Building on what I said yesterday about how Barbara Tuchman’s book Practicing History helped me organize my research, through the years, I’ve read most of the major works in Barbara Tuchman’s canon: The Guns of August, The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror (in a Patagonian basecamp), and, of course, Stilwell and the American Experience in China. If my count is accurate, I’ve read Stilwell 4 times, once for a military history course on the China-Burma-India theater while I was a cadet at West Point, once before I wrote the China’s Wings book proposal, a third time while I was writing it, and a fourth (and probably final time) after I finished my first complete draft. There are a few places where I find I don’t agree with her analysis, most notably around the massive Battle of Shanghai fought in the last half of 1937, but in the main, I think she’s spot on.
For the record, Tuchman’s Stilwell isn’t the only book that received such massive attention during my writing. I cover-to-covered Charles F. Romanus’s and Riley Sunderland’s magisterial three-volume history of the CBI at least a half a dozen times. It was on my desk constantly through the writing of China’s Wings Part IV. For the first sections of the book I was constantly checking facts and events in letters against Robert Dalleck’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945, Jonathan Spence’s Search for Modern China, and David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.) All three of which are superb books.
I’m excited, humbled, and more than a little trepidacious as I attempt to stand alongside such great books.
Love this post Greg. It is interesting, thoughtful and such lovely Gregory speak. Thanks.
Thanks for the kind words, Dina! And thanks for checking in. Have you read any of her books?