Before the fall of Nanjing in December 1937, the garrison strengthened the city defense and prepared for street battles according to the orders of Tang Shengzhi, the commander of the city defense. All the gates of Nanjing were blocked with sandbags, trenches were dug on the highways, and sandbags were also set up on the main roads of the city, posing a posture of coexisting and dying with Nanjing.
However, when the city of Nanjing was destroyed and the Japanese army broke into the city, there was almost no decent organized resistance in the downtown area of Nanjing. Although there were some fierce battles, they were encounters with the Japanese during the breakout of some of the defenders, rather than planned, organized active street battles. After the defenders in Nanjing issued the retreat order on the night of December 12, the task of the garrison troops changed to mainly preserve the transfer of living forces. With the exception of the defenders who served as cover, the rest of the defenders withdrew from the city and resumed fighting.
Therefore, it took only one day from the destruction of the city of Nanjing to the complete occupation of the Japanese army. However, due to the tight time, the original plan was for most of the troops to break through, and a small number of troops to cross the river, but it became that most of the troops waited to cross the river, and only a small part of the troops took the breakout. This caused chaos in the nanjing garrison. Only 50,000 of the 150,000 troops were eventually safely evacuated to the rear, and the remaining 100,000 remained in Nanjing or along the Yangtze River and became the target of Japanese massacres.
These officers and men who retreated to the city on the Yangtze River in a panic, after losing their command, wandered around in the face of the pursuit of the Japanese army and hid everywhere. Yang Qinzhou, a survivor of the Nanjing Massacre, witnessed such a lamentable tragedy.
At that time, a group of about 300 Nanjing garrison troops, under the pursuit of the Japanese army, retreated all the way to Jiangxinzhou. Jiangxinzhou is an island in the Yangtze River in Nanjing, also known as Meizizhou because of its shape like a plum. By the time the force fled here, there were no retreating ships on the river. Faced with the Yangtze River in front and the pursuing troops in the back, this unit of more than 300 people did not choose to fight to the death, but chose to surrender to the Japanese army.
At that time, the number of Japanese troops who pursued Jiangxinzhou to accept the surrender of this 300-strong unit was far less than them. What is even more bizarre is that more than 300 people, in the end, only two Japanese escorts rushed to a grain depot by the river to be detained. I believe that many of us now have a hard time imagining the "spectacle" of 300 people being escorted by two people.
When these 300 people surrendered to the Japanese army, the Japanese army killed two people at the beginning, that is, the two people killed, so that the unit that ran from the city of Nanjing to Jiangxinzhou lost the belief in resistance. After this unit disarmed, the Japanese army searched them one by one. During the search, the Japanese shot and killed eight more soldiers. The Japanese army completely crushed the will of these soldiers who fled to Jiangxinzhou by killing. They have lost even the courage to fight to the death, and they have become lambs waiting to be slaughtered.
These more than 300 people obediently waited under the supervision of two Japanese troops until the arrival of the follow-up units of the Japanese army that crossed the Jiajiang River from downtown Nanjing. The last group of soldiers who had lost their fighting spirit were tied back to back by two Japanese soldiers, and then the Japanese army strafed them with two machine guns. After the gunfire stopped, the Japanese set up firewood, poured gasoline on the soldiers who had not been killed by machine guns, and burned them all alive.
At that time, when the city of Nanjing was destroyed, due to the poor organization of the retreat, a large number of officers and men could neither cross the river to retreat north nor successfully break through, and at the same time, because they could not maintain organized combat effectiveness, most of the soldiers who were captured or laid down their weapons were slaughtered by the Japanese army and suffered heavy losses.