Battle of Nanking

The Battle of Nanking (or Nanjing) was fought in early December 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War between the Chinese National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army for control of Nanjing (), the capital of the Republic of China.

Following the outbreak of war between Japan and China in July 1937, the Japanese and Chinese forces engaged in the vicious three-month Battle of Shanghai, where both sides suffered heavy casualties. The Japanese eventually won the battle, forcing the Chinese army into a withdrawal. Capitalizing on their victory, the Japanese officially authorized a campaign to capture Nanjing. The task of occupying Nanjing was given to General Iwane Matsui, the commander of Japan's Central China Area Army, who believed that the capture of Nanjing would force China to surrender and thus end the war. Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek ultimately decided to defend the city and appointed Tang Shengzhi to command the Nanjing Garrison Force, a hastily assembled army of local conscripts and the remnants of the Chinese units who had fought in Shanghai.

In a five-week campaign between November 11 and December 9, the Japanese army marched from Shanghai to Nanjing at a rapid pace, pursuing the retreating Chinese army and overcoming all Chinese resistance in its way. The campaign was marked by tremendous brutality and destruction, with increasing levels of atrocities committed by Japanese forces against the local population, while Chinese forces implemented scorched earth tactics to slow the Japanese advances.

Nevertheless, by December 9 the Japanese had reached the last line of defense, the Fukuo Line, behind which lay Nanjing's fortified walls. On December 10 Matsui ordered an all-out attack on Nanjing, and after two days of intense fighting Chiang decided to abandon the city. To prevent the Nanjing defenders from being surrounded and annihilated by the enemy, Chiang Kai-shek considered ordering a retreat at noon on the 11th. He then instructed Gu Zhutong, then in Jiangbei, to convey this message by phone to Tang Shengzhi. Gu instructed Tang to cross the river north that night and order the defenders to break out if necessary. Tang Shengzhi, having previously advocated for a firm hold, feared the potential liability of a sudden withdrawal. Therefore, he demanded that the Supreme Commander's intentions be clearly conveyed to the defending generals before any withdrawal could be allowed. Tang Shengzhi, a man of urgency, insisted on receiving Chiang Kai-shek's personal order before retreating. That evening, Chiang Kai-shek indeed telegraphed Tang Shengzhi: "If the situation cannot be sustained, you may retreat if necessary to regroup and prepare for a counterattack." Tang ordered his men to launch a concerted breakout of the Japanese siege, but by this time Nanjing was largely surrounded and its defenses were at the breaking point. Most of Tang's troops collapsed in a disorganized rout. While some units were able to escape, many more were caught in the death trap the city had become. By December 13, Nanjing had fallen to the Japanese.

Following the capture of the city, Japanese forces massacred Chinese prisoners of war, murdered civilians, and committed acts of looting, torture, and rape in the Nanjing Massacre. Though Japan's victory excited and emboldened them, the subsequent massacre tarnished their reputation in the eyes of the world. Contrary to Matsui's expectations, China did not surrender and the Second Sino-Japanese War continued for another eight years, leading to the surrender of Japan.

Background

Japan's decision to capture Nanjing

The conflict which would become known as the Second Sino-Japanese War started on July 7, 1937, with a skirmish at Marco Polo Bridge which escalated rapidly into a full-scale war in northern China between the armies of China and Japan. China, however, wanted to avoid a decisive confrontation in the north and so instead opened a second front by attacking Japanese units in Shanghai in central China. Intense fighting in Shanghai forced Japan's Army General Staff, which was in charge of military operations, to repeatedly reinforce the SEA, and finally on November 9 an entirely new army, the 10th Army commanded by Lieutenant General Heisuke Yanagawa, was also landed at Hangzhou Bay just south of Shanghai. On November 7 its de facto leader Deputy Chief of Staff Hayao Tada laid down an "operation restriction line" preventing its forces from leaving the vicinity of Shanghai, or more specifically from going west of the Chinese cities of Suzhou and Jiaxing. The city of Nanjing is roughly west of Shanghai. Matsui made clear to his superiors even before he left for Shanghai that he wanted to march on Nanjing. He was convinced that the conquest of the Chinese capital city of Nanjing would provoke the fall of the entire Nationalist Government of China and thus hand Japan a quick and complete victory in its war on China. When Tada discovered this the next day he ordered Yanagawa to stop immediately, but was ignored. Matsui made some effort to restrain Yanagawa, but also told him that he could send some advance units beyond the line. and a few days later on November 22 Matsui issued an urgent telegram to the Army General Staff insisting that "To resolve this crisis in a prompt manner we need to take advantage of the enemy's present declining fortunes and conquer Nanking ... By staying behind the operation restriction line at this point we are not only letting our chance to advance slip by, but it is also having the effect of encouraging the enemy to replenish their fighting strength and recover their fighting spirit and there is a risk that it will become harder to completely break their will to make war."

