Revolution and Civil War, episode 18

Nanjing

Chiang Kai-shek swears to defend his capital to the last, hands it to Tang Shengzhi, a former warlord general, and flies out before dawn on 7 December 1937; within a week Japanese troops are inside the walls, and for seven weeks they murder, rape and loot. The episode follows Tang, whose defence collapses as he flees, and John Rabe, a German businessman who leads the foreigners running a safety zone for Chinese refugees, with the American missionary teacher Minnie Vautrin beside him, and gives the death toll and its later denials real time, saying where the sources disagree on numbers and holding firm on what is not in doubt. It leans entirely on scholars.

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Transcript

Last time, Chiang Kai-shek threw the best of his army into a three month battle for Shanghai, and lost some 187,000 men killed and wounded. On the fifth of November 1937, three Japanese divisions landed unopposed on the shore of Hangzhou Bay, forty miles south of the city, behind his lines. Three days later he secretly ordered the retreat, choosing a long war of attrition over a quick decision. The man who had said in July that to lose one more inch of China's territory would be an unpardonable offence was now pulling his armies out of Shanghai, and the Japanese were coming on toward his own capital. This time, that capital. Before we start, a word of warning. It is a hard episode. I am going to tell it plainly, through the people who were there, and I am not going to dwell on horror for its own sake. But I am not going to look away from it either. It begins in the dark, a few days before the end. At four in the morning on the seventh of December 1937, Chiang Kai-shek rose and said his prayers. He was a Christian, a Methodist, and prayer and silent meditation began every day of his life. At five o'clock, he and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, left Nanjing by aeroplane. His wife had spent the autumn writing and broadcasting to the Americans in her perfect English, pleading China's case to a country that admired her and did not intend to fight. They took off from the airfield inside the walls, built on the ground where the palace of the Ming emperors had once stood. They flew south first, to Nanchang in Jiangxi province, and then on to Lushan. His diary for those days says that the situation left him broken-hearted. Yet even then he was planning: education, mobilisation, a war that would go on. Foreign help, he reckoned, would come, but only after about three years of hard struggle by China on its own. It would take longer than that. For four days after he left, he lay prostrate with fever, and he wrote that his spirit had not recovered. And there is one thing his diary does not record in the days after he left: any thought at all about what might be happening in the capital behind him. Why leave? Because he was not just the leader of the government; he was its commander in chief, and the next great defence, of the river city of Wuhan, would need him. So the leader flew out before dawn, and the general stayed behind with the soldiers and the people. Keep both of those pictures in mind. And there was one more thing he had been weighing in those last days in the capital. Through the autumn, Germany's ambassador to China, Oskar Trautmann, had been carrying peace terms back and forth between Tokyo and Nanjing. Germany was friendly with both sides, and wanted the war stopped. On the second of December, with the Japanese closing in, Chiang met Trautmann in Nanjing and agreed to talk on the basis of Japan's terms, so long as north China stayed Chinese. It came to nothing. Once Nanjing fell, Japan raised its demands, and the door closed. So the question this episode keeps asking is a simple one. Who was left behind in Nanjing, and what happened to them? We will follow two men to answer it. One was a Chinese general who swore to defend the city to the death. The other was a German businessman who never meant to defend anything except his own household, and ended up sheltering a city.

