11. During the Nanjing Massacre, more than 200,000 surrendering Chinese were murdered by the Japanese, including thousands of POWs in brutal fashion
On December 13, 1937, the Japanese captured Nanjing, then-capital of the Republic of China. After disarming the surrendering population, approximately 200,000 Chinese prisoners were murdered by the occupying Japanese over a period of brutality lasting six weeks. As part of the “Rape of Nanjing“, Chinese soldiers were refused the quarter afforded to them under international law as prisoners of war. Stemming from “Riku Shi Mitsu No.198” – a directive issued on August 5 ordering Imperial Forces to no longer adhere to the restrictive term “prisoner of war” – the Japanese arrested and detained thousands of young men.
Transported to the Yangtze River, these POWs were murdered in what is believed to be the largest single massacre of Chinese soldiers. Taking more than an hour to shoot and bayonet the bound prisoners, the bodies of those killed in the “Straw String Gorge Massacre” were dumped into the river. A further 1,300 were taken to the Taiping Gate, where they were blown up with landmines, killed by bayonet, or coated in petrol and set alight. American correspondent F. Tillman Durdin reported that the streets were filled with the dead, whilst missionary Ralph L. Phillips testified after the war that he was “forced to watch while the Japs disemboweled a Chinese soldier” and “roasted his heart and liver and ate them”.