The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945

by Mark R. Peattie (Editor), Edward Drea (Editor), Hans van de Ven (Editor)

Winner of the 2012 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award (non-US). Most studies of the Sino-Japanese War are presented from the perspective of the West. Departing from this tradition, The Battle for China brings together Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars to provide a comprehensive and multifaceted overview of the military operations that shaped much of what happened in political, economic, and cultural realms. The volume's diverse contributors have taken pains to sustain a scholarly, dispassionate tone throughout their analyses of the course and the nature of military operations, from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident to the final campaigns of 1945. They present Western involvement in Sino-Japanese contexts, and establish the war's place in World War II and world history in general.

Genres: History, China, World War II, Japan, Nonfiction, Military History, Historical

662 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2010

About the author

The son of expatriate writers, Mark Peattie grew up in Santa Barbara, California. He earned a BA in history at Pomona College and an MA in history at Stanford University. After service in Asia and Washington, DC as a member of the U.S. Information Agency, Peattie returned to the United States and earned a doctorate in history from Princeton University. He taught at Pennsylvania State University, the University of California – Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. For many years, Peattie was a research fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He was also a senior research staff member of the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace, before becoming a visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.

Reviews

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reasons I can't quite bring myself to give this book top marks basically boil down to how even the best anthology is never quite as coherent as a straight narrative will be, and that this isn't quite as fresh a take as I hoped. I suspect that it's been in circulation long enough, and I've done enough related reading in that period, that the findings of the contributors have influenced those books. That I finally got to this work (it's been on various "to-read" lists since it was published) was due to a passing comment by the novelist Rebecca Kuang that this was one of the works she found most useful in her education.

For the average reader of history this will be a serious jag to their expectations. If they are aware of China's war with Japan at all, they will have probably learned about it through the prism of Barbara Tuchman's biography of "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, and have picked up the dismissive opinion of the Nationalist war effort. This book is anything but dismissive of that effort, but the participants are collectively critical of Tokyo's rudimentary sense of strategy. I read this as an inter-library loan but I'm feeling like I actually have to own a copy.

Still probably not a work for the reader fresh to the subject; they'd be better off with Rana Mitter's "Forgotten Ally."

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the least known theater of the Second World War, the war between Japan and China was a world-historical event of the first order. While Japan's bid for supremacy in Asia was defeated by the United States in the Pacific, it was Japan's decision to invade China that, in many ways, made that defeat inevitable. For China, this war was an unspeakable human and social catastrophe, but her efforts now receive more respect than previously done by authors like Barbara Tuchman. The military efforts of the Nationalist Chinese government, for instance, need to be understood in the context of China's overwhelmingly agrarian society, its lack of a unified polity and her traditional institutions. Japan, a more European-style industrial country and possessing modern military equipped with up to date weapon systems, never had quite enough army to carry out the conquest and control of China's vastness. This excellent and comprehensive collection of essays on the military aspects of the war is a timely and eye-opening contribution to an enormous conflict that helped determine the outcome of WWII. One cannot really comprehend the outcome of the war against Japan without an understanding of the Sino-Japanese War, and this book is fine place to start.

[Ryan Qixu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the best English language accounts of the Sino-Japanese War to date. Featuring the best scholars from China, Japan and the Western academic world, this collection contains essays from both Japanese and Chinese perspectives, and utilizes Chinese and Japanese sources that are not widely known to the Western academic world. There is also comprehensive treatment of the Chinese war effort which till now has been clouded in political debates both in the mainland and in Taiwan. Yang Kuisong highlights that both Nationalist and Communist forces made substantial efforts to establish guerrilla forces in Japanese-occupied China, and over the course of the war the Chinese Communists were more successful. This overturns the long held perception that only the Chinese Communists paid attention to mobile guerilla warfare against the well-armed Imperial Japanese Army in Japanese-held areas Little is known of Jiang Jieshi's efforts to achieve foreign aid for China's ongoing resistance against Japan. In his chapter, Zhang Baijia comprehensively covers Nazi Germany's aid to China from 1933-1938, Soviet Union's aid from 1937-1941 and American aid from 1941-1945. Foreign aid was no doubt an important factor in keeping China in the war, and was one of the key factors that prevented China's surrender in the early stages.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Given the lack of well-researched and accurate English books on the Second Sino-Japanese War, this work is a highly welcomed addition. A variety of operations are discussed in essays by differing authors, each offering an ample number of sources to support them—both primary and secondary. Japanese and Chinese language sources are examined by authors proficient in the languages, allowing for the reader to see both sides of the major participants in the conflict from a viewpoint that largely maintains neutrality. While the structure may not make this exceptionally appealing to a casual or new reader on the subject, I would highly recommend it.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Battle for China" is the best English-language military history of the war to date. It serves as a great introduction to a conflict that is often misunderstood, if not entirely ignored, in the West.