To answer it, we go back a few weeks, to the end of November. Nanjing had been the capital of the Nationalist government for ten years. It was a walled city on the south bank of the Yangtze, its great Ming dynasty wall running for more than twenty miles around it, with the river on one side and the Purple Mountain on the other. The Ming was the dynasty that ruled China from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, and Nanjing had been its first capital. In ten years Chiang's government had remade it. It had laid out broad new avenues lined with trees, put up ministries in a modern Chinese style with sweeping tiled roofs, and the city had grown to around a million people. Since August, Japanese bombers had come over Nanjing again and again. People dug shelters in their gardens, and in November the ministries began packing their files onto boats and leaving for the west. Those with money and somewhere to go left with them. Those without stayed. Chiang's question was whether to fight for it. Most of his commanders, and his chief German adviser, Alexander von Falkenhausen, thought that a stand at Nanjing would be an unnecessary sacrifice, with nothing to gain. The city was hard to defend. The river behind it would trap any army that stayed too long. But Chiang decided that Nanjing was more than a place on a map. It was the new capital, the site of Sun Yat-sen's tomb, and with its new buildings and wide avenues, it was the model of the China he meant to build. The government could not abandon it without a serious fight. Sun Yat-sen was the founding father of the republic and of Chiang's party, and his white and blue mausoleum on the slope of the Purple Mountain was the closest thing the new China had to a national shrine. Chiang wanted it clear that the capital had died hard, and that its troops had fought to the last man. So he swore to defend Nanjing to the last. Then he looked for someone to do it. The man who stepped forward was Tang Shengzhi. Tang was a general from Hunan, a former warlord who had marched with Chiang on the Northern Expedition in 1926, at the head of an army of his own. His troops had taken Changsha and Wuhan, and for a few months in 1927 he was one of the most powerful men in China, and Chiang's rival. In 1927 the struggle between Tang and Chiang was fierce enough that Moscow changed its plans in China because of it. Tang lost that struggle, fled to Japan for a time, came back, turned against Chiang again, and lost again. He was a devout Buddhist, proud and touchy, and in 1937 he held a senior post in Chiang's military council without much of an army to command. At a council of war in November, when the other generals said the city could not be held, Tang spoke up and offered to defend it, and to live or die with Nanjing. He told the newspapers the same. The capital would be held, he said, and he would live or die with it. To show that he meant it, he had the boats along the riverbank taken away or moved to the far shore, so that no unit could slip across the Yangtze without orders. Hold on to that decision. It would come back to haunt him. Why would Chiang hand his capital to a man who had turned against him before? Because Tang volunteered, and because Chiang wanted his commanders' loyalty and willingness to fight tested in public. In effect, he was being asked to carry out a suicide mission, or else be publicly disgraced. And the troops he was given were not Chiang's best. Chiang's way of fighting this war meant putting less well trained troops into hopeless positions, and Nanjing was one of them. He had perhaps a hundred thousand men or more, many of them raw recruits, others the exhausted remnants of divisions that had been shattered at Shanghai and had just walked two hundred miles under air attack. The best had already been spent at Shanghai. Chiang knew it. He kept what was left of his good divisions for the battles still to come, and Nanjing got what remained. Coming the other way was Iwane Matsui, the Japanese general who had taken Shanghai, now in command of the Central China Area Army. Matsui was an odd man to lead this army. He had known Sun Yat-sen, he talked of Japan and China as brothers who should stand together against the West, and he saw this war, in his own mind, as an older brother disciplining a younger one. Matsui issued a warning to the Chinese government. Unless it changed its attitude and stopped resisting, his armies would march on Nanjing, and then on to Hankou and Chongqing. Hankou was the river port at the heart of Wuhan, where Chiang's command was moving. Chongqing was the city far up the Yangtze where his ministries were going. Matsui was ill that December, and when his armies reached the capital the officer in command on the spot was his deputy, Prince Asaka, a member