Therefore, the life and death of these troops were not considered by the government at all, and all the focus was on the defense of Jinling at that time.

Therefore, when these troops were about to arrive in Jinling, they were surrounded by the Japanese.

It is said that after hearing the report at the palace, his command issued a series of orders stamped with his personal seal and marked with the words 'confidential, read and destroyed', and these orders were 'to execute all prisoners'.

Even in the future, it is impossible to determine whether these orders were given by Asaka himself or not, after all, all the orders have been destroyed.

This massacre of prisoners of war also laid the groundwork for the Jinling Massacre in the future.

After the Japanese army entered Jinling, the order to exterminate all Chinese prisoners of war was no longer just on paper, but was conveyed from top to bottom, to every lower-level officer.

On December 13, 1937, the 66th Division of the Japanese Army received an order:

At 2 o'clock, the divisional combat correspondent received an order from the division and regimental headquarters: according to the order of the brigade headquarters, all prisoners of war must be executed. Method of Execution: Prisoners of war were divided into groups of 12 and shot separately.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, the company commanders held a meeting to exchange views on how to deal with prisoners of war. After discussion, it was decided that the prisoners of war should be evenly distributed among each company, and that the prisoners of war should be executed from the prison area in groups of 50 people, and that the place of execution of each company should be marked, and even the time of execution should be marked in detail.

This order contains a cruel logic.

The Japanese army could not provide enough food to the prisoners of war, so they had to be eliminated, and the killing of the prisoners of war not only solved the food problem, but also eliminated the possibility of retaliation, after all, only the dead enemy, would not organize partisan detachments to retaliate against their troops.

Executing orders, however, is another matter.

At dawn on December 13, when the Japanese broke through the city of Jinling, they entered a city that far outnumbered their own troops.

About 500,000 civilians and more than 90,000 Chinese soldiers were trapped in Jinling, compared to 50,000 Japanese soldiers attacking Jinling.

Killing about 600,000 people with 50,000 people meant that every Japanese soldier had to slaughter 12 Chinese.

At that time, it was extremely difficult to dispose of 1,000, 5,000 or 10,000 prisoners, let alone disarm them, let alone disarm them, not to mention the 600,000 people in Jinling City.

Therefore, the Japanese army put a lot of effort into how to disarm these Chinese soldiers, they relied on a policy of deception to dispose of prisoners, and even formulated detailed steps.

This strategy of mass murder first promised the Chinese that if they stopped resisting, they would be treated fairly, coaxed them into surrendering to the Japanese occupation forces, and then divided these coaxed Chinese soldiers into groups of 100-200 people, and finally abducted them to different places near Jinling and killed.

Nakajima believes that this plan is unlikely to be realized, because judging from the situation of the Battle of Songhu at that time, the Chinese are bloody, and even have the spirit of living to death, they are backward, ignorant, poor, and have a huge population base, but in the face of their heavy machine guns, these ignorant and backward Chinese listen to their chests and charge forward in the face of the rain of bullets.

He only hoped that most of the prisoners of war would hesitate to resist further hopelessly and lose confidence, to the point of distrusting the Japanese policy of coaxing and being able to deceive the Chinese and thus obey any command of the Japanese.

However, when the Japanese began to implement a policy of deception, the Japanese were surprised to find that the Chinese had engaged in only sporadic resistance, in fact, which was almost negligible.

When the Japanese invaded Jinling, many Chinese soldiers abandoned their weapons and tried to abandon the city, and when they found that there was no hope of escape, they would disarm and surrender.

In just one day, the Japanese army captured more than 7,000 Chinese soldiers, who faced the guns of the Japanese devils and showed a negative attitude of being slaughtered by others, as if facing the oppression and exploitation of feudal society, and like pork on the board.

The Chinese of the old era seemed to be accustomed to oppression and exploitation, and they gathered together and broke out into a noise like frogs, and some Japanese officers saw countless cigarette butts flashing in the dark in the dark before they saw the Chinese prisoners of war.

Closer to it, the scene is especially spectacular.

In the same place where the 7,000 prisoners of war gathered, they gathered around two white flags, which were patched together in pieces of white cloth, and the white flag hung on a dead branch, waving in the cold wind and howling night.

