The only disinterested and trustworthy person close to Chiang, May-ling continued to be informed of all casualties and deaths among the airmen and delivered the speeches when pilots were singled out for outstanding achievements. One of the best Chinese pilots was an American-born man named Art Chen. One day Chen took on three Japanese planes in a dogfight but ran out of ammunition after shooting the first one down. So he rammed the second one, wrecking it, and then bailed out of his own plane near the wreckage. He examined what was left of the plane, found one machine gun in good condition, took it, and walked the eight miles back to base, carrying the gun on his shoulder. There he ran into Chennault. Before Chennault had a chance to say a word, he held out the gun. “Sir,” he said, “can I have another airplane for my machine gun?”
While serving as nominal head of the Chinese air force, May-ling often risked her life and her emotional well-being by going out to the airfield, a major Japanese target, to encourage the Chinese pilots. “It was strong medicine even for a man—the grim and hopeless manner as they went off to face ever lengthening odds, the long nerve-racking waiting, and the return of bloody, burned, and battle-glazed survivors,” Chennault said. “It always unnerved her, but she stuck it out, seeing that hot tea was ready and listening to their stories of the fighting.” May-ling managed to remain calm and consoling until the day four pilots were killed and five out of eleven planes returning from a mission were wrecked in trying to land. On that day she turned to Chennault and “burst into tears. ‘What can we do.… We buy them the best planes money can buy, spend so much time and money training them, and they are killing themselves before my eyes.’ “
Her concern and her knowledge of airplanes endeared her to the pilots. One of the Americans described a particularly bad day:
We got out there to survey the damage, but before we got out of the auto we see Madame Chiang out walking around the airplane that had been severely damaged. She had beaten us to the airport… she was a mighty brave woman. She was taking chances all the time during the war, as if she was one of the soldiers herself. After an air raid she seemed to hasten to the airport to count the boys when they came back in, and she insisted on there being coffee for them and was trying to do what she could to make it as easy as possible for these brave boys that really were fighting against odds and without replacements.
The generalissimo’s wife also talked another American into working for the Chinese air force. After the bombing of the International Settlement, she called Royal Leonard and asked him to come see her. “I was called to the Generalissimo’s headquarters at Nanking, on a small country estate outside the city,” Leonard wrote in his memoirs. “Madame Chiang Kai-shek met me in the living room. With her serious face and shining dark hair, dressed in brown slacks, she looked like a schoolgirl, but her attitude was all business. I knew that she was head of the air force.… I also knew that there was a great deal of jealousy among the air-corps generals because she held that post. They did not care to take orders from a woman. The records show, however, that during the time when Madame was in charge of Chinese aviation the corps was at a pitch of efficiency that has since been unequaled.”
“I want you to take charge of all Chinese bombardment,” she told Leonard.
“I am a pursuit pilot,” he answered. “I don’t know anything about bombardment.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she told him. “You are a good flyer and you have a good head. We need your judgment. You can be trusted. That is what we want.” Leonard said he would try.
May-ling resigned from her position with the air force in 1938, giving as her excuse the injuries she had suffered in the car accident on the road from Shanghai to Nanking. The real reason, however, was the discovery of corruption in the purchase of planes and aviation equipment—a scandal involving an agent named A. L. Patterson, a Chinese general, and her sister Ai-ling. According to the memorandum of a conversation between the American ambassador, Nelson T. Johnson, and a member of his staff, “Wing Commander Garnet Malley… was satisfied that Patterson had doubled, and in some cases trebled, the price of American aircraft sold to the Chinese Government over the list prices in the United States. This was done… to provide a larger ‘squeeze’ to Chinese officials handling the orders. Patterson… had even gone so far as to have special catalogues printed in China showing the adjusted prices and purporting to be the American catalogues. Malley said that Madam Chiang had asked him to suggest means of stopping the ‘squeeze.’ ” In one instance Patterson “had sold to the Aviation Commission one hundred if not two hundred radio sets; not only was the price… four times the right price, but the sets themselves were quite unsuitable for use on Chinese military planes, since it was impossible… to alter the wave length.”
According to this memo:
General Tzau had been mentioned for some time as the agent of Mrs. H. H. Kung in collecting ‘squeeze’ on the purchase of airplanes. I inquired… how it was that Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek, Mrs. Kung’s sister, could take any action which would, if carried to its conclusion, expose Mrs. Kung’s alleged part in these transactions. He [Malley] said that Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek had given orders to sift the matter to the bottom and that the bribery in connection with air plane purchases had been the subject of a struggle between the two sisters for some time. Commander Malley did not seem to think that Dr. H. H. Kung had any part in these corrupt practices nor even that he was cognizant of what was taking place.
Purchases made for the Chinese air force apparently passed through an entity called the Central Trust, a Chinese organization that, biographer Laura Tyson Li tells us, was under the influence of Madame Kung and that refused to give orders to any company not represented by Patterson. May-ling’s efforts to clean up the corruption were stopped by Chiang, who worried that this would have “gutted” the air force. According to Li, “He— and no doubt May-ling too—was reluctant to bring to light a scandal that would embarrass him and cast a pall over foreign aid that the country desperately needed as it struggled to resist the Japanese invasion.” Heeding the advice of Donald, May-ling “abruptly” resigned, taking the Chinese air force officers “completely by surprise and very crestfallen.”