of Japan's imperial family. Asaka was the emperor's uncle by marriage. The Japanese armies had raced each other to the capital from Shanghai, two of them, side by side, each eager to be first. Many of their soldiers were reservists, older men with families, called up for a short campaign that had turned into a long and bloody one. They came on in columns from the east and the south, and by the end of the first week of December they were fighting for the hills and forts outside the walls. On the way, newspapers in Tokyo had cheered them on. One paper ran a story about two young lieutenants racing each other to be first to kill a hundred Chinese with their swords, and reported the score like a sporting contest. After the war, both men were tried in Nanjing and shot. On the sixth of December, the night before he flew out, Chiang wrote his own verdict on the city's chances. Japanese arms were superior, the Chinese forces were weak, and morale inside Nanjing had already been destroyed. So the man who had sworn to hold the capital to the last did not believe it could be held. He was asking for a gesture, a hard and bloody one, and he was leaving someone else to make it. The city emptied as the Japanese came closer. The mayor, Ma Zhaoqun, left on the seventh of December. And the next day, a German businessman in the city noted in his diary that he was now, in effect, the mayor of Nanjing. His name was John Rabe, and we will come back to him in a moment. On the tenth of December, a Chinese woman named Cheng Ruifang, the dormitory matron at Ginling College, a women's college in the city, watched the people of Nanjing on the move. "No cars," she wrote, "but men, women, old, and young were carrying everything themselves." Japanese planes had been bombing the city since the middle of August. At the first raid, many people had stood in the streets talking and laughing while the air fighting went on overhead, unaware of the danger. Outside the walls, the Chinese army was setting fire to whatever might be of value to the enemy. Tillman Durdin, the New York Times correspondent in Nanjing, wrote that "the Chinese burned nearly all suburbs, including fine buildings and homes in Mausoleum Park." The burning was meant to leave the attackers no cover. It also left thousands of families outside the walls with nothing, and sent them crowding into the city. On the ninth of December, Japanese planes dropped leaflets over the city from Matsui, calling on Tang to surrender by noon the next day and promising that civilians would be spared if he did. Tang did not answer. When the deadline passed on the tenth, the Japanese attacked. Then the Japanese reached the walls, and Tang's men fought. The fiercest fighting was on the hills south of the city and at its southern gates, and on the slopes of the Purple Mountain to the east, where the Japanese clawed their way up toward Sun Yat-sen's tomb. For two days they fought hard. Some 70,000 Chinese soldiers had already been killed trying to defend the city. On the evening of the twelfth of December, Tang decided that Nanjing could not be held. He ordered his divisions to break out through a gate in the city's northern wall and to abandon the capital to the Japanese. It was not an orderly retreat. Soldiers fled, looted as they went, and in some cases drowned in the Yangtze in their haste to escape. The order to break out did not reach every unit. Some divisions fought on at the walls not knowing that their commander had already decided to go. Others heard the news and simply dissolved. And now Tang's own order about the boats came back. There were almost none left on the riverbank, and tens of thousands of soldiers were trapped between the walls and the water. At the northern gate, the soldiers jammed together in a crush of men, carts and abandoned equipment, and many were trampled. Others threw away their uniforms and rifles and tried to pass as civilians. In the streets, a policeman tried to tear off his uniform, then fell over, his face white. And Tang Shengzhi himself? He left at night, in a small coal driven launch, chugging down a river full of civilians and soldiers clinging to whatever they could find. The general who had sworn to live or die with the city did neither. He got away. It is easy to despise him for it, and many Chinese did. But be fair to him for a moment. He had been given a job that his own commander thought could not be done, with second rate troops, in a city with a river at its back. The failure was not his alone. On the thirteenth of December, Nanjing fell. The matron wrote down the hour: at two in the afternoon, the Japanese army came in through the Shuixi gate. Tang's troops had fought hard. But when the Japanese came in to overrun the city and kill and rape its people, the army was not there.

