The first English language history of China's Most Important Battle in World War II

In April 1944, Imperial Japan launched Operation Ichigo to secure a transport route linking Japanese forces in northern China and Southeast Asia, while eliminating American airfields in the region. The Japanese army quickly overran Chinese resistance and pushed fast toward the city of Hengyang, a key railway junction in south-central China. The Battle of Hengyang began on June 23, 1944. With just 17,000 troops and besieged in an area of less than ten square miles, the Chinese 10th Army held off a Japanese force totaling more than 110,000 men, supported by aircraft, tanks, chemical weapons, and artillery, for forty-seven days. The fighting was among the most savage of the entire Second World War. Hengyang finally fell on August 8, but the Chinese defenders and undaunted American pilots had stopped Ichigo’s momentum. The Japanese military’s failure to quickly conquer such a small city led to the fall of Japanese Prime Minister Tojo’s cabinet in July 1944, ultimately weakening Japan’s resolve to prosecute the war. News accounts compared the battle to the German defeat at Stalingrad in its ferocity and to the Battle of Suiyang, the most famous siege in ancient Chinese history. 

In the aftermath of World War II, the battle was erased from Chinese history books since Communist propaganda insisted that only they, not the Nationalists, had successfully resisted the Japanese. But the survivors, both soldiers and civilians, kept the battle alive in their memories, and during the early part of the twenty-first century, the truth of Hengyang was finally presented to the Chinese people. The Battle of Hengyang: Japan’s Fateful Siege of World War II by Shifen Fox is the first English language history of one of the most important battles of the Second World War. The author returned to China where she interviewed survivors and children of survivors, read private letters, and had access to normally closed archives; in addition, she read memoirs written by Japanese survivors and referenced Japanese historical records. Learning late in life that her father perished in the battle, she also explains how the role of her father and this heroic defense was censored by China, but more than eighty years later has now been restored to its place in Chinese and world history. 
 

From the respected author of one of the best books on World War II combat, comes an equally captivating saga of battle recovery, healing, and homecoming. 

China Marine is the long-awaited sequel to E. B. Sledge’s critically acclaimed memoir, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Picking up where his previous memoir leaves off, Sledge, a young marine in the First Division, traces his company’s movements and charts his own difficult passage to peace following his horrific experiences in the Pacific. He reflects on his duty in the ancient city of Peiping (now Beijing) and recounts the difficulty of returning to his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and resuming civilian life haunted by the shadows of close combat.

Distinguished historians have praised Sledge’s first book as the definitive rifleman’s account of World War II, ranking it with the Civil War’s Red Badge of Courage and World War I’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Although With the Old Breed ends with the surrender of Japan, marines in the Pacific were still faced with the mission of disarming the immense Japanese forces on the Asian mainland and reestablishing order. For infantrymen so long engaged in the savage and surreal world of close combat, there remained the personal tasks of regaining normalcy and dealing with suppressed memories, fears, and guilt. 

In China Marine, E. B. Sledge completes his story and provides emotional closure to the searing events detailed in his first memoir. He speaks frankly about the real costs of war, emotional and psychological as well as physical, and explains the lifetime loyalties that develop between men who face fear, loss, and horror together. That bond becomes one of the newfound treasures of life after battle.

With his hallmark style of simplicity, directness, and lack of sentimentality, "Sledgehammer" has given us yet another great document of war literature.

From the Pacific’s brutality to China’s uneasy peace—one Marine’s fight to reclaim himself.

In this powerful anniversary edition of China Marine, Eugene B. Sledge—acclaimed author of the classic WWII memoir With the Old Breed—offers an unforgettable portrait of a young Marine navigating the uneasy peace that followed history’s most brutal war. Already celebrated for his visceral honesty and humanity, Sledge deepened his legacy with this rare account of the U.S. occupation of North China, a period as volatile as it was transformative. 

Sledge’s memoirs remain enduringly popular because they never flinch from the truth. His reflections resonate across generations, offering readers not only a veteran’s hard-won wisdom but a moving story of survival, friendship, trauma, and the long journey back to ordinary life. His life and words have become part of American cultural memory, featured prominently in both Ken Burns’s PBS series The War and the HBO production The Pacific. 

This special anniversary edition honors that legacy with two new forewords: one by his son, bestselling author John Sledge, and another by eminent military historian John McManus, who together illuminate Sledge’s continued relevance in understanding war and its aftermath. 

Intimate, vivid, and deeply human, China Marine stands as a timeless testament to courage, resilience, and the costs of peace after war.

China’s Date Debate is an in-depth investigation of the Chinese Communist Party’s remapping of China’s World War II timeline from eight years (1937–1945) to fourteen years (1931–1945). Instead of the previously accepted starting date of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, the Chinese Communist Party defined the war’s starting date as the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931, which triggered the Japanese Kwantung Army’s invasion of Manchuria. Since the 1980s, scholars from Manchuria have demanded a fourteen-year war timeline to encompass the invasion of their homeland. By the 1990s, other scholars took notice and started to counter with claims that the eight-year timeline was the more accurate. Subsequently, a fierce “date debate” emerged between the two sides that was only resolved by the 2017 proclamation from the Ministry of Education. 

