Invading Japanese troops massacred at least 500,000 Chinese before the occupation of Nanjing in 1937, according to declassified documents from the United States government, said a Chinese scholar.

Two telegrams from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration added evidence to support claims of a "Pan-Nanjing Massacre" that included the slaughter of people in the area surrounding China's then capital, said Wang Lan, a research worker for the State Archives Administration of China.

Telegrams sent by the U.S. diplomats pointed to the massacre of an estimated half a million people in Shanghai, Suzhou,Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Wuxi and Changzhou, said Wang.

Historical records show that more than 300,000 unarmed soldiers and innocent civilians were murdered by Japanese troops during the six-week Nanjing Massacre during a period from December 1937 to January 1938.

However, the massacre of Chinese before the occupation of Nanjing is less well documented.

William Edward Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany, sent a telegram from Berlin to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Dec. 14, 1937, one day after the Japanese army occupied Nanjing, saying, "Today the news from the Far East is worse than ever and I have read yours and Secretary Hull's statement as to Japanese brutality. The Japanese Ambassador here boasted a day or two ago of his country's having killed 500,000 Chinese people."

Dodd also suggested in the telegram that the U.S. government should take action to resist Japanese brutality at once.

In the other telegram sent by Clarence E. Causs, U.S. Consul in Shanghai, to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on Jan. 25, 1938, Gauss reported the brutalities of Japanese army spotted by the U.S. missionaries in the cities near Nanjing during the same period.

Wang said he found the telegrams, numbered as RG59-793.94/11631and RG59-793.94/12207, while searching for materials related to China's war against the Japanese invasion from 1937 to 1945 in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

"The new evidence, given by a Japanese official and a third party, verifies and proves the slaughters took place along the way of the Japanese from Shanghai to Nanjing. The Nanjing Massacre was not the beginning," said Wang in an article published in the latest edition of the Shanghai-based Academic Monthly.

Wang said he identified the Japanese Ambassador mentioned by Dodd as Shigenori Togo, who accepted the post in Berlin in October 1937.

"Togo was a leading planner and executor of Japan's expansion policies during World War II, and he was also one of Japan's 14 Class A war criminals. He was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946," he said.

Wang said that the content of the two telegrams was reliable as they were classified in the administration's record group 59, which contains the most important archives of the U.S. State Department.

"It is of great importance that we should never forget the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, but we should also remember others so far unknown to the public," said Wang.

Documents from international humanitarian and charity organization personnel who witnessed the tragedy and records seized from Japanese troops show that Japanese troops killed more than 200,000 civilians and soldiers in 28 mass killings, and another 150,000 people were killed in scattered cases during the infamous Nanjing Massacre.

The Nanjing City government plans to reopen the Nanjing Massacre Memorial on Thursday after an expansion project to mark the 70th anniversary of the massacre.
 
(Xinhua News Agency December 13, 2007)