China's Trial by Fire : The Shanghai War of 1932

Rating:
Summary: Authoritative Account
Review: The Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932 has been overshadowed by the second assault five years later, and then by the Second World War. But it was a key moment in the long build-up to the world conflict, and Professor Jordan has done it full justice in this book.
Drawing on a multiplicity of sources, he tells the gripping story from the pretexts set up by a Japanese army major to the final search for a truce so that the Japanese could turn their attention to conquest elsewhere in China. In the course of his narrative, he also puts the record straight on a number of key areas where politics subsequently distorted the account of what happened during the five weeks of Shanghai's trial for bombing, artillery and fire.
As in his earlier book on the Northern Expedition by the Nationalists to take control of China, Professor Jordan cuts through the propaganda which surrounds much of the country's history to produce an authoritative picture of an episode which, in many ways, presaged later events such as the bombing of unprotected civilian areas and the failure of the democracies to resists militrarism. His book also raises the interesting question of why so many historical accounts of China in this period have unquestioningly accepted conventional wisdom that gets some important aspects of the Shanghai attack wrong, despite contemporary evidence to the contrary.