Four Pages from Nanjing: The Burning City.

[richardak]

I know I owe everyone scans from issue two of Conqueror of the Barren Earth, but I had to share this new comic, Nanjing: The Burning City, by Ethan Young, that I picked up this past Wednesday (don't worry, I've only posted four pages). It's set during the early years of World War Two, when it was still just the Second Sino-Japanese War. In December of 1937, the Japanese attacked and captured Nanjing (Nanking in the Wade-Giles transliteration) and carried out a series of atrocities that would become known as the infamous "Rape of Nanjing." As the Chinese Army retreated from the city in disorder, many soldiers were left behind in the chaos. This comic tells the story of one such soldier. In these scans, he has been captured by a Japanese Army colonel. Said colonel is a sincere believer in Japan's mission to unite all of East Asia under its leadership, and tries to persuade the Chinese captain (neither character's name is ever given):





The colonel takes the captain to the Nanking Safety Zone, which was a neutral area that the Westerners living in the city had set up under the leadership of a German, John Rabe. Large numbers of civilians and Chinese soldiers in civilian guise, including the only other survivor of the captain's command, fled to the Safety Zone. The colonel wants the captains help in rooting out the hiding soldiers, promising that it will better this way, as it will enable him to avoid harming the civilians in the Safety Zone. You can probably guess the captain's answer:



Anyway, I felt I had to post this.  I highly recommend picking up a copy.

Comments

[baihu]

'Generalissimo' is an odd term, I dunno, feels like another equivalent title would have worked better.

The real reason everyone knew Japan could never handle its grand schemes is that its empire was far too small and its people too few. China alone was the biggest obstacle. Too many people, too huge a country.

By the time the Japanese came to Singapore, at the tail-end of the Japanese war invasion, their army was stretched so thin that had the British not been incompetent and surrendered, and instead forced the invading Japanese into street fighting, my tiny island country alone had the people, arms and supplies to fight them off and force them back across the courseway, where they had to fight with the Malay resistance in Malaysia.

But that's all in hindsight of course, the Brits had surrendered after a series of blunders made them think they had no chance, and then we had to suffer the Japanese Occupation.

[richardak]

"Generalissimo" was his actual, historical title, at least as far as I understand it. Or do you mean that Chiang himself should have taken a different title, like commander-in-chief or something?

You are certainly correct that Japan was extremely overstretched, but it was not obvious at the time of the battle of Nanjing that that would necessarily make their plans impossible. At the time, a number of relatively small industrialized states had managed to take over much larger, more populous countries with a relatively small commitment of men and materiel. It is also true that the age of such empires was coming to an end by the late thirties, precisely because it was becoming too expensive to rule such empires, but people at the time did not necessarily know that. In 1937, China was facing Japan alone and unaided, and it was not so obvious that China would eventually prevail.

You are certainly correct that the British badly botched the defense of Singapore. What makes it especially appalling is that the British had well over twice as many men. Being unable to defend a built-up island that you've had all the time in the world to fortify when you have the attackers badly outnumbered really is appalling.

[baihu]

Isn't it a transliteration of the original term they use? I just get the impression that it's Italian or Spanish, which seems off to me in the setting, but I'm not aware if it's a proper military term used in general by armies around the world and it was the closest approximation to the title.

Well the British did put guns facing the wrong way, though to be fair they thought that it would be mad to try to enter Singapore via the courseway and not by the sea from the south.

Still how did they fail to defend an island that has exactly one bridge for entry is mindboggling. I can only conclude that the British administration here were low on morale due to what their homeland was going through, but really they should have ceded control to the people then if they weren't up to leading us in actually fighting.

[shadur]

'-issimo' is a Italian/spanish superlative amplifier, from latin '-issimus'

In musical notation, 'forte' and 'piano' mean 'play this bit louder/stronger' and 'play this bit softer/quiter/gentler' respectively; 'fortissimo' and 'pianissimo' mean 'PUT YOUR BACK INTO IT, MAGGOT!' and 'softly, softly, barely there...'

According to wikipedia, 'Generalissimo' was in fact the accepted term for Chiang Kai-shek at the time...