Top-secret Chinese Nationalist Documents Reveal the Truth about the Nanking Incident
TOP-SECRET
CHINESE NATIONALIST DOCUMENTS REVEAL THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NANKING
INCIDENT
Higashinakano Shudo
Professor of Intellectual History
Asia University, Tokyo
Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact
Published by Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact
Shin Sakuma Bldg., 3F
2-13-14, Nishi-Shimbashi,
Minato-ku, Tokyo, 150-003
Japan
Copyright c2008 by Higashinakano Shudo
Original Japanese Language edition
published by Seishisha, Tokyo, Japan 2006.
English translation rights
owned by Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact.
All rights reserved, including the rights of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Printed in Japan
Note:
Japanese, Chinese and Korean personal names have been rendered surname first, in accordance with
customs in those countries.
The hanyu pinyin Romanization system has been used to translate Chinese personal and place names, with
the exception of Wade-Giles translations that are still in common use (e.g. Yangtze River, Chiang Kai-
shek).
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: UNCOVERING A TOP-SECRET DOCUMENT 1
§1 What War Means as the authority for the Nanking Massacre
§2 Suspicions that What War Means was a work of propaganda
§3 Getting hold of a top-secret document
§4 What War Means was an anti-Japanese propaganda book after all
§5 For a new investigation from the perspective of war propaganda
CHAPTER 2: BEFORE THE INSTITUTION OF INTERNATIONAL PROPAGANDA DIVISION
15
§1 From the Second Shanghai Incident to all-out warfare
§2 The Nanking dilemma: abandon the city, or defend it to the last man
§3 The establishment of the International Propaganda Section of the Kuomintang’s Central Propaganda
Bureau
§4 Dong Xianguang and Zeng Xubai: the men who spearheaded the Kuomingang’s CPB
CHAPTER 3: MASTERFUL INTERNATIONAL PROPAGANDA 25
§1 The propaganda operations and anti-enemy propaganda that were the core of international
propaganda
§2 Propaganda operations using Christian organizations
§3 Propaganda operations using foreign friends
§4 A thorough and rigorous screening of articles by foreign journalists
§5 The aim of anti-enemy propaganda
§6 Anti-enemy propaganda aimed at Japanese forces on the continent
§7 Anti-enemy propaganda aimed at Japanese inside and outside Japan
CHAPTER 4: THE PRELUDE TO REPORTING THE NANKING
MASSACRE 51
§1 The inauguration of the International Committee
§2 Tea parties and meetings with journalists held in Nanking
§3 The number of refugees
§4 The site of the Safety Zone
§5 Chinese military installations that did not withdraw from the Safety Zone
§6 Defensive problems with the Safety Zone’s fatal defects
§7 Those around Rabe, part one ? the Americans involved with the Guomindang government
§8 Those around Rabe, part two ? the hiding of Chinese soldiers
§9 Those around Rabe, part three ? why were Chinese soldiers left behind?
§10 Disarming Chinese soldiers and letting them into the Safety Zone
CHAPTER 5: WERE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER ARTICLES PART OF THE CPB’S
PROPAGANDA WAR? 77
§1 The CPB anticipated defeat in the battle for Nanking
§2 The CPB and the newspapermen
§3 Durdin’s article
§4 There was another plan to make Japan pay dearly to occupy Nanking
§5 Durdin and Steel report a “massacre in Nanking”
§6 What did the other three journalists see?
§7 Smith’s talk
§8 Records of foreigners living in Nanking
§9 Bates’ “report” to the American newspapers
§10 Those concerned with What War Means get started
§11 There was no response to the American articles
§12 The CPB recognized that the “Nanking Massacre Story” was a false report
CHAPTER 6: RE-EXAMINING THE PROPAGANDA BOOK WHAT WAR MEANS
109
§1 The role served by Timperley’s foreword
§2 The raw voices of Chapters One through Four of What War Means
§3 Investigation 1 ? the first chapter of What War Means
§4 Population distribution up to the fall of Nanking
§5 The four-day period after the fall of Nanking
§6 Investigation 2 ? the second chapter of What War Means
§7 Investigation 3 ? the third chapter of What War Means
§8 Further evidence for a large number of executions
§9 The burial detail’s report was revised
§10 Investigation 4 ? the first half of Chapter Four of What War Means
CHAPTER 7: THE CENTRAL PROPAGANDA BUREAU DIDN’T
THINK THERE WAS A NANKING MASSACRE 153
§1 Chinese soldiers after the city’s fall viewed in the light of international wartime law
§2 Ironclad rules that remain unchanged even today
§3 How should we regard Chinese soldiers who discarded their uniforms?
§4 The CPB examined the legality of the Japanese army’s executions
§5 The CPB erases Bates’ two sentences
§6 The government of Chiang Kai-shek continued to remove the insinuation of Japan’s unlawful execution
of 40,000
§7 Bates himself repudiated the claim of Japan’s unlawful execution of 40,000
§8 Further evidence that the CPB considered the executions to be lawful
CHAPTER 8: THE TOP-SECRET DOCUMENTS WERE A TREASURE TROVE ? WITH AN
EPILOGUE 173
§1 Taking the viewpoint of propaganda warfare
§2 The basis for the Tokyo Tribunal was “the statements of witnesses”
§3 The witnesses who should have appeared at the Tokyo Tribunal did not do so
§4 The three American witnesses
§5 Problems with Bates
§6 Upon opening the treasure trove that was the top-secret documents
BIBLIOGRAPHY 183
AUTHOR PROFILE 191
CHAPTER ONE:
UNCOVERING A TOP-SECRET DOCUMENT
They say that it is darkest at the base of the lighthouse, and it is true. In writing about the Nanking Incident,
one would think that all the historical documents have already been used up, but the principal documents
have been left out. What I had overlooked was documents of the Guomindang’s Central Propaganda
Bureau (hereafter CPB), who took on the duties of conducting propaganda warfare against Japan during
the Sino?Japanese War (1937?1945).
Due to the military weakness on the part of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces at the time, they began
putting all their efforts into conducting a war of propaganda starting just before the fall of Nanking on Dec.
13, 1937. The CPB considered that, if one excludes the use of military force in the prosecution of this war,
propaganda becomes one of the prime factors in deciding the victory. Therefore, their watchword became
“propaganda takes precedence over tactics.” I wondered if there were not somewhere to be found
documents intended to make Japan look bad and isolate Japan internationally ? documents critical of the
Japanese army ? and I exhausted every means to find them.
After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which burst forth on July 7, 1937, provoking the Second Shanghai
Incident on Aug. 13, there is no way they could have missed the Japanese army in Nanking with the fall of
the capital on Dec. 23. If, perchance, there had been some faults in the Japanese army in Nanking, what
could it have been? They would certainly have drawn more attention to it, and worked harder to get
exacting information about the situation.
In 2003, I decided to search for these records in historical documents repositories in Taipei. It was about
that time that I started to get the feeling that the book What War Means, which is one of the most important
authoritative sources on the Nanking Massacre, was in fact a work of propaganda produced by the CPB.
§1 What War Means as the authority for the Nanking Massacre
According to the verdict of the Tokyo Trials, there was a massacre in Nanking perpetrated by the
Japanese army after the city’s fall, with the number of the slain counted as several tens of thousands, over a
hundred thousand, or over two hundred thousand, and it was compared to the Nazi Holocaust.
Nonetheless, in China, where there would have to have been many who were its victims, and in Japan,
where there would have to have been many who had been involved in its perpetration, and even among the
Allies who had decreed Japan’s guilt, it was different than the Holocaust: for a long time, no one ever
spoke of the Nanking Massacre. It wasn’t in the textbooks, either. The Nanking Massacre had been
judged as happened, but thereafter it was not taken seriously as a historical truth.
If one reads A Detailed History of Japan, published in 1975, all that appears is:
Therein, on July 7, 1937, after the establishment of the cabinet of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, conflict
broke out between the Japanese and Chinese armies on the outskirts of Beijing (the Marco Polo Bridge
Incident). Prime Minister Konoe declared his intent that the hostilities be confined and should not spread,
but the military actions of local forces caused the conflict to widen. At the end of September, the
Guomindang joined forces with the Communist Party to create a united front to counter the Japanese army.
Confronted by this resistance, the Japanese threw a large force into the fray and expanded the battle lines,
but Prime Minister Konoe, unable to grasp the opportunity to bring things under control, announced in
January of 1938 that “we will not deal with the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek.”
There is no record of the Nanking Massacre here. Now, however, it appears in every textbook published
in Japan. What follows are the particulars of how this has come about.
It was less than half a century after the Tokyo Trials (in 1972) that relations were reestablished between
China and Japan. That same year, Honda Katsuichi published Travels in China. Honda, a journalist with the
Asahi newspaper, had made a trip to China the previous year and written a series of articles called “Travels
in China” for his paper; the book was a compilation of his articles. It became a bestseller and had
considerable repercussions.
“My purpose in going to China,” said Honda, “was, as I had already informed the Chinese when I applied
for permission [to visit], to make clear the Chinese viewpoint on the actions of the Japanese soldiers who
had fought in China during the War ? in particular, putting emphasis on any Japanese acts of brutality,
visiting the actual sites of the brutalization and walking around and hearing first-hand the voices of the
surviving victims.” [Emphasis in the original]
For his book, Honda collected testimony from survivors on the question of whether the Japanese army
actually committed brutalities during the Sino?Japanese War.
The first time they read of “brutalities committed by the Japanese army” written from the viewpoint of the
Chinese, it came as a considerable shock to the Japanese people, who have achieved a post-war
restoration powered by a high level of economic growth and who are enjoying peace and prosperity.
In point of fact, at that time, only 35 years had passed since the fall of Nanking. We had among us many
people who had participated in the battle for Nanking. A great number of people who had no idea just
couldn’t believe it, and wondered if it might not be part truth and part lie. Moreover, even though evidence
to back up the stories of Chinese eyewitnesses were scarce, to be certain, Japanese hearts were pierced
by the Chinese people’s pathos-inducing accounts of “brutalities committed by the Japanese army.”
The next year (1973), the rediscovery of an English book written by those charging that there had been a
massacre, What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China, seemed to present some authority to support
the claims of a massacre.
The book, published in New York and London in 1938, was put together by Harold Timperley, a
Shanghai-based correspondent for the British newspaper Manchester Guardian, who compiled anonymous
manuscripts from European and American residents of Nanking. It was a book that was made with the
intention of expressing the misery of war, and in particular it took up the issue of Japanese atrocities
committed in Nanking. To be sure, the independent, third-party perspective of Europeans and Americans
can be felt by those who read this unique book.
The contributors to the book were anonymous, but letters and “memos” from Americans who supposedly
saw the whole thing from before through after the fall of Nanking primarily accuse the Japanese army of
murder, rape, looting, and arson.
What made the evaluation of What War Means rise by leaps and bounds was afterwards, when it was
made known that two of the contributors were Professor Miner Bates and the missionary George Fitch.
Bates, in particular, had appeared at the Tokyo Trials, where he was one of those who accused the
Japanese army of atrocities. The evidence he gave in the Tokyo Trials was clearly identical to his accounts
in What War Means (which came out only seven months after the fall of Nanking). This became a novel
way of presenting evidence supporting the verdict of the Tokyo Trials.
Professor Bates, a famous missionary, taught at the prestigious Nanking University. One would think that
there was no way he would commit perjury, and no reason for him to lie, so there was no need to verify the
content of What War Means.
With What War Means as the authority, books claiming a massacre in Nanking came out one after the
other. One example is The Road to Nanjing [sic.] (1986) by Honda Katsuichi, who collected the testimony
of survivors who had personal experiences of the Nanking massacre. Another is Shimosato Masaki’s A
Collection of Records Related to the Nanking Incident Kyoto Division (1989), edited primarily from
soldiers’ diaries and memoirs. Yet another example is A History of the Battle for Nanking and Collected
Documents of the Battle for Nanking (both 1989), produced by the Nanking Battle Historical Editorial
Committee, based principally on testimony of people connected with the Japanese army and diaries of
those in the field.
In 1992, the Nanking Incident Investigative Research Committee published Collected Documents of the
Nanking Incident, America-related Materials, further bolstering the claims within What War Means. This
book also contains the American newspaper articles reporting the Nanking Massacre which were
published three days after the fall of the city, and the correspondence between the Shanghai-based
journalist Timperley, who published What War Means, and the Nanking-resident missionary Professor
Bates.
By now, the contents of What War Means have come to be considered immutable truths that are incapable
of being brought into question. Reports by Europeans and Americans at the scene were thrust under the
noses of the Japanese as truths that had been unknown to them. The accusation was that the Nanking
Massacre had been made known to the world when it happened, at the fall of the city, while the Japanese
knew nothing.
“NHK Special ‘World of Images’ Japan II,” a program featuring the Nanking Massacre, was televised in
1996, re-broadcast in 2003, and later released on CD-ROM. It showed newsreel footage from Paramount
News and concluded with the commentary, “the so-called Nanking Massacre came to be a problem
known to the Japanese only after the post-war Tokyo Trials.”
The Japanese had not been apprised of the truth to that point, and the societal trend of accepting that there
had indeed been a Nanking Massacre spread. The verdict of the Tokyo Trials (lending a sense of truth in
name but not in substance) went on to impress on the Japanese the belief that the Massacre had, in fact,
taken place.
Since all of this happened, the Nanking Incident ? which had not appeared at all in the 37 years after
Japan’s defeat in Japanese historical textbooks ? has appeared in virtually every historical textbook
published in Japan.
For example, a junior high-school Japanese history textbook published in 2001 by Nihon Shoseki said:
Hostilities erupted on July 7, 1937, between the Chinese and Japanese armies at the Marco Polo Bridge on
the outskirts of Beijing. Without a formal declaration of war, Japan began an all-out war against China (the
Sino-Japanese War). At year’s end, the Japanese army occupied the capital city, Nanking. It is said that at
this instance some 200,000 Chinese prisoners and civilians were murdered, and acts of violence and looting
were visited upon the Chinese. Because of this (the Nanking Incident), Japan bore harsh international
criticism.
A footnote to this entry says, “Most Japanese didn’t know of this incident until after the war ended.”
A history textbook published in China offers:
When the Japanese army occupied Nanking, they exacted a bloody slaughter on the citizens of the city,
committing offenses that blackened the heavens…. In the six weeks after Nanking’s fall, they butchered
over 300,000 civilians who didn’t even have side arms and soldiers who had abandoned their weapons.
There is even a Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall in China, inaugurated in 1985, which was built after a
worldwide solicitation for donations, much as had been done with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
This has been the flow of events in Japan surrounding the Nanking Incident over the 60-odd years since
Japan’s defeat in World War II. What War Means became the nucleus ? or perhaps it became the filler
? and debate, writing, and theorizing on the Nanking Massacre have grown. Had there been no What
War Means, would the Nanking Massacre have made it into the textbooks? Such are the manifest
ramifications of this book.
§2 Suspicions that What War Means was a work of propaganda
From the particulars already laid out above, one can say with certainty that there are those who charge that
there was a Nanking Massacre ? so much so, in fact, that they said that the Nanking Massacre was made
known to the whole world immediately after the city’s fall. But wait a minute. To be sure, after the fall of
Nanking, American newspapers published accounts of the “Rape of Nanking,” and seven months after the
city fell, writings of American and European who claimed to have witnessed the brutality of Japanese
soldiers in Nanking were published in What War Means. Therefore, there is no mistake in making the claim
that people came to publicize worldwide the Nanking Massacre from the time of the city’s fall itself.
Be that as it may, however, a matter may be “made known” ? but the issue of whether the substance of
that “made known” matter is true or false is a completely different problem. To be honest, I, too, had been
dragged along by the strange power of “the Nanking Massacre was publicized to the whole world at the
time of the fall of the city,” and didn’t clearly see the distinction of substance vs. concept. Researchers find
themselves in a position of clear distinctions, and have to academically verify historical records that have
been uncovered.
With research conducted in recent years, it has become obvious to everyone the Nanking Massacre can
not be conclusively identified as a historical truth. For example, if one compares the incidents described in
What War Means to other historical documents to verify them (as described in Chapter Six), problems and
contradictions appear one after the other. In addition, with a careful reading of the “Daily Reports of
Serious Injuries to Civilians” that are collected as an appendix in What War Means, as laid out herein in
Chapter Five, what appears are clearly nothing but hearsay accounts, and there is virtually nothing to
confirm them.
What is more, it becomes clear that the people who were most deeply involved in What War Means were
not in fact working as an independent, third-party. According to A Cyclopedia of Recent Foreign Visitors
to China, the book’s editor, Timperley, is listed as a “adviser” with the Central Propaganda Bureau. Suzuki
Akira, in his New Edition: Illusions of the “Nanking Massacre” (1999) and Kitamura Minoru’s The Politics
of Nanjing [sic.]: An Impartial Investigation (2001), both make this clear. Suzuki concludes that the
Guomindang CPB in the capital of Hankou “exerted all their efforts … and they were successful.”
Professor Kitamura, citing the authority of Zeng Xubai: Autobiographyi and Wang Lingxiao’s Research on
KMT’s News Administration Policy, argues that What War Means was “a work of propaganda.” In his
Autobiography, published post-war, Zeng bears witness that the CPB “paid out money, requested that
[Timperley] write a book, and succeeded in having it published.”
The next item makes it even more clear. According to an editorial note in the January, 1940, issue of China
Monthly, the wife of Miner Bates, the man who contributed to What War Means and appeared at the
Tokyo Trials, was a close personal friend of Soong Ch’ing-ling, the wife of Chiang Kai-shek.
Both Timperly and Bates had connections of some sort to the Guomindang ? What War Means was not a
book published independently by a third party with no connections to the events.
More and more, suspicions are coming to the surface that What War Means was actually a work of
propaganda.
Thinking practically, as long as doubts and contradictions remain concerning a given matter, one can not
simply declare that it is a fact. It is unforgivable that it is being published in textbooks from which children
learn. It would be difficult to erase in a day words that are in all the textbooks the Japanese government
certifies, however, and that have already seared themselves in the Japanese consciousness. Even if one
points out one’s doubts, they would be rejected as mere conjecture. To make the truth clear, one must
understand what kind of book What War Means ?the book that is both nucleus and filler of the Nanking
Massacre ? truly is; evidence to prove that it is a product of Guomindang propaganda is necessary.
I reflected on the saying about darkness at the base of the lighthouse. Somewhat belatedly, I realized that I
had to look for the historical documents of the CPB from that time.
§3 Getting hold of a top-secret document
The CPB documents I was searching for were resting soundly in the Guomindang Historical Documents
Archive in Taipei. According to Wartime Chinese Reportage by Cheng Qiheng (1944), in the CPB were
six sections (the Regular Propaganda Section, International Propaganda Section, Art Propaganda Section,
Publication Propaganda Section, Newspaper Operations Section, and the General Affairs Section) and
four offices (the Specialists’ Office, Supervisory Office, Publication Review Office, and the Personal Affairs
Office). There were nine other attached organs including a central news agency and photography office.
One of the documents of the International Propaganda Section was An Overview of Propaganda
Operations of the International Information Division of the Central Propaganda Bureau of the Nationalist
Party: from 1938 to April 1941, which has ties to What War Means. It was stamped at the head “Top
Secret.” It was the first time that I had seen or held in my hands this highly confidential document.
The photograph on the next page is that document’s first page. It is handwritten, character by character,
and typical for the time, was reproduced by mimeograph.
First, take a look at the diagram of the makeup of the International Propaganda Department. The chart
shows six sections (the Editorial Section, External Affairs Section, Anti-Enemy [i.e., Counter-Intelligence]
Section, Photographic Section, the International Broadcasting Section, and the General Affairs Section)
and two offices (the Broadcasting Office and the Documents Office).
Three domestic organs ? the Shanghai Residential Office, the Chengdu Editorial Committee Office, and
the Overseas Telegraph Office ? are attached to the Chinese international intelligence operations, while
the overseas offices listed are the Hong Kong, London, and New York Residential Offices.
When exactly did the CPB begin conducting its international propaganda operations? The activities of the
various departments are all reported in this top-secret document. If one looks at the “Summary of Foreign
Section Operations,” which reports on the administration of contacts with foreign special correspondents
and foreign embassies, one finds: “On Nov. 1, 1937, this Division [the International Propaganda Division]
ordered the opening of an office in Hankou.” In “Summary of Anti-Enemy Section Operations,” one finds: “
On December 1, 1937, operations began.”
The CPB’s top-secret Overview of Propaganda Operations of the International Propaganda Division of the
Central Propaganda Bureau (1941 mimeograph). It is imprinted “Top Secret” in the top-right corner.
Preserved in the Guomindang Party Archives in Taipei, Taiwan.
Thus we find that the operations of the various sections began at different times, but they all appear to have
begun about a month before the fall of Nanking, which occurred on Dec. 23, 1937. This top-secret
document
? An Overview of Propaganda Operations of the Central Propaganda Bureau ? holds classified
accounts that record the details of all of the diverse propaganda operations conducted by the offices of the
International Propaganda Division over the three-year period of 1938 to April of 1941.
We can get a glimpse of the nature of CPB meetings by looking at the Summary of Propaganda Operations
(hereafter [Oral] Summary of Propaganda Operations), which were booklets in which the oral reports from
the executive committees were recorded.
It must be noted that this summary, also housed in Taipei’s Guomindang Historical Documents Archive, are
different reports than the Overview of Propaganda Operations of the CPB. One report begins:
Chairman, comrades ?
Written accounts of ten months of propaganda operations since the Fifth National Convention of the
Central Executive Committee have been presented under a separate cover, but we will here present to you
the basics of these operations in an oral report. As concerns the concrete details of the various types of
propaganda operations: before discussing each of the articles, we would like to apprise you of the general
disposition of the current status of propaganda operations.
First, we feel that the “combative nature” of propaganda operations [conducted] since the Resistance
[began] is growing particularly strong. Propaganda hitherto has been a type of warfare, but the combative
nature of propaganda operations only grows higher in times of war.… Second, we believe that the since the
Second-stage Resistance, the nature of the organization of propaganda operations has become particularly
important.
The (Oral) Summary of Propaganda Operations (1938). This document, highlighting the nature of the
conflict in propoganda efforts, is preserved in the Guomindang Party Archives in Taipei. The line was
placed by this author
This was the state of things at the assembly in November of 1938, almost a year after the fall of Nanking.
How about it? With the usage of “you” in that first paragraph, can’t you just feel the breath of those people
back then, huddling together over their propaganda plots? It is as if one can feel their enthusiasm for
propaganda when they use the term “combative nature” and make the catchphrase “propaganda has
priority over tactics.”
§4 What War Means was an anti-Japanese propaganda book after all
As I have said, I went looking for historical documents of the CPB to determine whether What War Means
was or was not actually a work of propaganda.
Inside the top secret document I found, in a section titled “Summary of Anti-Enemy Operations,” the
heading, “I. Editorial production of a book for anti-enemy propaganda” (emphasis mine), and under that
heading, “1. Books.” The following is that section, which makes it all clear:
1. Books
There were two pieces of anti-enemy propaganda publications edited and produced by this Division [the
International Propaganda Division].
A. Japanese Atrocities Witnessed by Foreigners
This book was written by the famous English journalist Timperley. The book records detailed accounts of
heinous acts ? rape, arson, looting ? and a breakdown in military discipline and circumstances of
depraved human conditions after the enemy entered Nanking in Dec. 13, 1937.
In Section “A,” the name “Timperley” is written in phonetically in Chinese characters. Japanese Atrocities
Witnessed by Foreigners was published in English translation as What War Means. What War Means,
edited by Timperley, was one of the two books that were “anti-enemy propaganda publications edited and
produced by this Division [the International Propaganda Division].” The other book mentioned in “1”
above is the here omitted subsection “B,” identified as The Offspring of God Are in China, said to have
been written by an Italian. (See page 61 for this entry.)
Some may object and say that “anti-enemy propaganda publications edited and produced by this Division”
could simply mean that the International Propaganda Division oversaw the translation of a work into
English. To make doubly certain, let me add that both the English edition of What War Means and the
Chinese edition of Japanese Atrocities Witnessed by Foreigners were published in July of 1938. Given the
fact that they were published at the same time, and that, as I already mentioned, Zeng Xubai recalled that
the CPB “paid out money, requested that [Timperley] write a book, and succeeded in having it published,”
objections that they are different books simply cannot stand.
Given all of the above, it is confirmed that What War Means was the “propaganda book” that was
produced by the CPB. What War Means and its appended data, which have for a long time been the basis
of “the Nanking Massacre,” have to now be viewed from the position that they are wartime propaganda.
§5 For a new investigation from the perspective of war propaganda
Thus have I fulfilled my intentions in unearthing that top-secret document. So that there will be no
misunderstandings, let me state that I am not saying that just because What War Means was a work of
propaganda produced by the CPB, we can immediately say that there was no Nanking Massacre.
Accordingly, at that point I decided to put the top-secret document aside, and thereafter intended to
analyze other historical documents with the added viewpoint of wartime propaganda.
In January of 2003, as I was again going over the top-secret document I had gotten hold of the first time I
went to Taiwan, by chance something strange caught my attention. Even though depictions of what was
called “murder after murder” appeared frequently in What War Means, as I read the afore-mentioned
“Summary of Anti-Enemy Section Operations,” I realized that in the description that summarizes What War
Means, the word “murder” ? to say nothing of the word “massacre” ? does not appear at all! Who
would summarize What War Means, and yet not mention murder and massacre as they appear so
prominently in the book? Wouldn’t it be only natural to mention them?
Even if I carefully went over the 43-page copy I made of the Overview of Propaganda Operations of the
CPB the first time I went to Taiwan, I could find no mention of “murder” or “massacre” at Nanking. If there
had been a massacre in Nanking, it would only be natural that it would be mentioned in this top-secret
document, as it would get considerable attention for propaganda purposes in every section of the CPB ?
but it was simply not to be found. It was very strange. What could this mean? I had become caught up in
yet another problem and inconsistency.
Thereupon, to unravel this mystery, I once again made my way to Taiwan. The first time, through the
courtesy of the Guomindang Historical Documents Archives, I was able to copy the 43 pages of the
document a bit at a time; since the second time I went, however, even though these are documents
available to the public, I was not able to get copies. Instead, I had to copy them out by hand. Since it took
considerable time to copy the documents longhand, the third time I went to Taiwan, I prevailed upon a
person I knew in Taiwan to input the text into a computer. This was how I got a complete copy of the CPB
’s top-secret Overview of Propaganda Operations of the CPB.
I had gotten hold of a priceless historical document. While I was digesting it, I set to work to do something
that I had not tried before: I looked at the previous historical documents once again ? this time interpreting
them from a new viewpoint. This book is the result of that investigation and analysis.
Finally, I would like to point out the distinctive feature of the top-secret Overview of Propaganda
Operations of the CPB, which is the focus of this book.
First, this is a contemporary document from the period which summarizes three years’ worth of operations
conducted by the International Propaganda Division of the CPB, based on the CPB’s use of every possible
means to counter the Japanese army. Second, this is different from private memoirs or diaries. This is an
official record of the CPB which at the time was at war with my country, and which exerted its full force
against Japan. Third, this was a secret, internal report that was written confidentially and never intended to
be released to the outside.
CHAPTER TWO:
BEFORE THE INSTITUTION OF INTERNATIONAL PROPAGANDA DIVISION
After the fall of Shanghai on Nov. 12, 1937, with Chiang Kai-shek’s decision that the capital of Nanking
would be defended to the last man, it was obvious to everyone that China’s Nationalist Army was going to
lose. If Chiang Kai-shek could draw the Japanese army into China’s interior and use the vast territories of
China themselves as a weapon, however, by fighting a sustained war of attrition against the Japanese he
might not lose ? even if he couldn’t win. He decided to employ that strategy, so he launched a
propaganda war with the stated intent that “propaganda takes precedence over tactics.” To make this fully
operational, with the forming of the Second United Front of the Guomindang and the Communists just
before the battle for Nanking, the International Propaganda Division was organized within the Guomindang’
s Central Propaganda Bureau with personnel from both the Guomindang and the Communist Party.
§1 From the Second Shanghai Incident to all-out warfare
In the 1930s, Japan’s neighbor China ? full as it was with military factions ? was in a state of continuous
civil war. It was not a unified nation as China is today. Among the factions, the most powerful was Chiang
Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Militarily, Chiang set out to unify the country with the northern expedition to bring
down the other factions. He also went after Mao Zedong’s Communist Party.
In 1934, Mao, hotly pursued, began the migration to Yenan, where it would be easy to obtain needed
resources and supplies from the Soviet Union. This flight became famously known as “The Long March.”
Chiang Kai-shek was in a position to crush the Communists once and for all, but he held back. In Mao:
The Unknown Story, authors Jun Chan and Jon Halliday say that Chiang agreed to allow the Communists
to continue to exist to ensure the safety of his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who was living in Moscow at the
time.
Starting in 1935, Mao began calling for an expansion of “the people’s war against Japan” and for the
implementation of a campaign of resistance against Japan, and there were complaints that Chiang should
redirect the target of his attacks from the Communists to the Japanese. Chiang, however, had no plans to
engage in an all-out war against Japan. Then, something happened that totally turned everything around. On
Dec. 12, 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was taken captive in Xi’an by Zhang Xueliang in what became known as
the Xi’an Incident. After about two weeks of captivity, Chiang agreed to end the civil war against the
Communists and give full priority to the war with Japan. He was then released.
Why did Chiang agree to place the war against Japan over the extermination of the Communists? That has
long been a puzzling question. The explanation for this, found in Mao: The Unknown Story, came from an
extensive reading of letters and related documents from Chinese military leaders now kept in a historical
archive in Moscow.
According to the authors’ finding, Stalin was concerned about Japan moving north toward the Soviet
border, and he wanted Chiang to engage the Japanese army and draw them into the heart of China and
away from his border. Chiang, held captive in Xi’an, heard that Stalin was willing to agree to return his son
to China, so he agreed to give priority to fighting the Japanese.
Seven months after the Xi’an Incident, on June 7, 1937, at the Marco Polo Bridge north of Beijing, shots
were fired at the Japanese army. Following the Boxer Protocol, the Japanese were drilling with blank
ammunition. It was an attack by the Chinese 29th Army. The attack continued for a second wave, and then
a third. The Japanese army tried to respond to the attacks with self-control, but at 5:30 in the morning of
the 8th, the fourth attack came; it had been seven hours since the first. With a clear field of vision in the
early morning, the Japanese army finally counter-attacked after the fourth assault.
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident was followed by the Guanganmen Incident, the Tongzhou Massacre, and
so on. The incident in Tongzhou is particularly notable. On June 29, in Tongzhou, east of Beijing, Chinese
soldiers rose up without warning and massacred the 300 Japanese residents living in the area. When it was
all over, the bodies of men with their eyes gouged out and their organs spilled, and the nude bodies of
women who had been stabbed to death, were scattered all about. It was a pitiful scene.
Japan had a policy of not expanding the sphere of conflict, however. Chiang Kai-shek, too, had no plans to
move toward all-out warfare between China and Japan. To that end, peace talks were scheduled to take
place in Shanghai on Aug. 9. In Shanghai, however, there was an incident in which members of the Chinese
Peace Preservation Corps shot and killed a Japanese naval lieutenant junior grade named Oyama Isao and
another man.
Shanghai at the time was divided; one part was “Shanghai city” and was governed by Chiang Kai-shek,
and the other part was the “foreign concession,” which was territory governed by foreigners. There was a
French concession, and a co-governed group of British, American, Italian, and Japanese concessions.
Americans, Europeans, and Japanese lived in those concessions, and there were troop detachments from
each country in place to defend each concession.
According to the 1938 edition of the China Yearbook, there were 1,700 American troops, 2,500 British
troops, 2,500 French troops, and 770 Italian troops. To protect the 30,000 Japanese residents of
Shanghai, there were but 2,500 Japanese naval troops. Between Aug. 13 and 19, 20,000 Japanese
residents returned to Japan, but there were 10,000 who stayed. The naval detachment was reinforced from
Japan, bringing their total strength up to 5,000.
Chiang Kai-shek had already given the order for widespread mobilization on July 12, ordering the Central
Army 10th Division into Shanghai on Aug. 9, before the Shanghai Incident took place. Three days later ?
on Aug. 12 ? the total Chinese forces in Shanghai numbered 50,000. That was not all. Under the
leadership of German advisors, the Chinese had launched a program to train a corps of picked troops and
construct a series of strong bunkers. Preparations for war in Shanghai were nearly complete.
Chiang still was wary of expanding the scope of the war, however. Gen. Zhang Zhizhong, commandant of
the Shanghai-Nanking Military District, requested permission to attack the Japanese army, but he was
refused. Disregarding his instructions from Chiang Kai-shek, Gen. Zhang went ahead with his assault on the
Japanese. On Aug. 8, it became an all-out war between China and Japan. According to Mao: The Untold
Story, the one who took advantage of the situation to expand into full-fledged war between the two
countries was none other than Gen. Zhang Zhizhong. This central figure in the Guomindang military was, in
fact, a Communist Party spy hiding in their midst.
§2 The Nanking dilemma: abandon the city, or defend it to the last man
The Japanese forces in Shanghai were being hard pressed. This was because the Chinese army firmly held
their positions by means of their bunkers and trenches. At this, the Japanese struck at Shanghai from the
south. On Nov. 5, the Japanese 10th Army, dispatched from Japan in haste, landed at the port of
Hangzhou, seven kilometers south of Nanking. Struck from behind by the Japanese assault, the Chinese
army was routed. The Japanese were finally able to take Shanghai on Nov. 12. The battle caused a huge
number of Japanese and Chinese fatalities.
The day before Shanghai fell ? Nov. 11 ? Chiang Kai-shek was in discussions in the capital of Nanking
with generals Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi, He Yingqin, Tang Shengzhi, Xu Bingchang, and the German
advisor Alexander von Falkenhausen. The question was whether Nanking should be abandoned or
defended to the last man.
Gen. Li Zongren is recorded in volume one of Collected Documents of the Battle for Nanking as arguing, “I
am opposed to the defense of Nanking. The reason for this is strategic in nature. Nanking is isolated from
other cities, and there is potential for it being surrounded by the enemy on three sides. What’s more, the
Yangzi River blocks any retreat to the north. If we post troops who have been defeated already in that
isolated city to protect it, it would be difficult to hope for a sustained defense.”
The German advisor strongly agreed, “forcefully arguing” the abandonment of Nanking and that there was
no reason to make a pointless sacrifice. Many were in favor of this position, but Gen. Tang Shengzhi
suddenly made an impassioned plea to defend the city. At this, Chiang swore, “we will defend it with our
bodies and our blood ? we will live or die with Nanking,” and he appointed Tang commandant in
command of the defense of Nanking. It was decided: Nanking would be defended to the last man.
§3 The establishment of the International Propaganda Section of the Guomindang’s Central Propaganda
Bureau
With the decision to defend Nanking to the last man, it was clear to all that the Guomindang was going to
be defeated. In truth, however, although the decision had been made to defend the city, five days later a
secret decision was made to abandon Nanking. Orders were issued to the effect that within three days
from Nov. 16, preparations must be made for a withdrawal of all officials.
Nonetheless, preparations for the an ambush of the Japanese forces made by Gen. Tang, as commandant
in charge of the defense of Nanking, proceeded apace. Chiang Kai-shek took the view of making the most
of the advice of his German advisors to “use the area as a weapon,” drawing the Japanese into the Chinese
interior. And there was another thing. With his
Photograph by Central News Agency photojournalist Wang Xiaoting in the Oct.4, 1937, issue of the
American magazine Life.
policy of “propaganda has precedence over tactics,” Chiang had set out on a global strategy lending serious
attention to propaganda warfare.
The above photograph appeared one month before the fall of Shanghai in the Oct. 4, 1937, issue of Life
magazine. This photograph, which propagandized the brutality of the Japanese army, had a strong impact
on the American populace. It was chosen by the readers as one of the top ten news images for the year
1937. Most people would probably have never thought that this image was a propaganda photo, but I
would like to direct the readers to the book, Analyzing the “Photographic Evidence” of the Nanking
Incident, which I co-authored with Kobayashi Susumu and Fukunaga Shinjiro. This was, in fact, a piece of
the propaganda war. Dong Xianguang, who would later be chief of the CPB, wrote about this photograph
in The Autobiography of Dong Xianguang. He said:
The military situation in Shanghai was steadily growing worse, and we gradually moved our propaganda
operations from Shanghai to Nanking.… Working with Xiao Tongzi, I was able to establish a particularly
effective photography group in the Central News Agency. At its inauguration, there was only one
photographer working in this group ? a pro news photographer named Wang Xiaoting. Many of the
photographs he had taken had been used in newspapers all over the world. In particular, his photograph of
the lone, crying baby sitting amidst the ruins of a bombed train station during the battle for Shanghai was the
most highly-praised masterpiece of that group throughout the Sino?Japanese War.
According to Wartime Chinese Reportage, from 1926, this Central News Agency, which was subordinate
to the Guomindang Central Party Bureau, was China’s largest news agency. As a detached arm of the
CPB, the Central News Agency photographic group was certain of the tremendous effect their
photographs were having. They labored carefully to manufacture photographs to draw attention to and
criticism on the Japanese forces. Their masterpiece was Wang Xiaoting’s photo.
The “Summary of Editorial Operations” section of the top-secret Overview of Propaganda Operations of
the CPB says the following:
Upon receiving his orders, Deputy Director Dong Xianguang transferred from Shanghai to Nanking and
took on the burden of [overseeing] the Fifth Board, realizing the necessity of external propaganda.… In the
middle of the same month [that is, November, 1937] … he tightened the scope of the Fifth Board and
turned it into the International Propaganda Division and attached the [new] division to the Central
Propaganda Bureau.
