Picture this. It is January 28, 1948. The air is bitter cold in the mountains outside Nanjing, China. A group of men stand in a clearing at Yuhuatai, a place that for centuries had been a site of Chinese executions. Now it is being used again. Three Japanese men kneel in the dirt, hands bound behind their backs.

One of them, a 42-year-old former army captain named Gunkichi Tanaka, had once posed for a photograph in this very city. In the photo, he is mid-swing with a sword. The caption beneath it called him a hero. Today, a Chinese firing squad is about to tell him exactly what history thinks of that.

 But here is what makes this story different from every other war crime documentary you’ve seen. This man had a name for his sword. He called it Sukehiro. He carried it like it was part of his identity, his legacy. He used it to behead more than 300 people. He let a propagandist photograph him doing it.

 And then, when he stood before a war crimes tribunal and the photo was placed in front of him, he looked the judge dead in the eye and said, “It wasn’t me.” This is the story of Gunkichi Tanaka, a man who believed he was untouchable. And the moment he discovered he was wrong. You are watching War Heroes, the channel that goes where other history channels won’t. Real stories.

 Real consequences. Real people who changed the world for better or for worse. If you are new here, subscribe right now. Turn on notifications. We drop a new chapter of history every week, and you do not want to miss what’s coming next. Now, let’s go back to 1931. To understand how Gunkichi Tanaka ended up in Nanjing with a sword, you first need to understand what Japan was going through in the early 20th century.

 Japan in the 1930s was a nation caught between two identities, an ancient empire trying to become a modern industrial superpower. The factories were running. The military was expanding. The population was growing. But Japan’s islands held almost no natural resources, no oil, no coal, no rubber, no iron ore at scale.

 Every engine, every battleship, every bullet Japan produced required raw materials imported from somewhere else. That somewhere else became an obsession. China’s northeastern region, Manchuria, was practically overflowing with what Japan needed: rich coal seams, iron ore deposits, timber, agricultural land. It was, to Japanese military strategists, not just an opportunity.

 It was a solution. But they needed a justification to take it. Here is the authentic fact most people don’t know. On the night of September 18, 1931, Japanese army officers from the Kwantung Army, acting entirely without authorization from Tokyo’s civilian government, planted a small explosive charge on a section of the South Manchuria Railway near the city of Mukden. It was Japan’s own railway.

 The blast was so minor that a train passed over the damaged section just minutes later without derailing. That didn’t matter. The explosion was the spark they needed. Within hours, the Kwantung Army launched a full military assault on Mukden. City after city fell. By February 1932, all of Manchuria was under Japanese control.

 Japan’s civilian government in Tokyo was furious. They had not approved this. But the military had moved, the territory was won, and there was no political will to give it back. The League of Nations investigated, condemned the invasion, and demanded Japanese withdrawal. Japan’s response was simple. They walked out of the League entirely.

 A puppet state called Manchukuo was established on March 1, 1932. Its nominal ruler was the last Qing Dynasty emperor, Puyi, now a prisoner king manipulated by Tokyo. Real power belonged to the Japanese military. For the next 5 years, Japan and China traded smaller confrontations, tense, bloody, never fully exploding.

That changed on July 7, 1937. That night, a Japanese military unit running nighttime exercises near the Marco Polo Bridge, just southwest of Beijing, lost track of one of their soldiers during a roll call. They demanded entry to the nearby walled town of Wanping to search for him. The Chinese garrison refused.

 A shot was fired. Historians debate who pulled the trigger, and within minutes both sides were in open combat. Here is the journalism detail that most people skip over. The missing Japanese soldier, Private Shimura Kikujiro, actually returned to his unit on his own within hours. He had simply wandered off in the dark.

 But by the time anyone realized that, the shooting had already started. A war that would kill between 15 and 20 million people began because of a soldier who got lost in the dark and came back fine. History is sometimes that fragile. Gunkichi Tanaka was born on March 19, 1905 in Tokyo, 5 years before Japan formally annexed Korea, at a time when the Japanese Empire was still rising and no one had yet calculated the full cost of where that rise would lead.

