did not take him up on this, probably because of his own responsibility for the disaster, but General Tang was widely condemned as a coward and an incompetent. The rumour swirled around Wuhan, so Chen Kewen’s diary suggests, that after his arrival there General Tang wired 400,000 Chinese dollars to a bank in Hong Kong – a story that implied that it was not nationalism but plain avarice that had led him to take command of the city’s defence.20 He devoted the rest of his life to the study of Buddhism – a way of indicating that he had abandoned all ambition. It is possible that the rumours about General Tang were the result of scapegoating.

  The Japanese had not planned to attack the Nationalists’ capital. After the Battle of Shanghai, neither the General Staff in Tokyo nor the commander on the ground, General Matsui, favoured the occupation of Nanjing. But General Yanagawa Heisukei, the commander of the 10th Army, which had just landed at Hangzhou Bay, followed his own nose. Trained to exploit any opportunity quickly and decisively, on 15 November he ordered his units to disregard the limits placed on their area of operation and pursue the fleeing Chinese forces. When General Matsui learned that the Nationalists had lost half their troops and that the rest were demoralised, he came round to General Yanagawa’s view that the seizure of Nanjing would precipitate their surrender.21 The General Staff provided retrospective approval for his plans on 1 December. Japanese forces charged forwards, covering over 30 kilometres a day, travelling without rations or supplies because their logistics were unable to support such a fast-moving front. They torched homes, farms and even whole villages in order to thwart possible Chinese ambushes.22 Having not carried either blankets or winter uniforms, they arrived at Nanjing exhausted, hungry and bitterly cold.

  When they approached Nanjing, the Japanese had an excellent opportunity to make a good impression. The Nationalists’s scorched earth policy had extended to everywhere within 15 kilometres of the city, including ‘whole villages’, while within Nanjing ‘the torch was applied to districts around South Gate and in Hsiakwan [Xiaguan]’.23 Chinese soldiers had also begun looting the city, in part because they had run out of food and water but also because ‘the realisation was becoming general that the majority were trapped and must die�
�.24 According to New York Times reporter Tillman Durdin,

  When the final collapse of the Chinese came in Nanking, so great was the feeling of relief among the populace and such was the bad impression created by the break-up of the Chinese municipal regime and the defence command that the people were ready to welcome the Japanese troops. Indeed scattered bands of civilians actually cheered Japanese columns as they marched in from the South Gate and the West Gate.25

  The Japanese failed to avail themselves of this opportunity; instead they perpetrated a terrible atrocity.

  General Matsui’s plan had been to leave most of his forces outside the city and, as a symbolic gesture, enter Nanjing with just the military police and a few battalions of each of the two armies that had encircled it.26 Instead, because so many Chinese soldiers who had not surrendered remained in the city, 70,000 troops were marched in, many of whom were exhausted, hungry, cold, thirsty and frightened. The orgy of violence that followed focused first on soldiers and suspected soldiers within the city, but it then expanded outwards to the suburbs, involving large numbers of civilians.

  Durdin left Nanjing by river on the gunboat USS Oahu on 17 December, four days after the Japanese occupation, having born witness to the mass execution of Nationalist soldiers and suspected soldiers. In early January he reported that the Japanese had admitted that 15,000 Chinese had been rounded up ‘during the first three days’ of the occupation and that they captured another 25,000 Chinese soldiers in hiding throughout the city,27 who were ‘systematically rounded up and executed’.28 These included thousands of Nationalist soldiers who had fled to the Nanjing Safety Zone, established by foreigners in the city to protect civilians. The Safety Zone was to be a demilitarised zone, but some guards had admitted Nationalist soldiers, who feared for their lives, after they laid down their arms. The Japanese took them away in groups and executed them en masse. Events like these were bound to come to Durdin’s knowledge.

  Xiaguan was another area where mass executions took place. The Japanese had made no preparations for accommodating prisoners of war and initially were also under pressure to make the city safe for a victory parade in which Prince Asaka, a member of the royal family, was to participate. Lieutenant General Nakajima Kesago, the commander of 16th Division, wrote in his diary of the Nationalist soldiers that ‘since our policy is not to take prisoners, we made a point of executing them as soon as we had captured them’.29 Tasked with clearing the Xiaguan area, his division rounded up ‘22,550 at eight different locations’.30 One careful contemporary analysis estimates that the ‘number of Chinese prisoners executed by the 16th Division ranges from 4,000 to 12,000’.31 The Yangzi became ‘a river of dead bodies’ as corpses were shoved into the water.32

  At Mufushan Mountain to the north of Nanjing, another regiment was tasked with guarding 20,000 prisoners, housed in a local barracks. They had been ordered to take care of these soldiers, but a fire broke out in the barracks and machine guns were let off. There seem to have been few survivors.33 Another instance of the mass killing of prisoners of war involved a regiment of the 9th Division. It reported that it had executed ‘6,700’ soldiers during mop-ping-up operations, a figure ‘very close to 7,000, which happened to be the number of rifle and machine gun bullets the regiment reported to have spent’, and hence likely to be accurate.34

  In this first phase of what came to be called the Nanjing Massacre, or Atrocity, the Japanese hunted for Nationalist soldiers who had changed into civilian outfits. They checked the bodies of those they stopped for marks that indicated that a person was a soldier, including looking for bruises on the shoulder left by the recoil of a rifle. Inevitably many civilians were caught in the dragnet. ‘A favourite method of execution’, according to Durdin, ‘was to herd groups of a dozen men at entrances of dugouts and to shoot them so the bodies toppled inside. Dirt then was shovelled in and the men buried.’35 In actions that could only be counterproductive, the Japanese also targeted firemen and policemen. According to Durdin, ‘any person, who through excitement or fear, ran at the approach of the Japanese soldiers was in danger of being shot’.36