The middle of November, 1937, was when Shanghai fell. This “Fifth Board” was the board inside the
Nationalist Political and Military Affairs Committee which managed international propaganda, and Dong
Xianguang became its deputy director two months before Nanking’s fall. It was Dong himself, having a high
opinion of external propaganda, who suggested the reworking of the Fifth Board into the Int’l Propaganda
Division.
In his Autobiography, Dong said this:
In a large-scale restructuring, the government abolished the Fifth Board, and international propaganda
operations were integrated into the Propaganda Bureau, which was attached to the central Party office. As
the deputy director of the Propaganda Bureau, I oversaw the International Propaganda Department with
Zeng Xubai in charge. During the eight-year resistance [against the Japanese], many Propaganda Bureau
directors came and went, but I stayed in my job until the very end, completely without change.
It is believed that the reason for many directors of the CPB coming and going was that there was a power
struggle in the CPB between the Guomindang and the Communist Party. Incidentally, the first director of
the CPB was Shao Lishi, a Communist Party spy. Given this situation, Dong Xianguang of the
Guomindang, as the deputy director, was the real key figure in the CPB until the war’s end. He and Zeng
Xubai were central in running the international propaganda war, and they were entrusted with China’s hope
to “surround the enemy with propaganda warfare and take the final victory.”
§4 Dong Xianguang and Zeng Xubai: the men who spearheaded the Guomindang’s CPB
We need to look at Dong Xianguang’s Autobiography to find out more about Dong, deputy director of the
CPB, and Zeng Xubai, the director of the International Propaganda Division. Dong was born in Ningbo,
Zhejiang province, in 1887. Chiang Kai-shek, who was born in the same year, was also from the same
province ? and that’s not all. When Chiang was a middle school student at Longjin Academy in his
hometown province of Fenghua, he was an English instructor at the school.
He was born into a Christian family, and was educated at the the University of Missouri and then attended
graduate school at Columbia. After working as a correspondent at the New York Evening Post and other
places, he became editor of the Peking Daily News (an English-language newspaper) in 1913. In 1926, he
became editor of the Chinese paper Dalu Bao (The Content) in Tianjin. After that, he served as chairman
of the China Press, China Times, and Da Wan Bao (China Evening News) in Shanghai. After the war, he
served the Weng Wenhao cabinet in Taiwan as Director of Newspapers. In 1953, he became ambassador
to Japan, and later was made ambassador to the United States. He died on Jan. 9, 1972, at the age of 84.
He was a devout Christian, of whom it was said he never missed a Sunday service in his life.
In the winter of 1935, while recuperating from an illness, a man named W.H. Donald asked him to “screen
overseas newspaper telegraphs.” Donald was a close foreign advisor to Chiang Kai-shek. From his time as
a journalist with the London Times, he had been in correspondence with Dong, and he knew of his wit, so
it is probable that Donald recommended Dong to Chiang Kai-shek. Of this incident, Dong recalled, “for my
new appointment this time, it was only because I had earned the favor of Chairman Chiang and I was
specially selected, and Mme. Chiang recommended me most strongly.”
Upon taking up the screening of the newspaper articles, Dong’s life changed completely. As he reminisced:
The second half of my life was completely different than it had been before. Thanks to my experiences from
when I was with The Continent, I have had a comparatively diverse life. I have been able to come into
contact with many people of considerable influence both inside and outside the country, and through them I
have been able to continually discover new worlds and gain new knowledge.… More and more I went on
to new, enriching, and meaningful levels.
After the screening of the newspaper telegraphs, the operation of the Fifth Board were entrusted to Dong,
and he became the heart of the CPB and came to lead the propaganda bureau. “With that,” he recalled, “I
got the chance to get some new blood into the organization I led. As a condition of employment for new
operatives, I rigidly required people with academic backgrounds and experiences with newspaper activities
and connections to propaganda.” As this shows, he put strength into the CPB’s human resources.
It was Dong Xianguang who had selected Zeng Xubai to be head of the International Propaganda Division.
Of Zeng, Dong said this:
Fortunately, I was able to join and work with Zeng Xubai, and he became my greatest helper. He had been
my old partner in the 20 years I was in the newspaper business. This time, he cleanly broke with a famous
Shanghai evening paper with continuing management difficulties and joined the government’s resistance
operations. During the resistance, he always thoroughly demonstrated his exceeding intelligence and
abilities. [Emphasis mine.]
Zeng Xubai was born in 1895, and so was eight years Dong’s junior. He graduated from St. John’s
University in the United States. He taught Chinese at Nanking University from 1930 to 1931, and in March
of 1932 ? immediately after the First Shanghai Incident ? he went to work as editor-in-chief of Shanghai
’s Da Wan Bao (China Evening News).
Dong Xianguang, who promptly addressed the necessity of propaganda with, “propaganda is just as
essential a weapon as an airplane or a tank,” and Zeng Xubai, praised by Dong as the possessor of
“exceeding intelligence and abilities,” became the central figures leading the CPB until the very end. When
one considers that What War Means has not been recognized as a work of propaganda until now, one
understands how ingeniously waged the propaganda war actually was.
CHAPTER THREE:
MASTERFUL INTERNATIONAL PROPAGANDA
It goes without saying that the international propaganda hammered out by Dong Xianguang and Zeng Xubai
was propaganda aimed at foreigners (including Japanese). These operations had the CPB acting behind the
scenes and not showing their faces, so that they would not be recognized as works of propaganda. It was “
propaganda activities” and “anti-enemy propaganda” that the International Propaganda Division focused on
particularly closely so as to “surround the enemy with propaganda warfare and take the final victory,”
§1 The propaganda operations and anti-enemy propaganda that were the core of international propaganda
What was the international propaganda of the CPB?
The (Oral) Summary of Propaganda Operations goes into “international propaganda.” It might be a bit
long, but allow me to quote from it. The following text is from a progress report made at the January,1938,
meeting of the Fifth National Convention of the Central Executive Committee, by the Guomindang’s
Propaganda Bureau:
INTERNATIONAL PROPAGANDA
In international propaganda, in addition to editing propaganda telegrams in all manner of languages ? for
example, English, French, and Russian ? we have put out 71 different pamphlets in English, French,
Russian, etc. in the name of the People’s Press. We have focused particularly on propaganda operations
and anti-enemy propaganda.
As for propaganda operations, we have directed various international organizations, maneuvered domestic
diplomacy, and contacted newspaper correspondents from different countries. Everything we have done
using them in our resistance propaganda has gone smoothly. With using the truth of the appeal of the
generalissimo’s great personality and the intense strategy of the officers and men as the authority for our
propaganda, currently we are leading international propaganda operations in a victorious trend.
As for anti-enemy propaganda, for example, we published and shipped to Japan the generalissimo’s An
Appeal to the Japanese People; however, it was shipped secretly to Japan so as not to arouse the enemy’s
notice. Also, we have had considerable success with propaganda using the war-weariness of prisoners to
our benefit by making broadcast productions with them and so on. Recently, we organized a propaganda
committee to strengthen opportunities for international propaganda, establishing an overseas network of
foreign-resident government officials, special correspondents, and battlefield propagandists (for the
accumulation of international propaganda documents). We anticipate progress in the efficacy of our
operations. [Emphasis mine.]
As indicated by the section in italics, the international propaganda most strongly attended to by the
International Propaganda Division was “propaganda operations” and “anti-enemy propaganda.”
First is “propaganda operations,” which is described as the Division “directed various international
organizations, maneuvered domestic diplomacy, and contacted newspaper correspondents from different
countries.” The part about “using them” ? the Guomindang’s CPB maneuvering Christian organizations,
international friends, and journalists from behind. In other words, propaganda operations meant getting
foreigners to do the propaganda work for the CPB.
Next comes “anti-enemy propaganda.” On this subject, the (Oral) Summary of Propaganda Operations is
not very specific. To quote on this topic from the top-secret report’s “Summary of Anti-Enemy Section
Operations,” anti-enemy propaganda included text, graphics, and broadcasts. The purpose was “wide-
scale propaganda aimed at the enemy’s forces in China, people in the enemy’s country, and people of the
enemy’s country living anywhere else in the world, intended to reveal the truth of the brutality of the enemy’
s military factions and that their defeat is inevitable, and to build up the sentiment of war-weariness.”
The Guomindang’s propaganda war looked down on Japan in moral terms; anti-enemy propaganda aimed
at getting the Japanese themselves to come to hate Japan and thereby inflict a psychological defeat on them.
This top-secret document highly valued the “propaganda operations” where foreigners were put to work
and this “anti-enemy propaganda,” stating it was how the CPB was “leading international propaganda
operations in a victorious trend.” Let us take a detailed look at the operations that were conducted.
§2 Propaganda operations using Christian organizations
As I have already quoted, the top-secret document makes reference to using “various international
organizations” in conducting resistance propaganda. When we look at the document to see what
international organizations were most important, we find that it was Christian organizations. From 1920 to
1930, the New York Times’ Pacific bureau chief, residing in Shanghai, was Hallet Abend. According to his
Collapsing China (published in 1930), propaganda operations surrounding Christian organizations seem to
have already started by 1920. In An Overview of Propaganda Operations of the International Propaganda
Division of the Central Propaganda Bureau, the following secret report appears:
The Chinese Foreign News Agency:
From the beginning, it relocated to Chongqing using the name Yishi Foreign News Agency. The president
was Father Yang Anran, and this Division entrusted French operations to his company. Expenses were
allocated and paid out in the name of the church so as to erase any trace of propaganda. We were able to
get subsidies from many people connected with French churches, and published a weekly magazine in
French. It was launched on Apr. 16, 1939, and each issue was 10 pages. Each issue published four or five
manuscripts with no set page count. The content was primarily propaganda about the situation with our
resistance [against the Japanese] and our progress with the building up of China. As a rule, the articles were
written to fit with a French and Vietnamese readership. [Emphasis mine.]
We don’t know the nationality of the Father Yang Anran mentioned here, but in December of 1939 he left
the Yishi Foreign News Agency and established the China Foreign News Agency, an attached organ of the
CPB. Perhaps the substance of the Yishi Foreign News Agency was like that of the China Foreign News
Agency, and the Yishi Foreign News Agency that he led took on the task of dealing with the French-
language propaganda operations. Be that as it may, as the italicized section shows, in order to erase any
vestiges of connection to Chinese propaganda operations, they made it look as if the pamphlets were all
independently published by the church, and payments were made in the name of the church. We also
understand they were able to get subsidized by many people associated with the church.
Let us read on:
In addition to this, we published a monthly French-language magazine in the Belgian capital, Brussels. The
editor-in-chief was R.P. Edward Neat, a French professor at Luowen University and a priest of Belgian
nationality. Many of its materials had been published by the Yishi Foreign News Agency, and in addition to
editorial direction from this Division as required and with the direction and cooperation of [our]
ambassador in France, Gu Weijun, each issue was widely circulated. [Emphasis mine]
It should be clear that people involved with the church were connected to propaganda operations under the
direction of the International Propaganda Division. The readers and faithful who read the pamphlets
probably viewed them as genuine church publications.
There is one more element of participation by Christian churches. Here is one example from the section,
“Summary of Foreign Section Operations”:
In the resolution of the All-China Association of Christian Churches is the article, “Those men, women, and
children in the prime of life who cannot remain in the zone of surrender should immediately be evacuated to
free China.” As a result of this resolution, four or five hundred people who possessed the abilities [to
conduct operations] were withdrawn to the rear of the resistance to participate in church operations in the
resistance. Our government planned for convenience of transportation, sending them on trips at no cost,
and while traveling they sheltered with the military or police; once they reached their destination, they were
able to demand absolute cooperation on their operations. This division’s deputy director Dong transmitted
this to the generalissimo, who instructed him to “deal with it like that.” Thereupon, on Nov. 23, 1940, we
activated missionaries in Chongqing and created an advisory committee. From March of 1941, missionary
groups were evacuated one by one to Chongqing, all under the direction of deputy director Dong, who
arranged a meeting among all the related departments with an eye toward facilitating communication.
[Emphasis mine.]
With this, the connection between the Christian church and the International Propaganda Division can be
understood. What needs to be noted here is the “1940”; the International Propaganda Division had
acquired operatives inside the Christian church before 1940.
§3 Propaganda operations using foreign friends
The top-secret document makes reference to using “domestic diplomacy” in conducting resistance
propaganda. This “domestic diplomacy” meant the use of foreign friends by the CPB in conducting
propaganda. In his autobiography, the director of the International Propaganda Division, Zeng Xubai, said,
“in the international propaganda we oversaw, Chinese themselves absolutely could not be seen to be in
front of things. We sought out foreign friends who understood the state and policies of our resistance and
got them to agree to act as our surrogates.” In this aspect, nothing has changed. Just as those who have
been cooperative with the policies of today’s government in Beijing have been called “old and good friends
of China,” there were foreigners ? “foreign friends” ? at that time cooperative with the Guomindang
government who were privately called “our good friends” ? a term which appears in the top-secret
document. Consider some examples.
We have brought in under special contract many foreign professors of Huaxi University in Chengdu and
Nanking University. In addition to their academic affairs, they were responsible for final screening
operations and the translation and editing of material in English language pamphlets for this Division. We
established an editorial committee and put the American professor Bi Fanyu in charge. Bi Fanyu is our
good friend, and his cooperation is truly a great help. [Emphasis mine.]
The top-secret document doesn’t actually name the names of the foreign professors of Huaxi University in
Chengdu and the University of Nanking, but as mentioned in the prologue, Miner Bates was a professor at
the University of Nanking. Prof. Bates has recently been determined to have been an “advisor” to the
Chinese (see page 118). Might the “special contract” mentioned in the quoted passage ? an agreement
carrying special conditions or profit ? be something like this?
The Bi Fanyu called “our good friend” in the top-secret document has been identified as Frank Wilson
Price, an American professor of French at Huaxi University, and his name appears four times in that
document. In addition to this, the names of Fei Yingsheng, an American on the Christian Alliance, and
Father Neat, the afore-mentioned Belgian priest, also appear, among others.
In Dong Xianguang’s memoirs, W.H. Donald, Hallet Abend, Matsumoto Shigeharu, and the
correspondent Timperly are mentioned as “good friends,” “old friends,” or “close friends.” There were
actually probably many more foreign friends, but because the names are all rendered in hanzi rather than
Roman letters it would be difficult to determine exactly who they are. The person referred to in his
autobiography as Doudian’an has now finally been identified New York Times correspondent Durdin.
Dong writes thus:
On Nov. 18, Doudian’an, a colleague from my days at The Continent and then a correspondent for the
New York Times residing in China, came to my office. He brought the unfortunate news that Suzhou had
already fallen. The next day I received an order from Chairman Chiang [Kai-shek] to immediately leave
Nanking and go to Hankou. Chairman Chiang made arrangements for the boat Zeng Xubai and I left on
that evening. However, I was suddenly requested by Chairman Chiang to translate the contents of a
telegram given to Doudian’an to send to the New York Times for publication. [Emphasis mine.]
At the time, Durdin was the only New York Times correspondent in Nanking, so the italicized name ?
Doudian’an ? must be understood as his name. In the top-secret document, Durdin’s name is rendered as
Diandeng (see page 49). Durdin was the special correspondent who reported to American newspapers
immediately after the fall of Nanking.
The president of Nanking Women’s University also appears in the top-secret document.
China’s New West, jointly edited by Bi Fanyu and Ying Yifang, the president of Nanking Women’s
University, was published in the United States. The original edition and reprints totaled 500,000 copies. It
was sent to American school libraries and various groups.
I don’t know what type of content was in China’s New West. Nevertheless, it is clear that it is a book the
publication of which the International Propaganda Division was involved. Americans who got their hands on
this book in libraries and so forth had no way of knowing that it was a book with which the CPB was
deeply involved ? they probably just viewed it as a book co-edited by an American professor at Huaxi
University and the president at Nanking Women’s University.
The following shows yet another example of a foreign friend cooperating with the CPB.
Answering the call of leftwing writers acting in concert with Communist Party overseas propaganda,
eminent foreigners conducted propaganda harmful to our government in accordance with Communist Party
strategies. Snow was the most important of these. At the outbreak of the New Fourth Army Incident,
Snow took on the Chinese allied front and made public wily criticism that it was as if civil war was just on
the verge of breaking out. This Division used American-related newspaper journalists residing in the Far
East to counter this, ending up refuting it. According to the report of the New York resident office [of this
Division], all the most prestigious newspapers in America inflicted a reversal on Snow’s account. In
addition, the American professor Bi Fanyu of Chengdu’s Huaxi University and the American Fei Yingsheng
of Chongqing’s Christian Alliance made several broadcasts geared toward Americans. These Americans
fought hard with an impartial eye against the complete nonsense of Snow and others, giving copies of the
manuscripts of their broadcasts to all the American news agencies in Chengdu. They didn’t just telegraph
digests of the broadcasts on the same day ? they sent the full text out by air mail and distributed them to
all the important newspapers via the New York resident office. Afterward, tear-sheets from the
newspapers arrived [back in China], proving that the articles by these two were widely circulated.
Edward Snow arrived in China in 1928, and in the summer of 1936 visited Yenan. He was the first
American journalist to interview Mao Zedong, Zhu De, and other members of the Chinese Communist
Party leaders. It only recently became clear for the first time that he was personally picked by Mao to be
the writer of The Story of Mao Zedong. Snow shot to fame when his Red Star Over China, mixing fact
with fiction as Mao himself apparently had a heavy hand in the book’s editing, was published in October of
1939 in London by Victor Golencz Co. Many young people in China flocked to join the Communist Party.
Today, Snow rests in a grave on the Beijing University campus. Snow had a deep relationship with Mao
and the Chinese Communist Party.
With the Second United Front of Nationalist and Communist Parties, the Guomindang and the Chinese
Communist Party worked in unison; but as presented in the top-secret document and quoted herein, we
can see that there was still deep-rooted antagonism between the two. The Communist Party used the
American Snow, and the Guomindang also used Americans ? academics and church-affiliated people ?
to exchange criticism of each other. Nonetheless, both parties had foreign friends supporting anti-Japanese
international propaganda.
§4 Propaganda operations using newspaper journalists
Compared to magazines and books, newspapers are published in much larger numbers, and are seen by far
many more people. There is no way that those involved in propaganda warfare would not make use of
them. As the quoted top-secret report says, they contacted various newspapers and used them in
propaganda operations.
The best result would be gained by getting foreign journalists to publish our propaganda texts unchanged;
but if the propaganda texts we put out are to be published by foreign journalists, we first have to gain their
confidence. These operations are truly troublesome and difficult, but we absolutely have to do them
carefully. [Emphasis mine.]
The International Propaganda Division, recognizing that using foreign journalists for propaganda operations
was “truly troublesome and difficult,” and that they had to do things carefully, turned all of its efforts to
dealing with this important point. Let us look at the “Summary of Foreign Section Operations” section in the
top-secret Summary of Propaganda Operations. The bar graph on the next page shows the “Frequency of
Tea Parties Held Each Year.” As a supplemental note says, “a tea party was held each day in 1938.” The
following appears:
Contacting foreign journalists, foreign residents, and even officials in embassies and consulates.
Item: Press conferences. Since this Division was ordered to open an office in Hankou on Nov. 1, 1937,
press conferences were held in accordance with our agenda with resident foreign correspondents of all
newspapers and foreign military officials and news specialists from official residences in China.… In the 42
months
from December, 1937, to April, 1941, a total of 600 press conferences were held in Hankou and
Chongqing, with the number of speakers in Chongqing being around 100. To expedite the explanation, it is
broken down by periods.…
Item: Press conferences held in Hankou from Dec. 1, 1937, to Oct. 24, 1938, had an average of over 50
people participating. Information on the military front was presented by military officials,
while governmental material was the responsibility of government officials, and diplomatic matters were
addressed by the foreign office. There were 300 held. [Emphasis mine.]
Graph displaying the number of “tea parties” held by the CPB. Sections of text poorly reproduced in the
mimeograph were over-written by this author below and to the right.
As shown by the italicized text, CPB tea parties and press conferences began before the fall of Nanking,
and 300 were held in the 11 months between Dec. 1, 1937, and Oct. 24, 1938, right through the time of
Nanking’s fall (see the top of the next page). Dong Xianguang, who
supervised these events, wrote of them in his Autobiography, saying, “As one of the first things I did when I
started the job, I had a session to get to meet with all the newspaper journalists.” The photograph at the
bottom of the next page is not from the time of Nanking’s fall, but rather a scene from such an event later in
Chongqing.
In addition to hosting tea parties and conducting press conferences ? even though “truly troublesome and
difficult” ? the CPB also undertook the following five actions to gain the confidence of newspaper
correspondents:
The “Summary of Foreign Section Operations” in the top-secret document. It shows that “a total of 300”
press conferences were held in Hankou between Dec. 1, 1937, (just before the fall of Nanking) and
October of 1938. The lines were placed by this author.
First:
Twice a week on average, the foreign affairs section was in communication with the foreign correspondents
and gave directions to them to participate in meetings of popular cultural groups, citizen’s diplomacy
associations, “anti-invader” chapters, sessions with colleague-journalists, etc., in addition to holding their
regular or extraordinary meetings. There were about 35 foreign journalists and resident foreign diplomatic
personnel on average who attended these sessions. In the approximately 28 months between January,
1938, and April, 1941, 250 meetings with journalists took place. [Emphasis mine.]
On the surface they were being introduced to a variety of different groups with these meetings, but as the
italics show, in truth it was all under the direction of the CPB.
After the fall of Hankou in October of 1938, the CPB transferred operations to the capital of Chongqing.
The photograph depicts one of the monthly tea parties held in Chongqing for foreign and domestic
journalists. The man in front at the left is Deputy Director Dong Xianguang. Undated photograph. (From
The Reminiscences of Mr. Dong Xianguang.)
Second: The data on the next page is part of a table taking up eight pages in the “Summary of Foreign
Section Operations” section, in a subsection called “2. Cooperating in Gathering Material for Journalists.”
From 1938 to 1941, the CPB recorded the particulars each year for “journalists from major news agencies
[to whom the CPB has] issued credentials, and people accommodating data collection [on our behalf]”
under the headings of name, nationality, occupation, destination,
classification of certification issued by the person’s agency, data accumulation methodology and type of
data sought. Therein, as detailed later the name of American special correspondent Archibald Steele, who
wrote the “Nanking Massacre Story,” appears twice; the journalist F. Tillman Durdin’s name appears three
times. Along with them, the name of Reuter’s correspondent Leslie Smith, who left Nanking, appears
twice. The name of Central News Agency photographer Wang Xiaoting, introduced in this book on page
19, also appears twice.
Third: The following is a secret report of the CPB “inviting a group of journalists to inspect the military gains
in the northern part of Hunan.”
There was a major military victory in the northern part of Hunan in the winter of 1939. When this was made
known, spirits all over China were lifted and voices were raised in jubilation. This Division took journalists
from various countries to Guilin by charter flight, and then by car to Hengyang and Changsha so they could
inspect the military gains that had been made. Journalists invited by this Division included Durdin of the
New York Times, Stewart of the Associated Press, Yeshamin of Tass, Morris of the United Press, and
Selby Walker of Reuters. [Emphasis mine.]
As the italics show, Durdin’s name appears here, too.
Fourth: The CPB also reports the names of journalists “invited to military academy reviews.”
When the Central Military Academy held its commencement ceremonies in Chengdu in 1939, the foreign
affairs section invited along foreign journalists and cameramen. The wives of Sun [Yat-sen], Chiang [Kai-
shek], and Kung [Hsiang-hsi] were also in attendance,
and they inspected the Air Force school as well. There were seven foreign journalists invited, including
McDonald, Wang Xiaoting, and [David] Griffin. [Emphasis mine.]
Note that cameraman Wang Xiaoting is mentioned here.
Fifth: Let us look at the top-secret report on “leading and directing journalists and foreign friends in
meetings with Party, civil, and military authorities.”
When foreign journalists or foreign friends covered or met with authorities in Hankou or Chongqing,
submitting various questions on government, economy, transportation, money market, industry, or the social
situation, they asked for the views of the responsible authorities. Of these, the most numerous were those of
McDonald of the London Times. When he arrived in Chongqing in 1940, he submitted over 2,000
questions to the authorities. The foreign affairs section dealt with them by taking them around to the various
directors and getting them answered one by one.… There were on average fifteen meetings with the
various directors and each of the journalists who arrived in Chongqing. In addition to the foreign affairs
section being responsible for the language interpretation in meetings with directors, they explained without
fail the background and political leanings of the person requesting the meeting to the directors and
determined just how much would and could be told to the journalists. There was a total of over 300 foreign
writers and journalists who visited Hankou and Chongqing. The submitted documents and information,
once turned into book form, totalled several dozen volumes. The most famous of these were John Gunther’
s Inside Asia [E.F.] Carlson’s Twin Stars Over China, Yootorai’s Muddy Japanese Feet, etc.
Additionally, there were several thousand magazine and newspaper articles that were published. Please
consult with the complete details, which are kept catalogued in this Division’s document room.
The number of foreigners and journalists who came to China from January, 1938, to April, 1941, as well as
the number of meetings they had with directors, are indicated by the following graph. [Emphasis mine.]
The graph above shows the number of foreign journalists and famous writers who went to Hankou and
Chongqing and the number of meetings they had with Guomindang authorities. What should be noted here
is the explanation of the graph, the text of which follows:
1. Does not include 30 journalists who lived in Hankou and Chongqing.
2. Does not include the 20 people in the news staff or military attaches of the British, American, French, or
Soviet embassies.
3. Journalists who made five or six round-trip visits in a year are still only counted once.
One can perceive by this entry to what extent the diplomats and journalists comprising 1, 2, and 3 above
had contact with the CPB.
§5 A thorough and rigorous screening of articles by foreign journalists
In this manner, the CPB’s International Propaganda Division paid scrupulous attention to dealing with
special foreign correspondents, recognizing the importance of working with them even though it was “truly
troublesome and difficult.” It goes without saying that they had the journalists write articles for them in
accordance with the expectations of the CPB. The Overview of Propaganda Operations of the
International Propaganda Division of the Central Propaganda Bureau has this to say:
Foreign journalists have a considerably frank sentiment, so this Division deals with them in a sincere
manner. Most of them deeply sympathize with our country, but journalists by temperament will always write
down whatever they hear, and they are quite capable of picking up rumors and sending off telegrams [to
report what they have heard]. As an expression rife with implications, they excel at cleverly escaping the
censors’ attention. If the telegrams dispatched by [foreign] journalists living in China are published in
newspapers all over the world, people overseas who are observing the situation in the Far East would
consider them something of importance, so it is necessary to make a thorough and rigorous screening of
these reports. Those telegrams lacking in propriety were either censored or prohibited, and then the reason
was explained to the sender and we attempted to gain reliable consent to amend the mistaken viewpoints.
[Emphasis mine.]
An excerpt from “Summary of Foreign Section Operations” in the top-secret document. The chart shows
the number of foreign journalists’ articles “passed” and “censored” by the International Propaganda
Division censors.
Foreign correspondents cooperated with the CPB in this rigorous and thorough screening. Of this process,
the accompanying graph from Overview of Propaganda Operations of the International Propaganda
Division of the Central Propaganda Bureau shows “the number of wires sent by foreign journalists and the
number of cancelled characters as screened by this Division from December, 1937.”
After every telegram has received an introductory-level screening and if there is no problem, the censor
applies this Division’s “Passed Screening” stamp and it is then sent to the telegraph office for transmission.
If there was any censoring, it is stamped either “Passed With ___ Characters Censored” or “Entire Text
Censored.” There were a total of seven “Passed Screening” stamps. [Emphasis mine.]
What did the International Propaganda Division examine, and what did they censor? That much information
was not recorded, so we do not know for certain. As shown by the italicized portion on page 41, however,
the International Propaganda Division decided that, if articles sent by journalists resident in China were
published in newspapers all over the world, “people overseas … observing the situation in the Far East
would consider them something of importance.” If there was a viewpoint irreconcilable to the Guomindang
government’s point of view, it is easy to imagine that the CPB would completely censor matters
disadvantageous to them. A thorough and rigorous screening is extremely necessary to smoothly develop
international propaganda.
§5 The aim of anti-enemy propaganda
As laid out so far, propaganda operations making use of foreigners ran international groups, foreign friends,
and foreign journalists operating in English, French, Russian, etc., so that their operations would not be seen
to be propaganda by the CPB. “Anti-enemy propaganda” covered in this section is, as indicated by the
name, information warfare operations targeting the enemy ? the Japanese army and the Japanese people.
Let us look again at what the “Summary of Foreign Section Operations” in the top-secret Overview of
Propaganda Operations of the International Propaganda Division of the Central Propaganda Bureau has to
say about the subject:
Anti-enemy propaganda is text, graphics, broadcasts, etc., and is wide-scale propaganda aimed at the
enemy’s forces in China, people in the enemy’s country, and people of the enemy’s country living anywhere
else in the world, intended to reveal the truth of the brutality of the enemy’s military factions and that their
defeat is inevitable, and to build up the sentiment of war-weariness.
The CPB had set its sights to “reveal the truth of the brutality of the enemy’s military factions … and to
build up the sentiment of war-weariness” ? in other words, the weakening of the emotional state of the
Japanese people. Let us take a look at the lead-in of the “Summary of Foreign Section Operations.”
Anti-enemy propaganda materials include books, pamphlets, periodicals, propaganda handbills, graphics,
etc. They were each distributed differently, depending on the location and the circumstances. For example,
books and periodicals were distributed overseas, and of course circulation was extensive also in
surrendered territories, and within the enemy’s home country and colonies. Without fail, the aforementioned
materials could be seen wherever there were citizens of the enemy nation. The majority of pamphlets,
handbills, and graphics were used at the front lines and in cases when surrounded by enemy forces.
The intent of anti-enemy propaganda was that the Guomindang’s propaganda materials should be seen by
the Japanese forces on the continent, Japanese people living in Japan, and Japanese living overseas in
America and other places. Propaganda materials were put to their appropriate use depending on location
and circumstances.
So exactly what kinds of anti-enemy propaganda were developed? The target of the propaganda was
divided into two: Japanese military forces on the continent, and Japanese living at home and in Japanese
colonies.
§6 Anti-enemy propaganda aimed at Japanese forces on the continent
The International Propaganda Division developed the following propaganda operations directed at
Japanese officers and men fighting on the continent in China:
During large-scale battles, propaganda materials like fliers and graphics written in Japanese were
immediately printed up and then either strewn about by plane by the aviation committee or they were
scattered about by front-line units. There were over ten types of propaganda fliers, with texts addressing
shared connections as compatriot peasants, compatriot factory workers, compatriot citizens, etc., and in
principle their content was made to suit the specific battlefield and distribution that was intended. As for
graphics, such themes as “For whom is this war being fought?”, “How will this war turn out?”, “Cherry-
blossom front,” “The current state of your family and friends back at home,” and so on, were meant to
create homesickness in the Japanese soldiers, to give rise to feelings of displeasure about the war, and to
create a sense of war-weariness.
Readers will probably be surprised at the usage of the term “compatriot” here. In literal terms, a compatriot
is a fellow countryman. If the propaganda fliers were aimed at compatriot peasants, workers, and
countrymen from China, the fliers would of course have been written in Chinese, but for Japanese language
fliers, the usage is a little odd. Nonetheless, as I have laid out here, this was anti-enemy propaganda, so it
was a Chinese military secret, and this was probably meant to make it look as if it was a Japanese plane
that was dropping leaflets and graphics over a battlefield in China for the sake of compatriot Japanese
peasants, compatriot Japanese factory workers, and for compatriot Japanese citizens. Even if Japanese
officers and men on the battlefield read the fliers and graphics and understood that they were the work of
the enemy, they would probably start to think of home, and the will to fight would likely weaken.
Since I was unable to copy these fliers and graphics at the Party Archives in Taipei, I can’t present any of
them here. The ones I saw, however, I remember as war propaganda graphics where the Japanese soldiers
were doing bad things and the Chinese soldiers would punish them.
Concerning anti-enemy propaganda, the CPB reported that, “over a period of three years, we had similarly
striking results in every campaign.”
The International Propaganda Bureau took the position on Japanese soldiers who had been taken prisoner
by the Chinese, that “reformation of the prisoners, along with using them in anti-enemy propaganda, is one
of our extremely important works,” so they made use of prisoners in their propaganda operations.
From time to time we sent people to Hankou or Chongqing, (1) directing foreign correspondents to meet
with prisoners, (2) and in an atmosphere of kindness we put them together and had them talk. (3) They
interviewed them closely about their mental state around the time they deployed, and the state of affairs on
the enemy side. (4) Also, we fully explained the significance of our resistance war to get them to change
the erroneous notions they had held up to that point. (5) We had them write down their impressions since
coming to China, or (6) we had them write letters to send home to Japan. (7) We had those manuscripts
printed up via copperplate and used them for external propaganda. (8) There are also times we invited
them in to do broadcasts, and (9) these had considerable power in terms of anti-enemy propaganda.
[Numbers mine.]
Reading the above section numbered in sequence, one should be able to well understand the consistent
plan from brainwashing prisoners to using them in anti-enemy propaganda.
Since number eight mentions “broadcasts,” this would be an opportune time to address the issue of
broadcasting.
The enemy government held cabinet meetings and debated countermeasures regarding our Japanese-
language broadcasts, while even the enemy’s imperial headquarters issued rebuttals to camouflage the
issue. The enemy’s newspapers and magazines took up the subject from time to time. It was an intense
matter. Given all of this, we can say that the effect of this form of propaganda deeply penetrated [the enemy
’s psyche].
In all probability, these broadcasts reached the Japanese officers and men in China and newspaper
correspondents as well. The top-secret document tells us of the permeation of these broadcasts, but we
don’t know the level of their effect.
§7 Anti-enemy propaganda aimed at Japanese inside and outside Japan
Chiang Kai-shek’s An Appeal to the Japanese People, touched on in this book on page 26, was also a
work of anti-enemy propaganda. As previously mentioned, the top-secret documents report that “it was
shipped secretly to Japan so as not to arouse the enemy’s notice.” This was different from scattering fliers
about on a battlefield. It was necessary to find someone to help who would secretly take copies to Japan
so that the book could end up in Japanese hands.
Examples of the books and pamphlets used in anti-enemy propaganda appear in the secret documents, so
we should take a look at them. For example, on the pamphlets, the document explains, “We translated and
published our leader’s pronouncements and vital literature refuting the enemy, as well as foreign
correspondents’ on-the-spot reports, [accounts of] acts of violence by the enemy army, and [accounts of]
monstrous deeds of the enemy’s secret service; we compiled, printed, and distributed the war-weariness of
the people and military of our enemy.” It offers the following nine examples:
1. The Collected Words of Chiang Kai-shek, “Resistance and Nation-Building”,
2. Chiang Kai-shek’s Refutation of the Konoe Statement,
3. On the Second Anniversary of the Resistance ? Chiang Kai-shek’s Words to the Japanese People,
4. Chiang Kai-shek Thoroughly Rejects the False Government of Wang [Jingwei], Which has Been
Recognized by the Enemy’s Military Faction,
5. The Battle for Northern Hunan as Seen by Foreign Journalists,
6. Address from the Sixth Plenum of the Guomindang’s Central Executive Committee,
7. I’m So Sorry For You
8. The Cruelty of Japan’s Secret Agency,
9. Pocket Edition ? Anti-Enemy Propaganda Booklet.
A summary of all of these nine pamphlets is written down in the top-secret document. For example, the first
booklet ? The Collected Words of Chiang Kai-shek, “Resistance and Nation-Building” ? is covered
thus: “Its content was text of important speeches, instructions, conversations with foreign journalists,
transcripts of broadcasted addresses, information for people within and outside China, telegrams to the
International Peace Conference, since the [beginning of the] resistance. It totals 24 sections and has about
80,000 characters.”
As I have already presented herein, the CPB also produced books as materials for anti-enemy
propaganda. The top-secret document says this about two book projects:
1. Books
There were two pieces of anti-enemy propaganda publications edited and produced by this Division .
A. Japanese Atrocities Witnessed by Foreigners
This book was written by the famous English journalist Timperley . The book records detailed accounts of
heinous acts ? rape, arson, looting ? and a breakdown in military discipline and circumstances of
depraved human conditions after the enemy entered Nanking in Dec. 13, 1937. In addition to publishing
this book in Chinese and in English, it was also translated into Japanese. The Japanese edition’s title was
changed to “What is War?” The preface of the Japanese edition is by Japanese anti-war author Aoyama
Kazuo, and there are many photographs of brutality inside. This book was widely sold in Hong Kong,
Shanghai, and everywhere overseas as well. Afterward, the enemy’s chief of the General Staff, Prince Kan’
in [Kotohito], put out a book to inform the officers and men of the Japanese army, acknowledging that this
was conduct disgraceful to the nation and the Imperial Army in China, to admonish them.
B. The Offspring of God Are in China
This book is the work of the Italian Fansbo. It provides the lowdown on how the enemy’s intelligence
service looted assets of the three northeast provinces, overrunning our compatriots. This book is an
extremely powerful work of anti-enemy propaganda. It disclosed how the enemy’s militarist faction
deceived their people and paints a picture the oppressive state under which our compatriots in the enemy-
governed three northeast provinces live. In addition to Chinese and English editions, there was also a
Japanese translation. On the cover of the Japanese edition was printed “Postwar policies and the army’s
attitudes.” It was taken into Japan where it managed to avoid being stopped by the Japanese censors.
I have said several times that the purpose of anti-enemy propaganda was to break down the spirit of the
Japanese. If these works were read by Europeans and Americans, they would bring scorn on the Japanese.
If the editor of the work should happen to have been Chinese, what would the reader think at that moment?
During the war, one would probably suspect that it might be nothing but a work of propaganda produced
by the enemy, and so would probably not read the work through to the end. Even if it was read, then, it
would have been read with a dubious eye, would it not? The CPB did not forget this critical point.
