On this date in 1938 the Imperial Japanese Army conquered the Hankow or Hankou industrial district within the city of Wuhan, and according to the Associated Press* “shot scores of Chinese soldiers or civilians luckless enough to be taken for soldiers” including “twenty uniformed and civilian-garbed Chinese … executed within sight of foreign gunboats.”
A major trading city that had been forced open to western concessions by the Second Opium War, Wuhan had become, briefly, the capital of the Chinese Kuomintang after Japan’s initial onslaught the previous year quickly captured the former capital Nanking.
* The linked newspaper miscopied the dateline; it should read “Hankow, Oct. 27” rather than “Oct. 2”.
On this day..
- 1937: Nikolai Nikolayevich Durnovo, Slavist
- Feast Day of the Talavera Martyrs
- 1799: Egyptians after the Revolt of Cairo
- 1905: Ed Lamb, bully
- 1821: Elizabeth Warriner, Lincoln poisoner
- 1441: Margery Jourdemayne, the Witch of Eye
- 1698: Old Believer popes and Princess Sophia's petitioners
- 1942: Helmuth Huebener, Mormon anti-Nazi
- 1449: Ulugh Beg, astronomer prince
- 1659: The first two Boston Martyrs
- 1666: Robert Hubert for the Great Fire of London
- 1553: Michael Servetus, but not to defend a doctrine