  As well as the large-scale massacres, there were many smaller ones. To take just one example, on 15 December members of a small Japanese unit killed 100 prisoners of war they were escorting after panic broke out when a Japanese soldier either fell or was pushed into a pool of water. His comrades, all fresh recruits, ‘being already scared, started stabbing or clubbing the prisoners while crying out cursing words. The prisoners began to flee as the panic spread’, upon which the Japanese soldiers turned their rifles on them.37

  After the first phase, mass executions on this scale became rare, if only because most of the Nationalist troops now lay dead, but Japanese brutality continued. Hallett Abend reported from Shanghai on 24 January that ‘the conditions in Nanking one month and ten days after the victorious Japanese Army crashed the gates of China’s former capital are so lawless and so scandalous that Japanese authorities continue to refuse permission to any foreigners except diplomatic officials to visit the city’.38 Looting was rife. ‘Nearly every building was entered by the Japanese soldiers, often under the eyes of their officers, and the men took whatever they wanted. The Japanese soldiers often impressed Chinese to carry their loot.’39

  So was rape. There are many gruesome accounts of rape, which in some cases involved all the women of a family. Survivors have told harrowing stories, and awful photographs have been published. The lowest estimate of the number of rapes is 4,000 to 5,000, while the more common figure is around 20,000. Recounting details of these incidents would be gratuitous. However, it is worth pointing out that rape continued throughout the six weeks that the Nanjing Atrocity is usually considered to have lasted, partly because the Japanese military police were so ineffectual.40 Underpaid, lacking in discipline and suffering from low morale, they were simply ignored by the soldiers, who certainly did not seem to fear that their actions would be punished.

  Abend noted that ‘Shanghai observers speculated whether a condition of mutiny existed among the soldiery.’ That does not seem to have been the case, given that, for instance, the Shanghai Expeditionary Army gave orders to lower units to dispose of large numbers of prisoners of war. Abend’s comment was an indication of the bewilderment caused by Japan’s atrocious behaviour in Nanjing.

  The figure of 300,000 is etched into the front of the Museum for the Commemoration of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing, established in 1985, representing an estimate of the number of victims of the atrocity as endorsed by the Chinese government. This estimate is based on the judgments of the Tokyo and Nanjing War Crimes Tribunals, both of which have been criticised for the way they handled evidence.41 The figure is essentially a political one, in the sense that the Chinese government has endorsed it and uses it for political purposes. Over the last three decades much research has gone into refining this estimate, for instance by using burial records, although even that is not without its problems. Three hundred thousand would appear to be an overestimate.42 A recent analysis by a Japanese historian, who initially accepted the Chinese government’s estimate of the scale of the atrocity and then rejected it, puts the number of victims at ‘45,000 to 65,000’.43 That figure forms the lower end of reasonable estimates.

  Focusing on gaining as accurate a figure as possible of the number of victims of the Nanjing Atrocity has brought with it its own problems, not least that it effaces the victims as individuals. It makes them part of a narrative constructed by Beijing, with which some victims – among whom would have been many staunch believers in the Nationalist cause – might not wish to have been associated. The Nanjing Atrocity has become the enduring symbol of Japanese brutality, eliding other Japanese atrocities in China and elsewhere, then and later. The articulating of horror purely in number terms also brings with it the risk of erasing the differences between the many different atrocities that took place across the world during the Second World War.

  Massacres can and have been used as in
struments of war. In the case of Nanjing, though, that does not seem to have been the case. Instead, the conditions in Nanjing when Japanese forces entered, the failures of the logistical system of the Imperial Japanese Army, the occupation of the city by troops that had been both brutalised and exhausted by their training and during three months of fighting, the decision to stage a victory march, and the breakdown of discipline in some parts of the Japanese army seem to have been its main causes. Whatever its origin, Japan will have to live with the reality of that terrible atrocity for generations to come.

  From the perspective purely of military history, the Nanjing Atrocity was emblematic of the fact that surrender became rare in the Second World War. In earlier times, when a battle lasted no more than a few days, if that, and took place on a circumscribed battlefield, an individual commander could decide that the battle was lost and that further bloodshed was meaningless. With war spread out in time and space, no commander had sufficient oversight to make that call. Indeed, to continue to fight to the death of all could make sense from an overall strategic point of view. Chiang Kaishek clearly thought so in the case of Nanjing.

  Xuzhou

  Chen Kewen arrived in Wuhan on 28 November in a British steamer, travelling, rather to his embarrassment, as a privileged official ‘safely and exceedingly comfortably’.44 His family made the journey separately, largely in overcrowded trains and vessels. In Wuhan, Chen and his government colleagues took over buildings in the Japanese concession vacated when the Japanese evacuated to Shanghai. He found the mood in the city a weird mix of defiance, despair, optimism, anger and decadence. One of Chen’s colleagues, who had been offered a job in a bank and hence no longer cared about what he said, parted with the words: ‘to reform the political system, it’s best to ask Mao Zedong to take over as head of the government and Zhu De [the Communist commander-in-chief] as chief of the army.’45 Reports about military casualties, refugees, clogged-up transport networks and collapsing order filled Chen Kewen’s meetings with a deep pessimism: ‘they inevitably ended with mutterings about “it’s nonsense to say that China cannot lose”’.46 To Chen’s anger, some colleagues dined, drank, sang and visited prostitutes as if there was no tomorrow.47 ‘Sister, I love you’ was a popular song on the ships that carried government personnel to Wuhan.48