September 5, 2015, 2015 - No. 32

Supplement

China's War of Resistance Against
Japanese Imperialism

Victory Day Parade, Chongqing, September 3, 1945

Supplement

War of Resistance Against Japanese Imperialism (1937-1945)

- Israel Epstein -

TML is posting below Chapter 16 of the book From Opium to Liberation, by Israel Epstein, first published in 1956. It recounts China's heroic efforts to check the Japanese imperialists and liberate China which was a great contribution to the victory over fascism in World War II.

***

[...] On July 7, 1937, the Japanese army launched its attack on Lukouchiao (Marco Polo Bridge). After some days of fierce fighting, it occupied nearby Peking. On August 13, Japanese naval and land forces began a combined assault on Shanghai, where Chinese troops held them off for three months.

Breaking with the tradition of semi-colonial domination of China, Tokyo now tried to reduce China to a complete colony. The Chinese people were faced with the biggest crisis in their history.

Within China, the civil war ceased and the Kuomintang and Communist Party reached an agreement. The Red Army received the designation of the New Fourth and Eighth Route Armies. In the revolutionary bases under its leadership, the Communist Party brought other united front groups into participation in local councils and governments. The policy of confiscating landlord estates for the benefit of the peasantry was changed to one of reducing rents and interest. The eight-year war for national survival, in which all armies, parties and groups were tested, now began.

Troops of the New Fourth Army.

In the first stage of the hostilities, i.e. until the fall of Hankow and Canton in October 1938, the Kuomintang put up a certain amount of resistance, and some of the troops under its command fought tenaciously and well. But even at this period, Chiang's tactics were passive, opportunist and treacherous.

Internally, he attempted the impossible task of facing the enemy with only one part of his armies, keeping the rest in reserve against the people and jealously preventing every form of popular organization and initiative in the struggle. And even in this early phase he entered into negotiations with the Japanese on two occasions. The first was through the Germans, on the eve of Japan's occupation of his capital, Nanking, in 1937. The second was in 1938, through his own emissaries.

Internationally, Chiang kept looking over his shoulder at the League of Nations and his Anglo-American masters, hoping that they would pull him out of the mess. He did not use the closer relations the Soviet Union established with his government, and the aid it gave to China, as a means of strengthening China's own resistance. Instead he hoped to embroil the U.S.S.R. itself in a war with Japan, enabling him to bargain once more with the foe and even to switch sides.

But even when the Chinese people united to fight for survival, and acknowledged him as head of state, Chiang preserved the outlook he had acquired in his youth as a commodity-exchange speculator in Shanghai. He thought and acted only in the narrow interests of his clique. While the soldiers and people fought and died for their country, he remained a servant and stooge of foreign interests and policies. The most striking expression of this is that, for four and a half years after Japanese attack on China in 1937, Chiang did not declare war on Japan. But it took him only two days to do so after Japan attacked the United States and Britain in December 1941.

From early 1939 onwards, Chiang did practically no fighting against the Japanese. He preferred to let them concentrate their forces against the people's armies led by the Communist Party, which operated mainly in the enemy's rear. In the meantime he himself renewed anti-Communist attacks and provocations.

These internal manoeuvres had their counterpart in Chiang's foreign policy. After the outbreak of the European war brought temporary successes to the Axis, he proved that he was just as ready to double-cross Britain and America, if need be, as he was to betray his own people. Following the fall of France, he resumed direct secret touch on the highest level with Japan. At the height of the war, Tokyo's Foreign Minister Matsuoka spoke to his Nazi counterpart, Von Ribbentropp, of "Chiang Kai-shek, with whom he was in personal contact, who knew him and trusted him".[1]

After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Kuomintang planned a large-scale resumption of civil war. The signal for the all-out attack on the areas led by the Communist Party was to be the Nazi capture of Moscow. Afterwards, some of the leading elements of the Kuomintang intended to adhere to the Axis. But like so many of the dreams of reactionaries throughout the world, this one was punctured, along with Hitler's offensive, by the heroic efforts of the Soviet people and army. The whole episode demonstrated once more how closely the fortunes of the socialist state were bound up with the interests of the Chinese people as of all others.

