The Japanese Invasion of Manchuria
The History of the Occupation of Northeastern China That Presaged World War II
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Narrated by:
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Colin Fluxman
About this listen
Though scarcely mentioned in the world of early 21st century politics, Manchuria represented a key region of Asia during the first half of the 20th century. Once the heartland of the fierce Manchu empire, this northeastern Chinese region's rich natural resources made it a prize for nations in the process of entering the modern age, and three ambitious nations in the midst of such a transformation lay close enough to Manchuria to attempt to claim it: Japan, Russia, and China.
For countries attempting to shake off their feudal past and enter a dynamic era of industrialization, Manchuria's resources presented an irresistible lure. With immense natural resources coupled to economic activity more concentrated than elsewhere in China, this region, abutting Mongolia, Korea, the Yellow Sea, and the Great Wall "accounted for 90 percent of China's oil, 70 percent of its iron, 55 percent of its gold, and 33 percent of its trade. If Shanghai remained China's commercial center, by 1931 Manchuria had become its industrial center." (Paine, 2012, 15).
Thus, it's not altogether surprising that Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 resulted from a long, complex chain of historical events stretching back to the late 19th century. Approximately 380,000 square miles in extent, Manchuria came into Imperial Russia's possession in 1900 due to the Boxer Rebellion in China, but the Russians held it only briefly; their defeat in the Russo-Japanese War shook loose their control from important parts of Manchuria by the end of 1905.
The Japanese gained two important footholds in Manchuria thanks to their victory. One consisted of Port Arthur (renamed Ryojun by the Japanese), an economically and strategically vital harbor city on the Liaodung Peninsula, plus the peninsula itself. The other comprised the South Manchurian Railway, which the Russians gave to the Japanese as a prize of war, in lieu of a cash indemnity. The Japanese subsequently formed the South Manchurian Railway Company, mostly owned by the Japanese Army, and Japanese civilians began investing heavily in Manchuria's lucrative industries. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurs flooded into Manchuria, greatly strengthening Japan's interests in the area. The Japanese Army stepped up their presence in this economically vital region, creating a quasi-independent military force and government known as the Kwantung Army.
Naturally, the Chinese also wanted their portion of the tempting Manchurian feast. Unable to go head to head with the organized, thoroughly militaristic Japanese, they sent some six million emigrant laborers and settlers into the area as a sort of demographic occupation. Nominally Chinese but subject to massive Japanese investment and military infiltration, filled with bandits and rival chieftains, Manchuria hovered on the brink of another conflict in the 1920s.
The Kwantung Army deliberately shoved it over that brink in 1931, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria is sometimes described as the true beginning of World War II. At the very least, it marked the expansion of Japan's imperial empire, its ongoing friction with China, and what would turn into a Chinese resistance campaign that would last nearly 15 years until the end of World War II. Given its importance, the invasion of Manchuria continues to be remembered as one of the seminal events of the 20th century.
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- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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John Mosier presents a revisionist retelling of the war on the Eastern Front. The conventional wisdom is that Hitler was mad to think he could defeat the USSR, because of its vast size and population, and that the Battle of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war. Neither statement is accurate, says Mosier; Hitler came very close to winning outright.
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Speaking the un-speakable
- By Jonathan Gardner on 09-27-10
By: John Mosier
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The Fall of the Ottomans
- The Great War in the Middle East
- By: Eugene Rogan
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict.
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Great Book About A Little Known Part of WWI
- By Nostromo on 06-08-15
By: Eugene Rogan
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The Battle for Spain
- The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
- By: Antony Beevor
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Antony Beevor has written a completely updated and revised account of one of the most bitter and hard-fought wars of the 20th century. With new material gleaned from Russian archives and numerous other sources, this brisk and accessible audiobook (Spain's number-one best seller for 12 weeks) provides a balanced and penetrating perspective, explaining the tensions that led to this terrible overture to World War II and affording new insights into the war - its causes, course, and consequences.
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Not an Accurate History Book
- By Jose on 10-16-19
By: Antony Beevor
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No Simple Victory
- World War II in Europe, 1939-1945
- By: Norman Davies
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 20 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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If history really belongs to the victor, what happens when there's more than one side declaring victory? That's the conundrum Norman Davies unravels in his groundbreaking book No Simple Victory. Far from being a revisionist history, No Simple Victory instead offers a clear-eyed reappraisal, untangling and setting right the disparate claims made by America, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union in order to get at the startling truth.
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The Best Account of WWII in Europe
- By Nikoli Gogol on 12-27-07
By: Norman Davies
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The End
- The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945
- By: Ian Kershaw
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 18 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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From the preeminent Hitler biographer, a fascinating and original exploration of how the Third Reich was willing and able to fight to the bitter end of World War II. Countless books have been written about why Nazi Germany lost World War II, yet remarkably little attention has been paid to the equally vital question of how and why it was able to hold out as long as it did.
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Engrossing yet horrifying
- By Liz on 10-14-11
By: Ian Kershaw
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The Allure of Battle
- A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost
- By: Cathal J. Nolan
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 25 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive". Cannae, Konigsberg, Austerlitz, Midway, Agincourt - all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But these legendary battles may or may not have determined the final outcome of the wars in which they were fought. Cathal J. Nolan's The Allure of Battle systematically and engrossingly examines the great battles, tracing what he calls "short-war thinking".
