The poster above is of British origin, and with the Chinese soldier placed at the center it is clearly meant to signal that the United Kingdom considers the Chinese contribution to the Allied war effort of key importance. This is underlined by the Chinese text, which roughly translates as follows: “This is the only war we…
In the second of two articles about Japan’s Skull Squadron, first carried on the Warfare Historian Blog, we look at the uniforms and equipment of this elite unit, active for several years in Manchuria: The Skull Squadron and its leader, Lt Ikagami, would have been dressed in mostly similar uniforms and equipped with the base…
One of the oddest but also most feared Japanese units on the Asian mainland in the years prior to full-scale war with China was the so-called Skull Squadron. Read on in this article first carried on the Warfare Historian Blog: The Second Sino-Japanese Conflict of 1931-1945 saw thousands of different regiments, divisions, units, and armies,…
On April 7, 1938, the city of Hankou in central China “turned into a bedlam as thousands of firecrackers were exploded and newsboys tore about the streets shouting at the top of their lungs the news of the ‘annihiliation of a Japanese column at Taierzhuang’.” The scenes, described by the North China Herald, were surely…
Japan’s psychological warfare program in World War II was remarkably diverse, and targeted not just the western Allies, but also the Chinese, as the examples below demonstrate. They are from the extremely comprehensive website Psywarrior. The explanations accompanying the illustrations are written by Herb Friedman, who quotes a 1948 publication on physchological warfare issued by the…
On May 26, 1945, sixteen B-25J Mitchell bombers took off from their base in the Philippines, headed for Taiwan. They were from the 498th Bomb Squadron, part of the 5th Air Force’s 345th Bombardment Group, which had been stationed in the Philippines since November 1944, carrying out missions against shipping along the China coast as…
This article on how a sleepy California beach town was at the center of a war across the Pacific is excerpted from Boom, a Journal of California. For the full story, click here The newsmen ignored the Japanese bombs shaking seventy-five feet of rock above their heads. It was June 1940, and a team of…
Shanghai, 1945: Roy Matsumoto, a 32-year-old linguist in the US Army, is on a mission to interrogate Japanese prisoners of the war that has just ended. Defying the laws of probability, he spots his own cousin among the captives. The cousin has news. In an even unlikelier turn of events, Matsumoto’s own brother is also a…
With his kind smile, it would be easy to confuse Bai Chongxi with a Buddhist cleric, detached from the worries of this world. That was one of the first thoughts that occurred to German war correspondent Wolf Schenke when he met with Bai, the 45-year-old deputy chief of staff of the Chinese Army, at the…
When the Japanese army marched into the Chinese capital Nanjing in December 1937, only a small number of foreign residents had stayed behind. One of them was John Gillespie Magee, an American citizen and a minister at an Episcopal mission. In the terrible days that followed, he used his 16mm camera to record the atrocities committed by…
