For two and a half years (1937-1939), Captain John Seymour Letcher commanded a company of the U.S. Embassy Marine Guard in Peking. During that time, he wrote a series of letters to his parents in Virginia describing the life of a Westerner in the former imperial city. During that same time, China was invaded by Japan.

Captain Letcher describes the flavor of life in pre-Communist China -- the food, servants, cold Peking winters and torrid summers, hunting, and excursions to the major tourist sites.

But his letters also tell of the Japanese slaughter of Chinese troops in the opening...

Gwen Terasaki's Bridge to the Sun, an idealized memoir of her marriage in the 1930s and 1940s to a Japanese diplomat, Terasaki Hidenari, is still widely read as an inspiring tale of a "bridge" between two cultures that waged savage war against each other from 1941 to 1945. However, neither this memoir nor charges that Terasaki was a master spy and a double agent are the whole historical truth. In Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan, Roger B. Jeans reassesses Terasaki Hidenari's story, using the FBI's voluminous dossier on Terasaki, decoded Japanese Foreign Ministry cables...

This study examines the CIA's "third force" strategy-providing support for a third-party alternative over two primary on-the-ground options-in East Asia during the first decade of the Cold War. The author argues that the strategy failed due to a lack of understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of the region.

This collection includes the letters and diaries of US Army colonel John Hart Caughey, who served in the China theater in the final years of World War II. Caughey describes the role of the US military in China during this period and chronicles the power struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists.