Ep.11 – Did 3,000 Chinese Soldiers Really Disappear into Thin Air During WWII?
Mass disappearances conjure up an extreme set of emotions, and they genuinely are terrifying. The most recent and arguably most notorious mass vanishing in Chinese history is the March 2014 disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 – which vanished en route to Beijing with 227 people on board, 153 of which were Chinese citizens. While MH370 may be the first China-related mass disappearance to come to mind, it might not be the earliest or biggest. According to various print and online sources, in 1939, during the horrors of Japanese aggression against the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), almost 3,000 soldiers stationed in the rolling hills around Nanjing allegedly disappeared without leaving a single clue about their fate… In this episode of China Untold, I explore the legend of WWII’s missing Chinese soldiers and recap another mysterious event from the former Soviet Union.