This article by Alex Baugh was originally posted on the excellent blog The Children’s War: A Guide to Books for Young Readers about World War II… and Other Interesting Bits. For more, click here. Like Pearl S. Buck, Phyllis Ayer Sowers spent much of her life living in China and other Asian countries and has written…
The German newsreel below shows highlights of the 1937 battle of Shanghai. It’s interesting for a number of reasons. First, it features several of the weapons that were used most aggressively by the two sides of the struggle, including a Japanese 75 mm mountain gun (at 0:24), Chinese Curtiss Hawk biplanes (0:27), and a Japanese…
The 1939 Battle of Khalkhin Gol, on the border between the USSR and Manchukuo, is little known in the West, but may have been one of the crucial engagements determining the future course of World War II. Once nationalistic concerns are put aside, most historical experts would be forced to conclude that the Eastern Front…
In the early afternoon of August 16, 1937, six Curtis Hawk III aircraft from the 25th Squadron of the Chinese Air Force took off from their base in East China, heading for Shanghai. China’s largest city was quickly becoming the main battlefield in the war with the Japanese invader, and the Chinese Air Force was playing a decisive role in…
Yang Youfu was 24 years old when he was drafted from his village in southwest China’s Sichuan province to fight in the war against Japan, leaving his one-year old son behind. They didn’t meet again until this month, when his baby boy had become an old man of 73 and he himself nearly a centenarian….
The most visible Japanese presence in Shanghai during the three-month battle for the city in the fall of 1937 was the cruiser Izumo, anchored in the Huangpu River. It was the flagship of Vice-Admiral Hasegawa Kiyoshi, commander of the Imperial Navy’s Third Fleet, and especially in the early part of the battle, its large guns…
Hemingway and China. It’s not two words that are placed alongside each other very often, and for good reason. The iconic American writer had very little interest in the Middle Kingdom, and might never have visited if it wasn’t because his wife at the time, world-famous war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, was as eager as he…
To express the essence of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in 104 poems—that is the mission which Honolulu businessman and writer Wing Tek Lum embarks upon in a recent collection of poetry. He succeeds marvellously. The Nanjing Massacre: Poems, published by Bamboo Ridge Press (www.bambooridge.com), succinctly portrays the battles that led to the fall of Nanjing as well as the ensuing…
“This American pilot is kicking the Japanese out of the skies over China. Help him.” That’s the simple message of the poster to the left. The image, showing an American aviator subduing a blue-faced, sword-wielding Japanese enemy, was part of an effort by the American military to make sure that personnel shot down over Japanese-controlled…
In 1933, Chinese and Japanese soldiers clashed in the area around the Great Wall. It was among the most vicious confrontations prior to the outbreak of full-scale war between the two nations in the summer of 1937. One battle in particular attained legendary status in the years afterwards: The Chinese defense of the Xifengkou pass,…
