John Magee: the priest with the 16 mm camera

Members of the Nanking International Relief Committee with the staff of the Jinling Middle School refugee camp, spring 1938; John Magee and Searle Bates sit in the front row. Photo: Unknown photographer, Zhonglou jiyi (Jiangsu People’s Publishing, 2013), PD China / PD-1996 via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Rape of Nanking, 1937–1938

John Magee: The Priest with the 16 mm Camera

An Episcopal missionary who ran a hospital for the wounded, chaired the city’s Red Cross committee, and filmed what he saw.

Content note. This page discusses film of wounded and killed civilians and contains one blurred still from Magee’s film showing a wounded woman. Click the image to reveal it.

John Gillespie Magee had been a missionary of the American Episcopal Church in China for 25 years when Nanjing fell. He stayed in the city when his church and most of his colleagues left, set up a hospital for wounded soldiers and refugees, and became chairman of the Nanking Committee of the International Red Cross. He was also a member of the International Committee that ran the Safety Zone. In those roles he moved through the city more freely than most of the Westerners, and he went out of the zone into the streets and lanes where people had been killed or left wounded.

He also had a 16 mm movie camera. Between December 1937 and the early weeks of 1938 he filmed wounded civilians in the University Hospital and in his own wards, the bodies of the dead, and scenes in the zone, some of them shot through windows. He interviewed survivors and wrote notes for each scene explaining who the person was and what had happened. The result is the only known moving-picture record of the atrocities made during the massacre itself.

The film’s journey out of Nanjing, sewn into the lining of George Fitch’s coat, and its afterlife, in Berlin, in Washington, in the pages of Life and before the Tokyo tribunal, is part of this story. So is the fate of the original reels, which the Magee family gave to the Memorial Hall in Nanjing in 2001 and to the Yale Divinity Library in 2016. The American side of the story is told in Chapter 7.

A Pittsburgh priest in Nanjing

Magee was born in Pittsburgh on 10 October 1884, into a wealthy family. He graduated from Yale in 1906 and from the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1911, was ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church, and went to China in 1912. The Yale Divinity Library records that in July 1921 he married Faith Emmeline Backhouse, an English missionary of the China Inland Mission; they had four sons, John, Hugh, David and Christopher. The eldest, John Gillespie Magee Jr., joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and wrote the sonnet “High Flight” before he was killed in a flying accident in 1941.

By 1937 Magee was one of the senior figures of the American Church Mission in Nanjing, working alongside a younger Episcopal missionary, Ernest Forster, who had transferred to the city in November 1937. As the Japanese approached, Magee organized a hospital for wounded Chinese soldiers and civilians, and the Western residents set up a branch of the International Red Cross with Magee as chairman. Its seventeen members included Dr Robert Wilson and the hospital administrator James McCallum of the University Hospital, and Minnie Vautrin of Ginling College.

What he saw, and what he wrote home

Magee’s letters to his wife are contemporary evidence written in the first days of the occupation. On 19 December 1937 he wrote: “The horror of last week is beyond anything I have ever experienced.” In the same letter he called it “a week of murder and rape.” Both lines were quoted by Yale News in 2016. They match what the Safety Zone committee was recording in its daily lists of cases, and what Wilson, Vautrin and Rabe were writing in the same days.

The Red Cross committee had little to work with. Its members collected the wounded, buried the dead where they could, and tried to keep the hospitals supplied. Magee’s particular role was to go where others did not. He recorded scenes in the streets and alleys and the accounts of survivors.

The film

The film was shot on 16 mm stock with what was then a modern amateur movie camera. Most of it was taken in the University Hospital, where Wilson was operating almost alone, and shows patients who had been burned, shot or stabbed, many of them women. Other scenes show bodies in the streets and in ponds and canals, and the sites of killings that survivors described to him. For each sequence Magee wrote an explanatory note, naming where he could the person on the screen and giving their account of what had been done to them. Those notes are contemporary records in their own right.

