Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (23 page)

Yet Cheng Ruifang felt that Vautrin still failed to understand the nature of the invaders. In late December Vautrin said of Japanese military policemen who had been sent to the college: “They really seem like clean, well-disciplined men, and in the main have kind faces.”
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But Cheng had reason to doubt this assessment. On December 21 more Japanese soldiers had turned up at the college. “Miss Vautrin thought he was a good man,” Cheng observed, “but actually he hates us [Chinese] because he has lost face [when previously reprimanded]. So although we still take in girls from outside, the soldiers come at all times to drag them away.” The next day “two soldiers came and dragged out two girls on the grass [and raped them]. I’d heard how immoral they were, but now I see it.” Cheng despaired of Vautrin’s desperate attempts to mediate by reporting these acts to the Japanese consulate: “I tell her, the more you report them, the more they will keep doing this.” Yet Cheng also noted that without the few Americans and Germans in the city assisting them, even more Chinese would be on “the road to death.”
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On December 20 Cheng’s frustrations came together in a howl of anger at the Japanese, at her American protectress, at her compatriots:

Today at noon two soldiers came to snatch two girls; as it happened, a senior officer came to inspect them, and Miss Vautrin told him to look and see what his soldiers were doing, so he was embarrassed. But this doesn’t really matter to him. The Chinese are his enemy, but Miss Vautrin doesn’t understand this. She is really busy, driving soldiers away as she receives their superior officers. Chen Feiran [head of a local governmental district] is terrified and for two days has not wanted to come outside. I’m tired to death. And these refugees don’t
listen
to anything you say—they shit and piss everywhere, there’s nowhere to walk, you don’t dare
move
after dark.
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Cheng added: “In one week, one baby died, and ten were born.” A couple of days later this thought darkened her mood yet further. “Every day a child is born. I can’t handle it, I feel very disturbed.” She was angry, too, because she had not washed for two weeks, in part because she was worried that Japanese soldiers on the lookout for women to rape might enter the bathhouse and seize her, and also because there was a blackout after dark. The Japanese had destroyed the college’s electricity generator. Those sheltering inside did not even dare light candles in case it attracted unwelcome attention at night. Sometimes, ironically, it would be the squalor of the circumstances that would lead to salvation: Cheng managed to save one girl from an attempted rape by a Japanese soldier because the girl was in one of the many parts of the college where the ground was covered in excrement, and in the struggle, her clothes became covered in feces, making her no longer so desirable.
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The desperation of the times led both Chinese and foreigners into judgments that sit very uncomfortably by present-day standards. On December 23 Cheng observed a girl who had been brought back after suffering multiple rape by Japanese soldiers, so badly injured that she was unable to walk. Cheng observed in her diary that there would soon be a lot of mixed-race babies in Nanjing: “Hateful!” The next day she described how Japanese officers had come with Chinese collaborators looking for prostitutes. Minnie Vautrin had agreed to a deal. On Christmas Eve in an attempt to protect the “innocent and decent women,” she allowed Japanese officers to search for prostitutes. (They obtained twenty-one of them in the end.) Cheng’s reaction was that if the prostitutes were taken away and forced to work outside the college, then the soldiers would not come in and rape the “good women”; this seemed “reasonable.” But apart from making a moral judgment about sex workers that few would endorse today, Cheng’s idea of what was “reasonable” was tied to an expectation of rationality that the Japanese army showed no signs of displaying. By Christmas Eve some 600 people were camping in Rabe’s garden.
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Rabe told Cheng that it was Christmas. Cheng replied that it was like a “holiday in hell.”

The Safety Zone committee and their Chinese colleagues were on the same side, but there were still tensions between them (perhaps unsurprising in the hysterical atmosphere of those weeks). In the first few days Japanese soldiers repeatedly raided houses and buildings, stealing cigarettes, alcohol, and food (even the chickens held at Ginling as part of the animal science laboratory). Cheng noted with a certain black satisfaction after one raid: “They even took the wine and cigarettes of the International Committee. The Committee lost face; they had feared
our
[the Chinese] army looting, and said that the Japanese would behave very well. Now they know this isn’t true. The Japanese don’t even recognize the Safety Zone.”
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For many Chinese, the foreigners were allies, but even so, the hierarchical relationship between Westerners and Chinese cast a shadow, and clichés about the Japanese being more ordered than the chaotic Chinese persisted. It is easy to see why Cheng took bleak comfort from the committee’s embarrassment about their mistaken judgment.

There seemed to be no letup in the intensity of the atrocities. Just after Christmas the Japanese set up public stages where they called upon former Chinese soldiers to confess, saying that if they did so, they would not be harmed, but if it were later discovered that they had been soldiers, they would be executed. Over 200 former soldiers did come forward, and were promptly killed. Men then stopped identifying themselves as soldiers, but the Japanese rounded up a group of young men who had aroused suspicion. Some of the women refugees were asked to identify them: if they were recognized as relatives, then they would be freed, but “people left unrecognized were just taken away” to their deaths. “There was a brave old lady who identified three people she didn’t know to save them,” Cheng recorded, “and a young woman who identified her brother then came out again having changed her clothes and identified other relatives . . . this was really admirable.”
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A few days later Cheng reported that her colleague Wei had come back from the Xiaguan district of the city. He said “you couldn’t walk . . . without treading on corpses; what he saw was terrifying, and he was scared to death.”
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The members of the Safety Zone committee were conscientious in their recording of the events. They knew that they were the only outside witnesses to a major war crime (indeed, some would later be called to testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial), and that they had to record details that few others would be able to. But even though few Chinese were able to document their experiences at the time, the entire population was witness to the horrors being visited on the city. The judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), held in Tokyo after the war, described what happened in the city over the next few weeks:

