In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 ed. by Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, Hans van de Ven
  • Michael A. Barnhart (bio)
The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945. Edited by Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2011. xxv, 614 pages. $65.00.

Reviewers and publishers alike have been known to shun books based on the compilation of academic conference papers. Uneven quality, uncertain focus, and inadequate editorial control have been known to bedevil these volumes, especially for long conferences with many contributors. This volume, however, proves the doubters wrong. The three editors not only have successfully demanded a close matching of contributions, they have made [End Page 469] their own in seasoned, often scintillating chapters of this tightly produced and superbly focused collection. The result is a book with value to a wide range of scholars.

First in that range would come students of World War II. Hans van de Ven’s essay persuasively condemns much American scholarship on the Asian theater of that war. Nearly all studies, from those of Theodore White through Barbara Tuchman, saw that theater through the heated lens of the cold war and bitter U.S. partisan struggles over who “lost” China. The great majority of the chapters here, written by Chinese and Japanese scholars, take the Chinese Nationalists, communists, and Japanese on their own terms. While the West and Soviet Union would play a role, particularly through the ironic consequences of the use of Soviet and then U.S. air power from Chinese bases, the key decisions were made in Chongqing, Tokyo, and Japanese field army headquarters.

The nature of the war itself receives well-directed attention. Chongqing was one of the most heavily bombed cities of the war, as Edna Tow’s chapter illuminates. It was also the first real test of the use of strategic air power, by a Japanese air force almost never discussed from this perspective, designed to destroy an enemy’s will to resist. Many chapters cover the blurry line between conventional and guerrilla warfare, a blur that increasingly seems to account for the infamous Nanjing Massacre. While some scholars here emphasize this aspect of the Sino-Japanese War as central, if not unique, to the conflict, many others will recognize that World War II, in Europe as well as Asia, was characterized by irregular forces and sorts of resistance attempted actively by the Chinese Nationalists but perfected only by Chiang’s communist rivals.

Genuinely new in this book are examinations of wartime alliance diplomacy, especially for Chiang Kai-shek. He understood that China could not win on its own, and this understanding has been well known through decades of scholarship. But the extent to which his strategic decisions were dictated by his need for active allies emerges here much more clearly, powerfully, and often piteously. Chiang’s decision to fight pitched battles in the autumn of 1937 centered around his hope for help from the members of the Brussels Conference (the Nine Powers Treaty Conference) and, soon after, the Soviet Union. The Soviets delivered, for a time; the conference yielded only the farce of aid.

Historians of republican China will form a second audience for these studies. While most are military histories, and while they do not shirk the operational details, collectively they offer persuasive judgments of the Nationalist regime and its leader. Overall, those judgments are mixed. Chiang receives considerable criticism for his tendency to meddle tactically in the fighting and, more fundamentally, for creating an intolerable command culture in which subordinates competed for and, much worse, conformed to [End Page 470] only his attentions. His decisions to risk his best forces at Shanghai to get help from Brussels, to defend Nanjing haltingly, and to flood the dikes at Huayuankou draw little praise.

Yet his regime got a great deal right. Chiang may not have welcomed war in the summer of 1937, but his government was prepared for it. That government may not have held the allegiance of all the country, but it formed a national alliance of...

pdf