Who was there? Hundreds of thousands of civilians, most of them too poor to get away. And a handful of foreigners who had decided to stay with them. Fewer than thirty Westerners remained in the city. The man they chose to lead them was John Rabe. Rabe was the representative in Nanjing of the German electrical company Siemens, a stocky, balding man in his fifties who had lived in China for some thirty years. He was also a member of the Nazi party. He had joined the party while living abroad, and he seems to have thought of it as a kind of workers' movement, a party of ordinary decent Germans. He knew very little about what it was doing at home. That last fact matters, in a strange way. Germany was Japan's friend, and a German, with a swastika armband on his sleeve, was a man a Japanese soldier might think twice about. Rabe had spread a huge swastika flag over the garden of his house as a sign to the Japanese bombers, and his Chinese staff and neighbours sheltered underneath it. Why did he stay? He could have left with the other Germans. But his Chinese employees and their families depended on him, and he wrote that he could not leave them. He kept a diary through all of it, a thick one, with photographs pasted in among the pages. Rabe and a few other foreigners who had stayed, among them a university professor, a missionary teacher and the head of the city's YMCA, decided that if the Japanese took Nanjing they would set up a safety zone. It would be neutral ground, and Chinese who sheltered there would be safe. They had a model. Only weeks before, in Shanghai, a French priest had talked both armies into sparing a refugee zone in the old Chinese city. The Nanjing zone took in a patch of the city's west, about one and a half square miles, around the American university and Ginling College. The committee that ran it was a small group of Germans, Americans, Britons and a Dane. Most of the Americans were missionaries, teachers at the university, and doctors and nurses at the university hospital. Two of its most tireless members taught at the American university, an American sociologist and an American historian. Between them they kept the records, wrote the protests and argued with the Japanese officers at the gates. One of the doctors, the American surgeon Robert Wilson, stayed on as the only surgeon left in the city, and operated almost without a break for weeks. The committee took over the government's rice stores, set up soup kitchens, and turned schools, offices and empty houses inside the zone into refugee camps. Chiang's government offered 100,000 dollars to support the zone. Only 40,000 dollars was ever paid. The Japanese never accepted it. They suspected it would hide Chinese soldiers. And Tang Shengzhi confirmed their fears, when he made it clear that Chinese troops would be stationed inside the zone. So the zone would never have the protection of a real agreement. It would have only what the foreigners could give it: their flags, their passports, their nerve, and their willingness to stand in front of a Japanese soldier and tell him to go away. Beside Rabe stood another foreigner whose name Nanjing remembers. Minnie Vautrin was an American missionary from Illinois, in her fifties, who had taught at Ginling College for nearly twenty years and was in charge of it now that its president and students had gone west. Ginling had been founded by American church women before the First World War, as one of the first colleges in China to give women university degrees. Its president, Wu Yifang, was one of the first Chinese women to graduate from a college at all. Vautrin had stayed behind with a few Chinese staff to look after the empty campus. Within days it was not empty. Like Rabe, she spread her country's flag on the ground, a huge American flag laid out on the college lawn, so that planes and soldiers alike would know whose property this was. At her college, the plan had been to admit no more than 2,700 people to the campus, but within days the number had ballooned. Within a week, more than 9,000 people were sleeping in the college's corridors. Families camped in classrooms, on stairs and verandas, on straw mats in the halls, with their bundles of clothes and their pots and whatever rice they had brought. Across the zone, the university's dormitories, libraries and lecture halls filled up the same way. Vautrin had to ration what food there was. The poorest refugees, who would get their rice free, had a red cloth tag sewn to their clothes. She kept a diary every day, as Rabe did, and wrote it up at night by lamplight after the gates were shut. The matron saw what crowding like that meant for the people in it. There were not nearly enough latrines. "They just do it anywhere," she wrote, "so there's excrement and urine everywhere." Not every refuge was inside the walls. Outside the city, at a cement works near the river, a Dane named Bernhard Sindberg and a German named Karl Gunther flew the flags of their countries over the gates and took in thousands of peasants from the countryside around. That was the zone at its best. It was about to be tested.

