A bit of awful history that needs to be remembered!-----Nanking - There are some stories that historians approach with a little more hesitation, not because the facts are unclear, but because they are so painfully clear.

Those choices produced one of the worst episodes of violence in modern history. - Dave’s Home Page

• The events that unfolded in and around Nanking in December of 1937 were the result of choices made on battlefields, in political offices, and in the minds of men who believed that their cause lifted them above ordinary restraint...

The story remains difficult, but difficulty is not an excuse for silence...

The sheer scale of the suffering has produced decades of argument, denial, and painful efforts to piece together the truth. 

What happened in Nanking was not an accident of war or a moment of battlefield chaos. 

• It was the predictable result of a chain of decisions that dismantled the rules of armed conflict and encouraged soldiers to behave as if their enemies were something less than human...
• The path toward the capital began months earlier in Shanghai. In August 1937 Japanese and Chinese forces clashed in a brutal urban battle that ground on for three months.