 He was shaped by the military from childhood. Preparatory military schools fed him into the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, the West Point of Japan, the institution that produced the officer class that would command Japan’s wars. The curriculum was intense. College-level academics, horsemanship, traditional martial arts, and platoon leadership embedded with real infantry units.

Tanaka was, by all accounts, not a reluctant soldier. He was a committed one. He graduated, received his commission as a second lieutenant, and rose steadily through the ranks. By 1937, he was a company commander in the 6th Division’s 45th Regiment, a veteran unit that would fight in some of the most brutal engagements of the entire war. He fought at Shanghai.

The Battle of Shanghai, August 13 to November 26, 1937, was 3 and 1/2 months of house-to-house, street-by-street combat that historians have called the Pacific War’s equivalent of Stalingrad. Nearly 1 million soldiers fought on both sides. China’s National Revolutionary Army, despite being outgunned, held Shanghai longer than anyone expected.

The city became a graveyard. Here is a fact that reframes the entire story. China’s resistance at Shanghai was so fierce that it shocked the world and shattered Japan’s expectation that the war would be over in 3 months. The Japanese military had told its soldiers they’d be home by autumn. They weren’t. The stubbornness of Shanghai’s defenders transformed what Tokyo expected to be a quick colonial campaign into a full-scale war with no clear end.

 Japan eventually broke through. The Chinese army retreated westward toward Nanjing, 300 km up the Yangtze River, and the Japanese followed. Captain Gunkichi Tanaka marched with them. His sword Sukehira was on his belt. When the Japanese army reached the outskirts of Nanjing on December 9, 1937, the city was already half empty.

A fact worth sitting with. In the weeks before the Japanese arrived, approximately three quarters of Nanjing’s population had fled. Wealthy families left first, in cars, taking everything they could carry. The middle class followed on foot, then the poor. What remained was roughly 300,000 to 500,000 people who had nowhere to go.

The destitute, the elderly, the sick, the families too large to move fast enough. A remarkable group of foreigners stayed behind. 27 international residents, American, German, British, Danish, established the Nanjing Safety Zone on December 1, 1937. Their leader was a German businessman named John Rabe, a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, who despite his political affiliations, turned out to be one of the most courageous men in this entire story.

Rabe used his Nazi Party membership as a shield, hanging swastika flags over buildings in the safety zone, betting correctly that Japanese commanders would not risk an international incident with Hitler’s Germany by attacking those structures. The zone ultimately sheltered 250,000 Chinese civilians. Rabe personally intervened hundreds of times to pull civilians from Japanese soldiers.

After the war, when he returned to Germany, he was investigated by Allied authorities for his Nazi membership, then cleared. He died in 1950, largely forgotten. The people of Nanjing who survived took up collections and sent him food packages during Germany’s post-war famine. That detail alone tells you everything about who John Rabe actually was.

 On December 9, Japanese aircraft dropped leaflets over the city. Surrender within 24 hours or face no mercy. Chinese commander General Tang Shengzhi had publicly vowed to die defending Nanjing. No surrender was offered. On December 10, General Matsui waited one extra hour after the deadline, then ordered the assault. On December 12, under relentless artillery bombardment and aerial attack, General Tang quietly reversed his vow and ordered his men to retreat.

 Chaos erupted. Chinese soldiers stripped clothes from civilians to blend into the fleeing population. Others were shot by their own side for breaking formation. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese 6th Division entered Nanjing. Captain Gunichi Tanaka entered with them. And Tsukahero came with him. What happened next in Nanjing lasted 6 weeks.

 What follows is documented in Chinese government records, Japanese soldier diaries, Western witness testimony, and the findings of the post-war Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. The Japanese army executed suspected Chinese soldiers, many of whom were actually civilians wrongly identified, by marching them to the Yangtze River in groups of hundreds and opening machine guns on them.

