Author : Peter Harmsen
Publisher : Casemate
Page : pages
File Size : 16,30 MB
Release : 2018-11-15
Category :
ISBN : 9781612004808
First in a trilogy of books comprising a general history of war in the Asia Pacific, from the origins of enmity between Japan and China, through Japan's ascendancy in the early years of World War II.
Author : Peter Harmsen
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 24,37 MB
Release : 2018-12-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1612004814
“An excellent primer about World War II in Asia prior to the involvement of the United States”—part one of a fascinating history trilogy (New York Journal of Books). War in the Far East is a trilogy of books offering the most complete narrative yet written about the Pacific Theater of World War II, and the first truly international treatment of the epic conflict. Historian Peter Harmsen weaves together a complex and revealing narrative, including facets of the war that are often overlooked in historic narratives. He explores the war in subarctic conditions on the Aleutians; details the mass starvations in China, Indochina, and India; and offers a range of perspectives on the war experience, from the Oval Office to the blistering sands of Peleliu. Storm Clouds Over the Pacific begins the story long before Pearl Harbor, showing how the war can only be understood if ancient hatreds and long-standing geopolitics are taken into account. Harmsen demonstrates how Japan and China’s ancient enmity led to increased tensions in the 1930s, which, in turn, exploded into conflict in 1937. The battles of Shanghai and Nanjing were followed by the Battle of Taierzhuang in 1938, China’s only major victory. A war of attrition continued up to 1941, the year when Japan made the momentous decision to pursue all-out war. The infamous attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the United States into the war, as the Japanese also overran British and Dutch territories throughout the western Pacific.
Author : Peter Harmsen
Publisher : Casemate
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 40,17 MB
Release : 2023-06-15
Category :
ISBN : 9781636243016
"This book is the first volume in a trilogy that will offer a more complete account of the Pacific War than any previously published. While keeping a focus on the decade leading up to Pearl Harbor, Storm Clouds Over the Pacific goes back centuries to examine the origins of enmity between Japan and China and trace the deep animosities that drove the immensely destructive war in the Asia Pacific, exploring the love-hate relationship between East Asia's two oldest civilizations, conditioned by shifting geopolitical winds." -- Back cover.
Author : Peter Harmsen
Publisher : Casemate
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 12,58 MB
Release : 2013-05-03
Category : History
ISBN : 161200167X
This deeply researched book describes one of the great forgotten battles of the 20th century. At its height it involved nearly a million Chinese and Japanese soldiers, while sucking in three million civilians as unwilling spectators and, often, victims. It turned what had been a Japanese adventure in China into a general war between the two oldest and proudest civilizations of the Far East. Ultimately, it led to Pearl Harbor and to seven decades of tumultuous history in Asia. The Battle of Shanghai was a pivotal event that helped define and shape the modern world. In its sheer scale, the struggle for ChinaÕs largest city was a sinister forewarning of what was in store for the rest of mankind only a few years hence, in theaters around the world. It demonstrated how technology had given rise to new forms of warfare, or had made old forms even more lethal. Amphibious landings, tank assaults, aerial dogfights and most importantly, urban combat, all happened in Shanghai in 1937. It was a dress rehearsal for World War IIÑor perhaps more correctly it was the inaugural act in the warÑthe first major battle in the global conflict. Actors from a variety of nations were present in Shanghai during the three fateful autumn months when the battle raged. The rich cast included China's ascetic Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Japanese adversary, General Matsui Iwane, who wanted Asia to rise from disunity, but ultimately pushed the continent toward its deadliest conflict ever. Claire Chennault, later of ÒFlying TigerÓ fame, was among the figures emerging in the course of the campaign, as was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In an ironic twist, Alexander von Falkenhausen, a stern German veteran of the Great War, abandoned his role as a mere advisor to the Chinese army and led it into battle against the Japanese invaders. Written by Peter Harmsen, a foreign correspondent in East Asia for two decades, and currently bureau chief in Taiwan for the French news agency AFP, Shanghai 1937 fills a gaping chasm in our understanding of the Second World War.
Author : Peter Harmsen
Publisher : Casemate
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 10,46 MB
Release : 2024-07-15
Category :
ISBN : 9781636244310
This book details the astonishing transformation that took place from 1942 to 1943, setting the Allies on a path to final victory against Japan.
