Japan's war of aggression against China is a history full of blood and tears. Especially after 1931, until Japan's defeat and surrender, in just a dozen years, more than 30 million of China's 400 million people died in this war. Accounting for almost a tenth of China's total population at the time, the figure had to be alarming.
Among the more than 30 million compatriots who died, in addition to the anti-Japanese soldiers who died on the battlefield, a large part of them were unarmed ordinary people. During this period, young women were brutally killed by the Japanese army; men were sent to labor camps for heavy physical labor, where they froze to death, died of illness or exhaustion; and some troops used living people to practice assassinations and even used prisoners to go to landmines. In short, when the Japanese army faced unarmed people, the way they killed their prisoners was various and cruel.
Japanese veteran Fujiwara Tsurugi, conscripted into the army in 1936, followed the Japanese army to experience the fierce scenes such as the Battle of Songhu and the Nanjing Massacre, and wrote down and published his personal experience in 1957 after returning to China.
In his memoirs, he said that even the devil felt cruel to the atrocities we committed, and I never wanted to remember those scenes again for the rest of my life.
Here are some of what he recalled and recorded.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="53" > near Shanghai</h1>
The so-called battle in the northern part of Shanghai is a battle that destroys the way of thinking of the domestic people in my mind at once, and it is a bitter battle after another!
But when I think about it, I think it is deserved. Originally, we invaded other countries and were completely unfamiliar with the local situation, and the Chinese army's espionage work was very good, and at that time, we felt that there was no hope of survival.
I'm going to talk about a few days after landing. We saw a newspaper left on the ground of a farmer's home on the outskirts of Shanghai. The newspaper accurately reported the time of our departure from Yupin Port, and even described in detail the formation of the troops, the strategic objectives, and even the experience of the commander of the troops. We also learned about those situations after reading the newspapers.
From that moment on, we were so afraid of the local Chinese that we began to kill the occasional people and captives as ordered.
Yes, there is nothing more annoying than killing, but we are entangled in an invisible fear that is more terrible than killing. It was as if something had suddenly been attacked somewhere. Even the old man who honestly labored us made us sleep because he was Chinese.
Moreover, the idea that "we must get used to killing people" has been deeply instilled. The soldiers who killed people were praised and were quickly promoted.
The atrocities we have committed are so cruel that even the devil finds them unbearable. Those atrocities further aroused the fighting spirit of the enemy. The enemy stubbornly resists us, as if to tear away the contemptuous Nature of China that we have long instilled in Japan. When the commander of the unit instructed, he said: "We must completely annihilate the enemy." "This is simply a beautiful word without a trace!" In fact, we were shooting at each other one-on-one and engaging in trench warfare.
What to say happened in the cotton field on the outskirts of Shanghai, was such that the two sides were about three hundred meters apart from each other, and from time to time they could still hear each other's voices mixed with women's voices. Enemy trenches were not our kind of simple trenches, and the enemy was shooting at us from holes under thick mantou-shaped bunkers. If the other side is not blindly shooting, we must crouch in the trench. Sometimes the hand was just stretched out to support the gun, and the enemy troops who had been prepared "clicked" and strafed over.
According to the situation learned later, it was learned that the area used to be the exercise site of the enemy's Nineteenth Route Army. Unbeknownst to us, we came to a place where the enemy had already set up its guns and had been fully prepared. The enemy is waiting.
For nearly ten days, that kind of fighting continued, and there were casualties every day. During the battle, the wounded lay unattended and waited until dark before being sent to the rear. The wounds of the wounded who were covered with mud must have been red, swollen and pusy, emitting a foul odor, and could not be healed for a long time. For some reason, in this area full of canals, it seems that there are special poisonous bacteria in the soil, and it makes the morale of our army decline rapidly.
One day, the soldiers who had just been sent to the rear limped back to the army. He said that in the field hospital, the commander personally untied the bandages on the treated wounds of the light wounded, and forcefully tore off the plaster on the wounds, and after strict examination, he felt that there was no problem, and said: "It doesn't matter, no problem." There are so many wounds on the front line! The commander of the unit will not allow anyone to be lazy! The medic told the soldier to go to the unit at once. "I heard that the commander of the unit used this strength to check every day in the tent of the field hospital.
