Editing Battle of Nanking (section)

=== "Mopping-up operations": the mass execution of prisoners ===
By the late morning December 13, all major gates to the city had been captured by the Japanese. The fighting in Nanjing did not end on the night of December 12–13, when the Japanese Army took the remaining gates and entered the city. During their mopping-up operations in the city the Japanese continued for several more days to beat back sporadic resistance from remnant Chinese forces.<ref name="noboru22">{{Cite book |last=Noboru Kojima |publisher=Bungei Shunju |year=1984 |location=Tokyo |pages=191, 194–195, 197–200 |language=ja |script-title=ja:日中戦争(3)}}; Kojima relied heavily on field diaries for his research.</ref><ref name="mopping22">Masahiro Yamamoto, ''Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity'' (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 85–91. For this information, Yamamoto cites a dozen different Japanese combat diaries.</ref><ref>"March of Victory into Nanking Set," ''The New York Times'', December 16, 1937, 15.</ref> Though Mufushan, just north of Nanjing, was taken by Japan's Yamada Detachment without much bloodshed on the morning of December 14,<ref>{{Cite book |last=Noboru Kojima |publisher=Bungei Shunju |year=1984 |location=Tokyo |page=196 |language=ja |script-title=ja:日中戦争(3)}}; Kojima relied heavily on field diaries for his research.</ref> pockets of resistance outside Nanjing persisted for several more days.<ref>Senshi Hensan Iinkai, {{Nihongo2|騎兵・搜索第二聯隊戦史}} (Sendai: Kihei Sosaku Daini Rentai Senyukai, 1987), 155–158.</ref>

Months of fighting had taught the Chinese defenders to expect no mercy if captured by Japanese forces, and many who remained in the city were frantically seeking a way out before it was too late. For some units like those in the Guangdong Army, there were detailed plans establishing a route out of Nanjing.<ref name=":32" /> As a result, there were hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of Chinese stragglers who managed to slip through Japanese lines, in groups or individually. However, these plans were only good for those who got word of them, with most being intercepted by Japanese troops or remaining in the city, meeting almost certain death.<ref name=":022" />

Meanwhile, the Japanese units in Nanjing, under the pretense of rooting out military opposition, began conducting thorough searches of every building in Nanjing for Chinese soldiers, and made frequent incursions into the Nanking Safety Zone in search of them.<ref name="noboru22" /><ref name="mopping22" /> Japanese units attempted to identify former soldiers by checking if they had marks on their shoulders from wearing a backpack or carrying a rifle.<ref name="noboru22" /> However, the criteria used were often arbitrary as was the case with one Japanese company which apprehended all men with "shoe sores, callouses on the face, extremely good posture, and/or sharp-looking eyes" and for this reason many civilians were taken at the same time.<ref>Masahiro Yamamoto, ''Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity'' (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 100. Yamamoto's interpretation is based on the diaries of soldiers Mataichi Inoie and So Mizutani.</ref> According to George Fitch, head of Nanjing's YMCA, "rickshaw coolies, carpenters, and other laborers are frequently taken."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kaiyuan |first=Zhang |title=Eyewitnesses to Massacre |pages=94}}</ref> Chinese police officers and firefighters were also targeted, with even street sweepers and Buddhist burial workers from the [[Red Swastika Society]] being marched away on suspicion of being soldiers.<ref name=":52">{{Cite book |last=Harmsen |first=Peter |title=Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City |date=2015 |publisher=Casemate |pages=242–243}}</ref>
[[File:Chinese_captives_in_Nanking.jpg|thumb|Chinese men rounded up in the "mopping-up operations". All of them would be killed within a few days, and their bodies dumped into the Yangtze]]
Chinese prisoners who were rounded up were summarily executed en masse as part of an event that came to be known as the [[Nanjing Massacre]], which the foreign residents and journalists in Nanjing made known internationally within days of the city's fall.<ref>Masahiro Yamamoto, ''Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity'' (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 81, 93, 99.</ref> 

The massacres were organized to kill as many people within a short timeframe, which usually meant rows of unarmed prisoners being mowed down by machine gun fire before being finished off with bayonets or revolvers. In one instance, Japanese troops from the Yamada Detachment and the 65th Infantry Regiment systemically led 17,000 to 20,000 Chinese prisoners to the banks of the Yangtze River near Mufushan and machine gunned them to death. They then disposed of the corpses by burning or flushing them downstream.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wakabayashi |first=Bob |title=The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938: Complicating the Picture |publisher=Berghan Books |pages=84-85}}</ref> 

In many other instances, prisoners were decapitated, used for bayonet practice, or tied together, doused in gasoline and set on fire. Wounded Chinese soldiers who remaining in the city were killed in their hospital beds, bayonetted, clubbed, or dragged outside and burned alive.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Dorn |first=Frank |title=The Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1941 |date=1974 |pages=92}}</ref> The massacres were usually conducted on the banks of the Yangtze River to facilitate the mass disposal of corpses.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Harmsen |first=Peter |title=Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City |date=2015 |publisher=Casemate |pages=241}}</ref>
[[File:A_waterpond_filled_with_the_bodies_of_executed_Chinese_soldiers_who_got_safety_promise_by_Japanese_(b),_Nanjing_Massacre.jpg|thumb|Photo by [[Bernhard Arp Sindberg|Bernhard Sindberg]] of a pond full of executed Chinese POWs who had received false promises of clemency by the Japanese]]
The rounding-up and mass killings of male civilians and genuine POWs were referred to euphemistically as "mopping-up operations" in Japanese communiqués, in a manner "just like the [[Nazi Germany|Germans]] were to talk about '[[The Holocaust|processing]]' or 'handling' Jews."<ref name=":52" /> The number of prisoners of war executed is disputed, as numerous male civilians were falsely accused of being former soldiers and summarily executed. The International Military Tribunal in Tokyo, using the thorough records of the Safety Zone Committee, found that some 20,000 male civilians were killed on false grounds of being soldiers, whilst another 30,000 genuine former combatants were unlawfully executed and their bodies disposed of in the river.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Mitter |first=Rana |title=Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 |date=2013 |publisher=Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |pages=139}}</ref> Other estimates vary: Colonel Uemura Toshimichi wrote in his war diary that somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 Chinese prisoners were executed, but makes no distinction between soldiers or male civilians.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lai |first=Benjamin |title=Shanghai and Nanjing 1937: Massacre on the Yangtze |date=2017 |publisher=Osprey Publishing |pages=89}}</ref> Zhaiwei Sun estimates between 36,500 and 40,000 Chinese prisoners of war were executed after capture.<ref name=":62">{{Cite journal |last=Zhaiwei Sun |year=1997 |script-title=zh:南京大屠杀遇难同胞中究竟有多少军人 |url=http://jds.cass.cn/UploadFiles/zyqk/2010/12/201012101114478943.pdf |url-status=dead |language=zh |issue=4 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150709222256/http://jds.cass.cn/UploadFiles/zyqk/2010/12/201012101114478943.pdf |archive-date=July 9, 2015 |access-date=December 16, 2014 |script-journal=zh:抗日战争研究}}</ref>