Dong, John Sunstruck Giant. Band 2: The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. Teil 2

Volume 60 of the series From Musket to Maxim 1815-1914. Using previously untranslated sources, the second volume of Sunstruck Giant provides a complete campaign history of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, detailing not only the battles themselves but also the strategic motives that shaped them. Six color plates bring the most important battles of the war back to life with vivid authenticity. The First Sino-Japanese War is often portrayed as the death throes of one empire and the rise of another, and is commonly understood as a stark contrast between a backward China and a fully modernized Japan. This nationalistic view has led many accounts to gloss over the positive qualities of the Chinese military while downplaying the serious shortcomings of the Japanese military. Based on previously untranslated sources, Sunstruck Giant is the first English-language work to take a truly comprehensive and balanced look at both sides of this neglected conflict. Existing English-language historical works rely almost exclusively on Japanese sources, ignoring the invaluable Chinese perspective and often concealing facts that are less flattering to the Japanese side. Sunstruck Giant therefore examines the other side of the mountain and analyzes the successes, failures, mistakes, and misfortunes of both sides of the war. The Chinese forces were by no means uniformly backward, but showed moments of genuine heroism, while the supposedly modernized Japanese were by no means immune to serious and costly mistakes.