By Mark Oliver | Checked By Leah Silverman
Published December 6, 2018
Updated June 14, 2019
With as many as 20 million dead, China suffered more casualties during
World War II than any other country except the Soviet Union.
The Start Of The Second Sino-Japanese
War
The first shots of the Second Sino-Japanese War were fired on Sept. 18,
1931. Eight years before Germany would invade Poland and instigate World War II
in Europe, three Japanese officers, looking for any excuse to invade China,
planted a bomb near their railway tracks in Manchuria. They planned to blame
the explosion on the Chinese and use the attack as justification for invading
the country.
The bomb didn’t cause any immediate harm. It was deliberately far enough
from the tracks that it barely even scratched the railway. In fact, ten minutes
after the bomb went off, a train went across the damaged tracks without the
slightest problem.
In those days, Japan had an unequivocal policy of militant imperialism.
They were willing to do anything to extend their influence and capture the
territory around them.
Manchuria, with its abundant resources and strategic location in between
Japan and the Soviet Union, was the perfect place to start an Imperialist
campaign. And so, with no other excuse than a harmless bomb planted by one of
their own men, Japan attacked.
The invasion began in Mukden on the morning of Sept. 19, 1931, and,
before nightfall, the city was captured. The Chinese were caught completely
off-guard by the invasion and five hundred men were killed.
It only took five months for the Japanese armies to sweep through
Manchuria. China, at the time, was locked in a turbulent internal conflict, and
there was little they could do to rally against the more powerful Japanese
invaders.
It would be another eight years until the rest of the world went into
war. Until then, the Chinese would be all but on their own during the Second
Sino-Japanese war.
Unit 731
Nearly as soon as Manchuria was under their control, the Japanese began
to perform human experiments on their Chinese victims.
Japanese Surgeon General Shirō Ishii was fascinated by the use of
chemical warfare in World War I, and he was determined to make chemical weapons
the key to Japanese victory in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
By 1932, he’d already set up a precursor to what would later be known
at Unit 731. He established a lab for human experimentation just
outside of Harbin, a place where – in his own words – unsuspecting Chinese test subjects “could be
plucked from the streets like rats.”
Some had every drop of blood drained out of their bodies while Japanese
doctors watched, taking careful notes about how their bodies deteriorated.
Others were injected with plagues to observe how they died or vivisected so
that the scientists could examine their internal organs while they were still
alive.
Nobody shut Ishii down. Instead, his project was expanded into Unit 731
by August 1940. Human test subjects were injected with cholera, typhoid, and
the bubonic plague, while others were left out in the cold so that they could
watch how the frostbite killed them.
Others were just abused. Members of Unit 731 have recounted violent
rapes of the women kept there, as some of the women were deliberately raped to
impregnate them or infect them with venereal diseases so that the scientists
could experiment on them.
Any children born in Unit 731 were subjected to horrifying experiments.
Not a single one survived.
The Beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War
By some counts, the Second Sino-Japanese War began with the invasion of
Manchuria. Others, though, put the beginning at July 7, 1937, when the fighting
hit full swing.
The instigator into full-out war has been hailed the Marco Polo Bridge
Incident, when a Japanese soldier, Private Shimura Kikujiro, disappeared from
his post there. The Japanese demanded permission to march their troops into the
Chinese town on Wanping, and when they refused, the put the town under siege.
By the next day, the Japanese troops had amassed a full-on battle. By
the end of the month, they’d captured Beijing and Tianjin, and from there they
set their sights on Shanghai.
Soldiers weren’t the only victims of the Japanese raids. Shanghai and
Chongqing were racked with bombings; in one single attack on Aug. 14, 1937,
more than 3,000 innocent civilians died under a hail of bombs.
The Japanese army then plowed on to Nanking and outnumbered and
overpowered the Chinese with every step on the way.
After the Fall of Nanking, the Second Sino-Japanese War became more than
a war. It became a massacre.
