After the Japanese occupied Nanking, the Nanking Massacre broke out. Chinese prisoners of war in Nanking were used as live firing practice for bayonet test stabbings. Chinese corpses littered the trenches after the massacre.

　　 The Nanking Massacre holocaust broke out after Japanese troops occupied Nanking on December 13, 1937 during the Sino-Japanese War. Japanese soldiers used Chinese prisoners of war as live firing practice for test stabbing with bayonets. Chinese corpses littered the trenches after the massacre. This photo captures the devastation of the Nanking Massacre perpetrated by Japanese soldiers against the Chinese.

　China was the scene of the Sino-Japanese War that began on July 7, 1937, when fighting erupted to halt the Japanese invasion. China ultimately lost some 20 million lives in the Sino-Japanese War. The approximately 17 million Chinese victims were not soldiers, but unarmed and defenseless civilians. By the end of the Nanking Massacre, an estimated 300,000 people had died, but estimates of the death toll varied widely, with some figures around 40,000, and there was fierce controversy over the estimates.

　The worst massacre occurred on December 13, 1937, about six weeks after Japanese troops raided the Chinese capital of Nanking. The massacre in Nanking began even before the Japanese reached the city walls. At the beginning of the invasion, the Japanese army moved from battle to battle throughout China, slaughtering and looting under strict orders to kill all prisoners of war.

　When the Nanking Massacre began, they burned the city walls, homes, surrounding forests, and even villages in their path. They looted buildings and stole from the poor and the rich. They slaughtered scores of people they met by chance. Some of the victims of the Nanking Massacre were thrown into unmarked mass graves and left to die. The Chinese people mutilated by Japanese soldiers were not Chinese combatants; the victims were unarmed, defenseless civilians.

　In the mere six weeks between December 13, 1937 and the Nanking Massacre, an estimated 20,000 to 80,000 Chinese women were brutally raped and sexually assaulted by the invading soldiers. They dragged out women and even small children and violently gang-raped them. When they finished raping their victims, they often killed them. Pregnant mothers were mutilated, and rape victims were stabbed to death with bamboo sticks and bayonets.

　The Japanese government's Murakami Cabinet officially apologized for the atrocities committed during World War II on August 15, 1995, and in 1984 the Japanese Army Veterans Association interviewed Japanese veterans who witnessed the Nanking Massacre in order to refute reports of Japanese military atrocities. The Veterans Association found that the veterans spoke candidly about the widespread atrocities. The Veterans Association's journal published an apology for the Nanking Massacre. The Veterans of Foreign Wars' journal, "Whatever the severity of the war or the particular circumstances of the psychology of war, we are simply speechless in the face of this illegal massacre. As a pre-war military official, I can only apologize deeply to the Chinese people. It was truly a regrettable act of barbarism."