Meanwhile, as more and more Japanese units continued to slip past the operation restriction line, Tada was also coming under pressure from within the Army General Staff. though by then his own armies in the field were already well on their way to Nanjing. Here Chiang insisted fervently on mounting a sustained defense of Nanjing. Chiang argued, just as he had during the Battle of Shanghai, that China would be more likely to receive aid from the great powers, possibly at the ongoing Nine Power Treaty Conference, if it could prove on the battlefield its will and capacity to resist the Japanese. They argued that the Chinese Army needed more time to recover from its losses at Shanghai, and pointed out that Nanjing was highly indefensible topographically. they were aware of their precarious situation. Further, both Chiang and Tang would at times give contradictory instructions to their subordinates on whether their mission was to defend Nanjing to the death or merely delay the Japanese advance.

thumb|Nanjing's stone city walls as photographed in 1930

On November 20 the Chinese Army and teams of conscripted laborers began to hurriedly bolster Nanjing's defenses both inside and outside the city. Nanjing itself was surrounded by formidable stone walls stretching almost around the entire city. The walls, which had been constructed hundreds of years earlier during the Ming Dynasty, rose up to in height, were thick, and had been studded with machine gun emplacements. By December 6 all the gates into the city had been closed and then barricaded with an additional layer of sandbags and concrete thick.

Outside the walls a series of semicircular defense lines were constructed in the path of the Japanese advance, most notably an outer one about from the city and an inner one directly outside the city known as the Fukuo Line, or multiple positions line. The Fukuo Line, a sprawling network of trenches, moats, barbed wire, mine fields, gun emplacements, and pillboxes, was to be the final defense line outside Nanjing's city walls. There were also two key high points of land on the Fukuo Line, the peaks of Zijinshan to the northeast and the plateau of Yuhuatai to the south, where fortification was especially dense. In order to deny the Japanese invaders any shelter or supplies in this area, Tang adopted a strategy of scorched earth on December 7, ordering all homes and structures in the path of the Japanese within one to of the city to be incinerated, as well as all homes and structures near roadways within of the city. By the time they reached Nanjing they were physically exhausted, low on equipment, and badly depleted in total troop strength. In order to replenish some of these units, 16,000 young men and teenagers from Nanjing and the rural villages surrounding it were speedily pressed into service as new recruits.

thumb|Chinese soldiers from one of the elite [[List of German-trained divisions of the National Revolutionary Army|German-trained divisions between Nanjing and Shanghai, November 26, 1937. Most wear the M35 Stahlhelm. One wears a German-style ski cap.]]

The German trained units, the 36th, 87th and 88th Divisions, had each taken heavy casualties in Shanghai and saw their elite quality drop as a result. As of December, each division consisted of between 6,000 and 7,000 troops, of which roughly half were raw recruits. However, most of these units had also suffered very high losses from the months of fighting in and around Shanghai. The 66th Corps had been reduced to half its original size, and its two divisions had to be reorganized into regiments. To replenish the Chinese garrison, 40,200 men from 44 supplementary battalions, 4 supplementary regiments, and 1 Jiangxi security regiment were sent towards the 36th division, 87th division, 88th division, 51st and 58th divisions of the 74th corps, and the Training Division of the Central Army. An additional 16,000-18,000 fresh soldiers were brought in from Hankou in the ranks of the 2nd Army, with 80% of their strength composed of recent recruits. However, due to the unexpected rapidity of the Japanese advance, most of these new conscripts received only rudimentary training on how to fire their guns on their way to or upon their arrival at the frontlines. and Tokushi Kasahara who argues in favor of about 150,000. These numbers are backed up by the Nanking Garrison staff officer T'an Tao-p'ing, who records a garrison of 81,000 soldiers, a number which Masahiro Yamamoto argues to be one of the most probable figures.

Japanese mass bombings

right|thumb|A Chinese civilian carries his dying son wounded in a Japanese air raid on Nanjing.

thumb|The aftermath of a Japanese bombing raid on Nanjing

Even before the conclusion of the battle of Shanghai, Japan's Navy Air Service was launching frequent air raids on the city, eventually totaling 50 raids according to the Navy's own records. The Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service had struck Nanjing for the first time on August 15 with Mitsubishi G3M medium-heavy bombers, but suffered heavy losses in face of the aerial defense from Chinese Air Force Boeing P-26/281 Peashooter and Hawk II/Hawk III fighters based primarily at Jurong Airbase for the defense of Nanjing. It wasn't until after the introduction of the advanced Mitsubishi A5M fighter did the Japanese begin to turn the tide in air-to-air combat, and proceed with bombing both military and civilian targets day and night with increasing impunity as the Chinese Air Force losses mounted through continuous attrition; the Chinese did not have the aircraft industry nor comprehensive training regimen to replace men and machines to contend against the ever-growing and ever-improving Japanese war machine. Both Col. Gao and Capt. Liu died in non-aerial combat incidents by the following month as they were preparing to receive improved fighter aircraft design in the Polikarpov I-16s.