When the United States entered the war in December 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Chiang declared war on Japan and the other Axis powers. Now the Kuomintang plan was to sit tight until it was rescued both from Japanese appetites and from its own people by America, which it regarded as invincible. But in 1942-43 Japan gained a series of big victories over the Anglo-American forces in the Pacific. Chiang Kai-shek's government at once resumed undercover contact with Tokyo, using open traitors as well as the Nazi Walter Stennes. At one point it actually allowed an important Japanese secret service official, Kuroda, to reside under its protection in China's wartime capital, Chungking.

In this phase, Chiang Kai-shek ordered 57 of his generals to go over to the Japanese with 500,000 troops so that, paid and equipped by Japan, they could fight against the Communist-led armies in North and Central China. His reckoning was simple. If the Axis won, these troops would form a bridge for his own change of sides. If the Allies won, they would be useful too. Having returned, under the Japanese flag, to occupied areas from which the regular Kuomintang armies had been driven, they would be in ideal positions for the subsequent civil war.

In the next phase, 1944-45, the naval and air power of Japan waned. Her shipping lines became powerless against American attacks. Her land forces, therefore, violated the unwritten truce in the Kuomintang areas. They attacked them again, in order to complete a line of communications by rail from Manchuria to the Indo-China border.

Chiang put up no defence. Instead he used all the arms he had obtained from the United States, and his crack units trained by American officers, to blockade and in some cases attack areas held by the people's forces. To the Japanese fronts he sent not fighting troops but negotiators.

Every one of these facts has since been thoroughly documented, exposed and proved. Many, indeed, were made known at the time, not only by indignant Chinese patriots but also by some American officers and diplomats, among- them General Stilwell,[2] supreme commander of the U.S. forces in China until removed in 1944. These men, though they too wanted to consolidate wartime and post-war U.S. dominance in China, wanted more active struggle against the Axis. Many of them were themselves unaware of the full perfidy of the "grand strategy" of Chiang-Japanese-American collaboration against the Chinese people, already being prepared for the post-war years. Some resisted it when it came into the open, and later paid the penalty by being hounded out of American official life or, like Stilwell himself, to premature death.

But the real history of China and the Far East was not being made by Chiang, the Japanese or the American politicians and generals. The future was being forged by the Chinese people and their revolutionary leadership. In these same years, they grew so much in strength, experience and political foresight, that they could no longer be defeated or manoeuvred out of the fruits of their struggle as they had been in 1927.

While the ruling Kuomintang clique was betraying not only the nation as a whole but the soldiers in its own armies, and amassing fabulous wealth by robbing the people in its own areas, the forces led by the Communist Party held high the banner of the national liberation war. In the fire of ceaseless battles against the invaders, they multiplied in numbers and influence. The small northwestern town of Yenan, where Mao Tse-tung and the Communist Party Central Committee were quartered, became the lodestar for all that was healthy, forward-looking and patriotic in China. Here was the mighty smithy in which the future leaders of the whole country were shaped and educated.

During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Imperialism, the Communist Party came to be recognized, by all strata of Chinese society in which love of the homeland was not dead, as the. Party of the Nation. Its membership grew from some 40,000 in 1937 to 1,200,000 in 1945.

Chinese soldiers of the communist-led Eighth Route Army work with civilians to plant land mines in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei border region.

The widespread mobile and guerilla warfare, waged in every corner of the nominally Japanese-occupied .areas under the Party's guidance, awoke hundreds of millions to hope, confidence and decisive action. It produced innumerable talented military and political leaders from the ranks of the masses -- creating an armed force of unprecedented proportions, which was truly "the Fist of the People". At the end of the heroic Long March in 1935, the Chinese Red Army had been reduced to only 30,000 men. By 1945 the people's army had grown, in constant battles, to 910,000 with more than 2,500,000 armed auxiliaries in the people's militia.

Vast liberated areas were formed in all places where the people's forces wrested back territory from the Japanese invaders, from the frozen north to the sub-tropical southern island of Hainan. The leadership in these areas was exercised by the party of the Chinese working class. The peasants, who formed the overwhelming majority of their population, gained not only full political rights but great economic amelioration in the shape of sharp reductions in rents and interests (to preserve the anti-Japanese unity of all possible sections of the population, redistribution of land was not then undertaken). Patriotic elements of all classes were represented in their administration under which political, economic and cultural policy alike served the needs of the people and the national war.

