The Unpublished Story

The train from Shanghai to Nanking arrived on a Tuesday in December 1937, three days after the Japanese army had taken the city, and Catherine Morrison stepped onto the platform with a Leica camera around her neck and a notebook in her hand and the kind of professional detachment that had carried her through three civil wars and two dictators' rise to power and would, she was about to learn, carry her through the worst thing she would ever witness.

She was thirty-two years old, American, and employed by the Chicago Chronicle as a foreign correspondent. She had reported from the Spanish Civil War — covered the bombing of Guernica, interviewed survivors of the siege of Madrid, written the kind of story that had won her a nomination for the Pulitzer. She had covered the rally in Nuremberg where Hitler first unfurled the full grotesque theater of the Nazi movement. She had learned, through training and temperament, to look at horror and write about it clearly.

What she found in Nanking was different from anything she had seen before.

The city, once home to three million people, was a wound. Buildings burned. The Yangtze River was choked with bodies. Japanese soldiers moved through the streets in organized patrols, shooting anyone they found — men, women, children, elderly people, anyone. The Chinese resistance had collapsed in hours. The International Safety Zone, established by a handful of brave Westerners who had stayed behind, was the only place anyone could find refuge. But it was full. It was overflowing. It was not enough.

Kate set up her office in the American embassy compound. Colonel Jeremiah Black, an intelligence officer embedded with the Chinese resistance, met her on her second day in the city. He was a tall, lean man in his forties with a face that looked carved from granite and eyes that had seen too much and were not yet finished.

"I have something for you," Black said. He led her to a back room in the embassy, locked the door, and opened a leather satchel.

Inside were photographs. Dozens of them. Black-and-white prints, some colorized by hand, showing scenes that Kate had heard rumors of but had not seen documented. Mass executions along the Yangtze bank. Rows of captured men kneeling on the riverbank, hands bound, being machine-gunned. Children huddled in the Safety Zone, staring at nothing with eyes that had seen things no children should see.

And a reel of film — rare for the era, a newsreel camera capturing evidence that could not be denied.

"These were taken by a German businessman," Black said. "Hermann Rabe. He's documented everything the army has done. I have copies of his film and his photographs. I have survivor testimonies. I have official documents captured from Japanese officers. Everything you need."

Kate looked at the photographs. Her pen trembled in her hand. She put it down. She picked it up again.

"If I publish this," she said, "what happens?"

"The world knows," Black said. "Or at least the American public knows. And knowing changes things."

"And if I publish and nothing changes? If Congress blocks the stories? If the administration suppresses them because they don't want to provoke Japan?"

Black was quiet for a moment. "Then the victims die twice," he said. "Once by the Japanese. Once by our indifference."

Kate took the photographs. She took the film copies. She took the testimonies. She went back to her office at the embassy and opened her notebook and began to write.

She wrote for two weeks. She wrote every day, eleven or twelve hours at a time, stopping only to eat and sleep and develop film in a darkroom she had set up in a closet. She wrote about the executions. She wrote about the Sexual violence. She wrote about the children. She wrote about theSafety Zone and the doctors who treated the wounded with no anesthesia and no supply of morphine. She wrote about the Japanese officers who sat in restaurants drinking sake and watching the city burn through the windows.

She drafted the story. It was seventy pages long. It included photographs, maps, survivor testimonies, official documents. It was the most thorough account of a single atrocity ever compiled by an American journalist.

She did not publish it.

She told herself she was waiting for the right moment. The war in Europe was intensifying — Germany had invaded Poland, France was mobilizing, Britain was preparing for war. America was not ready to engage. If she published the Nanking story now, it would be buried under coverage of European events. She needed to wait until the American public was paying attention, until Congress was debating intervention, until the story could change policy, not just generate sympathy.

She waited.

She published smaller pieces — fragment stories, focused on specific aspects of the massacre. A piece on the Safety Zone. A piece on Hermann Rabe. A piece on a single survivor's testimony. They were good stories. They ran in the Chronicle. They generated some interest. But they were not the full story. The full story lived in her desk drawer, in a Manila folder that grew thicker as she added documents and photographs and drafts.

Dr. Arthur Lin sent her a letter from a refugee camp outside the city, dated January 1938. Lin was a Chinese-American doctor who had stayed in Nanking when most Westerners left. He treated the survivors of the massacre — shrapnel wounds, broken bones, malnutrition, shell shock.

"You have our truth in your hands," Lin wrote. "Do not let it become ink on a page and then dust on a desk. These people deserve more than a story. They deserve justice."

Kate read the letter in the embassy office, surrounded by photographs of dead children. She wept. Then she put the letter in the Manila folder and kept working.

She published the full story in March 1942 — five years after she had first written it. By then, the United States had entered the war. The Pacific theater was active. Japan was at war with America. The Nanking story ran for three days on the front page, accompanied by photographs and a map and a timeline. It was good journalism. It was thorough. It was devastating.

And then it was over.

Readers wrote letters. Some were moved. Some were outraged. Some asked what they could do. The Chronicle received twelve thousand letters of response — a fraction of what it received about the war in Europe. The story generated a Congressional hearing that lasted one day and produced one resolution that was non-binding and symbolic and entirely without effect.

Eight hundred thousand people had died in the Nanking Massacre. The American public read about it for three days and then moved on to more urgent stories: Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad.

Kate sat in her office and read the letters and felt the weight of the Manila folder on her desk and understood, with a clarity that she would carry for the rest of her life, that she had published the truth and the truth had not been enough.

For the next forty years, Kate wrote and rewrote the story. Every few years, she would open the Manila folder, reread the drafts, add new documents, delete old paragraphs, rewrite the introduction. She published smaller pieces — books, articles, lectures. But the full account — the seventy-page master document — lived only in the folder, on her desk, in her mind.

Her colleague Silas Thornton watched her struggle. They had worked together since Madrid, both of them young correspondents covering the approach of war. Silas was married, father of two, a man who believed in institutions and processes and the slow, steady work of democracy.

"Kate," he said in 1982, when they were both retired and sitting on her porch in Vermont, watching snow fall on the trees. "You've been rewriting that story for forty years."

"It's not finished," Kate said.

"It will never be finished," Silas said gently. "There is no perfect version. There is only the version that gets published."

"I waited for the right moment," Kate said. "There is no right moment."

"No," Silas said. "There isn't. There is only the moment. And the moment is always now."

Kate died in 1987. The Manila folder was found in her desk drawer, after the funeral, by her editor at the Chronicle — a woman who had worked with Kate in the nineties and had never seen the folder but had always suspected its existence.

The full story of Nanking — told by an American witness in 1937, forty years before the world would know — was published posthumously. It was 112 pages long, illustrated with photographs, accompanied by survivor testimonies and official documents.

It was too late.

But it was not nothing.

The book's dedication read: "To the eight hundred thousand who waited forty years to be heard."

Kate Morrison had held the truth in her hands. She had waited for the right moment to publish it. The right moment had passed. But the truth had survived — in a drawer, in a folder, in a woman who had spent forty years rewriting a story that the world had not been ready to read, but would eventually, necessarily, have to.