Evacuation of Nanjing

In the face of Japanese terror bombing and the ongoing advance of the Imperial Japanese Army, the large majority of Nanjing's citizens fled the city. By early December Nanjing's population had dropped from its former total of more than one million to less than 500,000, a figure which included Chinese refugees from rural villages burned down by their own government's scorched earth policies. Most of those still in the city were very poor and had nowhere else to go. but those few foreigners brave enough to stay behind strived to find a way to help the Chinese civilians who had been unable to leave. In late-November a group of them led by German citizen John Rabe established the Nanking Safety Zone in the center of the city, a self-proclaimed demilitarized zone where civilian refugees could congregate in order to hopefully escape the fighting. and on December 8 Tang Shengzhi demanded that all civilians evacuate there. The mayor of Nanjing and most of the municipal government left the same day, entrusting management of the city to the Nanjing Garrison Force. though only about 70,000 of these would ultimately participate in the fighting. The plan of attack against Nanjing was a pincer movement which the Japanese called "encirclement and annihilation". The two prongs of the Central China Area Army's pincer were the Shanghai Expeditionary Army (SEA) advancing on Nanjing from its eastern side and the 10th Army advancing from its southern side. To the north and west of Nanjing lay the Yangtze River, but the Japanese planned to plug this possible escape route as well both by dispatching a squadron of ships up the river and by deploying two special detachments to circle around behind the city. The Kunisaki Detachment was to cross the Yangtze in the south with the ultimate aim of occupying Pukou on the river bank west of Nanjing while the Yamada Detachment was to be sent on the far north route with the ultimate aim of taking Mufushan just north of Nanjing.

thumb|Japanese troops of the 16th Division landing on the South Yangtze near Baimaokou, November 13 or 14

On 12 November, the Japanese forces deployed in Shanghai were ordered to pursue the retreating Chinese forces. With most Chinese troops melting away into the retreat, many cities and towns were quickly captured by the Japanese, including Jiading, Taicang, and Jiashan. Japanese troops from the freshly deployed Tenth Army, consisting of the 6th, 18th, 114th divisions and the Kunisaki Detachment, were eager for combat. However, many of the other Japanese units were exhausted from the fighting in Shanghai, and were slower to follow through with their orders.

Despite the Chinese retreat, the Japanese encountered strong resistance at the Wufu defensive line between Fushan and Lake Tai, which had been nicknamed a "new Hindenburg line" in Chinese propaganda. At Changshu, Japanese forces had to fight slowly through an interlocking system of concrete pillboxes manned by Chinese soldiers fighting to the death, all whilst Chinese artillery bombarded them with accurate fire. The Japanese 9th Division was faced with a similar challenge in Suzhou: contrary to propaganda accounts of the city falling without a fight, Japanese soldiers had to fight through a series of pillboxes in front of the city before painstakingly eliminating pockets of resistance in street fighting. These operations were concluded by 19 November, with some 1,000 Chinese soldiers killed in Suzhou and another 100 artillery pieces captured, according to Japanese records.

By late November, the Japanese army was advancing rapidly around Lake Tai en route to Nanjing. The Chinese, in order to counter these advances, deployed some five divisions of the Sichuanese 23rd Group Army from warlord Liu Xiang's forces to the southern end of the lake near Guangde, and two more divisions (the 103rd and 112th) to the river fortress Jiangyin near the lake's northern end, which had been the site of a naval battle in August.

Battles of Lake Tai and Guangde

thumb|Sichuanese general Rao Guohua, whose forces would defend Guangde. He would commit suicide at the battle's end.

On November 25, the Japanese 18th Division attacked the town of Sian near Guangde. The Chinese defenders, underequipped and inexperienced troops from the 145th Division, were overwhelmed by Japanese airpower and tanks and hastily fell back. A counterattack on Sian from the 146th Division was repelled by Japanese armor.

On the southwestern edge of Lake Tai, the Sichuanese 144th Division from the 23rd Group Army had dug into a position where the local terrain formed a narrow funnel in the local road. When faced with the advance of the Japanese 114th Division, the Chinese ambushed the Japanese with hidden mountain guns, inflicting heavy casualties on the Japanese. However, fearing the loss of their artillery from retaliatory enemy attacks, the Chinese officers withdrew their artillery in the heat of battle. As a result, the Chinese infantry were slowly pushed back, and finally broke into a retreat towards Guangde when Japanese troops flanked their positions on the lake's shores via stolen civilian motor boats.

right|thumb|Japanese soldiers marching on Nanjing

The last days of November saw the five Sichuanese divisions fight fiercely in the vicinity of Guangde, but their defense was hindered by divided leadership and a lack of radio communications. The Japanese overwhelmed the Chinese defenders with artillery, and finally forced the 23rd Group Army back on November 30. Sichuanese division commander Rao Guohua, unable to bear the defeat, shot himself the day after the retreat. The 23rd Group Army suffered heavy casualties in this battle, with at least 4,454 killed, wounded, or missing.

Battle of Jiangyin

On November 29, the Japanese 13th Division attacked the walled town of Jiangyin near the Yangtze River after a two-day artillery bombardment. They were confronted by some 10,000 troops from the Chinese 112th and 103rd Divisions, which were composed of a mix of Manchurian veteran exiles and recruits from Southwestern China, respectively. Despite encountering ambushes and difficult terrain in the form of 33 hills around the city, the Japanese were able to advance under the cover of land and naval artillery from their ships on the Yangtze. Chinese coastal batteries mounted on Jiangyin's walls retaliated against the Japanese ships, causing damage to several Japanese vessels. To even the odds, Chinese raiders organized suicide missions to infiltrate Japanese lines at night and destroy enemy tanks with explosives. The hills around Jiangyin were the site of vicious fighting, with Mount Ding changing hands several times, resulting in Chinese company commander Xia Min'an being killed in action.

