The China theatre of the Second World War remains one of the most shadowy aspects of that global conflict, both in popular memory and in academic historiography. Although much excellent work on the war has been produced by scholars in Japanese, Chinese and English in the last two decades, the bigger story is still being pieced together. Therefore, the appearance of this excellent volume of essays bringing together a comprehensive picture of the military history of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 is to be greatly welcomed.

Much earlier work on the this conflict was shaped by longstanding conventional wisdom that the struggles of the Communists against the Japanese in north China were the truly important elements of the war, and that the Chinese Nationalists (under Chiang Kai-shek) did little fighting. This view is significantly challenged by the essays here, which do not underplay Nationalist failings, but show a more considered and active strategy against the Japanese than is often realized.

Two particularly useful essays contrast the state of the Chinese and Japanese military at the outbreak of the war itself. Chang Jui-te analyses the combat readiness of the Nationalist forces on the eve of the war, and paints a dire picture of troops with little training, and whose officers were often trained in anachronistic ways that did not suit the needs of modern warfare. On the other hand, there was also a concerted effort to use German advisers to train selected officers and their troops, and given time, the Nationalist forces as a whole might have improved. Time, of course, was what the Nationalists lacked. The Japanese, as Edward Drea's essay shows, had incomparably better military training and technological superiority. Yet these strengths concealed weaknesses: Japan was in the middle of major reconstruction of its armed forces, and there was no plan for an extended conflict in China. While the initial clash of forces saw a series of Japanese victories, there was little sense of how the occupation of China could be maintained.

The core of the book is a set of very detailed and rigorous essays giving details of the various campaigns that made up the war. All the major battles are covered, including the desperate (and failed) Chinese defence of Shanghai and the Yangtze delta, and the subsequent attempt to hold central China, as well as the campaigns in Burma (1942) and the last attempt by the Japanese to thrust into central China (Ichigo, 1944). The details serve to make the wider point, that both sides were caught in a deadly balance. The Japanese poured men into China, but never had sufficient resources or political traction to complete a full occupation successfully. The Nationalists had enough strength to maintain an ever-shrinking area of control but at a huge price to the society that they ruled (with everything from conscription to corruption eating away at their power). And the Communists stuck largely to their much-vaunted techniques of guerrilla warfare, which harassed the enemy but could not defeat them. In the end, only international, mainly American, intervention was decisive.

The account of the campaigns (along with innovative pieces such as Edna Tow's essay on air-raid defences in the temporary Chinese capital at Chongqing) paves the way for major concluding essays on the state of the field with regard to the military significance of the war. The editors are careful not to claim too much. In China in particular there has been a new enthusiasm to claim that the Sino-Japanese War was the decisive theatre for the Second World War in Asia; yet this is a hard position to sustain. It is evident, nonetheless, that the events in the China theatre have achieved nothing like the prominence that they deserve, and that when they have been considered, it is usually in highly dismissive terms. Haruo Tohmatsu points out that the Japanese army was crippled by its own deficiencies by the last years of the war, and that Japanese incapacity rather than specific Chinese campaigns were at the heart of the collapse of their China campaign. In response, Hans van de Ven argues that the importance of the China war lay not in its centrality to the global war, but rather as an important rupture in the path to Chinese modernization, and one which paved the way for the Chinese Communist Party's victory, not because of the inherent incompetence of the Nationalists, but rather because of the hollowing-out of their capacity that followed their war with Japan.

This beautifully produced volume also has very useful bibliographies of relevant scholarship in English, Chinese and Japanese, a detailed chronology of the major events during the war, and detailed maps (although it would have been helpful if they could have been embedded in the chapters rather than presented as a block at the front of the book). It is a milestone in scholarship that is sure to be the standard volume for decades to come.