The Rape Of Nanking (21 page)

To cover up the nauseating details of their military outrages, the Japanese even impeded the return of foreign diplomats to Nanking. But in the end they proved unsuccessful in hiding the truth—especially from the Germans and the Americans.

Hitler's government soon learned the Japanese motives for the delay. “The assumption I made in my previous report that the
Japanese delayed our return in order to have no official witnesses of the atrocities has been confirmed,” a German diplomat reported to Berlin in January. “Once the intention of the foreign representatives to return to Nanking had been made known, according to Germans and Americans who were there, there were feverish cleanup efforts undertaken to remove the evidence of the senseless mass murders of civilians, women and children.”

The American government also knew what the Japanese were trying to hide. A machine cipher had protected the Japanese Foreign Office's high-level diplomatic messages, but by 1936 cryptanalysts from the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service had cracked the Japanese code, which the Americans dubbed “RED.” American intelligence was thus able to intercept and read secret messages between the Japanese leadership in Tokyo and their representatives in Washington, D.C., during the Rape of Nanking. On December 26, 1937, Foreign Minister Hirota Koki sent one such message to Japanese Ambassador Saito Hirosi in Washington; it emphasized the need to stonewall the American embassy staff to prevent their immediate return to Nanking. “If they do return and receive unfavorable reports on the military's activities from their own nationals and if the diplomats, on receipt of such complaints, forward the reports to their home countries, we shall find ourselves in an exceedingly disadvantageous position,” the message read. “We believe, therefore, that the best policy is to do our utmost to hold them here as long as possible. Even if this should cause some hard feeling, we believe that it would be better than running the risk of a clash on the scene.”

But the U.S. government did not disclose to the public what it knew at the time and even contributed to Japanese censorship of the truth. For example, Norman Alley, the Universal newsreel man, had shot fifty-three hundred-foot rolls of movie film of the Japanese attack on the
Panay,
but before the film was released to the theaters, President Roosevelt asked him to excise some thirty feet of film that revealed several Japanese bombers shooting at the gunboat at nearly deck level. Alley agreed, even though those thirty feet were probably the best
images in the entire film and certainly the most damning to the Japanese government. Hamilton Darby Perry, author of
The Panay Incident,
believes that Roosevelt wanted to give credence to the Japanese excuse that the attack was a case of mistaken identity, not deliberate design. No doubt the U.S. government was anxious to reach a financial and diplomatic settlement with the Japanese over the bombing and knew that those thirty feet of film would have made such a settlement impossible.

Japanese attempts to influence public opinion were nothing new. Even before the Rape of Nanking, the American intelligence community had seen the Japanese plans, marked “utmost secrecy,” to spread favorable propaganda of themselves in the United States. The Japanese government also had a large budget for wooing influential newspaper men, advertising in major newspapers and radio stations, and printing pamphlets and leaflets.

But during the Rape of Nanking the Japanese faced a public relations disaster so titanic it seems almost ridiculous today that they even tried to cover it up. Instead of bringing a measure of discipline to their forces in Nanking, the Japanese marshaled together their resources to launch a blitz of propaganda, which they hoped would somehow obscure the details of one of the greatest bloodbaths of world history.

The Japanese media first proclaimed that all was well and good in the city of Nanking. On December 20, Robert Wilson heard that Domei, the Japanese news agency, had reported that the Nanking population was returning home and everything was normal. “If that is all the news coming out of Nanking, it is due for a big shake up when the real news breaks,” Wilson wrote.

Then the Japanese government authorized carefully prepared tours of the city for Japanese visitors. A week after the Domei report, a Japanese merchant ship arrived in Nanking from Shanghai, crowded with Japanese sightseers. “Carefully
they were herded through the few streets now cleared of corpses,” George Fitch wrote of the visit. “Graciously they passed sweets to Chinese children and patted their frightened heads.” A number of ladies accompanied Japanese business representatives on a tour of the city, and Fitch observed that they seemed “tremendously pleased with themselves, also with Japan's wonderful victory, but of course they hear nothing of the real truth—nor does the rest of the world, I suppose.”

In January Japanese newsmen came to Nanking to stage pictures of the city for distribution throughout Japan and the rest of the world. On New Year's Eve the Japanese embassy called together the Chinese managers of the refugee camps for a meeting and told them that “spontaneous” celebrations were to be held in the city the next day. The Chinese were ordered to make thousands of Japanese flags and carry them about in a parade for a motion picture that would illustrate crowds of joyful residents welcoming Japanese soldiers. Japanese photographers also came to Nanking to take pictures of Chinese children receiving medical care from a Japanese army doctor and candy from Japanese soldiers. “But,” Lewis Smythe wrote in a letter to his friends, “these acts were not repeated when no camera was around!”