In 1937, the Communist Party had only one revolutionary base, in a poor and drought-stricken corner of the Northwest, with a population of 1,500,000. By April 1945, five months before Japan's surrender, the Liberated Areas contained 95 million people with their own well-organized local administration. These areas were the seedbed, and prototype of the People's Republic of China today.

After the first two years of the eight-year war, the Kuomintang "front" was dormant. The Liberated Areas bore the brunt of constant and bitter armed struggle with over 60 per cent of all the Japanese troops in China. They also faced 95 per cent of the Chinese quisling troops under Japanese command (including those who had gone over to the enemy on Chiang Kai-shek's orders).

Throughout this time, the Kuomintang subjected the Liberated Areas to military and economic embargo. It cut them off from all sources of supply in its own rear areas. It gave them no share of the supplies that came in from America and the Soviet Union for the purpose of the anti-Japanese war. Instead, it diverted these supplies to equip the forces blockading the Liberated Areas, so that these troops became the best-equipped in the whole Kuomintang army. It also directly attacked the people's forces on many occasions. The most notorious was the treacherous ambushing and massacre of the headquarters column of the Communist-led New Fourth Army early in 1941.

The popular forces fought the immeasurably better-armed Japanese by constant guerilla and mobile actions. They refrained from attacking the large and well-entrenched enemy garrisons in the cities, by frustrating every enemy attempt to clamp control on the countryside. At the same time the quisling forces, composed largely of drafted Chinese peasants, were defeated or neutralized by a variety of methods: military and political. Altogether, in the course of the war, over 960,000 casualties were inflicted on .the enemy by the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies, which also captured very large amounts of equipment.

Toward the Kuomintang, a flexible policy of "unity and struggle" was adopted. Militarily, its attacks were always beaten back, "tit for tat," but every care was taken to wage such conflicts "with a just reason, with advantage and with restraint," and not to allow clashes to develop into a large-scale civil war which would play into the hands of the Japanese and the extreme reactionaries. Politically, the Communist Party exposed each Kuomintang provocation to the people of the entire country, calling on them to consolidate and enforce the anti-Japanese united front. It also took care to make the facts known to democratic opinion abroad.

No military action was taken to break the Kuomintang's economic blockade. Instead, the Liberated Areas gave a striking demonstration of the way all the resources of the nation should and could have been mobilized. They successfully enlisted the people of the rural hinterland in an organized upsurge of agriculture and small-scale (largely handicraft) industrial production. On the base of the village and small-town economy alone (the Liberated Areas had no cities or substantial towns at the time), they created not only the resources for war but also a better-fed, better-dressed army and population than could be seen in the Kuomintang areas -- which had far more resources and enjoyed the benefits of foreign aid. The people's armies, when not actually fighting, themselves produced a large part of their own sustenance, minimizing the burden on the peasants.

At the same time, the Liberated Areas also became the cultural centre of the nation, radiating optimism and confidence. In all these ways they not only consolidated their military and economic strength but won the admiration of ever greater numbers of the Chinese people, including those in the Japanese-occupied and Chiang Kai-shek-controlled regions, where the Communist Party was underground or in semi-legality and stringent censorship sought to suppress news of its achievements.

The Liberated Areas were a magnet of attraction not only for the people of China. Here the leader of the Japanese Communist Party, Sanzo Nosaka, led a heroic group of his compatriots, including many former prisoners of war, in struggle against the enemy that was theirs as well as China's -- the Japanese imperialists. Here one met Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian and other patriots. The young Indian physician Dwarkanath Kotnis died while serving the wounded in the front lines. The American revolutionary writer Agnes Smedley marched with the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies to gather material that aroused so many of her own countrymen to a realization of the world-wide glory and significance of the struggle of the common people of China. Here the Canadian surgeon and Marxist-Leninist, Dr. Norman Bethune sacrificed his life to be commemorated by Mao Tse-tung as a model of proletarian internationalism for all to learn from.[3] Yenan was a wellspring of the fighting friendship of the Chinese and foreign peoples against all alliances of Chinese and foreign reactionaries.

