Craig Watson
speaker
4,699 appearances
13 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 17 Aug
Craig Watson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
But the accusation carried a troubling degree of accuracy.
The Second Battle of Changsha had yielded no decisive strategic gain, and no substantial alteration in the military balance.
What it did generate, rather effectively, was a story, and by the autumn of nineteen forty one, stories were one of the few things China still had in putiful supply.
The most consequential struggles were taking place not along the Milo River, but in foreign ministries and embassies, in Washington and Moscow, and the messages passing between Chongqing and London.
And in the increasingly strained calculations of statesmen trying to determine, amid rapidly changing circumstances, whom to support and for how long.
For Chen Kai Shek, the challenge was never merely military, it was structural, and had been so from the outset.
He had always seen clearly, precisely because he understood China's weakness, that Japan could not be defeated by China alone.
The country lacked the industrial base, the logistical reach, and after four years of relentless attrition, more and more the manpower needed to force a decisive result on the battlefield.
China's survival depended on making its war inseparable from the wars of other powers.
Since nineteen thirty seven, Chang's diplomacy had pursued that single objective, convincing enough great powers that their interests were aligned with China's, and holding that coalition together long enough for Japan to be subdued.
That effort turned out to be vastly more difficult than it ought to have been.
The problem started with the international order in which the war emerged.
Chiang had hoped to assemble a concert of allies willing to help defend China against Japanese aggression.
He was blocked, not just by the reluctance of neutral states to aid China, but by the speed with which alliances shifted in the opening years of the Second World War.
He had never welcomed the prospect of a general European conflict, correctly fearing that it would push China even further to the margins of world attention.
Even so, he recognized that once the lines had hardened between the imperial democracies and fascism, new alignments might become possible.
From his perspective, the growing amity between Berlin and Moscow was therefore disastrous.
He had been eager to draw the USSR into a war against Japan.
Instead, the Soviets were now effectively aligned with the Nazis, who were themselves allied with Tokyo.
The world created after Versailles had already enraged many Chinese.
Showing 421–440 of 4,699 · page 22 of 235
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