The Japanese eventually managed to overcome the Chinese defenses through a combination of artillery, aircraft and tanks. The Chinese began a withdrawal on December 1, but poor communication resulted in the 112th Division leaving too soon, resulting in a chaotic retreat for the 103rd Division. Both divisions had suffered heavy losses in the fighting, and only a portion of their original strength (estimated to be between 1,000 and 2,000 men for the 103rd Division) made it back to Nanjing.

During the rest of their advance, the Japanese overcame resistance from the already battered Chinese forces who were being pursued by the Japanese from Shanghai in a "running battle". Tillman Durdin reported in one case where Japanese troops surrounded some 300 Chinese soldiers from the 83rd Corps on a cone-shaped peak: "The Japanese set a ring of fire around the peak. The fire, feeding on trees and grass, gradually crept nearer and nearer to the top, forcing the Chinese upward until, huddled together, they were mercilessly machine-gunned to death."

Japanese atrocities on the way to Nanjing

thumb|Japanese soldiers enter Danyang, 50 km (30 miles) east of Nanjing

General Matsui, along with the Army General Staff, had originally envisaged making a slow and steady march on Nanjing, but his subordinates disobeyed orders and instead raced each other to the city. The capture of Guangde had occurred three days before the army was even supposed to start its planned advance, and the SEA had captured Danyang on December 2, more than five days ahead of schedule. In order to achieve such speeds, the Japanese soldiers carried little with them except weaponry and ammunition. Because they were marching well ahead of most of their supply lines, Japanese troops usually looted from Chinese civilians along the way, which was almost always accompanied by extreme violence.

thumb|Japanese soldier posing with a severed head

The Japanese advance on Nanjing was marked by a trail of arson, rape and murder. The 170 miles between Shanghai and Nanjing were left "a nightmarish zone of death and destruction." Japanese planes strafed unarmed farmers and refugees "for fun". Civilians were subjected to extreme violence and brutality in a foreshadowing of the Nanjing Massacre. For example, the Nanqiantou hamlet was set on fire, with many of its inhabitants locked within the burning houses. Two women, one of them pregnant, were raped repeatedly. Afterwards, the soldiers "cut open the belly of the pregnant woman and gouged out the fetus." A crying two-year-old boy was wrestled from his mother's arms and thrown into the flames, while the hysterically sobbing mother and remaining villagers were bayoneted, disemboweled, and thrown into a nearby creek. Many Chinese civilians committed suicide, such as two girls who deliberately drowned themselves near Pinghu.

thumb|A Japanese newspaper reporting on the [[hundred man killing contest]]

Many cities and towns were subject to destruction and looting by the advancing Japanese, including but not limited to Suzhou, Taicang and Jiading. When massacring villages, Japanese forces usually executed the men immediately, while the women and children were raped and tortured first before being murdered. One atrocity of note was the killing contest between two Japanese officers, where both men held a competition to see who could behead 100 Chinese captives the first. The atrocity was conducted twice with the second round raising the goal to 150 captives, and was reported on by Japanese newspapers.

In a continuation of their practices from Shanghai, the Japanese troops executed all Chinese soldiers they captured on their way to Nanjing. Prisoners of war were shot, beheaded, bayonetted and burned to death. In addition, since thousands of Chinese soldiers had dispersed into the countryside, the Japanese implemented "mopping-up operations" in the countryside to deny the Chinese shelter, where all buildings without any immediate value to the Japanese army were burned down, and their inhabitants slaughtered.

Battle for Nanjing's outer line of defense (December 5–9)

Battles of Chunhua and the Two Peaks

On December 5, Chiang Kai-shek paid a visit to a defensive encampment near Jurong to boost the morale of his men but was forced to leave when the Imperial Japanese Army began their attack on the battlefield. On that day the rapidly moving forward contingents of the SEA occupied Jurong and then arrived near Chunhua(zhen), a town 15 miles southeast of Nanjing and a key point of the capital's outer line of defense which would put Japanese artillery in range of the city.

Battle had already begun on 4 December, when 500 soldiers from the Japanese 9th division attacked Chinese forward positions in Shuhu, a small town several miles away from Chunhua. The Chinese company in Shuhu held out for two days, and at one point deployed a tank platoon against the Japanese infantry, losing 3 armored vehicles in exchange for 40 Japanese casualties. By 6 December, the defenders abandoned their positions, and some 30 survivors fought their way out of Shuhu.

The Japanese pushed to Chunhua, but were faced with heavy resistance by the 51st Division, who inflicted heavy casualties on the Japanese in preplanned kill zones with machine guns and artillery attacks. Nevertheless, Japanese artillery strikes enabled their infantry to capture the first defensive line, while a well-timed attack by six Japanese bombers enabled a deeper breakthrough. The Japanese left flank managed to penetrate behind Chunhua on December 7, but the final breakthrough came on December 8 when an entire regiment of the 9th Division that had lagged behind entered the fray.

The SEA also took the fortress at Zhenjiang and the spa town of Tangshuizhen the same day. Meanwhile, on the south side of the same defense line, armored vehicles of Japan's 10th Army charged the Chinese positions at Jiangjunshan (General's Peak) and Niushoushan (Ox Head Peak) defended by China's 58th Division of the 74th Corps. On December 9, after darkness fell on the battlefield, the 58th Division was finally overwhelmed and withdrew, having suffered, according to its own records, 800 casualties.

