The Chinese civil war of 1946–1950 has attracted the attention of only a relatively small number of Western historians despite the fact that it was through this war that the Chinese Communist Party came to power. Military history is still not accorded the respect it deserves among China scholars despite their familiarity with Mao Zedong's maxim about gun barrels being the source of power, a maxim amply confirmed by China's bloody modern history. O. Arne Westad's superb and indispensable Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford University Press, 2003) leaps to mind as the only recent comprehensive military history of the period. Harold Tanner's insightful and persuasive study of the conflict between the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists for control of Manchuria focuses on the first ten months of an epic struggle complicated by the presence between August 1945 and April 1946 of Soviet Red Army occupation forces and US General George C. Marshall's Sisyphean efforts to broker a peaceful settlement between irreconcilable Chinese antagonists. Steeping himself in the extensive Chinese-language literature on the battle for Manchuria that has become available over the past quarter century, Tanner makes a notable and accessible contribution to understanding of the struggle for control of what both sides correctly viewed as perhaps the key region in the complicated chessboard of conflict.

His point of departure is the oft-repeated assertion by political and academic partisans of the Chinese Nationalists, starting with Chiang Kai-shek himself in Chiang Chung-cheng Soviet Russia in China: A Summing up at Seventy (Farrar, Straus and Company, 1957), that Nationalist General Du Yuming's forces could have destroyed Lin Biao's Northeast Democratic United Army (NDUA) after the second battle of Siping in May 1946, had not General Marshall imposed a Manchurian ceasefire in June that saved the communists from annihilation. The corollary often deduced from this thesis is that the Nationalists would have won the civil war but for this tragic folly.

Tanner's critical examination of this proposition analyses the evolving strategic calculations of both Chinese antagonists from the Japanese surrender in August 1945 through the spring of 1946. He confirms what earlier writers have said, namely, that the manner of the withdrawal of Soviet occupation forces favoured “the Chinese Communists who benefited most from the Red Army's extended presence in the Northeast” (pp. 100–101), where prior to the Japanese surrender the CCP had failed to gain so much as a toehold. Tanner reviews the dispute over strategy within the CCP Northeast leadership that pitted Peng Zhen, head of the Northeast Bureau, who favoured a strategy of positional defence of large cities, against Lin Biao, who favoured rural-based guerrilla and mobile warfare. Mao Zedong tried to integrate battlefield strategy with the on-going CCP-GMD negotiations brokered by General Marshall. To bolster the CCP's position in the negotiations, Mao insisted on a vigorous defence of Siping, a strategic transport and communications hub south of Changchun that the communists had seized in mid-March 1946, against Du Yuming's vastly superior forces heading north along the rail line from southern Manchuria. The second battle of Siping itself lasted only five days, from 14 to 18 May 1946. Despite their best efforts Lin Biao's increasingly demoralized, inadequately equipped, and undermanned armies were forced to retreat. Du Yuming's troops soon occupied Changchun in defiance of Marshall's strictures and contrary to Chiang Kai-shek's false assurances that this would not happen.

In his masterful concluding chapter Tanner skilfully weaves together political and military analysis to refute the thesis that by halting the Nationalists' victorious military campaign, Marshall's June ceasefire in Manchuria robbed Chiang Kai-shek of almost certain victory in the key region and, by extension, prefigured the outcome of the civil war itself. Even within Manchuria communist forces still had plenty of fight left in them, and Nationalist forces were widely dispersed and far less capable than often supposed. The significant, and ultimately fatal, political and military weaknesses that the Nationalists displayed during the civil war – weaknesses that Chiang Kai-shek himself acknowledged – combined with the Communists' superior generalship, political mobilization, and many other factors, were responsible for the outcome of the civil war. Tanner concludes pungently with indisputable but oft-ignored advice, “if you want to draw a ‘lesson of history’ from some event that occurred in the past, the first step might be to understand what actually happened” (p. 221). He has certainly done this on our collective behalf and reminded us of the importance of well-crafted military history.

There are some minor errors. Neville Chamberlain is referred to as British foreign minister rather than prime minister at the time of Munich; Mao, not Peng Dehuai, circulated Peng's private letter to the Chairman at the 1959 Lushan Plenum. The military maps lack any indication of scale. But why quibble? This fine book belongs in both libraries and history classrooms.