[T]here were many cases of rape. Death was a frequently [
sic
] penalty for the slightest resistance on the part of a victim or the members of her family who sought to protect her . . . Many women were killed after the act and their bodies mutilated. Approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation.
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The IMTFE also found that 20,000 Chinese civilian men were killed on the false grounds that they were ex-combatants, and that 30,000 genuine combatants were killed and their bodies thrown in the river. Since then, controversy has raged about the exact number of people killed, with the Chinese government maintaining that 300,000 is the correct figure, and other estimates ranging from the tens into the hundreds of thousands.
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This dispute should not obscure the fact that a very large number died as the out-of-control Imperial Army exacted revenge on a population that had stood in the way of its advance.

The anarchy in Nanjing showed very clearly that there was a crippling division between the rhetoric (and possibly the intentions) of the Japanese civilians in the city and the behavior of the military. Over and over again, Japanese Embassy officials and senior officers declared that they would calm the situation down. But in the streets the rape and murder went on. Japan was at the time a very hierarchical society. Still, over the previous two decades, it had become clear that lower-level actors in Japan were quite capable of defying their supposed superiors, and that as long as they acted quickly, those superiors would not question their acts, at least in public. The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 had not been approved by the government in Tokyo, but once it had happened, the government (led by a relative liberal) felt unable to condemn it.

Orders from officials counted for little in Nanjing that December. Fitch visited the Japanese Embassy, frustrated by the inability of Japanese officials to do anything about the endless rapes and murders. “The victorious army must have its rewards,” he wrote, “and those rewards are to plunder, murder and rape at will, to commit acts of unbelievable brutality and savagery . . . In all modern history surely there is no page that will stand so black as that of the rape of Nanking.”
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The embassy staff soon proved unable even to cope with their own needs: Fitch observed wryly that at one point the three Japanese diplomats he met asked him whether he could help them find transport in the city.
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On one occasion a drunk Japanese soldier who threatened two Germans with a bayonet was caught by a visiting general, who “soundly slapped” his face a couple of times, “but I don’t suppose he got any more than that.”
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Things did improve, albeit very slowly. The fury of the army eventually began to fade, and the Japanese began to turn their minds to co-opting the city’s inhabitants rather than merely terrorizing them. By December 30, 1937, Japanese guards had been placed at the foreign embassies; up to that point, Japanese soldiers had been breaking into them on a regular basis. By late January 1938 the arbitrary murders and rapes were lessening in number. Cheng had noted that as refugees began to leave Ginling College, layers “of dirt and piss” were left behind.
⁵⁵
At the start of the year, a new city government under Japanese command was set up, which slowly began to restore some sort of order. Food also became a little easier to find.
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The Japanese made some attempts to create a belated impression of benevolence in the conquered city. Just after the New Year, Japanese women associated with the army called on Minnie Vautrin, who brought them to Cheng Ruifang. Cheng “couldn’t bear to look” at the “devils,” but she reserved her greater contempt for her fellow Chinese. When the Japanese visitors unwrapped some “mouldy apples and sweets, the refugees immediately ran and snatched the food.” “For children this would be acceptable,” Cheng fumed, “but for adults, it’s not right to eat Japanese food.” She reflected gloomily: “there is very little hope for China’s future. When you think about how many intellectuals have become collaborators, then we can understand why this uneducated group behaves this way.”
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Chiang Kai-shek felt similarly about the country as a whole. How could the population be persuaded to resist when nationalism was still patchy and unformed, and when everyday needs, such as food and shelter, were much more pressing? And who should be judged a collaborator, and on what grounds?

Nanjing slowly returned to a sort of deathly calm. It was a city under occupation, and atrocities continued into the spring and beyond. But by mid-February, the initial frenzy of murder and rape had ended. Now the city waited to find out what years of Japanese occupation would bring.

It is one of the peculiarities of the massacre in Nanjing that so much of what we know about it comes from reports by foreigners. But that is not surprising. Chiang had stated clearly that Nanjing would be defended to the end, so Chinese newspapers were constrained from reporting fully the reality of social breakdown and mounting panic in the city. After the city fell on December 13, with the Chinese press gone, there was no chance that Japanese reporters would expose what had happened, and very few foreign journalists were able to enter Nanjing and move around freely. Furthermore, Nanjing itself was in limbo after the Nationalists’ withdrawal: there were no Chinese government officials there, and therefore the agencies that would normally deal with welfare and relief simply did not exist. They were replaced by a shadowy self-government set up with great haste, working alongside local charitable organizations. The structures that would allow full reporting of crimes were also absent. The members of the Safety Zone committee nevertheless kept as complete a record as they could.

The fall of Nanjing also showed the Nationalists in a bad light. Chiang could not have held the city, but the inaction of the government suggested it had little concern for the fate of the thousands of Chinese stranded there. Tang Shengzhi’s actions also made things worse; not only was the city set on fire, but in the end the defenders fled without trying genuinely to defend the city’s population. News reports about Nanjing in China itself were muted, and there were few foreign reporters in the city. Durdin, one of a handful who did report on the conquest of the capital, blamed Chiang for insisting that the army should make a stand at Nanjing: “Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was responsible to a great degree because against the unanimous counsel of his German military advisers and the opinions of his chief of staff, General Pai Chung-hsi [Bai Chongxi], he permitted the futile defense of the city.”
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