Mark Gagnon

It was just being erased.

And this was only the beginning.

The killings didn't stop for weeks.

Japanese troops rounded up Chinese men by the thousands.

It didn't matter who they were.

Soldiers who had surrendered, civilians who had never touched a weapon, teenage boys who barely understood what was happening, old men who could barely even stand.

If you looked like you might have been a soldier, you were taken.

They were marched to open fields, riverbanks, empty lots along the Yangtze River, any space big enough to hold hundreds at a time, and then the executions began.

Sometimes machine guns tore through entire lines of prisoners at once, just bodies dropping into mass graves or tumbling into the river to just drift downstream.

Sometimes men were tied to posts and used for bayonet practice, stabbing again and again to teach these new recruits how to kill.

Others were doused in gasoline and just burned alive.

The killing was so relentless.

The bodies were so many that no one could even agree on the true number of casualties.

Most modern historians estimate the death toll to be over 100,000, though China officially commemorates the number as 300,000.

At the riverbank near the Straw String Gorge, men stood with their hands tied, watching the ones ahead of them collapse under gunfire, just knowing that they were next.

And they begged, they cried out for their families, they prayed.

And behind their voices...

just came the crack of rifles and the thuds of bayonets and the splash of bodies falling into the river.

The Japanese officers stood nearby, just smoking cigarettes as they watched.

There was no mercy.