In the battles near Shanghai, the resistance of the Chinese army was also very tenacious. Even if the Japanese army is good at defensive warfare, it is helpless under the concentrated blows of artillery fire.
After that, we went camping in a village called "Wang Zhai" north of the north-south front of Luodian Town, and we were hit hard again.
On that day, we dug trenches behind the bamboo forest, slaughtered the pigs we had recruited, and while we were roasting with fire, the enemy found the cooking smoke we had cooked for dinner, so we aimed in advance and waited. As soon as it was dark, we concentrated our fire on us fiercely, and we hurried to fight, but the darkness and the bamboo forest in front of us blocked the line of sight, which was simply blind shooting. And as soon as we shoot, the enemy's impact point is more accurate. Soon the trenches were too full of the bodies of their comrades to move. The smell of gun smoke and the blood flowing out filled us with tension. We just held the gun tightly and slid it over the corpse and shot it indiscriminately. After dawn, we could see what was going on around us.
The bamboo shoots five feet above the ground were all hanging down in one direction, not to mention that the enemy had discounted them with machine guns and rifles. Moreover, at that time, we also discovered the incredible fact that the enemy fired almost all the Japanese-made Type 38 rifle bullets that night.
It is said that during the disarmament of World War I, Japanese politicians forced China to buy a large number of Type 38 rifles. We looked at the corpses of the soldiers who had eaten the bullet and were enraged.
This made us hate the Chinese soldiers even more, and at the same time translated this sentiment into the unarmed Chinese people, which turned us into killing machines, even if they were prisoners, we killed them mercilessly.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="89" > kill captives</h1>
The attack on Jiangyin City from Wuxi to the yangtze river was in early December. From this point on, the war situation was finally favorable to our side. The number of captives also increased suddenly, and we already knew the advantages of enslaving them, and when they ran out of necessity, they were killed one by one and then continued to attack.
As there were more and more captives, killing people gradually became a burden, and finally everyone came up with a way to kill the captives quickly. This way is to let the fast-moving tanks roll over. In terms of feeling, this method is the easiest.
For example, when we were struggling to march along mountain or dirt roads, friendly tanks drove over from behind. Tank units will never stop because soldiers from their own forces are gathered there.
I have seen soldiers who run slower because of their stunnedness being crushed to death by tanks. Of course, the abominable thing is not the tank that crushes the people, but the soldier who hinders the speed of the tank. At this point, we desperately clung to the mountain wall to make way for the tanks behind us. But this opportunity can be used to take out the captives. That night, we suddenly kicked the prisoners we were going to kill at the tank. Unexpectedly, this method of killing captives was easy and fast.
Another time, it probably happened before the villages near Zhenjiang were about to march at night. We piled up the furniture, chairs, etc., and lit the fire to drive away the cold, when suddenly we heard someone shouting: "I'm going to do it!" As soon as he returned to his senses, he saw a young soldier named Chuan Tian suddenly pick up a prisoner who was sitting cross-legged by the roaring fire from behind and throw him into the burning fire. The man was now smoking a "prestigious" Japanese cigarette given to him, a 50-year-old peasant prisoner who had been carrying a heavy burden all day. "Oops!" The farmer shouted in despair and quickly bounced out of the fire. Chuan Tian, with no less than the peasant's strength, opened his hand and hugged him, once again thrusting him into the fire.
The captive who had been pushed back fell to the ground in the fire, like a firework bursting out countless sparks, stirring up more violently flying Sparks. But then he stood up again in the flames. He raised his hands high, majestically and majestically like a frozen colossus. He was indeed much taller than before, because the joints of his limbs and waist had changed after they had been burned, so the man's height had grown. The unnaturally taut hands and legs stretched out to the limit and then slowly fell into the flames.
Chuan Tian, who was gasping for breath, still stood upright, staring at it with wide blank eyes, looking there without blinking.
After a while, the officer poked Kawatoshi with his hand and said, "Hey! How? Don't hurry up and clean up the guy. ”
"Kill him!" Every time the officer shouted at him, Chuan Tian's body couldn't help but shiver.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="12" > nanjing massacre</h1>
This happened around December 8, two months after the Shanghai landings. At that time we arrived at a place that was still a day away from Nanjing. By then, Nanjing had fallen, and a notorious massacre was underway against the city's ordinary residents. Although I was not directly involved in the tragedy in the city, I had to clean up the tens of thousands of slaughtered corpses located in the foothills of the Wulong Mountains north of Nanjing.