Defensive stand of the 2nd Army and the Battle for Old Tiger's Cave

On December 6, the Japanese 16th Division attacked Chinese positions 14 miles east of Nanjing. The Chinese defenders were composed of fresh troops from the 2nd Army, and had dug in onto a ridgeline to meet the Japanese assault. Japanese aircraft and artillery shelled the Chinese defenses relentlessly, inflicting extensive damage and confusion. The Chinese defenders were also hampered by their own inexperience, with some soldiers forgetting to ignite the fuses of their hand grenades before throwing them. Only a cadre of experienced officers and NCO's prevented a total collapse, and enabled the 2nd Army to hold an organized defense for three days until December 9, when they were forced back to Qixia. The fighting had resulted in 3,919 killed and 1,099 wounded for the two divisions of the 2nd Army, an almost four-to-one death-injury ratio. Additionally, the special service company of the 2nd Army suffered 47 killed and 13 wounded.

thumb|The peaks of Purple Mountain, where the Training Division made its stand

Meanwhile, the 16th division had also begun probing Chinese positions around Purple Mountain, which was manned by China's elite Training Brigade. The Japanese first attacked the Old Tiger's Cave on a hill east of Purple Mountain, which was defended by the Training Brigade's 5th Regiment. After shelling the peak on December 8, Japanese infantry attacked up the hill's slopes, but were cut down by accurate and concentrated fire. On December 9, the Japanese attacked again using smokescreens and air bombardment, but the assault was stopped again when a neighboring Chinese unit counterattacked on the Japanese right flank. However, the 5th Regiment had also suffered heavy casualties in the fighting, losing more than half their men including their commander. In addition, the hill was very exposed and hard to resupply, so the Training Brigade ultimately abandoned the Old Man's Cave and retreated to better positions on the Purple Mountain itself.

By December 9, Japan's forces had reached Nanjing's last line of defense, the daunting Fukuo Line. The stage was set for the final stage of the campaign: the battle for Nanjing itself.

Final Battle for Nanjing City (December 9–13)

Opening shots

thumb|Japanese artillery shelling Guanghua gate

In the dawn of December 9, Japanese soldiers from the 36th Infantry Regiment engaged a battalion of the elite Training Division outside the Nanjing city wall near the Guanghua gate (Gate of Enlightenment). The Chinese withdrew into the wall after half had become casualties. When the Japanese attempted to follow, the Chinese exposed their positions with electrical lights and attacked with small-arms fire, forcing the Japanese back.

The Japanese then wheeled up two mountain guns and began shelling the gate, while Japanese aircraft launched several raids in the area, resulting in over 100 Chinese casualties. The Chinese reinforced the gate with troops from the Nanjing Gendarmerie Military Police and a battalion from the elite 88th Division, the latter of which suffered some 300 casualties in further fighting. The Japanese sent engineers to blow holes in the gate, but after three attempts failed to inflict significant damage. Additional Japanese soldiers rushed the gate in support, but most were cut down by Chinese gunfire. At one point, several Chinese defenders launched a raid to burn down a flour mill outside the wall to deny the Japanese an observation point, which they succeeded in accomplishing. Chinese stragglers outside the city wall also attacked the Japanese in the rear, targeting and killing several messengers in the Japanese communication network. By nightfall, the first battle had ended with a stalemate between both sides.

Japanese requests for a Chinese surrender

At this point General Matsui had a "summons to surrender" drawn up which requested the Chinese to send military envoys to Nanjing's Zhongshan Gate to discuss terms for the peaceful occupation of the city, and he then had a Mitsubishi Ki-21 scatter thousands of copies of the message over the city. On December 10 a group of Matsui's senior staff officers waited to see if the gate would be opened, but Tang Shengzhi had no intention of responding. To enforce his orders, Tang deployed the elite 36th division near the Xiaguan docks to ward off any retreat attempts across the Yangtze River, and sent many of the larger vessels away to Hankou. The American journalist F. Tillman Durdin, who was reporting on site during the battle, saw one small group of Chinese soldiers set up a barricade, assemble in a solemn semicircle, and promise each other that they would die together where they stood.

thumb|A bridge across the Nanjing city moat destroyed by artillery fire

Also on Nanjing's eastern side but further south, other units of the SEA faced the difficult task of fording the large moat standing between them and three of the city gates, Zhongshan Gate, Guanghua Gate, and Tongji Gate, though the speed of Japan's earlier advance played in their favor as key Chinese units slated to be deployed here were not yet in position.

Attacking the Gate of Enlightenment

That evening, Japanese engineers and artillerymen closing in on Guanghua Gate managed to blow a hole in the wall. Two Japanese companies of the 36th Regiment immediately launched a daring attack through the gap and planted a Japanese flag on a portion of the gate, but were immediately pinned down by a series of determined Chinese counterattacks. The Chinese for their part had lost several officers and over 30 men killed in its counterattacks.

The 88th Division at Yuhuatai Plateau and Zhonghua Gate

thumb|Troops of the 88th Division, who were tasked with defending Yuhuatai and Zhonghua Gate. Most would be killed in the battle.

