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Born on December 1, 1883, in Winnsboro, South Carolina, Wilson Plumer Mills, son of a Presbyterian pastor, went on to serve as an American Presbyterian missionary in China during a crucial and tragic episode that has been forgotten by some and will never be forgotten by others.
Mills’ extensive studies included course work at Davidson College, North Carolina (BA, 1903); the University of South Carolina (M.A., 1907); Christ Church College, the University of Oxford, where, as a Rhodes Scholar, he graduated with honors in theology (B.A. 1910); Columbia Theological Seminary, South Carolina (B.D., 1912); and Union Theological Seminary, New York (S.T.M., 1932). From 1912 to 1932, he worked for the YMCA in China; in that year Mills resigned from the YMCA, was ordained, and joined the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board in Nanjing (then the capital of China).
When the Second Sino-Japanese War began in July 1937, Mills played an important diplomatic role as the Japanese prepared to occupy Nanjing. He attempted to negotiate a truce, and also suggested the creation of a Safety Zone to protect civilians. After the occupation, in November 1937, Mills was appointed vice-chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone (later in February 1938, he became the chairman).
For his role in protecting the 250,000 citizens of the Nanjing Safety Zone (about 70,000 of which were dependent upon the committee for food and fuel), Mills received the Order of the Green Jade, the highest honor given to Westerners by the Chinese government. During World War II he was interned* for nine months in Shanghai by the Japanese, was repatriated in 1943, and returned to China the following year and stayed there until 1949. He worked for the Missionary Research Library at Union Theological Seminary in New York City until 1955, and died there four years later.
At Log College Press, we have available a set of letters which he wrote from Nanjing, mostly to his wife, which recount his personal experiences in the midst of what came to be known to the world as the “Rape of Nanjing,” a massacre by Japanese soldiers that resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 40,000-300,000 civilians, as well as barbaric atrocities, all of which became the subject of war crime trials after the end of World War II. His efforts to help arrange a truce are described in letters dated January 22/24 and January 31, 1938. The story of his eyewitness account of the Japanese occupation of the city and the reign of terror that existed is told sequentially in letters from January to March 1938. These letters, which with great effort were sent out through the American embassy, constitute part of the primary source material which documents a tragedy that is forgotten in many parts of the world, but whose painful memory is still borne by survivors and descendants of the massacre some 82 years later.
Reading this correspondence — which is mostly typewritten, but also contains handwritten notes — one is struck by the increasingly horrifying realization of just how evil the occupation became. Following initial reassurances to his wife about his personal safety, as the details were explained and anecdotes related over time, one can imagine how Nina must have felt and had cause to pray as she read his letters.
While one can read more about the awful details of this massacre elsewhere too, the letters by Mills reveal how one American Presbyterian missionary did what he could, in God’s Providence, to help those in need, and how he was able to relate the story to his family about what happened in installments while much of the world remained in the dark about the extent of the tragedy. To read a gripping story about a painful but important chapter in world history in the words of one who was there, visit his page here.
*Another Protestant missionary, Eric Liddell, was interned by the Japanese at Weihsien Internment Camp (site of an American Presbyterian mission compound) at Shandong, China from 1943 until his death in 1945.
