Tang Shengzhi
An official report of the Nationalist Government argued that an excess of untrained and inexperienced troops was a major cause of the defeat, but at the time Tang Shengzhi was made to bear much of the blame and later historians have also criticized him. Japanese historian Tokushi Kasahara, for instance, has characterized his battlefield leadership as incompetent, arguing that an orderly withdrawal from Nanking may have been possible if Tang had carried it out on December 11 or if he had not fled his post well in advance of most of his beleaguered units. However, Chiang's very decision to defend Nanking is also controversial. Masahiro Yamamoto believes that Chiang chose "almost entirely out of emotion" to fight a battle he knew he could only lose, and fellow historian Frederick Fu Liu concurs that the decision is often regarded as one of "the greatest strategical mistakes of the Sino-Japanese war". Still, the historian Jay Taylor notes that Chiang was convinced that to run from his capital city "without a serious fight ... would forever be regarded as a cowardly decision".