33 Disturbing Photos Of The Second Sino-Japanese War That Reveal Why China Is World War II’s Forgotten Victim
With as many as 20 million dead, China suffered more casualties during World War II than any other country except the Soviet Union.
The Start Of The Second Sino-Japanese War
Manchuria, with its abundant resources and strategic location in between Japan and the Soviet Union, was the perfect place to start an Imperialist campaign. And so, with no other excuse than a harmless bomb planted by one of their own men, Japan attacked.
The invasion began in Mukden on the morning of Sept. 19, 1931, and, before nightfall, the city was captured. The Chinese were caught completely off-guard by the invasion and five hundred men were killed.
It only took five months for the Japanese armies to sweep through Manchuria. China, at the time, was locked in a turbulent internal conflict, and there was little they could do to rally against the more powerful Japanese invaders.
It would be another eight years until the rest of the world went into war. Until then, the Chinese would be all but on their own during the Second Sino-Japanese war.
Unit 731
Nearly as soon as Manchuria was under their control, the Japanese began to perform human experiments on their Chinese victims.
Japanese Surgeon General Shirō Ishii was fascinated by the use of chemical warfare in World War I, and he was determined to make chemical weapons the key to Japanese victory in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
By 1932, he’d already set up a precursor to what would later be known at Unit 731. He established a lab for human experimentation just outside of Harbin, a place where – in his own words – unsuspecting Chinese test subjects “could be plucked from the streets like rats.”
Some had every drop of blood drained out of their bodies while Japanese doctors watched, taking careful notes about how their bodies deteriorated. Others were injected with plagues to observe how they died or vivisected so that the scientists could examine their internal organs while they were still alive.
Nobody shut Ishii down. Instead, his project was expanded into Unit 731 by August 1940. Human test subjects were injected with cholera, typhoid, and the bubonic plague, while others were left out in the cold so that they could watch how the frostbite killed them.
Others were just abused. Members of Unit 731 have recounted violent rapes of the women kept there, as some of the women were deliberately raped to impregnate them or infect them with venereal diseases so that the scientists could experiment on them.
Any children born in Unit 731 were subjected to horrifying experiments. Not a single one survived.
The Beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War
By some counts, the Second Sino-Japanese War began with the invasion of Manchuria. Others, though, put the beginning at July 7, 1937, when the fighting hit full swing.
The instigator into full-out war has been hailed the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, when a Japanese soldier, Private Shimura Kikujiro, disappeared from his post there. The Japanese demanded permission to march their troops into the Chinese town on Wanping, and when they refused, the put the town under siege.
The Rape Of Nanking
Between Dec. 13, 1937, and Jan. 30, 1938, Japanese forces rounded up, tortured, and murdered up to 300,000 Chinese civilians and surrendered soldiers.
Comfort Women And The Genocide of Hui Muslims
The Hui Muslims of China were nearly completely eradicated during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Their extermination was an official policy of the Japanese army. As the Japanese marched into China, they burned down the mosques and massacred the Hui Muslims by the thousands.
Every desecration imaginable was pushed on them. Mosques were smeared with pork fat; Hui Muslims were forced to butcher pigs; and Hui girls were forced to become “comfort women” – prostitutes regularly raped by the Japanese soldiers.
It wasn’t just Hui women who were forced into prostitution. Up to 400,000 women were abducted from their homes, violently raped, and forced to follow the army around as comfort women, being violently brutalized every day.
The Aftermath
In time, the tides of war turned. The Second Sino-Japanese War erupted into the full-fledged World War, and with the help of the Allied nations of the world, China was able to fight the Japanese invaders off of their soil.
But few in the West know about the horrors the Chinese endured. Every schoolboy learns about the Holocaust and the Blitzkrieg in Poland, but Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanking are rarely taught in schools outside of China.
When the Second Sino-Japanese War ended, the United States government granted Shirō Ishii and the men behind Unit 731 complete immunity.
Unit 731 had been one of the worst war crimes in history, but the American government was too interested in their research to shut them down. They made a deal with Japan, demanding exclusive access to everything they’d learned on biological warfare, and giving them complete freedom in return.
To this day, the horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese War are still downplayed. Textbooks are still printed in Japan that do not fully describe the horrors of the Rape of Nanking or even go so far as to deny it ever happened altogether.
But while reparations have been made or attempted in other corners of the world, the horrors the Chinese faced continue to be largely ignored.
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