Such were the results of the two lines of action, that of the Kuomintang on the one hand and that of the Communist Party on the other, in the war against Japan. One led to disintegration, reaction and constant defeats. The other, the line of people's war, laid the groundwork for the victory of the Chinese people over Japanese imperialism. More than this, it provided the foundation for the subsequent triumph of the century-old anti-feudal, anti-imperialist revolution in China against all foreign and domestic foes, a mighty victory for all the peoples of the world.

Now let us look at certain phases of the international environment in which the Sino-Japanese War took place.

President Roosevelt of the United States, as early as 1937, had called for "quarantine of the aggressors" and expressed sympathy for their victims. But in fact, U.S. monopolies had stepped up sales of oil, scrap iron and other military material to Japan, which could not have waged war without them. In 1938, such war supplies constituted 67 per cent of the total U.S. exports to Japan. In 1939, the proportion rose to 70 per cent. Despite much anti-Japanese talk, Washington began to take economic action against the aggressor only in 1941. In other words, it acted only when it became clear that Japan would not confine herself to attacking China or fight the Soviet Union, but that she had decided on "southward" advance against U.S. and British spheres of power in Asia. Even after this, however, U.S. diplomats were still trying to negotiate a "Far Eastern Munich". In this deal, they offered to let Japan keep her conquests in Northeast China (Manchuria), which is nearest the Soviet Union, if she did not impinge too much on their interests elsewhere. The talks were actually in progress when Japan attacked in Hawaii.

The inter-imperialist struggle between the United States and Japan was very real and sharp. But the United States government, right up to the moment of actual hostilities, was trying to settle it at the expense of China and the Soviet Union, hoping later to subordinate the new Japanese empire economically by the well-tested means of the dollar.

After Pearl Harbour, the tactics of ruling groups in the United States had of course to change. Now they were waging war with China as an ally. But their policy gradually emerged as an effort to enmesh this ally in such a way as to make it a virtual U.S. colony, to the permanent exclusion not only of the national aspirations of the Chinese people but also of rival imperialist influences. China was flooded with American officers, officials and advisers, military, economic and educational. These scolded the Kuomintang regime for its hopeless corruption and inefficiency, and proceeded to install American commanders and comptrollers, and the most "trusted" pro-American Chinese officials, in every department. of military and civil life.

In occasionally urging Chiang Kai-shek to negotiate with the Communist Party instead of plunging into civil strife while the war with Japan was still on, the United States also had its own calculations. In these the interests of the war against Japan held a major place only while its issue still hung in the balance. By 1944, the whole emphasis was on "saving the Kuomintang from itself," on holding it back from prematurely launching civil war until it could be groomed into a shape in which it would stand a chance, after the war, of destroying the people's revolution.

The United States government advanced itself as a mediator between the two parties. In doing so, it pursued the vain hope that it could "negotiate" the anti-imperialist force represented by the Liberated Areas and the People's Army out of existence. It intended to use this cheap way of cancelling the most solid gains made by the Chinese people in a hundred years of bitter experience and effort, the precious guarantee of the future which they had built and cemented with their blood. In addition it tried to employ its "neutral" position for military and political espionage in the Liberated Areas.

Great Britain, in the years 1937-41, was concerned chiefly with buying off Japan. She turned over to the Japanese occupying forces in China's maritime ports the revenues of the Chinese Customs, which she had long controlled. In North China, the British-dominated Kailan Mining Administration happily supplied the invaders with coal. In March 1938 it called on Japanese troops to suppress a strike of Chinese miners, which was done with great bloodshed.[4] On June 27, 1938, the British government offered to mediate between China and Japan. This was done, in the words of a British writer,[5] "without the least suggestion that one side might be more responsible than the other for the outbreak of the war." A Japanese victory was regarded as inevitable in London and on November 1, 1938, Prime Minister Chamberlain declared complacently, says the same author, "that he did not believe that, when the Sino-Japanese war was concluded, the new capital to develop China could be supplied by Japan alone; China could not be reconstructed without some help from Britain." In the middle of 1939, in negotiations between its Ambassador in Tokyo Sir Robert Craigie and Japanese Foreign Minister Arita, the British government formally agreed that, in its extraterritorial concession in Tientsin, the Japanese forces would have the right "to suppress or remove any such acts or causes as will obstruct them or benefit their enemy". Dutifully, it handed over for execution a number of Chinese engaged in patriotic resistance.

