THE RAPE OF NANKING

  ON DECEMBER 13, 1937, Nanking, the capital city of Nationalist China, fell to the Japanese. For Japan, this was to have beenthe decisive tuming point in the war, the triumpham culmination of a half-year struggle against Chiang Kai-shek's armies in the Yangtze Valley. For Chinese forces, whose heroic defense of Shanghai had finally failed,and whose best troops had suffered crippling casualties, the fall of Nanking was a bitter,perhaps fatal defeat.

  In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured and murdered- a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written the definitive history of this horrifying episode.

  The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers; that of the Chinese; and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone which saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Among the heroes was the German John Rabe, a Nazi, whose diaries Chang discovered and whom she calls the 'Oskar Schindler of China'. More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, The Rape of Nanking analyses the militaristic culture that fostered in the Japanese soldiers a total disregard for human life. It also tells of the concerted effort during the Cold War on the part of the West and even China to stifle open discussion of this atrocity.