One of the patients he filmed was Li Xiuying, a 19-year-old woman, pregnant, who had been stabbed many times while fighting off soldiers who tried to rape her. She survived and spoke about what had happened to her for the rest of her life; her story is told on her own page. The film also recorded the house at No. 5 Xinlukou where most of the family of Xia Shuqin, then eight years old, was killed on 13 December. When a Japanese author later claimed that she was not the girl in Magee’s account, courts in China (2006) and Japan (2009) found that he had defamed her.

Out of Nanjing

The Japanese controlled who could leave the city, and film of this kind could not be carried openly. In January 1938 George Fitch, the YMCA secretary, obtained permission to travel to Shanghai on a Japanese military train. He took with him eight reels of Magee’s negative, sewn into the lining of his camel’s-hair overcoat. Accounts give his departure as 19, 20 or 23 January. Copies were made. One set went to Germany, where Georg Rosen of the German embassy, back in Nanjing since 9 January, had urged the Foreign Ministry to obtain the film. In a report of 10 February 1938 he wrote that Magee “took motion pictures that eloquently bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Japanese” (in John E. Woods’s English translation). John Rabe showed a copy at his lectures in Berlin that spring.

1. Dec 1937 – early 1938Magee films patients in the University Hospital, bodies, and sites of killings in and around the Safety Zone, writing notes for each scene.
2. January 1938George Fitch leaves for Shanghai on a Japanese military train with eight reels of negative sewn into his coat; copies are made.
3. 10 February 1938Georg Rosen recommends to the German Foreign Ministry that it obtain Magee’s film.
4. Spring 1938Rabe shows a copy in Berlin; Fitch, in the United States from 9 March, shows it in Washington and on a speaking tour.
5. 16 May 1938Life publishes ten small stills from the film, without credit to Magee.
6. 1946Magee testifies before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo.
7. 2001His son David Magee donates the camera and four rolls of film, 105 minutes, to the Memorial Hall in Nanjing.
8. January 2016The family gives 13 reels to the Yale Divinity Library, two of them, about 22 minutes, from Nanking in 1937–38; USC Shoah Foundation digitizes them.

Fitch reached San Francisco on 9 March 1938 and briefed the State Department in Washington on 17 March. He then toured the United States, showing the film in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Seattle. On 16 May 1938 Life printed ten small, grainy stills from it, without naming Magee. Fitch grew frustrated with the response. The United States was not ready to act against Japan, and American oil continued to flow to Japan until 1941.

Witness in Tokyo

The Yale Divinity Library records that Magee returned to the United States in the summer of 1938, after 28 years in China, and made an extensive speaking tour; Yale’s news office, writing in 2016, gives his return as 1940. In 1946 he travelled to Tokyo to testify for the prosecution before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. His testimony, like Wilson’s and Bates’s, is postwar evidence, but it rested on notes, letters and film made at the time, and the tribunal’s judgment drew on the American witnesses in finding that the killing, rape and looting at Nanjing had continued for at least six weeks.

He spent the rest of his life as Episcopal chaplain at Yale, from 1946 until he died of a heart attack in Pittsburgh on 11 September 1953. Before his death he gave the camera and film to his son David, who had been with him in Nanjing.

The reels today

In 2001 David Magee donated his father’s camera and four rolls of film, 105 minutes in all, to the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre, free of charge, as his father had wished. In January 2016 the Magee family gave 13 further reels to the Yale Divinity Library. Two of them, a gift from Magee’s grandson John Magee III, contain about 22 minutes of footage from the Japanese occupation of Nanjing; the others show life in Nanjing and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Yangtze floods of 1931. The USC Shoah Foundation digitized the reels for the library at no cost, and excerpts are available on the library’s Nanking Massacre Project website.

For historians the film’s value lies less in its images, which are few and often hard to read, than in the combination of image and note. Each sequence ties a named or described person, a place and an injury to an account given at the time. That combination is why the film mattered in the Xia Shuqin case seventy years later.