Pearl Harbor

In late 1937, the Japanese escalate their military campaign in China.

[gunshots] They already occupy Manchuria.

After three months of fighting, they take Shanghai.

[screaming] And move to the ancient Chinese capital of Nanking.

[gunshots] The Japanese brutality that follows will shock the world.

They enter the city, but instead of just occupying it, they let the Japanese troops off the leash.

They rape, they pillage, they burn, they steal.

The Japanese commanders ordered their soldiers not to take any prisoners, which meant executions.

[gunshots]

This was Japanese soldiers looking down on the Chinese as an inferior people and as being non-humans.

Japanese soldier who committed atrocities himself, he described it as killing pigs.

[gunshots]

Japanese officers had a competition to see who could be the first to kill 100 civilians with a sword.

This was printed in Japanese newspaper.

To show pictures of swordsmen decapitating bound prisoners in the 20th century made the people doing the killing seem almost like they were barbarians from another era.

And it struck Americans and people in the Western world in a different way than had they shown people being lined up against a wall and shot.

Hundreds of thousands of people raped and murdered by the Japanese.

It was called the Rape of Nanking.

[gunshots]

In just six weeks, the Japanese Army killed 200,000 Chinese in Nanking.

Most are civilians.

The Japanese invasion does identify the Japanese is as an aggressive power in the Pacific, that they are brutal in the way that they've treated the population, and this starts to change people's perceptions with regards to the Japanese.