Therefore, for both books above, the editors were foreigners. It was just as if the foreigners did the editing
on their own, and they gave the appearance that they had published the books by themselves. With the
belief that the authors and editors were writing from the position of independent, third-party foreigners, the
readers’ interest would probably be piqued and they would have no suspicions about reading them. For
example, the London Times published a highly favorable review of What War Means, saying “It is clear
that the evidence presented herein is genuine and accurate.” This skillful work of the CPB was displayed
even at the moment of Nanking’s fall.
Up to now, I have only introduced just a part, but this shows just how incredible were the operations of the
CPB. I have not presented any of it here, but the CPB’s film department began full-scale operations in
1938, producing photographs to appeal to the eye for use in news and in film as a link in their propaganda
operations. By 1939, 95 percent of the photographs concerning China that appeared on the world market
were the product of the CPB’s Central News Agency. For more on this, see Analyzing the “Photographic
Evidence” of the Nanking Incident, which I co-wrote with Kobayashi Susumu and Fukunaga Shinjiro.
CHAPTER FOUR:
THE PRELUDE TO REPORTING THE NANKING MASSACRE
When the Japanese army made its way steadily toward Nanking, the CPB promptly launched in Nanking
by holding tea parties and press conferences. As shown in Chapter Three, the CPB brought in foreigners as
a link in propaganda operations to readily expand the propaganda warfare. From when Japanese forces
first took Nanking, an opposition organization said to be Europeans and Americans antagonistic to the
Japanese army was apparently in place, but the shadow of the CPB can be seen to have been lurking
behind that organization. In particular, let us take a look at the lead-in to the creation of the anti-Japanese
organization thanks to the work of John Rabe, Nanking branch manager of the German firm Siemens AG
and chairman of the International Committee.
§1 The inauguration of the International Committee
Chiang Kai-shek decided on Nov. 12, 1937, to defend Nanking to the death, but on the 16th he decided
in secret to abandon the city and issued an order to all the authorities therein to withdraw. Chiang stayed in
Nanking for 20 days, and then secretly fled by airplane. That was on Dec. 7 ? six days before the city fell.
On Nov. 17, the day after his decision to abandon the city, the Europeans and Americans in Nanking
formed the International Committee to create a “safety zone” for the protection of non-combatants. Minnie
Vautrin wrote about this in her diary. Miss Vautrin had worked as head of the pedagogy department at
Ginling Women’s College since its founding by an American Christian group in 1916. She wrote:
Wednesday, Nov. 18. Conditions seem slightly improved today although the trek out of the city continues.
Almost all who can go are going…. At our informal publicity meeting today we heard reports on the plan for
a “Zone of Safety.” It is remarkable how much has been accomplished. The idea was only mentioned two
days ago. An influential international committee was formed yesterday and tomorrow morning will interview
the Mayor of Nanking.
On Nov. 16, as the withdrawal of all the officials began, the Europeans and Americans put out the idea of a
Safety Zone. The next day, they formed the International Committee. It was certain that with the
commencement of hostilities there would be refugees, and they wanted to prepare as soon as possible.
Vautrin’s comment that “It is remarkable how much has been accomplished” meant that plans for the
Safety Zone and International Committee had already been informally moving forward, and that a model
had already been developed.
Just who was it who had been moving it forward?
At the farewell party upon Rabe’s leaving Nanking, he said, “The one who first put out the idea of a Safety
Zone was Wilson Plumer Mills, the American missionary.” In a letter addressed to his wife on Jan. 24,
1938, Mills said that he had been inspired to create a Safety Zone in Nanking by the one in the south of
Shanghai which Father Jacquinot de Besange had organized.
On Oct. 7, Mills left Nanking, relocating around Oct. 14 to the home of Lossing Bak (a professor at the
University of Nanking who had left the city). Those who shared his life there as refugees included Miner
Bates, Lewis Smythe (sociology professor at the University of Nanking), Robert Wilson (a surgeon at the
hospital affiliated with the University of Nanking), and George Fitch. Afterward, when Rabe left Nanking,
he said that the Bak house was the brains of the International Committee. Vautrin wrote in her diary on
Nov. 24 that “those who worked night and day for this [Safety Zone] plan were all there ? Mills, Bates,
Smythe, and Han Li-wu.” As both Rabe and Vautrin said, it appears that the people staying in Bak’s
house were central in moving the plans forward.
Thus the Safety Zone idea surfaced on Nov. 17 and the International Committee was formed. Over time
the membership fluctuated a little, but in general there were six Americans, four Germans, five British, and
one Dane.
On Nov. 22, Rabe was recommended to be the International Committee’s spokesman. Previously, on
Nov. 19, Rabe recorded in his journal that the idea for the Safety Zone was presented and, “I was
approached about whether I would like to join the committee. I agreed and at dinner this evening at
Professor Smythe’s home, I made the acquaintance of a good number of the Americans members.”
Earnest Forster and John Magee, pastors at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, said several times ? as did
Rabe ? that there could absolutely be no military presence in the Safety Zone. It had to be neutral territory
for non-combatants. Therefore, when Magee wrote a letter to his wife on Dec. 12, 1937, about the
International Committee managing the situation, he said it would only be natural to refer to them as “the
Neutral Zone Committee.”
§2 Tea parties and press conferences held in Nanking
It was at about this same time that the CPB started holding tea parties and press conferences in Nanking.
As shown by the tea party bar graph and the press conference graph recorded in the section, “Summary of
Foreign Section Operations” in the top-secret Summary of Propaganda Operations, the tea parties and
press conferences appear to have occurred frequently before the fall of the city. The one who suggested
holding the tea parties in Nanking was Dong Xianguang, the man who directed the actions of the CPB. In
his Autobiography, he recalls that, “[o]n Nov. 25, on my advice, Madame Chiang Kai-shek hosted a tea
party and invited the foreign journalists residing in Nanking.”
The day and time given varied, but the tea parties appear to have begun on Nov. 23, 20 days before the
city fell. On that day, Rabe wrote in his journal:
5 p.m.: Tea party given by Mr. Chang Chun [Zhang Qun], former foreign minister and now chief secretary
of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition to about 50 Americans and Europeans from various
countries, the party was attended by: General Tang, who is in charge of the defense of the city; General
Wang Kopang [Wang Gupan], the chief of police, and Ma [Ma Chaojun], the mayor. The “main idea” is
that all of us remaining Europeans and Americans are to gather each evening between eight and nine o’
clock at the International Club, so that we can remain contact with leading Chinese figures or their
representatives.
The same thing appears in the Nov. 23 entry in the Vautrin Diary. According to her entry, 50 people
assembled at the International Club, which was managed by the Chinese government to foster
communication between Chinese and foreigners. It says that representatives from all the embassies in
Nanking, businessmen, missionaries, and many journalists were there. Starting on the 23rd, anyone who
wanted could go every day from 8:30 to 9:30 P.M. to meet with representatives of the defense forces, the
police agency, or the city government.
In a letter dated Dec. 2, Vautrin wrote about the daily press conferences held at the Anglo?Chinese
Culture Center. In a letter dated Jan. 28, she wrote “the daily Press conference which took place until
Sunday, Dec. 12.”
From this, we understand that tea parties and press conferences were held in the Anglo?Chinese Culture
Center on Beiping Road inside the Safety Zone from Nov. 23 until the fall of the city on Dec. 12. For Rabe
(who had become the chairman of the International Committee), it was more than just creating the Safety
Zone ? getting help from the Chinese was surely essential, and his exchanges with other members of the
International Committee likewise must have been of great importance. It was only natural that he would
have considered the tea parties and press conferences “a good idea.” As to the Europeans and Americans
having contact with “either a Chinese leader or his representative,” this was organized by the CPB. We don
’t know exactly what subjects came up during these press conferences as they were not recorded in detail,
but we can speculate based on entries in diaries and so forth made at the time.
§3 The number of refugees
Having created the Safety Zone, the subject that was now the greatest concern of the International
Committee was the number of refugees who would be in residence in the zone. In managing the Safety
Zone, it was essential to the International Committee to keep a grip on the population. For their part, they
needed to verify the information as quickly as possible.
Detailed diagram of the complete boundaries of Nanking. This map shows the population density by depth
of shading, and was dated November, 1937. (Furnished by Inagaki Kiyoshi.) The Safety Zone is indicated
by the heavy dotted lines. The horizontal dotted line below it connects Zhongshan Gate (on the right) and
Hanxi Gate (on the left).
Map of the Saftey Zone and its environs inside Nanking.
The shaded section shows the Safety Zone. (Produced by Takamura Kazuyuki.)
At one of the press conferences, the population-count of Nanking was inquired about (likely on behalf of
the International Committee), and the Guomindang government official seems to have immediately
responded. Looking at Rabe’s journal, his entry for Nov. 25 says “imminent battle for Nanking otherwise
endangers the lives of over two hundred thousand people,” and, “[I] have decided to remain in Nanking ?
have accepted chairmanship of International Committee for creation of neutral zone to protect over two
hundred thousand non-combatants.” On Nov. 28, he recorded, “Wang Kopang, chief of police, has
repeatedly declared that 200,000 Chinese are still living in the city.” [Emphasis mine.] That Wang Gupan
repeated this information suggests that the International Committee had requested verification of the
population several times.
In other words, 15 days before the fall of Nanking, the population had been verified to be 200,000.
How can we confirm the population just before Nanking’s fall? Just before the fall, the International
Committee attempted a truce proposal “[f]or the sake of 200,000 helpless civilians.” That is to say, in the
hours before Nanking fell, 200,000 was the official population count.
How did the Guomindang arrive at this number? Moreover, was the number 200,000 correct? We just don
’t know. Guomindang governmental officials, people affiliated with the CPB, and members of the
International Committee were assembled at these press conferences, however. Therefore, the number
200,000 was a well-known figure. This was also common knowledge to those remaining in Nanking.
§4 The site of the Safety Zone
Look at the map on the next page. This is a detailed map of the entire city of Nanking. This map, published
in Shanghai in November of 1937, one month before the fall of Nanking, by the Qianjin Yudi Co., indicates
population density by the color saturation. According to this, we can clearly understand the highest
population density was south from the center of the city (an imaginary line connecting Zhongshan Gate and
Hanxi Gate). If the safe zone for the city’s residents were to be established there, many people would not
have to leave the houses they had gotten used to living in, and it would also certainly reduce the burden on
the International Committee when it came to the issue of housing the refugees. Another likely issue was the
problem of protecting the houses from both the Chinese and Japanese forces.
In point of fact, however, what became the Safety Zone was established north from the center of the city in
the area I have indicated by the dotted lines on the map. If one looks at the next map, one can see ? in
addition to the Japanese embassy ? the University of Nanking, the Gulou Hospital (which is affiliated with
the university), the Ginling Women’s College, and other sites tied to American property. I have not
indicated their locations on the map, but within this zone are the Bak house (in which Bates, Wilson, and
Smythe were living), the homes of Rabe and others, the homes of Zheng Qun (whose house had become
the headquarters of the International Committee) and other Guomindang governmental officials, the
American embassy, the Italian embassy, the German embassy, and the Anglo?Chinese Culture Center (the
home of the tea parties and press conferences). There were also military installations inside the area.
It is not clearly recorded as to just exactly how the boundaries for the Safety Zone were decided upon, but
it seems that hard fighting was anticipated in the southern area, so they decided to put it the north. In April
of 1938, however, when Cabot Coville, the American military attache at the embassy in Tokyo, came to
Nanking, an English businessman named Swills complained to him that the setting of the Safety Zone in the
northern part of the city (unlike Shanghai where it was in the south) was, “in actuality, to protect the
property of Americans, Germans, and affluent Chinese.”
At any rate, the International Committee had to get recognition by both the Japanese and Chinese armies
for the Safety Zone. To get recognition by the Japanese army, committee chairman Rabe sent a telegram to
the Japanese headquarters in Shanghai via the wireless set at the American embassy. Rabe recorded the
contents of the telegram in his diary on Nov. 22:
The International Committee will undertake to secure from the Chinese authorities specific guarantees that
(1) the proposed “Safety Zone” will be made free and kept free from military establishments and offices,
including those of communications; from the presence of armed men other than civilian police with pistols;
and (2) from passage of soldiers or military officers in any capacity. The International Committee would
inspect and observe the Safety Zone to see that these undertakings are satisfactorily carried out. [Numbers
and emphasis mine.]
The Safety Zone, as neutral territory, was a neutral, demilitarized zone wherein no military installations or
personnel would be. To establish the Safety Zone, this was the most essential and basic condition. As
George Fitch wrote in his diary, “a certain area in the city which would be kept free of soldiers and all
military offices … ” , and everyone in the International Committee understood this point full well. Therefore,
with the decision made that the International Committee would manage the Safety Zone, all the Chinese
military installations inside the zone would have to evacuate the area.
The International Committee designated all manner of Chinese army military installations inside the Safety
Zone, including the newest German-made anti-aircraft guns. The committee probably thought that the
Chinese army would withdraw their military installations immediately, and chairman Rabe promised the
Japanese army that he would guarantee it. This didn’t happen, however. This was negligence on the part of
the International Committee, and it was their first big mistake.
§5 Chinese military installations did not withdraw from the Safety Zone
The International Committee requested that the Chinese army remove their men and materiel from the
Safety Zone as soon as possible, and the Nationalist government promised to see it done. Be that as it may,
whether it was just that the promise was broken or that on the contrary they were expanding their military
installations, this was, unfortunately, not carried out. Let us return to Rabe’s journal.
Dec. 3. Although General Tang, who is in charge of defending the city, promised us that all military
personnel and installations would be kept out of the refugee zone, we now learn three new trenches and/or
foundations for anti-aircraft batteries are being dug in the Zone.
…
Dec. 4. Soldiers continue to build new trenches and install military telephones inside the Safety Zone.
The withdrawal of military installations and the pull-out of the army were the critical conditions for the
Safety Zone, and Rabe, as chairman of the International Committee, was worried about it. Rabe suddenly
realized the following: “Dec. 5.… I pay a call on General Tang, who is in charge of the city’s defense, in
order to get his consent to have all military personnel and establishments removed from the Zone at once.
Imagine our amazement when General Tang tells us that this is quite impossible, that at best it will be
another two weeks before the military can evacuate the zone.… But the fact is General Tang himself
received us today in a house inside the refugee zone.”
Rabe went to see Gen. Tang Shengzhi, commandant of Nanking’s defense forces, to request the
withdrawal of all military personnel and installations. He had expected that they had already been removed
from the Zone, but Rabe suddenly realized that Tang, who shouldn’t have been there, was himself in the
Zone.
To add one more thing to this subject, the daily press conferences were being held at the Anglo?Chinese
Culture Center on Beiping Road, which was inside the Safety Zone. What this means is that Chinese
officers and soldiers regularly entered the Zone as a matter of course.
For that reason, Rabe wondered if, in fact, the press conferences were no longer needed or perhaps that
they should be held in a different place outside the Safety Zone. He didn’t bring it up however; it was not
something for discussion. It was likely for the protection of their own assets that they had chosen a place
with an accumulation of European houses as the location of the Safety Zone. For their part, the Chinese
accepted this, designating the estate of Zhang Qun as the headquarters of the International Committee.
Moreover, the International Committee received money and food rations from the Guomindang
government. For example, on Nov. 29, Rabe recorded in his journal, “The generalissimo has placed
100,000 dollars at the committee’s disposal.” Vautrin also writes in her diary next day, “Mayor has said
municipality will give $100,000 and also a large quantity of rice.” In his diary, Fitch wrote that “Mayor Ma
virtually turned over to us the administrative responsibilities for the Zone together with a police force of
450, 30,000 piculs (2,000 tons) of rice, and 10,000 bags of flour, and some salt, also a promise of a
hundred thousand dollars in cash －80,000 of twhich was subsequently recieved.” [Emphasis mine.]
We can therefore imagine that the International Committee received provisions from the Guomindang
government and believed that it was being made responsible for managing the Safety Zone. On the
contrary ? basic military installations developed stealthily. Rabe, as chairman of the International
Committee, had told the Japanese that he would have the Guomindang government promise to meet the
principal condition of the Safety Zone ? the withdrawal of all military ? but in reality, that didn’t happen.
On Dec. 2, Rabe received a reply from the Japanese via the French priest, Fr. Jacquinot de Besange. He
recorded its contents in his journal.
Japanese authorities have duly noted request for safety zone but regret cannot grant it. In event of Chinese
forces misbehavior toward civilians and or property cannot assume responsibility, but they themselves will
endeavor to respect the district as far as consistent with military necessity.
Rabe was in a hard place, stuck between the Chinese and Japanese. It was only natural that the Japanese
government had responded, with regret, that they could not approve the concept of a “Safety Zone.” The
Japanese government doubted that the International Committee actually had the authority to be able to get
all the Chinese military installations moved out of the Zone, or that they could effectively maintain neutrality
within it.
Consider Rabe’s journal just before the fall of Nanking:
Dec. 11, 8 A.M. … there are still armed soldiers inside, and all our efforts to get them out have thus far
been to no avail. We cannot tell the Japanese, as was our intention, that the Zone is now free of all military.
Dec. 12. … Under such circumstances there’s no hope of clearing them out of the Zone.
The battle to take Nanking began on Dec. 10. Nanking fell before dawn on the 13th, and even just before
that the Chinese army was failing to keep its promise. The International Committee had been unable to get
the Chinese army and its military installations out of the Safety Zone. We can see that behind Rabe’s
assessment of their attempts as “utter failure,” he was resigned to the fact from the beginning that it was a
pointless discussion to insist on expelling the Chinese military from the Zone.
§6 Defensive problems with the Safety Zone’s fatal defects
The original model for Nanking’s Safety Zone was a safety zone established for the protection of refugees
in a part of the Chinese residency-zone called Nantao, south of the Shanghai international settlement and
the French concession, when a total withdrawal of the Chinese army from Shanghai and its environs was
anticipated (from the end of October to early November) by the French missionary priest Fr. Jacquinot de
Besange. The French army strictly preserved neutrality in the safety zone in the south of the city, dubbed
the “Jacquinot Zone.” Naturally, there were no Chinese soldiers or military installations inside the zone, and
when Chinese soldiers fled from the battle in the north of the city to the neutrality zone, the French soldiers
forcefully stopped them.
If the Nanking Safety Zone is compared to that of Shanghai on that point, we find several fatal defects.
First, there were Chinese soldiers and military installations in the Nanking Safety Zone.
Second, the Safety Zone’s boundaries were not made securely distinct. Unlike the Jacquinot Zone, which
was isolated by barbed wire entanglements, the boundaries of the Nanking Safety Zone were wide avenues
where flags were flown at intervals along the streets to indicate the zone. With this, the Chinese soldiers
were able to come and go in the Safety Zone wherever and whenever they wanted.
Third, unlike Shanghai, there was no third-party military force to regulate the entrances and exits of the
Nanking Safety Zone and to prevent the comings and goings of Chinese soldiers. And that wasn’t all. All
the government agencies, the city government, and the police, had fled Nanking. Everyone in authority had
speedily evacuated and there was not one person of responsibility left. In the south of Shanghai, authorities
and officials of the city government and police remained; but all that stayed behind in Nanking, as Rabe and
Bates said, were “the poorest of the poor.” There was not even ability to maintain public order.
Fourth, the Shanghai International Committee recognized that the Jacquinot Zone was “under the full
authority of the Japanese military,” and they declared that the zone’s control was not the concern of the
committee; but the International Committee in Nanking made no such declaration. In fact, Rabe wrote in his
journal on Dec. 8 that, “since the committee, with his approval, is forced to deal with all the administrative
problems and workings of municipality inside our Safety Zone, I have in fact become something very like an
acting mayor.” The Safety Zone in Nanking was not under the full authority of the Japanese army.
Having seen thus much, it was futile to try to create in Nanking a neutral safety zone as in Shanghai where
soldiers were forbidden entry, surrounded as Nanking was by giant ramparts and protected by the latest
anti-aircraft artillery and so forth (and on top of that, a city that was soon to be a battlefield).
The International Committee was aware of these fatal flaws. As seen in Rabe’s note (1) on page 58 of this
book, it seems that at the beginning they thought to establish a force of “our own policemen armed with
pistols.” But consider this ? though called settlement policemen, the personnel were civilians, and it was
only natural that they would have been unable to prevent the entry of Chinese officers or soldiers.
After all was said and done, the Safety Zone created by the International Committee encountered the
occupation of Nanking by the Japanese army while still unable to overcome these fatal flaws.
§7 Those around Rabe, part one ? the Americans involved with the Guomindang government
While the Guomindang government approved the establishment of the Safety Zone, they were not about to
cooperate with the most essential points. It must be obvious to anyone looking at it that one can only
conclude that the fault was on the Chinese side. It is fair to assume that, like Rabe, all the Europeans and
Americans in Nanking were concerned about the uncooperative attitude of the Chinese military. In point of
fact, however, this was not the case.
When George Fitch, one of the International Committee members, wrote an anonymous contribution for
What War Means, he wrote that quite the opposite was true. “Gen. Tang, recently executed we have been
told, charged with the defense of the city, cooperated splendidly on the whole in the very difficult task of
clearing the Zone of the military and anti-aircraft, and most commendable degree of order was preserved
right up to the very last moment when the Japanese began, on Sunday the 12th, to enter the walls.”
In an article published in the New York Times on Dec. 8, the journalist Durdin, writing from Nanking, said,
“An anti-aircraft battery and a number of military offices moved out of the zone today, giving further
indication of the Chinese military’s intention to carry out demilitarization pledges.”
A journal entry made by Rabe on that same date (Dec. 8) expressing his fears stands in contrast to the
afore-mentioned accounts:
We are working feverishly to develop the Zone. Unfortunately we must deal with endless encroachments
by the military, who still have not left our zone and apparently are in no hurry to do so.… We are all close
to despair. Chinese military headquarters is our worst problem. Chinese soldiers have moved a whole
section of the flags we had just managed to set out around our perimeter. The size of the Zone is to be
reduced; they need the reclaimed area for their artillery and fortifications.… if the Japanese get wind of it,
they’ll bombard us without mercy. And they may well turn the Safety Zone into the High Danger Zone.…
None of us expected this sort of dirty dealing.
As I have mentioned before, George Fitch’s wife was a close friend of Soong Ch’ing-ling, the wife of
Chiang Kai-shek. Afterward, Fitch set out on a lecture circuit in the United States to tell of the Nanking
Massacre. As I have also laid out, Durdin was an “old friend” and a “good friend” of the CPB’s Dong
Xianguang, and he was one of the people who reported the Nanking Massacre to newspapers in America.
Speaking of ties to the Guomindang government, Miner Searle Bates (who was also a member of the
International Committee, it should be remembered) was an advisor to the government of the Republic of
China (see page 95), and in 1930 had been a colleague of Zeng Xubai’s at the University of Nanking.
Though we only know this today, there were many Americans who had some kind of connection to the
Guomindang government around International Committee chairman Rabe. Of course, we have no way of
knowing whether Rabe knew of their connections, or what kind of influences they may have had on him.
§8 Those around Rabe, part two ? the hiding of Chinese soldiers
As chairman of the International Committee, Rabe had frequent opportunities to meet with “Chinese
leaders or their representatives” outside the regular journalists’ meetings.
On Dec. 7, Chiang Kai-shek fled Nanking along with his wife and their foreign advisor W. H. Donald.
Gen. Tang Shengzhi, who had publicly proclaimed that he would defend Nanking to the death, abandoned
Nanking and his subordinates the night before the city fell (leaving at 8 p.m. on Dec. 12), fleeing along with
several other high-ranking commanders. Tang left behind many ranking officers, however.
The night before Nanking fell, Rabe wrote in his journal: “Dec. 12, Shortly before eight o’clock Colonels
Lung [Long] and Chow [Zhou] arrive … and ask if they can take shelter in my house. I agree. Before Han
and I left for home, these two gentlemen deposited $30,000 in the committee’s safe.”
Long and Zhou were both Chinese army colonels. Rabe was also sheltering an air force captain. Rabe left
Nanking on Feb. 23, 1938, to return to Germany, but the night before leaving he wrote in his journal that, “
Mr. Loh Fu Hsian [Luo Fuxiang], whose real name is Captain Huang Kuanghan, an air force officer…. His
real name is Wang Hanwan [Wang Hanwan].… [H]e can finally escape from danger, because he’s been
hiding in my house since the fall of Nanking.”
Rabe was hiding at least three Chinese officers. In Rabe’s unpublished journal (published as Feindliche
Flieger uber Nanking [Enemy Planes Over Nanking]), the registry of names of “employees of the Nanking
branch office of Siemens” is recorded. In that registry, Rabe has recorded as employees the names of the
military people he himself was hiding.
Ten signatures including the names of Chinese army officers on a New Year’s greeting. It appears in
“Enemy Planes Over Nanking,” the unpublished journal of Rabe, in vol. 4, page 84. Preserved in the
Archives of the German Foreign Ministry.
In the employee list, the names were typed alphabetically in roman letters, but the employees themselves
wrote their names in pen in hanzi. It was excellent penmanship. The name Luo Fuxiang appears clearly and
he is indicated as a “salesman.”
We don’t know the names for colonels Long and Zhou who came to Rabe before Nanking’s fall to ask him
to hide them, but for argument’s sake, if we take them to be the Long Weiguang and Zhou Wenbai who
appear on the list, Zhou was listed as a 43-year-old accountant from Guangdong whose name appears in
roman letters as “Chow Wen Po,” and Long was listed as a 38-year-old translator also from Guangdong
using the English name “William Long.”
As Fr. John Magee said, the International Committee was “a neutral committee.” Member of the
International Committee had to occupy a position of neutrality, but for activities like hiding Chinese military
personnel, chairman Rabe himself was a violator of their public promise of forbidding Chinese military entry
into the Safety Zone (see Rabe’s note (2) on page 58).
In his memoirs, My 80 Years in China, George Fitch wrote that when air force captain Wang Hanwan
came to him in the Safety Zone to ask for protection, “I took his uniform to be hidden away in some safe
place after having it dried. At a staff meeting it was decided to appoint him as special assistant and
interpreter to our Chairman, Dr. Rabe.”
Tsuji Masanobu addressed the question of how great a problem the issue of soldiers hiding during and
immediately after a battle is in his book, Traveling 3,000 Leagues Incognito. When Japan met with defeat in
Thailand, Tsuji just went into hiding there as he was, but he says that when the English army entered
Thailand then, they issued a country-wide special order stating, “If anyone is found to have sheltered a
Japanese or assisted in his escape, regardless of whether he is a Thai or a Chinese merchant, he shall be
executed on the spot by firing squad without a trial.”
The Japanese army in Nanking was different than the English army. They did not issue a special order such
as this, though the sheltering of enemy soldiers was an act benefiting the enemy. In his Discourse on
International Law in Wartime (1933), Prof. Tachi Taro introduces the opinions of Cambridge University’s
Prof. Westlake (professor of international law) and others who say that citizens of a neutral country
“enticing enemy forces and inducing them to desert” is forbidden under international law as “war treason.”
It must certainly have occurred to Rabe that hiding Chinese soldiers would raise any number of problems in
terms of wartime international law. So what caused Rabe to do so? He was asked “please hide me” by
Chinese soldiers he had known before Nanking’s fall, and though one may say he was motivated to
acquiesce to their requests out of humanitarian motives, might that have really been all there was to it?
In Rabe’s unpublished journal (Enemy Planes Over Nanking), kept at the governmental archives of the
German foreign ministry, the signatures from a New Year’s greeting addressed to Chairman Rabe appear.
On the previous page the photo shows one page of the collected signatures. We can’t be sure if these are
all their true names, but the names given are as follows (with the modern pinyin reading of the name in
brackets): Han [Han Xianglin], Loh [Luo Fuxiang] (Wang Hanwan), Chow [Zhou Wenbai], Lung [Long
Weiguang], Ma Naiping [Ma Naibin], Wang Din [Wang Ding], Chang [Zhang Ruchun], Hsu Chuan-ying
[Xu Chuanyin], KZ Tsao [Cao Gengquan], and Chen Zeong-liang [Chen Zhongliang]. The names are all
written in hanzi and roman letters with fountain pens. All the signatures were speedily written. Because of
the facility with writing in roman letters, it would appear that they have all received a high level of education.
The name of Luo Fuxiang, whom Rabe hid, and the names of Long Weiguang and Zhou Wenbai, whom
we also suspect Rabe hid, appear. Since the signatures of these people all appear together on the same
paper, they are doubtless all acquaintances.
Just to add one more thing, by the way, about Rabe. Prof. Nakanishi Terumasa indicates that Rabe’s
“public face” was his position as the chief of the Nanking branch office of Siemens, but he “moved in secret
as a confidential contactee of the German military assistance advisory group.” When considering Rabe’s
actions, this fact should not be overlooked. As to whether Rabe was actually a secret agent, I would like to
explore that at a future occasion.
§9 Those around Rabe, part three ? why were Chinese soldiers left behind?
It appears that it was not just Rabe who was hiding Chinese soldiers. Many Chinese officers and men were
in the Safety Zone, and this means that they were in hiding and getting shelter from someone. Maj. Gen.
Iinuma Mamoru, chief of staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, wrote in his journal in camp on Jan. 4,
“The military police continue to seize outlaw gangs hiding in the Nanking refugee area or in foreign
embassies and so forth. The commanding officer of the security forces, the second-in-command of the 88th
Division, etc., are principal among them.” There must have been those who, with nowhere else to go, hid in
the Safety Zone, but that can’t be said to have been the only reason. Let us return to Rabe’s journal. On
Feb. 15, 1938, eight days before Rabe finally left Nanking, he wrote:
Lung and Chow left my house yesterday evening; they intend to leave the city today. I don’t know how.
They haven’t volunteered their plan to me, and I haven’t asked. Our friendship has in fact been ruptured.
All the same, I wish them a good journey home to Hong Kong. But I have no wish ever to see these people
again.
It should be remembered that the two colonels, Long and Zhou, were high ranking officers who were hiding
in the home of chairman of the International Committee, John Rabe. But what could engender so much
resentment from him? What had they done to form a break in their friendship?
What follows is my conjecture of what happened.
After the fall of Nanking, Chinese soldiers hiding in the Safety Zone worked evil deeds. These were
publicized as being the doings of the Japanese military. These became matters of particular concern to the
International Committee. This is especially evident in a letter written by an unknown party and addressed to
the Japanese embassy, dated Dec. 31. It is recorded in Bates’ writings, kept at Yale University.
The letter refers to the Japanese unmasking of an incident that took place at the sericulture facility at the
University of Nanking, where Chinese officers raped women in the Safety Zone, then buried their guns to
hide them. The letter then explains that the suspects, “Chen Mi (Chen Mei) and Wang Hsing-lung (Wang
Xinlun),” had no connection to the University of Nanking.
We don’t know who wrote this letter, but what is important is that it vindicates the suspicion that
Americans and Europeans were hiding Chinese soldiers at the University of Nanking. What must be noted
is that the writer of this letter sent it to the Japanese embassy, that there was no protestation that the
suspicion and arrest of Chen Mi and Wang Xinlun were invalid, and that there was no connection between
Wang and the university.
What happened after the incident at the university’s sericulture facility? We know what happened thanks to
an article written by an American and published in the Jan. 25, 1938, edition of Shanghai’s China Press.
The same paper recounts that before Dec. 28, 23 Chinese army officers (including Chen Mei and Wang
Xinlun), 54 non-commissioned officers, and 1,498 soldiers were found out. Moreover, on the previous
day, they received a public notice from the Japanese military police in Nanking. The paper reported:
Among them, it is claimed, was the commander of the Nanking peace preservation corps, Wang Hsing-lau
[Wang Xinlun?], “who masqueraded as Chen Mi” and was in command of the fourth branch detachment of
the international refugee zone, Lieutenant-General Ma Pou-shang [Ma Pauxiang], former adjutant of the
88th Division, and a high official of the Nanking Police, Mi Shin-shi [Mi Xinxi].
General Ma, it claimed, was active in instigating anti-Japanese disorders within the zone, which also
sheltered Captain Hwan An [Huang An] and 17 men with a machine-gun and 17 rifles, while the report
states that Wang Hsing-lau and three former subordinates were engaged in looting and raping. [Emphasis
mine.]
The italicized “former adjutant of the 88th Division” appears also in the camp journal of Maj. Gen. Iinuma,
cited before. It says that the Chinese officers were in hiding, but it does not say who it was who was hiding
them.
That being said, for the time being we shouldn’t be suspicious of whether the reports of the Japanese
military police in Nanking were true.
If we were to take it that the arrests were improper, the Americans and Europeans on the International
Committee surely would have objected. For example, consider another letter in Bates’ papers sent to the
Japanese embassy by an unnamed writer, this one dated Jan. 8. This letter protests the sudden arrest by the
Japanese military police of one Liu Wen-pin, who, it said, had been working inside the Safety Zone as a
Japanese translator. In addition, in a letter from Bates himself to the Japanese embassy dated Jan. 1, Bates
protests that the military police arrested Liu Wen-pin at his home with no cause. However, in a letter dated
Jan. 24 and addressed to Consul Allison at the American embassy, Bates reverses himself and says that Liu
Wen-pin was just a “hooligan.” After this, Bates ceased his protestations.
As this shows, when the Americans and Europeans thought something untoward was being done, they
quickly protested it. Despite this fact, there was no complaint made over the arrests concerning the incident
at the university’s sericulture facility. Based on what we have seen thus far, it should be fair to say that the
notices of the Japanese military police in Nanking that as reported by the China Press were valid.
There are other recorded examples of Chinese soldiers hiding in the Safety Zone carrying out evil deeds
that were being attributed to the Japanese army. The article “Looting Outrage in Nanking by [Offenders]
Impersonating the Imperial Army: Outlaw Chinese Gang Captured,” distributed by Nanking’s Domei
Tsushin News on Feb. 26, was published in the Feb. 27, 1938 edition of the Osaka Asahi News.
According to the article, the military police in Nanking arrested 29-year-old Wu Yaobang and eleven
confederates who were pretending to be members of the Japanese military and who were doing nothing but
looting. Since rumors had reached some foreign countries that Japanese soldiers had committed countless
outrages from the time the Japanese army entered Nanking, the Nanking military police had exerted great
pains in their investigations. The result was the arrest of this gang. The article says that innocent citizens of
Nanking who were attacked believed that the gang of Wu Yaobang, who was skilled at Japanese, were
Japanese soldiers, and only too late realized the truth.
The members of this gang were originally policemen, but since the fall of Nanking they had set up three
places inside the city as their bases from which they launched their robberies and acts of violence. It is not
certain if the house where they were hiding was located at No. 50 Yutai Town as reported, but another of
their hideouts ? No. 14 Shanghai Road ? was inside the Safety Zone. If the address of the third hideout,
given as No. 106 Ganhe Road, is a mistake for 106 Ganhe Bank, then it is also inside the Safety Zone ?
and also very near the residence of International Committee Chairman Rabe in the neighborhood of
Xiaotao Yuan.
The background explanation would take considerable time, but let’s return to Rabe’s journal, and consider
why he writes that his friendship with the two Chinese officers “ruptured.”
What is strange in reading Rabe’s Journal is that rapes and arson were occurring all around Rabe’s home,
and Rabe was even a witness to the events. For example, at 6pm on Dec. 18, as he was returning home,
some Japanese soldiers had forced their way in and were about to rape a servant. Rabe said his
appearance saved her in the nick of time. Moreover, on Feb. 27, as Rabe and the servant went to look
around the Sino?Japanese Joint-Management Store, flames began shooting from the store. He was
witnessing an act of arson. Almost as if they had been waiting for Rabe to arrive, the Japanese soldiers’
crime occurred right in front of his eyes. It was oddly good timing.
It would be fair to say that the Americans and Europeans in Nanking really couldn’t distinguish between
Chinese and Japanese. This was doubtless all the more the case when something totally unexpected
suddenly happened. Given this, we have to wonder if it wasn’t someone who knew Rabe’s daily schedule
who was using Chinese people for various schemes.
If Cols. Zhou and Long were using Rabe’s home as their hideout and making schemes to create
disturbances behind the Japanese army, and if this became something that Rabe grew concerned about,
would he not have come to feel betrayed? Rabe, finally realizing the truth about the events that were
occurring one after the other all around him and ultimately coming to the understanding that his good will
was being taken advantage of, had fallen into the dilemma of wanting to say something about it but being
unable to do so. Rabe couldn’t even write the whole truth in his journal. Was the truth hidden behind Rabe’
s words that their “friendship has in fact been ruptured,” and he had “no wish ever to see these people
again” possibly something like this?
As the chairman of a neutral zone, Rabe’s act of sheltering Chinese officers and men itself was a huge
violation of his agreement. As you have already seen, Rabe understood this fact more than anyone else. By
hiding Chinese soldiers, he had already renounced neutrality, and committed an offense against the
Japanese army for which he would not have been able to make a defense. In point of fact, if by chance this
had come to light, might not Rabe have been charged under international wartime law?
When looking at it from the perspective of the CPB, the Guomindang had Rabe ?who represented the
International Committee and who entered into talks with the Japanese army ? on their side.
§10 Disarming Chinese soldiers and letting them into the Safety Zone
At 8 p.m. on Dec. 12, several hours before the fall of the city’s gates, the highest ranking officer in Nanking
? Gen. Tang Shengzi ? fled the city along with several other high-ranking officers from the solitary
narrow exit that was Yijiang Gate (the north gate). What might the Chinese soldiers at the gates battling the
Japanese army have thought upon hearing that their commanders had abandoned them? It is only natural
that panic must have set in amongst them. They then all ran off to take various actions.
First, some escaped from within the city to the outside. To do that, a great number of Chinese soldiers
descended on Yijiang Gate, which was the only open gate in the city, to get outside to the banks of the
Yangzi River and to try to cross it. In front of the river, however, the Chinese army’s front-line supervising
unit was lying in wait as they had been ordered: to fire on any friendly troops attempting to flee the line of
battle and kill them. Before long, the supervising unit also realized the critical nature of their situation. When
the supervising unit fled, many soldiers continued to rush into the narrow escape route. As Durdin wrote in
the New York Times on Dec. 18, “[t]he capture of Xiaguan [=Yijiang] Gate by the Japanese was
accompanied by the mass killing of the defenders, who were piled up among the sandbags forming a
mound six feet high.” As Durdin recalled 60 years later, however, whether the bodies were those of
soldiers who had been shot dead by their own supervising unit or those who had been crushed to death all
at once in the rush through the narrow gateway, it made no difference as they were dead.
