Ap World History Rape of Nanking Summary/Critique

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When most people think of World War II, they think of Hitler invading Poland, concentration camps, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But in the book Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang tells about the horrendous, brutal massacre that occurred in Nanjing, China. What many people don’t know about World War II is that things started to go downhill a few years before the 1940s. The war began in 1937 when Japan and China started to have conflict with each other. Even several years before that, Japan invaded the city of Manchuria, China and took it over, changing its name to Manchukuo. In the year of 1937, Japan invaded a few more Chinese cities, one of them being its then capital city, Nanjing. This is where things really got gruesome. Every Japanese soldier that invaded Nanjing had a license to murder, rape and torture anyone residing in the country’s capital. Walking down the streets, these soldiers raped Nanjing’s women and killed its men and children without an ounce of guilt. Although citizens tried to escape, this was no easy task, as a big wall bordered the entire city. Chang tells us that over the course of six weeks, 350,000 Chinese citizens and soldiers were brutally killed, many of the citizens being completely disarmed. On page six of The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang immediately begins to tell us some of the horrific things that happened to innocent people during the tragic massacre: “Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the

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