Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (22 page)

Meanwhile, residents began to panic. Cheng Ruifang (Mrs. S. F. Tsen) was a member of the Emergency Management Committee set up at Ginling Women’s College, under the directorship of Minnie Vautrin. Cheng’s diary recorded the way that public buildings inside the Safety Zone—colleges in particular—were beginning to fill up as people sought shelter from the inevitable arrival of the Japanese army. On December 10, shortly after Chiang’s departure but before the city’s fall, Cheng recorded the chaos that was engulfing Nanjing. “No cars,” she observed, “but men, women, old, and young were carrying everything themselves. They paid no attention to the noise of aircraft or artillery. It was truly miserable.”
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The college was a prime target for the fleeing population; in the men’s part of the college, even the library was full of people. On the buildings and on the ground, there were hanging “old ragged clothes, ragged blankets and diapers, and on the trees too.” Even the ornamental ponds on campus served a purpose: one was for washing clothes and food bowls, and one for cleaning chamber pots and soiled infant clothes.

The commerce that normally kept the capital fed suddenly collapsed. As people fled their own homes for the Safety Zone, measures had to be initiated to feed them. Cheng Ruifang set up a kitchen dispensing rice porridge just outside the main gate of the college. On the first day of operation, it would be free, after which those who could afford it would pay a small fee. The original plan had been to allow no more than 2,700 people to relocate to the campus, but within days this number ballooned. By mid-December, Vautrin had instituted a new system by which a red cloth tag was sewn to the poorest refugees’ clothes, which would enable a fairer distribution of food, making sure that only the truly destitute obtained it for free.
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There was a long-standing tradition of members of local elites providing public relief in the face of emergencies in China, notably at times when the imperial dynasty appeared unable to cope.
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The actions of the committee at Ginling College echoed and built on that tradition.

Panic and disruption could literally be smelled in the air. One of the clearest signals that things were not normal in Nanjing was the sudden rush of sewage. As Cheng put it ruefully, “food going in is a small thing, but coming out, it’s a big thing.” She described unsparingly the reality of life lived in crammed quarters with no adequate sanitation, not even the traditional stool buckets (or “honeypots”) which were used instead of flush lavatories in poor Chinese homes: “They just do it anywhere, so there’s excrement and urine everywhere.” Within days, things got worse: “You can’t even go into the stool bucket room [because of the smell] and there are people with no buckets, so they just use other people’s.” To make it worse, “there are people living in the toilet.”
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The ubiquity of human waste was not just an immediate health hazard. It marked a reversal of a trend that had been central to Chinese self-perception over the past few decades. Technology and new forms of government had been among the most prominent ways in which the Chinese state had demonstrated its modernity, and therefore its right to reject imperialism on its own territory. Another was “hygienic modernity,” the idea that using scientific techniques could make a society cleaner and healthier.
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As Chinese cities modernized, they used sewage and drainage to show the world the progress that the country had made. Now the impact of war had reversed that tendency in the most arresting, and noxious, way. As it had been for Mrs. Yang, fleeing Wuxi just a couple of months previously, it was the stench of war that brought its reality home most clearly.

On December 12 the Japanese carried out an act that shocked the outside world: they sank the American gunboat USS
Panay
. American and British ships were stationed on the Yangtze outside Nanjing, and served as a reminder to Japan that the Western powers had not yet abandoned their interest in China, even if they remained neutral in the conflict. Japanese aircraft swooped over the ship without warning and bombed it, killing three sailors and wounding forty-eight people.
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The Japanese government took responsibility and quickly issued compensation of $2.2 million to the US government, all the while maintaining that the incident had been unintentional. A confrontation that had had the potential to open hostilities between Japan and the US was therefore avoided. But the
Panay
affair was a clear warning that the West could not rely on neutrality to shut itself off from the ever-spreading war.

