The Battle of Nanjing begins

On 1 December 1937 Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo issued an order that Japanese documents number 8 in the series of “continental orders” (Tairikumei): “The commander of the Central China Area Army, in cooperation with the navy, shall capture Nanjing, the capital of the enemy state.” On the same day order no. 7 gave that army a permanent order of battle. The Japanese high command, which only two weeks earlier had been forbidding its troops to advance more than a few dozen kilometres beyond Shanghai, thereby accepted a fait accompli: General Iwane Matsui’s divisions had long been marching on Nanjing without permission. On the other side, the city was to be defended by General Tang Shengzhi with an army made up of divisions bled white at Shanghai and hastily drafted recruits.

It is often said that on 1 December “the Battle of Nanjing began with an attack by Japanese troops on the city”. That is a simplification. On 1 December no one was yet storming the capital’s walls: the Japanese vanguards were then several dozen kilometres away, near Danyang, Jurong and on Lake Tai. The date is nevertheless well justified as the start of the battle, because on that day the formal decision to capture the Chinese capital was taken in Tokyo. The fighting for the outer defence line began on 4–5 December, the general assault on 10 December, and the city fell on 13 December. Some historians count the whole operation more broadly, from 11 November, when the Japanese set off in pursuit from Shanghai.

The road to the order

The war that broke out in July 1937 after the Marco Polo Bridge incident was, according to Tokyo’s plans, to remain a local “incident”. In August, however, Chiang Kai-shek opened a second front at Shanghai and threw in his best divisions, trained by German advisers. The Battle of Shanghai lasted three months and cost both sides enormous losses. It was decided only by the landing of General Heisuke Yanagawa’s Japanese 10th Army in Hangzhou Bay at the beginning of November, which threatened the entire Chinese force with encirclement. The Chinese began to retreat westwards in disorder.

On 7 November the Japanese combined the Shanghai Expeditionary Army and the 10th Army into the Central China Area Army under Matsui’s command. On the same day the General Staff set it an “operational restriction line” running through Suzhou and Jiaxing. The troops were not permitted to venture beyond it. The Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Hayao Tada, and some of the operations officers believed that Japan should end the war before it became bogged down in China, rather than chase the Chinese army into the interior. For the same reason Tokyo agreed to mediation by the German ambassador to China, Oskar Trautmann.

The commanders in the field thought otherwise. Even before leaving for Shanghai, Matsui had said that Nanjing had to be taken, because the fall of the capital would bring down Chiang’s government and end the war. On 15 and 19 November Yanagawa’s 10th Army set off in pursuit towards Nanjing on its own initiative, breaking through the restriction line. Tada ordered it to halt, but the order was ignored, and Matsui in practice backed Yanagawa. On 22 November he cabled Tokyo that the collapse of enemy morale must be exploited and Nanjing taken, because standing on the line would allow the Chinese to rebuild their forces. On 20 November Imperial General Headquarters (Daihon’ei), the supreme organ for the direction of the war, was set up in the Imperial Palace. On 24 November the restriction line was lifted. The head of the operations section, General Sadamu Shimomura, finally won over the wavering Tada, and Imperial General Headquarters issued the order of 1 December. According to some sources Tada brought it to Shanghai himself. It was sanctioned by imperial authority: continental orders were issued in the name of Emperor Hirohito.

Japan already knew this pattern from Manchuria, where in 1931 the Kwantung Army had also acted on its own initiative and Tokyo had approved its conquests after the fact. This time, however, the prize was not a peripheral province but the capital of China.

The Japanese forces

At the beginning of December the Central China Area Army numbered more than 160,000 men, and according to some Japanese tallies around 200,000. Some 70,000 soldiers took part in the fighting for Nanjing itself. The plan envisaged a great pincer movement. The Shanghai Expeditionary Army, with the 16th, 9th and 13th Divisions and parts of the 3rd and 11th, advanced from the east, along the Shanghai–Nanjing railway and the bank of the Yangtze. The 10th Army, with the 6th, 18th and 114th Divisions, struck from the south and south-east. The Kunisaki Detachment was to cross the Yangtze upstream of the city and take Pukou on the opposite bank, and the Yamada Detachment was to cross north of Nanjing. A naval flotilla was to sail upriver and close the last escape route. The Japanese called this “encirclement and annihilation”.

On 2 December, the day after the order was issued, command of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army was taken over by Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, a member of the imperial family: married to a daughter of Emperor Meiji, he was Hirohito’s uncle and at the same time the paternal uncle of Empress Nagako. Matsui, until then in command at both levels at once, remained at the head of the Area Army, but in the days of the decisive fighting he was ill and commanded mainly through written orders. The Japanese troops were worn out by three months of fighting, had outrun their own supplies and were living on what they took from the peasants. Division commanders raced one another to be first into Nanjing. Danyang was taken on 2 December, more than five days ahead of the planned schedule. Along the route from Shanghai they left behind burnt villages, murdered civilians and raped women, and Chinese soldiers taken prisoner were usually killed. Japanese newspapers at the time reported, as if it were a sporting event, a “contest” between two second lieutenants over which of them would be the first to cut down a hundred people with his sword.