We camped in the buildings of supposedly government schools. In the early morning of the next day, just after eating breakfast, suddenly came the message "With lunch action, all immediately pack lightly!" " command. Completely unaware of the destination and mission, he walked nearly eight kilometers and was suddenly taken to the scene of the massacre in the foothills of the Wulong Mountains, and the arrival time was about 10 o'clock.
The terrain there is, on one side, the foothills of Oolong Mountain, downhill along the mountain road to a large, gentle and open beach on the Yangtze River. The whole beach vividly shows a hellish scene on earth. Accustomed to seeing the battlefield, we who were already full of indifference to everything were so shocked that we could not speak for a long time. I heard that more than 20,000 people were killed here. Others say forty thousand people.
These are the residents around Nanjing City, ready to enter the Nanjing City for refuge. The troops forced them to stay here for a week, without food or drink, so that they had no strength to resist when they were slaughtered.
Unaware of the truth, we came to the scene along the road by the mountain. The first thing that surprises you is the countless coins that are discarded on the road. There were copper coins, silver dollars, and coins like silver paper on small round hard paper issued by Chiang Kai-shek's government at that time, like toys. Hundreds of meters of pavement are scattered everywhere. We are driven by strange curiosity and step on them at the same time. These must have been left behind by the Chinese refugees, but we can't understand why we should throw them on the road. Maybe these Chinese probably realized something, and let them assemble on the way to the beach, and throw their money all the way away.
We were ordered by the officers to throw the bodies at the scene into the Yangtze River. There was an indescribable stench at the scene, and everyone rushed to cover their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs, covering them with breathlessness.
At about 3 p.m., looking at these corpses, which seemed to be cleaning up more and more, we stopped. The officer didn't squeak either, pretending not to see.
After returning to the team, for two or three days none of us could eat. As soon as I saw the meal, I was tormented by the feeling of vomiting that came up. No matter how you change clothes and take a bath, you can't eliminate the foul odor that penetrates into every pore or even into the mucous membrane of the nasal cavity. When everyone met, they shrugged their eyelids at each other and did not speak. I don't want to mention the countless more cruel things in Nanjing to this day, because it is so inhumane.
I also attended what appeared to be the Nanjing Entrance Ceremony on December 14, but on the surface, the traces of the massacre on our path had been cleared.
On December 23, we assembled in Xiaguan and prepared to leave Nanjing for Anhui Province. Everyone was lining up, waiting to take a boat to Pukou on the other side of the Yangtze River, when I saw something.
A soldier was pointing to a small boat tied to the shore. It turned out that there was a narrow boat that resembled a Japanese river boat. According to him, the Japanese first let the citizens of Nanjing sit in a boat, and then used a motorboat to drag it violently, and the ship was suddenly overturned; sometimes when the boat was dragged to the center of the river, and then as long as a few shots were fired, the people on the ship would be frightened by this sudden cruel act and stand up at once, causing chaos, and the hull of the ship shook and lost its balance, so that the ship could easily overturn. It is said that the more the crew uses tactics to reassure those sitting on the ship, the better the effect. Thus the more entertaining. The whirlpools in the rivers near Nanjing are terrible, and it is difficult for swimmers to escape, let alone in the middle of winter.
As for why these people willingly got on the ship, I later heard that the Japanese army tricked them into working, the kind that had wages, so many people signed up and finally died in the river.
The above is part of the content recalled and recorded by Fujiwara, a veteran of the Japanese invasion of China, in its complete record, also includes human experiments on the living, as well as a variety of pictures that are easy to cause discomfort, the author has deleted it, only a small part of it is left, but I believe that after reading it, you can still feel the cruelty of the Japanese troops in dealing with prisoners.
This article restores a real history for everyone through the Perspective of the Japanese side. In today's anti-Japanese dramas, many directors do not follow the real history, completely through speculation to shoot, only to see that Japanese devils in China are beaten head-to-head, there is no ability to resist. So many children think that such a picture is the real history. To tell the truth, when I see these pictures, I often wonder how the devils have persisted in China for so many years and have not been beaten away, which is really a sweat for the devils.
Respecting history and facing history squarely is the attitude that media people should have; I hope that we will not forget history and the alarm bell will always sound.