Forgotten Ally is a serious scholarly contribution to a major theater of World War 2 which has been understudied in the literature. China fought one of the longest versions of World War 2, with major combat operations from the 1937 invasion by Japan right up to V-J Day. This international war was book-ended by the regional conflicts of the Warlord Period and the Communist victory of the Chinese Civil War, making up long decades of conflict which killed millions of people and wrecked Chinese infrastructure, but also laid the groundwork for the modern Chinese state. Mitter's analysis is focused on Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and the state-making trauma of the war, with a secondary look at Mao, and the almost forgotten collaborationist Nationalist Wang Jingwei.

China had a profoundly awful 19th century. Starting the century as a great imperial power, a sequence of colonial skirmishes with European powers saw the credibility of the Qing dynasty wrecked with unequal treaties that granted Europeans substantial commercial concessions and legal immunities. The Taiping Rebellion burned across China's agricultural heartland, killing millions and leading to a major devolution of central power down to regional military-political governors. And while the entire world had to come to grips with the new industrial modernity of the period, China had particular cultural troubles adapting.

The 20th century was little better, as Sun Yat-sen's dream of a modern Chinese Republic fell apart into factional warlordism, and while China got Germany and Austria's concessions, other foreign powers remained. Rising Japanese militarism saw China as subordinate to Japanese pan-Asianism, another form of imperial domination. Manchuria fell under Japanese control in 1931, and then the hammer fell properly in 1937 with a massive invasion.

The Nationalist defense was spirited, but serious deficiencies in material, airpower, morale, and command meant that Chinese forces suffered a series of defeats in the north, at Shanghai, Nanking, and Wuhan forced Nationalist retreats from the richest and most productive provinces. Nanking was comprehensively destroyed, the infamous Rape of Nanking, while Nationalist forces destroyed dikes on the Yellow River, creating flooding that gave a few months of tactical breathing space, but also consigned millions to a horrific famine. Japanese forces reached their military limits in the Chinese interior, controlling railroads and major cities, and able to strike more or less at will, as they would repeatedly through the war, but unable to deliver a decisive blow.

Chiang Kai-shek endured the grinding defeats and dislocations with almost no support from Western democracies prior to Pearl Harbor, and then only minor support thereafter. British envoys continued to treat the Chinese as colonial subjects, while American aid was fraught with inter-service rivalries and personal conflicts around General "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell. The Nationalist government was infamously brutal and corrupt, ruling via arbitrary terror and enriching a small clique around Chiang Kai-shek while millions of Chinese starved. Not that anyone else could have likely done better, insurmountable military and political problems greatly hampered Chiang's war effort, while treating the Chinese theater as a tertiary concern was endemic for all the Allies. Ddespite the devastation of war, resistance created a modern national mythology for China, efforts to care for refugees (however insufficient) provided a basis for modern welfare state practices, and Mao's experiments in the base area of Yan'an acted a model for the future red terrors of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

This book is a serious academic contribution to the literature, and a valuable reassessment of the Nationalist war effort without either Chinese Communist Party propaganda lines, or the American Cold War debates about "who lost China". Yet a couple of gaps prevent it from reaching five stars. First, I'd describe the writing as competent. Mitter is a good historian, but sometimes a reader appreciate a little more flash. Second, the Japanese were the actual protagonists of the war: their strategic vision drove the conflict, and full account of the war would include why and how Japan fought as it did, not just the Chinese resistance.