War in the Far East is a trilogy of books comprising a general history of the war against Japan; unlike other histories it expands the narrative beginning long before Pearl Harbor and encompasses a much wider group of actors to produce the most complete narrative yet written and the first truly international treatment of the epic conflict. Peter Harmsen uses his renowned ability to weave together complex events into an entertaining and revealing narrative, including facets of the war that may be unknown to many readers of WWII history, such as the war in Subarctic conditions on the Aleutians, or the mass starvations that cost the lives of millions in China, Indochina, and India, and offering a range of perspectives to reflect what war was like both at the top and at the bottom, from the Oval Office to the blistering sands of Peleliu. Storm Clouds Over the Pacific begins the story long before Pearl Harbor, showing how the war can only be understood if ancient hatreds and long-standing geopolitics are taken into account. Peter Harmsen demonstrates how Japan and China’s ancient enmity grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leading to increased tensions in the 1930s which exploded into conflict in 1937. The battles of Shanghai and Nanjing were followed by the battle of Taierzhuang in 1938, China’s only major victory. A war of attrition continued up to 1941, the year when Japan made the momentous decision for all-out war; the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the United States into the war, and the Japanese also overran British and Dutch territories throughout the western Pacific. "The Anglophone readership must not forget what Asia's peoples remember. Harmsen's highly compressed, readable narrative of the cascade to conflict is highly recommended reading for contemporary world citizens." (Robert A. Kapp, author and past president, The US-China Business Council) "Harmsen has managed to craft into a single accessible narrative the complex military history of the early years of the Chinese-Japanese conflict. The great strength of the book is the equal attention given to both Japanese and Chinese sides in terms of military strategies and outcomes on the battlefield." (Stephen R. MacKinnon, Emeritus Professor, Arizona State University) "Storm Clouds Over the Pacific is an excellent primer about World War II in Asia prior to the involvement of the United States . . . an excellent resource for understanding the relationship between China and Japan, past and present." (Benjamin Welton New York Journal of Books) "The Pacific part of World War II is generally perceived as a four year conflict. As this first-rate book clearly demonstrates, it was much more than that." (Baird Maritime) "A model of compression that pays attention to all the decision makers -- Japanese, Chinese, Russian, British, French, and American and shifts its narrative focus from government deliberations to the experiences of ordinary people." (Air Force Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs) "Harmsen shifts easily from cabinet rooms to battlefields, and gives us profiles of many persons, high and low, who played interesting roles in these events... Very good work about a very neglected subject in the literature about the Pacific War." (StrategyPage) "Presents the subject in an unprecedentedly broad perspective and in a lively style... Revealing the complexity of history for non-specialists through vivid storytelling." (Journal of Chinese Miitary History) "Author Peter Harmsen, a highly regarded "new breed" World War II historian who is willing to focus years of research attention on highly complex, rarely scrutinized themes and theses, presents us with hitherto ignored pre-Pearl Harbor causes." (Leatherneck) Peter Harmsen, a foreign correspondent in East Asia for two decades, has worked for Bloomberg, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Financial Times. A fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese, Harmsen is also the former bureau chief in Taiwan for French news agency AFP. His book Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze inspired a US Public Television documentary by three-time Emmy Award winner Bill Einreinhofer, which started airing in the fall of 2018, reaching 80 percent of the American television audience. Harmsen’s work has been translated into Chinese, Danish, and Romanian.