Author : Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 550 pages
File Size : 24,65 MB
Release : 2020-03-23
Category : History
ISBN : 1684173507
"In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan’s military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book. The principal agency in the piecemeal growth of Japanese colonization was the South Manchurian Railway Company, and by the mid-1920s Japan had a deeply entrenched presence in Manchuria and exercised a dominant economic and political influence over the area. Japanese colonial expansion in Manchuria also loomed large in Japanese politics, military policy, economic development, and foreign relations and deeply influenced many aspects of Japan’s interwar history."
Author : Peter Harmsen
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 41,54 MB
Release : 2015-11-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1504026241
A true story of the Sino-Japanese conflict: A “valuable account of a little-known event [and] a grim reminder of the darker side of war” (Military History Monthly). The infamous Rape of Nanjing looms like a dark shadow over the history of Asia in the twentieth century, and is among the most widely recognized chapters of World War II in China. By contrast, the story of the month-long campaign before this notorious massacre has never been told in its entirety. Nanjing 1937 by Peter Harmsen fills this gap. This is the follow-up to Harmsen’s bestselling Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, and begins where that book left off. In stirring prose, it describes how the Japanese Army, having invaded the mainland and emerging victorious from the Battle of Shanghai, pushed on toward the capital, Nanjing, in a crushing advance that confirmed its reputation for bravery and savagery in equal measure. While much of the struggle over Shanghai had carried echoes of the grueling war in the trenches two decades earlier, the Nanjing campaign was a fast-paced mobile operation in which armor and air power played major roles. It was blitzkrieg two years before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Facing the full might of modern, mechanized warfare, China’s resistance was heroic, but ultimately futile. As in Shanghai, the battle for Nanjing was more than a clash between Chinese and Japanese. Soldiers and citizens of a variety of nations witnessed or took part in the hostilities. German advisors, American journalists, and British diplomats all played important parts in this vast drama. And a new power appeared on the scene: Soviet pilots dispatched by Stalin to challenge Japan’s control of the skies. This epic tale is told with verve and attention to detail by Harmsen, a veteran East Asia correspondent who consolidates his status as the foremost chronicler of World War II in China with this path-breaking work of narrative history.
Author : Peter Harmsen
Publisher : Casemate
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 24,42 MB
Release : 2021-08-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1612006280
A gripping account of the final period of the war in the Asia Pacific during WWII. The last installment of the War in the Far East trilogy, Asian Armageddon 1944-1945, continues and completes the narrative of the first two volumes, describing how a US-led coalition of nations battled Japan into submission through a series of cataclysmic encounters. Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle ever, was testimony to the paramount importance of controlling the ocean, as was the fact that the US Navy carried out the only successful submarine campaign in history, reducing Japan’s military and merchant navies to shadows of the former selves. Meanwhile, fighting continued in disparate geographic conditions on land, with the chaos of Imphal, the inferno of Manila, and the carnage of Iwo Jima forming some of the milestones on the bloody road to peace, sealed in Tokyo Bay in September 1945. The nuclear blasts at the end of the war made one observer feel as if he was ‘present at the creation.' Indeed, the participants in the events in the Asia Pacific in the mid-1940s were present at the creation of a new and dangerous world. It was a world where the stage was set for the Cold War and for international rivalries that last to this day, and a new constellation of powers emerged, with the outlines, just over the horizon, of a rising China. War in the Far East is a trilogy of books comprising a general history of World War II in the Asia Pacific. Unlike other histories on the conflict it goes into its deep origins, beginning long before Pearl Harbor, and encompasses a far wider group of actors to produce the most complete account yet written on the subject and the first truly international treatment of this epic conflict. Author Peter Harmsen weaves together complex events into a revealing and entertaining narrative, including facets of the war that may be unknown even to avid readers of World War II history, from the mass starvation that cost the lives of millions across China, Indochina, and India to the war in sub-arctic conditions in the Aleutians. Harmsen pieces together the full range of perspectives, reflecting what war was like both at the top and on the ground.
