Flags Of Our Fathers

Various Japanese authors have objectively tried to help their country come to terms with atrocities their military committed in Nanjing, and elsewhere in China. Some of the authors interviewed Chinese survivors (who told of horrifying events) and further relied on other primary sources (such as pictures taken by Japanese soldiers, maps, diaries and interviews with Japanese officers).

The extent of the brutality,  by soldiers from a civilized society, is impossible to comprehend. Although many primary sources of the time were destroyed, some of the following pictures of war - which are the least shocking of those available at various national archives - are gruesome:

• Japanese soldiers enter Nanjing (Nanking) in 1937.
  
  
• In Tokyo, street banners proclaimed: “To the fall of Nanjing. To the victory of the Imperial Army.”
  
  
• Bodies of mass-execution victims were buried in a place called “Ten Thousand Corpse Ditch.”
  
  
• It is claimed that army recruits practiced bayonet thrusts on live victims.
  
  
• Hora Tomio included military pictures in his book The Great Nanjing Massacre and the Kill All, Loot All, Burn All War. They were marked by military censors “Not Allowed” for publication.

Members of the same Japanese military who invaded China - about 22,000 of them - were sent to defend the Pacific island of Iwo Jima.