Twilight Dogs

On July 7, 1937, the sun started to dip towards the political horizon for the two most powerful strata in the Netherlands Indies-the Dutch and the "Chinese," both foreign-bom totok and locally bom peranakan.On that day, Japanese generals launched a full-scale invasion of China, and within a year established control over half the country's people and almost all its richest provinces.President Chiang Kai-shek was forced to flee to the remote interior town of Chungking, with no obvious prospects of expelling the invaders.The sky began visibly to darken two short years later.On September 1, 1939, Hitler's armies entered Poland, and France and Britain declared war two days later.On April 9, 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway.On May 10, The Netherlands was assaulted, and its military surrendered four days later, while Queen Wilhelmina and the cabinet fled to London.By the end of the month British armed forces had been withdrawn from continental Europe after crushing defeats, and on June 14 German troops marched into Paris.In April 1941, Hitler's armies invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, and on June 22 the Fuehrer launched a vast operation against the Soviet Union.By December 5, two days before Pearl Harbor, the Wehrmacht was within twenty-five miles of Moscow.Full twilight fell with the astonishingly successful Japanese attack on the American fleet in Hawaii, which opened the Pacific War.The US, Britain, and The Netherlands declared war on Japan, allying themselves with the beleaguered China of the bravissimo generalissimo.Nine days later, Japanese forces were in British Borneo, and beginning an attack on British Burma from bases in "friendly" Thailand.On Christmas Day, Hong Kong surrendered, and the following day the Americans were forced to declare Manila an open city, while beating a rapid retreat to the Bataan peninsula in the face of the lightning destruction of their local air force and a large-scale Japanese 1 This Finneganish te x t ow es its inspiration to Rudolf M razek's brilliant, u nsettling new book, Engineers of Happy Land

Astronomy · Physics · Twilight · Anatomy · Hereditary Neurological Disorders · Medicine

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