At the same time, the Japanese 6th Division was storming Yuhuatai, a rugged plateau situated directly in front of Zhonghua Gate on Nanjing's southern side. The 6th division's progress was slow and casualties were heavy, as Yuhuatai was built like a fortress of interlocking fortifications and trenches, fortified with dense tangles of barbed wire, antitank ditches and concrete pillboxes. Making matters worse was the presence of the German-trained 88th Division, who were apt to counterattack, forcing some Japanese units to spend more time defending than attacking. The Chinese defenders, recognizing the importance of Yuhaitai, had deployed the 527th and 528th Regiment, providing tactical artillery support with two artillery companies. Behind Yuhuatai was Nanjing's Zhonghua Gate, which the 88th Division had stationed its barely trained new recruits atop.

The Japanese attacked the 88th division on December 10, but suffered heavy casualties, as they had to fight through hilly terrain covered in barbed wire barricades and tactically placed machine gun nests. Chinese defenders often fought to the last man, with Japanese soldiers noticing that many Chinese pillboxes had been chained from the outside to prevent their occupants from fleeing. The Japanese also encountered problems with advancing too fast at times and bypassing surviving Chinese soldiers, who would then open fire into their flanks and rear. The 88th division also encountered many difficulties for their part, as half of those fighting in the division's ranks were raw recruits, and nearly all of its trained officer corps had been wiped out from the fighting in Shanghai. Furthermore, Chinese artillery crews were reluctant to provide effective artillery support, citing a fear of exposing their positions to return fire.

On December 11, the Japanese, frustrated by the lack of progress near the Gate of Enlightenment, attacked the Zhonghua Gate. Japanese aircraft routed Chinese forces in front of the gate, forcing them inside with the Japanese on their heels. When some 300 Japanese soldiers managed to breach the wall, the Chinese mobilized all available forces and forced them out. By the end of the night, the 88th Division had been forced to fall back in front of the city wall, with many of its surviving troops suffering from severe fatigue. The Japanese made an attempt to infiltrate a "suicide squadron" bearing explosive picric acid up to the Zhonghua Gate to blow a hole in it, but it got lost in the morning fog and failed to reach the wall.

On the morning of December 12, the Japanese began to bombard Zhonghua Gate with field artillery and tank fire. Chinese troops who remained posted outside the gate attempted to retreat back inside the city wall, but almost all were killed before they could make it. By noon, Yuhuatai had been overrun and virtually every man of the 88th division defending it had been killed, including three of their four regimental commanders and both of their brigade commanders, but in the process the Japanese had suffered heavy casualties of their own, some 2,240 losses including 566 dead according to their own records.

Breaching the Nanjing city wall

Back at Guanghua Gate, the Japanese attempted to relieve their beleaguered comrades trapped inside, and after two attempts managed to link up with their forces inside. What followed was an artillery duel between both sides, which lasted the entirety of December 12. During the duel, a stray shell severed the telephone line of the Chinese 87th Division, severing their communications to the rear.

Burdened with the fog of war, the commanders of the 87th Division were alarmed upon noticing their comrades in the Guangdong 83rd Corps abandoning their positions, but did not immediately retreat due to their prior orders and because Nanjing had become considered a home amongst many soldiers in the division.

The Japanese, having noticed the diminishing Chinese resistance, scaled the city gate at around 4am and found it almost deserted. They killed whatever few Chinese soldiers remained in the area and raised the Rising Sun flag to cheers of "Banzai!" Per its own records, the 36th Regiment had suffered some 257 or 275 killed and 546 wounded in the battle of Nanjing, with most of the casualties being from the battle of Chunhua Town and the battle of Guanghua Gate.

thumb|Japanese soldiers cross a moat beneath the Nanjing City Wall

Back near Zhonghua Gate, two Japanese regiments had become pinned down by Chinese gunfire and mortars atop the gate. To conceal their movements, a Japanese team set a fire in front of the gate to create a smokescreen, The Japanese seized the gate through this opening, and with artillery support beat back all Chinese counterattacks, securing the Zhonghua Gate by nightfall. Meanwhile, just west of Zhonghua Gate, other soldiers also of Japan's 10th Army had punched a hole through Chinese lines in the wetlands south of Shuixi Gate and were launching a violent drive on that gate with the support of a fleet of tanks. but what the Chinese lacked in equipment they made up for in the sheer ferocity with which they fought, partially due to strict orders that no man or unit was to retreat one step without permission. Over the course of the battle, roughly 1,000 Chinese soldiers were shot dead by other members of their own army for attempting to retreat.

Attacks on the USS Panay and British vessels

In the morning of December 12, the American gunboat USS Panay was escorting three Standard Oil river tankers on the Yangtze River away from the battle zone. The ship was clearly marked by two large American flags painted on canvas awnings, as well as another cloth flag flying from the bow.

thumb|Japanese aircraft attack the Panay, filmed by cameramen Norman Alley and Eric Mayell

The Panay was about twenty-eight miles upstream from Nanjing when Japanese naval aircraft led by Lt. Shigeharu Murata (who would later lead torpedo bomber squadrons against Pearl Harbor) attacked and bombed the gunboat.

The crew and civilians aboard the Panay, the vast majority of them injured in the attack, evacuated the sinking ship in two boats. Two newsreel cameramen on board the Panay were able to film parts of the attack, at one point capturing footage of Japanese aircraft passing so close to the ship that the pilots' faces were visible.

thumb|The USS Panay sinking beneath the Yangtze

The crew and passengers hid in the reeds of a nearby island, and witnessed a passing Japanese motorboat machine-gun the sinking ship and board it briefly before departing; the American flag had still been flying from the bow at that time. At 3:54pm, the Panay rolled over to starboard and sank. The survivors then made their way to a nearby village, where some of the injured succumbed to their wounds. Two crewmen and a civilian had been killed in the attack, and another forty-three crew and five civilians wounded.

