Nanking Massacre Denial - Testimony of Westerners - F. Tillman Durdin and Archibald Steele

F. Tillman Durdin and Archibald Steele

F. Tillman Durdin and Archibald Steele, American news correspondents, reported that they had seen on 15 December a lot of bodies of dead Chinese soldiers forming a small mound six feet high at the Nanking Yijiang gate in the north.

Durdin, who was working for the New York Times, made a tour of Nanjing before his departure from the city. He heard waves of machine-gun fire and witnessed the Japanese soldiers gun down some two hundred Chinese within ten minutes.

On 18 December 1937, in his report to the New York Times, he stated that the alleys and street were filled with civilian bodies, including women and children.

Kasahara, a massacre affirmationist, interviewed Durdin on August 14, 1987, and published it in Japan. In the interview, Durdin mentioned that "the mound of the bodies" he witnessed had been formed before the Japanese military reached there, and the Chinese soldiers had been killed not by the Japanese military. He said, "The bodies were Chinese soldiers who tried to escape... I think that the mound of the bodies had been formed before the Japanese military occupied there. In that area was no combat of the Japanese military." However, on 18 May 1992, Durdin held a news conference in New York during which he repudiated the Japanese media's distortion of his report on the Nanking massacre.

According to Higashinakano, the bodies witnessed by Durdin and Steele had been killed by a Chinese supervisory unit who had been waiting behind to kill Chinese soldiers trying to escape from the battlefield.

Hiroshi Motomiya claims that the killings of "some two hundred Chinese" witnessed by Durdin were the execution of Chinese soldiers in mufti, ordinary clothes, who were found hiding weapons or were considered to be rebellious and dangerous. There were some cases that Japanese soldiers were killed by captured Chinese soldiers who made surprise attack. The execution was done because, Motomiya claims, it was legitimate under international law and there was no specific problem even if other people happened to see it.

While, Durdin's article "the alleys and street were filled with civilian bodies, including women and children" was, Takemoto and Ohara claim, not what he had witnessed, for Durdin wrote, "Foreigners who toured the city and saw that all the alleys and streets were..." Durdin thus wrote this in a hearsay style.

Takemoto and Ohara claim that these "foreigners" were Rabe, Bates, and other International Committee members, especially Bates who drove Durdin to the harbor on December 15 to see him off; Durdin got on board a ship and left Nanking at 2:00 p.m. Bates later wrote in a letter of April 12, 1938, that he had given a memo about the incidents of Nanking to Durdin and other correspondents on December 15. Takemoto and Ohara claim that Durdin's article was written according to this memo that Bates handed him. They also claim that the information of Bates was only hearsay or misconception, since Bates could not prove the massacre of civilians when he was required to show proof from Consul John M. Allison.