Rising Sun: From China to Pearl Harbor

CHAPTER 7 · 1937–MAY 1942 · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

Switch theaters — the Pacific war is older than the European one. Japan, an industrial empire with almost no raw materials, has been carving up China since 1931 (Manchuria) and fully since 1937; the sack of Nanjing that December is among the war’s worst atrocities. But China, retreating up the Yangtze to Chongqing, refuses to surrender — and the war bogs down, consuming a million Japanese troops.

The turn: Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.