Analyzing the “Photographic Evidence” of the Nanking Massacre

and Fitch in Timperly’s book described the Japanese army’s mopping-up operations followingthe fall of the city as well as the separation of plain-clothed soldiers from civilians in the“safety zone”— military actions that entailed lawful execution of combatants orex-combatants— as cases of Japanese troops indulging in “repeated murder.” Those accountsthat appeared as eyewitness accounts of Westerners in Nanking obviously served the statedpurpose of the GMD propaganda bureau, that is, to denounce the “cruel nature of the enemy’smilitary clique” and to “promote the anti-war feeling in the international community.”Yet, there was one serious problem. As already pointed out, Bates concluded that allof the “40,000 dead bodies” as recorded in burial and other records were the results of unlawfulkilling by the Japanese army, and inserted a short passage referring to this in What War Means.As the previously quoted top secret GMD document suggests, however, the party’s propagandabureau did not recognize as a fact a “massacre” of such scale in Nanking.Organization Structure of GMZ, GMD, and its Central Propaganda BureauHad the propaganda bureau, which professed to “expose the enemy’s atrocities in thecapital following its fall,” accepted Bates’s contention as the truth, it would have included,even emphasized, the massacre of 40,000 in its Chinese edition—a contention that was statedin Timperly’s original English edition. The bureau, however, could not because had it beenincluded in the Chinese edition, they knew that knowledgeable sources in China would havesoon exposed the fallacy of the “massacre of 40,000 in Nanking”. As a solution, thepropaganda bureau on one hand included that passage only in the English version, which waspublished ostensibly as Timperly’s work and mainly targeted at Western readers who wereunfamiliar with the situation in China. The bureau, on the other hand, omitted that portion not6