Before we go into the city, one thing happened out on the river. On the twelfth of December, the day Tang ordered the retreat, Japanese planes attacked an American gunboat on the Yangtze, upriver from Nanjing, and sank her. She was the USS Panay. The Panay had taken on American embassy staff and other foreigners leaving the city, and was escorting tankers of the Standard Oil company, all of them flying American flags. She lay at anchor upriver from the city, with large American flags spread flat on her awnings so that pilots could see them from the air. The attack killed three sailors and wounded forty-eight people. The Panay's captain was among the wounded. The planes came over in waves, bombing and then machine gunning the boats that carried the wounded to the shore, and the survivors hid in the reeds along the riverbank until it was over. It took the survivors days, hiding by the river and moving at night through the villages, before British and American ships picked them up. A newsreel cameraman on board filmed it, and within weeks Americans could watch the Panay going down in their own cinemas. That same day, further upriver, Japanese army guns fired on British gunboats on the Yangtze. Their commander was Kingoro Hashimoto, an ultranationalist colonel who was spoiling for a fight with the Western powers. Here was a moment that could have opened hostilities between Japan and the United States. Instead, the Japanese government took responsibility, said the attack had been unintentional, and quickly paid compensation of $2.2 million to the American government, and the confrontation was avoided. The Japanese navy said its pilots had taken the ships for Chinese vessels carrying fleeing troops. In Japan, ordinary people sent letters of apology and gifts of money to the American embassy in Tokyo. The government in Washington accepted the apology. The Japanese navy recalled the air commander responsible. It was a sign of how the world would treat this war for years to come. An American ship sunk on a Chinese river was a crisis to be closed quickly, with an apology and a cheque. A few weeks later, a poll found that most Americans wanted their country to pull its citizens and its gunboats out of China altogether, rather than risk a war over them. Americans had once gone to war over a sunken ship, crying remember the Maine. Nobody went to war over the Panay. And upriver from that sunken gunboat, the gates of Nanjing were open.

Early on the thirteenth of December 1937 the Japanese army entered Nanjing. What followed was so shocking that it still shapes the relationship between China and Japan. For the next six weeks, until the middle of January 1938, the soldiers of Japan's Central China Area Army carried out an unbroken spree of murder, rape and robbery. Nanjing was put through seven weeks of terror. On the seventeenth of December, Matsui rode into the city at the head of a victory parade. In Japan, crowds had already celebrated the fall of the enemy's capital with lantern processions in the streets. The next day, at a memorial service for the Japanese dead, Matsui is said to have rebuked his officers for the conduct of their troops. Whatever he said, the killing went on. The Japanese public read about a glorious victory. What happened in Nanjing's streets went unreported at home, under the army's censorship. I am going to tell you some of what the foreigners and the matron wrote down, as they wrote it, in the days it happened. Rabe needed workers and could not find any. In his diary he explained why: "The Japanese soldiers are completely out of control." The matron wrote, "In the streets, a lot of people have been bayoneted to death, even in the Safety Zone." Most of the dead, she noted, were young men. Young men were the ones the Japanese hunted first. Any man of fighting age might be a soldier who had thrown away his uniform, and so any man of fighting age might be taken away and shot. Soldiers checked the men's hands for the calluses a rifle leaves, and their foreheads for the mark of a helmet strap. A man with a labourer's hands or a sunburnt forehead could be marched away with the rest. And at the very top, at least one Japanese divisional commander, Kesago Nakajima, wrote in his diary on the day the city fell that his men were following a policy of taking no prisoners. Just after Christmas the Japanese set up public stages and called on former soldiers to come forward and confess. Over 200 did, and they were promptly killed. They had been told that they would be spared and put to work. After the war, the international tribunal in Tokyo found that 20,000 Chinese civilian men had been killed on the false grounds that they had been soldiers, and that 30,000 real soldiers had been killed and their bodies thrown into the river. Along the river north of the city, at the foot of a hill called Mufushan, Japanese units shot and bayoneted prisoners in their thousands over several days, and left the bodies on the bank and in the water. Sometimes Japanese soldiers made their Chinese prisoners dig their own graves before they killed them. George Ashmore Fitch, an American who ran the YMCA in Nanjing and helped run the zone, went to look at ponds a quarter of a mile from the committee's headquarters, and counted fifty corpses in