#REAL WAR FOOTAGE KILLING MOVIE#

“The pictures shown herewith give but a fragmentary glimpse of the unspeakable things that happened following the Japanese occupation of Nanking …” he wrote in his notes about the films, which are housed at the Divinity Library. “But a fragmentary glimpse of the unspeakable …” He began shooting footage of the refugee camps and surrounding devastation, capturing horrific images of the wounded and showing the toll the violence had taken on the city’s civilians. It has been a week of murder and rape, worse, I imagine, than has happened for a very long time unless the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks was comparable.” “I never dreamed that the Japanese soldiers were such savages. “The horror of last week is beyond anything I have ever experienced,” he wrote to his wife on Dec. Magee was appalled by the brutality and depravity of the Japanese soldiers. Magee, top right, stands with other members of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. Hundreds of thousands of refugees sought and received protection there. When the city fell, residents flocked to the safety zone to escape the marauding Japanese soldiers. (The American embassy was evacuated several days ahead of the invasion.) He was a member of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, which had established a safety zone for non-combatants in an area near Nanking’s center that included government buildings, the American embassy, the University of Nanking, and Ginling College, a college for women established by Protestant missionaries. Magee was among about two-dozen Westerners - missionaries, physicians, businessmen, and academics - who remained in the city when the Japanese invaded. They married in 1921 and had four sons: John, David, Christopher, and Hugh.

While in China, he met Faith Emmeline Backhouse, a fellow missionary. He was ordained a minister in the Episcopal Church and assigned to missionary work in Nanking. Magee and other missionaries performed there.” “It has been a week of murder and rape …”īorn in Pittsburgh in 1884, Magee graduated from Yale in 1906. “The reels are a valuable addition to our collections documenting the Nanking Massacre and the works that John G. “We are very grateful to the Magee family for donating these remarkable film reels to the library, and the USC Shoah Foundation for digitizing the footage, which allows us to share it with scholars,” says Martha Smalley, special collections librarian and curator of the Day Missions Collection at the Divinity School Library. Excerpts of the two reels of footage taken during the Japanese invasion, reels one and nine, are posted on the library’s Nanking Massacre Project website. The digitized footage is now available to researchers. The USC Shoah Foundation, which is producing a documentary on events in the Chinese cities of Nanking (now Nanjing) and Shanghai during World War II, digitized the reels for the library at no cost. They include footage of the flooding of the Yangtze River in September 1931 and the consecration of the second Chinese bishop in the Anglican Church, which occurred on Nov. The other 11 reels document daily life in Nanking and other places, including street scenes and church services, during the 1920s and 1930s. They were part of a collection of 13 reels of footage that Magee shot during his missionary career in China. The Yale Divinity School Library recently acquired two of Magee’s original film reels from the massacre - a gift of Magee’s grandson, John Magee III. It provided among the first visual evidence of the Nanking Massacre. He smuggled the footage out of China the following year.

#REAL WAR FOOTAGE KILLING MOVIE#

Magee, who owned a 16mm movie camera, risked his safety to capture footage of the horror happening around him. Instead of fleeing the violence, Magee remained in the city and worked with other Westerners, considered neutral parties to the Sino-Japanese War, to save lives and document the soldiers’ crimes. Japanese soldiers perpetrated mass atrocities against war prisoners and civilians alike, including widespread looting, rape, and murder. The invasion unleashed six weeks of terror in the capital city of Nationalist China. was an American missionary stationed in Nanking when the Japanese Imperial Army entered the city on Dec. The reels contain footage that Magee shot while serving as a missionary in China during the 1920s and 1930s, including footage from the so-called Nanking Massacre. Magee donated these 13 film reels to the Yale Divinity School Library.

Real war footage killing