Lost 1940 Footage of Japanese Bombing of Chongqing Unveiled on 85th Anniversary, Sparking Global Outcry

The images are stark. Burned-out houses and shattered rooftops give way to streets filled with refugees fleeing the inferno. Smoke plumes rise over the city’s famed Jiefang Bridge, while a plane releases a fresh payload of incendiary bombs that ignite a schoolyard, the flames reflected in terrified children’s faces. In another sequence, a Japanese fighter makes a low pass over a makeshift field hospital, its crew firing into the wounded and the volunteers trying to tend them. The film, though mute, conveys a brutality that words alone have struggled to capture.

Scott’s original reel was taken at great personal risk. As a correspondent for the United Press, he had embedded himself with Chinese ground forces, carrying a hand‑cranked 35‑mm camera into the heart of the city during the nightly raids that began in February 1939 and intensified in 1940. He never sent the footage back to his newsroom; the reels were tucked away in a wooden crate, buried under debris when Chongqing’s defenders retreated in late 1940. The film resurfaced in 2022 when a family in the outskirts of Beijing, cleaning out a long‑abandoned closet belonging to a war‑time descendant of a local photographer, discovered the sealed metal canisters. Restoration experts at the China Film Archive spent months cleaning the emulsion, correcting war‑time scratches, and digitising the footage for modern consumption.

The timing of the release is significant. Official Chinese commemorations of the Chongqing bombing have long centred on the June 5th “Air‑Raid Memorial Day,” marked by an air‑raid siren that wails across the city at dawn, a reminder of the 30,000 civilians killed outright and the additional 6,600 who died from injuries, disease and starvation in its wake. By releasing the footage on the exact 85th anniversary of the most devastating raid – a series of night attacks in late May 1940 that reduced large swathes of the city to ash – Beijing not only honors the dead but also presents a fresh visual testament that can no longer be dismissed as propaganda.

Within hours the clip sparked a frenzy on Weibo, China’s Twitter‑like platform. The hashtag #日军罪行时隔85年完整曝光# (Japanese army crimes fully exposed after 85 years) trended nationally, amassing millions of views. Users posted screenshots of the burning school and the shattered hospital, accompanied by captions such as “Historical ironclad evidence! Let the truth blast apart all the Japanese invaders’ lies” and “Blood debt! The reality far exceeds what textbooks ever said.” A wave of sentiment – a mixture of outrage, sorrow, and renewed patriotism – coursed through the comment threads. Many invoked the slogan “勿忘历史，吾辈自强” (Never forget history, we must strive for self‑improvement), underscoring a collective resolve to let the past sharpen contemporary national identity.

The emotional resonance was not limited to Chinese netizens. A Japanese user who posted a reflective essay about the invasion of China received over 4,000 retweets, more than 1.3 million views and 23,000 likes. The post, which lamented the “shadows that still linger over our shared history,” signalled a modest but noteworthy current‑generation introspection in Japan – a country whose official wartime narrative continues to be contested both at home and abroad.

The release of Scott’s film dovetails with other recent discoveries that together deepen the historical record. Earlier this year a diary and a photo album recovered from a looted house in Hebei province revealed daily accounts of forced labour, mass executions and the use of chemical weapons by Japanese troops in 1938‑39. In another revelation, a previously secret collection of glass‑negative photographs kept by Luo Jin, a young apprentice in a Chengde studio, was donated to the National Museum of Chinese History. The images chronicle Japanese troops rounding up civilians, torturing prisoners and torching villages across northern China. Together, these artifacts paint a more granular picture of the scale and systematic nature of Japanese war crimes, beyond the more widely known Nanjing Massacre and the horrors of atomic bombings.

The ramifications of these revelations ripple across society, politics and even industry. For educators, the footage provides a visceral teaching tool that can transform abstract textbook accounts into tangible reality, particularly for a generation whose grandparents were the direct survivors. Museums and memorial sites are already planning to incorporate the digitised reels into permanent exhibitions, while tourism operators anticipate a surge of visitors to Chongqing’s anti‑Japanese war museum and related memorial parks.

Politically, the timing of the release cannot be ignored. China’s leadership has long leveraged historical memory to bolster its narrative of “national rejuvenation” and to justify a robust defence posture. The newly exposed visual evidence reinforces the government's messaging around “learning from history” and could be used to galvanise public support for policies aimed at strengthening the military and securing regional interests. At the same time, the already fraught diplomatic relationship with Japan may experience fresh strain. While Japanese officials have, over the years, issued a series of apologies and expressions of remorse, many in China view them as insufficient. The fresh visual proof of systematic bombing of civilians revives calls for a more explicit acknowledgment of responsibility – a request that is unlikely to be satisfied in the short term.

The media and archival sectors stand to benefit from heightened public interest. Filmmakers are already courting the newly restored footage for documentary projects, and streaming platforms have expressed interest in a series that juxtaposes the wartime footage with contemporary interviews of survivors and historians. The technological challenge of restoring century‑old film has also shone a spotlight on China’s growing expertise in digital preservation, prompting increased investment in AI‑driven restoration tools and cloud‑based archiving solutions.

In the broader cultural realm, the emotive power of the images is inspiring a new wave of artistic responses. Poets, painters and musicians are referencing the footage in their work, seeking to translate the visual trauma into other expressive forms. Social media influencers in China and abroad have begun recounting their families’ stories of the Chongqing raids, contributing to a mosaic of personal narratives that enrich the collective memory.

The resurgence of these historic records arrives at a moment when global attention to the manipulation of history—whether through denial, revisionism or selective remembrance—is intensifying. By making the footage publicly accessible, Chinese authorities have provided an undeniable, incontrovertible piece of evidence that will be difficult for any party to dispute as a catalyst for genuine reconciliation, a reinforcement of nationalist sentiment, or a combination of both, depends on how the story is wielded in diplomatic dialogues and educational settings in the years to come.

What is clear is that the grainy frames, flickering in black and white, have reignited a conversation that has lingered in the shadows for 85 years. They remind the world that the horrors of war are not abstract statistics but lived realities that scar cities, families and nations. As Chinese netizens wrote, “Every frame tells of suffering, reminding us that peace is not easy.” In the age of instant information, the revelation of these lost images reaffirms a timeless truth: remembering the past with honesty is essential to shaping a future where such atrocities are no longer imaginable.