- The Nanjing Massacre -
The savage and brutal methods with which the Japanese carried out their killings were so many and varied as to surpass the human imagination. Some Japanese soldiers considered the act of killing people to be a form of amusement.
For instance, there was one incident in which more than 1,000 people who had been bound and marched into a square were separated into rows and made to stand still. Some were wearing long traditional gowns, while others were wearing western style clothing; some in the group were women and there were also children. The entire group was haggard, disheveled, and barefoot. First, the Japanese doused the people with gasoline and then they opened fire on the crowd with machine guns. When the bullets hit their bodies, the gasoline caught fire. The refugees' burning bodies quivered from head to toe causing the whole scene to flicker from the light of the gasoline fires on their bodies. The Japanese soldiers stood by laughing hysterically and taking pleasure from the scene they had created. (See the [two] files from the Nanjing Historical Archives, "A Record of the Miserable Conditions in Enemy Occupied Areas," Volume V (unpublished), and "A Conversation with Liu Rouyuan After His Escape From Nanjing to Hunan.")
There were some Japanese soldiers who tied up groups of several dozen or several hundred refugees and forced them to march to the edge of a frozen pond. The Japanese forced them all to strip naked, break the ice, enter the freezing water, and "go fishing." In a matter of seconds they froze to death. Some tried to resist but were immediately shot and their corpses shoved into the frozen water. In another incident, Japanese soldiers, for no apparent reason, captured a young man and hung him from an electrical wire. Below their victim, they stacked up a pile of firewood. The wood burned slowly until much of the young man's body had been roasted and charred to a crisp. The soldiers, yelling wildly, departed the scene. On another day, the Japanese set a fire on Taiping Road. After the fire had spread, they forced a large number of shop clerks from the area to extinguish it. But while they were in the midst of putting out the fire, the Japanese soldiers used rope to tie up the fire fighters and tossed them into the blaze to be burned alive. The soldiers watched on the sidelines, raising an uproar and yelling excitedly. On yet another occasion, the Japanese bound up a group of refugees, hand and foot, and threw them into a shallow pond. One after the other, they lobbed in their grenades causing an explosive shower of blood and flesh. The assembled Japanese soldiers could not control their laughter. In another case, the Japanese tied up a group of captives and marched them to the Judicial Yuan building. One by one, the Japanese forced them to climb up to the roof of the building. Some people, realizing that their time had come, voluntarily tossed themselves off the building and fell to their immediate deaths. Others, however, had to be forced onto the roof. Down below, the Japanese had built a bonfire. The captives could neither go up nor go back down, and the screams echoed from amidst the flames.
One time, several Japanese suddenly charged into a butcher shop. They captured a young man, ordered him to remove his clothing, and poured acid all over his body from head to toe. Immediately, his body was burned. In order to speed up his death, the youth began cursing indignantly at the Japanese. From behind the young man, the Japanese followed along raising a clamor and enjoying themselves. They forced the young man to walk around until he died. There were some other Japanese who tied up a group of about 100 captives. They divided them up, gouged out their eyes, cut off their noses and ears, and then used gasoline to burn them to death.
Even worse than this incident, one time a group of Japanese gang raped a middle-aged woman. Later, when they discovered that the woman was pregnant, they wantonly cut open her stomach, pulled out the foetus, and used it as a plaything. Laughing, they carried their toy out onto the street where they ran into a Japanese officer. They brandished the foetus, which was pierced onto one of their bayonets, in front of the officer causing him to let out a chuckle.
It is impossible to say how many hundreds or thousands of cases of these sorts of savage killing games actually occurred. The instances described here are only a very few examples.
