Scan barcode
jason_pym's review against another edition
4.0
Most critical view of Chiang Kai-shek I've read, and Claire Chennault (Flying Tigers) doesn't come out of it much better.
anti_formalist12's review against another edition
4.0
This is an excellent book, although it does have that somewhat blinkered view of a foreign country that western writers tend to have. Tuchman is far more fair than most writers would have been in 1971, but this is very much a book about the United States in China as opposed to the United States and China. Also Chennault comes off like an incredibly pompous idiot. He actually said that Japan could be defeated if he had 140 planes to fight with. Man.
mcguffin's review against another edition
3.0
Detailed and thorough, the book bogs down sometimes, but it's worth a read through for anyone who wants to know more about the US in China during WW2. It is one of the most critical takes on Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalist I've ever read, and it spends quite some time on difficulties with corruption, apathy, and ignorance that Stilwell had to face in China. I am not sure how much of this is a historical view of the times the book was written in and how much of it is certain. The books narrative of these faults nicely lines up with the eventual collapse of the KMT, however that may be just as much by design/accident as historical fact. The book makes Stilwell out to be a prickly man with little personal tact put in a place where he could not succeed no matter his personality and where he was as much a politician as a military commander. Despite this, he also comes off as a smart commander and someone who knew more about the region and its people as anyone who could have been sent.
bobbo49's review against another edition
4.0
David Halberstam mentions this book in The Best and The Brightest as a detailed study of the background in China that drove American decision-making in the 1950s and 1960s. Tuchman is an excellent writer (won the Pulitzer for this one), and the story follows the career of General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell in China from 1911-1945. Much of Tuchman's focus is on the flaws in American foreign and military policy in China during this period; despite the continual warnings from Stilwell and others on the ground in China, the tag of "Communism" attached to Mao and his armies caused the US to throw support entirely to Chiang and the Nationalists (much as with Diem, and against Ho, in Vietnam later), despite Chiang's self-aggrandizing (and anti-Stilwell) focus. Whether the ensuing forty years of America's China (and Asia) policy might have been different - and significantly more constructive - had Roosevelt listened to George Marshall and his protege Stilwell is unknowable, but the repeating patterns of history are troubling, to say the least.
More...