Emily Matson demonstrates that the decision to set China’s World War II timeline at fourteen years was not merely a top-down decision, but was influenced by decades of Manchurian scholarship on the war. China’s Date Debate recenters Manchuria as a region of critical importance for China’s national identity today and the implications of this “date debate” on the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic legitimacy and international image. 

Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai was not yet ten years old in the spring of 1942 when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—about two-thirds of them US citizens—from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. They included Mitzi and most of her family, who owned a fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon. The Asais spent much of World War II in the camps while two of the older sons served in the Pacific in the US Army. Three years later, when the camps began to close, the family returned to Hood River to find an altered community. Shop owners refused to serve neighbors they had known for decades; racism and hostility were open and largely unchecked. Humiliation and shame drove teenaged Mitzi to reject her Japanese heritage, including her birth name. More than a decade later, her life took another turn when a Fulbright grant sent her to teach in Japan, where she reconnected with her roots.

In From Thorns to Blossoms, Mitzi recounts her rich and varied life, from a childhood surrounded by barbed wire and hatred to a successful career as a high school English teacher and college instructor in English as a Second Language. Today, Asai descendants continue to tend the Hood River farm while the town confronts its shameful history. Originally published in 1990 as Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon, this revised and expanded edition describes the positive influence Mitzi’s immigrant parents had on their children, provides additional context for her story, and illuminates the personal side of a dark chapter in US history. It’s the remarkable story of a transformation from thorns into blossoms, pain into healing.

A richly researched account of the social, racial, and political history of a major Deep South infantry division at home and in the Pacific

Chris Rein’s study of the Thirty-First Infantry Division, known officially as the “Dixie Division,” illuminates the complexities in mobilizing American reserve units to meet the global emergency during World War II. Citizen soldiers from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi formed the core of one of the ninety infantry divisions the Army successfully activated, trained, equipped, and deployed to defeat fascism in Europe and race-based imperialism in the Pacific. But the Army mobilized ideas along with manpower, and soldiers from across the Jim Crow South brought their racial ideas and views with them into the ranks and then exported these across the South Pacific. If the American victory in World War II represents a “double victory” over racism abroad and at home, the division’s service is a cogent reminder that the same powerful force could pull in opposite directions.

While focused on the division’s operational service during the war years, Mobilizing the South: The Thirty-First Infantry Division, Race, and World War II spans the division’s entire service from 1917 to 1967, from an interwar period highlighted by responses to natural disasters and facing down lynch mobs through a postwar service that included protecting activists in the most important struggles of the civil rights era. But the division’s extended service as a training establishment highlights lingering resentments and tensions within the American military system between the active and reserve components. Despite this, the division performed well in General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign across the South Pacific. Using official records as well as details drawn from correspondence and oral histories, Rein captures how individual soldiers framed their exposure to a larger world, and how service alongside African American, New Guinean, and Filipino units both reinforced and modified views on race and postwar American society.
 

Hideko was ten years old when the atomic bomb devastated her home in Hiroshima. In this eloquent and moving narrative, Hideko recalls her life before the bomb, the explosion itself, and the influence of that trauma upon her subsequent life in Japan and the United States. Her years in America have given her unusual insights into the relationship between Japanese and American cultures and the impact of Hiroshima on our lives.  

This new edition includes two expanded chapters and revisions throughout. A new epilogue brings the story up to date. This poignant story of courage and resilience remains deeply relevant today, offering a profoundly personal testament against the ongoing threat of nuclear warfare.

Pacific Airman is based on a US Army Air Forces bomber plane navigator's, Edward S. Goode, hand-written pocket journal of his time in the Pacific theater during World War II. He was a member of the 400th Bomber Squadron (“the Black Pirates”), part of the legendary 90th Bomb Group “the Jolly Rogers.” The journal, covering from 1943 to the end of the war in 1945, chronicles daily life and missions, noting difficult working conditions, air attacks, leave, and more.

Examines Japan’s war generation—Japanese men and women who survived World War Two and rebuilt their lives from memories of that conflict.

Since John Hersey’s Hiroshima—the classic account, published in 1946, of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of that city—very few books have examined the meaning and impact of World War II through the eyes of Japanese men and women who survived that conflict. Tattered Kimonos in Japan does just that: It is an intimate journey into contemporary Japan from the perspective of the generation of Japanese soldiers and civilians who survived World War II, by a writer whose American father and Japanese father-in-law fought on opposite sides of the conflict.

The author, a former NPR senior editor, is Jewish, and he approaches the subject with the sensibilities of having grown up in a community of Holocaust survivors. Mindful of the power of victimhood, memory, and shared suffering, he travels across Japan, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meeting a compelling group of men and women whose lives, even now, are defined by the trauma of war, and by lingering questions of responsibility and repentance for Japan’s wartime aggression.

The image of a tattered kimono from Hiroshima is the thread that drives the narrative arc of this emotional story about a writer’s encounter with history, inside the Japan of his father’s generation, on the other side of his father’s war. This is a book about history with elements of family memoir. It offers a fresh and truly unique perspective for readers interested in World War II, Japan, or Judaica; readers seeking cross-cultural journeys; and readers intrigued by Japanese culture, particularly the kimono.