They Were in Nanjing

The Nanjing Massacre, which took place after the Japanese attacked and captured Nanjing in December 1937, shocked the world with the magnitude of its atrocities. With newly uncovered eye-witness material left behind by American and British journalists, missionaries, and diplomats, They Were in Nanjing takes the readers back in time to revisit the event and live through those horror-filled days. The first-hand accounts range from English media reports, personal records, missionary and Christian organization documents, to American and British diplomatic and military documents. The research yields new discoveries and presents issues that have previously not been adequately dealt with, for instance, Japanese attacks on American citizens, and losses and damage to American and British properties as a result of Japanese atrocities. No other book on the Nanjing Massacre presents the first-hand foreign perspective so thoroughly or consistently.

Suping Lu is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“For decades, revisionists in Japan denied the existence of the ‘Rape of Nanking’-the brutal rape, torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in 1937 and 1938–while conveniently ignoring the fact that these atrocities had been carefully recorded in thousands of primary source documents across the globe. They Were in Nanjing is an important compilation of many contemporaneous eyewitness accounts, and should serve as a vital historical resource for all serious scholars of the Pacific War.” —Iris Chang, New York Times bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking and The Chinese in America: A Narrative History.