Peter Harmsen, PhD, a foreign correspondent in East Asia for two decades, has worked for Bloomberg, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Financial Times. He is also the former bureau chief in Taiwan for French news agency AFP. His books have been translated into Chinese, Danish, and Romanian. Harmsen's latest book is Asian Armageddon, 1944-1945.
This WWII battle has been called one of the worst naval defeats in U.S. history.
Much of mainland Asia in the 1930s faced an unappealing choice: Western imperialism or Japanese imperialism.
A seminal cartoon presaged the American entrance into the Pacific Theater.