It was not strategists in Tokyo, but the junior officers leading the Central China Area Army who decided to follow the Chinese in flight all the way to Nanjing. As with the naval planners who would play a decisive role in the coming Pacific War, these men were ardent believers in the cult of decisive battle (sokusen sokketsu, literally, “rapid combat, quick decision”). They would seek decision through arms regardless of Tokyo’s orders to the contrary. It was not unlike a perverse game of telephone. When the command to halt the advance outside of Shanghai came, officers at each level of command watered down the orders they received before they passed them down the ranks. The soldiers at the bottom of the chain—who at campaign’s start were not eager to press forward, remembering the horrors of the trenches outside Shanghai—had no idea that the orders they were following had been changed bit by bit until they commanded the opposite of their original intent. The Japanese advance was soon a race to the finish line, each division and battalion competing to be present at the capture of China’s capital and the glorious final victory of the war. This drive to end the war by inflicting one great, decisive disaster on the Chinese people explains much about the Japanese infantry’s subsequent behavior in Nanjing.

This callousness was in part a response to the fanaticism of the Chinese defenders who opposed their march to the capital. From the moment the Xicheng line was crossed everyone in China’s leadership knew that Nanjing was a doomed city. Its conquest could only be delayed, not defeated. Those ordered to its defense were being ordered to their deaths, and they knew it. It is extraordinary to see just how many of them accepted these commands with gusto.

Harmsen relates dozens of such stories of Chinese grit and heroism, each describing a battalion or brigade sent to slow down the Japanese advance with the full knowledge that no one who went to man the failing defenses outside the city could expect to return to it alive. The courage which these soldiers displayed awed both the Japanese and the Westerners who witnessed it. Modern readers will be reminded of the hopeless last stands of Japanese soldiers holed up in islands redoubts during the Pacific War. This comparison favors the Chinese, usually portrayed as faithless cowards. Western observers who saw the Chinese in action did not think of them this way: many claimed that the Chinese soldiers they met on the battlefields of Shanghai and Nanjing were the equal of the any Japanese soldier. The difference between them, they claimed, was not a matter of commitment or bravery, but weapons and supplies. Alas, this was not to last! The greatest tragedy of the upper Yangtze campaigns was that during its battles all of the men willing to die for China did. The 88th, 87th, and Training Divisions, schooled in the Nationalist Party’s revolutionary ideology in the years before they were tasked with defending Nanjing against the Japanese assault, walked away from the campaign with less than 2,500 men between them.[11] Chiang Kai-shek’s carefully trained junior officer corps would share a similar fate. 70% of the officers that served in Shanghai died there.[12] This greatly changed the composition of the Nationalist officer corp: 80% of the junior officers that went to war in 1937 were academy graduates. By 1945 that number had dropped to 20%. By then the Nationalists were resorting to the conscription and the forced march of men in chains to fill its ranks. The results were predictably pathetic. To give just one example, when one “elite” unit of 1943 was temporarily placed on reserve, more than 55% of its soldiers deserted.[13] Such high levels of desertion were unthinkable from the elite units who fought in Shanghai and Nanjing. The Nationalists had traded lives for time, and in so doing had severely constrained what they could do with the time they had bought.

"Many of the traits bitter American liaisons and attaches would attribute to Nationalist forces—their passivity, an unwillingness to commit to new offenses, Chiang Kai-shek’s penchant for having poorly trained warlord forces defend the most dangerous positions—were a direct consequence of the human capital lost in 1937 and 1938."

“Perhaps [China’s] biggest weakness,” Harmsen says in one of his rare assessments of the strategies each side employed, “was what Chinese commanders erroneously considered their biggest strength: a willingness to absorb losses that often defied imagination.”[14] While the loss of their best troops did not prevent the Chinese from seizing the occasional victory later in the war—most notably in Taierzhuang, fought only a few months after the Battle of Nanjing had ended—it did irreversibly change the types of operations the Nationalists could commit themselves to in the future. Many of the traits bitter American liaisons and attaches would attribute to Nationalist forces—their passivity, an unwillingness to commit to new offenses, Chiang Kai-shek’s penchant for having poorly trained warlord forces defend the most dangerous positions—were a direct consequence of the human capital lost in 1937 and 1938. Chiang Kai-shek simply did not have the reserve of well-trained, well-led, and fiercely committed troops in 1942 that he had in 1937. Those men were all dead, and he could not risk using squandering what little talent he had left on risky set-piece engagements.