I have read a few books on “The Rape of Nanking”:
- The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II
- The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs
- The Devil of Nanking: A Novel
I posted a little about them and the event here and here.
What I haven’t said is that when I read those books my mind was racing on how the civilian population could have better defended themselves. If I were able to go back in time and space and take whatever I could carry with me to that city it would be a backpack full of suppressed .22 LR pistols and several thousand rounds of ammo.
There probably would still have been thousands of Chinese who would have been gang raped and murdered but it wouldn’t have been hundreds of thousands and there would have been a lot of Japanese bodies floating down the rivers along with the Chinese.
A Girl and Her Gun posted about a woman from London who was in China when the Japanese invaded. This brought a flood of memories from reading those books. The well, so to speak, was primed so I guess it’s isn’t too surprising that my eyes filled up with tears as I got to the end of her post An Open Letter To The Anti-Gun Folks.
The Japanese might have lost a few men to the suppressed 22 pistols, but then they likely would pull back and let their artillery do the work of reducing the population of Nanking, instead of troops.
The lesson I got from The Rape of Nanking was that genocidal, racist movements aren’t as concerned with methods as with results.
Don’t forget the planes and bombs. But artillery and aircraft raise the cost and take more time.
I still think it would have saved a lot of lives. Eventually they would have gotten help or the Japanese would have looked at the economics and realized there were more important targets to expend their resources, both time and supplies, on.