 Bodies were pushed into the current. Some were buried in mass graves. Others were left where they fell. Prisoners of war were killed with landmines, set on fire, drowned, and bayoneted. Japanese soldiers held beheading competitions. One contest between officers Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, who could behead 100 people first using only a sword, was published in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun newspaper with daily score updates, written as though it were a baseball box score.

 Captain Tanaka used Tsukahero to behead more than 300 people. He was celebrated for it. A propaganda book called Imperial Soldiers, authored by Yamanaka Minetaro, featured Tanaka as a model warrior. A photograph in the book captured him in the act, sword raised, civilian kneeling. The moment frozen in black and white forever. Tanaka was not ashamed.

He was proud. Between 20,000 and 80,000 women were raped during the Nanjing Massacre. Soldiers moved systematically through neighborhoods. The elderly, the young, no one was spared. Victims were frequently killed afterward. A Japanese veteran named Shiro Azuma, speaking decades later, explained the logic in terms so cold they still stop readers cold.

 Dead people, he said, cannot testify. 1/3 of the city was burned. Looting was total. By the time the violence subsided in February 1938, historians estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 people had been killed. The exact number remains disputed, not because there is doubt that a massacre occurred, but because the fires, the river, and the mass graves made a precise count impossible.

The war ended on September 2nd, 1945. War crimes tribunals opened. Lists were compiled. Tanaka’s name was not initially on them. But in April 1947, the Chinese delegation in Japan filed a formal extradition request. May 14th, 1947, it was approved. Four days later, Tanaka was on a ship to Shanghai. He was transferred to a detention center, then moved to Nanjing on May 22nd, back to the city where he had carried Sukhiro.

On December 12th, 1947, exactly 10 years to the day after his division first entered the city gates, with Gunkichi Tanaka’s war crimes trial began. Five days in, his case was merged with those of Mukai and Noda, the beheading contest officers. Tanaka’s defense was simple, denial. He denied the killings. He denied the photograph.

 He claimed the people in the famous photo were wearing short sleeves, which proved it wasn’t taken during winter, so it couldn’t have been Nanjing. The prosecutor’s reply was measured and devastating. A man committing violent acts might remove his jacket. That is not evidence of innocence. That is a detail. Then Tanaka said something that shocked the courtroom.

 He looked at the judges and declared that the claim he killed 300 people and Imperial soldiers was fiction. Propaganda written to make him look heroic. He said you can ask every God in heaven and on earth, I had nothing to do with the rape of Nanking. The tribunal had the photograph, the testimony, the book he had allowed to be published about himself, the survivor accounts.

 On December 17, 1947, all three men, Tanaka, Mukai, and Noda, were found guilty of massacring prisoners and civilians during the Battle of Nanking and the subsequent weeks of organized slaughter. All three were sentenced to death. January 28, 1948, Yu Hua Tai District, mountains outside Nanking. Three men, a firing squad, one command.

 Toshiaki Mukai was 35. Tsuyoshi Noda was 35. Gunkichi Tanaka was 42 years old, the man who named his sword, the man who posed for photographs, the man who told a court that heaven and earth would vouch for his innocence. He died in those mountains on a cold January morning, 10 years and 46 days after he helped burn Nanking to the ground.

Sukehira was never found. No tears were shed for Gunkichi Tanaka. And history recorded exactly what kind of man he was. 300,000 people, six weeks, one captain with a named sword and no regrets until the moment justice arrived. This is why war heroes exist, not to glorify violence, not to sensationalize suffering, but to make sure that when history tries to forget, you refuse to let it.

 If history removed you, if you think the world needs to hear stories like this, subscribe to War Heroes right now. Share this video. Drop a comment below. Had you heard of the Nanking Massacre before today? We read every comment. We see you, and we’ll see you in the next chapter. War Heroes, real stories, real consequences.