Forgotten ally
"For decades, a major piece of World War II history has gone virtually unwritten. China was the fourth great ally, partner to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, yet its drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue remains little known in the West. In this emotionally gripping book, made possible through access to newly unsealed Chinese archives, Rana Mitter unfurls the story of China's World War II as never before and rewrites the larger history of the war in the process. He focuses his narrative on three towering leaders -- Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and the lesser-known collaborator Wang Jingwei -- and extends the timeline of the war back to 1937, when Japanese and Chinese troops began to clash, fully two years before Hitler invaded Poland. Unparalleled in its research and scope, Forgotten Ally is a sweeping, character-driven history that will be essential reading not only for anyone with an interest in World War II, but also for those seeking to understand today's China, where, as Mitter reveals, the echoes of the war still reverberate"
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What Hacker News says
- You’re correct in that the narrative of Mao and communist guerrillas fighting both the Japanese and Nationalist Army is a very common one in China. However, with the exception of the Hundred Regiments Offensive, the communist armies never engaged in the kind of the regular, brutal combat that occurred near China’s major cities against the Japanese. For political reasons, namely to portray the Nationalists as an ineffective and corrupt government, until the last decade there were few Chinese TV series or movies that depicted Nationalist armies effectively fighting the Japanese.
When you look at Nationalist efforts to secure the critical Burma Road into Burma and India, and the hundreds of thousands of casualties involved in fighting rearguard actions as civilians and governments fled inland, the casualty counts are not even close. Nationalist military fatalities are generally estimated by historians to outnumber Communist military fatalities by nearly an order of magnitude.
One of the reasons I wrote that WW2 set up the communists for a clean victory in the resumption of the civil war is that Japanese surrender left vast swaths of China under communist control, simply because there was not a nationalist presence in many of those areas. Hundreds of thousands of firearms, rounds of ammunition, and artillery pieces were surrendered by the Japanese to communist armies. As a result, the Communists were for the first time able to equip a large regular army, as opposed to fighting irregular war as guerrillas.
I highly recommend reading Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter. This is maybe the best popular history of China in WW2.
P.s. I say this as the descendant of soldiers who fought on both sides of the civil war.
- As I was writing, I refrained from referring to the the theatre as 'Eastern'. The term tends to turn encourage us to turn our backs on the way in which the Second World War shapes the politics of China and Korea [or Koreas] and the way in which the US interprets them.
China was the first of 'the Allies'. It went to war with Japan in July 1937 - more than two years before France and Britain against Germany and four years before the rest of the Allies engaged Japan, i.e. China fought against Japan alone for longer than as one of 'The Allies'. Rana Mintner's Forgotten Ally was on the new shelf a few months ago at the public library:
http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Ally-China%C2%92s-World-1937...
More recently I read Bruce Cummings The Korean War: A History. Now I no longer write North Korea's actions off as crazy. That's the country whose founders fought Japanese imperialism before and throughout the war. The American military maintained Japan's administrative structure in the South when it 'established itself' their following Japan's defeat. South Korea has had foreign troops in it continuously since 1895. North Korea sees that as problematic.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Korean-War-History-Chronicles/dp/0...