Within Nanjing itself, though, December 12 was clear and still. Although the artillery kept firing, Cheng Ruifang noted, there was “no aerial bombing. The weather’s been good. This is good for the refugees, but it also has helped the enemy.”
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The shops were all shut, and refugees continued to gather in the Safety Zone. But after dark, matters took a more sinister turn. For the city was now in flames. As it became clear that they could not hold Nanjing, Tang Shengzhi’s men had begun to burn buildings across the capital. John Rabe was told by a senior Chinese official that Tang himself had left the city by eight o’clock.

While the refugees huddled in the Safety Zone, Tang Shengzhi’s troops had made their last stand. They did resist with vigor. The troops had been fighting hard for the two days since Chiang’s departure, and Tang had refused a formal request for surrender.
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But on the evening of December 12 he decided that the city could no longer be defended. Tang gave orders to his divisions to break through the CCAA’s siege via a gate in the city’s northern wall, and abandon Nanjing to the Japanese.

Immediately, Chinese soldiers fled, looted, and squeezed through the wall, in some cases drowning in the Yangtze in their haste to escape. Some 70,000 had already been killed trying to defend the city. The night sky was lit up by flames; this was not the doing of the Japanese, but of the Chinese troops who had set further major buildings ablaze. Durdin of the
New York Times
wrote that “the Chinese burned nearly all suburbs, including fine buildings and homes in Mausoleum Park. Hsiakwan [Xiaguan] is a mass of charred ruins . . . The Japanese even avoided bombing Chinese troop concentrations in built-up areas, apparently to preserve the buildings. The fine Ministry of Communications building was the only big government structure destroyed inside the city. It was fired by Chinese.”
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The burning of buildings was a constant feature of the war. In a desperate attempt to deny anything of value to an advancing enemy, the Chinese forces, both Nationalist and Communist, would set buildings on fire. Back in October, Mao had advised his colleagues to think about burning Taiyuan in the event of that city’s capture.

Early on December 13 the Japanese army entered the capital. General Matsui Iwane led the CCAA, but illness meant that his deputy, Prince Asaka, was the acting officer in command when the Japanese took the capital. The city was in desperate shape. Durdin noted the change in Zhongshan (Chungshan) Road, the boulevard that symbolized the Nationalists’ hopes for modernity: “Chungshan Road was a long avenue of filth and discarded uniforms, rifles, pistols, machine guns, fieldpieces, knives and knapsacks. In some places the Japanese had to hitch tanks to debris to clear the road.”

Cheng Ruifang recorded the arrival of the invaders in her diary too: “Yesterday evening our army retreated. This morning we heard no return fire. At 2 p.m. today the Japanese army entered through the Shuixi gate.” The policeman who guarded the college gates saw the Japanese marching through the city and tried to tear off his uniform while running down the road: “He fell over and his face was white; he’s such a coward.” But in the next couple of days Cheng recorded good reasons for the policeman’s terror. More and more people arrived at Ginling College:

because Japanese soldiers were arriving in broad daylight to steal their money and to rape. In the streets, a lot of people have been bayoneted to death, even in the Safety Zone. Even more [have been killed] outside [the Zone]; nobody dares go outside. Most of the dead are young men.
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Less than a week after the city surrendered, there were more than 9,000 people sleeping in the college’s corridors, “like sardines in a tin.”
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And not long after, Minnie Vautrin recorded: “Great fires are now lighting the sky to the northeast, east and southeast, each night these fires light the sky and by day clouds of smoke make us know that the work of looting and destruction still continues. The fruits of war are death and desolation.”
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In many places in China foreigners were bystanders to the conflict between the Chinese and the Japanese. In Nanjing the tiny group of Westerners, fewer than thirty, who remained in the city, found themselves thrust suddenly into the midst of events, providing a buffer between the Japanese army and a Chinese population left defenseless. The Westerners who formed the Safety Zone committee were not trained bureaucrats or public servants. Rabe was a businessman, Robert O. Wilson a doctor, Smythe and Vautrin were university teachers. The committee members made an assumption that the Japanese army would behave, overall, according to the laws of war. They also assumed that it would have an interest in restoring order, something that would also benefit the Chinese and the foreigners in the city. As they were citizens of neutral countries (including the US and Germany), the committee members also hoped that they would gain authority by virtue of their third-party status. And there were hopeful precedents. Beiping and Tianjin had been occupied without major chaos. Even Shanghai, pounded to destruction that same autumn, had fallen into a deathly calm once the Nationalist government had retreated.