Second, soldiers who decided that they couldn’t escape via Yijiang Gate tried to get outside by climbing
down ropes from the top of the city’s walls. The walls were 10 meters high, however, and escaping that
way was not easy. One after another, Chinese soldiers fell to their death.
Third, soldiers threw away their arms and stripped off their uniforms to impersonate the civilian population,
hiding in the Safety Zone and disappearing among Nanking’s refugees. As explained on pages 62 and 63,
since the Safety Zone was not cordoned off with barbed wire and there were no troops stationed to
prevent soldiers coming and going, all anyone had to do was walk across the street and they were in the
Safety Zone. As one would think, all those who decided that there was no avenue of escape from inside the
city chose this as their only remaining option.
What becomes a problem here is how the International Committee responded to the Chinese soldiers
swarming into the neutral, demilitarized Safety Zone.
It was to be expected that the International Committee had to exert all their efforts to prevent their entry
into the Safety Zone. As shown earlier, the International Committee promised the Japanese that the
“‘Safety Zone’ will be made free and kept free from … passage of soldiers or military officers in any
capacity. The International Committee would inspect and observe the Safety Zone to see that these
undertakings are satisfactorily carried out.” Implementation of this promise was something that they had to
carry out.
On the 13th (the day Nanking fell), Rabe recorded in his journal that they were “able to save three
detachments of about 600 Chinese soldiers by disarming them.” As this shows, rather than prevent
Chinese soldiers from coming into the Safety Zone, the International Committee allowed them to enter the
zone once disarmed.
Rabe said that they were able to help the Chinese soldiers, “disarming” them, but this went completely
against his agreement. To begin with, disarmament is the occupying army relying on the enemy army to lay
down their capacity to fight (weapons and soldiers) under their own control. Civilian intrusion into the
disarmament process was itself a military problem. If the International Committee wanted to say they had
carried out disarmament, they should have been able to say they started the disarmament by handing over
to the Japanese a list of the Chinese army’s weapons and soldiers, and differentiating the latter from the
townsmen. Instead, the International Committee failed to hand the Chinese soldiers over to the Japanese.
Was the International Committee, then, unaware of all of this? No, they weren’t. After Nanking’s fall, the
International Committee wrote the following (“Document No. 2”) to Fukuda Tokuyasu, attache at the
Japanese embassy, on Dec. 15, signed by Rabe as chairman:
The International Committee for Nanking Safety Zone is very much perplexed by the problem of soldiers
who have thrown away their arms. (1) From the beginning the Committee strove to have this Zone entirely
free of Chinese soldiers and up to the afternoon of Monday Dec. 13, had achieved considerable success in
this respect. At that time several hundred soldiers approached or entered the Zone through the northern
boundary and appealed to us for help. (2) The Committee plainly told the soldiers that it could not protect
them. But we told them that if they abandoned their arms and all resistance to the Japanese, (3) we thought
the Japanese would give them merciful treatment.
In the confusion and haste of that evening, (4) the Committee was unable to keep the disarmed soldiers
separate from civilians, particularly because some of the soldiers had abandoned their military uniforms.
[Emphasis and numbering mine.]
As indicated by number four above, the International Committee plainly recognized that their most basic
responsibility was separating the soldiers from the civilians. While they clearly knew this, they didn’t do
anything about it. In fact, Rabe himself was already hiding Chinese officers, and had been doing so since
before the city fell. In other words, though they should have been making an effort to distinguish the civilians
from the soldiers, they let the Chinese soldiers who had cast away their uniforms run loose in the midst of
the civilian population. It doesn’t matter what country the army is from ? a mixture of civilians and non-
uniformed enemy combatants presents an incredibly dangerous situation.
What might the Japanese army have done with this dangerous situation upon entering Nanking? Surely the
International Committee also speculated that the Japanese may revert to a normal status assuming only
civilians to be in the city, that they may hunt out the soldiers to separate them from the civilians, or that they
might even go so far as to execute them.
Military action by the Japanese to expose and perhaps punish the soldiers was critical to resolve the
situation with the military?civilian mixture that the International Committee had created.
As exemplified by number three above, however, though the International Committee itself had committed
the offence, they hoped to rely on the good nature of the Japanese army if they could get the Chinese
soldiers who had disarmed to agree to cease hostilities against the Japanese. For any army, separating the
soldiers from the civilians would be a critically needed military operation; yet it had somehow gotten turned
to a question of whether Japan had a “kind disposition.”
This meant that the International Committee recognized the Japanese army and that they were in a position
to criticize them. On this point, a confrontational posture toward the Japanese army had become clear. This
is well expressed by numbers one and two above.
As I have shown, even though Rabe wrote in his journal on Dec. 11 that, “there are still armed soldiers
inside,” and on Dec. 12 that, “there’s no hope of clearing them out of the Zone,” he also wrote that the
International Committee “strove to have this Zone entirely free of Chinese soldiers,” that they had “achieved
considerable success” and that they “plainly told the soldiers that it could not protect them.” This was
clearly far from the truth. The document (“Number Two”) that Rabe had signed was completely divorced
from reality. This was not some random spoken falsehood. Though he knew it to be a lie, he wrote it
anyway.
At any rate, the desperate plan of “an International Committee to stand up to the Japanese army” was put
together in this fashion when the Japanese army entered Nanking. That is just what the CPB had not asked
them to do.
CHAPTER FIVE:
WERE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER ARTICLES PART OF THE CPB’S PROPAGANDA WAR?
Three days after the fall of Nanking, on Dec 15, 1937, an American newspaper reported on the front page
and above the fold a massacre in Nanking. It was the first report in the world of a Nanking massacre.
There is no definitive evidence, but does this not fit with the CPB’s propaganda war as stated in the third
chapter of, “contact[ing] newspaper correspondents from different countries.… [and] using them in our
resistance propaganda”? As shown herein, the possibility for this cannot be denied.
§1 The CPB anticipated defeat in the battle for Nanking
Regard the map on the next page. Nanking is environed by fortified walls and huge gates. Forming
formidable natural defenses is the 500-meter-high Mt. Zijin, which soars above Nanking’s walls in the east,
and the Yangzi River, which runs from the west to the north of the city. If one were to attack Nanking, it
would have to be from the east, the south, or the south-west.
Let us return to the opinion expressed by Gen. Li Zongren when Chiang Kai-shek was debating whether
Nanking should be defended to the last man. He said, “I am opposed to the defense of Nanking. My
reasons are strategic in nature. Nanking is isolated from other cities, and there is potential for it to be
surrounded on three sides by the enemy. What’s more, the Yangzi River blocks any retreat to the north. If
we post troops who have been defeated already in that isolated city to protect it, it would be difficult to
hope for a sustained defense.”
This was an extremely sensible assessment. Even the civilian W. Plummer Mills wrote this in a letter to his
wife some 40 days after Nanking’s fall, saying “It was perfectly clear from a variety of reasons that the
Chinese could not hold the city.”
Gen. Li had concluded that it would be difficult to hope to defend Nanking, but Chiang agreed with the
advice of Gen. Tang Shengzhi, who said, “We will never be able to apologize to our supreme commander
unless even one or two commanders makes a sacrifice in Nanking. My advice is to defend Nanking to the
death, and go all the way with the enemy.”
As has already been recounted several times, however, Chiang secretly decided five days later (Nov. 16)
to abandon Nanking, and issued orders to all the officials in the city to make preparations for withdrawal in
three days’ time. Dong Xianguang, head of the CPB, wrote in his autobiography, “Restructuring the
government and large-scale movement were taking place at the same time. We would not be able to
defend Nanking for much longer. In our battle for the defense of the capital, we could but slow down the
enemy’s rapid march.”
The Chinese army and the CPB thus fairly acknowledged that there were no prospects for victory in
Nanking, following as it did China’s loss of Shanghai. Still, this didn’t mean they were going to abandon
their fight against the Japanese. As the 1943 book, The Propaganda War in the Past Six Years of
Resistance, says, “In the present war, propaganda warfare carried out alongside military warfare will play a
conclusive part in determining the outcome.” The Chinese had a policy whereby even if they might lose the
war militarily, they could potentially win by fighting the war on the propaganda front ? and the CPB, led
by Dong Xianguang, planned a propaganda war the likes of which had never been seen.
The “Summary of Editorial Operations” part of the top-secret Summary of Propaganda Operations
references “English Dailies” in the editorial operations section, where it reports:
In the early part of November, 1937, we pulled out of Shanghai and the front moved westward. The battle
for the defense of the capital [Nanking] was already under way and we were about to lose the city.… We
modified, as situational changes dictated, the material collected for English-language dailies over the past
three and a half years. For example, during the battle for the defense of the capital, we propagandized
strategies to muster the courage of our soldiers and operations to reinforce the rear. After the fall of the
capital, we exposed the enemy’s outrages, and in the phase for the battle for Wuhan, we propagandized
that our martial power was increasing day by day. [Emphasis mine.]
In other words, according to the CPB itself, a focal point for the battle for Nanking was the propaganda
war through which they would squeeze out all possible propaganda value for the outrages of the Japanese
army after the city’s fall. The italicized section, however, can be taken in two ways: that either the enemy’s
actions after Nanking fell were from time to time so outrageous that the CPB made propaganda use out of
them, or that they planned beforehand to conduct a propaganda war after Nanking fell.
Illustration emphasizing Nanking’s environs. (Provided by Inagaki Kiyoshi.)
§2 The CPB and the newspapermen
As shown in Chapter Three, referencing the Overview of Propaganda Operations of the International
Propaganda Division of the Central Propaganda Bureau, one of the most vital aspects of international
propaganda carried out by the CPB was “contact[ing] newspaper correspondents from different countries.
… [and] using them in our resistance propaganda.” In other words, “[t]he best result would be gained by
getting foreign journalists to publish our propaganda texts” ? and operations to those ends were critical.
In Dong Xianguang’s Autobiography, he says that, “[International Propaganda Div. chief] Zeng Xubai and I
decided to stay in Nanking until the final phase.” Exactly how long Dong remained in Nanking isn’t clear,
but Minnie Vautrin in her diary mentions Dong being there on Nov. 26. Until the end of November, while
Dong was in the city, he was working to gain the trust of foreign journalists. He recalled the events in his
Autobiography:
Most of the foreign journalists remained in Nanking until the end. Their staffs (who did the things they
needed to be done) were no longer there by that time, and they were distanced from people who had had
dealings with them publicly, so I became a true friendly connection for them. I met with them daily without
fail and I called on them at the Central Hotel where they were, and either chatted with them or we just ate
together individually.
There were five journalists and photographers who remained in Nanking after it fell: Archibald Steele of the
Chicago Daily News, Frank Tillman Durdin of the New York Times, Arthur Manson of the Paramount
News (telefilm), the Englishman L.C. Smith of the Reuters News Service, and the American C. Yates
McDaniel of the Associated Press.
Dong says he met with them and ate individually with them, but he didn’t go so far as to say with whom he
met or what they discussed. At the very least, however, it is believed that he met with Durdin. He
mentioned that Durdin had been “an old colleague” since moving to the China Press in Shanghai in 1931,
and in his memoirs, Durdin’s name pops up from time to time. The article that Durdin wrote for the New
York Times is of considerable interest.
§3 Durdin’s article
Durdin, a special correspondent with the New York Times, wrote the following in an article published on
January 9, 1938:
It is evident that the Chinese command never contemplated that any but a few thousand of the defending
Nanking troops could evacuate across the river. The absence of all means of conveyance across the river
except a few junks and steam launches throughout the siege period was proof of this.
Indeed, the conclusion is inescapable that statements of the Defense Commander Tang Sheng-chi and
division commanders subordinate to him － made before the siege － that no Chinese withdrawal was ever
contemplated were sincerely meant and were expressions of the real intention of Chinese command.
In other words, the Chinese command, fully realizing the practical certainty that the Chinese Army would be
completely surrounded in the walled city of Nanking － trapped like rats while Japanese land and naval
artillery and airplanes would be in a position to pound them to pieces － chose voluntarily to place
themselves in just such situation, apparently with the intention of making the capture of the city as costly to
the Japanese as possible in a final heroic gesture of the kind so dear to the Chinese heart.
The Japanese army, as Gen. Li had predicted, attacked Nanking from three points: the east, south, and the
south-west. The Chinese army strengthened the walls of Nanking and fortified the city’s defenses inside.
They had also reverted to China’s ancient scorched-earth tactic and had burnt to ashes all that lay outside
the walls to remove any potential cover for the enemy and at the same time deprive them of supplies. The
South Gate (Zhonghua Gate) heavily fortified and defended by five hold gates. The walls were 24.5 meters
high; the east and west walls were 128 meters thick and the north and south walls 129 meters deep. Still,
the Japanese army was fighting a desperate, determined battle to take the gate.
With this going on, if the Chinese army were to flee the city, they had no other option but to flee north
across the Yangzi. Moreover, there were hardly any available transport ships; they hadn’t even entered into
Chiang Kai-shek’s plans for withdrawal preparations. The Chinese army command assumed before the
attack began that their army, surrounded by the walls of Nanking, were trapped like rats, and said, “the
Chinese army is not even thinking of withdrawing.” The Japanese army had caught the Chinese soldiers like
rats in a trap, and in addition to anticipating they would be smashed to smithereens, Durdin wrote that even
under those conditions “they chose to carry on.” Why was this? It was because they thought that the
courageous behavior of the Chinese army when placed under those conditions would, itself, inspire the
Chinese people.
Durdin continued:
The disgraceful part of the whole business is that the Chinese command Proved lacking in the courage
needed to carry through their oft-announced and apparent intentions. When Japanese troops succeeded in
breaking over the southwestern wall and while the Hsiakwan back door was still open, though threatened
by a rapidly encircling Japanese Army and the approaching fleet, General Tang A few close associates fled,
leaving subordinate commanders and well-nigh leaderless troops to the mercy of a hopeless situation, which
probably had never been explained to them in the first place.
As the Chinese soldiers engaged in a death struggle with the Japanese army, they were certain to face death
as the Japanese artillery rained down on them and cut them to pieces. The courageous actions of the troops
who chose to share the fate of Nanking moved the Chinese people and raised their determination to resist
the enemy. Ultimately, this would only have served to make the Japanese army’s taking of Nanking a costly
one. This was checked, however, by the flight of General Tang Shenzhi. Just before the city fell, Gen. Tang
left many Chinese soldiers just where they were in Nanking and fled via the narrow road of the only open
gate in the city, Yijiang Gate, making his way outside the city and then over to the north bank of the Yangzi
by boat. Durdin criticized Gen. Tang for his loss of courage.
On Dec. 27, the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun published an article with the headline, “Commandant Tang Shengzhi
Shot Dead: Bore the Blame for Abandoning the Capital Nanking.” The article reported, “Special telegraph
report from Nanking, sent [Dec.] 26.… It was confirmed that on the 18th, at a court martial, a death
sentence was passed down and on the 19th, the sentence of death by firing squad was carried out.” In the
propaganda book produced by the CPB, What War Means, George Fitch wrote, “Gen. Tang, recently
executed we have been told.…”
The Japanese army in Nanking, as well as the Europeans and Americans, recognized that with his death
sentence Gen. Tang was answering for his responsibility in abandoning the city. Everyone believed that the
battle for Nanking’s defense ended with Tang’s flight and this resulted in his execution. It isn’t known
whether Durdin knew of Gen. Tang’s sentence when he wrote the article, but he did write that Tang’s flight
put a halt to the Chinese army’s plan to make the Japanese army pay heavily to take Nanking.
§4 There was another plan to make Japan pay dearly to occupy Nanking
Chiang Kai-shek made Gen. Tang Shengzhi commandant in charge of the defense of Nanking and
announced that the city would be defended to the last man, but Tang abandoned the city and fled in the
face of the enemy. It was unforgivable. This is why everyone reacted as if it was only natural when, on Dec.
18, six days after Tang’s flight, Chiang Kai-shek’s government announced that “the verdict of the court
martial [against Gen. Tang Shengzhi] is death.” The report of the execution, it seems, also indicated just
how much Chiang Kai-shek’s government supposedly had wanted Nanking to be defended to the last man.
In truth, however, Gen. Tang was not executed. According to the 1966 edition of Who’s Who in
Communist China, published in Hong Kong, Tang dropped the Guomindang and ran to join the Communist
Party in 1949 (the year that the People’s Republic of China was declared) and over the years held many
posts in the Communist Party, including that of vice governor of the province of Hunan. Since the important
announcement of Gen. Tang Shengzhi’s execution was put out only by Chiang Kai-shek’s government, it is
only natural to think that its source was the CPB. If this is so, Chiang Kai-shek’s government made up the
lie that it had executed Gen. Tang.
Why did they spread false reports? Let us put that aside for the moment. What must be considered here is
why Chiang didn’t execute Tang for his betrayal, and why Tang’s flight in the face of the enemy was
overlooked.
There can only be one answer to these questions, and that is this: Chiang Kai-shek had approved Gen.
Tang’s flight beforehand. In other words, Chiang’s government’s announcement that Nanking would be
defended to the last man was only a front, and that Tang Shengzhi’s flight had been taken into account from
the beginning.
Just why was this? It would be good at this point to recall the CPB’s propaganda operations. The top-
secret document’s section titled “Summary of Editorial Operations” reports that the CPB had decided to
make their aim the propagandizing of “outrages committed by the enemy after the fall of the capital.” Their
method for doing this was to get foreigners to spread the propaganda for them.
Let us consider what would have happened had Gen. Tang Shegzhi not fled. Had all the Chinese forces ?
including Gen. Tang ? died an honorable death in the Japanese onslaught, their heroic deeds would surely
have inspired the Chinese people just as Durdin wrote. The CPB surely would have propagandized that
enthusiastically. If, by some chance, Gen. Tang raised a white flag and surrendered after a fierce battle, the
Japanese forces probably would have disarmed the Chinese forces, and the Japanese army would have
occupied Nanking completely in accord with international laws of warfare.
Thus, if Gen. Tang had not fled, the CPB would not have been able to propagandize any “outrages
committed by the enemy after the fall of the capital.” That would have been a problem.
Having seen this much, one can understand what Gen. Tang Shengzhi’s flight actually meant.
Let us take a simple look back at what transpired after Gen. Tang’s flight.
Gen. Tang Shengzhi fled leaving many soldiers in place and giving no order for surrender. If the
commanders fled right before capitulation, there would be no margin for the remaining soldiers make their
way out of the city. It is only natural that the situation would develop like this: the soldiers trapped inside the
walls and with no avenue of escape would fall into panic mode. They would start stripping off their uniforms
and throwing them away, fleeing into the refugee area (the Safety Zone). This was something the Americans
and Europeans inside Nanking had not anticipated. The International Committee, too, fell into a panic,
unable as they were to prevent armed soldiers from entering the Safety Zone. They felt pity for the Chinese
soldiers who were running every which way seeking help. The International Committee put the Chinese
soldiers under their own protection.
Then the Japanese army moved in. For the Japanese army to totally occupy Nanking, they would have to
remove the Chinese soldiers who were hiding in the Safety Zone. Since it was a battlefield, as long as the
Chinese soldiers were resisting, they were subject to punishment or being shot. In any battlefield, “mopping
up” would have been standard operational procedure, so it was only natural that the Japanese army would
do exactly the same.
What might the Americans and Europeans inside the Safety Zone have felt about this? The International
Committee established the Safety Zone in Nanking to protect refugees. The occupying force ? the
Japanese army ? that moved into Nanking was one they didn’t know. New leaders appeared in front of
the Americans and Europeans (who had been in a position of leadership) in Nanking. As previously laid
out, a “confrontational arrangement” had already been created with International Committee vis-a-vis the
Japanese army. The new leaders would expose the Chinese soldiers that they were protecting and secretly
hiding in the Safety Zone ? which the International Committee regarded as sacred space. And punish
them. The Europeans and Americans of the International Committee naturally must have been concerned
and displeased about this, and were frightened and against it. Moreover, it was shocking to the civilians, as
it was the first time in their lives they had encountered such exposures and punishment.
Thus after Nanking’s fall there was a definite pattern where on one hand the Japanese army made great
efforts in following the rules of war with the total occupation of a Nanking that included the Safety Zone
while on the other hand the Americans and Europeans opposed the Japanese entry into the Safety Zone
and the Japanese army’s occupation of Nanking. Of course Durdin wrote of none of this. This was the
CPB’s true plan in making Japan pay dearly for occupying Nanking. After this, it was essential for the CPB
to propagandize that there were outrages committed by the Japanese during their total occupation of
Nanking. Gen. Tang Shengzhi’s flight put an end to the defensive battle for Nanking but it was the opening
for the Chinese “war of information.”
§5 Durdin and Steel report a “massacre in Nanking”
As you have seen, Dong Xianguang met daily with the foreign journalists who remained in Nanking and ate
with them. To reiterate who these people were: (1) Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News, (2) Frank
Tillman Durdin of the New York Times, (3) Arthur Manson of the Paramount News, (4) England’s L.C.
Smith of the Reuters News Service, and (5) American C. Yates McDaniel of the Associated Press. On
Dec. 15, the third day of Nanking’s occupation, since there was no electricity at that point in Nanking, they
headed off to the international concession in Shanghai to send off their articles. It seems that McDaniel set
out on the 16th, however.
On the 15th, Steele sent out the first report on Nanking’s occupation from the American navy’s USS
Oahu. The article appeared the next day (but was dated on the 15th in America owing to the International
Dateline) as the lead story in the Chicago Daily News under the headline “Account of Massacre in Nanking
”:
“Four days in hell” would be the most fitting way to describe the siege and capture of Nanking. … The
story of Nanking’s fall is a story of indescribable panic and confusion among the entrapped Chinese
defenders, followed by a reign of terror by the conquering army which cost thousand of lives, many of them
innocent ones. … It was like killing sheep. … This account is based on the observations of myself and
other foreigners remaining in Nanking throughout the siege. [Emphasis mine]
Durdin’s article, sent somewhat later, appeared in the New York Times on Dec. 18 (Dec. 19 in China):
Wholesale looting, the violation of women, the murder of civilians … turned Nanking into a city of terror.
… Any person who ran because of fear or excitement was likely to be killed on the spot … Many slayings
were witnessed by foreigners. [Emphasis mine]
Expressions appearing in these articles like “four days in hell,” “terror under the thumbs of the occupying
army,” “slaughtered like sheep,” “wholesale slaughter and barbarism,” “Nanking has been turned into a city
of fear,” and “as if everyone was slain on the spot,” gave readers the impression that occupied Nanking
was a Japanese horror. In addition, with the writing of things like “many were innocent” and “killing of
civilians,” the reader would probably believe that the killing of civilians ? townsmen ? was being carried
out. The killing of townsmen was itself an unlawful act, so it could only have been a massacre.
In general, we don’t distrust journalists; we expect that they are writing the truth. Therefore, people who
read these articles probably thought that the Japanese army’s occupation of Nanking brought with it
frequent instances of murder. In view of the propaganda operations of the CPB that have been covered
thus far, however, it becomes necessary first to verify whether these journalists reported the truth. Three
points should be examined when making that determination.
§6 What did the other three journalists see?
As indicated by the italicized sections of the above articles, given Steele and Durdin’s accounts of “four
days in Hell” in Nanking being their own eyewitness accounts, and given that they said other foreigners
witnessed it, if the observations of the other three foreigners who left Nanking along with them (Smith,
McDaniel, and Mason) were the same, then the others surely would have reported the same information to
the world. Let us see what these other three reported.
I looked in the Nanking Incident Source Material, Vol. 1, America Rferences, but as hard as I searched, it
would appear that these three never sent out any articles. We can, however, find several articles containing
conversations with them.
One month after the fall of Nanking, “An Eyewitness Account of L.C. Smith of Reuters News” was
published in the Jan. 14, 1938 edition of Shijie Ribao. The article begins, “[t]ransmitted from Shanghai
Dec.18. Englishman L.C. Smith, a journalist with Reuters News Service who witnessed the siege of
Nanking, left Nanking when its occupation began and came to Shanghai.” Over 90 percent of the article is
his account of the battle between the Chinese and Japanese as he witnessed it on the afternoon of Dec. 12
from Mt. Zijin, and the Chinese army’s panicked flight.
On searching through the article to see if there might be any descriptions of the city after its fall, I found this
account: “By one a.m. on Dec. 13, much of Nanking was in Japanese hands. The north part of the city was
still held and being defended by the Chinese, however. The Japanese took the north part on the morning of
the 15th. The Chinese army completely abandoned the capital.” This was all that Smith saw.
It would be fair to assume that this article, “[t]ransmitted from Shanghai Dec.18,” was sent right after Smith
arrived in Shanghai. He must have spoken of the shocking matters freshest in his mind, but he never
mentioned any killing of civilians. Durdin and Steele make a forceful argument and both say that foreigners
witnessed the civilian deaths, but Smith’s account stands in stark contrast. Exactly what are we to make of
this?
How, then, did the two cameramen ? McDaniel of the Associated Press and Manson of Paramount
News ? report the events? McDaniel’s name doesn’t appear in any articles, but if we just use “AP”
reports, there is an article that appeared in the Washington Post on Dec. 17 with the tagline “Sun., Dec. 17,
Shanghai (AP).” We can’t verify whether this is McDaniel’s report, but in the article there is a mention of a
Paramount News cameraman named Arthur Menken.
From the American gunboat Oahu came the first eyewitness account of the Japanese capture of Nanking.
Arthur Menken, Paramount newsreel cameraman, radioed that the once proud capital was a shambles,
dotted with corpses of soldier and civilian victims of the terrific Japanese air and land attack. …
All Chinese males found with any signs of having served in the army were herded together and executed,
Menken said. But he confirmed Japanese reports that magnificient tomb of Sun Yat-sen, father of Chinese
republic, east of Nanking’s walls had come through unscathed.
Menken, who probably saw Nanking as a photographer, reported about bodies and executions of soldiers
and townsmen in the battle (that is, the “attack from both ground and air”). In order that there be no
misunderstandings, let me state this: most of the Japanese army held back from striking (by land or air) the
Safety Zone where the townsmen were all assembled. In their first communique to the Japanese army, the
International Committee wrote, “[w]e come to thank you for the fine way your artillery spared the Safety
Zone.” From this, we can imagine that there were not many strikes therein.
Be that as it may, the civilian dead mentioned in his report were those caught up in the battle and slain. The
exposing of young men who had the appearance of serving in the Chinese army was one of the duties of the
Japanese army in “mopping up” operations. According to the reports of Steele and Durdin, the “killing of
civilians spread” after the Japanese army entered Nanking, but we just don’t see this in Mencken’s
account.
§7 Smith’s talk
L.C. Smith’s “eyewitness account” as told to the Shijie Ribao was generally concerned with the condition
of the battle and the Chinese soldiers’ panic. Smith appears in Rabe’s journal in an entry dated Dec. 15
referencing “Smith’s (of Reuters) talk.” As I mentioned in my book The Nanking Massacre: Fact Versus
Fiction, the text in its entirety is recorded in The Sino-Japanese Strife, a work composed of public
documents from the German embassy in Nanking. The date of his talk wasn’t written down. It’s rather
long, but I would like to excerpt as much of it as possible.
(1) By the morning of 13 December, there were still no Japanese soldiers to be seen in the city.… (2) Two
serious battles had been fought at the south gate during the night, and the number of the Chinese dead was
put at over 1,000. (3) By the eve of 13 December, Chinese troops and civilians began to loot. Mainly
grocery stores were pillaged, but Chinese soldiers were also seen leaving private homes with food.…
Hundreds of soldiers thronged before these shops. Ready-made civilian clothes of every sort sold like
hotcakes. Soldiers spent their last cent on these clothes, changed into them out in the street, threw their
uniforms away, and vanished as civilians.… (4) It was not until almost noon that Mr. McDaniel spotted the
first Japanese patrols in South City.… (5) Occasional shots could be heard. Here and there one saw dead
civilians at the side of the road, who, or so the Japanese said, had been shot while trying to flee. (6) At the
sight of the Japanese, a sense of relief seem to pass through the Chinese civilian population, and they came
out ready accept the Japanese if they would have behaved humanely.… (7) By night Japanese troops had
entered the Safety Zone as well.… (8) By the morning of December 14, the Japanese soldiers had still
adopted no hostile attitude toward the Chinese civilian population. (9) By noon, however, in many locations
small groups of six to ten Japanese had formed, who then moved from house to house, looting. Whereas
the Chinese had restricted their theft primarily to food, nothing was secure from the Japanese. They had
looted the city systematically and thoroughly. Until the day I departed, 15 December, by my own
observation and that of other Europeans, the houses of the Chinese had without exception been looted, as
had most of those belonging to Europeans.… They appeared to have a special preference for wall clocks.
… Outside the firm of Kiessling & Bader I ran into Herr Rabe, who with the help of the owner threw out
several Japanese.… (10) On 15 December the Japanese granted foreign correspondents permission to
board a Japanese gunboat leaving Nanking for Shanghai.… When the wait for departure lasted longer than
expected, we used the time to undertake a short investigative walk. We saw how the Japanese had tied up
some thousand Chinese out in an open field, and watched as small groups of them were led away to be
shot. They were forced to kneel and were then shot in the back of the head. We had observed some 100
such executions, when the Japanese officer in charge noticed us and ordered to leave at once. [Numbers
mine.]
When we compare it to the articles by Steele and Durdin, terms like “four days in hell,” “slaughtered like
sheep,” and “terror under the thumbs of the occupying army” do not appear in Smith’s lecture. That is
probably the first thing that strikes the reader. Could it be because Smith only speaks of things he
personally witnessed and not of things others observed? This is not likely the case. As the italicized text
indicates, he said, “by my own observation and that of other Europeans.” What, then, might he have seen
and heard? Let us settle that matter.
Of the numbered items in the quoted excerpt, items (1), (4), (6), (7), and (8) were concerning the situation
of the Japanese army and civilians in the Safety Zone; item 2 was combat and related deaths; item 3 was
looting by Chinese soldiers and civilians and the flight of Chinese soldiers into the Safety Zone; item 5 was
observed corpses; and item 9 was executions. Given that there are no accounts herein that murder of
civilians was a frequent occurrence, one senses that there probably wasn’t any such atmosphere.
If one expects more accuracy, we can force an analogy with civilians being killed. I offer item 5 from Smith’
s lecture: “Occasional shots could be heard. Here and there one saw dead civilians at the side of the road,
who, or so the Japanese said, had been shot while trying to flee.”
I will touch on these gunshots on the next page, and as you will see from that, these were probably the
shots Smith heard right after Nanking capitulated. He did not himself witness the scene of these shootings,
but he did see the bodies of the fallen townsmen, so he connected in his mind the bodies and the sound of
the gunfire. He wrote, “[a]ccording to the Japanese army, they were shot while attempting to flee.” Smith
never says whether these were Chinese soldiers who had discarded their uniforms to blend in with the
civilians, who they were, or why they were shot. He never says he saw them shot and killed, either. He only
said that he heard gunfire. This was all he had to say about bodies.
Item 10 from the list (executions) will be discussed in Chapter Seven.
Even though Nanking had fallen, the Japanese army was on the lookout for Chinese soldiers who had not
surrendered and were mixing in with the civilian population and hiding inside the city. This was because the
Japanese never knew when they might get shot at. In point of fact, the Japanese were taking sniper fire
from Chinese forces. Steele writes of the post-capitulation Nanking thus: “a mounted soldier galloping
directionless along the street raised his pistol and for no reason fired into the air.” The battle had probably
already ended. Durdin wrote, “Any person who ran because of fear or excitement was likely to be killed on
the spot as was anyone caught by roving patrols in streets or alleys after dusk. Many slayings were
witnessed by foreigners.” Can one really say that this was accurate? We don’t yet know whether we can
consider Smith’s account more veracious than others’.
Did foreigners living in Nanking actually see what Durdin and Steele wrote of when they said, “Many
slayings were witnessed by foreigners”? We will have to look also at their records to see.
§8 Records of foreigners living in Nanking
In investigating whether foreigners in Nanking actually witnessed many murders, the most fundamental
source of historical records is probably the “reports of serious injuries to civilians.” These were reports of
unfortunate events which were sent to the Japanese embassy by the foreigners in Nanking making up the
International Committee. These “reports of serious injuries to civilians” were compiled into a single set by
the hand of Prof. Lewis Smythe in February, 1938, and about 30 percent (123 cases out of a total of 444)
were included as an appendix to What War Means. After that, it was published in the summer of 1939 in
English as Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, edited by Xu Shuxi under the editorial supervision of
the Council of International Affairs (itself under the direct control of Chiang Kai-shek’s Military Affairs
Committee). Therefore today we can still see these reported incidents in Documents of the Nanking Safety
Zone. In fact, however, only 40 percent of the total number of incidents in this book were submitted to the
Japanese embassy.
A section of the “Daily Reports of Serious Injuries to Civilians” presented to the Japanese embassy by the
International Committee. There is no indication of the names of those who witnessed or recorded the
incidents. (From Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, edited by Xu Shuxi.)
We must go to the “Daily Reports of Serious Injuries to Civilians” to see those problematic three days after
the fall of Nanking written about by Steele and Durdin. Let us look at two of the incident reports sent to the
Japanese embassy by the International Committee.
On December 14, Japanese soldiers entered the home of Miss Grace Bauer, an American missionary, and
took a pair of fur-lined gloves, drank up all the milk on the table, and scooped up sugar with their hands.
…
Last Night, December 15, Japanese soldiers entered the garage of Dr. R.F. Brady (American) at 11 Shuan
Lun Hsiang, smashed a window in his Ford V8, later came back with a mechanic and tried to start the car.
What needs to be noted here, as can be understood by reading these two accounts, is that there is no
record of who witnessed the incidents, who discovered them, who reported them, and who recorded them.
Lewis Smythe writes for the International Committee that, “[t]hese incidents were investigated fully by
foreign members and staff of the International Committee. Humbly submitted, Lewis Smythe,” but there is
no crucial proof to say that Japanese soldiers committed them.
Let us look at all the incidents reported for those three days.
Dec. 13: Murders, zero incidents; rapes, one incident; looting, two incidents; arson, zero incidents;
kidnapping, one incident; injuries, one incident; trespass, zero incidents.
Dec. 14: Murders, one incident; rapes, four incidents; looting, three incidents; arson, zero incidents;
kidnapping, one incident; injuries, zero incidents; trespass, one incident.
Dec. 15: Murders, four incidents; rapes, five incidents; looting, five incidents; arson, zero incidents;
kidnapping, one incident; injuries, five incidents; trespass, two incidents.
There were no cases of murder being witnessed. It should be clear that there is no basis for truth in Steele
and Durdin’s assertions that “Many slayings were witnessed by foreigners.”
It would not do to leave anything out. Putting together contemporary Chinese, Japanese, German, and
English records of all the murders (in Rabe’s journal, Minnie Vautrin’s diary and so on, including Nanking
Incident Source Material, Vol. 1, America Rferences) yields a total of three on Dec. 13, four on Dec. 14,
and eight on Dec. 15. In all of these, however, there were no actual eyewitnesses to the incidents.
When Father John Magee appeared at the Tokyo Tribunals, he gave testimony that many murders had
occurred in Nanking. When asked how many incidents of murder he witnessed, however, he testified, “I
only personally witnessed the killing of one man.” In his journal, however, he wrote, “The actual killing we
did not see as it took place.” We therefore have cause to doubt even the testimony of Father Magee that
he saw “one.”
The result of investigating the American newspaper reports from these three sources ? as far as incidents
of murder are concerned ? is that evidence supporting claims of civilian murders at the hands of the
Japanese army can’t be found in any contemporary records. We can only say, then, that when Steele and
Durdin wrote that foreigners were witnessing frequent civilian murders in Nanking, both were reporting
falsely. Just why would they write articles that were diametrically opposed to the truth? Were these false
reports in fact nothing but an extraordinary measure of the propaganda warfare of the CPB? We cannot
definitively say this was so just yet.
§9 Bates’ “report” to the American newspapers
Miner Searle Bates was a professor at the University of Nanking and an influential member of the
International Committee. He was also a popular and well-known missionary. This is what was believed for
over 60 years, but consider this newspaper clipping first. It is a 5 1/2″ by 2″ piece clipped from an
American newspaper and found in the Yale University archive of Nanking-related texts.
It says Bates was an advisor to the Chinese central government. We don’t know who wrote this piece, or
when it was published. When one makes a newspaper clipping, one doesn’t always write down the name if
the name of the newspaper is self-evident at the time, but in the case of this clipping, there is no inclusion of
date or newspaper name. Since it says “as the Japanese battered at the gates of China’s capital,” however,
we can conclude it was sometime around the time Nanking fell on Dec. 13.
An announcement from the American embassy in Nanking dated Dec. 8 and headed, “Circulation: to
Americans in Nanking,” requested all the embassy staff still in China to assemble on the USS Panay on the
Yangzi River on the evening of the eighth, and stated that “ropes to scale the walls and escape are being
kept at the home of Miner Bates.” From the “ropes … are being kept at the home of Miner Bates,” we can
date the clipping to after Dec. 8. There doesn’t seem to be any reason that the writer of this piece would
falsify Bates’ career history, so there is no reason to doubt that he was an advisor to the government.
We have a letter sent by Bates from Shanghai dated Apr. 12, 1938, addressed “[t]o my friends.” In it, he
says, “[t]hat book uses a statement which I prepared on the 15th of December to be utilized by the various
correspondents living Nanking on that date.” [Emphasis mine.]