The Rape Of Nanking
Between Dec. 13, 1937, and Jan. 30, 1938, Japanese forces rounded up,
tortured, and murdered up to 300,000 Chinese civilians and surrendered
soldiers.
The massacre, which came to be known as the Rape of Nanking, was horrifying. People were mutilated, beaten, or
slaughtered wherever they were found.
Two Japanese soldiers, Toshiaki Mukai, and Tsuyoshi Noda, even held a
contest to see who could murder the most people with a sword. In a short time,
they had each murdered a hundred men. Noda himself would later admit that almost every person they’d killed was
unarmed and surrendering:
“We'd face an enemy trench that we'd captured ... Then we’d line them up
and cut them down, from one end of the line to the other. I was praised for
having killed a hundred people, but actually, almost all of them were killed in
this way.”
Rape was just as widespread. Japanese soldiers would go door-to-door,
dragging women out of their homes to violently gang-rape them and murder anyone
who intervened. Often, the women they abused were left dead.
An American witness, Robert O. Wilson, wrote in his diary on Dec. 18,
1938:
“Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the
university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two
girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the
University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten
times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they
were satisfied. They bayoneted one little boy of eight who [had] five bayonet
wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was
outside the abdomen.”
Mutilated bodies littered the streets. Bodies were desecrated, women
were penetrated with bayonets and young girls had their stomachs cut open.
Some Japanese soldiers even turned to cannibalism. Another witness,
missionary Ralph L. Phillips, reported that he was “forced to watch while the Japs
disemboweled a Chinese soldier” and “roasted his heart and liver and ate them.”
Comfort Women And The Genocide of Hui Muslims
The Hui Muslims of China were nearly completely eradicated during the
Second Sino-Japanese War. Their extermination was an official policy of the
Japanese army. As the Japanese marched into China, they burned down the mosques
and massacred the Hui Muslims by the thousands.
Every desecration imaginable was pushed on them. Mosques were smeared
with pork fat; Hui Muslims were forced to butcher pigs; and Hui girls were
forced to become “comfort women” – prostitutes regularly raped by the Japanese
soldiers.
It wasn’t just Hui women who were forced into prostitution. Up to
400,000 women were abducted from their homes, violently raped, and forced to
follow the army around as comfort women, being violently brutalized every day.
One Korean survivor, Kim Hak-sun, would later tell the press that she became a comfort woman when
she was just 17-years-old, after being beaten and dragged off by Japanese
soldiers:
“The first day I was raped and the rapes never stopped… I feel sick when
I come close to a man. Not just Japanese men, but all men — even my own husband
who saved me from the brothel. I shiver whenever I see a Japanese flag.
The Aftermath
In time, the tides of war turned. The Second Sino-Japanese War erupted
into the full-fledged World War, and with the help of the Allied nations of the
world, China was able to fight the Japanese invaders off of their soil.
But few in the West know about the horrors the Chinese endured. Every
schoolboy learns about the Holocaust and the Blitzkrieg in Poland, but Unit 731
and the Rape of Nanking are rarely taught in schools outside of China.
When the Second Sino-Japanese War ended, the United States government
granted Shirō Ishii and the men behind Unit 731 complete immunity.
Unit 731 had been one of the worst war crimes in history, but the
American government was too interested in their research to shut them down.
They made a deal with Japan, demanding exclusive access to everything they’d
learned on biological warfare, and giving them complete freedom in return.
To this day, the horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese War are still
downplayed. Textbooks are still printed in Japan that do not fully describe the horrors
of the Rape of Nanking or even go so far as to deny it ever happened
altogether.
But while reparations have been made or attempted in other corners of
the world, the horrors the Chinese faced continue to be largely ignored.
After seeing these horrifying images from the Japanese
invasion of China, learn more about the Rape of Nanking. Then, read more about the two Japanese soldiers who
competed to kill the most Chinese civilians.
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