But something utterly different happened in Nanjing. From the first hours of the occupation, the Japanese troops seem to have abandoned all constraints. For the next six weeks, until the middle of January 1938, the soldiers of the Japanese Central China Area Army embarked on an uninterrupted spree of murder, rape, and robbery. Far from establishing a new, if temporary, order in the city, the army seemed determined to reduce Nanjing to utter chaos.

In the days after the Japanese entry into Nanjing, Rabe was asked by senior Japanese officers to try to bring together a Chinese workforce that could restart supplies of electricity. Rabe was keen to preserve order in the city, and so agreed to help, but found it impossible to recruit workers in the atmosphere of constant terror: “The Japanese soldiers are completely out of control. Under the circumstances I can’t find the workers needed to get the electricity works running again.”
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The foreign observers witnessed deeply disturbing sights from the very first day of the occupation. At first, the targets seemed to be civilian men suspected of being soldiers who had abandoned their uniforms, although it seemed that little discrimination was being used. Any Chinese man might be a victim. The sounds of rifle fire were heard over and over again in those days, but those who were shot were perhaps fortunate. George Fitch, head of the city’s YMCA, noted on December 19:

I . . . went to the house of Douglas Jenkins of our Embassy. The flag was still there; but in his garage, the house boy lay dead . . . There are still many corpses on the streets, all of them civilians as far as we can see. The Red Swastika Society [the Buddhist charitable organization; it had no connection with Nazism] would bury them, but their truck has been stolen, their coffins used for bonfires, and several of their workers bearing their insignia have been marched away.
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Three days later, Fitch wrote, “Went . . . to see fifty corpses in some ponds 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 sabre practice?”
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Fitch saw for himself what might happen to those suspected of being soldiers. On December 23 a man was brought to headquarters, “head burned cinder black—eyes and ears gone, nose partly, a ghastly sight.”
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He said that he had been part of a gang of some one hundred men, all of whom had been tied together, covered in gasoline, then set on fire. Some workers, Cheng observed, had shaved their heads to disguise themselves. To their regret, the tonsure made them look more like soldiers, not less.

The Japanese of course claimed that they were simply rooting out military opposition, but no such explanation could make sense of another crime that was visited upon the civilian population: rape. Day by day, hour by hour, reports came in of women being sexually assaulted. On December 17 Rabe wrote: “Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about a hundred girls at Ginling College alone. You hear of nothing but rape.”
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Two days later Fitch reported: “Some houses are entered from five to ten times in one day and the poor people looted and robbed and the women raped. Several were killed in cold blood for no apparent reason whatsoever.”
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Minnie Vautrin’s diary reported the victims of rape who sought refuge at Ginling College. “A stream of weary wild-eyed women were coming in,” she wrote. “Said their night had been one of horror; that again and again their homes had been visited by soldiers. (Twelve-year-old girls up to sixty-year-old women raped. Husbands forced to leave bedroom and pregnant wife at point of bayonet . . .).”
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Working under Vautrin at the increasingly crowded refugee station at Ginling College, Cheng Ruifang saw the city’s women becoming victims over and over again. Women were raped in the living quarters of one of the buildings. Vautrin did her best to intervene but was unable to be everywhere at once, and she appeared “tired to death.” An entry in Vautrin’s own diary for December 19 was typical: “was frantically called to the old Faculty House where I was told two soldiers had gone upstairs. There, in room 538, I found one standing at the door, and one inside already raping a poor girl.”
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On one occasion Japanese soldiers demanded to know whether Chinese soldiers were being concealed in the building. When Vautrin told them that there were no soldiers present, “he then slapped me on the face and slapped Mr. Li [her Chinese colleague] very severely.”
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