Mark Gagnon

So by the winter of that year, everything was worse.

Shops were closing early.

Parents were keeping their kids inside at the sound of distant explosions in nearby villages.

And refugees came from all over the city into this city of Nanjing with stories that made people very uncomfortable, even if they tried not to talk about it.

The streets were emptying a little bit more and more every single day.

And some families tried to leave with whatever they could carry, just preparing for this imminent threat that they couldn't exactly put their finger on how it would look.

Others just stayed because they had nowhere else to go.

Even longtime residents, people who lived through the hard years of different wars and different conflicts that had happened in the region, started to sense that something far worse was on its way.

Nanjing, the capital at the time known as the southern capital, you can imagine Beijing, that same suffix, you know, Jing, being, you know, the city, the capital.

This was a peaceful place full of schools and markets and regular people living regular lives by the mid 20th century.

But as December moved on, the city was just on pause and everyone was just waiting for this imminent threat.

No one in the city could see the full shape of what was coming, but the signs were there.

So Japan's invasion of China kicked off by July 1937, and it was fast and it was ruthless.

The Japanese army believed that they could take over China before the rest of the world even had time to respond.

The Japanese command followed a simple but brutal idea.

Hit hard, break any resistance, and push China towards surrender through fear.

Terror itself was one of their main weapons.

Meanwhile, China was fighting from the edge of collapse, basically.

The country was split between the nationalists known as the KMT, the Kuomintang, China's ruling government, and the communists, their longtime rivals.

And its armies were undertrained and really just outmatched by Japan's modern war machine.