In any case, by October of that year, fewer than twelve out of the ninety-one planes that had begun the fight with Japan were left, and many of China’s best pilots were dead. When Chiang’s government put out an official call for help to all the Great Powers, only Russia responded, sending four fighter and two bomber squadrons, complete with pilots, ground crews, and supplies. The Russians—“a sour and surly lot” according to one observer— were hoping that the Chinese would keep the Japanese occupied, hence too busy to attack the Soviet Union.* Later on, they sent another three hundred combat planes and a quantity of anti-aircraft artillery, although they complained that much of what they had sent was “misused,” “cracked up by inexperienced personnel,” or “disappeared” into squeeze. The total credit given China by Russia, according to Crozier, was $350 million, which the Chinese partially paid for in tungsten, wool, and tea.
Along with war materials, Stalin sent Chiang some advice on achieving national unity: “Tell the Generalissimo that if he wants to do away with any manifestation of disloyalty on the part of his people while the fight continues, he should arrange to shoot at least 4,500,000 persons. Otherwise,” Stalin said, “I fear that he will not be able to bring the war of resistance to a successful conclusion.”
26
The morning papers report that the hostilities in China must continue because China refuses to show “sincerity.” Henceforth I shall always hate that word because it will always remind me of the Japanese connotation of it: if I hit you and you hit back, you are obviously insincere.
—JOSEPH C. GREW, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO JAPAN, 1937
HAVING SENT his best troops to fight the Japanese in Shanghai, Chiang had to decide whether to try to defend Nanking or abandon it—an issue he threw open to a meeting with some of his top military men. Only one general recom
mended fighting it out with the Japanese. That was Tang Sheng-chih, who argued that by defending Nanking, the Chinese could slow down the Japanese army, thus giving the rest of their troops a chance to rest and regroup. It was a valid idea, but none of the generals present was willing to take on the job of leading the doomed. “Either I stay or you stay,” Chiang said, pointing to Tang—at which point Tang was forced, in the presence of his peers, to volunteer. He then held a press conference in which he promised to fight to the death for the capital. Reporters gave him an enthusiastic round of applause, although some noticed that, having just recovered from a major illness, he seemed “dazed if not doped,” and, according to Iris Chang,* was sweating “profusely.”
Having sent his government out of Nanking, the generalissimo called for 50,000 Chinese soldiers to move in and prepare the capital for invasion. The troops fortified the city walls, placed machine guns on the battlements, sandbagged the gates, and closed all but one to traffic. They burned a battle zone a mile wide around the perimeter of the city walls, causing untold misery to those who lived there. Meanwhile, the Chiangs had two hundred boxes packed with artworks and artifacts from the Palace Museum and put on a boat to be sent to a safe place.† In light of all this preparation, one would have thought that the Chinese could have put up more of a fight for the city. But, according to Iris Chang, the officials who left the city took with them most of the communications equipment, so that one part of the army could not talk to another. Moreover, the Chinese air force decamped with the officials, making it impossible for Tang to get any information on the location of Japanese guns. Worse, many of the soldiers brought in to defend Nanking were not seasoned fighters but new conscripts or men exhausted from recent battles.
With all the odds against him, Tang tried to arrange a truce with the Japanese, but the terms were rejected by the generalissimo, who ordered Tang to go to the dock, where he would be picked up and taken to safety. The only escape route from Nanking was its harbor—a frantic melee of screaming, pushing citizens and soldiers, all attempting to cross the Yangtze River to the place where junks waited to take them away. Once the boats were filled, some tried to escape by clinging to pieces of wood or swimming. Many drowned in the attempt. Those who remained were left to fend for themselves.
WHEN THEY ARRIVED in Nanking, the Japanese demanded that the city be surrendered intact, dropping leaflets that said that in order to “protect innocent civilians and cultural relics in the city,” the Chinese must give up without a fight. In return for compliance, they promised to be “kind and generous to non-combatants and to Chinese troops who entertained no enmity to Japan,” but to those who put up a fight, they would be “harsh and relentless.” When the Chinese tried to mount a pathetic defense, the Japanese field commander, an uncle of the emperor, gave his soldiers leave to mutilate, rape, and murder anyone they found. Orders were given to take no prisoners, and what came to be known in the history of holocausts as the Rape of Nanking began.
There were only some 50,000 Japanese soldiers to deal with about 500,000 Chinese civilians and 90,000 Chinese soldiers in the capital. This meant that the Japanese had to deceive those they planned to kill into believing that they would be treated according to international rules of warfare. Posters were put up bearing the message “Trust our Japanese army—they will protect and feed you,” but Chinese soldiers who gave up their arms were herded into outlying districts, divided into small groups, and beheaded or shot. With so many bodies, there was a problem of disposal. One Japanese general complained how hard it was to find ditches large enough to take 7,000 or 8,000 corpses. It was difficult to get enough fuel to cremate the vast numbers of bodies, and many were simply thrown into the muddy waters of the Yangtze.
