This book was written to help explain the awful impact of the Resistance War (1937–45) on Chinese society. It is written in the hope that readers will come to see this war as one of the pivotal events in modern Chinese history and not just a murky prelude to the communist advent to power in 1949.

I grew up in the shadow of the two world wars. World War I was the overwhelming event in the lives of my grandmothers. Mabel Symmes mourned all her long life for her husband, killed on Easter Sunday 1917, along with almost 4,000 Canadians. Margaret Lainson kept two scrapbooks filled with three-line death announcements from the Times of men from her small part of Suffolk who had been killed in the war. World War II was my parents' war. It was close to us as children. The adults in our world talked about the war constantly. We lived with post-war shortages, and we understood the losses war had brought to a ‘victorious’ country. My mother, M. M. E. Lainson, taught us how painful and wasteful war was. The human costs to the West can be magnified many times for China. I have wanted to bring some understanding of the trauma and also of the heroism of the Resistance War.