The pilots responsible for the Panay attack would also bomb the British vessel SS Wantung later that same day.

Collapse of the Nanjing Garrison Force

thumb|Japanese troops rushing the newly blasted hole in the Nanjing wall near Zhongshan Gate Back in Nanjing, the Japanese had gained the upper hand over the hard-pressed and surrounded Chinese defenders.

thumb|Japanese Type 94 tankettes and soldiers attack the Zhongshan gate on the Nanjing city wall

Unbeknownst to the Japanese, Chiang had already ordered Tang to abandon the defense. Tang prepared to do so the next day on December 12, but startled by Japan's intensified onslaught he made a frantic last-minute bid to conclude a temporary ceasefire with the Japanese through German citizens John Rabe and Eduard Sperling. Furthermore, contact had already been lost with many units (such as the 87th division) who never received Tang's message, and thus continued to hold their positions as ordered. However even those that did receive Tang's orders faced tremendous difficulties at slipping through the Japanese lines.

Unit-by-unit breakout attempts

In accordance with Tang's orders, the Guangdong 66th Corps under Ye Zhao and elements of the 83rd Corps under Deng Longguang gathered their remaining forces to break through the Japanese lines using a gap in the east, an extremely difficult task given the circumstances. Upon exiting the Taiping Gate, the troops of the Guangdong Army had to navigate both Chinese and Japanese minefields, then move through the countryside using pre-planned escape routes. Despite avoiding roads and Japanese armored patrols, the Guangdong troops were forced to fight through multiple attacks by Japanese units, and suffered many casualties including two divisional chiefs of staff in combat. Of the 12,500 men in the two corps at the start of the battle, only some 3,000 or 4,000 of them made it out of Nanjing. According to Ye Zhao, the 159th and 160th divisions of his 66th Corps still had more than 7,800 officers and soldiers after breaking out of the capital.

One of the units that did manage to escape Nanjing intact was China's 2nd Army led by Xu Yuanquan, situated just north of Nanjing.

Other units were less fortunate. Near dawn on December 13, a different part of the 74th Corps was destroyed in its attempt to break through Japanese lines along the Yangtze River south of Nanjing. The 112th Division of the Northeastern Army was in a worse condition, with only 60 soldiers from the unit managing to cross the Yangtze River. The regular police, which participated in the battle with more than 6,000 men, had only 840 who broke out of the city, with the remaining 5,160 presumed dead.

Due to their heavy losses from combat and proximity to the frontline, only between one and two thousand troops from the 88th Division escaped over the river, as did another thousand troops from the Training Division. Sun Yuanliang, commander of the 72nd Corps and 88th Division, claimed in his memoir to have led 600 of his men to reach Wuhan in late March 1938. Deputy commander Zhou Zhenqiang recalled the Training Division taking in 4,000 officers and soldiers after crossing the river. Yu Jishi reported taking in 500 survivors and 400 rifles from the 87th Division. Adding to the mayhem were barrier troops of the 36th Division posted atop the gate, who had not received word of Tang's orders and mistaken members of the crowd for deserters. Errors in communication resulted in those soldiers opening fire on parts of the crowd. Others who saw this turned back to the city in despair. Though Mufushan, just north of Nanjing, was taken by Japan's Yamada Detachment without much bloodshed on the morning of December 14, pockets of resistance outside Nanjing persisted for several more days.

Months of fighting had taught the Chinese defenders to expect no mercy if captured by Japanese forces, and many who remained in the city were frantically seeking a way out before it was too late. For some units like those in the Guangdong Army, there were detailed plans establishing a route out of Nanjing. According to George Fitch, head of Nanjing's YMCA, "rickshaw coolies, carpenters, and other laborers are frequently taken." Chinese police officers and firefighters were also targeted, with even street sweepers and Buddhist burial workers from the Red Swastika Society being marched away on suspicion of being soldiers.

thumb|Chinese men rounded up in the "mopping-up operations". All of them would be killed within a few days, and their bodies dumped into the Yangtze

Chinese prisoners who were rounded up were summarily executed en masse as part of an event that came to be known as the Nanjing Massacre, which the foreign residents and journalists in Nanjing made known internationally within days of the city's fall.

The massacres were organized to kill as many people within a short timeframe, which usually meant rows of unarmed prisoners being mowed down by machine gun fire before being finished off with bayonets or revolvers. In one instance, Japanese troops from the Yamada Detachment and the 65th Infantry Regiment systemically led 17,000 to 20,000 Chinese prisoners to the banks of the Yangtze River near Mufushan and machine gunned them to death. They then disposed of the corpses by burning or flushing them downstream.