The Chinese defence

The Chinese command argued over whether Nanjing should be defended at all. At meetings in mid-November He Yingqin, Bai Chongxi, Li Zongren and the chief German adviser, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, argued that the city could not be held. Gentle hills to the east and south made it easy to approach, and the broad Yangtze at the defenders’ backs cut off any retreat. The army needed time to recover after Shanghai. Chiang, however, believed that the capital must not be given up without a fight. He hoped that resistance would strengthen China’s position with the powers meeting in Brussels on the observance of the Nine-Power Treaty, and in the talks conducted through Trautmann. Tang Shengzhi was the only senior general to back him.

Tang had been a Hunanese warlord in the 1920s and an army commander during the Northern Expedition; he had later rebelled against Chiang several times and had not commanded in the field for years. In the second half of November he became commander of the capital garrison (sources date his appointment to anywhere between 20 and 26 November). He publicly declared that he would defend the city “to the last man”. On 20 November the government announced the transfer of the capital to Chongqing, and government offices and headquarters left for the interior, mainly for Wuhan. On 30 November Tang received orders from Chiang to hold the designated lines at all costs.

On paper Tang’s forces numbered thirteen divisions and a dozen or so regiments. They included three German-trained divisions (the 36th, 87th and 88th) and the elite Training Brigade. In reality almost all had been decimated at Shanghai. The German-trained divisions had 6,000–7,000 men each, about half of them newly called-up recruits. To these were added the Cantonese 66th and 83rd Corps, the 74th Corps, the 2nd Army sent from Hankou, the gendarmerie and the police. Historians estimate the total number of defenders variously: from around 70,000–80,000 (David Askew, Masahiro Yamamoto; the garrison staff officer Tan Daoping gave 81,000), through around 100,000 (Ikuhiko Hata), to around 150,000 including rear-echelon units (Tokushi Kasahara, Sun Zhaiwei).

The defence rested on two semicircles of fortifications. The outer line ran a dozen or so kilometres from the city; the inner one, called the Fukuo line, lay just in front of the walls. Its pillars were Zijin Mountain (Purple Mountain) to the north-east, site of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, and the Yuhuatai plateau to the south, in front of the Zhonghua Gate. Behind them stood the Ming-dynasty walls, more than 30 kilometres long and in places more than ten metres high. The gates were bricked up and banked with sandbags.

The situation on 1 December

The first day of December brought no fighting at Nanjing itself, but on the approaches the battle was already under way. On Lake Tai and near Guangde the Japanese 18th and 114th Divisions had spent the last days of November smashing the Sichuanese 23rd Army Group, which had to withdraw on 30 November. One of its division commanders, Rao Guohua, took his own life. On the Yangtze the 13th Division was assaulting the Jiangyin fortress, and on 1 December its defenders began to withdraw, in chaos and with heavy losses. Japanese aircraft attacked roads crowded with retreating soldiers and refugees unopposed. Before this, Nanjing had endured dozens of raids by naval aircraft, which Chinese fighters resisted ever more feebly, despite the help of Soviet volunteer airmen who were just arriving.

The city was emptying. Of its more than one million inhabitants, fewer than half a million remained, mostly the poorest and refugees from the countryside. A handful of foreigners, led by the German John Rabe, Siemens’s representative and a member of the NSDAP, set up the Nanking Safety Zone in the centre of the city, where civilians were to wait out the fighting. On 2 December Chiang received Trautmann and agreed to discuss the Japanese peace terms. On the morning of 7 December he flew out of Nanjing with his wife, Soong Mei-ling, and on the same day Tang ordered the burning of buildings on the approaches to deny the attackers cover.

What the following days brought

After 1 December the Japanese advanced faster than the plan had assumed. On 4–9 December they broke through the outer defence line at Chunhua, Tangshui and on the Jiangjun and Niushou hills. On 9 December they reached the walls, and aircraft dropped over the city Matsui’s call to surrender, with a deadline of noon the following day. Tang did not reply. On 10 December the general assault began on Purple Mountain, Yuhuatai and the Guanghua and Zhonghua Gates. On 11 December Chiang authorised a withdrawal, and on the evening of 12 December Tang issued the order to break out and crossed the Yangtze himself. Many units never received the order. The garrison disintegrated in panic at the Yijiang Gate and on the Xiaguan waterfront, where there were not enough boats. On 13 December the Japanese entered the city. What followed has gone down in history as one of the greatest war crimes of the 20th century.

Significance

The order of 1 December was the last moment at which Japan could have stopped. Tada and his supporters understood that the march on Nanjing would drag the country into an endless war, but they gave way to the army in the field, to their colleagues on the staff and to the mood at home. The decision confirmed that in the Japanese state of the 1930s field commanders could dictate policy to Tokyo, as they had in Manchuria in 1931 and near Beijing in July 1937.

Matsui believed that the fall of the capital would force Chiang to capitulate. The opposite happened. The government moved into the interior, and after the victory Tokyo hardened the peace terms passed on through Trautmann so much that China could not accept them. In January 1938 Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe announced that Japan would no longer deal with Chiang’s government. The war that Nanjing was supposed to end went on for another eight years and tied down the greater part of the Japanese army in China. Seeking a way to cut China off from outside help, Japan moved into Indochina in 1940, which led to the American embargo and ultimately to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

The crimes committed on the road to Nanjing and in the city itself gave the war in Asia a character that has survived in the memory of both nations to this day. For the Western world, which only days earlier in Brussels had failed to agree on any joint action against Japanese aggression, they were also proof that a policy of passive onlooking would not stop states ready to seize territory by force. Two years later the same lesson had to be learned in Europe.