Peter Harmsen's debut book opens with a murder mystery. Three corpses are found riddled with bullets at an aerodrome in the middle of the night. As international police screech to the scene, a bitter turf war erupts.
But this is no ordinary murder mystery. It is the opening to a serious historical work, “Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze,” and the turf war between Chinese and Japanese police over the victims from both countries is symbolic of a much larger conflict that is set to explode a few days later.
The 1937 Battle for Shanghai can be seen as many things: as when the Sino-Japanese War started in earnest, the beginning of World War II, a precursor to the Nanjing Massacre and even as the forerunner of Stalingrad.
For Harmsen, all these aspects are important, and not just to pique the interest of a Western audience largely unfamiliar with a war that claimed as many lives as Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.
“By saying that the war started in 1937, I hope to persuade readers to abandon some of the usual Eurocentric ways of looking at history,” Harmsen told Taiwan Today in a July 15 email. “What we have is a gradually escalating conflict between two rather fluid camps that began little by little in the late 1930s before gradually morphing into Armageddon in 1945, the worst slaughter in human history.”
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