The special correspondents mentioned by Bates are those described herein on pages 98 and 99: Steele,
Durdin, Mencken, McDaniel, and Smith. “That book” refers to the book that we have determined to have
been a product of the CPB: What War Means, edited by Harold Timperley. The first half of Chapter One
of that book was written anonymously by Bates. This was the “report” of which Bates spoke. He handed
the report to journalists leaving Nanking on Dec. 15 and asked them to make use of it.
Why would Bates have gone through the trouble to do something like this?
Two possibilities come to mind. The first one is that Bates, not knowing anything else to do to let the world
know as quickly as possible the conditions in Nanking, hurriedly wrote the report and entrusted it to the
journalists. Considering that he was an advisor to the government, however, could the second possibility be
that Bates undertook some measure of propaganda warfare on behalf of the CPB in claiming to expose the
outrages of an enemy who had conquered the capital? Just which one was it really?
We have Bates anonymous first half of Chapter One of What War Means on hand. Let us consider it.
But in two days the whole outlook has been ruined by frequent murder, wholesale and semi regular looting,
and uncontrolled disturbance of private homes including offences against the security of women. Foreigners
who have traveled over the city report many civilian bodies lying in the streets.… A considerable
percentage of the dead civilians were the victims of shooting or bayoneting in the afternoon and evening of
the 13th, which was the time of the Japanese entry into the city.… Squads of men picked out by Japanese
troops as former Chinese soldiers have been tied together and shot. These soldiers had discarded their
arms, and in some cases their military clothing.… Surely this horrible exhibition in Nanking.…
It was on Dec. 15 that Bates handed this to the journalists. The thing that is therefore problematic with this
report (like that already laid out with the American newspapers’ accounts) is the events of the three days
between Nanking’s fall (on Dec. 13) and Dec. 15. When we look at what is written, we see murder,
looting, outrages against women, corpses, and even the exposure, arrest, and shooting of Chinese soldiers.
As we have already seen from comparing this to the records of foreigners living in Nanking over those three
days after its fall, we can see that it is very different from the actual conditions in Nanking during that time.
What’s more, Bates was an influential member of the International Committee. In the daily reports of
civilian injuries that Bates delivered to the Japanese embassy in Nanking, he didn’t write even one criticism
of “the spread of killings over the two days since Nanking’s fall” that he wrote of in that report on the 15th,
or that he testified to in the Tokyo Tribunal. There is no way we can see that he wrote the report to let the
world know the truth. That being the case, there is a large probability that his reason for writing it was
number two: backing the propaganda war.
Of course, just because he was an “advisor” to the government doesn’t necessarily mean we can say he
was connected to the CPB.
As I wrote in an article in the April, 2002, issue of the magazine Shokun!, Bates had known Timperley
(himself an advisor to the CPB) since 1936. Moreover, during the production of the CPB’s propaganda
book What War Means, Bates played an important role as a contributor to the book. Finally, we know
from a letter Timperley sent on Feb. 14 about the production of What War Means that Bates was also a
friend of the deputy director of the CPB, Dong Xianguang.
In this letter, Timperley wrote, “Dear Bates; I received the following message from Hollington Tong in
Hankou. Would you be so kind as to put the situation in Nanking into a memo? Sincerely…” The name
Hollington Tong, as shown in the 1938 edition of the China Yearbook, was the “English name” that Dong
liked to use ? the “Tong” being the old Wade-Giles Romanization of his surname “Dong.”
If we take such facts into account, we put aside whether Bates did so deliberately or unconsciously, and
given the following point one can’t help but come to think that it was done to support the propaganda
operations of the CPB.
For the CPB’s plan to “[expose] outrages committed by the enemy after the fall of the capital” to bear fruit,
they would have to have gotten these five journalists to write about the same things. If the Americans Steele
and Durdin had, like the Briton Smith, not mentioned any civilian killings, the CPB’s plans would likely have
come to naught. Bates’ report, therefore, served as a sort of “guideline” for the journalists to write their
articles. To put it another way, if there had been no report from Bates, Steele and Durdin probably would
not have been able to write the newspaper articles that have been presented here.
Since the articles were by American journalists, there was absolutely no reason to question the veracity of
their writing. For reassurance, all they had to say when they wrote their articles was that the accounts were
based on “eye-witnessed incidents” and “reports” from foreigners in Nanking.
The CPB determined that getting journalists to write articles for them would be an effective way to
propagandize, so the CPB didn’t show itself. Standing in their place was Bates’ “report” that he handed to
journalists just before they left Nanking, requesting that they make use of his account of “frequent murders
of civilians” in their articles. We can’t be certain whether all five journalists got copies of the report, but as
shown from the chart as bellow, comparing corresponding points in the articles by Durdin and Steele and
the report, it appears that they, at least, used the report.
That two of the five journalists ? Steele and Durdin ? wrote articles for them marked a success for the
CPB’s plan to “[expose] outrages committed by the enemy after the fall of the capital.” Just as Steele and
Durdin had Bates in the background behind them, so did Bates, a contributor to What War Means, have
the CPB in the background behind him. It is for that reason that even though Steele and Durdin were the
first to report to the world the “Nanking massacre,” they did not appear at the Tokyo Tribunal to assert the
truth of “frequent murders of civilians.” In point of fact, they could not have done so.
Comparison of Descriptions: Prof. Bates, A. Steel and T. Durdin
Prof. Bates Archibald Steel Tillman Durdin
At Nanking the Japanese army has lost much of its reputation, and has thrown away a remarkable
opportunity to gain the respect of the Chinese inhabitants and of foreign residents.
Japanese brutality at Nanking is costing them a golden opportunity to win the sympathy of the Chinese
population, whose friendship they claim to be seeking.
… the Japanese Army has thrown away a rare opportunity to gain the respect and confidence of the
Chinese inhabitants and of foreign opinions there.
Many local people freely expressed their relief when the entry of Japanese troops …
Nanking experienced a distant sense of release when the Japanese entered —
A tremendous sense of relief … pervaded the Chinese population when the Japanese took over control
within the walls.
… the wholesale outlook has been ruined …
They were quickly disillusioned.
Two days of Japanese occupation changed the whole outlook
Any persons who ran in fear or excitement, and any one who was caught in streets or alleys after dusk by
roving patrols was likely to be killed on the spot.
Any person who ran because of fear or excitement was likely to be killed on the spot as was any one
caught by roving patrols in streets or alley after dusk.
Foreigners who have traveled over the city report many civilian bodies lying in the street.
Streets throughout the city were littered with bodies of civilians and abandoned Chinese equipments and
uniforms. — This account is based on observations of myself and other foreigners
Foreigners who traveled widely through the city Wednesday found civilians dead on every street.
… scores of refugees in camps and shelters had money and valuables removed from their slight possessions
…
They even invaded foreign the camps of refugees, stripping many poor of the few dollars they owned.
… who conducted mass searches in the refugee centers and took money and valuables, often the entire
possessions of the unfortunates.
… the staff of the University Hospital were stripped of cash and watches from their persons, and of other
possessions from the nurses’ dormitory …
In American-operated University Hospital they relieved the nurses of watches and money.
The staff of the American Mission University Hospital was stripped of cash and watches. Other
possessions were taken from the nurses’ dormitory.
… the seizure of motorcars and other property after tearing down the flag upon them …
They stole at least two American-owned cars, ripping off the flags.
Foreign flags were torn from buildings and at least three motor cars were taken from foreigners.
… four hundred men were selected by the local police under compulsion from the Japanese soldiers, and
were marched off tied in batches of fifty between lines of riflemen and machine gunners.
In one building in refugee zone 400 men were seized. They were marched off, tied in batches of fifty,
between lines if riflemen and machine gunners, to the execution ground.
§10 Those concerned with What War Means get started
There were also other articles in addition to those by Steele and Durdin. For example, 12 days after the fall
of Nanking, on Dec. 25, the South China Morning Post reported, “[i]n a Dec. 15 letter, the most trusted
foreigner in Nanking wrote to friends in Shanghai about the Japanese occupation of Nanking. According to
the letter, frequent incidents of murder and large-scale, semi-overt looting…”
Just who was this “most trusted foreigner in Nanking”? In other words, if we ask who wrote a letter dated
Dec. 15, it would seem to point to Bates. Just from looking at the contents of the article, it appears to be
nearly identical to the report that Bates wrote on Dec. 15.
A month after Nanking fell, on Jan. 13, 1938, the Washington Post reported, “[w]e have only been able to
get partial reports from the small number of reporters remaining in Nanking since the city’s occupation by
the Japanese beginning on Dec. 14. In addition, reports have leaked out of increasingly frequent killings
over a period of two weeks thereafter from the abandoned capital.” [Emphasis mine.]
It would seem from these that reports of large-scale killings that go beyond Steele and Durdin’s reported
three-day “Nanking massacre” had leaked out. Who was it in Nanking who could have been reporting on
an even larger-scale Nanking massacre? The Washington Post continues: “Every day, Chinese soldiers and
even civilians are bound together with wire and are taken out in groups of 30 to 50 to Xiakwan on the
Changjiang shore where they are machinegunned.”
This was a report that would appear to indicate that someone (regardless that they were in Nanking without
authorization until the last part of February, 1938) witnessed people being killed by machineguns at
Xiakwan outside the city “every day.”
When searching for descriptions of “Chinese soldiers and even civilians … bound together with wire,” I
found this: “The men in the immediate vicinity of my informant … were bound with wire, wrist to wrist, in
pairs. Thirty or more were taken to Han Chung Men [sic. ?Hanzhong Gate].” This appears in Chapter
Three of What War Means. in this instance, Bates said that he wrote down what he was told by a Chinese
man who had fled for his life when he was to have been executed; but we have no way now of verifying
who the news source for the Washington Post article was.
One month later, on Feb. 11, the Manchester Guardian Weekly reported, “[f]or some time the Manchester
Guardian’s special correspondent in Shanghai has been prohibited from writing articles concerning the
Japanese massacre in Nanking due to army censorship, … but now that we have been able to get a first-
hand report from Nanking, we are able to expose in detail the terrorism of the Japanese army.”
The special correspondent in Shanghai mentioned in the article was the editor of What War Means ?
Harold Timperley. As will be detailed later, Timperley wrote in the foreword of What War Means of an
instance that telegrams were prohibited (either by the Japanese embassy or the Japanese army). But from
whom in Nanking might Timperley have gotten this first-hand report? Correspondence between Timperley
and Bates concerning the publication of What War Means began as early as Jan. 29, 1938. It is likely that
the first-hand report came to him via Bates during this time.
A further month later, on Mar. 16, the South China Morning Post reported,
At the beginning of March, provincial governor Wu Tiecheng sponsored a cozy tea party in Guandong
where an American recently returned from Nanking spoke on the conditions of the Japanese occupation.…
Horrifying acts of brutality such as the mass killings of civilians and unarmed soldiers, looting, arson, and
rape witnessed in Nanking were vividly recounted.
The American mentioned in this article was one of the contributors to What War Means ? George Fitch.
On Jan. 29 he went from Nanking to Shanghai carrying film shot by Magee to show to Timperley. On Feb.
23, he again went to Shanghai. While en route from Hong Kong on Mar. 8 to America to launch a lecture
tour, he received an invitation from the provincial governor of Guanzhou in Guandong. Of this event, Fitch
recounted,
My old friend Jim Henry radioed that he would meet me, and on arrival we immediately took a train to
Canton (Guandong). There the Governor of the province of Kwangtung, Gen. Wu-The-Chen, another old
friend, had arranged a reception for me at Civic Hall where I was asked speak on the Nanking siege and
occupation. [Emphasis mine, parenthetical in the original.]
All this means that articles with Bates and Fitch as news sources and articles that it is believed Timperley
furnished were published in addition to the articles by Steele and Durdin. I am repeating myself, but these
three ? Bates, Fitch, and Timperley ? were the editor of and contributors to What War Means, which I
will examine in the next chapter. Can it be mere conjecture that these three were involved in these articles?
§11 There was no response to the American articles
The “Nanking Massacre Story” articles written by Steele and Durdin were based on reports of the three
days’ events from people who were at actually there. As I have already laid out, later Nanking articles
were also based on reports from foreigners in Nanking. These articles described how the indiscriminate
killing of civilians was spreading. China’s representative to the League of Nations, Gu Weijin, immediately
addressed the League on Feb. 2, 1938, stating that 20,000 people had been killed, basing his address on
the articles.
If this had been true, the governments of every nation would instantly have had to control the situation, and
confirmation of the articles would be quick.
Let us look at the case of the American government. Since these articles were reported in America, there
can be no doubt of what the American government sensed in them. We can’t be certain of whether the
government interviewed the American journalists who wrote the articles, but in April, 1938 ? four months
after Nanking fell ? Cabot Colville, the military attache at the American embassy in Tokyo, arrived in
Nanking to investigate. Consul John Allison and Vice-consul James Espy from the American embassy,
Consul E.W. Jeffrey of England, Secretary Georg Rosen of Germany, Bates, Smythe, and many other
foreigners got together with Colville to apprise him of the situation in Nanking.
In Colville’s report, he said that, “[l]ooting and rapes by the Japanese soldiers continued for some weeks,
and when Allison arrived at 11 a.m. on Jan. 6 to reopen the embassy, it was still going on.”
What should be noted is that his report made no mention of killings or massacres. What the American
government did protest to the Japanese government about, therefore, was the accidental bombing by
Japanese navy planes of the USS Panay when it had stopped for the night near Nanking, the incident when
Consul Allison was struck by a Japanese soldier as he tried to break free when the Japanese had grabbed
him, and incidents of offense to the American flag and other foreign properties. The American government
made no reference to any massacre in Nanking.
Considering the international situation at the time, had they made even the slightest acknowledgement of a
civilian massacre, surely none of the governments of the world ? to say nothing of the American
government itself ? would have disregarded it. The League of Nations would have immediately sent an
investigative committee to Nanking just as it had sent the Lytton Commission at the time of the Manchukuo
uprising to quickly verify all the facts of the case, and then concluding that it was true, they would have
called for a resolution to censure the Japanese and voices raised in outrage would not be silenced. No
international investigative committee went to Nanking, however. Neither the Americans nor any other
government made a move to complain to the Japanese.
What should not be forgotten at this point is that when the “Nanking Massacre Story” appeared in
American newspapers, it was the Guomindang who needed to continue to express outrage and complain
about the Japanese. In truth, however, Gu Weijin, a prominent figure in Chinese diplomatic circles, made
only one address to the League of Nations. That was the only time.
After the war, in his Autobiography, Dong Xianguang wrote,
After the national army withdrew, the enemy forces crowded into Nanking, devoting themselves entirely to
slaughter, acts of violence, and looting ? creating havoc and a hell on earth. People saw their brutality with
their own eyes and we continued to complain about it to the world. The most striking was my old friend
Durdin, who from the midst of danger, published about the brutal conditions in the New York Times. The
American government didn’t respond quickly to these outrages, but the world’s sympathies tilted in China’s
favor. They became critical of the barbaric actions they called inhuman Japanese aggression, and an
opportunity opened for our propaganda.
Dong Xianguang, deputy director of the CPB, knew that his old friend Durdin had reported “slaughter, acts
of violence, and looting.” He was greatly concerned over how the American government might respond to
the articles in the American newspapers. The reader was probably surprised by this excerpt from Dong’s
Autobiography. It is only natural that as deputy director of the CPB he would contact the media regarding
Japan’s actions in Nanking and publicize the Nanking massacre to journalists both within and outside China
to engender hostility toward Japan.
The American government never responded to the 18 Americans (and his old friend Durdin) who stayed
amidst the dangers in Nanking, reporting to the world, or to those newspaper articles ? but Dong was still
able to write that the articles had the effect of turning the world’s sympathies toward China. It seems his
heart was warmed by the effectiveness of the American newspaper articles, and he offered thanks to the
foreigners who sent out false reports of a Nanking massacre.
§12 The CPB recognized that the “Nanking Massacre Story” was a false report
As I have already cited in Chapter Three, within the “Summary of Foreign Section Operations” portion of
the top-secret Summary of Propaganda Operations is a chart listing journalists and occasions where the
CPB “collaborate[d] with journalists in collecting data.” The CPB has an entry “by year, journalists from
major news agencies [to whom the CPB has] issued credentials and people accommodating data collection
[on our behalf]” for the years 1938 to 1941, and on that list Steele’s name appears twice and Durdin’s
three times. The name of Smith, the Englishman who worked for Reuters and left Nanking with Steele and
Durdin, appears twice.
As I cited previously, the section referencing “inviting a group of journalists to inspect the military victory in
north Hunan,” Durdin’s name can be seen. It says, “winter of 1939.… This Division took journalists from
various countries to Guilin by charter flight, … so they could inspect the military gains that had been made.
Journalists invited by this Division included Durdin of the New York Times, Stewart of the Associated
Press, Yeshamin of Tass, Morris of the United Press, and Selby Walker of Reuters.”
The CPB thus had had repeated contact with Steele and Durdin, so they had to have been able to confirm
all the facts with them. Somewhere in this top-secret document there had to be a record that they had them
verify the facts of the Nanking massacre and that the CPB as usual held an “urgent press conference” with
the massacre as the major problem, inviting these foreign journalists to come as eyewitnesses and had them
speak, and produced statements for the Chinese government for world-wide distribution.
Please consider a more full version of the excerpt appearing in Chapter 3:
Item: Press conferences. Since this Division was ordered to open an office in Hankou on Nov. 1, 1937,
press conferences were held in accordance with our agenda with resident foreign correspondents of all
newspapers and foreign military officials and news specialists from official residences in China. We invited
the leaders and officials of our party, government, and army, as well as scholars renowned at home and
abroad, and asked them to take turns as the people responsible for giving the talks, with the Foreign Office
being responsible for translating. The speakers’ commentary and exposition, as well as the questions and
explanations of the journalists, were all translated and explained in detail. If there was important or urgent
news and necessity arose to publicize it abroad, we either held an ad-hoc urgent press conference or
reported to the journalists by telephone. Even if it was late at night, we allowed not a moment’s delay.
[Emphasis mine.]
After the fall of Nanking, American newspapers published articles with headlines like “Japanese Army Kills
Thousands,” “Eye-witnesses Recount ‘Four Days in Hell,’” “Five-Foot-Deep Pile of Corpses in the Street,
” and “Large Numbers of Civilians Slain.” Journalists from other countries who saw these headlines
probably waited for the CPB to hold an urgent press conference to get more detailed information.
In the top-secret documents, however, there is no mention anywhere of the CPB holding an “urgent press
conference” for the Nanking massacre. To give an example of an urgent press conference they did hold,
note the italicized text in the following excerpt, which marks its solitary appearance:
Extraordinary military affairs report were convened by this Division and held in the official residence of the
director. When a responsive report was necessary from the director responsible concerning other urgent
problems or international changes, this Division immediately convened an extraordinary [press] conference
with a government official as spokesman. To give examples, Director Kong Xiangxi held a reception for
journalists at the Central Bank, Deputy Director Zhang Qun had a talk with journalists at the Salt Industry
Building, etc.
Let us take a look at one more thing. The following is a part of the “English-language monthly” sub-section
from the “Summary of Editorial Operations” section.
In the spring of 1938, before the battle of Xuzhou, when this Division was still in Hankou, many of the texts
published in English-language dailies were works expressing our country’s spirit of resistance and nation
building. Thinking that these matters had to be widely propagandized, we decided to start an English-
language monthly. We called it China at War, and volume one issue one was published in April this year
[1938]. It contained 29 articles over 80 pages, and 1,000 copies were printed. Over half of the print run
was mailed overseas, and they were well received.
If the articles in American newspapers were even only a little bit true, the CPB would have made use of
them as propaganda sources for publicizing the Nanking massacre. Although the inauguration of the
monthly magazine China at War occurred only four months after the American newspapers reported the
Nanking massacre, there was no reference in the periodical to any Nanking massacre such as Durdin and
Steele had reported. The truth is, if one reads the inaugural issue of China at War, which followed a policy
of describing only “the facts” based on official announcements, one finds that all it has to say about Nanking
is this: “Nanking － after December 12, 1937 － became a hunting ground for the Japanese soldiers who
combed the city looking for money, loot and women.” The word “massacre” never appears.
There were five sections in the International Propaganda Division. I looked at the other sections’
“Operations Summaries,” but I could not even find any traces that they took up the issue that American
newspapers had reported a Nanking massacre. In his post-war Autobiography, CPB deputy director Dong
wrote, “American journalists stayed the midst of danger in Nanking and continued to complain about the
situation,” praising the journalists highly. It is quite a striking contrast that these journalists had gained such
approval from Dong, yet the American newspaper articles are ignored in the top-secret document drawn
up at the time.
If one wishes to maintain that the American newspaper articles were true, would not the Guomindang
government, the CPB, and the Republic of China’s Foreign Service, boldly have repeated it over and over
in the public forum, complaining about the Nanking massacre to the whole world? Using the diplomatic
route, surely they would have protested repeatedly to the Japanese government. In point of fact, there is
not one such instance.
Gu Weijin’s address (based on the American newspaper articles) to the League of Nations was the first
and last declaration to the world by the Guomindang government of the “Nanking massacre.” We can but
say that the “Nanking Massacre Story” as published in American newspapers was false reportage because
the CPB recognized that it was.
CHAPTER SIX:
RE-EXAMINING THE PROPAGANDA BOOK WHAT WAR MEANS
As discussed in the previous chapter, the American newspaper articles reporting on the three days after the
fall of Nanking did not present the truth. There can be no denying the possibility that the reports were
extraordinary works put forth as part of the propaganda war by the CPB. Deputy director Dong
Xianguang, writing of these articles, said “the world’s sympathies tilted in China’s favor … and an
opportunity opened for our propaganda” ? and part of the propaganda to which he referred was What
War Means, which came out seven months after the fall of Nanking. The book depicts events in the month
following the city’s fall. As touched on in Chapter One, however, this was a propaganda book produced
by the CPB. Of course, just because we say What War Means was a work of propaganda doesn’t mean
we can jump to the conclusion that everything presented in it is fiction. We will now therefore investigate in
detail the contents of this work of propaganda.
§1 The role served by Timperley’s foreword
Harold Timperley composed the book in three sections: the foreword, the body (eight chapters), and the
appendices (A through F). Nanking is covered in the book through Chapter Four. We shall look at the
book starting with the role served by the book’s foreword.
In his foreword, Timperley wrote of the course of events in the editing of What War Means:
Perhaps this book would not have come to be written had it not been for the fact that telegrams reporting
outrages committed against Chinese civilians by the Japanese troops which occupied Nanking in December
of last year were suppressed by the censors installed by the Japanese authorities in the foreign cable offices
at Shanghai.
How would this seem to the reader? Might the reader not be struck first by the description of telegrams
that were seized by the Japanese censors? Would not the reader then seize upon the word “truth”?
To be sure, this was the truth. Timperley sent a telegram from Shanghai to the Manchester Guardian
bearing text mentioning “the massacre of 300,000 in the Yangzi delta.” It was seized by the Japanese
authorities in Shanghai. The text of this telegram was reported in the Dec. 22, 2002, edition of the Tokyo
Shinbun, among other sources.
Considering what we have so far, we can say that it is due to Timperly’s skillful writing that What War
Means does not look like a work of propaganda.
Timperley deliberately does not present the contents of his crucial telegram with the reference to “the
massacre of 300,000 in the Yangzi delta” here, but it should be. What is important to Timperley, then, is
something else. Isn’t this “massacre of 300,000” simply a “fact” of convenience really only intended to be
used to level accusations against the Japanese army? At any rate, Timperley didn’t present the contents of
the telegram in his foreword. Why?
He only required the truth about his telegram having been seized. To that end, he did all he could when
writing the telegram to assure that it would be seized by the Japanese authorities ? thus his use of the
words “the massacre of 300,000 in the Yangzi delta.” Timperley knew better than anyone else that the
charge was baseless.
Bates wrote a letter to Timperley on Mar. 3 concerning the editorial direction of What War Means. He
suggested, “For purpose of impressing a distant public with the brutality of warfare, … it seems much more
effective to have a base wider than that of one city.” On Mar. 21, he again made the same suggestion. In
other words, Bates wanted to raise the issue of the Japanese army’s action in Shanghai and other places,
not just Nanking.
Timperley replied, “In your letter You ask why I have done nothing about Shanghai, Sungking and Kashing.
I think you will find that Chapter VII fills the gap. When we looked into the matter we found that there was
very little authentic evidence of Japanese outrages against the civilian population around Shanghai.”
[Emphasis and parenthetical mine.]
As shown by the italics, Timperley himself knew that there was no positive proof of anything like “the
massacre of 300,000” by Japanese army actions in the Yangzi delta area of Shanghai, Songjiang
(Sungking), and Jiaxing (Kashing).
In addition, in Chapter Six of What War Means, we read “at least 300,000 Chinese civilians have lost their
lives as a result of the Sino-Japanese hostilities in the Yangtze Delta.” Setting aside for now the number of
the slain and their status as common townsfolk, Timperley admits that the dead were the result of “Sino-
Japanese hostilities” ? thus not the product of a “massacre.”
The seizure of the telegram by the Japanese becomes an inevitable result if one changes “the result of
hostilities” to “a Japanese army massacre” like this and attempts to send it off. If he had truly intended to
send the telegram reliably and claim “the massacre of 300,000 in the Yangzi delta,” he should have sent it
from the French concession or the joint Anglo?American concession in Shanghai. Instead, he deliberately
chose to send it from a Japanese-managed telegraph office. Just as one would expect, the Japanese seized
the telegram due to “excessive exaggeration.” We can only say that Timperley expected that the telegram
would be seized, and that is why he deliberately went to the Japanese telegraphy office to send it.
Readers of What War Means probably have no interest in whether the telegram was true. They are struck
by the fact that the telegram was seized, and likely think that the Japanese army had something to hide.
They doubtless accepted that the text of What War Means, beginning after that foreword, exposed a truth
that had been concealed. Timperley’s foreword had the purpose of lending credibility to the raw voices in
Chapters One through Four.
§2 The raw voices of Chapters One through Four of What War Means
The voices of Chapters One through Four are all anonymous. Generally, reliability vanishes when material is
anonymous; but with Timperley’s skilled explanations, credibility rose instead.
For example, concerning the raw voice making up the first half of Chapter One, at the outset Timperley
wrote, “[t]his brief but illuminating description of events immediately after the Japanese entry of Nanking is
taken from a letter dated December 15, written to friends in Shanghai by one of the most respected
members of Nanking’s foreign community who is noted for his fairmindedness.” [Emphasis mine.]
On the chapter’s second half, he said, “[f]urther details are given in the following vivid account by a foreign
resident of Nanking who has spent almost the whole of his life in China. His letter has been left exactly as it
was received by his friends in Shanghai except that references of a largely personal nature have been
deleted.” [Emphasis mine.] For Chapter Two, he offers this: “Continuing his narrative in diary form the
writer says.…”
As can be understood from the italics above, since he explains that these reports, although anonymous,
were by “a foreign resident of Nanking,” readers are reassured and probably no longer feel any concern
that they are anonymous accounts.
As also indicated by the italics, Timperley explains that everything but Chapter Three consists of personal
letters sent to friends by “a foreign resident of Nanking.” (Chapter Two is a continuation of the second half
of Chapter One, so it is probably fair to consider it, too, as “a letter received by friends in Shanghai.”)
It seems to be an innocent enough explanation; but given that they are explained as “letters” from foreign
individuals in Nanking, readers probably understood that the editor put the book together by making use of
letters that had been sent from time to time by foreigners in Nanking to friends in Shanghai. That is, readers
would probably think that the Nanking-based foreigners did not write these manuscripts for deliberate use
in What War Means.
Moreover, with the explanation that they are “letters,” a “ripple effect” comes into play. Readers would
probably assume that the writers sending private messages to friends would not conceal the truth. If by any
chance anonymous authors were identified and lies and exaggerated descriptions were pointed out, it was
still a private letter so there was no one who could be held to account for it.
The explanation that the text is made up of “letters” by “individual foreigners in Nanking” is an extremely
important note for completely erasing any traces that What War Means is a work of propaganda.
Were these really private letters, though? At the very least, the “letter” published as the first half of Chapter
One, as I have already discussed, was the report Bates wrote and passed on to journalists who were
leaving Nanking on Dec. 15, asking them to make use of it. Strictly speaking, this was not a letter written
by someone (Bates) to a friend in Shanghai.
As laid out herein in Chapter One, two of the anonymous “foreign residents of Nanking” have been
identified as Miner Searle Bates and George Fitch. Only the writer contributing the last half of Chapter
Four has remained unidentified. In Bates’ personal history (in the Yale archives), he records that, “In
Timperley’s volume, Chapter I & II came from George Fitch; except pp. 18-20 from me, also III, IVa and
Appendix F.” Bates did not clarify who was responsible for “(b),” the second half of Chapter Four.
What War Means can be divided into the first and second halves of Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter
Three, and the first and second halves of Chapter Four. That is, one can believe that six people contributed
to it. It appears as if they are the raw voices of six “foreigners living in Nanking,” but the truth is that most
of the writing was that of only Bates and Fitch. It would have been better, would it not, if Timperley had
sought out more raw voices of foreigners in Nanking?
Speaking of foreign residents of Nanking ? by Jan. 27, 1938, there were only 33 Americans and
Europeans left in the city. During that time, Rabe, Magee, Robert Wilson, and Vautrin, all kept diaries.
There were 15 members on the International Committee. Bates had been living in Nanking as a missionary
since 1920, and as a member of the International Committee he had had a long association with the others.
If 40,000 had truly been killed inside the small confines of Nanking as Bates had said, one can’t help but
think that most of the others would have had the same experiences and witnessed the same things.
It would have been good if Timperley had added Steele (who had promptly written “The Nanking
Massacre Story” for the American newspapers) and Durdin to the list of contributors to What War Means,
but ultimately there were only three voices ? those of Bates, Fitch, and the anonymous third contributor.
Was it because they were unable to ask others to describe the events of the Nanking Massacre? That is to
say, was it because What War Means was a work of propaganda that there were no sources he could get
to contribute material for him?
Consider those involved with the production of What War Means. The editor Timperley was an “advisor”
to the CPB. Bates was an “advisor” to the Nationalist government. We don’t know that much about Fitch,
but we do know that his wife was a “close friend” of the wife of Chiang Kai-shek. After the war, many
photographs purported to be of the Nanking Massacre surfaced, and the person who provided the
photographs was identified as Fitch’s daughter, Marion.
§3 Investigation 1 ? the first chapter of What War Means
The first chapter of What War Means, “Nanking’s Ordeal,” is divided into two halves. The first half
describes the conditions in Nanking up to Dec. 15, and the author was Miner Searle Bates. As I discussed
in Chapter Five, this was the report that Bates handed to American journalists on Dec. 15, after Nanking
had fallen. The second half describes Nanking up to Dec. 16 in diary form, and the author was George
Fitch. The first chapter thus presents the events in Nanking covering the four days of Dec. 13 ? Dec. 16.
When we combine contemporary Chinese, Japanese, English, and German records to investigate incidents
of murder during those four days, we find three murders took place on Dec. 13, four on Dec. 14, eight on
Dec. 15, and seven on Dec. 16. These are all hearsay accounts of uncertain provenance, however, and
there are zero instances of murder that was witnessed.
We therefore surely have to say that Bates’ account in Chapter One of “[i]n two days the whole outlook
has been ruined by frequent murder.… Foreigners who have traveled over the city report many civilian
bodies lying in the street,” and Fitch’s commentary that “[t]he victorious army must have its rewards ? and
those rewards are to plunder, murder, rape, at will,” are fiction. But we still have to examine it closely once
more.
The reason is a statement Miner Bates made in Nanking on Feb. 6, 1947, half a year after his testimony
asserting the existence of a Nanking Massacre at the Tokyo Tribunal in July, 1946. This statement was
made one year before the closing arguments of the prosecutor, which took place on Feb. 18, 1948. Bates
said this:
[A] low and incomplete figure for civilian deaths … inflicted by the Japanese in the first few weeks of their
occupation of Nanking, was 12,000; and for deaths of unarmed men in military clothing, 35,000. Of these
murders, over 90 per cent occurred in the first ten days, most of all in the first three days. [Emphasis
mine.]
That is to say, at the Tokyo Tribunal, Bates asserted a massacre of 40,000 people, including 12,000
civilians, and that most of all “ in the first three days.” This statement, however, is at considerable variance
from “incidents of witnessed murder were zero,” which is the result of combing contemporary records. We
can’t move forward as long as we have not yet been able to ascertain Bates’ grounds to say what he said.
Let us go back and re-examine the records made by foreigners remaining in Nanking with Bates and Fitch
of conditions in Nanking over those three post-fall days.
§4 Population distribution up to the fall of Nanking
First, let us verify the population distribution in Nanking before the city fell. When the fighting broke out at
Shanghai four months before the battle for Nanking, townsmen almost immediately began to flee from
Nanking. On Aug. 31, 1937, a large number of merchants closed their shops, and on Sept. 28, Minnie
Vautrin wrote in her diary that “[m]ost of the shops on the business streets were locked, and somehow the
city had a forlorn and deserted look.”
Vautrin recorded in her diary that wounded soldiers were brought to Nanking from the Shanghai area ?
1,500 seriously wounded ones on Oct. 25, and 8,000 more injured soldiers on Nov. 14. They were taken
to the aid station at Xiaguan, but on Nov. 20, she says, 20 or 30 percent of the soldiers had died.
Wounded soldiers were left in great numbers at Nanking Station and ignored, and the stench of
decomposing corpses hung in the air. Ernest Forster, with Nanking’s St. Paul’s Anglican Mission, wrote
that all the government offices and workers had relocated to Hankou or Chongqing in mid-November so
the townsmen were in a panic, while refugees continued to flow into the city and waves of residents
continued fleeing from it.
Under these conditions, most people who were able to leave Nanking did so. Wang Gupan, head of the
metropolitan police agency, repeated on Nov. 28 that there were only 200,000 people still in the city.
As for the “the poorest of the poor” (as Rabe termed them) remaining in Nanking, the Chinese army had
burned down everything surrounding the city walls following Operation Clean Fields, so many of the
townsfolk who had been burnt out and were unable to leave sought refuge in the Safety Zone so as not to
be mistaken for spies. Steele wrote, “I saw Chinese troops needlessly applying the torch to whole blocks
of houses and shops around the city walls, disposing thousands in futile attempt to impede the Japanese
attack.
On Dec. 8, the commandant of Nanking’s defenses, Gen. Tang Shengzhi, ordered everyone remaining in
Nanking to take refuge in the Safety Zone. In a Dec. 2 letter, Vautrin wrote, “Nanking is a deserted and
defeated city already.” and on the 9th she wrote, “[t]he houses in this area are fast filling but the rest of the
city is deserted.”
On Dec. 9, Rabe wrote in his journal “[t]he old Communications Ministry (arsenal) is opened to refugees
and in no time fills to the rafters.” Townsmen found refuge living in tents on the grounds of Chinese army
buildings, European and British buildings including Ginling Women’s College, and even in Rabe’s garden.
The Chinese army, on the other hand, was near the walls where they would meet the Japanese army in
combat. What must not be overlooked, however, as you can see from page 62, was that during the battle
which began on Dec. 10, the Chinese army was also still in the “demilitarized” neutral territory that was the
Safety Zone. The Chinese army discussed with Rabe moving their seriously wounded soldiers from the field
hospital outside the Safety Zone to inside the Safety Zone on Dec. 10. Though Rabe recognized that this
was a violation of the agreement that it was to be neutral territory, he “refer Dr. King to Dr. Trimmer, the
chairman [our] medical Division at Kulou Hospital.” In other words, there were both Chinese soldiers who
were wounded and those who were engaged in combat inside the Safety Zone.
At noon on Dec. 9, Japanese planes dropped leaflets advising the Chinese army to surrender. The
Japanese waited for a reply from the Chinese side until the expiration of their offer (noon on Dec. 10), but
they received no reply. About 2 p.m., therefore, the Japanese launched a full-scale attack with the Sixth,
Ninth, and Sixteenth Divisions, and other units. Fierce attacks began on Zhongshan Gate (the east gate),
Zhonghua Gate (the south gate), Guanghua Gate (between Zhongshan and Zhonghua Gates), and at other
locations.
Of the fierce attack that began on Dec. 10, Vautrin wrote in her diary on Dec. 11 that “[a]ll night and all
day there has been heavy artillery fire into the city,” and W. Plumer Mills recorded that, “[b]ut the roar of
the guns could be heard all over the city.”
At this time, did the Japanese bomb the Safety Zone where almost all the townsfolk were assembled or
not? That also is an issue that has to be looked at.
On Dec. 11, Rabe recorded that, “[t]he first grenades land in the refugee Zone in front of and behind the
Foo Gong Hotel. A total of twelve dead and about twelve wounded. Sperling … is slightly wounded by
flying glass.” In What War Means, Fitch wrote of the bombing “killing about fourty.”
As I have already laid out, the International Committee to which Rabe, Fitch, and Sperling belonged wrote
to the Japanese command in the “Document No. 1” saying, “[w]e come to thank you for the fine way your
artillery spared the Safety Zone.” Moreover, Durdin wrote in the New York Times on Dec. 18 that, “The
Japanese seemingly avoided wrecking good buildings. The scarcity of air bombardments in the capture
indicated their intention to avoid the destruction of buildings. The Japanese even avoided bombing Chinese
troop concentrations in built-up areas, apparently to preserve the buildings.”
The Japanese army thus exerted every effort not to attack the Safety Zone or important buildings. Someone
was protecting the Safety Zone from the danger of bombardment. ? Of course, even if they adjusted their
sights exactly, there were often times where shells would stray from the target. We don’t know exactly
where the stray artillery damage that Fitch and Rabe wrote about was. In the “Document No. 9, the
International Committee wrote only that, “there had been very little destruction by stray shells,” and they
did not criticize the Japanese.
