A Long Journey Home: A Memoir of Life and War in Our Times

After returning from China at the end of World War II in 1945, the author, a Flying Tigers tail gunner, wondered what this war with Japan was all about. He learned that all of the Far Eastern wars had a common beginning: the Opium Wars with China. They began in the 1830s with the British shipping large quantities of opium into that decadent country for the purpose of opening up China to foreign trade. The Opium Wars were followed by the Chinese-Japanese War of 1894-95, the Russian-Japanese ...