them, civilians, with their hands tied. A man who survived, badly burned, said he had been one of a gang of about a hundred men, tied together, doused in gasoline and set on fire. The foreigners did what they could. Every day Rabe and the others drove or walked from one end of the zone to the other, pulling soldiers off women, standing in doorways, waving Rabe's swastika armband or an American passport. Again and again, Rabe came home to find Japanese soldiers in his own house or climbing his garden wall, and threw them out himself, shouting at them in German and pointing at his armband. He still believed, that winter, that if Hitler only knew what his Japanese friends were doing, he would put a stop to it. Every evening the committee typed up what its members had seen, case by numbered case, and sent the lists to the Japanese embassy. The embassy's diplomats were sympathetic, and almost powerless against their own army. And there were the women. On one night in December, Rabe wrote, "Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about a hundred girls at Ginling College alone." Japanese soldiers came over the walls of the college and through its gates, day and night, looking for women. When Vautrin told one group of soldiers that there were no Chinese troops hidden in her college, one of them, she wrote, "slapped me on the face", and then slapped her Chinese colleague, Mr. Li, very hard. While she and her colleagues were held at the front gate that night, other soldiers went in at the back and carried off a group of young women from the college. The filth that the matron had complained of turned into a kind of shield. She managed to save one girl from a Japanese soldier because the girl was in a part of the college where the ground was covered in excrement. On Christmas Eve, Japanese officers came to Ginling and demanded that Vautrin let them search for prostitutes among the refugees. She let them. They took twenty-one women away. Ask yourself what choice she had, with thousands of women behind her, and you begin to see what that Christmas was like. The refugees had a name for Vautrin by then. They called her the goddess of mercy. When someone asked the matron about Christmas, she said it was like a "holiday in hell." By Christmas Eve, some 600 people were camping in Rabe's own garden, under his flag. And there were small acts of courage that the matron set down with admiration. A brave old woman claimed three strangers as her own relatives, to save them from being taken away. Life went on, even there. In one week in the college, the matron noted, one baby died, and ten were born. By late January 1938, the random murders and rapes were growing fewer. By then the Japanese had set up a Chinese committee to run the city in their name, and they began to push the refugees out of the zone and back to the ruins of their homes. The foreigners got the story out in pieces. The American reporters left on the fifteenth of December, and their stories reached the world's newspapers within days. The first reports in America and Britain spoke of the killing of prisoners and civilians, and of bodies lying in the streets by the hundred. The stories ran for a few days, and then the news moved on. On his way out, as he waited to board a ship on the riverfront, the American reporter watched Japanese soldiers line some two hundred Chinese men up against a wall and shoot them, in a matter of minutes. An American missionary priest, John Magee, filmed what he could with a small movie camera, and Fitch smuggled the reels out to Shanghai sewn into the lining of his coat. Why did it happen? Few believe that there was a plan, laid in advance, to massacre the people of Nanjing. The Japanese troops had been enraged by how hard the Chinese had fought, and by how long it had taken to win at Shanghai. At the time, the Japanese themselves blamed a breakdown of discipline, among troops who were exhausted and hungry and suddenly found themselves in a relatively wealthy city. The Japanese armies had raced to Nanjing ahead of their supplies, and they had been told to live off the land. In practice, that meant taking what they wanted from the Chinese they found. And it was not only the city. In the villages and small towns of the countryside around Nanjing, the same things happened through that winter, far from any foreigner's diary. Durdin, one of the handful of reporters who covered the fall of the city, wrote, "The Japanese appear to want the horrors to remain as long as possible, to impress on the Chinese the terrible results of resisting Japan". If that was the aim, the atrocity had the opposite result. It hardened the Chinese will to resist. As the news spread across unoccupied China, carried by refugees, by the press and by word of mouth, Nanjing became a word that needed no explanation. It turned a war between governments into something far more personal, for millions of people who had never seen a Japanese soldier. Now, the numbers. And here I want to be careful, because the numbers have become a battlefield of their own. Here the sources disagree. The standard accounts estimate that 200,000 Chinese civilians were murdered in Nanjing and 20,000 women raped. The Chinese government holds that 300,000 is the correct figure, and other estimates range