According to Vautrin’s diary, south Nanking and Xiaguan were still burning on Dec. 12, and at night she
could see the huge muzzle flash from the Japanese artillery on Mt. Zijin. There was fierce bombardment
inside the city’s southwest quarter, so all the windows in the Safety Zone were covered up to prevent flying
glass. Even through all this, Vautrin records that, “refugees continue to come in.”
At 8 p.m. on Dec. 12, Gen. Tang Shengzhi, who had declared that he would defend Nanking to the death,
slipped out of the city. Durdin wrote in the New York Times on Dec. 18 that Tang and his associated
division commanders “deserted their troops and fled, not even attempting to make the most of the
desperate situation following the entry of the first Japanese troops inside the city’s walls.” Following
Chiang Kai-shek’s order to “not let even one Chinese person, even one mound of land fall into enemy
hands ? reduce them to ashes!”, the Chinese army fired the splendid transportation department building
and slipped off. There are many records of the conflagration of the transportation department building, and
with this, panic and chaos spread even more.
At this point, we should mention the outrages of the Chinese army, which have not been considered much
of an issue where Nanking is concerned. For example, in his unpublished book Enemy Planes Over
Nanking, Rabe quotes a handwritten letter from “a European lady” addressed to the “International Refugee
Committee” and dated Dec. 11 (two days before Nanking’s fall). The letter says:
The Chinese soldiers, numbered about hundred, many armed, who are living, since few days, (about two
weeks) in the Woo-Tai-San-Tsung, began , this morning to threat to kill foreign people and destroy their
properties, bamboo fences and other things have already been destroyed. Tha danger is imminent.
Please interfere immediately to protect the foreign and Chinese lives in your control by sending these
soldiers away.
P.S. These soldiers bear, since yesterday, the yellow brassard of Nanking Guard.
Mt. Wutai was inside the Safety Zone. It was a letter asking for help against the outrages committed against
townsmen, Europeans, and Americans by Chinese soldiers who had trespassed on Mt. Wutai in violation
of the agreement with the International Committee.
Now our story returns to the flight of Gen. Tang Shengzhi. The behavior of Chinese soldiers who had been
abandoned by their commanders is covered herein on pages 72 and 73, so there is no need to repeat it
here. Vautrin says, that “refugees continue to come in,” but among these were very many Chinese soldiers
who had thrown away their uniforms and entered the Safety Zone.
This panic and chaos continued through the night of Dec. 12 and into Dec. 13. On the 13th, the city fell. As
indicated by the “Document No. 9” from the International Committee to the Japanese embassy, which
says, “when your troops entered the city, we had nearly all the civilian population gathered in a Zone,” most
of the townsfolk were assembled in the Safety Zone. Vautrin and German embassy secretary Paul
Scharffenberg wrote the same thing.
A rough map of the distribution of the population of Nanking just before the city fell is shown in the
following illustration. In this map, (A) marks the Safety Zone, (B) marks the city of Nanking beyond the
Safety Zone, and (C) marks the territory outside Nanking.
§5 The four-day period after the fall of Nanking
Nanking fell on Dec. 13. What we should all note here is the situation inside the city, and in particular, in the
Safety Zone. That is, as can be understood from the afore-mentioned distribution of population, the people
who were the object of the massacre were all taking refuge in the Safety Zone (A). The city proper other
than the Safety Zone (B) was virtually deserted. Beyond the city’s walls (C) was a battlefield until Dec. 16,
so if anyone was out there, he was a Chinese soldier. There were no civilians there.
Where were Bates and Fitch (who described the three or four days after Nanking’s fall) during this time?
They were in the Safety Zone. For one day only ? on Dec. 15 ? Fitch went outside the Safety Zone on a
round trip to Xiaguan to see off journalists leaving Nanking. When he made reference to that day, he
mentioned only a large pile of corpses near Yijiang Gate. (These were the bodies of Chinese soldiers shot
by their own army’s supervising unit, or were crushed in the press to escape, as I discussed on pages 72
and 73.)
As Smith’s observations (presented on pages 89 and 90) and other records show, through the morning of
the 13th as Nanking fell, the Japanese troops didn’t enter the Safety Zone.
In other words, the focus of the problem is on what the actions of the
Japanese army after the afternoon of the 13th.
Nanking and its environs after the city fell. “A” is the Safety Zone, where nearly all of the city’s residents
sought refuge. Chinese soldiers entered it as well. “B” indicates the city outside the Safety Zone. “C” shows
the land outside the city’s walls. (After “A Map of Nanking and Its Surrounding Gates” in Ishiwari Heizo’s
A Summary of Chinese Citadels [1940].)
“Mr. Rabe, I hereby inform you that, according to orders, the army will begin a search for [Chinese]
regulars in the so-called Safety Zone starting at 9 AM today. Nanking Special Agency, K. Kikuchi.” This
notice from the Japanese army to the International Committee after Nanking’s fall on the 14th about
operations to sweep for stragglers is undated. Is this “K. Kikuchi” actually Kikuchi Ken’ichi, who was
transferred from the Manchukuo government? (In vol. 3, pages 144?145, of Rabe’s Enemy Planes Over
Nanking.)
Preparing for mopping-up operations to begin the next day, the Japanese army’s vanguard entered part of
the Safety Zone on a preliminary inspection for several hours on the afternoon of the 13th. With the
promulgation of the “Ninth Division Sweep Unit Order” on Dec. 14 to “make the occupation of Nanking
sound by mopping up any remaining enemy forces,” only the Seventh Infantry Regiment of the Ninth
Division entered the Safety Zone during the three days from the 14th through the 16th. Gen. Matsui Iwane
had already issued his “Nanking Conquest Points” order concerning the exposure of enemy soldiers,
protection of civilians, and mopping-up zones for each regiment six days earlier, on Dec. 7.
On Dec. 14, the Seventh Infantry Regiment, who were responsible for mopping up inside the Safety Zone,
entered the Zone where soldiers who had cast off their uniforms were mixing indistinguishably with civilians.
Col. Isa Kazuo, the commander of the Seventh Infantry Regiment, wrote concisely in his journal that, “[w]e
begin the sweep in the morning. There is a refugee zone in our assigned area. Refugees total an estimated
100,000 or so.” We tend to think that the post-capitulation Japanese army’s military discipline was
disorderly and that anyone could easily go into the Safety Zone, but those who were not authorized were
forbidden from entering.
For example, at the Tokyo Tribunal, Col. Wakisaka Jiro, commander of the Ninth Division’s Thirty-Sixth
Infantry Regiment, testified that,
On Dec. 15, on the occasion of an inspection tour inside Nanking, I thought I would like to inspect the
actual conditions inside the refugee zone, but military police were guarding it strictly and even though I was
a ranking officer I was refused and told that without special authorization entry was forbidden. Ultimately, I
was unable to inspect the zone.
The Japanese army’s military police controlled Col. Wakisaka’s actions, and that they were that firm with
an army colonel shows that the Japanese military discipline was strictly enforced throughout the army. Of
course, there were probably some soldiers there who ignored military regulations.
Once again, please look at Bates’ assertion on page 114 that there was a massacre of 40,000 that included
12,000 civilians. From Bates’ claim that “most of all in the first three days,” in the three days that the
Seventh Infantry Regiment was in the Safety Zone, they would have had to have massacred 12,000
“civilians” and most of some 30,000 soldiers. Might Bates and Fitch have described this as “frequent
murder” and “wanton slaughter” in the first chapter of What War Means? But as I have already shown, as
consolidated records from contemporary Chinese, Japanese, English, and German sources indicate, there
was not one witnessed murder of a civilian. Exactly what were the murders described by Bates and Fitch,
and in particular Bates’ supposed slaughter of 12,000 “civilians”?
If I may be so bold as to bring up an appropriate thing for the word “murder” in the Safety Zone during
those three days, it seems that it can only be the execution of Chinese soldiers by the Japanese forces after
mopping-up operations. Strictly speaking, however, neither Bates nor Fitch actually saw those executions.
What the two saw was the unmasking of Chinese soldiers while the Japanese army conducted mopping-up
operations in the Safety Zone.
Fitch said that on Dec. 15, “it was all too evident that execution was going on, hundreds of poor disarmed
soldiers with many innocent civilians among them ? the real reason for his not wanting me to go further.”
In other words, he points to the possible executions of Chinese soldiers after they were identified and taken
from the Safety Zone, and he supposed then that “civilias” had been massacred.
If the executions carried out by the Japanese army during those three days were mistaken for murders, then
they would correspond to Bates’ and Fitch’s references to “frequent murders” and “wanton slaughter.”
This would also fit with Bates’ assertion that “most of all in the first three days.”
No other “killings” but these can be seen in the three days after Nanking’s fall.
We should look at the mopping-up operations. It is a common military function always carried out after a
battle regardless of locale. The Seventh Infantry Regiment, who had the responsibility for sweeping up in
the Safety Zone, did two things.
First was the seizure of all the scattered weapons and uniforms. Nanking yielded a veritable mountain of
munitions: four tanks and 39,000 rounds of tank ammunition, ten mortars and 57,218 shells, 103 pistols
and 261,350 rounds of ammunition, 960 rifles and 390,000 rounds of ammunition, 55,122 hand grenades,
eight 20-millimeter artillery pieces and some 1,000 shells, etc. It was a difficult job. This operation could
have been mistaken for looting on the part of Japanese soldiers.
The second thing was to uncover enemy troops hiding in the Safety Zone where Chinese soldiers had
changed out of their uniforms and blended seamlessly with civilians. If the enemy soldiers who had not
come forward and surrendered had been left alone, concealed as they were, there was no way to know
when they might seize the opportunity to strike back against the Japanese. If that were the case, the Safety
Zone was quite capable of becoming the Danger Zone. In point of fact, the Japanese inside Nanking took
sporadic fire from Chinese forces in the city. These mopping-up operations were indispensable in securing
the Japanese occupation of Nanking and preserving the peace between the Japanese and townsfolk.
Unmasking the Chinese soldiers in the Safety Zone was no easy matter. According to the first volume of
Source Material Relating to the Battle for Nanking, at 4:30 on the afternoon of Dec. 13, the “Notes for
Effecting the Sweep” order was issued to the Seventh Infantry Regiment, to wit:
All young men are to be considered as defeated soldiers or as bianyi-dui and are to be arrested and
confined. As for those other than young men ? Chinese who have no hostile intent, and in particular
women, children, and the elderly ? treat them with leniency, so they will respect the dignity of the Imperial
Army. [Emphasis mine.]
As the italicized part of this order shows, the Japanese army was ordered to show leniency to “Chinese
who have no hostile intent, and in particular women, children, and the elderly.”
The above photograph shows a mimeographed document (9″ x 2 3/4″) from the journal-like album of naval
Lt. Taguchi Yasamatsu. On Dec. 10, the day the battle for the conquest of Nanking began, in accordance
with the Shanghai naval land combat unit order, Lt. Taguchi’s First Independent Battery set out for the
Daxiao Airfield south of Guanghua Gate (outside the city) as the “Nanking air force base construction
corps.” While fighting the remnants of the defeated army, Taguchi had copies of this document printed up.
It says, “[as this individual is] a good person, those who cause injury [to him] will be severely punished,
[issued by] Yokosuka Force, First Independent Battery Commander Taguchi (seal).” Taguchi had these
distributed to the homes of “good people” and had them affixed to their doors and gates. These “good
people” were non-combatants. In addition, he gave armbands to them to help distinguish them from the
bianyi-dui. When he “gave medical attention and care” to a wounded Chinese soldier, the soldier’s mother
eventually came to him and was so grateful that Taguchi said, “she kowtowed to me to express her thanks.”
We don’t know exactly when these documents were distributed, unfortunately. The copy in Taguchi’s
album was affixed into the Dec. 13 place, so given the above notes, they must have been distributed before
this date. In either case, even though there were differences between “inside Nanking” and “outside
Nanking” and between the army and navy, we can probably say the same thing was going on inside the
city.
Having seen this, it becomes difficult to believe that any women or children were taken, let alone executed.
Given the order requiring that, “[a]ll young men are to be considered as defeated soldiers or as bianyi-dui
and are to be arrested and confined,” we can’t unconditionally deny the possibility that townsfolk who were
not in the army might mistakenly have been identified as having been Chinese soldiers.
The part of the order referencing “young men” needs clarification. As Durdin recalled, Chiang Kai-shek
had “all who were capable of bearing arms mobilized and devoted to drilling, attaching themselves to the
defense of Nanking.” This means that most of the youth in Nanking were mobilized, so it is extremely
possible that the young men were soldiers. This is why the Japanese army demanded that “[a]ll young men
[were] to be considered as defeated soldiers or as bianyi-dui.”
If by some chance a mistake was made, a relative or friend would show up and after their petition was
heard and the situation cleared up, the arrested individual would be released. In the “Reports of Injuries to
Civilians,” there are no complaints with a real name given where any townsmen were taken off. Even if
people were arrested, if they showed no “signs of resistance” they were spared the death sentence and
employed as coolies. The number of coolies employed by the end of February, 1938, (two and a half
months after Nanking fell) reached 10,000.
How many Chinese soldiers from the Safety Zone were executed during those three days? We don’t have
records for those three days, but there is a record of unmasking soldiers covering an 11-day period inside
the city which includes the Safety Zone. This is the Seventh Infantry Regiment’s “List of the Nanking
Sweep from Dec. 13 to Dec. 24,” which says “Number shot or bayoneted to death (defeated soldiers):
6,670.”
It is generally considered that reports of this type typically inflate the numbers threefold, so it is probably
fair to imagine that something like 2,000 were shot. The problem is whether these executions fit the
accounts of “frequent murders” and “wanton slaughter.” In other words, were these executions mistaken
for illegal killing ? that is, a massacre?
Steele writes in his article in the Chicago Daily News about the three days from Dec. 12 ? Dec. 15 that, “a
band of 300 Chinese being methodically executed before the the wall near the waterfront.” He reported the
“execution of Chinese soldiers” as “the execution of Chinese.” The world knew of the Japanese army’s
executions after mopping-up operations were complete, but no country made any complaints to Japan
based on this incident. All the more notable was that the Guomindang government, far from criticizing
Japan, ignored the situation. This was as I have already discussed herein.
In other words, Bates and Fitch’s accounts of “frequent murders” and “wanton slaughter” in the first
chapter of What War Means were based on the unmasking and execution of Chinese soldiers during
mopping-up exercises. The “three days” referenced in the massacre of 40,000 people, including 12,000
civilians, that “most of all [took place] in the first three days” point to the first three days of the Japanese
army’s mopping-up.
§6 Investigation 2 ? the second chapter of What War Means
Fitch, continuing in the second chapter from the first, presented accounts of “robbery, murder, and rape” in
the form of a diary covering Dec. 17?Dec. 31. I would like to focus on the “murder” in this section.
Dec. 17 was the day that the official occupation of Nanking was established, and was the day the Japanese
army held the ceremony commemorating their formal entrance into the city. Of this, Fitch wrote the
following:
Robbery, murder, rape continue unabated. A rough estimate would be at least a thousand women raped
last night and during the day. One poor woman was raped thirty-seven times. Another had her five months
infant deliberately smothered by the brute to stop its crying while he raped her.
The only mention of a murder on this day is the baby in the account above. Rabe wrote in his journal on
Dec. 17, saying, “Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped.” There can be
nothing more wretched than the smothering of a baby, yet Rabe was silent on this subject. If this had been
true, they would have immediately complained to the Japanese embassy, but there is no record of it in the “
Reports of Serious Injuries to Civilians.” Who was this woman who said the baby was smothered? Who
met this woman, and who substantiated the Japanese soldier’s offense? This was an unreliable rumor at any
rate, as there is no evidence pointing to a crime by any Japanese soldier.
The German embassy’s chancellor, Paul Scharrfenberg, told Rabe, “[a]s for all these excesses, one hears
only one side of it, after all.” As this shows, the account of 1,000 rapes seems to exist only from the
Chinese side and so lacks reliability. We can only say, then, that the story that a baby was suffocated ?
like the attendant story that the Japanese committed 1,000 rapes ? was only a rumor.
On Dec. 18, Fitch recorded a conversation with Dr. Wilson. He said,
Wilson reported a boy of five years of age brought to the hospital [attached University of Nanking] after
having been stabbed with a bayonet five times, once through his abdomen; a man with eighteen bayonet
wounds, a woman with seventeen cuts on her face and several on her legs.
On this day he recorded no murders. We can only see outrages as mentioned above. The essential matter
of whether these were outrages committed by the Japanese army is not recorded. What needs to be noted
here is that at the time, all that one had to do was report that one had received an injury from the Japanese
army and one was able to go to the hospital attached to the University of Nanking and get medical
treatment free-of-charge.
Fitch wrote this of Dec. 19:
Sunday, December 19. A day of complete anarchy. Several big fires raging today, started by the soldiers,
and more are promised. The American flag was torn down in a number of places.… Several were killed in
cold blood, for no apparent reasons whatever. Six out of seven of our sanitation squad in one district were
slaughtered; the seventh escaped, wounded, to tell the tale.… I also went to the house of Douglas Jenkins
of our Embassy. The flag was still there; but in the garage his house boy lay dead, another servant, dead,
was under a bed, both brutally killed. The house was in utter confusion. There are still many corpses on the
streets. All of them civilians as far as we can see.
We are a bit puzzled by the phrase “a day of complete anarchy” at the beginning. As for stories concerning
murder, however, there is the one told by the person who escaped and fled back home. Where did this
take place? What time, and on what day? Fitch didn’t say. Moreover, about the corpses Fitch said he saw
? might he have investigated when and why they died? Post-combat burial details had not yet begun
operation, so bodies from before Nanking fell were still left in place where they had lain. There is no proof
anywhere that these were the bodies of people massacred by the Japanese army as Fitch had said.
Dec. 20 marked a full week since Nanking’s fall. On this date, Fitch recorded:
Monday, December 20. Vandalism and violence continue absolutely unchecked. Whole sections of the city
are being systematically burned. At 5 p.m. Smythe and I went for a drive. All Taiping [Daping] Road, the
most important shopping street in the city, was in flames.
Fitch is harsh with his criticism, but he records no killings. Still, was there any truth to his claim, “whole
sections of the city are being systematically burned”?
To be sure, Rabe wrote in his “Letter to Hitler” that, “A third of the city has been burned by the Japanese
army. Daping Road and the Temple of Confucius on Huanle Street were gone in an instant.”
Daping Road, the street they say was burned down, was designated almost immediately after Nanking’s fall
as “Japan Road” because it was the street where Japanese would shop and go dining.
The Nanking Special Agency Report (1), issued on Jan. 21, 1938, reported that “Japan Street is an
important site. The area is some 220 hectares. There are some 60 shops ranging from post exchanges,
dining establishments, watchmakers, barbershops, general stores, inns, etc.”
Maruyama Susumu, who was transferred to the Nanking Special Agency (as an employee of Manchuria
Rail) from Shanghai, wrote me a letter postmarked on Apr. 13, 1989. In it, he recalled that he had heard
that Daping Road and Guofu Road, formerly Fanhua Road, were designated as “Japan Road” in the
beginning of January. He also said that Confucius’ Temple had been quickly restored, and a party for the
war reporter Ishikawa Tatsuzo had been held there.
Given such conditions, to say that the entire area of Daping Road went up in smoke is clearly hyperbole.
Fitch records no killings on Dec. 21. He describes arson and attempted robbery, however. Fitch writes,
Rabe fears for his house, for buildings are burning across the street from him.… The problem of feeding is
becoming serious.… Soldiers came into our place today, over the wall, and try to take our cars while we
were all out.… [Emphasis mine.]
He records arson continuing on the 21st from the 20th, so it would be good to look into the subject. It is
true that there were incidents of arson. The issue, however, is whether the arson was the work of the
Japanese army or someone else. The “Nanking Conquest Points” order issued by the Japanese army on
Dec. 7 warns that, “[e]ven if through inattentiveness, those who are careless with fire will be strictly
punished.” They paid scrupulous attention to accidental fires ? even more so than arson. Since fires were
being set, though, they established a fire brigade in the middle of January, a month after Nanking’s fall.
Be that as it may, if one reads the above text closely, one is struck by something odd. Fitch couldn’t have
been a witness when soldiers climbed over the trenches and stole their way in and tried to make off with the
automobile when everyone was absent. It is necessary to note from whom the story might have been heard,
and who would have witnessed the events.
Fitch recorded the following for Dec. 22:
Went with Sperling to see fifty corpses in some ponds a quarter of a mile east of headquarters. All
obviously civilians, hands bound behind backs, one with the top half of his head cut completely off. Were
they used for saber practice? [Emphasis mine.]
If the ponds at issue are some 400 meters (about a quarter mile) from the International Committee
Headquarters, it is safe to assume it was inside the Safety Zone. To be sure, as Nanking is on the shore of
the Yangzi, there are ponds both large and small inside and outside the city. Fitch said that all 50 bodies
were those of “civilians,” but did he actually check each body to see if it was someone killed in battle, a
Chinese soldier who had cast off his uniform, or a common townsman? All Fitch did was see some dead
bodies; yet in spite of this, he went so far as to speculate that they had been killed by Japanese soldiers
testing out their swords. If we take it that they were civilians, surely at least one relative would have come
running, and would not have left their bodies lying there like that. There are no such reports of injury in
Nanking, however.
Fitch continues:
Mr. Wu, engineer in the power plant which is located in Hsiakwan [Xiaguan], brought us the amazing news
that forty-three of the fifty-four employees … had been taken out and shot.… [Emphasis mine.]
This is an incident of murder that Fitch heard from a Mr. Wu. This also appears in Rabe’s journal on Dec.
22. According to Rabe’s journal, however, this Wu was a laborer who was also to be executed, but when
the two next to him were hit, “he fell unwounded into the river beneath the bodies of two victims and so
was able to save himself” and was fortunate enough to be able to make his escape. He also says that this
event took place “three or four days ago.” This is an important event.
Still, if 43 out of 54 men had been taken away, why didn’t the 11 men who were not taken away
immediately rush off and notify the International Committee? Why were they silent? Would it not have been
requisite for Fitch, upon hearing this account from Wu, to seek out the other 11 people for corroboration?
If this had been true, Fitch and Rabe should have filed a complaint with the Japanese embassy ? but they
never wrote out one.
The “electric company” appearing here was probably the Metropolitan Electric Works. According to
Nanking Special Agency Report (2), the Metropolitan Electric Works, under the jurisdiction of the
National Government Construction Committee, managed the Xiagwan power plant. This power plant was
used as a military facility until Dec. 12, but before Nanking’s fall the power lines were damaged by fire and
the iron pipes at the Mt. Qingliang service reservoir exploded. Because of that, the Special Agency
employed Chinese workers around the clock from around Dec. 22 to get the facility operating again.
It is probably because of this situation that the rumor spread that “forty-three of the fifty-four employees …
had been taken out and shot,” and since, “at the outset the fear of war was extreme” the Special Agency
went so far as to offer conditions that during the construction “[workers] could look forward to their lives
being safe, the security of their homes, a ration allowance, the distribution of rice and other supplementary
food, [identification by] armbands, protection, and assignment to specific sectors for work.” Thanks to
these efforts, they were able to have partial electric and water service by Jan. 1. In February, Chinese
workers numbered “160-plus electrical workers, and 60-plus waterworks workers,” and electrical and
water services were restored to normal. If the workers at the Xiaguan power plant had been taken away
and shot, surely the Japanese would not have been able to assemble this many workers.
To return to the original point: ten days after Nanking fell ? on Dec. 23 ? Fitch wrote the following:
Seventy were taken from our camp at the Rural Leaders’ Training School and shot.… At noon a man was
led to headquarters with head burned cinder black ? eyes and ears gone, nose partly, a ghastly sight. I
took him to the hospital in my car where he died a few hours later. His story was that he was one of a gang
of some hundred who had been tied together, then gasoline thrown over them and set afire.
By Dec. 17, 1,500 refugees were being housed in Rural Leaders’ Training School. On searching
Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone (where the reports of injuries to Nanking residents are collected)
for instances of incidents connected with the school, there are only two examples, and they are on Dec. 19.
The first incident is when Japanese soldiers stole $10 (or perhaps $2.50) and between two and five women
were raped. The second incident was an attempted rape. Again, there is no record of who the witnesses
were.
The case Fitch writes about above would have to have been considerably more serious than the two
reported cases, but no report appears in Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone. Fitch writes that 70
people were taken away and shot, but from whom might he have heard the tale? How might he have
behaved, hearing the tale from a man about to die, “head burned cinder black ? eyes and ears gone, nose
partly”? The man died three hours later at the hospital ? but why was he first brought to the International
Committee before the hospital? Finally, who brought him by in the first place? It is truly peculiar.
Fitch writes that on Dec. 24,
Mr. Tang of the U.S. Embassy reports that the Chinese staff and their relatives, living in the Embassy, were
all robbed last night by an officer and his men.
On this day, the Japanese army began conducting a census of the total population of the city. The Chinese
soldiers who had been exposed during the mopping-up operations of the first three days had almost all
been of low rank; this is because extremely few of the office class, who were probably hiding, had been
found out.
In other words, the ultimate goal of the Japanese army was to remove the Chinese soldiers from the neutral
territory of the Safety Zone. Another goal was getting an actual count of people in town so they could
address the problem of the urgent need for food in the city. To accomplish this, the Japanese army
requested all the townsfolk appear at designated locations to be registered. The Chinese were one by one
personally handed individual registry documents (see the photo bellow), and the Japanese were thereby
able to get a handle on the population in Nanking.
As shown above, Fitch’s record for this day is hearsay reports of theft with no mention about killings. Just
to be sure, I checked the Records of the Nanking Safety Zone to see if Fitch’s account of theft appeared
? and it didn’t. It would therefore not have been reported to the Japanese embassy.
Of the registration of Nanking’s citizens, Fitch wrote this on Dec. 25:
At the University, registration commenced. The people were told that if any ex-soldiers were there and
would step out, they would be used in the labor corps and their lives would be saved; about 240 stepped
out. They were herded together and taken away. Two or three lived to tell the tale and, by feigning death
after they were wounded, escaped and came to the hospital. One group was machine-gunned, another was
surrounded by soldiers and used for bayonet practice.
Fitch observed the situation with the registration, including the Japanese army taking off Chinese soldiers to
segregate them. What happened to them after they were taken away was recounted by one who was
fortunate enough to have returned alive.
From Fitch’s account, we might think that 240 were “machine-gunned” right away or “used for bayonet
practice,” but as long as they were not being a problem, the Japanese army registered soldiers who had
been taken out of the demilitarized neutral zone as regular citizens. This was the segregation of military from
civilians. This segregation is covered in more detail in the next section, “Investigation 3 ? the third chapter
of What War Means.”
The killings written about by Fitch on the 25th were executions carried out at this time. This segregation
went on until Jan. 5, and if these executions were improper as Fitch perceived them, he surely would have
written “this is unlawful” day after day. In point of fact, however, this was the only day that Fitch indicated
he had any problem with the segregation of military from civilians.
On Dec. 27, however, this record of a killing appears:
A boy of thirteen, taken by the Japanese nearly two weeks ago, beaten with an iron rod and then
bayoneted because he didn’t do his work satisfactorily.
This is the only instance of a killing recorded for this day. If the youth had been taken away “nearly two
weeks ago,” it would have to have been immediately after Nanking fell. Did this 13-year-old work for the
Japanese right after the city’s fall? We are told that in spite of this, the Japanese ultimately visited on him a
violent death by bayonet. Where might Fitch have seen the body of this youth? Did he actually go to where
the body was to confirm it for himself? If it was true, a murder that was such a horrid, violent act would
have to have been a very noteworthy occurrence. Be that as it may, there is no record of this incident or the
13-year-old in the “Daily Reports of Serious Injuries to Civilians.” There is no trace of any protest at all.
To continue, there are no instances of killing recorded for Dec. 28, 29, 30, or 31.
Having looked at Fitch’s diary-style report, we find that the number of cases of killings from the period of
Dec. 17 ? 31 for which there is positive proof is zero. If we must speak of killings, they are the executions
of Chinese regulars (who had cast away their uniforms) that were segregated and taken out of the
demilitarized neutral zone. But even of that story, we have only the solitary, one-sided account of a man
who escaped and told the tale, and his story has no verification or corroboration. As Fitch wrote at the
outset, “What I am about to relate is anything but a pleasant story … a story of such crime and horror …
the story of depredations of horde …” the target of his criticism seems to have been plundering.
In 1974, Fitch published My Eighty Years in China. In it are unreliable descriptions as cited above. When
looking to see if he has written more on the Nanking Massacre, we can only find the following in Chapter
Ten, “Nanking’s Doomed”:
Those that made it to the river found only a few boats there and these they overloaded before they could
push them into the stream and so most of them were drowned. In the meantime a contingent of the
Japanese Army came around the wall from the south and shot down those at the river front and others who
were still trying to get down over the wall. It was a masscare.
Fitch, contributing anonymously to the propaganda work What War Means, wrote “The victorious army
must have its rewards ? and those rewards are to plunder, murder, rape, at will.” In My Eighty Years in
China, however, which he wrote under his own name, he only describes the natural result of combat and
pursuit by the Japanese army as a “massacre.” On that day, Fitch was in the Safety Zone, so that account,
too, is likely hearsay.
§7 Investigation 3 ? the third chapter of What War Means
Miner Searle Bates appeared at the Tokyo Tribunal in June of 1946 to give testimony that 40,000 people,
including 12,000 civilians, had been massacred in Nanking. Six months after, he issued a statement on the
matter. I would like to look at that statement again. He said,
[A] low and incomplete figure for civilian deaths … inflicted by the Japanese in the first few weeks of their
occupation of Nanking, was 12,000; and for deaths of unarmed men in military clothing, 35,000. Of these
murders, over 90 per cent occurred in the first ten days, most of all in the first three days.
The “first three days” in Bates’ statement were the first three or four days after Nanking’s fall, which were
described by Fitch and Bates in the first chapter of What War Means. The basis for this, as I have
described, was the exposure and execution of Chinese soldiers during the mopping-up operations carried
out by the Japanese army between Dec. 14 ? 16.
There is another thing that needs to be made clear about Bates’ statement. That is, exactly when were
those “first ten days” Bates speaks of when he says, “over 90 per cent occurred in the first 10 days”? Up
to now we have been looking at Fitch’s accounts in the second chapter of What War Means, but if we
look at Nanking for ten day from its fall ? up to Dec. 23 ? there are zero killings. Just what was Bates
basing the “over 90 per cent occurred in the first 10 days” on when he presented his statement? That has
been the problem for some time.
The answer to this can be found by investigating the third chapter of What War Means, to which Bates
contributed. This is how the third chapter begins:
Registration was begun on December 20 in the main compound, occupied mainly by women.… Out of the
total of about three thousand men massed together on the tennis courts below Swanzy Hall, between two
and three hundred stepped out in answer to a half-hour of haranguing to this effect: “All who have been
soldiers or who had performed compulsory labor (fu juh) pass to the rear. Your lives will be spared, and
you will be given work if you thus voluntarily come forth. If you do not, and upon inspection you are
discovered, you will be shot.” … Toward five o’clock in the afternoon, the two or three hundred men who
had stepped out were taken away in two groups by military police.… Next morning a man with five
bayonet wounds came to the University Hospital. On two occasions before this man declared with fair
clarity that he has been a refugee in the library of the University. He stated that he had been picked up by
the Japanese on the street and added to a group that had come from the tennis court mentioned above.
That evening, he said, somewhere to the west, about 130 Japanese soldiers had killed most of five hundred
similar captives with bayonet thrusts. When he regained consciousness he found that the Japanese had
gone, and managed to crawl away during the night. He was not familiar with this part of Nanking, and was
vague as to places. [Emphasis mine]
The date of Dec. 20 at the head of the piece has long been problematic. That is because Bates says
“registration was begun” on this date, but registration, coinciding with segregating the civilians from the
soldiers, began on Dec. 24. Therefore, Dec. 20 was probably a mistake for Dec. 24. If this is the case, and
it refers to events taking place starting on Dec. 24, then it simply cannot correspond to Bates’ “first ten
days.”
When Bates issued this statement at the height of the Tokyo Tribunals referencing “the first ten days,” he
probably based that “first ten days” on the text of his memorandum from that time which said “Dec. 20.”
Be that as it may, we can imagine that the second source for Bates’ claim of a massacre was this
segregation of soldiers and civilians.
As I have said, the first four chapters of What War Means were mostly organized in the form of letters. As
can be seen from Timperley’s explanation leading into Chapter Three, however, this chapter alone was
formed from Bates’ “memorandum”:
The registration was made of all residents in the city. The following account of what happened was written
by a foreign member of the University faculty on January 25 from a draft information prepared on
December 31 and notes made on January 3.
In other words, Timperley put together Chapter Three, titled “Promise and Performance,” on Jan. 25,
based on the manuscript Bates completed on Dec. 31 and the memo he wrote on Jan. 3. When might
Bates have begun writing the manuscript he finished on Dec. 31?
On Dec. 25, Minnie Vautrin wrote in her diary, “[a]t Christmas Dinner today Searle Bates said that he had
been trying to write an article on ‘Christmas in Hell.’” At Bates’ words, Vautrin wrote, “[i]t really has not
been that for us here at Ginling; in fact we have had some bits of heaven on our campus.” As one can
imagine from reading this, it’s unlikely that Vautrin knew that Bates was in the process of contributing what
would become Chapter Three. At any rate, we now understand that Bates started writing the manuscript
around this time. Strictly speaking, it would probably be fair to say that about this time Bates started
collecting stories about executions resulting from the segregation of military and civilian populace.
In the mopping-up operations, taking place over the first three days after Nanking fell, the Japanese army
exposed Chinese soldiers hiding in the Safety Zone and removed them. Although there were cases where
executions took place, the main point of the segregation of civilians and military that took up roughly 20
days starting on Dec. 24 was, as shown from the registration card previously introduced, having the
townsfolk appear one by one at a designated place and recording and registering the bearer’s name, age,
and sex. As I’ve already said, there were two goals here. The first was segregating soldiers from civilians in
the demilitarized and neutral Safety Zone to quickly restore public order. The second was to administer
drawing up the necessary certificates of residence for the distribution of food rations, etc.
Let us now return to the third chapter of What War Means and Bates’ memorandum. The memorandum
began with the account of a man who had escaped execution and told him that the Japanese army had
declared that if the Chinese surrendered the Japanese would spare their lives, but when they came forward,
the Japanese went back on that promise and took them away and killed them.
Some doubt must remain to this man’s story, for in addition to bayonet wounds in five places, and even
though he was unfamiliar with the geography, he was able to find his way past the Japanese army who were
rigorously guarding the gates and the city to get to the hospital. Bates was not able to confirm the existence
of the bodies of the 500 prisoners said killed by the man.
Let us continue with Bates’ tale. As a sequel to the previous story, Bates wrote:
On the morning of the 27th another man was brought to me. He said he was one of thirty or forty who had
escaped the death met by most of the two hundred or three hundred taken away the previous evening. The
man desired help for himself and one or more companions in the registration then continuing, but since I
was surrounded by military police at that time, I had to tell him that registration was that day limited to
women, and that it was best not to speak further at the moment.…
In the course of the same day and the next (27th and 28th) I heard and checked apparently circumstantial
reports that part of the men taken away had been bound in groups of five and ten, to be passed
successively from a first room of a large house into a second room or court where there was a big fire. As
each group went forward, groans and cries could be heard by the remainder, but no shots. Some twenty
remaining from an original sixty broke away in desperation through a back wall and made their escape.
[Emphasis mine.]
This is corroboration from a different man that “200 men were killed.” This man, however, was probably
injured. If that had been the case, though, it would have been natural to take him to the hospital, but instead
he had been brought to Bates. Bates says he spent two days listening to the man’s account and verifying it
? but when, where, and how were they to have been killed, and how did they open that hole in the wall?
Were they unarmed? Again, Bates didn’t make a confirmation of the essential bodies.
Bates wrote about another event four days later, on New Year’s Eve:
On the 31st, two men gave a request for aid, with their story, to a trusted assistant of the Library refugee
camp, who offered to bring them to me for confirmation if desired. One frankly declared that he had been a
soldier, thus creating some presumption in favor of his truthfulness. They declared that two hundred-three
hundred men from the University were split up into various groups. They themselves were taken first to Wu
Tai Shan [Mt. Wutai], then to the bank of the canal outside Han Hsi Men [Hanxi Gate] where a machine
gun was turned upon them. They fell, one of them wounded, among the dead men and smeared with their
blood. [Emphasis mine.]
Please note the italics, where Bates essentially tells us that, “one frankly declared that he had been a soldier,
thus creating some presumption in favor of his truthfulness.” To turn this around, none of the men up till now
had said they were soldiers. It is as if Bates is saying it doubtful to believe that their tales were true. In other
words, the only ones able to give testimony that the Japanese army took away and executed Chinese
soldiers who had hidden after discarding their uniforms were those who had actually admitted they were
soldiers who had surrendered. The people from whom Bates had heard these accounts so far probably
hadn’t said they were soldiers, however. For that reason, Bates might have doubted the stories he was
told. For the first time, however, a man who said he was a soldier had come forth, and with that Bates
stressed that this gave a sense of reliability to their stories.
Bates continued getting information about executions. The following is the entry for Jan. 3:
On the 3rd of January, an interview was secured with two men among five acquaintances in the Library,
who were survivors of the experience of December 26. One of them was in the first group taken from the
University, and confirmed circumstantially the room-find-fire account at Wu Tai Shan [Mt. Wutai] as given
above under the date of the 27th and 28th. He estimated that of his group eighty were killed and forty to
fifty escaped; one of them, wounded by a bayonet thrust, was in the Library, and could be brought to
report the same facts.
The second was an unusually intelligent man, clear and specific both in narrative and under cross-
questioning. He was taken with the second group to a large house at Wu Tai Shan opposite a temple.
As indicated by Bates’ comment that the men “reported the same incident,” the accounts of the survivors of
the group taken to Mt. Wutai were all identical. We can’t deny that there is a possibility that they took the
five days to work out their stories, but Bates wrote that this only increased the reliability of their accounts.
