It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times for Manchukuo’s national soccer team. In June 1940, while participating in a regional tournament in Osaka, it lost 0-7 to Japan. A few days later, it won 1-0 over China – or more correctly, puppet China, the part of the country that had…
In the early part of the three-month battle for Shanghai in 1937, China deployed its fledgling tank arm in an all-out attempt to wipe out the small and beleaguered Japanese enclave. China’s main weapon in this fight was the British-built Vickers Mark E medium tank. It was a disaster. The Chinese commanders sent the tanks…
The photos on this page all have the same basic motif: Japanese soldiers engaged in battle in front of a giant Coca-Cola ad. They are from the same spot in Shanghai, North Sichuan Road. But they are from two different battles – the 1932 and 1937 Sino-Japanese struggles for the city, respectively. We can say…
By January 1938, Russian pilot F. P. Polynin had only been in the central Chinese city of Hankou for a few weeks, and the Japanese invaders had still not gotten used to the idea that they now also had to fight the mighty Soviet Air Force. The 31-year-old officer’s squadron of high-speed Tupolev SB bombers…
When Japanese tank commander Fujita Sanehiko, pictured left, took part in the campaign in central China in late 1937, he was well-known back home. A gifted writer, he sent dispatches from the frontline that were widely read by a public generally supportive of the war against the giant neighbor across the sea. Whether Fujita was…
All Quiet on the Western Front as an 80-year-old Chinese comic book! That’s one of the most recent acquisitions made by the Rauner Special Collections Library, part of Dartmouth College Library. Below an excerpt from their website about this amazing find: “Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues)…
When the German Wehrmacht rolled into Austria in March 1938, one of its soldiers stood out. The 21-year-old sergeant-cadet in the 98th Jäger Regiment had jet-black hair, and his features were distinctly Asian. His name was Chiang Wei-kuo, and he was the adopted son of China’s ruler Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang Wei-kuo was the biological son…
Part of the Sino-Japanese struggle in the late 1930s was aimed at global public opinion, and movies were among the weapons. This short documentary, shot shortly after the fall of Shanghai in late 1937, is clearly painting the Japanese side in a positive light. It reports how “17 Japanese-appointed Chinese officials were murdered by terrorists…
On August 14, 1937, Chinese planes dropped several bombs over the international parts of Shanghai, in a tragic error that cost the lives of hundreds. Among the victims was Robert K. Reischauer, a promising 30-year-old political scientist from Princeton University. Later, family and friends would refer to him as the first American to be killed…
Beurt SerVaas, who died on February 2, 2014, aged 94, was one of the key American agents in China during World War 2, especially as the war with Japan ended and gradually morphed into the early Cold War. Remarkably, the then 26-year-old, working for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, was reportedly involved in the surrender of Japanese forces…
