Sino-Japanese War · War Crimes & Atrocities

The Darkest Hours

The Second Sino-Japanese War was distinguished by systematic, large-scale atrocities committed primarily by Imperial Japanese forces against Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. These were not isolated incidents of battlefield violence but the products of deliberate policy, institutional culture, and a military ideology that held Chinese life in contempt. The Nanjing Massacre — six weeks of systematic murder, rape, and destruction that killed 200,000–300,000 people in and around China's capital — is the most documented and most internationally recognized of these atrocities, but it was neither the first nor the worst in terms of total casualties. Unit 731's biological warfare experiments on living human beings, the systematic use of chemical weapons that killed tens of thousands, the Three Alls Policy that devastated entire provinces, and the mass rape institutionalized through the 'comfort women' system together constitute one of the 20th century's most extensive records of state-sanctioned war crimes. It must also be noted that Chinese forces committed atrocities: the Yellow River flood of 1938, ordered by Chiang Kai-shek, killed 400,000–900,000 Chinese civilians; the burning of Changsha in 1938 to deny it to the Japanese killed thousands of Chinese residents. War's brutality in this conflict was not exclusively Japanese — but its scale, systematization, and deliberateness was.