First in a trilogy of books comprising a general history of war in the Asia Pacific. Unlike other histories, this book 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. Storm Clouds over the Pacific shows how the war can only be understood if ancient hatreds and longstanding 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. A war of attrition continued up to 1941, the year when Japan made the momentous decision for all-out war. AUTHOR: Peter Harmsen, a foreign correspondent in East Asia for two decades, is former bureau chief in Taiwan for the French news agency AFP. 32 pages of b/w photographs