My name was Junjiro Izuto, and when I attacked Nanjing, I was part of the 19th Company of the Japanese 13th Division's Regimental Hill Artillery, and I was an ammunition man. I'm older now, in my 80s, but I remember what happened to me on the battlefield in China.
I remember I landed in Shanghai on October 2, 1937. After many battles, I remember that there was a place called Majiazhai, the bunker fortress was very strong, the enemy was very tenacious, and it took us more than ten days to capture there. Majiazhai finally fell, and we began the pursuit of Nanjing.
On the way to Nanjing, I saw the bodies of many Chinese soldiers, abandoned on the road after death, probably for more than a week or ten days, all of which were half decomposed. We marched sleeplessly, often getting up at 2 a.m., and by the next camp it was already 12 noon, and for about fifteen days or so, we were advancing while fighting, getting closer and closer to Nanjing.
When I got to the vicinity of Nanjing, I saw 50 or 100 enemy troops, gathered together, holding white flags to surrender, many of them wounded, or slashed by knives, or wounded by artillery fire. Seeing them, I didn't have the slightest sympathy. In the Japanese family, the neighbors said that I was a good father and an honest person, but when we went to the battlefield, we were often taught to say: "It is because of these soldiers that we are recruited to the battlefield, and it is because of them that we work so hard." ”
On the way to Nanjing, our squadron also did some bad things. For example, when you go to a village to camp, you pull all the Chinese men into a house, kill them with guns, or set the whole house on fire. Then, lock the women in a room and insult them at night. Then, when they were about to leave the next morning, they were all killed and all the houses were burned down before leaving. In this way, the Chinese who escaped would have nowhere to live even if they returned.
We just killed and moved forward. Sometimes, I also felt incredible, so I consulted why I did such a thing, and the answer was that because the Chinese anti-Japanese ideology in this area was very strong, it was the superior who ordered us to kill them all, so we had to do it. I think this is war, there are arsons, murders, robberies, rapes everywhere.
When our squadron reached the vicinity of Shogun Hill in Nanjing, the number of Chinese soldiers captured was already innumerable. It is said that there were about twenty thousand people, and among these captives were children of twelve or thirteen years of age, as well as old men with beards and wrinkles. They shouted, "Give me a cigarette, give me something to eat." However, in fact, our supplies are also very difficult, and if we had not sent soldiers out every day to collect grain (the author's note: that is, to go out and rob the Chinese people), we would have run out of food. So there was not a single grain for the captives to eat.
Because there was a large barracks at the foot of the shogunate mountain, the prisoners were placed there. Although it was a barracks, it was just a large house with a thatched roof and about 20 girders in it.
One morning, all of us asked to go outside the dormitory to form a team, and I wondered what was going on, so I went outside to line up. As a result, the order was given that the people in the front row entered the city and the people in the back row went to deal with the prisoners. I had bad luck that day, and I was just in the back line, and I thought it was troublesome, but there was no way. We obeyed the order to go to the house and take out all the guns, and the people in the back row counted me as about 50 people, and everyone lined up with guns.
Then, we came to the barracks at the foot of shogunate hill. When I got to the place, I saw about 20 light and heavy machine guns on guard, not to mention the captives, even an ant could not run out. The commander told us to tie up all the captives, but for a moment we could not find anything to bind them. So we ripped off the clothes of the captives, tore them into strips of cloth, tied them up one by one, tied them up, and let them sit side by side with each of the two of them. More than 20,000 people, this is not a small number. Our soldiers here add up to only a few hundred. Such a small number of people were too busy to come, and when they arrived at the barracks in the morning, when the moon came out in the evening, we tied up all the more than 20,000 people. Of course, there were also some Japanese soldiers who, while binding, collected money, watches, pens, precious metals, etc. from their captives. Because we had machine guns, rifles, and bayonets in our hands, I thought the captives couldn't run away.
After the binding, the commander asked the prisoners to form two columns and march in the direction of the Yangtze River, flanked by japanese soldiers with live ammunition pulling the prisoners forward. On the way, because it was dark, some of the captives tripped over something without knowing what, and then fell one by one, but we did not have time to help them, and we directly stabbed them one by one with bayonets.
There is a building on the south bank of the Yangtze River that I don't know if it is a barracks or what, because it is night, and I can't see clearly. Machine guns were set up on the roof of the building and aimed at the Chinese prisoners in the square. On the north side is a stone wall about a few meters high, and although it is not clear at night, I wanted to find such a place, probably to prevent the captives from escaping to the north.
The commander ordered us to cut off the heads of the captives with sabers. I was an artilleryman, and I had not yet cut the heads of a living person with my own saber, so I borrowed a saber from Cao Chang and slashed at the prisoners who were paralyzed by frost and hunger. During this time, suddenly someone shouted among the prisoners, and the prisoners all stood up, and at this time the guns began to shoot "click, click, click". Soon, under the strafing of dozens of machine guns, the prisoners in the square fell to the ground one by one.
Another incident occurred when a prisoner climbed up a high wall, jumped down, and rolled into the river with a gunman standing on the beach below, killing a man from a machine gun squad.
Then the commander ordered us to take up our bayonets and look for those who might still be alive. I stabbed as I walked. Around the wee hours of the morning, we were finally on our way home. Only then did I realize that because of the excessive number of captives, my two arms were too sore to lift.
The next day, it happened to be the ceremony of entering the city of Nanjing, and we also participated. At this time, I heard that the soldiers in the front row who had not gone to deal with the prisoners yesterday were ordered to collect the bodies. They dragged all the more than 20,000 people we killed last night to the Yangtze River with hooks made of branches.
After the Nanjing entry ceremony, it was the Pukou battle, and to Pukou you had to take a boat from Nanjing. When I was on the boat, I saw a startling scene, the corpses on the river in Nanjing were piled up, the river was full of corpses flowing down the river, and the white corpses of the bubble kept hitting our boat gang, and it seemed that more than our squadron had killed so many people.
I actually served as a soldier for more than six years, and I never saw so many corpses all over the place, and the scene was simply unbearable to look back on.