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Missing important facts and not well researched
- By Andrew on 02-24-18
By: Cathal J. Nolan
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Jungle of Snakes
- A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq
- By: James R. Arnold
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The end of the Cold War promised a new era of international peace. But instead, violence has proliferated across the globe, not in the form of a superpower arms race or a clash of armies, but in bitter local conflicts marked by terrorism, insurgency, and guerrilla warfare. Former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey likened the post-Cold-War world to "a jungle full of snakes". The emergence of this new, potentially never-ending struggle has forced our military to reevaluate strategies or risk losing hearts, minds, and soldiers the world over.
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Some Lessons
- By Amazon Customer on 10-02-16
By: James R. Arnold
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A Warrior Dynasty
- The Rise and Fall of Sweden as a Military Superpower 1611-1721
- By: Henrik O. Lunde
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook examines the meteoric rise of Sweden as the pre-eminent military power in Europe during the Thirty Years War during the 1600s, and then follows its line of warrior kings into the next century until the Swedes finally meet their demise, in an overreach into the vastness of Russia. A small Scandinavian nation, with at most one and a half million people and scant internal resources of its own, there was small logic to how Sweden could become the dominant power on the Continent.
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An author with an idea but not the skills
- By chris loomis on 08-07-15
By: Henrik O. Lunde
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American Heritage History of World War II
- By: Stephen E. Ambrose, C. L. Sulzberger
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In planes and foxholes, in deserts and jungles, on ships and beaches, Ambrose shines a light on the people involved - the leaders, the fighters, the victims. With chapters on the atrocities of the Holocaust and revelations about the secret war of espionage, Ambrose's analysis also offers insight into the events that precipitated the Cold War.
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Excellent overview of WWII
- By Laura Kernen on 11-15-18
By: Stephen E. Ambrose, and others
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The Cold War's Killing Fields
- Rethinking the Long Peace
- By: Paul Thomas Chamberlin
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 22 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweeping, deeply researched book, Paul Thomas Chamberlin boldly argues that the Cold War, long viewed as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between democracy and communism, was actually a part of a vast, deadly conflict that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy peace hung over Europe, ferocious proxy wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than 14 million dead - victims who remain largely forgotten and all but lost to history.
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Interesting but Biased
- By Jonathan W Schneider on 08-13-18
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The Iraq War
- By: John Keegan
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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John Keegan, whom the New York Review of Books calls "the best historian of our day", now brings his extraordinary expertise to bear on perhaps the most controversial war of our time. In exclusive interviews with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, John Keegan has gathered information about the war that adds immeasurably to our grasp of its causes, complications, costs, and consequences.
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A Solid, Quick Overview
- By Charles on 12-08-04
By: John Keegan
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Spanish Civil War
- A History from Beginning to End
- By: Hourly History
- Narrated by: Stephen Paul Aulridge Jr
- Length: 1 hr and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The Spanish Civil War was much more than just an overture to World War II. It was a war born out of schisms in Spanish society between rich and poor, monarchists and Republicans, the right and the left, and between those who supported the church and those who saw it as an instrument of oppression. For all its brutality and horror, the Spanish Civil War was a conflict between ideals often fought by volunteers on each side who truly believed that they were helping to build a better world.
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Only honest book I have found on the subject.
- By brendan f kelly on 05-18-21
By: Hourly History
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The Third Reich at War
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 35 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Evans interweaves a broad narrative of the war’s progress with viscerally affecting personal testimony from a wide range of people - from generals to front-line soldiers, from Hitler Youth activists to middle-class housewives. The Third Reich at War lays bare the dynamics of a nation more deeply immersed in war than any society before or since. Fresh insights into the conflict’s great events are here, from the invasion of Poland to the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler’s suicide in the bunker.
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Masterful
- By Karen on 09-03-10
By: Richard J. Evans
What listeners say about The Japanese Invasion of Manchuria
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- AJC
- 06-21-19
Concise History of a Pre World War II Sideshow
The Japanese decision to invade Manchuria and that nation's subsequent decisions on how to expand the Japanese Empire is covered quite well in this presentation. In a sense, Japan looking to the most northern part of China to expand its military empire and create an economic powerhouse of a colony led to Japan's crushing defeat by the Allies in World War II. In Manchuria, Japan's biggest colony they were cruel overlords and taskmasters, and in the end even to the Japanese population that had immigrated to Manchuria. This presentation will give everyone the background they need to understand how Japan's Manchurian invasion played a big part in World War II. Not too long of a presentation, but it covers all the bases. The narration by Colin Fluxman, at times too fast, is good.
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- Nadeeka De Saram
- 05-04-20
Bad performance of an outline more than a book
The Japanese Invasion of Manchuria somehow manages be both too detached -- not giving us a feel for the people on the ground -- and too lost in minutias -- not formulating any framework for the broader trends of the subject. It's a basic survey of the subject that you would find in undergraduate student essay.
You would be better served scanning Wikipedia for the information found here, and then read a better book to dig deeper.
Although the narrator is listenable, the fact that they are not Chinese nor Japanese speakers is apparent. And you don't need to be a Chinese speaker to know that "Mao" is not pronounced "mayo." He was a communist not a condiment. The pronunciation of Chinese is also inconsistent. "Pu Yi" is sometimes pronounced correctly, and other times merged together to sound like "pui." There are many such inconsistencies like that, including with "Mao."
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