December 13, 1937: The Nanjing Massacre

December 13, 1937: The Nanjing Massacre begins in the Chinese city of that name, then the capital of the Republic of China, known in the English-speaking world as Nanking. It was the Imperial Japanese follow-up to the brutal battle of Shanghai, which started the Second Sino-Japanese War, which is sometimes considered the start of the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Over 200,000 civilians were murdered, over a period of 6 weeks. There was also arson, looting, and mass rape of the city's women and girls, perhaps as many as 20,000 of those, leading to the actions being known as the time as "The Rape of Nanking."

Japan's actions in China were symbolized by a photograph taken by H.S. Wong on August 28, and appearing in the October 4, 1937 edition of Life magazine. Henry Luce, founder of Life, Time and Fortune (and, later, Sports Illustrated), had been born to Christian missionaries in China, and was obsessed with his birthplace, to the point where he tried to rally American support for its dictator, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, first against the Japanese, and, after World War II, against the Communist revolution of Mao Zedong.

In an article about the ongoing war, the picture showed a baby sitting in a bombed-out Shanghai train station. The child was screaming, and alone. Just out of the camera's range was the child's mother, dead. A moment later, an adult, whom Wong presumed to be the child's father, ran over and picked up him and carried him away.

Wong never found out the child's name, or what happened to him. (If, somehow, he survived, he would be 85 years old on December 13, 2022.)

The photo struck a nerve in Americans, in a way that 6 previous years of Sino-Japanese conflict hadn't. In this case, truly, a picture was worth far more than a thousand words.

It was as far as Wong was willing to go with his photos. He later recalled, "It was a horrible sight. Dead and injured lay strewn across the tracks and platform. Limbs lay all over the place. I stopped to reload my camera. I noticed that my shoes were soaked with blood."

H.S. Wong

As with "The Falling Soldier," the photo that had become a symbol of the Spanish Civil War the previous year, there were accusations that the photo was staged for propaganda purposes. The Japanese government put a $50,000 bounty on Wong. (A little over $1 million in 2022 money.) In spite of this, Wong kept clicking away, survived the war, and lived until 1981, age 81.

The battle before and the massacre after were ordered by Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, He was a cousin of Emperor Hirohito. After the defeat of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, as military governor, granted immunity to the entire imperial family. and so the Prince was never tried for war crimes, or what the Nuremberg Trials called "crimes against humanity." He lived until 1981.

*

December 13, 1937 was a Monday. Baseball was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. The NHL season was underway, but no games were scheduled. And the NFL Championship Game had been played the day before, with the Washington Redskins beating the Chicago Bears, 28-21 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. So there were on scores on this historic day.