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Text 2
Exercises
From G. A. Fitch's
Diary
Rec'd in N.Y. 2-18-38
Confidential
Not
for publication
Nanking, China, Christmas Eve,1937
What
I am about to relate is anything but a pleasant story；
in fact it is so very unpleasant that I cannot recommend anyone
without a strong stomach to read it. For it is a story of
such crime and horror as to be almost unbelievable, the story
of the
of a horde of degraded criminals of incredible bestiality,
who have been, and now are, working their will, unrestrained,
on a peaceful, kindly, law-abiding people. Yet it is a story
which I feel must be told, even if it is seen by only a few.
I cannot rest until I have told it, and unfortunately, or
perhaps fortunately, I am one of a very few who are in a position
to tell it. It is not complete for it is only a small part
of the whole； and God alone knows when it will be finished.
I pray it may be soon － but I am afraid it is going to go
on for many months to come, not just here but in other parts
of China. I believe it has no
in modern history.
It is now Christmas Eve.
I shall start with, say, December 10th. In these two short
weeks we here in Nanking have been through a siege； the Chinese
army has left, defeated, and the Japanese has come in. On
that day Nanking was still the beautiful city we were so proud
of, with law and order still prevailing； today it is a city
laid waste, ravaged, completely looted, much of it burned.
Complete
has reigned for ten days － it has been a hell on earth. Not
that my life has been in serious danger at any time； though
turning lust-mad, sometimes drunken soldiers out of houses
where they were raping women is not perhaps altogether a safe
occupation； nor does one feel too sure of himself when he
finds a
at his chest or a revolver at his head and know it is handled
by someone who heartily wishes him out of the way. For the
Japanese are anything but pleased at our being here after
having advised all foreigners to get out. They wanted no observers.
But to have to stand by while even the very poor are having
their last possessions taken from them － their last coin,
their last bit of bedding (and it is freezing weather), the
poor
man his rickshaw； while thousands of disarmed soldiers who
had sought sanctuary with you, together with many hundreds
of innocent civilians are taken out before your eyes to be
shot or used for bayonet practice and you have to listen to
the sound of the guns that are killing them； while a thousand
women kneel before you crying hysterically, begging you to
save them from the beasts who are preying on them； to stand
by and do nothing while your flag is taken down and insulted,
not once but a dozen times, and your own home is being looted；
and then watch the city you have come to love and the
to which you have planned to devote your best years deliberately
and systematically burned by fire － this is a hell I had never
before ,
but hell it is none the less.
We keep asking ourselves,
"How long can this last?" Day by day we are assured
by the officials that things will be better soon, that "we
will do our best", － but each day has been worse than
the day before. And now we are told that a new division of
20 000 men are arriving. Will they have to have their toll
of flesh and loot, of murder and rape? There will be little
left to rob, for the city has been well nigh stripped clean.
For the past week the soldiers have been busy loading their
trucks with what they wanted from the stores and then setting
fire to the building. And then there is the
realization that we have only enough rice and flour for the
200 000 refugees for another three weeks and coal for ten
days. Do you wonder that one wakes in the night in a cold
sweat of fear and sleep for the rest of the night is gone?
Even if we had food enough for three months, how are they
going to live? They cannot continue much longer in their present
terribly crowded condition； disease and pestilence must soon
follow if they do.
Every day we call at the
Embassy and present our protest, our appeals, our lists of
reports of violence and crime. We are met with suave Japanese
courtesy, but actually the officials there are powerless.
The victorious army must have its rewards － and those rewards
are to plunder, murder, rape at will, to commit acts of unbelievable
brutality and savagery on the very people whom they have come
to protect and befriend, as they have so loudly proclaimed
to the world. In all modern history surely there is no page
that will stand so black as that of the rape of Nanking.
To tell the whole story
of these past ten days or so would take too long. The tragic
thing is that by the time the truth gets out to the rest of
the world it will be cold － it will no longer be "news".
Anyway the Japanese have undoubtedly been proclaiming abroad
that they have established law and order in a city that had
already been looted and burned, and that the down-trodden
population had received their
army with open arms and a great flag-waving welcome. However,
I am going to record some of the more important events of
this period as I have jotted them down in my little diary,
for they will at least be of interest to some of
my friends and I shall have the satisfaction of having a permanent
record of these unhappy days. It will probably extend beyond
the date of this letter, for I do not anticipate being able
to get this off for some considerable time. The
Japanese censorship will see to that. Our own Embassy
officials and those of other countries together with some
of the business men who went aboard the ill-fated "Panay"
and the Standard Oil boats and other ships just before the
capture of Nanking, confidently expecting to return within
a week when they left, are still (those who haven’t been killed or wounded
by Japanese bombs and machine guns) out on the river or perhaps
in one of the ports. We are
that it will be another fortnight before any of us is permitted
to leave Nanking. We are virtually prisoners here.