With most of the soldiers gone, the citizens of Nanking were left to face the enemy on their own. Under the pretext of searching for soldiers, the Japanese soldiers moved from house to house and store to store, demanding that the doors be opened to welcome the victors and then gunning down the residents and shopkeepers. After looting, they often burned the premises. Even Japanese journalists were shocked by the results of these forays: “On Hsiakwan wharves,” one wrote,
there was the dark silhouette of a mountain made of dead bodies. About fifty to one hundred people were toiling there, dragging bodies from the mountain of corpses and throwing them into the Yangtze River. The bodies dripped blood, some of them still alive, and moaning weakly, their limbs twitching.… On the pier was a field of glistening mud under the moon’s dim light. Wow! That’s all blood! After a while, the coolies had done their job of dragging corpses and the soldiers lined them up along the river. Rat-tat-tat machine-gun fire could be heard. The coolies fell backward into the river and were swallowed by the raging currents.… A Japanese officer at the scene estimated that 20,000 people had been executed.
There was a great deal of sadism as well. Some Chinese citizens were nailed to wooden boards to be run over by tanks, crucified on trees or electrical posts, stripped of long pieces of skin, or had their eyes put out and noses and ears cut off before being killed. Other prisoners were tied together, thrown into pits, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. In one lethal game, the Chinese were driven to the top stories of buildings, the stairs were removed, and the buildings were incinerated. Still others were buried up to their waist and ripped apart by German shepherd dogs. There were medical experiments carried on in a secret location where scientists fed or injected prisoners with germs, poisons, and various lethal gases, killing about ten people a week.
Photographic evidence of the invaders’ inhumanity eventually made its way to the West. It came from snapshots taken by the Japanese themselves and given to Japanese photography shops in the International Settlement of Shanghai to develop. Risking their lives, a few Chinese employees made extra prints, which they sent to the Chinese Ministry of Information in Hankow, where the government had fled. These prints were given to an Australian journalist, Rhodes Farmer, who had them reproduced and sent, along with a covering story, to Look magazine. The pictures, declared spurious by the Japanese, were published around the world, while Farmer’s name was added to Japan’s death list. He wrote that he had other “pictures that the world will never see: Japanese soldiers in the act of raping Chinese women, Japanese soldiers tearing the clothes off young girls, and Japanese soldiers revoltingly examining the bodies of Chinese women. In one picture of a mass beheading, Japanese camera-fiends have climbed a tree to get better pictures.”
The worst suffering was endured by the women of Nanking. In the words of one Japanese soldier, “No matter how young or old, they all could not escape the fate of being raped. We sent out coal trucks… to seize a lot of women. And then each of them was allocated 15 to 20 soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse.” According to another soldier, “It would be all right if we only raped them, I shouldn’t say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk.… Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.” Iris Chang said that many of the Japanese soldiers believed that raping a virgin would make them more powerful on the battlefield, while some were even known to have the pubic hair of the girls they raped made into amulets to guard them against injury. According to a European observer, “There were girls under the age of 8 and women over the age of 70 who were raped and then, in the most brutal way possible, knocked down and beat up.… I saw the victims with my own eyes.”
As word of the unspeakable treatment of women drifted out of Nanking, there was, according to Iris Chang, a “massive outcry” from the nations of the West. In response—and in one of the strangest quirks of this or any other war—the Japanese established their infamous comfort houses. “By luring, purchasing, or kidnapping between eighty thousand and two hundred thousand women,” Chang said, “… the Japanese military hoped to reduce the incidence of random rape of local women (thereby diminishing the opportunity for international critic
ism), to contain sexually transmitted diseases through the use of condoms, and to reward soldiers for fighting on the battlefront for long stretches of time.”
One Japanese doctor who took part as a soldier in the Rape of Nanking and who tried to atone for the rest of his life had this to say: “Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water. They gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty and then killed them when they could no longer satisfy sexual requirements. I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things.”
It is estimated that somewhere in the range of 200,000 (some say closer to 300,000) Chinese were butchered in the first six weeks of the massacre. Some survivors made it into the Safety Zone, an area set up by about twenty Europeans and Americans who risked their lives to save their Chinese neighbors. Among these, the most notable were John Rabe, the leader of the Nazi Party in Nanking, “a splendid man” with “a tremendous heart”; Dr. Robert Wilson, the son of missionaries, who ruined his own health in attempting to care for the battered and broken Chinese; and Wilhemina Vautrin, an educator who took it upon herself to save as many women and girls as she could from rape and death. On December 18, 1937, Wilson wrote his family, “Today marks the sixth day of the modern Dante’s Inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape. Murder by the wholesale and rape by the thousands of cases. There seems to be no stop to the ferocity, lust and atavism of the brutes.”
The Last Empress Page 38