Not only did Britain seek an accommodation with the Japanese invaders at China's expense but she again resorted, during this period, to her old habit of utilizing China's misfortunes to grab territory. In 1936, when the massive Japanese attack on China was obviously coming, the arbitrarily-drawn "McMahon line" inside Tibet, never recognized by any Chinese government, was first entered on an official British map as a "border" rather than a mere claim.[6] Even in the succeeding war years when Britain was fighting against Japan as China's ally, she moved her Indian troops into one point after another. In May 1944, to cite an instance, one such encroachment was protested by the Tibetan local authorities in Lhasa. Though then themselves enmeshed in British influence, they could not swallow the "McMahon line" any more than could the central government of China. In December, the British tried to overcome Lhasa's objections by proposing another "line," south of Tawang, which was also refused. In April 1945, shortly before the war's end, the Tibetans again protested against the intrusion of British-Indian soldiers at Walong. During the same period, China's land borders were subjected to trespass in other parts of Tibet, in the Aksai Chin region of Sinkiang province, and from the direction of Burma.

In 1940, London acceded to Japanese pressure to close the Burma Road, the only safe channel through which China was able to receive supplies from the West, and offered its services in arranging a Sino-Japanese "settlement".

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Britain began gradually to concentrate on a long-range policy of saving her positions in China and the rest of East Asia, both from the national liberation movements and from increasing American encroachment.

The policy of the Soviet Union was to aid all countries attacked by Fascist aggression, regardless of social system or form of government. Immediately after the Japanese invasion in 1937, the U.S.S.R. signed a non-aggression pact with China, extended credits to her and began to supply her with military and other materials across the northwestern border. A Soviet volunteer air group, which was constantly kept up to strength, played a great role in knocking out Japanese air raiders over Nanking, Hankow and other cities. Even the American air general Chennault, a Chiang Kai-shek man all through, was compelled to admit in a book written in 1949 that, "From the outbreak of the war in the summer of 1937 to the end of 1942 the bulk of China's foreign aid was Russian."[7]

The violently anti-Communist and anti-Soviet Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wartime chief of the Kuomintang's Aeronautical Commission, shamed the United States with the contrast between its actions and those of the U.S.S.R. She wrote in a U.S. mass-circulation magazine:

Eighty per cent of Japan's war supplies come from America . . . and 95 per cent of the aviation gasoline which was used by Japan in her ruthless bombing was American.

Throughout the first three years of resistance Soviet Russia extended to China for the actual purchase of war supplies and other necessities, credits several times larger than the credits given by either Great Britain or America. . . .

Furthermore, at the meetings of the League of Nations it was Russia who took an uncompromising stand in support of China's appeal that active measures should be adopted to brand Japan as the aggressor . . . when Japan protested that the aid extended to China by Russia was a breach of neutrality, Russia did not wilt, or surrender, or compromise, but continued to send supplies. . . .

I may point out that Russian help has been unconditional throughout.[8]

On two occasions, largely in retaliation for this help, Japan attacked the territory of the Soviet Union and its ally the Mongolian People's Republic. Both times, at Lake Khassan (Changkufeng), not far from Vladivostok in 1937 and at Khalkhin-Gol[9] in Mongolia in 1939, Japan sustained major defeats. The Khalkhin-Gol battles alone cost her 660 planes, large numbers of tanks and no less than 25,000 men killed. These unflinching rebuffs were the reason Japan did not take kindly to western promptings that she satisfy her ambitions by an incursion into Siberia, preferring to try her luck along what she considered the "line of least resistance" in the South Pacific.

Finally, after breaking the back of the Hitler aggressors in 1941-45, the Soviet Union honoured its engagements to the other Allies and struck a swift and powerful lightning blow at Japan's biggest concentration of land forces in Manchuria, making certain that the Tokyo militarists could no longer continue the war from Chinese soil and plunging them into final defeat. Participating in that blow were the forces of the Mongolian People's Republic.