Also, unlike the men Bates had spoken with before, the second man was surprisingly intelligent and his
interview was quite clear, so Bates affirmed the dependability of his story.
Bates’ entry for Jan. 3 continues:
The men in the immediate vicinity of my informant (he did not speak of others) were bound with wire, wrist
to wrist, in pairs. Thirty or more were taken to Han Chung Men [Hanzhong Gate] and across the canal,
where four or five in desperation broke from the column in the dusk or dark, taking advantage of protecting
walls, and found a hiding-place.… At day-break he went a little in that direction and saw bodies in rows,
bayoneted.… He managed to get past the gate safely and slip back to the Safety Zone. [Emphasis mine.]
If their condition was that they “were bound with wire, wrist to wrist, in pairs,” they would be unlikely to be
able to escape from the line without injury. Even if they had been able to escape, it was impossible to enter
or exit the city’s gates freely for two and a half months after the fall of Nanking. They should not have been
able to pass through any of the gates without incident. Even more, upon being so fortunate as to have
gotten away, why would they then have returned to the Safety Zone, which was extremely dangerous?
Wouldn’t it have been more normal, upon escaping, to have made their way to some other place where
there were no Japanese soldiers?
Working from this man’s story, however, Bates strengthens its foundations:
To the account of this man and his testimony must be added two items. A responsible worker in the
Chinese Red Cross requested us to go outside the Han Chung Men to inspect a large number of bodies
there. Mr. Kroeger of the International Committee told me that he observed these bodies himself, in the
course of an early venture outside the gate; but that they could not be seen from the City Wall. The gate is
now closed. Burial gangs report three thousand bodies at that point, left in rows or piles after mass
execution. The original informant talked so freely to me because he had a premonition of trouble during
registration, which he was about to attempt. [Emphasis mine.]
Up to this point, that is the story of the man who said he had escaped. Their stories match on the point that
they said the place with the bodies was Hanzhong Gate (also called Hanxi Gate). Someone from the
Chinese Red Cross Society went to the spot and verified to Bates that there was a large number of corpses
there. This means that it was someone from the Red Cross who made the confirmation. Finally, Bates,
recorded, it was another International Committee member ? Christian Kroeger ?who said that “he
observed these bodies himself.”
There is something that doesn’t make sense concerning Kroeger’s eyewitness account, however.
The western boundary of the Safety Zone was Mt. Wutai, and beyond that to the west was Hanzhong
Gate. Kroeger might have gone out to Hanzhong Gate, but all the gates were under close guard by armed
soldiers. How would Kroeger have gotten out of the city? We don’t clearly
Men of the 14th Field Artillery Regiment inspect the field on the day of Nanking’s fall (Dec. 13) near Suixi
Gate, a short distance south of Hanzhong Gate. (From Kajimura Todomu’s Album Commemorating [My]
Military Campaign During the Chinese Incident.)
understand the point about the bodies being unable to be seen from the top of the ramparts, but might
Kroeger have seen 3,000 bodies beyond Hanzhong gate lying there in rows or stacked in piles? If he did
see them, he surely would have said so. Bates would have also written that crucial point down. All that
Bates wrote, however, was that Kroeger saw bodies while on his way there.
If he was so interested in this incident, and as he was requested to check the corpses, why didn’t Bates go
himself to verify the bodies? Incidentally, the Japanese army had not yet begun organizing burial details for
the dead Chinese soldiers that lay abandoned. As shown in the photograph on the preceding page, China’s
battlefield dead lay strewn about where they fell.
Nonetheless, Bates presents the location of the critically important bodies as evidence.
Bates continues the tale of the man who escaped:
On January 7, I believe, he was one of some ten men sorted out by the military police from the men passing
before them during the open registration resumed on the University compound.
…
Two other men from the University Library reported indirectly that they escaped from a large body of
several hundred who were bayoneted along the canal wall to the north, near San Chia Ho [Sancha Hu, or
Sancha River]. [Emphasis mine.]
Look again at the map on page 56. The river Sancha (also called Hucheng) runs alongside the wall beyond
the city at Hanzhong Gate, and between the wall and the river runs a road. Here and there in this area,
Bates says, several hundred bodies were “bayoneted along the canal wall to the north, near San Chia Ho.”
For Bates, this could only be evidence for the tale told by the Chinese that during the segregation of
civilians from the military the Japanese promised to spare any who surrendered, but executed them all the
same. This is the reason the third chapter is titled “Promises and Performance.”
§8 Further evidence for a large number of executions
Might the Japanese army, as Bates said, have broken its word in carrying out these executions?
Maj. Gen. Sasaki Toichi’s “memo” giving the order for the segregation of the military from civilians is
included in The Battle of Nanking:
Jan. 5. Interrogations completed. As of today, we have taken some 2,000 of the enemy from the city,
accommodating them in the old Foreign Office compound. We have taken wounded Chinese soldiers who
were in the keeping of foreign missionaries and made them prisoners of war. One by one we have arrested
defeated [enemy] soldiers who continue to carry out acts of outlawry just beyond the city, and we have
dealt with several thousand of them at Xiaguan.
From this, we understand that the Japanese army was housing Chinese soldiers they’d taken away in the
old Foreign Office buildings. If we take “we have dealt with … them at Xiaguan” as “we have executed …
them at Xiaguan,” we can imagine that the “defeated soldiers who [continued] to carry out acts of outlawry
just beyond the city” were apprehended and executed. This suggests that Chinese soldiers inside the city
who committed no acts of outlawry were not executed.
In my Nanking Massacre: Fact Versus Fiction, I presented an article from the Jan. 10, 1938, issue of the
Yomiuri Shinbun. In it, “1,600 stragglers and others” were registered as common townsfolk. That is, the
registration of Chinese soldiers as townsfolk was accepted.
As I have shown earlier, defeated soldiers were also put to work as coolies. This seems to have been good
treatment. According the “War Diary” of a certain second lieutenant included in The Battle of Nanking, a
Japanese army private’s base pay per month was five yen and 50 sen (to which was added a further three
yen and 30 sen for combat-duty pay). In comparison, a coolie was paid five yen a month. Though it is
possible to express some doubt about this figure, the coolies nonetheless were paid.
Of course, one probably would not be able to avoid a sentence of death if one committed acts of outlawry
in the city. For example, as in the article from the China Press I presented on page 70, on Dec. 28 (during
the segregation of civilians from the military), 23 Chinese army officers including Chen Mi and Wang Xinlun
and 54 subordinates were unmasked. It came to light that Wang and the others had been involved in
“robbery, sedition, and rape.” I can’t verify whether they were executed, but they surely must have been
dealt with seriously.
We can see, then, that the Japanese treated Chinese soldiers as prisoners of war as long as they committed
no acts of outlawry. However, after Bates wrote down what he was told by the Chinese men, he added the
following two sentences (A and B):
A: Burial gangs report three thousand bodies at that point, left in rows or piles after mass execution.
B: Evidence from burials indicate that close to forty thousand unarmed persons were killed within and near
the walls of Nanking, of whom some 30 per cent had never been soldiers.
Readers noting sentences A and B will probably have gotten the impression of a large number of unlawful
executions. It reads as if the burial detail confirmed all of the bodies. One is given to think that the result of
the burial detail’s body-by-body examination showed 12,000 civilian bodies and 30,000 bodies of Chinese
soldiers who had discarded their uniforms. Bates assumption was probably that the report of the burial
detail was empirical. At this point, then, it is necessary to examine the report of the burial detail.
§9 The burial detail’s report was revised
Bates’ A and B sentences stand in contradiction to the actual circumstances of the time.
According to Timperley’s commentary on Bates’ anonymously contributed third chapter, “was written by a
foreign member of the University faculty on January 25 from a draft of information prepared on December
31 and notes made on January 3.” Given this, the “burial gangs” and “evidences from burials” in the
previous sentences A and B are inconsistent with the actual conditions at the time.
Regardless of how early it was intended, the burial detail began at the end of January. On Jan. 31, Rabe
wrote in his journal, “I was happy to discover that the dead Chinese soldiers who have been lying at my
door for six weeks now has at last been buried.”
Consequently, if we consider the “Jan. 25” that Bates wrote, the burial detail had not yet begun, and body
count had not been established. Nonetheless, he wrote “evidences from burials indicate,” and Bates
claimed the burials as evidence that “close to 40,000” were unlawfully slain. He also said some 30 percent
of them ? 12,000 ? had been civilians. How could Bates have written these details down on Jan. 25?
We can’t help but presume that Bates added these two sentences when the burial detail finished around
Mar. 15, thinking to make it consistent.
In March, the publication date for What War Means was drawing nearer and nearer. On Mar. 14, when
the editing was nearly completed, Timperley asked Bates to inform him if his amendments would be limited
to minor changes, or if he intended major revisions.
One week later, on Mar. 21, Timperley suggested to Bates that, “The book must be shocking in the better
sense of the word and here, I feel, the kind of balance which might be called for in more academic
treatment must be sacrificed for the sake of dramatic effect.”
A further week later, on Mar. 28, he wrote back with a final letter (No. 10) saying, “I have received yours
of that date [21st] returning the manuscript with detailed suggestions for revision.” Concerning Bates’
“suggestions for revision,” he announced his agreement, saying “[y]our suggestions were most useful and
just what I wanted.” These “changes” were probably major revisions ? the addition of sentences A and B.
§10 Examining the two revision sentences
It is important to examine whether the content of Bates’ added two sentences was proper. The italicized
section below is the added sentence A:
A responsible worker in the Chinese Red Cross requested us to go outside the Han Chung Men
[Hanzhong Gate] to inspect a large number of bodies there. Mr. Kroeger of the International Committee
told me that he observed these bodies himself, in the course of an early venture outside the gate; but that
they could not be seen from the City Wall. The gate is now closed. Burial gangs report three thousand
bodies at that point, left in rows or piles after mass execution. The original informant … [o]n January 7, I
believe, … was one of some ten men sorted out by military police from the men passing before them during
the open registration resumed on the University compound. During that week the officers who did the
actual work seemed to be under instructions to get about that many men per day, or perhaps to feel that
they could satisfy their superiors with nothing less.
Look again at the photograph on page 142. It is from the photo album of an artillery second lieutenant of
the 14th Field Artillery Regiment (the Kokura Regiment), which departed for the front in August, 1937. It
bears the inscription, “at Shuixi Gate, Dec. 13.” Suixi Gate is on the west side of Nanking just a little south
of Huazhong Gate. The photo was probably taken during regular inspection of the target-ground of the
artillery on the day Nanking fell.
During the morning of Dec. 13, some 200 men of one unit from the 45th (Kagoshima) Regiment were
attacked by a frantic charge of 20,000 Chinese soldiers moving south from Xiaguan, and the death struggle
on the ground between Shuixi Gate and the Yangzi River to its west spread. Thanks to overwhelming
firepower, the 11th Company repulsed the Chinese assault, losing company commander Ozono and 13
others. A large number of Chinese also fell.
This action by the 11th Company is shown in a photograph in my Analyzing the “Photographic Evidence”
of Nanking Massacre. It is clear from the photograph that these were all deaths due to battle. As these
bodies could plainly be seen over the ramparts, many other people had to have known about them. Bates
most likely added the sentence “Burial gangs report three thousand bodies at that point, left in rows or piles
after mass execution,” so as to give the impression that these were bodies of Chinese who had been taken
away and executed. There is, nonetheless, a strong likelihood that these were in actuality battle-related
deaths.
The following is a reiteration of sentence B. The sentence in question is italicized.
Finally, it should be remembered that this incident is only one of a series of similar acts that had been going
on for two weeks, with changes on the main theme of mass murder of men accused rightfully or wrongfully
of being ex-soldiers. This is not the place to discuss the dictum of international law that the lives of prisoners
are to be preserved except under serious military necessity, nor the Japanese setting aside of that law for
frankly stated vengeance upon persons accused of having killed in battle comrades of the troops now
occupying Nanking. Other incidents involved larger numbers of men than did this one. Evidences from
burials indicate that close to forty thousand unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of
Nanking, of whom some 30 per cent had never been soldiers.
Since the Chinese army fled as the city fell, their battle-dead were left where they fell. The Japanese army’s
concerns were solving the problems of restoring public order, working out food supply, and seeing to burial
details. The organization of burial details just had to come last. The Japanese were well aware, however,
that disease could break out if the decaying bodies were left alone. From about the middle of January,
while the segregation of civilians from the military was ongoing, the Special Agency was at the center of
plans to deal with the situation.
The man put in charge of the burial detail by the chief of the Nanking Special Agency was Maruyama
Susumu. According to Maruyama’s testimony in my Recollections of Mr. Maruyama Susumu of the
Nanking Special Agency (an Employee of Manchurian Rail), the preliminary operations for the burial details
were his main concern at first. That meant going over many particulars. These included a factual
investigation of the bodies left strewn about both inside and outside the city, selection of a burial ground
where the underground water table of the Yangzi River was far enough below the surface to allow burial,
coordinating operations with the Red Swastika Society (a private charitable organization that is the
Buddhist answer to the Red Cross, Red Star, and Red Crescent societies) and assembling workers
centered around the Red Swastika to conduct burials, and procuring equipment for burials. Even though it
had been said that burials would start around “the first part of January,” the Nanking Special Agency and
their cooperative partner the Red Swastika Society had their hands full with preparations through the month
of January and didn’t start with the actual burials until February. Maruyama said “The burials began roughly
at the beginning of February.”
We can see what the situation was by looking at the “Report of the Nanking Special Agency (2): Nanking
Group Second Report (Conditions in February)” completed after March, 1938:
Under the supervision of the Special Agency, the Red Swastika burial group (c. 600 individuals) continued
conducting burials every day ranging within and without the city from the beginning of February. Currently,
as of the end of February, some 5,000 burials have taken place. This continues to bear considerable
results. [Emphasis mine.]
As detailed in my Recollections of Mr. Maruyama Susumu, when the pay for Chinese policemen was on
average 3 to 5 yen per month, the Special Agency made a provision to supply for the people’s welfare by
paying the Red Swastika Society 30 sen (.3 yen) per body buried. During this time there were few
available trucks, so bodies had to be transported by manual labor. Since there were also no steam shovels,
the graves all had to be dug likewise by manual labor.
Because of all this, on an average day they were only able to bury about 200 people. In “The Relief
Situation in Nanking,” dated on Feb. 14, Bates wrote that the Red Swastika “were burying 200 bodies a
day.” Still, as the “Report of the Nanking Special Agency (2)” says, “as of the end of February, some
5,000 burials have taken place.” As we can tell from this number, actual burials started at the beginning of
February.
On Mar. 22, a memorial service for Chinese civilian and military victims of the war was held under the
sponsorship of Special Agency director Onishi Hajime. Maruyama instructed to “finish all the burials by
Mar. 15” so that they would be completed in time for the service. With that consideration, they started
using trucks in March to speed up the burials. So what exactly was the workload of the burial detail? In
“The Situation in Nanking,” written on Mar. 4 by Georg Rosen of the German embassy, Rosen reported
that the Red Swastika buried 500 – 600 bodies each day. From this we understand that burials in March
were at three times the rate in February. On the other hand, bodies from the Yangzi riverside were “buried
at sea” and floated off down the river.
Maruyama went through the Self-Governing Committee to commission the Red Swastika to conduct all
the burials. They were finished in about 40 days.
Bates backed this up when, as chairman of the Nanking International Relief Committee, he edited the
“Nanking International Relief Committee Report” in 1939. The report says:
For example, $2540 was used to complete the necessary burial enterprises undertaken by the Red
Swastika Society, which covered over 40,000 bodies otherwise uncared for. During some 40 working
days, this employed 170 men. On this and a number of other work relief jobs, forty cents per day of actual
work was taken as a standard wage. [Emphasis mine.]
As this shows, all the burials were conducted by the Red Swastika Society. The Red Swastika burial
records, submitted at the Tokyo Tribunal, showed 41,278 burials inside the city, and 1,793 outside. The
report of the Special Agency was approximately the same. This number is considerably inflated, however.
According to Maruyama, the Special Agency sanctioned the inflation of the burial count in a plan to
revitalize civic life. As I showed in Nanking Massacre: Fact Versus Fiction, if we compute the number of
days the burial detail was in operation and the average number of burials per day, the total number of
burials was in reality probably 15,000 at most. Given that there had been fierce fighting at Nanking, and
that there were gravely wounded soldiers who had been just left there, it is not strange that there were this
many casualties among the Chinese army.
Be that as it may, we can understand that since burials began on Jan. 31 or Feb. 1 and were finished on
Mar. 15, they were a very rushed affair. As written in the “Report of the Nanking Special Agency (3):
Nanking Group Third Report (Conditions in March),” although they were called burials, ultimately most of
the bodies were just covered with straw mats and not actually interred. That is why, starting in May, burials
a second time ? now under earthen mounds ? and disinfection work became necessary.
Under such rushed conditions, even though there were examinations of the bodies, it was probably all they
could do to determine whether it was a man, woman, or a child. There had been no attempt made to
determine whether the bodies were those of civilians or soldiers who had discarded their uniforms, or
whether they had been massacred or killed in battle.
This all means that in the sentence Bates added ? “Evidences from burials indicate that close to forty
thousand unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of Nanking, of whom some 30 per cent
had never been soldiers” ? the only thing that was correct was the number 40,000.
In the end, the third chapter, with its title “Promises and Performance,” he inserted the idea of a massacre
into the publicly announced total of 40,000 burials under the reasoning that the Japanese promised to spare
the Chinese soldiers’ lives and then broke their word.
§11 Investigation 4 ? the first half of Chapter Four of What War Means
The title of the fourth chapter of What War Means is “The Nightmare Continues.” The first half was
contributed by Bates, and the actual identity of the contributor of the second half has not yet been
determined. Timperley’s comment on Bates’ contributed half reads, “A survey of the situation as it
presented itself nearly a month after the Japanese occupation is given in the following letter written on
January 10.” Of the second half, he said, “Written a week later, the following letter is less factual than the
preceding accounts but it is nevertheless valuable because of the atmosphere it conveys.”
Why did Timperley publish this second half of the chapter even though he said “less factual”? Was it just
because he wanted to publish a report from at least one more person? Was it perhaps that by making it
clear that it was “less factual,” it would give the readers the impression that the rest was all based on truth?
Still, Timperely’s comment at the start of the second half was such a small note it could have been
overlooked by readers anyway.
Let us consider Bates’ half of the chapter. Bates’ refers to “killing” in only a few scant lines. Everything else
is assaults, robbery, arson, the devoted service of foreigners living in Nanking, etc. Of the killing, he wrote:
More than ten thousand unarmed persons have been killed in cold blood. Most of my trusted friends would
put the figure much higher. These were Chinese soldiers who threw down their arms or surrendered after
being trapped; and civilians recklessly shot and bayoneted, often without even the pretext that they were
soldiers, including not a few women and children.
This was not the situation a month after Nanking fell. It was the conclusion of Bates’ pet theories of
chapters One through Three.
I would like to point out just three clearly erroneous points.
First, there were no “Chinese soldiers who surrendered” inside Nanking.
Second, there were no instances where the murder of common townsfolk ? including women ? was
actually witnessed by anyone. There are also no complaints by any witnesses on record.
Third, Bates’ mention here that “more than 10,000 unarmed people” were killed isn’t consistent with his
mention in Chapter One that “close to 40,000 unarmed persons” were killed. Now, although we now
know that it was Bates who wrote the first half of Chapter Four, at the time it was an anonymous
contribution, so it’s possible that this was deliberately written that way to make it appear to be the work of
someone else; in other words, so that it would look to readers as if it had been written by another person
who was making the same charges.
Toward the end of April, when Cabot Coville, the military attache at the American embassy in Tokyo,
came to Nanking to investigate the situation, Bates spent a considerable amount of time in conversation
with him. By this time, Bates had already passed on his contributions to the manuscript of What War
Means to Timperley in Shanghai. Therefore, he should have made the case that executions by the Japanese
army ? such as the “frequent murder” taking place in Nanking after the Japanese entered the city as
mentioned in the first chapter, or the story of the Chinese soldier who escaped execution who was
mentioned in the third and fourth chapters ? were unlawful. Quite the contrary, however; Bates did not
mention any of the material in chapters One, Three, or Four to Coville.
We have now looked at the first four chapters of What War Means. We have thoroughly investigated
Bates and Fitch’s claims of “frequent murder,” and they can be nothing but the executions of prisoners of
war during the first three days after Nanking fell.
The next problem is to determine whether the executions carried out by the Japanese were deserving of
criticism.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
THE CENTRAL PROPAGANDA BUREAU DIDN’T THINK THERE WAS A NANKING
MASSACRE
As the saying goes, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” so to give rise to the smoke ? the Nanking
Massacre ? a fire-source was needed. American newspapers and What War Means used battle dead
from before the fall of Nanking and the post-fall Japanese army’s mopping-up operations as the source for
the fire to send up the “Nanking Massacre” smoke. Were the executions carried out by the Japanese army
unlawful, and how did the CPB, who sent up that smoke, view the executions? This chapter will focus on
these two points.
§1 Chinese soldiers after the city’s fall viewed in the light of international wartime law
During peacetime, killing is a crime; in a war, it is lawful. In war, one tries to annihilate the enemy, and it
ends when one side or the other capitulates first. The battlefield is a place where you either live or die ?
but there are even in warfare certain fixed rules. These are rules for conducting hostilities under international
law during wartime. Under existing laws in 1937 as set forth in the 1907 Hague Convention Respecting the
Laws and Customs of War on Land, the following four conditions were required for one to meet the status
of a “belligerent”:
1. To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
2. To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
3. To carry arms openly; and
4. To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Those who follow the law are protected by the law, while those who violate the law are not. When the
Japanese entered Nanking, were the Chinese soldiers in the Safety Zone observing the above four
conditions of the Hague Convention? In addition, did they meet the legal requirements to be recognized as
prisoners of war?
Concerning “commanded by a person responsible” in (1) above, Gen. Tang Shengzhi and several
subordinates fled from Nanking, so there was no commander. As for the “fixed distinctive emblem
recognizable at a distance” requirement in (2), the Chinese soldiers cast off their uniforms. For the
requirement in (3), “to carry arms openly,” when the Chinese soldiers cast off their uniforms to blend in with
the civilian population, there were those who cast away their weapons as well, but there were also those
who hid theirs. According to the “Report of the Nanking Special Agency (2),” the amount of found
weapons that had been hidden by Chinese soldiers filled fifty trucks in February, 1938.
The Chinese army clearly violated the above three conditions. They violated taboos even the drafters of the
Hague Conventions couldn’t have conceived.
§2 Ironclad rules that remain unchanged even today
If one looks at the Chinese soldiers who were hiding in the Safety Zone in the light of international law, they
had lost the status of “belligerents.” This means that they lost the protection of the status of being prisoners
of war if they fell into the hands of the enemy. These qualifications for belligerent status are so important
that they remain unchanged to this day.
In January, 2002, Al-Qaida and Taliban militants were interned at the US military base in Guantanamo,
Cuba. At a Department of Defense briefing on Jan. 11, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. secretary of defense,
said, “[t]hey will be handled not as prisoners of wars, because they’re not, but as unlawful combatants. The
? as I understand it, technically unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.
” President Bush had determined that they were not prisoners of war, but detainees.
What exactly are prisoners of war and unlawful combatants? One of the reporters at the above briefing
asked Secretary Rumsfeld, “Mr. Secretary, can you explain why combatants who are on the enemy side
and were captured … in wartime should not be considered prisoners of war?” Rumsfeld responded,
It is a technical matter for lawyers, and there are a series of things that common usage looks for ?
uniforms … ? how one carries their weapons ? visibly or invisibly. These kind ? there’s a whole series
of things that are used as a template for people to determine whether or not somebody was functioning in a
visibly clear military manner or whether they were not. And to the extent they were not, I’m told by lawyers
that they fit in another category.
Rumsfeld is saying that if the combatants had been in compliance with the four conditions set down by the
Conventions when they were taken prisoner, they would have been treated as prisoners of war from the
start.
This is a point of view based on the Third Geneva Convention ? “Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of
War” ? which was ratified on Aug. 12, 1949. The four conditions that must all be met for a combatant to
qualify for the status of prisoner of war are set forth in this treaty. Article 4, Section 2, pertaining to
prisoners of war, sets them down thus:
(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) that of carrying arms openly;
(d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
These are fundamentally the same as the requirements in Article 1 in the Hague Convention of 1907,
“Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land.” Anthony Arend, a law professor at Georgetown
University specializing in Middle Eastern Studies, was quoted in the Jan. 18, 2002 Sankei Shinbun as
saying, “even though some of the Taliban foot soldiers have become prisoners of war, most of them are
probably unlawful combatants who will not be prisoners of war.”
On Jan. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld said, “[o]ne of the most important aspects of the Geneva Convention is the
distinction between lawful combatants and unlawful combatants.” He continued,
It is a terribly dangerous thing from the standpoint of our military and the military of other countries if we
blur the distinction between lawful combatants and unlawful combatants.
An unlawful combatant is a person who tries to look like a civilian and puts in jeopardy civilians. And a
lawful combatant is one that functions as I described, in a uniform, in an organized operation, showing their
weapons. The reason they are provided a higher standard of care is because they are lawful combatants,
and the idea that we should blur that distinction out of some unknown idea that that’s a good thing to do is
just fundamentally flawed. We want not to blur that distinction. [Emphasis mine.]
Rumsfeld stressed that everyone engaged in combat had to meet these four conditions. Combatants first
had to wear uniforms, show their arms, and follow systematic military operations to be lawful. As a lawful
combatant from the beginning, if one fell into enemy hands one would receive a higher standard of care ?
one’s life would be spared. Therefore, unlawful combatants who did not meet these conditions could not
count on receiving clemency or a high standard of care.
Allow me to present an example concerning the issue of lawful and unlawful combatants.
On Mar. 24, 1945, when the cabinet information service of Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki announced the
formation of a “Citizens’ Volunteer Corps” to rouse the whole nation to action everywhere in case of a
decisive battle on the Japanese homeland, it became a topic of conversation all over Japan. Nanbara
Shigeru, chairman of the faculty of law at Tokyo Imperial University (present-day Tokyo University) had
this to say to Tomizuka Kiyoshi of the university’s engineering faculty:
Acting as guerillas ? I guess it can’t be helped if we get slaughtered. If we’re real combatants, we would
be treated as prisoners of war and wouldn’t experience something so horrible ? but if we’re guerillas,
there can be no complaining if we get killed on the spot. That’s the worst that could happen.
When he said “real combatants,” he was referring to people conducting warfare in accordance to the four
conditions for being a belligerent ? that is to say, as lawful combatants. He was expressing his concern to
Tomizuka that should the “Citizens’ Heroism Corps” on the other hand take up arms and ignore these
conditions, they would be considered as guerillas and subject to immediate execution and would not be in
any position to complain about it.
Looking at it from today’s ironclad rules ? and looking at it from the ironclad rules of the time ? the
officers and men of the Chinese army in Nanking didn’t observe even one of these four conditions. They
were not prisoners of war. They can only be classified as “unlawful combatants.”
§3 How should we regard Chinese soldiers who discarded their uniforms?
Looking at it from the position of international law, these Chinese soldiers didn’t meet the conditions to be
prisoners of war. Nevertheless, an objection surfaced.
The objection states that, even though regulations stated that a commanding officer was a requirement, with
the sudden flight of Gen. Tang Shengzhi, the soldiers who were left behind unfortunately had no other
recourse. The soldiers, with their commanding officer fled and thinking the conflict at an end as the city fell,
cast off their uniforms and ran off. They became civilians who had been soldiers. It was all Tang’s fault. The
Chinese soldiers had done nothing wrong.
This, at least, was the argument.
To be sure, everything would have been fine if Tang had not fled and he had instead issued a formal
declaration of surrender, and everyone laid down their arms under the control of the Japanese army. The
entire fault lies with the supreme commander, Gen. Tang. Consider this: given that the officers and men of
the Chinese army had cast off their uniforms and were mixing and hiding among the civilian population, what
should the Japanese army have done? Should they have just let things go as they were?
Nanking had fallen, but the Chinese army had not surrendered. The only thing we can think is that the battle
had not yet truly ended. The conflict continued, only moving on to the next battlefield. The battle for
Nanking was just one part of an ongoing conflict. In fact, the Chinese soldiers who managed to escape
from Nanking did fight the Japanese army on the next battlefield. For example, about 1,000 Chinese
stragglers ambushed the Japanese at the Shanghai Expeditionary Force headquarters in Tangshuizhen
(about 30 kilometers east of Nanking) on the afternoon of Dec. 13. In his war journal, Maj. Gen. Iinuma
Mamoru, chief of staff of the Expeditionary Force, wrote that “a platoon commander (a warrant officer)
was killed in battle, and one soldier was wounded.” At 5 PM, however, the Japanese were attacked by a
second wave. It was such a hard battle that the Japanese had to get reinforcements from Nanking. Iinuma
wrote, “[a] free-for-all ensued.” In his memoirs, My Youth as a War Correspondent on the Continent in
China, Okayama Heijiro, a correspondent from the Shizuoka Shinbun, recalled that guerilla action from
Chinese stragglers (albeit Chinese regulars) continued on Tangshuizhen and around Nanking day and night
through April of 1938.
The Japanese couldn’t just accept that the Chinese soldiers who had arbitrarily discarded their uniforms,
prevented as they had been from escaping by the city’s gargantuan wall yet not giving up as the battle went
on, had surrendered.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines “surrender” as “[t]o relinquish
possession or control of to another because of demand or compulsion.” That is, it requires the defeated
party to formally submit to the victor. The supreme commander of Nanking’s defensive forces had not only
not issued a proper surrender to the Japanese, but he actually fled in the face of the enemy. No one in the
Chinese army made any agreement with the Japanese forces at all.
On the contrary, leaving things like they were in Nanking would have been considered quite a dangerous
situation. Exactly as Rumsfeld had said about when combatants feign being civilians, the Japanese couldn’t
deny that Nanking had become a place where a sudden counterattack by these ersatz civilians might occur.
It was only natural that the Japanese army would take this into consideration. To restate the reason for this:
the Chinese forces had not all surrendered, so they considered themselves still at war, so therefore the
Japanese were still at war.
Accordingly, even though the Chinese soldiers may have discarded their uniforms to appear as civilians, to
the Japanese who were still fighting, the Chinese soldiers inside Nanking were neither “former soldiers” nor
“civilians,” but were nothing less than soldiers at war whom they were still fighting. As long as there were
enemy soldiers inside the Safety Zone, they could only consider that the battle was still ongoing.
Now we return to the previous question. What should the Japanese army have done? To put an end to the
conflict, the first step was to determine who was really a civilian, and who was a soldier who had discarded
his uniform. This was their operation to expose the enemy during mopping-up operations. After that was
the execution of those enemy soldiers who resisted. This was the normal way of things during wartime.
On Dec. 15, Steele wrote of the executions of Chinese, saying, “the systematic execution of 300 Chinese at
the city wall near the riverbank as the last thing he saw as his party headed to Xiaguan.” On Dec. 28,
Durdin wrote about the execution of some men ? subtly suggesting by his use of just the word “men” that
it was not soldiers who were killed ? saying, “Just before boarding the ship for Shanghai, this writer
watched the execution of two hundred men on the Bund.” As the International Committee wrote in
“Document 4” to the Japanese embassy on Dec. 15, Chinese officers and men had assumed the posture of
“former soldiers” in a short time.
The executed “Chinese” and “men” and “former soldiers” were actually, however, the aforementioned
Chinese soldiers who had just thrown away their uniforms and hidden inside the Safety Zone.
One does not cease to be a soldier just by removing one’s uniform. Once in the army, one remains in the
army until discharged. Something from recent news accounts may serve as an example to this. In January,
1965, Sgt. Charles Jenkins of the United States army fled north across the guarded 38th parallel from
South into North Korea. In June of 2005, he finally was able to obtain discharge from the US army. During
those 40 years, Jenkins had been out of uniform, but he was still naught but an American soldier. Thus a
soldier can’t just stop being a soldier on his own without obtaining a discharge.
Criticism of the actions taken by the Japanese army using this reasoning therefore becomes perplexing. If
the Chinese soldiers had come forward in surrender, wearing their uniforms and under the command of
their officers, and had the International Committee not had some of the soldiers disarm and get rid of their
uniforms, the Chinese soldiers would likely have been taken by the Japanese and been treated as prisoners
of war. There would have been no suspicion of the Japanese army over what manner of treatment should
have been meted out to the Chinese soldiers who removed their uniforms and blended with the civilian
population, hiding their arms and biding their time, and the mopping-up of stragglers would have gone off
without any particular difficulties. Consequently, however, during the exposure of enemy soldiers, the
Japanese likely allowed for no margin of doubt that some civilians might have been mistaken for soldiers.
Issues were probably not raised with later mopping-up, either.
Before the war, Tachi Sakutaro, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University specializing in international
wartime law, wrote in his book Discourses on International Law in Wartime that it was the discernment of
combatant from non-combatant that was the “most important point of the main ideas” in the Hague
Convention.
That is to say, the wearing of uniforms by soldiers is an ironclad rule, and is the most basic requirement that
must be observed by combatants. The Japanese army, while taking into account the situation they were
facing, developed strategies based on international law to comply with their orders to “make the occupation
of Nanking sound by mopping up any remaining enemy forces.” The Chinese soldiers didn’t have the status
of prisoners of war, but we have to add that even then the Japanese army treated them as if they were
prisoners of war. As mentioned on page 156, “Nanking Special Agency Report (2)” and “Report (3),”
Chinese prisoners who were employed by the Japanese army as coolies worked a total of 10,000 man-
days by the end of February, 1938, and by the end of March 30,000 (including tramps). It should also not
be forgotten that many Chinese soldiers obtained registration acknowledging them as civilians.
§4 The CPB examined the legality of the Japanese army’s executions
In the Guomindang’s top-secret documents in a section titled “Investigating the Enemy Position,” the
following appears:
(1) Editing the Enemy News Reportage
We submitted [summaries of] the news reported daily in all the newspapers in Tokyo (including as well
material not in articles) on the same afternoon to the leaders of our party, government, and army. Through
these, we were able to understand the enemy’s situation and take measures to deal with it.
The CPB appears to have analyzed contemporary Japanese newspapers and so forth to get a handle on
most of the Japanese situation. Looking at Japanese newspapers of the day, in the Dec. 16 Tokyo Asahi
Shinbun, we see an article with the headline, “Search Continues for 25,000 Hiding Defeated Soldiers,” and
in the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun there is an article with the headline, “At Least 6,000 ? 7,000 Prisoners
Eliminated in Nanking.” Putting aside whether these articles are correct, the CPB clearly knew that the
Japanese army was uncovering Chinese soldiers hiding in the Safety Zone, and that there were executions
being carried out. Surely they must have investigated whether these executions were lawful. The CBP was
also collecting publications from Japan. For example, in the “Summary of Anti-Enemy Section Operations”
in the top-secret documents, the following entry appears:
II. The Japanese View of the Communique from the Nine-Nation Association.
This book is an abridged translation of the seventh and eighth chapters of Discourses on International Law
and the Chinese Incident, the writing of which was entrusted by the Japanese Foreign Ministry to Prof.
Tachi Sakutaro.
From this, we know that the CPB also gave weight to the works of Tachi Sakutaro, a Japanese authority
on the subject of international wartime law. In his Discourses on International Law and the Chinese
Incident, published in 1938, he argued that rules for conducting warfare apply even in a real war where
there is no declaration of hostilities. In his Discourses on International Law in Wartime, he said the
following:
Persons subject to the afore-mentioned legitimate military forces, as well as irregulars, militia, and volunteer
units, must by all means comply with the following four conditions. One would think that when one is a
regular, one is naturally equipped to comply with these conditions. When persons subject to legitimate
military authority fail to meet these conditions, they lose the privileges of being a combatant. For example: if
a person under authority of a legitimate military force, in conducting actions against an enemy, dons the
clothing of a common person instead of his uniform or if he does not wear clothing with [the appropriate]
distinguishing [military] insignia, he cannot demand from the enemy the rights of a combatant.
It is natural that regular soldiers would satisfy the four conditions of a combatant set down in the Hague
Convention. If there were times when they didn’t satisfy the conditions, it leaves to reason that they would
not be able to expect the enemy to treat them as combatants (that is, spare their lives).
The CPB looked over all manner of specialized works like this to make a judgment on the executions
carried out by the Japanese army from the perspective of international law. As I explained on page 97,
CPB deputy director Dong Xianguang was able to get a report from Bates in Nanking by using Timperley
as an intermediary. Also, Fitch went to Guangzhou, and on invitation from his old friend Gen. Wu Tiecheng,
was able to directly meet people connected with the Chinese military. When Fitch spoke on Dec. 25 on
“The Fall and Occupation of Nanking,” they got the latest report on the capital. Based on various reports
of these kinds, the CPB made their ultimate judgment on the Japanese executions. That judgment is
covered in the next section.
§5 The CPB erases Bates’ two sentences
At the same time the CPB was going forward with the editing and publishing of What War Means in
English, they were working on the Chinese-language edition of it, called Japanese Military Atrocities
Witnessed by Foreigners. At that same time, the CPB conducted editorial operations that can only be
called strange and contradictory. On the one hand, while they were publishing two sentences written by
Bates’ in What War Means, on the other hand the sentences were completely expunged from the English
edition of Japanese Military Atrocities Witnessed by Foreigners. These are the two sentences indicated as
A and B from the part of Chapter Three that Bates contributed.
Sentence A:
Burial gangs report three thousand bodies at that point, left in rows or piles after mass execution.
Sentence B:
Evidence from burials indicate that close to forty thousand unarmed persons were killed within and near the
walls of Nanking, of whom some 30 per cent had never been soldiers.
