They Did Everything But Learn from It: The Battle of An Bac, 1963

摘要

By the spring of 1942, the United States' war against Imperial Japan was off toan inauspicious start. America had lost a large part of its surface fleet at Pearl Harbor the previous December and lost the Philippines to the Japanese in early May. At the same time, Allied forces fighting in Burma suffered a series of defeats at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army, ultimately resulting in the loss of Burma and the isolation of China. Although the situation in Burma looked bleak to the Allies by early May, the Roosevelt administration's press releases promised that the Allies would defeat the Japanese and maintain an overland route into China. This policy of optimism even appeared in directives to the headquarters of Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, commander of American forces