The "decisive role of the atom-bomb" is a myth manufactured in Washington for political ends, and strenuously propagated throughout the world after the event. In the military judgment of the anti-Soviet U.S. air force general Chennault, expressed on the day of Japan's surrender, "Russia's entry into the Japanese war was the decisive factor in speeding its end, even if no atomic bombs had been dropped."[10] And two American policy analysts, one of whom later became Secretary of the Air Force in the government of President Truman, later revealed frankly that the decision to use the inhuman weapon was a political one:

Why then did we drop it? Or assuming that the use of the bomb was justified, why did we not demonstrate its power in a test under the auspices of the United Nations on the basis of which an ultimatum would be issued to Japan?

No, any test would have been impossible if the purpose was to knock Japan out before Russia came in or at least before Russia could make anything but a token participation prior to a Japanese collapse.[11]

The atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not, as then represented, a necessary weapon to defeat the Japanese militarists and conclude the war against Fascism.

The atomic weapon was unleashed to overawe the peoples with U.S. power and, in international relations, to make sure that the Soviet Union would have no voice in the post-war settlement in Japan. This was done at a time when, as testified by its architect, U.S. Under-Secretary of State Joseph Grew,the policy of the United States was already to preserve the Japanese emperor on his throne, and to forestall a revolution in that country.

Notes

1. Document Aufz. RAM 1941, March 29, 1941 of the German Foreign Ministry, captured and published by the U.S. government.

2. Cf. The Stilwell Papers, edited by T. H. White, New York, 1948.

3. Mao Tse-tung, "In Memory of Dr. Bethune" (1939), Selected Works, Vol. III.

4. The annual report of the Kailan Mines, printed in the London Times of December 30, 1938, expressed appreciation of "a better understanding with the Japanese authorities . . . who are showing every disposition to protect the Administration and assist in the production and transport of Kaiping coal". In the same year, the dividend paid to shareholders in the mines was 71/2 per cent as against 5 per cent in the year preceding, and, mainly to meet Japanese military purchases, new shafts with a capacity of 1 million tons a year were planned by this British concern. v. Jones, F. C., Shanghai and Tientsin, New York, 1940, p. 171.

5. Luard, Evan, Britain and China, London, 1962, pp. 45-46.

6. Except for the 1936 map referred to the majority of official survey of India maps, during the period of British rule, either showed this boundary where China said it was or described it as "undemarcated.'

7. Chennault, Claire L., Way of a Fighter, New York, 1949, p. 61.

8. Liberty Magazine, New York, January 21, 1939.

9. Khalkhin-Gol, Col. S. N. Shishkin, Military Publishing House, U.S.S.R. Ministry of Defence, Moscow, 1954, p. 56.

10. New York Times, August 15, 1945.

11. Cousins, Norman and Finletter, Thomas K., Saturday Review of Literature, June 15, 1946.

Both the above quotations are cited in Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, by P. M. S. Blackett, former member of the British government's Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy (London, 1948).

Israel Epstein was born in Warsaw in 1915 to a Jewish communist family. He and his parents moved to China when he was 15, to escape discrimination they faced in Europe. Epstein would come to prominence as a journalist, and was a collaborator with fellow author Edgar Snow. He eventually became editor of China Today and also joined the Communist Party of China. He died in 2005.

Scarred by History: The Rape of Nanjing

Posted below is an item published by the BBC on April 11, 2005 recounting the horrible atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army known as the Rape of Nanjing.

***

Between December 1937 and March 1938 one of the worst massacres in modern times took place. Japanese troops captured the Chinese city of Nanjing and embarked on a campaign of murder, rape and looting.

Thousands of bodies were buried in ditches.

Based on estimates made by historians and charity organisations in the city at the time, between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, many of them women and children.

The number of women raped was said by Westerners who were there to be 20,000, and there were widespread accounts of civilians being hacked to death.

Yet many Japanese officials and historians deny there was a massacre on such a scale.

They admit that deaths and rapes did occur, but say they were on a much smaller scale than reported. And in any case, they argue, these things happen in times of war.

The Sino-Japanese Wars

In 1931, Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria following a bombing incident at a railway controlled by Japanese interests.

The Chinese troops were no match for their opponents and Japan ended up in control of great swathes of Chinese territory.

Japanese troops enter the city in triumph.

The following years saw Japan consolidate its hold, while China suffered civil war between communists and the nationalists of the Kuomintang. The latter were led by General Chiang Kai-shek, whose capital was at Nanjing.

