Japan's invasion of China in 1937 saw most major campaigns north of the Yangtze River, where Chinese industry was concentrated. The southern theater proved a more difficult challenge for Japan because of its enormous size, diverse terrain, and poor infrastructure, but Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made a formidable stand that produced a veritable quagmire for a superior opponent-a stalemate much d...
Series: Modern War Studies (Hardcover)
Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher: University Press of Kansas; 1St Edition edition (November 14, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0700618775
ISBN-13: 978-0700618774
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.5 x 9.2 inches
Amazon Rank: 2243400
Format: PDF ePub fb2 TXT fb2 ebook
- Franco David Macri epub
- Franco David Macri ebooks
- English pdf
- History pdf ebooks
- 0700618775 pdf
This book finally examinates the war between China and Japan , that officially began on 1937 with the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge, but that in reality was in a crescendo since the creation of the Manchukuo puppet regime in Manchuria on 1931-33....
he Allied nations.In the first book to cover this southern theater in detail, David Macri closely examines strategic decisions, campaigns, and operations and shows how they affected Allied grand strategy. Drawing on documents of U.S. and British officials, he reveals for the first time how the Sino-Japanese War served as a "proxy war" for the Allies: by keeping Japan's military resources focused on southern China, they hoped to keep the enemy bogged down in a war of attrition that would prevent them from breaching British and Soviet territory.While the most immediate concern was preserving Siberia and its vast resources from invasion, Macri identifies Hong Kong as the keystone in that proxy war—vital in sustaining Chinese resistance against Japan as it provided the logistical interface between the outside world and battles in Hunan and Kwangtung provinces; a situation that emerged because of its vital rail connection to the city of Changsha. He describes the development of Anglo-Japanese low-intensity conflict at Hong Kong; he then explains the geopolitical significance of Hong Kong and southern China for the period following the German invasion of the Soviet Union.Opening a new window on this rarely studied theater, Macri underscores China's symbolic importance for the Allies, depicting them as unequal partners who fought the Japanese for entirely different reasons—China for restoration of its national sovereignty, the Allies to keep the Japanese preoccupied. And by aiding China's wartime efforts, the Allies further hoped to undermine Japanese propaganda designed to expel Western powers from its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.As Macri shows, Hong Kong was not just a sleepy British Colonial outpost on the fringes of the empire but an essential logistical component of the war, and to fully understand broader events Hong Kong must be viewed together with southern China as a single military zone. His account of that forgotten fight is a pioneering work that provides new insight into the origins of the Pacific War.
