Japanese Atrocities in Nanking

Writing about Japanese atrocities in her 1997 book The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang had this to say:

"Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000 - 80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls.

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people became routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.

"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of "bestial machinery."

Chang, who had since died, learnt that Japanese soldiers not only sliced babies in half but "in thirds and fourths", and that the Yangtze River ran red with blood for days.

Recounting the images that had compelled her to write the book so that "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II" would not be forgotten, Chang spoke of the black and white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open, and nude women forced by their rapists into various pornographic poses, "their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame."

Noting that the Japanese soldiers had degraded their victims and forced them "to expire in maximum pain and humiliation", Chang said she was suddenly seized by a panic "that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it."