from the tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands. Chinese estimates of more than 400,000 civilians killed cannot be substantiated. Part of the problem is that nobody counted. The soldiers killed outside the walls, the men taken from the zone, the bodies burned or thrown into the river, were never listed, and the city's population that winter is itself only a guess. What counts there are come partly from the Chinese charities that buried the dead, among them the Red Swastika Society, a Buddhist charity whose emblem had nothing to do with the Nazis. Their burial records run to tens of thousands of bodies, and they never pretended to be complete. And part of the problem is politics. In Japan, from the 1970s on, a number of writers and politicians have called the massacre exaggerated, or invented, and Chinese governments have held to the highest figure as a matter of national honour. So hold on to what is not in doubt. After the city fell, Japanese soldiers killed prisoners of war by the tens of thousands, and civilians in huge numbers, and raped women and girls on a scale that the foreigners in the zone recorded day after day, as it happened. Those records were written at the time, by people who had no reason to invent them, and Japanese soldiers' own diaries and letters say the same. The argument is about how many. It is not about whether. I want to be clear about why I spend time on this. In the years since, the numbers have been used to win arguments that have nothing to do with the people in this story. The people in this story were real, and the matron, the teacher, the businessman and the reporter wrote them down. Today a memorial hall stands in Nanjing on the site of one of the mass graves, and since 2014 China has marked the thirteenth of December as a national day of remembrance. The Japanese government acknowledges that its army killed large numbers of non-combatants in Nanjing, and says it cannot know the true number. And what became of the people in this story? After the war, the tribunal in Tokyo found Iwane Matsui guilty of failing to stop the atrocities, and he was hanged in 1948. Prince Asaka, the man in command on the spot, was never charged. A Chinese war crimes court in Nanjing tried one of the divisional commanders, Hisao Tani, and he was shot in the city in 1947. Tang Shengzhi, who escaped down the river, lived on. After 1949 he stayed on the mainland and served the Communist government. John Rabe left Nanjing in February 1938. Back in Berlin he wrote a report on what he had seen and sent it to Hitler. The Gestapo arrested him, questioned him, and told him to keep quiet. He died poor in 1950. In Nanjing they remembered him as a living Buddha. After the war, when Berlin was starving, the people of Nanjing raised money and sent him food parcels. Minnie Vautrin stayed with her college for more than two years. Then she broke down, went home to America, and in 1941 she took her own life. Think about those two for a moment. Neither had any power at all except the colour of their skin, the passports in their pockets and the decision to stay. On that, a great many people hung their lives. And they were not alone. The men and women of that committee, the doctors who did not sleep, the teachers who stood at gates, saved lives by the thousand and wrote down what they saw, so that nobody could later say it never happened. And Chiang? His diary first mentions the killing and raping in Nanjing on the twenty-second of January 1938, more than five weeks after the city fell. "In Nanjing," he wrote, "the Japanese dwarfs have been killing and raping." Perhaps none of his subordinates had told him what had happened. That is hard to imagine, but not impossible. His government was on the move, his armies were in pieces, and the men around him were in the habit of bringing him the news he wanted. Either way, the silence in his diary is its own kind of record. He had left the city broken-hearted, but still planning to fight on. He had said that this war would not be decided in the capital, or in any other city, but in the countryside, by the will of the people. Now he had to prove it. In Tokyo, Japan's leaders had expected that when the capital fell, China would give up. That was how wars were supposed to end. It did not. Chiang's government moved up the river, the armies regrouped, and the war went on. And Nanjing itself would have a strange future. Within a little more than two years it would be a capital again, of a government set up under Japanese protection, and the man at its head would be one of Chiang's oldest comrades, Wang Jingwei. But that is for later. First, the war had to be fought, and in the spring of the new year China would finally have something to celebrate. Next time: the spring after, and a general from Guangxi who had once taken up arms against Chiang gives China a famous victory at a town on the Grand Canal called Tai'erzhuang. And then Japan comes on again, and Chiang makes the hardest choice of the whole war.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 174-175, 321-322
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 149-151, 151-152
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 305-306, 306-307, 307-310
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)