The Chinese prisoners of war were dressed in rags, wearing blue cotton uniforms and coats, waiting for their hats, whether they had hats or not, blankets over their heads, some with straw mats, and some with cotton mattresses on their backs.

The Japanese had the prisoners of war lined up in four with white flags in front of them, and thousands of Chinese prisoners of war waited patiently for the Japanese to take them away and guide them on what to do next.

The obedience of the Chinese prisoners of war surprised all the Japanese officers, and when they attacked China, they were stubbornly resisted by these people, but when they put down their guns, they behaved extremely obediently, like captive livestock, or even inferior to livestock, some of which still needed to be spurred, and they did not need it at all.

In Japan's military culture, pilots wore daggers instead of parachutes, and they preferred suicide rather than capture.

For people from this cultural background, it is incomprehensible that the Chinese do not fight to the death with the enemy.

When it was discovered that the number of prisoners of war far exceeded the number of conquerors, they became even more contemptuous of the Chinese.

Some Japanese officers even thought about how these Chinese prisoners of war collected all the white cloths they could find and hung them on dead branches, and a group of people held up dead branches to the heads of the Imperial Army, which felt both ridiculous and pathetic.

"I thought, how did they become prisoners of war? There were so many of them - more than two divisions - that they did not even try to put up any resistance. There must have been a considerable number of officers in so many troops, but none of them remained, and I think they all fled, and although we had only two companies of convenience, and the 7,000 prisoners of war had been disarmed, if they rose up to resist, our troops would have been completely wiped out. ”

Shi Donglang, who accepted the surrender of Chinese prisoners of war, wrote.

He had mixed feelings in his heart, feeling sad for the fate of these Chinese soldiers in the future. These Chinese prisoners of war may have longed for the Japanese to place them in a prisoner of war camp, but they did not know that the place where they were taken was a big pit that had already been dug and even slaughtered.

Hungry, thirsty, and frightened, they constantly demanded water to drink, and repeatedly demanded assurances from the Japanese that they would not be killed.

Shi Donglang was very disgusted with the cowardice of these prisoners of war, and 7,000 men, commanded by two companies of Japanese soldiers, were taken away in batches.

He added: "They walked forward in groups, like ants crawling on the ground, and they looked like a group of homeless vagrants, with ignorance on their faces. ”

"They are like a group of ignorant Mianyang, talking to each other in the dark, and moving forward in an orderly manner."

"They're no more like the enemy who shot at us and caused us trouble like they did yesterday. It's hard to believe that they were once enemy soldiers. ”

"It feels silly to think that we've been fighting to the death against this group of ignorant slaves, some of whom are only twelve or thirteen-year-old boys."

The Japanese took the prisoners of war to a nearby village and held them in a large house, which they felt like a large slaughterhouse and hesitated to enter, but finally succumbed to the guns of the Japanese and obediently lined up to enter.

Only when the Japanese wanted to take away the blankets and bedding of these prisoners of war would these prisoners fight with the Japanese army.

The prisoners were then divided into groups of two or three hundred in the middle of the night, and then massacred.

At the time of the massacre, these prisoners of war did not know what was happening, late at night, the weather was cold, the visibility was too low and too low, and they couldn't see what was around them, only that these Japanese devils took them away, presumably to find a new place to settle.

In the team, some of the older veterans also comforted: "The Japanese devils are afraid that so many of us are locked up together, and they are not at ease, so they have to divide us so that they can rest assured." ”

These words have also been unanimously approved by everyone.

As everyone knows, in the dark place that they can't see, light and heavy machine guns, and even the muzzles of rifles, are already aimed at them.

When the execution began, the sound of intensive gunfire, the sound of entering the flesh, accompanied by the occurrence of screams, these prisoners of war suddenly discovered that the Japanese devils did not want to settle them at all, but to kill them, and the resettlement and fair treatment mentioned before were all fake, and they were only told to deceive them.

However, it was too late.

Gunshots and desperate cries mingled as these surrendered Chinese died in despair, struggling in pain.

An hour later, the crowd fell silent.

Japanese soldiers began to stab corpses one by one with bayonets, from night until dawn.

Subsequently, what to do with the corpses became a huge problem for the Japanese army.

In the Shogunate's massacre, the death toll was only a small fraction of the number of people slaughtered by the Japanese army in and around Jinling Castle, but the work of cleaning up the bodies lasted several days.