The rankest example of Japanese propaganda was an article that appeared on January 8, 1938, in the
Sin Shun Pao,
a Japanese-controlled newspaper in Shanghai. Under the headline “The Harmonious Atmosphere of Nanking City Develops Enjoyably,” the article claimed that “the Imperial Army entered the city, put their bayonets into their sheaths, and stretched forth merciful hands in order to examine and heal,” giving the starving and sick masses in Nanking medical aid and food.

Japanese attempts to gloss over the entire massacre with hokum provoked incredulous responses in the surviving missionary diaries. Here are a few samples:

 

From the diary of James McCallum, January 9, 1938:

From the diary of George Fitch, January 11, 1938:

From the diary of George Fitch, reprinted in
Reader's Digest
:

From a letter written by Lewis Smythe and his wife on March 8, 1938:

Leaflets were another form of Japanese propaganda. During the mass executions Japanese army planes inundated the Nanking population with messages dropped from the air; for example: “All good Chinese who return to their homes will be fed and clothed. Japan wants to be a good neighbor to those Chinese not fooled by monsters who are Chiang Kai-shek's soldiers.” The leaflets displayed colorful pictures of a handsome Japanese soldier holding a Chinese child (“Christ-like,” as one observer put it) in his arms, with a Chinese mother at his feet bowing her thanks for bags of rice. According to George Fitch, thousands of Chinese actually left the refugee camps for their ruined homes the day the leaflets were dropped.

The Japanese also pasted bright, colorful posters on or near houses in which tragedies had occurred. One featured a Japanese soldier carrying a small child while giving a bucket of rice to his mother and sugar and other food to the father. A German diplomatic report described the poster as depicting “a charming, lovable soldier with cooking implements in hand who carries on his shoulder a Chinese child whose poor but honest Chinese farming parents gaze up at him (the soldier) full of thankfulness and family happiness, up to the good uncle.” The writing on the upper right corner said: “Return to your homes! We will give you rice to eat! Trust and rely on the Japanese army, you can get help!”

At the same time the Japanese hosted glamorous receptions and media events in Nanking and Shanghai to divert attention away from the atrocities. In early February a Japanese general invited foreign diplomatic representatives to a tea at the Japanese embassy in Nanking. He boasted that the Japanese army was world-renowned for its discipline, and that not a single violation against discipline had occurred during the Russo-Japanese War and Manchurian campaign. The general said that if for some reason the Japanese had committed outrages in Nanking, it was only because the Chinese people had resisted
them under the instigation of foreign nationals, meaning, of course, the International Safety Zone Committee. But oddly enough, in the same speech the general contradicted his previous statements by admitting that Japanese soldiers had vented their anger upon the population because they had found nothing edible or usable during their advance on Nanking.

The Japanese media circus, however, failed to fool the foreign diplomatic community about the arson, rape, and murder that raged through Nanking. In mid-February the Japanese held a military concert in Shanghai, complete with geishas and press photographers. A German diplomat observed, however, that while the gala affair was taking place, “a mother of an 11-year-old girl who did not want to release the young girl to rape by the soldiers was burnt down with her house.”

The International Safety Zone Committee did all it could to fight the barrage of propaganda. During the first few days of the massacre the zone leaders enlisted the aid of American foreign correspondents like Frank Tillman Durdin, Archibald Steele, and C. Yates McDaniel. But after their departure, the International Committee was left to its own devices. The Japanese government barred other reporters, like Max Coppening of the
Chicago Tribune,
from entering Nanking, and the behavior of the Japanese soldiers grew worse when they realized that their actions would not be observed by the world media.

But the Japanese government underestimated the ability of the International Committee to wage its own publicity campaign. One distinguishing trait that united the zone leaders was their superior training in the verbal arts. Almost without exception, they were eloquent writers and speakers. The missionaries, educated at the best universities in America and Europe, had devoted most of their adult years to delivering sermons, writing papers, and working the Christian lecture circuit; some of the professors on the committee had written books. Moreover, as a group they were sophisticated about
working with the media; long before the fall of Nanking they had enjoyed broadcasting speeches over Nanking radio or penning articles about China for the popular press. Finally, the missionaries had an additional advantage the Japanese did not foresee: they had spent their entire lives contemplating the true meaning of hell. Having found one in Nanking, they wasted no time in describing it for the world public. Their hard, cogent prose recaptured the terror that they witnessed: