Norman Chapter 7Bataan Falls: The WoundedAre Left in Their BedsTHE WORLD WAR II militarists who ruled Japan had spent decades fashioning the Imperial Japanese Army into a swift, mobile and ruthless force that showed its true face to the world in the late fall and early winter of 1937 as it prepared to attack the city of Nanking. Tokyo’s marching orders were simple—take the Chinese city, kill every enemy soldier in it, loot any supplies necessary to sustain the troops during the winter and, by whatever means necessary, prevent the civilian population from mounting an insurgent movement behind Japanese lines.1The battle for the city was over in less than forty-eight hours. Then the real bloodshed began. Japanese troops looted homes, burned villages and rounded up groups of men—a hundred, two hundred, five hundred at a time; old men, young men, boys, it did not matter—and, point-blank, executed them. After that the soldiers of the Rising Sun went house to house, neighborhood by neighborhood, seeking out women and, in an almost methodical way, raped every one of them.All of this was witnessed by a number of foreign observers: “One poor woman was raped seven times,”
