First published in June 2014, updated in November 2026 with a new link to the newsreel. The German newsreel below, from 1937, includes a segment on the battle of Shanghai, starting at 11:25. It’s interesting for a number of reasons. First, it features several of the weapons that were used most aggressively by the two…
More than a month after Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japanese forces in north China formally handed over authority to Chinese and other Allied forces. It happened on October 10, 1945, inside Beiping’s (Beijing) Forbidden City in a ceremony attended by representatives of the main victorious powers. There were several reasons…
Foreign observers who arrived in the Chinese capital of Nanjing in early September 1945 for the handover of power from the Japanese occupation forces to the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek noticed something odd: The city, where the Japanese had carried out an infamous six-weeks massacre eight years earlier, was still policed by Hirohito’s men in…
Most are familiar with the portrait of Mao Zedong, the founder of communist China, hanging over the entrance of Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, in the capital Beijing. It was not always like that. From October 1945, to mark the recent defeat of Japan, the image of Chiang Kai-shek, the then-ruler of Nationalist China,…
Behind every great literary epic, there are real, deeply human ghosts. For the internationally acclaimed Eurasian author and physician Han Suyin, that ghost was her first husband: General Tang Pao-huang. To history, Tang is remembered as a staunchly patriotic, deeply conservative military officer who fought on the losing side of China’s brutal mid-century transformations. But…
In the autumn of 1943, the quiet, Quaker-hewn campus of Swarthmore College became an unexpected frontline for international military diplomacy. World War II was raging across two oceans, and the United States was deeply invested in strengthening its alliance with the Republic of China. To prepare for the postwar reconstruction of China’s maritime defenses, the…
In the autumn of 1944, John L. “Jack” Savage arrived in the rugged interior of wartime China to survey the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. As the chief designing engineer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), Savage was arguably the world’s foremost authority on massive hydroelectric infrastructure, having already supervised the designs for…
The cinematic landscape of wartime Hollywood was shaped by propaganda, patriotism, and a pressing need to tell stories of global conflict. Amidst this turbulent era, the 1942 film Lady from Chungking stands out as a unique and historically significant artifact. Produced by the low-budget studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) and released on December 21, 1942,…
If you picture the Japanese soldiers who fought in China and across the beaches of the Pacific, it is easy to imagine them as physically identical to modern Japanese people. In broad terms that is true. But recent research suggests the story is a little more nuanced and a lot more interesting. A 2026 study…
The photograph is quiet, almost unremarkable at first glance: a small group of men standing in the dust, horses waiting behind them, the light harsh and unforgiving. But at the far right stands a figure whose story would travel far beyond this moment—Canadian surgeon Dr. Norman Bethune. In 1938, Bethune had come to northern China…
