The English-language bibliography of the Second World War is faced with an odd contradiction: while there is no shortage of books about the conflict, there are still not enough of them. This is because for all of the thousands of tomes weighing down the shelves of libraries and bookstores the majority of them are concentrated in a few key areas, namely the war in Europe (particularly in Western Europe) and in the Pacific. As a result, English-language readers have an often distorted view of the conflict, one that ironically ignores its global nature.

Among the fronts of the war that are under-addressed, none is more so than the war in China. To be fair there are good reasons for this, such as the language difficulties and the challenges of archival access for some of the major governments involved in it. The lack of attention is inexcusable nevertheless, especially since many historians have argued that the start of the war that consumed the world can be traced to China, with the outbreak of fighting between units of the Japanese and Nationalist Chinese armies near Beijing in 1937. Because of this, people are left with the duality of a lack of understanding about the origins of the most widely written about war in human history, along with an an attending absence of awareness about the course of the fighting in that region and the impact on the postwar world.

It is for this reason why Rana Mitter's book is welcome. His study of the war waged in China begins to fill the gap in our understanding by providing a broad survey of events that fits them within the context of modern Chinese history. This allows him to fit the war both within the matrix of China's international relations and the dramatic political and military struggles within China that preceded the outbreak of the war with Japan. While he structures his narrative around the three major leaders of China during the war, his main focus is on Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of Nationalist China. This focus allows Mitter to challenge many Western (primarily American) conceptions of the war in eastern Asia, as he pushes back against the traditional narrative of a corrupt regime incompetently fighting the war by detailing the challenges Chiang faced and the strains of the war upon his his country, noting that by the time Japanese bombs fell on the American ships in Pearl Harbor China had already been at war against Japan for four years and had already lost the most valuable regions of their country to the enemy. Yet despite this Mitter describes the efforts by China to continue their effort, often in the face of indifference from the Western Allies and the outright hostility of their representatives in the country.

Mitter's book is a powerful corrective to our skewed misunderstanding of a key front in the global conflict, one in which hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops were committed throughout the fighting. Yet in many respects it is only a first effort of what is needed. The book reflects Mitter's specialization in Chinese history, and while he addresses the other participants his analysis of American and British strategy is disappointingly narrow considering the enormous amount of material available to him. His coverage of Japan is even more problematic, as his discussion of their political and military decision-making is far more opaque than it needs to be, which creates an imbalanced picture of a nuanced examination of the multi-combatant Chinese and Allied war effort against a monolithic "Japanese" foe.

To be fair these criticisms must be set against the scale of Mitter's achievement. He has produced a book that is required reading for anyone who wishes to claim a comprehensive understanding of the Second World War. Yet his book also demonstrates how much work is left to be done in researching and analyzing the war there, which will undoubtedly lead at some point to the epic, nuanced account of the fighting that the war in China truly deserves. Until then, however, we have his illuminating study of a front in the war that remains too underappreciated in our understanding of the conflict as a whole. ( )

Well-written, engaging reminder of why China was so important even before WW2, and how events there shaped the world today. ( )

An absolutely excellent history of the Sino-Japanese and subsequent involvement of China with Japan in WWII that has been long overdue in a post-Mao era. Historian Mitter has used resources and documents either long forgotten (or purposefully concealed) to write one of the first neutral histories of China's involvement with Japan. In this sense, the title is misleading China's War with Japan, 1937-1945 as the story begins in the late 1890s and continues post-1945.

This is a complex history with many players (Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao, Wang Jingwei, Churchill, Hurley, Chennault, Fumimaro, Marshall, Mountbatten, Stalin, Stilwell, Roosevelt...), but Mitter has accomplished in less than 400 pages what might have taken others thousands, due to his immaculate, succinct writing. Not only is this book illuminating reading, it is also pleasurable reading. Those seeking detailed battle information will be disappointed; the important battles and their preparations and results are included, but this is a book that focuses more on the issues and personalities than battlefield logistics. Yet it dips into the personal stories of soldiers and journalists in the field to illuminate in a short excerpt, some of the lesser-known facts of the time--the flooding of the central Chinese plains that led to countless Chinese deaths, the lack of equipment and food and training for the foot soldiers, Churchill's disdain for Chiang Kai-shek (the joke being that SEAC stood for "Save England's Asian Colonies" and betrayals, the to-and-fro, in-and-out policies and treaties that created the political quagmire that Chiang had to manage--sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And of course, the righting of the wrongful impression that it was the CCP, Mao's leadership and the accomplishment of the Eighth Route Army and its Long March that were the heroes of the war, as long defended by post-1949 Communist historians.

Anyone interested in Chinese history should read this book; lay readers and academics alike will benefit from the tale, and I would highly recommend watching the YouTube video of Mitter's presentation at the 2014 Jaipur Literature Festival (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XK-DUEPYa8&app=desktop).

A personal footnote: when travelling in northern Myanmar in the early 1990s, we came across rural areas where bones and skulls were still visible from the battles fought on Burma's (as it was known in those days) soil. Those villagers we spoke with who were children during the war confirmed that they were the remains of Chinese and Japanese soldiers, abandoned by both sides. Mitter refers to these war dead in his chapter on Burma and tells the tale of a Chinese participant (Huang Yaowu) who mourns for his lost comrades who 'not even buried...might at least have hoped that their deaths would be remembered'. We need historians such as Rana Mitter to keep reminding us. ( )

Mitter is an Oxford professor I have not previously encountered; he is apparently relatively young and a child of Bengali immigrants. All these indicators suggest that he brings a fresh perspective to the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and his book bears this out.

The book is written very largely from the Chinese perspective, and this means it is fairly sympathetic to Chiang Kai-shek without being particularly unsympathetic to Mao. Indeed, one chapter compares the Chiang, Mao, and (puppet) Wang regimes, and finds more similarity than differences. All claimed to be progressive but none were pluralistic; all were, at least at a gut level, nationalistic (yes, even the Wang regime); all maintained control partially through terror.

Mitter is particularly scathing of American dealings with China during the war. This criticism largely revolves around the character of "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, who was appointed as Chiang's chief of staff but saw himself as more an adviser -- in the sense that my Ph.D. adviser was an adviser; her advice wasn't really optional. Stilwell got very sympathetic press during the war, and even more sympathetic press after (culminating in the biography by Barbara Tuchman) but a strong case can be made that Stilwell was unsuited for his role and ought to have been relieved much sooner. Stilwell, and Americans in general, never really understood the nature of the challenges facing Chiang, acting and talking as if all the problems could be solved in short order if only their advice could be forced on the Chinese. In fact, China had suffered catastrophic military defeat in 1937, and it is remarkable that the surviving Chinese forces were able to put up as much resistance in the Yangtze Valley in 1938-1941 as they did. This By the time Stilwell was offering to tutor Chiang on how to lead his country, the Kuomintang were trying to make do with perhaps a quarter of the national budget they had had in 1937 -- and they had lost in 1937 against a Japan that was not yet fully mobilized. All was compounded by a devastating famine in Henan in 1942 that included literal plagues of locusts.

There are better military histories; I'm working through one now. But this is a reasonably tractable one-volume diplomatic and social history that includes the basics of the military campaigns as well. Recommended. ( )

Fleshes out a whole section of history without demanding you be a WWII nerd. Excellent, sobering, enlightening.