As I showed in Chapter Six, given that most of What War Means is hearsay, these two sentences present
proof of burials as evidence to lend credibility to the stories of Chinese men who had escaped after being
taken off for execution, and to sum up the descriptions from Chapter One through Chapter Four. It is
obvious that the term “unarmed persons” in B refers to people who had been Chinese soldiers but who cast
off their uniforms when Nanking fell. It is also clear that the part about people who “had never been
soldiers” refers to civilians in Nanking.
The main point of B ? expressed in a rather roundabout way ? is to criticize Japan for unlawful
executions and offering the number 40,000. Gen. Tang Shengzhi’s flight in the face of the enemy was the
trigger, and the Japanese army’s exposure and execution of Chinese soldiers after the fall of Nanking,
criticized in sentence B above, perfectly suited the CPB’s stated operational goal of “exposing outrages
committed by the enemy after the fall of the capital.” These two sentences were therefore truly important
claims in the CPB’s war of information.
These two sentences were expunged from the Chinese translation, however. Ordinarily, this would be
difficult to believe ? one can only call it a contradictory editorial direction. Why were they removed from
the Chinese edition? Viewed in the light of the top-secret documents, an idea emerges.
The CPB carried out various vetting operations. One thing they heeded in conducting censorship was this,
which is reported in the top-secret Overview of Propaganda Operations of the International Propaganda
Division of the Central Propaganda Bureau:
Newspapers in every country printing articles sent by reporters in China are considered important by
people overseas who take notice of the situation in the Far East, so rigorously thorough vetting is
necessary. Things lacking in validity are deleted or stopped. In addition, the reasons are explained to the
sender, and we make inquiry about the mistaken viewpoint to gain his complete understanding. [Emphasis
mine.]
One example of a newspaper that was the target of vetting is provided in the document, but one can
probably say the same thing occurred with other publications as well. We can understand how much the
CPB paid attention to the views of “people overseas who take notice of the situation in the Far East.” Such
people surely knew that after Nanking’s fall the Chinese soldiers trampled underfoot the four required
conditions to merit the status of combatant as set by international law. They also must have known that the
Japanese exposed and executed them. What might have happened had people living in the Chinese
mainland who had a good knowledge of the situation, upon seeing sentence B in What War Means, and
knowing that it wasn’t true, started to condemn it as mere propaganda? Rather than bringing scorn on the
Japanese, the CPB might have been digging their own grave. Thus, even though it may be said to be an
“information war,” there was no way they could allow for the transmission of something so clearly
understood to be a lie.
Naturally the CPB must have given the manuscript for What War Means a thorough inspection. The two
sentences are noticeable therein. We can imagine that they became a problem as “things lacking in validity.”
In light of the CPB’s information war, they were difficult to throw away, but nevertheless the CPB couldn’t
allow publication with the two sentences in place. The distressing result the CPB made the following
decision.
In What War Means, which was published in America and England and intended for the American and
European readership who were not as well versed in the true “situation in the Far East,” the two sentences
were allowed to stand. Since What War Means was presented to appear as if it was published by private
individuals based on the observations of third-party foreigners in criticism of the tragic war, the CPB
probably considered that there was no way they could come in for any criticism as there were no
observable traces that they had had a hand in it.
They deemed it safer, however, to remove the sentences for the publication of Japanese Military Atrocities
Witnessed by Foreigners, which was published in China and was aimed at the large number of those who
knew the true situation in Nanking. The CPB was concerned that it was too dangerous and they could lose
everything had those in the know criticized these two sentences as lies ? that is, if there was a formal
investigation of the pros and cons of the claims. If that happened, they would not be able to use Nanking
again in the information war.
Fearing that, and that all their efforts to that point would come to naught, the CPB decided on the safer
path of removing the two sentences.
In answer to why their removal was necessary, can one imagine anything other than this? At any rate, it is
true that the CPB removed Bates’ roundabout insinuation that the Japanese army unlawfully executed
40,000 people.
§6 The government of Chiang Kai-shek continued to remove the insinuation of Japan’s unlawful execution
of 40,000
As you have seen thus far, the CPB published the claim in What War Means that the Japanese army
unlawfully executed 40,000 people, but in the Chinese-language book Japanese Military Atrocities
Witnessed by Foreigners, they took a contrary position and removed the sentences. Which of these two is
the true intent of the CPB? Shortly, I would like to present other contradictions such as this for
examination.
On Dec. 14, 1938, a year and a day after Nanking’s fall (and five months after the publication of What
War Means), the Zhongyang Ribao introduced the number 200,000, which had not appeared in American
newspaper articles or What War Means. It reported, “[w]hen Nanking fell, the sight was a terrible
spectacle that defied description. The brutal enemy murdered, raped, and burned people to death. The
spilled blood of 200,000 was a horrible sight that can never go away.”
In Reportage in Wartime China, Cheng Qiheng said this of the Zhongyang Ribao: “[It is] the bulletin of the
Chinese Guomindang under the direct control of the Central Propaganda Bureau.” In other words, the
Guomindang put out an account of the Nanking massacre under the name of its pro-government
newspaper, the Zhongyang Ribao, rather than under the name of the Guomindang government itself.
As you will shortly see, however, the CPB did not change their recognition as false the claim that the
Japanese army unlawfully killed 40,000 people.
Bates’ memorandum, contributed as part of Chapter Three in What War Means, continued to be printed in
more publications. Arranged in the order by the date of their forewords, they are as follows:
1. Timperley, ed. What War Means. Mar. 13, 1938.
Timperley, ed. Japanese Atrocities Witnessed by Foreigners (Chinese edition of the above
title). Mar. 23, 1938.
2. Xu Shuxi, ed. War Conduct of the Japanese. Apr. 12, 1938.
3. Xu Shuxi, ed. A Digest of Japanese War Conduct. Jan. 28, 1939.
4. Chinese Yearbook 1938?1939. Mar. 15, 1939.
5. Xu Shuxi, ed. Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone. May 9, 1939.
Bates’ full “memorandum” appears in these six books. Comparing these volumes, the aforementioned
sentences A and B only appear in the English edition of No. 1, however. In the Chinese edition of No. 1,
like the other four English-language books all published inside China, they have been completely expunged.
What we have only recently understood is that government agencies connected with the CPB were
involved in the production of the above four propaganda volumes. Each bears at the front the inscription, “
Produced by the Council of International Affairs from official documents.” Since it has not been clearly
understood up till now exactly what this “Council of International Affairs” was, I just literally translated the
term into its Japanese equivalent in my Nanking Massacre: Fact Versus Fiction”(“Nankin gyakusatsu” tettei
kensho), published in 1998. Through investigation of historical documents, the Council of International
Affairs has been identified as the “Guoji Wenti Yanjiusuo.” Written in Chinese as 國際問題研究所, this
can reasonably be translated as “International Affairs Research Institute” or “International Affairs Council.”
Ma Jingyuan, the head of the First Department of the Council of International Affairs, wrote, “[t]he Council
of International Affairs was a special agency under the direct supervision of the Military Affairs Committee,
and under the chairmanship of Mr. Wang Pengsheng.”
In the spring of 1938, it was instituted under the control of the Military Affairs Committee (which was
headed by Chiang Kai-shek) as the “Military Affairs Committee International Affairs Council.” According
to the reminiscences of Shao Yulin, Lt. Gen. Wang Pengsheng was a fellow committee member in the Anti
-Enemy Propaganda Studies Committee and the Supreme Intelligence Committee of the CPB’s deputy
director Dong Xianguang, where they were engaged in studying the enemy’s movement and creating
psychological tactics to counter the enemy.
According to Huangchen Wanzhang: A Certain Chinese Man’s Confidential Papers Bearing Evidence to
the Sino?Japanese Incident, by Xia Wenyun (who graduated from Kyoto University in 1932 and became
the secretary of Gen. Li Zongren), the Council of International Affairs was Chiang Kai-shek’s second
largest intelligence agency next to the Blueshirts. Xia said, “The Blueshirts were a strategic organ for
collecting domestic intelligence, while the Council of International Affairs was for international intelligence.”
Therefore, Wang Pengsheng’s Council of International Affairs was a governmental agency in association
with Dong Xianguang’s CPB. Given this, we cannot overlook that it was actually the Nationalist
government’s Council of International Affairs and the Guomindang’s CPB that removed the claim of
40,000 being unlawfully killed by the Japanese from the above-mentioned Chinese-language Japanese
Atrocities Witnessed by Foreigners and the other four English-language volumes. We must say that this
represents the true views of the Nationalist government, but let us look at this a bit more cautiously.
§7 Bates himself repudiated the claim of Japan’s unlawful execution of 40,000
Referring back to the six books I mentioned in the last section, there is something else that should not be
overlooked. The first book was anonymous, so the contributions weren’t signed. In books 2 through 5,
however, at the end, Miner Searle Bates’ signature (as “M.S.B.”) was appended. Although Bates
deliberately added sentences A and B in the first book, his signature in the other four books indicates that
he approved of their removal.
The afore-mentioned top-secret document says, as I mentioned, that, “[t]hings lacking in validity are
deleted or stopped. In addition, the reasons are explained to the sender, and we make inquiry about the
mistaken viewpoint to gain his complete understanding.” The Council of International Affairs, under the
direct control of the CPB and Chiang Kai-shek’s Military Affairs Committee, would have had “the reasons
… explained” to the author Bates upon the instance of the removal of the text, and they likely obtained his
agreement. Bates must have consented as he signed the text.
Let us look again at sentence B, which Bates originally added to his text.
Evidence from burials indicate that close to forty thousand unarmed persons were killed within and near the
walls of Nanking, of whom some 30 per cent had never been soldiers.
As I have already discussed, not a few among the “40,000 interred” shown in the burial records were
actually soldiers killed in battle. The remainder were probably corpses of the executed. Was the execution
of the “unarmed persons” as Bates describes them ? that is, those who had cast off their military gear ?
lawful or not? Also, were there “[people who] had never been soldiers” ? civilians ? in this number?
Was there any evidence? This was investigated by the CPB and the Council of International Affairs in
consideration of international law and the actual state of affairs in Nanking. We can imagine that the result
was Bates’ sentence being deemed “lacking in validity,” and that they sought his assent to expunge it.
Normally, when someone else cuts out a writer’s text, the writer will not approve the action unless the
reason is explained to him. The writer would surely protest, as well, if the removal was forced on him. We
don’t know if Bates put his assent to the removal in a letter, or if the two parties actually met face to face
over the issue, but in any case Bates was in agreement and he consented. Considering that the English and
Chinese editions were published at the same time, Bates accepted the deletions carried out by the CPB and
the Council of International Affairs with no objections, not even complaining once.
Why was this? On reading Bates’ text, one sees him refer to international law in passages such as “the
dictum of international war that the lives of prisoners are to be preserved except under serious military
necessity,” and “the Japanese setting aside of that law.” Given this, we know he knew exactly what
international law was. He must have known that the executions by the Japanese were, under international
wartime law, clearly lawful. We can but think this is the reason he made no protestation when the text was
removed.
This is supported by the fact that when US embassy attache Cabot Coville went on a fact-finding mission
from Tokyo to Nanking four months after the city fell, Bates spent a considerable amount of time in
conference with him. From Coville’s report at the time, all he had to say was, “Looting and raping by the
Japanese army continued for several weeks. Alison arrived at 11 o’clock on the morning of January 6 to
reopen the embassy, but it continues unabated.” We can see no criticism of any unlawful executions by the
Japanese. Before meeting with him, Bates had sent the sentence about the unlawful killing of 40,000 people
at the hands of the Japanese to Timperley in Shanghai for inclusion in What War Means. Bates should
therefore have stressed his pet claim of the 40,000 murders, but when he met with Coville he didn’t even
touch on the subject of any unlawful killing by the Japanese.
§8 Further evidence that the CPB considered the executions to be lawful
The CPB put all their energies into the production of the propaganda work What War Means, edited by
Timperley. The book described “frequent murders” in Nanking, saying “a considerable percentage of the
dead civilians were victims of shooting or bayoneting in the afternoon and evening of the 13th, which was
the time of the Japanese entry into the city,” and “[o]ne poor woman was raped thirty-seven times. Another
had her five month infant deliberately smothered.… Resistance means the bayonet.”
Citing “[e]vidence from burials,” Bates produced the number 40,000, including 12,000 civilians, in making
his charge of 40,000 unlawful killings. Perhaps to try to back up the descriptions of a civilian massacre
made by Bates and Fitch, the CPB included many photographs of the bodies of children, executed
Chinese, and public executions in What War Means and its Chinese translation, Japanese Atrocities
Witnessed by Foreigners. For an analysis of these photographs, I would like to recommend readers to see
to book Analyzing the “Photographic Evidence” of the Nanking Massacre, in the production of which I was
a collaborator.
After reading a book that described the situation in Nanking in that fashion, and upon being asked to
summarize the book, how would we do so? Ordinarily, the first thing we would think of is to present
Nanking’s “murders” and “massacres” in the summary. The Anti-Enemy Section of the CPB’s International
Propaganda Division, who produced and published What War Means, summarized the book differently,
however. In the top-secret document, in the “Summary of Anti-Enemy Section Operations” section, this is
what they had to say:
A. Japanese Atrocities Witnessed by Foreigners
This book was written by the famous English journalist Timperley . The book records detailed accounts of
heinous acts ? rape, arson, looting ? and a breakdown in military discipline and circumstances of
depraved human conditions after the enemy entered Nanking in Dec. 13, 1937. In addition to publishing
this book in Chinese and in English, it was also translated into Japanese. The Japanese edition’s title was
changed to “What is War?” The preface of the Japanese edition is by Japanese anti-war author Aoyama
Kazuo, and there are many photographs of brutality inside. This book was widely sold in Hong Kong,
Shanghai, and everywhere overseas as well. Afterward, the enemy’s chief of the General Staff, Prince Kan’
in, put out a book to inform the officers and men of the Japanese army, acknowledging that this was
conduct disgraceful to the nation and the Imperial Army in China, to admonish them. [Emphasis mine.]
As can be seen from the italics, the content of What War Means was summarized as “heinous acts ? rape,
arson, [and] looting.” What should have been mentioned first ? “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “murder” ?
do not appear at all.
We don’t know whether it was before or after Nanking fell that the CPB paid Timperley and asked him to
write extensively on the Japanese atrocities, but this secret report was written three and a half years after
Nanking’s fall. What this actually means is that if the CPB acknowledged that there had been a massacre in
Nanking, they surely would have stressed quite clearly the word “massacre” in summarizing What War
Means.
In point of fact, it was because Bates’ claim that 40,000 were killed was not true that, even though What
War Means says that “frequent murder” occurred in Nanking, the Anti-Enemy Section could not use the
word “massacre” in summarizing the book.
I have quoted it before, but the “Summary of Editorial Operations” section of the top-secret Overview of
Propaganda Operations, summing up three years of activities, bears repeating:
We modified, as situational changes dictated, the material collected for English-language dailies over the
past three and a half years. For example, during the battle for the defense of the capital, we propagandized
strategies to muster the courage of our soldiers and operations to reinforce the rear. After the fall of the
capital, we exposed the enemy’s outrages, and in the phase for the battle for Wuhan, we propagandized
that our martial power was increasing day by day. [Emphasis mine.]
After three years, the Editorial Section of the CPB’s International Propaganda Division looked back at the
fall of Nanking, concluding, “[a]fter the fall of the capital, we exposed the enemy’s outrages.” If there had in
fact been a massacre in Nanking after the city fell, it would have been unlikely that they would have written
this as they did. The Editorial Section would have written, “[a]fter the fall of the capital, we exposed the
enemy’s massacre,” and they would surely have named each of the books in a special report on “The
Nanking Massacre.” There was no such report, however.
The pamphlets mentioned in the top-secret report and published in English, French, and so on, total 79.
They are such pamphlets as, “The People of Nanking,” “Hankou Under Enemy Occupation,” “Occupied
Huabei,” etc. We are unable to view their actual contents, but if there had been a massacre in Nanking, it
would not be surprising to see a pamphlet with the title “The Massacre in Nanking” (like some books
coming out today). There is no such pamphlet, however. I have examined the “Summary of Operations,”
which sums up three years of propaganda operations of the other sections of the CPB, but as there is no
report saying “massacre” or “murder” had been propagandized, I can find no accounts touching on the
subject.
It goes without saying that the CPB was looking for any way to bring the Japanese army down, and they
were laboring over operations to achieve that end. When they found out about the executions carried out
by the Japanese, they would have paid the greatest attention to whether the executions were lawful; the
very least they would have done would have been to investigate the matter. This was because had they
been able to expose the executions as unlawful, they would have been able to make propaganda use of
them. They recognized the executions as lawful, however. The removal of the sentence claiming the
unlawful killing of 40,000 people, along with the top-secret internal report of the CPB (which was made up
of officials of both the Guomindang and Communist Party), make the truth apparent. This is evidence that
they did not recognize there had been a Nanking Massacre.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
THE TOP-SECRET DOCUMENTS WERE A TREASURE TROVE ? WITH AN EPILOGUE
§1 Taking the viewpoint of propaganda warfare
This is the first time in my lifetime of research that I have read historical documents with the view that they
were wartime propaganda or some such. Now, however, since establishing that What War Means ? a
book that became a vital foundation to the Nanking Massacre ? was actually a work of propaganda
produced by the CPB, I have resigned myself to view it as such; and I have come to believe that if one
doesn’t view historical documents from that position, one can not make any progress in understanding what
happened at Nanking.
When adding the perspective of propaganda warfare, however, it becomes something that can be viewed
in a biased way. That is what we must be conscious of and must caution ourselves against. Something I
have imposed upon myself is that with any one given historical record, I first view it in the light of the top-
secret documents of the CBP; when I put that alongside other historical documents, it is ultimately the only
conclusion that I can reach.
Having the top-secret documents at one side like this was the first investigation. And what do you know ?
the paradox of black and white existing together disappears when adding the perspective of war
propaganda.
For example, Bates, the International Committee member who claimed ? under the cover of anonymity ?
that 30,000 prisoners of war and 12,000 civilians had been murdered, never once openly made the same
accusation. Moreover, a full year after Nanking’s fall, the CPB published in the Dec. 14, 1938, issue of
Zhongyang Ribao (which, it will be remembered, was an organ of the Guomindang under the control of the
CPB) that 200,000 had been massacred in Nanking. The CPB’s own top-secret documents, however,
never once touched on any massacre in Nanking. In the near-daily press conferences they held, too, they
never made any news announcement that a Nanking Massacre took place.
It’s like the same person was saying “it’s white” at one point and “it’s black” at another. Drawing a line in
the collected historical documents we’ve had up till now, we start to distinctly separate black from white,
and ultimately we establish that the one side is wartime propaganda that is far removed from the truth.
Also, adding the perspective of wartime propaganda yields this: the heretofore individual, loosely scattered
points of uncertainty gradually start to take on a mutual relevance, and begin to connect into a single line.
Consider these examples. (1) The American journalists Durdin and Steele wrote articles three days after
Nanking fell claiming that civilians and prisoners of war had been killed, even though there was not one
eyewitness to the murder of civilians after Nanking fell, and that those who were executed were unlawful
combatants and not prisoners of war. (2) We have established that Bates’ own “Report” was passed on to
these two journalists and used by them. The next question ? why Bates would do such a thing ? now
arises. (3) Upon investigating Bates’ “Report,” we realize that it was far from the truth. Generally, reports
are true; so why was a report so far removed from the truth prepared? This, too, has been a great mystery.
There are more problems, but at any rate there are scattered points of doubt such as these three. I tried to
throw some light on them using the top-secret documents. In these documents, (4) the CPB wrote of
“[using] journalists from various foreign countries” for their resistance propaganda, and “[t]he best result
would be gained by getting foreign journalists to publish our propaganda texts.” (5) Frequent tea parties
and press conferences were held. (6) In the sections “Introducing the Journalists” and “Cooperating in
Gathering Material for Journalists,” the names of Durdin and Steele appear. (7) The CPB placed great
importance on propaganda operations to “[expose] the enemy’s outrages” after the fall of Nanking.
Matters proved by historical sources other than top secret documents include the fact that (8) Durdin was
an old and intimate friend of the CPB’s deputy director Dong Xianguang. (9) Bates was an advisor of the
Guomindang government. (10) The “Report” that Bates passed on to the journalists became the first
chapter of What War Means. From the top-secret documents, then, we get (11) confirmation that What
War Means was a book of propaganda produced by the CPB.
How about that? When we adjust our view with an eye toward the war propaganda of the CPB, the first
problematic points (1, 2, and 3 above) fall into line as part of the propaganda operations of the CPB. I can
see no other way of solving the problems and contradictions. Over the first seven chapters of this book, I
have gone to great lengths to explain in detail how to solve them.
When we look at everything in the position of war propaganda as above, this is how it ends up.
To begin with, there was the CPB’s plan to produce an “anti-enemy propaganda book.” To accomplish
this, they set several operations into motion. What came out in the end was What War Means. Since this
was the CPB’s settling of accounts for all their propaganda operations, it is reported in their top-secret
documents as achieving results in its stated purpose. Accordingly, the CPB put all their efforts into What
War Means ? the flower of their ingenious, large-scale propaganda in making things that were not appear
as if they were so. They turned toward the goal of creating What War Means and controlled it in its
entirety.
It is not exaggeration to say that had What War Means not been produced (or had it not been so
masterfully produced as not have been recognized as a propaganda book over 60 years later into the 21st
century) today there would be no talk of a “Nanking Massacre.” The process by which it was given form is
made clear in the treasure trove that were the top-secret documents wherein important matters that the
enemy was never to know were recorded.
Here, however, should we not remember the readers’ confusion? If, as this book maintains, the Nanking
Massacre was war propaganda, should it not have disappeared at the conclusion of the war? That is,
should not the American newspaper articles reporting the Nanking Massacre and What War Means have
vanished as war propaganda? Yet, the Tokyo Tribunal determined that the Nanking Massacre was true,
did it not? What should we make of the Tokyo Tribunal’s verdict?
To be sure, these are doubts anyone would entertain. This book would therefore be a failure if it didn’t
investigate the Tokyo Tribunal’s decision. Once again, I took a close look at the Tribunal. When I did so,
something showed up that I can only call inexplicable. I would like to point out one fragment I investigated
for this book ? following the line of the CPB’s war propaganda ? that focuses on the American
newspaper articles and What War Means.
§2 The basis for the Tokyo Tribunal was “the statements of witnesses”
On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces on the terms that they would not have to make
an “unconditional surrender.” On Dec. 8, 1945 (not even four full months after the war was lost) the Allied
Headquarters published on the second page of every newspaper in Japan “A History of the Pacific War ?
The Collapse of Japan, the Untruthful Nation at War ? Sponsored by the Allied GHQ.” It said,
The nightmare in Nanking.… The Japanese army committed unspeakable acts of slaughter. According to
the statements of witnesses, positive proof has established that 20,000 men, women, and children were in
fact struck dead, making this the greatest massacre in recent history. For four weeks Nanking became a
city of blood, and hacked-up slabs of flesh were scattered everywhere.
After the passage of several years, given such a newspaper report as the above, one would generally think
along the following path:
(1) At the time of Nanking’s fall, the Nanking Massacre was made known.
(2) It was investigated.
(3) The result of the investigation was that the claims were determined to have been true, and all the
countries of the world condemned Japan.
(4) With the end of the war, it was once again on the table to be dealt with, and those responsible were to
be judged.
To be sure, (1) was correct. Immediately after the fall, the Nanking Massacre was made known as
American newspapers reported on it, and What War Means was published. The investigation in (2) was
not a public one ? it was a private investigation by the US military attache Coville. There was no result as
in (3) from the investigation in (2), however. Not one country ? not the Americans, the Chinese, or
anyone ? gave positive proof of Japan’s unlawful killing (that is, a massacre in Nanking) or criticized the
Japanese government.
Given this, upon what basis did the Allied HQ make the charge that “positive proof has established that
20,000 men, women, and children were in fact struck dead” and as in (4), call for people to be brought to
trial at the Tokyo Tribunal?
We can only assume that the thinking here was that the Allied GHQ (1) recalled that the Nanking Massacre
was made known by the American newspaper articles and What War Means, and that (2) the investigation
was inadequate, so an investigation by an international commission produced reliable evidence four months
after the end of the war that “20,000 men, women, and children were killed.”
In point of fact, however, this was not the case.
The foundation that the Allied GHQ relied on was witness statements. So just who were these “witnesses”?
Were they Americans, Europeans, and citizens of Nanking who were in the city at the time of its fall? As
can be seen on page 91, there is the example at that time of Nanking citizens sued for the theft of gloves
and sweaters as recorded in the Daily Reports of Serious Injuries to Civilians, written by Europeans and
Americans, and submitted to the Japanese embassy. Even Timperley, the editor of What War Means,
wrote of the Daily Reports that “completes the story of the first two months of the Japanese Army’s
occupation of Nanking.” As this shows, it was all the incidents that happened in Nanking. There was not a
single eyewitness, to say nothing to an actual case, of murder. In other words, there was not one European,
American, or Nanking resident who said that he had witnessed a murder.
That was the situation when Nanking fell; but might there have been Europeans, Americans, or Nanking
residents who came forward to make a new charge after the war ended? The “Report of the Nanking
Regional Court Prosecutor’s Inquiry into Crimes Committed by the Enemy,” which was submitted to the
Tokyo Tribunal in February, 1946, by the Nanking Regional Court’ prosecutor, declared that those
reporting massacre activities by the Japanese army were “extremely few.” Among the citizens of Nanking
interviewed for the Massacre investigation were those whose mouths, as the saying has it, “were sealed and
would not speak, like cicadas in the winter.” It was also reported that there were “people who refuted” the
stories, saying there had been no such thing. There is also a possibility that after the war there were no
interviews conducted with the foreigners who had been resident in Nanking. But this makes no sense.
§3 The witnesses who should have appeared at the Tokyo Tribunal did not do so
Given these circumstances, exactly who might the Allied powers have relied upon as witnesses to provide
proof that 20,000 men, women, and children had been killed? The “witnesses” of the Nanking Massacre
who the Allies had appear at the Tokyo Tribunal were Miner Searle Bates, Robert Wilson, and John
Magee. The Nanking townsfolk who appeared were Hu Zhuanyin, Shang Deyi, Wu Changde, Chen
Fubao, and Liang Tingfang.
Readers must be taken aback by this. One would likely think that there are five other people the Allies
should have brought out as witnesses first. Top on the list should have been the reporters Steele and Durdin
(who first reported on the Nanking Massacre); it is extremely unlikely that their articles escaped the notice
of the Allies. Next should be Timperley, who made allusions to his telegram charging a massacre of
300,000 in What War Means, and next should be Bates and Fitch, the contributors to that book. Of these
five, the only one to make an appearance at the Tribunal was Bates.
Why were Durdin, Steele, Fitch, and Timperley not summoned by the Tokyo Tribunal? For them, the
Tokyo Tribunal was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get new international recognition for the articles and
reports they had written at the time of Nanking’s fall. If they boasted that the things they had written at the
time were legitimate, they should have taken the opportunity to appear on that historical stage and deliver
testimony favorable to their cause. They did not, however, appear.
Why was this?
The first thing that occurs to me is that they didn’t have faith in their own accounts to be presented in the
courtroom as eyewitness testimony. That is, were they not admitting that their own accounts were false?
The next thing to occur to me is that they were probably afraid that their articles and reports would be seen
to have been part of the CPB’s propaganda war. Steele and Durdin were recognized as the
correspondents who wrote articles for American papers about the Nanking Massacre, but only those who
needed to know knew that Durdin was an old and close friend of the CBP’s deputy director Dong
Xianguang. Fitch had connections to Guangdong provincial chief Wu Tiecheng and others, and his going on
the lecture circuit in the United States and talking about the Nanking Massacre was known in Japan. As
recalled by Domei Tsushin’s Shanghai bureau chief Matsumoto Shigeharu, Timperley was known as the
editor of What War Means.
What this looks like so far is that the Allies actually avoided summoning as witnesses the very people who
made the Nanking Massacre public ? that is, those who had connections to the CPB. Having the people
who originally made the claim for a Nanking Massacre appear at the trial was absolutely necessary for the
Allies, however. Of those five people, none but Bates was there. Bates’ connection with Chiang Kai-shek’
s government was not known, however. Bates was a contributor to What War Means, but that has only
recently been proved. The contributors were anonymous, so at the time this, too, was completely unknown.
§4 The three American witnesses
Witnesses from a third country (that is, neither Japan nor China) were extremely important at the Tokyo
Tribunal. Wilson, Magee, and Bates made appearances in court. Let us take a basic look at their
testimony.
Wilson was a surgeon at Gulou Hospital, which was attached to Nanking University. He had therefore
been worked nearly to death treating patients daily at the hospital. What he had seen mostly was patients at
the hospital, and his testimony was predominantly of things he had been told by the patients. He showed no
positive proof that “20,000 men, women, and children were in fact struck dead.”
Magee was a missionary in Nanking. At the Tokyo Tribunal, he claimed that the Japanese soldiers had
committed acts of murders, rape, and looting. When asked, “Now, how many of these acts of murder did
you personally witness, Mr. Magee, approximately?”, Magee responded, “I only personally witnessed the
killing of one man.” (Looking at Magee’s journal at the time, he wrote “The actual killing we did not see as
it took place.” His testimony at the Tribunal that he “personally witnessed the killing of one man” therefore
becomes extremely dubious.) In support of his testimony, Magee said that he took a number of
photographs, but those photographs were not presented in evidence. In the book Analyzing the
“Photographic Evidence” of the Nanking Incident, on which I was a collaborator, we investigated these
photographs and found that they were mostly those of patients in the hospital.
Bates testimony was the same as the material he wrote in What War Means.
Bates said, “(concluded as a result of various investigations and observations and checking of burials
studies, that twelve thousand civilians, men, women and children, were killed inside the walls within our
own sure knowledge.” Moreover, that 30,000 disarmed soldiers, “within the first seventy-two hours, were
cut down by machine gun fire.” This is the same material as in the first “extra sentence” in What War
Means (that is, in the English edition of the book) that I investigated here in Chapters Six and Seven.
Indirectly, then, he here charges that the Japanese army unlawfully killed 40,000 people. We can imagine
that this testimony must have had a definite impact on the Tribunal. This testimony became the
substantiation for the Allies’ announcement that 20,000 men, women, and children were killed.
§5 Problems with Bates
As discussed in Chapter Seven, Bates’ testimony that the Japanese unlawfully killed 40,000 people was
repudiated and deleted both by Bates himself and the CPB. Yet Bates brought it up again at the Tokyo
Tribunal. Had the Japanese defense known of the deletion of those claims, they surely would have
demanded of Bates the reason why he was bringing up those charges again. This is something we know
now, however; it was not known at the time.
Additionally, the American lawyers working on the Japanese behalf had no knowledge that Bates was the
news source of the American newspaper articles, or that he was a contributor to What War Means. It is no
surprise, then, that they did not cross-examine him on any of this.
The most baffling thing about the Tokyo Tribunal was something from What War Means that Bates did not
reference again while on the stand. There was no longer any reason for Bates’ contribution to What War
Means to be anonymous, and although what he wrote at the time might have been used to support his
testimony, he never once mentioned the book. Of course, the American newspaper articles weren’t
mentioned, either. Naturally it appears he wanted to avoid those topics. Could it be that, for Bates, these
were texts that simply could not be made known?
Let us look at the same matters from the Allied side. When the Allies put the Nanking Massacre on the
table, they doubtlessly placed considerable evidentiary importance on the American newspaper articles
written by eyewitnesses to Nanking’s fall and What War Means. They should have presented them in court
as evidence for the Nanking Massacre. They should also have presented Fitch’s lectures in the United
States and the film that Magee brought. They did not present any of these, however. The Allied prosecutor
should have presented the American newspapers that said Europeans and Americans who remained in
Nanking had witnessed murders and the information in What War Means, and called Bates and other
witnesses to offer testimony to support them. The American prosecutor, too, however, made absolutely no
references to the content of the newspaper articles or What War Means.
Considering that that the American newspaper articles and What War Means have been assessed as
definitive evidence of the Nanking Massacre, it is baffling that they were not touched on at the Tribunal. It is
as if the prosecutors were afraid that the newspaper articles and What War Means might became the
object of dispute in court and be established as parts of the CPB’s propaganda war.
How might things have gone if the Japanese legal team knew what we know today? That is, had they
known that Bates was an advisor of the Nationalist government, that his “Report” was the source for the
American newspaper articles, that What War Means was a propaganda book produced by the CPB and
that Bates was one of the contributors to that book, that the material in the book was greatly removed from
the truth of the matter, and that the sentence in the book claiming Japan had murdered 40,000 had been
expunged five times with Bates’ own consent ? how would things have come out? The developments of
the Tokyo Tribunal would likely have been different. Unfortunately, at that point in time, they did not know
any of this, and there was no challenging of the testimony.
Documents from Bates waning years are in the Bates Collection in the Yale University Archives. One of the
documents is his CV, wherein Bates has recorded, “Twice decorated by the Chinese Government for
services on behalf of the Nanking population during the Japanese terror and occupation.” 1938 was the
year the What War Means was published, to which the CPB had gotten Bates to be a contributor. 1946
was the year Bates appeared before the Tokyo Tribunal and gave his testimony that 40,000 had been
murdered by the Japanese.
§6 Upon opening the treasure trove that was the top-secret documents
In contrast to the Tokyo Tribunal, where Bates (who had been in Nanking) gave testimony that 40,000 had
been massacred, Chiang Kai-shek’s government claimed that the number of the slain was 300,000. As you
have seen from this book, even though the Nanking Massacre appeared in American newspapers, and
Chiang Kai-shek’s CPB held frequent press conferences, they never blamed Japan for a “Nanking
Massacre” in front of foreign or domestic journalists. Despite this, in 1943 (the year the tide of war started
to turn against Japan), the government published in the United States the China Handbook 1937 ? 1943, in
which they claimed, “After their occupation of the Chinese capital, Japanese soldiers started a systematic
murdering of Chinese civilians, raping of women, looting and burning of properties which lasted for about
five months.” In China Handbook 1937 ? 1944, published in America the next year, and in China
Handbook 1937 ? 1945 (which was published during the Tokyo Tribunal in 1947), they said, “After their
occupation of Nanking, the invaders cut all communications with outside world and began to sack Nanking
systematically. The story of Japanese wholesale massacre, rape, murder, plundering and general barbarities
in Nanking could find no equal in modern history.” Thus was the charge made in the Tokyo Tribunal that
300,000 had been massacred.
The indictment from the American side at the Tribunal read that a Nanking Massacre of “several tens of
thousands” had occurred. About two years later, however, on Nov. 11, 1948, the judgment came down
that “over 200,000” had been killed in Nanking. The next day, the verdict was read against Gen. Matsui
Iwane, holding him responsible for the deaths of “over 100,000” people.
The fact that overnight “over 200,000” can become “over 100,000” is, in itself, a curiosity. In the end, the “
positive proof” referenced in the “History of the Pacific War ? The Collapse of Japan, the Untruthful
Nation at War ? Sponsored by the Allied GHQ” that was published on Dec. 8, 1945, did not appear at
the Tokyo Tribunal. As I showed in Chapter One, therefore, until 1970 the verdict of the Tokyo Tribunal
was merely a verdict in name only. Until then, there was nothing written about the Nanking Massacre in
either Chinese or Japanese textbooks, as well as textbooks from other countries.
At that time, neither people from the CPB who created the origin of the Nanking Massacre nor those
connected with the propaganda war shed any light on the truth. Everyone remained silent. Seventy years
after it all ended, however, the top-secret documents appeared. The treasure trove that was the top-secret
documents held the true intentions and minds of the CPB, which was made up of members of the
Guomindang and the Communist Party. I wondered if definite proof of the Nanking Massacre might be
inside this treasure chest ? but it wasn’t there.
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AUTHOR PROFILE: HIGASHINAKANO Shudo
Born in Kagoshima in 1947, Dr. HIGASHINAKANO Shudo is professor of history of political thought
and Japanese intellectual history at Asia University in Tokyo. He majored in the history of German political
thought and socialism at Kagoshima University and Osaka University. Prior to his appointment as professor
at Asia University in 1995, he served as visiting professor ofJapanese intellectual history at Western
Washington University (1985-86), and visiting scholar at the University of Hamburg (1988-89).
In 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dr. Higashinakano started to research the situation in
Nanking in 1937. And since 1995, the main focus of his research interest has been this subject. He has
been president of Japan Nanking Society since 2000.
He has published many books, among them Nankin gyakusatsu” no tettei kensho [An exhaustive study of
the “Nanking Massacre”] (Tokyo: Tendensha, 1998), its English translation version The Nanking
Massacre: Fact versus Fiction (Tokyo: Sekai Shuppan, Inc., 2005, Nankin jiken “shoko shashin” wo
kensho suru [Analyzing the “photographic evidence” of the Nanking Massacre] (co-authored with
Kobayashi Susumu and Fukunaga Shinjiro, Tokyo: Soshisha,2005), Nankin gyakusatsu kenkyu no
saizensen, vols.1-4 [The front line of research on the Nanking Massacre, vols. 1-4] (Tokyo: Tendensha,
2002-2005), 1937 Nankin koryaku sen no shinjitsu [ The truth about the capture of Nanking in 1937]
(Tokyo: Shogakukan Bunko, 2003), An Overview of the Nanking Massacre (Osaka: Kokumin Kaikan,
1999), Za reipu obu Nankin no kenkyu [A Study of the Rape of Nanking] (coauthored with Fujioka
Nobukatsu, Tokyo: Tendensha, 1999), Higashi Doitsu shakaishugi taisei no kenkyu [A study of the
socialistic system in East Germany] (Tokyo: Nansosha, 1996), and Kokka hasan: Higashi Doitsu
shakaishugi no 45 nen [Bankruptcy of a state: 45 Years of Socialism in East Germany] (Tokyo: Tendensha,
1992). One of his research papers, titled “The Overall Picture of the Nanking Massacre,” is included in
Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).