Burying the bodies was one option, but General Nakajima complained in his diary that it was difficult to find a huge trench to bury the bodies of seven or eight thousand people, and cremating the bodies was also a solution, but the Japanese army usually lacked enough to burn them.

After the Shogunyama massacre, the Japanese poured several large barrels of gasoline on the pile of corpses, but before the corpses could be reduced to ashes, the gasoline ran out, leaving only a large pile of charred corpses.

As a result, many corpses were thrown into the Yangtze River.

Later, the Japanese found a way to let the captives dig their own pits to bury themselves.

The Japanese army not only slaughtered Chinese soldiers, but also slaughtered desperately.

Xia Yuan led the remnants of more than 30 people, retreated late, and his actions were relatively hidden, so all he encountered were scenes after the massacre of the Japanese army.

There are schools, shops, hospitals, and corpses everywhere.

And from all directions in the city, there were scattered gunshots, I don't know if there were still people in the city resisting, or if the Japanese devils were shooting the ordinary people of Jinling City who had fled.

Xia Yuan was able to calm down, he took these people with him, while searching for the lone defeated soldiers, and at the same time arranged for the wounded to temporarily recuperate in the homes of ordinary people.

But he also knew in his heart that this method would treat the symptoms rather than the root cause, and the Japanese devils would sooner or later launch a bloody massacre in the entire Jinling City.

Within the Japanese army, the beginning of the massacre has always been a mystery.

Some say that it was the Asakanomiya who ordered it without authorization and subsequently destroyed the documents.

It is also said that the order was issued by Matsui Ishine and the Asahika Palace: "This time our imperial army attacked Jinling, and the Chinese army resisted stubbornly. In order to thank the emperor for his grace, he drank wine and smoke, carried forward his might to subdue Jinling, the capital of the enemy country, and killed all the prisoners. ”

The order also said: "Observing the battlefields in North China and Shanghai, the common people of China, even if they are old people, women, or children, many of them are engaged in the enemy's spies, or inform the location of the Japanese army, or lure the enemy to attack the Japanese army, or harm the individual soldiers of the Japanese army, etc., so they cannot be taken lightly and need special attention." If these acts are discovered, they should not be condoned, and drastic measures should be taken to kill them. ”

In order to make the soldiers firmly remember this order, the Japanese officers at the grassroots level simplified the full text of the order to: kill all the prisoners and kill all the common people.

December 13th.

For the people of Jinling, it was a disastrous day, and the bloody massacre began, as the national army gave up garrisoning Jinling!

On this day, the guns of the Chinese army's resistance were sparse, and tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers with a sense of revenge and an explosive beastly desire were waiting at the Zhonghua Gate, Hanzhong Gate, Shuixi Gate, Tongji Gate, and Zhongshan Gate, like hungry wolves hunting for food, and rushed madly towards the city, they had lost their humanity, like brutal beasts.

When he saw houses, he burned them, he killed them when he saw unarmed people, he raped women when he saw them, he even cut his stomach with a bayonet, and he watched her die in agony and despair.

The perversion of Japan is so deep in their bones that they even force old fathers and their daughters, even little girls and old people in their eighties.

They even cut off men's heads, stuffed a cigarette in their mouths, and placed them in the open space for fun.

The Mukai Squadron and Noda Squadron of the Japanese Matsuda Brigade had just entered the city from the Shuixi Gate. They stared at blood-red eyes and brandished broadswords, looking for their target.

After running for a while, he didn't see a single person, so he complained to the captain of the well and said to Noda: "Commander Matsui ordered us to kill all the soldiers of China and the people of Jinling, why is there no one on the street?" Where are all the officers and soldiers hiding? ”

Noda showed a murderous look and comforted him: "Don't worry, you can't run away from anyone who should be killed." ，”

Xiang Jing thought that Jinling City was so big that there would be no one there, so he was furious with his beastly nature, and thought of an idea that could allow him to vent his beastly nature, and suggested to Noda: "Noda-kun, do you dare to compete with me." ”

"Than what?" Noda didn't understand his intentions for a while, and even joked with a smile: "Is it better than eating, or sleeping, or running?" ”

"You stupid, kill into Jinling City, what do you say, of course it's more than killing!"

(End of chapter)