The Rape Of Nanking (41 page)

From W. H. Auden,
Collected Shorter Poems
,
1930–1944
(London: Faber and Faber, 1950), “In Time of War,” XVI, pp. 279–80.

Taisa Isamo, Asaka's staff officer for intelligence, later confessed to friends that on his own initiative he had forged the order. Another Japanese officer, Tanaka Ryukichi, said that in April 1938, Chou, then the head of the 74th wing of the Japanese army, told him an interesting tale. Chou told him that when his troops landed at Hangchow (or Hangzhou) Bay and pushed inland, nearly 300,000 Chinese troops were cut off from retreat, so they threw away their weapons and surrendered to the Japanese. “To arrange for so many prisoners, to feed them, was a huge problem,” Chou reportedly said.

As the story goes, Chou seized upon a quick-fix solution to eliminate the food problem: “I immediately issued orders to all troops: ‘We must entirely massacre these prisoners!' Using the name of the military commander, I sent these orders by telegram. The wording of the order was to annihilate.”

We will never know if this story is true, but it must be noted that even if Chou had indeed forged the kill order on his own, this does not absolve Prince Asaka of responsibility for the massacre. Asaka could have issued an order to cancel the massacre once it started and court-martialed his intelligence officer.