The origins of the global conflict that became known as World War II did not breakout in Europe.

The origins of the global conflict that became known as World War II did not breakout in Europe. Instead, the embers of this worldwide conflagration were first sparked in Asia. In September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army sabotaged a railroad line in northeastern China in a campaign to take over the resource-rich and geographically strategic Manchuria. Four months later, Japanese planes bombed the Chinese city of Shanghai. The next signal moment occurred on July 7, 1937, when Japanese troops clashed with Chinese defenders on the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing, initiating a full-scale invasion. For the next 8 years, huge swaths of China were occupied by Japanese troops, and before the contest ended, historians estimate that as many as 20 million Chinese died. The events of the early Japanese invasion culminated in 1937 in what became known as the Rape of Nanjing, which set the tone for the brutality that would sweep up millions of noncombatants across the globe over the next eight years in a world wide war.

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The path from the earliest Japanese aggression in Manchuria to the gates of Nanjing six years later can be traced through the brief life of a young Chinese soldier, Yang Dapeng, and his family. Dapeng was born in 1915 a few miles from the South Manchuria Railway. He was the second of three sons. When his father died of tuberculosis, his mother moved the family to their grandfather’s home in Faku. Dapeng and his younger brother Shu-Chin attended schools in Shenyang. Late one night, cannon fire woke the boys in their dorms. It was September 18, 1931, and the Japanese had commenced their attack on Manchuria. In the morning, the boys went to their aunt’s house, where they saw Japanese troops on horseback ordering Chinese civilians around. The boys made their way safely through back alleys, becoming among the first civilian witnesses to an act of territorial aggression that would put the world on its path to World War II.

This experience deepened Dapeng’s determination to defend his country. In 1934, he applied and was accepted into the Whampoa Military Academy in Nanjing. He was one of only 650 successful applicants out of more than 10,000. Convinced that war with Japan was inevitable, he became noted for his skills as a writer and orator who passionately advocated China’s defense. Dapeng graduated on August 13, 1937 - a date that marked the beginning of the Japanese assault on the city of Shanghai. Soon afterward, he was sent to defend Shanghai. He then fought alongside Nationalist Chinese forces as the Japanese drove up the Yangtze River toward Nanjing. In the following weeks, Dapeng was promoted to second lieutenant. He also had a chance meeting with his brother Shu-Chin on a railway car at Jiujiang, where he reassured Shu-Chin that his spirit was unbroken despite the physical hardships. It was the last time the two brothers ever saw each other.

Dapeng was killed defending the Zhongshan Gate in the city wall of Nanjing on December 12, 1937. His body was never recovered. Shu-Chin later found out that as Chinese forces fell apart, Dapeng refused to don civilian clothes to escape the Japanese. The next day, the Japanese Kwantung Army entered Nanjing, China’s southern capital, as conquerors.

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As the Japanese approached the city in November 1937, the foreign community in Nanjing organized an International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone to provide refuge to civilians. These brave expatriates who chose to stay in the city reasoned that as foreign nationals, the Japanese would not wish to harm them, and they could use their privileged positions to aid their Chinese neighbors. The International Committee also documented the looting, rape, murder, and destruction within Nanjing that the Japanese engaged in for seven weeks. American physician Robert Wilson bore special witness to these events. He treated Chinese patients and heard their stories of rapes and massacres taking place in the city. Throughout the rampage, Wilson wrote letters to his family back in the United States. Though he could not mail them at the time, the letters provide a running eyewitness account to the horrors of life under Japanese occupation.

In a letter dated December 14, 1937, Wilson wrote that an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 refugees were crammed into the city’s safety zone. One problem was that many thousands of Chinese troops had tossed their uniforms to try to blend into the mass. However, the Japanese were not fooled. They sought out young Chinese men and took them to peripheral areas around the city for mass executions. 

Wilson was one of only three doctors who could perform surgeries, and he refused to take breaks or days off. He reported that he performed 11 medical operations in a single day, and then 10 the next day. “The slaughter of civilians is appalling,” he wrote that day. “I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief.” Three days later on December 18, Wilson wrote, “Today marks the sixth day of the modern Dante’s Inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape. Murder by the wholesale, and rape by the thousands of cases. There seems to be no stop to the ferocity, lust, and sadism of the brutes.” Wilson’s reference to Dante’s Inferno, and its descending depths of hell, is an apt metaphor. His letters over the following weeks reveal an unending flow of terror and grief about the realities of life under Japanese occupation.

Two days later, on December 23, Wilson reported that when the International Committee negotiated with the Japanese to get a disabled power plant back online, the committee discovered that the Japanese had shot 43 of the 54 Chinese plant workers for no reason, leaving no one to operate the plant. The next day, on Christmas Eve, Wilson wrote that he’d lent a friend a camera to document a trench the Japanese had filled with executed and wounded soldiers. When the tomb-like trench was not piled high enough for the tanks to drive over, neighborhood civilians were rounded up and executed to fill it.

Three days after Christmas, Wilson wrote that the Japanese promised before members of the International Committee that Chinese soldiers would not be harmed if they came forward from the safety zone. And yet, when 200 Chinese soldiers did so, the Japanese took them outside the city and used them for bayonet practice.

The mass slaughter and rape continued in the city for weeks. It’s widely agreed that over 260,000 Chinese were killed in the massacre by Japanese troops during this period. The brave Dr. Robert Wilson had front row tickets to what the fate of Nanjing portended for the world’s future.

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For the Japanese, their occupation of China was a short-lived moment of euphoria. To the larger world, the “Rape" of Nanjing - as it was immediately called - turned public opinion against Japan in a way that little else could have. The reputation for ruthlessness and fanaticism that the Japanese acquired meant that no quarter would be given to them when they spread the war across the Pacific to the United States and its allies. Some Japanese leaders hoped that the fall of Nanjing meant that the Chinese Nationalist government would be forced to make peace, but they fought on under Chiang Kai-shek. What happened within the walls of that old city stiffened Chinese determination to recover Nanjing and to expel the invaders. In April 1938, the Nationalists won a battle at Tai’erzhuang that broke the image of the Imperial Japanese Army as invincible. As at Nanjing, the Chinese people were brutalized. But their spirit of resistance and sacrifice against the Japanese would never waver. The Chinese government retreated, regrouped, and ultimately outlasted Japan in a war that continued until 1945. In those eight years, Japan would occupy Nanjing and set up a government of Chinese collaborators, but it would never rule with confidence or legitimacy, and it could never force China's surrender.