Many Japanese, particularly some elements of the army, wanted to increase their influence and in July 1937, a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops escalated into full-scale war.

The Japanese again had initial success, but then there was a period of successful Chinese defence before the Japanese broke through at Shanghai and swiftly moved on to Nanjing.

Chiang Kai-shek's troops had already left the city and the Japanese army occupied it without difficulty.

'One of the Great Atrocities of Modern Times'

At the time, the Japanese army did not have a reputation for brutality.

In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the Japanese commanders had behaved with great courtesy towards their defeated opponents, but this was very different.

Japanese papers reported competitions among junior officers to kill the most Chinese.

One Japanese newspaper correspondent saw lines of Chinese being taken for execution on the banks of the Yangtze River, where he saw piles of burned corpses.

Photographs from the time, now part of an exhibition in the city, show Japanese soldiers standing, smiling, among heaps of dead bodies.

Tillman Durdin of the New York Times reported the early stages of the massacre before being forced to leave.

He later wrote: "I was 29 and it was my first big story for the New York Times. So I drove down to the waterfront in my car. And to get to the gate I had to just climb over masses of bodies accumulated there."

"The car just had to drive over these dead bodies. And the scene on the river front, as I waited for the launch... was of a group of smoking, chattering Japanese officers overseeing the massacring of a battalion of Chinese captured troops."

"They were marching about in groups of about 15, machine-gunning them."

As he departed, he saw 200 men being executed in 10 minutes to the apparent enjoyment of Japanese military spectators.

He concluded that the rape of Nanjing was "one of the great atrocities of modern times".

'The Memories Cannot Be Erased'

A Christian missionary, John Magee, described Japanese soldiers as killing not only "every prisoner they could find but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages."

"Many of them were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets," he said.

Chinese prisoners in Nanjing -- some victims were reportedly buried alive.

After what he described as a week of murder and rape, the Rev. Magee joined other Westerners in trying to set up an international safety zone.

Another who tried to help was an American woman, Minnie Vautrin, who kept a diary which has been likened to that of Anne Frank.

Her entry for 16 December reads: "There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from the language school [where she worked] last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night -- one of the girls was but 12 years old."

Later, she wrote: "How many thousands were mowed down by guns or bayoneted we shall probably never know. For in many cases oil was thrown over their bodies and then they were burned."

"Charred bodies tell the tales of some of these tragedies. The events of the following ten days are growing dim. But there are certain of them that lifetime will not erase from my memory and the memories of those who have been in Nanjing through this period."

Minnie Vautrin suffered a nervous breakdown in 1940 and returned to the US. She committed suicide in 1941.

Also horrified at what he saw was John Rabe, a German who was head of the local Nazi party.

He became leader of the international safety zone and recorded what he saw, some of it on film, but this was banned by the Nazis when he returned to Germany.

He wrote about rape and other brutalities which occurred even in the middle of the supposedly protected area.

Confession and Denial

After the Second World War was over, one of the Japanese soldiers who was in Nanjing spoke about what he had seen.

Japanese troops showed little mercy.

Azuma Shiro recalled one episode: "There were about 37 old men, old women and children. We captured them and gathered them in a square."

"There was a woman holding a child on her right arm... and another one on her left."

"We stabbed and killed them, all three -- like potatoes on a skewer. I thought then, it's been only one month since I left home... and 30 days later I was killing people without remorse."

Mr. Shiro suffered for his confession: "When there was a war exhibition in Kyoto, I testified. The first person who criticized me was a lady in Tokyo. She said I was damaging those who died in the war."

"She called me incessantly for three or four days. More and more letters came and the attack became so severe... that the police had to provide me with protection."

Such testimony, however, has been discounted at the highest levels in Japan.

Former Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano denied that the massacre had occurred, claiming it was a Chinese fabrication.

Professor Ienaga Saburo spent many years fighting the Japanese government in the courts with only limited success for not allowing true accounts of Japanese war atrocities to be given in school textbooks.

There is also opposition to the idea among ordinary Japanese people. A film called Don't Cry Nanjing was made by Chinese and Hong Kong film-makers in 1995 but it was several years before it was shown in Japan.

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