During the six weeks of the Nanking Massacre, the Chinese were not simply murdered. They were tortured, humiliated, and raped. The Japanese used a wide variety of methods of murder. They chased the Chinese into the Yangtze River with machine guns, drowning them. They poured gasoline on people, and shot them, so the victims flickered up like candles. They cut the eyeballs out of men, and then burned the people while they were still living. They tied Chinese civilians up on posts, and threw grenades to watch their flesh fly. A Japanese general poured acid on a man until he died of corrosion. Some Chinese were attacked with awls. Others were castrated. Some Chinese even had their hearts cut out. Some women were beaten at the vagina with fists and other objects until they died. Even babies were victims; they were skewered and tossed into boiling water. Hakudo Nagatomi, a Japanese war veteran, described, "I remember smiling proudly as I took his [another general's] sword and began killing people...The head was cut clean off and tumbled away on the ground as the body slumped forward, blood spurting in two great gushing fountains from the neck."The Atrocities of the Massacre
View Image - A soldier holding a Chinese head.
Japanese soldiers laughingly made games out of these atrocities. The Japanese generals organized contests to see how many Chinese one soldier could murder in a given time. Whoever killed the most won. News reporters and visitors came to observe the competitions and raise praise for the victor back in Japan. Sometimes the number of bodies reached as high as five-hundred in a single contest. In one such contest, two officers were racing to one hundred. However, they lost count, so they continued to one hundred and fifty. A short while later, the Nichi-nichi, a Tokyo newspaper, printed the story with pride.
Highly respected Japanese doctors and scientists went to China to do scientific research on unwilling
Chinese victims. In many cases, the subjects were American and Russian prisoners. Tests were done without anesthesia or pain killers. The Japanese placed people in pressure chambers to see how long it would take until their eyes popped out of the sockets. Lethal bacteria and other biological weapons were tested on people tied to stakes. Fetuses were cut from pregnant women and preserved in jars. The Japanese government also sponsored bombings of bubonic plague on villages to test germ warfare for later use on the United States.
View image - Women dead after being raped.
Because over twenty thousand women and girls were raped, the Nanking Massacre is also referred to as the Rape of Nanking. The Japanese officers encouraged their soldiers to rape wherever they went. One officer told his soldiers, "To avoid troubles,... kill them after that." So, soldiers raped in gangs of dozens and murdered the women afterward. The victims had their stomachs cut open or their breasts chopped off. "Comfort women" were kept as sex slaves in wood cabins to service the Japanese soldiers throughout the day. In one incident, a mother, two teenage daughters, and a one year old baby were raped in their own home. The family was raped and killed on their own tables and beds. When the International Committee entered the house to photograph the incident, they found blood everywhere.
The Japanese finally left China when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the six weeks of horror, Nanking was left in ruins. The storehouses were empty, and the civilians had lost everything. Their jewelry, coins, food, clothes, heirlooms, pets, and even everyday objects like dental floss were stolen. Only bodies were in abundance. So many dead bodies clogged the streets it was hard to move around, even on foot. They floated in the river for a year afterwards, emitting a smell for miles around. The International Committee buried the bodies in mass graves and kept close count of the marked sites.
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