Many Nanjing residents attended a memorial ceremony for a veteran of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945) on Wednesday morning.

Cheng Yun, 92, died on Monday. He and three other veterans apologized to local people in a local newspaper on Dec 13, the anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, for their failure to keep the city safe during the war.

The apologies were forwarded hundreds of thousands of times on the Internet. Many people left messages that Nanjing's falling into the Japanese' hands was not the veterans' fault.

More than 300,000 Chinese were killed by Japanese invaders in December 1937, during a six-week-long orgy of killing, burning, looting and raping.