Author : Stuart Goldman
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 43,16 MB
Release : 2013-10-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1612510981
Stuart Goldman convincingly argues that a little-known, but intense Soviet-Japanese conflict along the Manchurian-Mongolian frontier at Nomonhan influenced the outbreak of World War II and shaped the course of the war. The author draws on Japanese, Soviet, and western sources to put the seemingly obscure conflict—actually a small undeclared war— into its proper global geo-strategic perspective. The book describes how the Soviets, in response to a border conflict provoked by Japan, launched an offensive in August 1939 that wiped out the Japanese forces at Nomonhan. At the same time, Stalin signed the German—Soviet Nonaggression Pact, allowing Hitler to invade Poland. The timing of these military and diplomatic strikes was not coincidental, according to the author. In forming an alliance with Hitler that left Tokyo diplomatically isolated, Stalin succeeded in avoiding a two-front war. He saw the pact with the Nazis as a way to pit Germany against Britain and France, leaving the Soviet Union on the sidelines to eventually pick up the spoils from the European conflict, while at the same time giving him a free hand to smash the Japanese at Nomonhan. Goldman not only demonstrates the linkage between the Nomonhan conflict, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, and the outbreak of World War II , but also shows how Nomonhan influenced Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States and thus change the course of history. The book details Gen. Georgy Zhukov’s brilliant victory at Nomonhan that led to his command of the Red Army in 1941 and his success in stopping the Germans at Moscow with reinforcements from the Soviet Far East. Such a strategy was possible, the author contends, only because of Japan’s decision not to attack the Soviet Far East but to seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and attack Pearl Harbor instead. Goldman credits Tsuji Masanobu, an influential Japanese officer who instigated the Nomonhan conflict and survived the debacle, with urging his superiors not to take on the Soviets again in 1941, but instead to go to war with the United States.
Author : Rod Macdonald
Publisher : Frontline Books
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 17,90 MB
Release : 2023-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1399013327
"...informative and detailed with some interesting and little-known anecdotes as well." — National Maritime Historical Society. Early on Sunday, 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier-borne aircraft launched a surprise attack against the US Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor. It was a date that President Roosevelt declared “will live in infamy”. During the strike, Japanese planes attacked the seven US battleships lined up in Battleship Row – and the flag battleship USS Pennsylvania, in drydock for overhaul. The battleship USS Arizona exploded from a bomb hit at the forward magazine killing 1,177 officers and men. On USS Oklahoma, 429 men were killed – many trapped inside as the great battleship capsized after aerial torpedo strikes. USS West Virginia, meanwhile, was hit by at least seven torpedoes and several bombs, and engulfed in flames; she settled onto the bottom on an even keel. USS California was hit by a pair of torpedoes and a bomb, flooding slowly, she too settled on the bottom. The other four battleships present were more lightly damaged, with the crippled Nevada, the only battleship to get underway during the attack, being successfully beached. By the time the assault was over, eight battleships, three light cruisers, three destroyers, a training ship and other smaller vessels had been sunk or damaged. Hundreds of US aircraft had been damaged or destroyed, while 2,403 Americans had been killed. Within a week of the Japanese attack, a great salvage organization had been formed. Very quickly the lightly damaged battleships Pennsylvania, Maryland and Tennessee had been repaired in naval yards and put back into service to protect the west coast of the USA. Of the eight battleships attacked, all but Arizona were raised, temporarily patched-up and sent back to naval yards on the west coast of America for final repair and modernization. Main battery guns and ordnance were recovered from the wrecked Arizona, which would then be left to rest on the bottom of the harbor for eternity – as a memorial to the events of that fateful December day. USS Nevada was lifted off the bottom in February 1942, California in March 1942 and West Virginia in June 1942. The capsized Oklahoma, while eventually parbuckled and raised, was found to be too badly damaged to be fully rebuilt. Six of the eight battleships would thus return to service, with improved protection against bombs and torpedoes and being fitted with the latest anti-aircraft and gunnery systems. They would re-enter to the war to wreak a terrible revenge – making their presence felt during the reconquest of the Aleutian Islands and the Philippines, and the great battles of Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Nevada would go on Atlantic convoy duty before bombarding German positions off Utah beach as the D-Day Normandy landings began. This is the story of those six.