In many other instances, prisoners were decapitated, used for bayonet practice, or tied together, doused in gasoline and set on fire. Wounded Chinese soldiers who remaining in the city were killed in their hospital beds, bayonetted, clubbed, or dragged outside and burned alive. The massacres were usually conducted on the banks of the Yangtze River to facilitate the mass disposal of corpses.

thumb|Photo by [[Bernhard Arp Sindberg|Bernhard Sindberg of a pond full of executed Chinese POWs who had received false promises of clemency by the Japanese]]

The rounding-up and mass killings of male civilians and genuine POWs were referred to euphemistically as "mopping-up operations" in Japanese communiqués, in a manner "just like the Germans were to talk about 'processing' or 'handling' Jews." Other estimates vary: Colonel Uemura Toshimichi wrote in his war diary that somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 Chinese prisoners were executed, but makes no distinction between soldiers or male civilians. Zhaiwei Sun estimates between 36,500 and 40,000 Chinese prisoners of war were executed after capture.

The Rape of Nanjing

thumb|Bodies of Chinese refugees massacred by Japanese troops on the banks of the Yangtze River

In conjunction with the mass executions of young men, the Japanese also committed numerous acts of murder, torture, rape, looting, and arson during their occupation of Nanjing.

According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanjing and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000 while at least 20,000 women were raped, including infants and the elderly. Recent research estimates up to 80,000 women and children were victimized, as many victims were immediately murdered by Japanese soldiers after their rape. Estimates for the total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre vary widely, from 40,000 at the least to 430,000 at the greatest.

thumb|Victims of the Nanjing Massacre

By December 30, most Japanese soldiers had left Nanjing, though units of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army stayed on to occupy the city. The Nanjing Self-Government Committee, a new municipal authority formed from local Chinese collaborators, was inaugurated on January 1, 1938, but it was not until February 25 that all restrictions on the free movement of civilians into and out of the city were lifted.

Casualties

The capture of Nanjing had been quicker and easier than the Japanese had foreseen. Excluding the Yamada Detachment, they lost only 1,558 soldiers in battle, plus 4,619 wounded.

thumb|Japanese military leaders [[Kiyoshi Hasegawa (admiral), Iwane Matsui, Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, and Heisuke Yanagawa at the Memorial Ceremony for War Dead at Nanking Airfield on December 13, 1937]]

Chinese casualties were undoubtedly significantly higher, though no precise figures exist on how many Chinese were killed in action. The Japanese claimed to have killed up to 84,000 Chinese soldiers during the Nanjing campaign, whereas a contemporary Chinese source claimed that their army suffered 20,000 casualties in the fighting. Masahiro Yamamoto noted that the Japanese usually inflated their opponent's body counts by a factor of three while the Chinese had reason to downplay the scale of their loss. Ikuhiko Hata estimates that 50,000 Chinese soldiers were killed in combat during the entire battle On the other hand, Chinese scholar Sun Zhaiwei estimates Chinese combat losses at 6,000 to 10,000 men.

The number of Chinese soldiers wounded in action also lacks precise figures, but was undoubtedly also very high. Towards the end of November, wounded soldiers were arriving in Nanjing from the front line at a rate of 2,000 to 3,000 men per day, double the rate of the attrition in Shanghai. Many of these wounded soldiers would not receive adequate treatment due to the poor state of China's medical services, and also because Nanjing's hospitals were unable to treat so many patients at once. As a result, many injured soldiers were neglected and often succumbed to their wounds, a number estimated by Masahiro Yamamoto to be 9,000 total.

Aftermath

News of the massacre was tightly censored in Japan, where Nanjing's capture provoked a frenzy of excitement among the citizenry. Mass celebrations of every sort, either spontaneous or government-sponsored, took place throughout the country, including a number of resplendent lantern parades which were still vividly remembered by onlookers several decades later. F. Tillman Durdin noted even before Nanjing had fallen that "Events in the field have renewed the belief of the Japanese people in the invincibility of their arms." Japanese historian Tokushi Kasahara, for instance, has characterized his battlefield leadership as incompetent, arguing that an orderly withdrawal from Nanjing may have been possible if Tang had carried it out on December 11 or if he had not fled his post well in advance of most of his beleaguered units. However, Chiang's very decision to defend Nanjing is also controversial. Masahiro Yamamoto believes that Chiang chose "almost entirely out of emotion" to fight a battle he knew he could only lose, and fellow historian Frederick Fu Liu concurs that the decision is often regarded as one of "the greatest strategical mistakes of the Sino-Japanese war". Still, the historian Jay Taylor notes that Chiang was convinced that to run from his capital city "without a serious fight ... would forever be regarded as a cowardly decision". Most notable among them were the shelling by Japanese artillery of the British steamship Ladybird on the Yangtze River on December 12, and the sinking by Japanese aircraft of the American gunboat Panay not far downstream on the same day. The Allison Incident, the slapping of an American consul by a Japanese soldier, further increased tensions with the United States. On December 17 in a fiery speech entitled, "A Message to the People Upon Our Withdrawal from Nanjing", Chiang Kai-shek defiantly declared that,<blockquote>The outcome of this war will not be decided at Nanking or in any other big city; it will be decided in the countryside of our vast country and by the inflexible will of our people ... In the end we will wear the enemy down. In time the enemy's military might will count for nothing. I can assure you that the final victory will be ours.</blockquote>The Second Sino-Japanese War was to drag on for another eight years and ultimately end with Japan's surrender in 1945.<gallery widths="200" heights="165">

File:Nanking_celebrations.png|Celebrations in Japan following the fall of Nanjing

File:Nanking_victory_parade.webm|December 17 victory parade as seen in the Japanese propaganda film Nanking (1938)

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