China’s War with Japan 1937-1945

By Rana Mitter,

Book cover of China’s War with Japan 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival

Book description

Winner of the Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature

Different countries give different opening dates for the period of the Second World War, but perhaps the most compelling is 1937, when the 'Marco Polo Bridge Incident' plunged China and Japan into a conflict of extraordinary duration and ferocity -…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked China’s War with Japan 1937-1945 as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

In my opinion, you cannot fully understand the Pacific War without grasping the tragedy of the undeclared Sino-Japanese War which preceded Pearl Harbor by virtually four and a half years. Remarkably, however, the story is not well known. It’s often passed over as if it was of hardly any consequence at all. Far from being a minor item on the road to war, however, China’s horrendous struggle with Japan is pivotal because it managed to suck in arguably the best troops of the Imperial Japanese Army and kept them fighting throughout the duration of the Pacific War. This ensured that…

From Malcolm's list on Asian theatre in the Second World War.

For years the major war waged in China by the Japanese armed forces was ignored or played down in standard histories of World War II. Rana Mitter’s book is the first to explore the war in full and to put it back into the context of the wider world war. This was the Japanese army’s largest conflict and it created the conditions for the emergence of modern Communist China. The use of Chinese archives long neglected or previously closed makes this an original and convincing history, essential reading for anyone who wants to know what happened in Asia during the…

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