...
On Tuesday the 14th the Japanese
were pouring into the city － tanks, artillery, infantry, trucks.
The reign of terror commenced, and it was to increase in severity
and horror with each of the succeeding ten days. They were
the conquerors of China’s capital, the seat of the hated Chiang
Kai-shek government, they were given free reign to do as they
pleased. The proclamation on the handbills which airplanes
scattered over the city saying that the Japanese were the
only real friends of the Chinese and would protect the good,
of course, meant no more than most of their statements. And
to show their "sincerity" they raped, looted and
killed at will. Men were taken from our refugee camps in droves,
as we supposed at the time for labor － but they have never
been heard from again, nor will they be. A colonel and his
staff called at my office and spent an hour trying to learn
where the "6 000 disarmed soldiers" were. Four times
that day Japanese soldiers came and tried to take our cars
away. Others in the meantime succeeded in stealing three of
our cars that were elsewhere.
...
[On Wednesday, December
15] At
our staff conference that evening word came that soldiers
were taking all 1 300 men in one of our camps near headquarters
to shoot them. We knew there was a number of ex-soldiers
among them, but Rabe had been promised by an officer that
very afternoon that their lives would be spared. It was now
all too obvious what they were going to do. The men were lined
up and roped together in groups of about a hundred by soldiers
with bayonets fixed； those who had hats had them roughly torn
off and thrown on the ground, and then by the light of our
headlights we watched them march away to their doom. Not a
whimper came from that entire throng. Our hearts were lead.
Were those four lads from Canton who had trudged all the way
up from the south and yesterday
given me their arms among them, I wondered； or that all strapping
sergeant from the north whose disillusioned eyes as he made
the fatal decision still haunt me? How foolish I had been
to tell them the Japanese would spare their lives. We
had confidently expected that they would live up to their
promises, at least in some degree, and that order would be
established with their arrival. Little did we dream
that we should see such brutality and savagery as has probably
not been equaled in modern times. For worse days were yet
to come.
...
Friday, December 17. Robbery,
murder, rape continue .
A rough estimate would be at least a thousand women raped
last night and during the day. One poor woman was raped thirty-seven
times. Another had her five months infant deliberately smothered
by the brute to stop its crying while he raped her. Resistance
means the bayonet. And the hospital is rapidly filling up
with the victims of Japanese cruelty and barbarity. Bog Wilson,
our only surgeon, has hands more than full and has to work
into the night. Rickshaws, cattle, pigs, donkeys, often the
sole means of livelihood of the people, are taken from them.
...
Saturday, the 18th. At
breakfast Riggs, who lives in the Safety Zone a block away
but has his meals with us, reported that two women, one a
cousin of Wang Ding, our YMCA secretary, were raped in his
house while he was having dinner with us. Wilson reported
a boy of five years of age brought to the hospital after having
been stabbed with a bayonet five times, once through his abdomen；
a man with eighteen bayonet wounds, a woman with seventeen
cuts on her face and several on her legs. Between four and
five hundred terrorized women poured into our headquarters
compound in the afternoon and spent the night in the open.
Sunday the 19th. A day
of complete anarchy. Several big fires raging today, started
by the soldiers and more are promised. The American flag was
torn down in a number of places. At the American School it
was trampled on and the caretaker told he would be killed
if he put it up again. The proclamations placed on all American
and other foreign properties by the Japanese Embassy are flouted
by their soldiers, sometimes deliberately torn off. Some houses
are entered from five to ten times in one day and the poor
people looted and robbed and the women raped. Several were
killed in cold blood, for no apparent reason whatever. Six
out of seven of our sanitation squads in one district were
slaughtered； the seventh escaped, wounded, to tell the tale.
Towards evening today two of us rushed to Dr. Brady’s house
(he is away) and chased two would-be rapers out and took all
the women there to the University. Sperling is busy at this
game all day. I also went to the house of Douglas Jenkins,
of our Embassy. The flag was still there, but in the garage
his house boy lay dead. Another servant, dead, was under a
bed, both brutally killed. The house was in utter confusion.
There are still many corpses on the streets, all of them civilians
as far as we can see. The Red Swastika Society would bury
them but their truck has been stolen, their coffins used for
bonfires and several of their workers bearing their insignia
have been marched away.
...
(2 047 words)
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