Tang gave orders to his divisions to break through the CCAA’s siege via a gate in the city’s northern wall, and abandon Nanjing to the Japanese. Immediately, Chinese soldiers fled, looted, and squeezed through the wall, in some cases drowning in the Yangtze in their haste to escape. Some 70,000 had already been killed trying to defend the city. The night sky was lit up by flames; this was not the doing of the Japanese, but of the Chinese troops who had set further major buildings ablaze.
