Inside Fighting China (1942)

The enemy of my enemy is my friend also. That’s the gist of this newsreel feature that depicts the sterling efforts of the largely agrarian Chinese population to defeat the aggression of the well prepared and highly industrialised Japanese Imperial forces who landed in Manchuria in the early 1930s. Then they promptly set about ensuring that nation’s vast mineral wealth could be used to further enhance a military machine that clearly had expansionist tendencies. There are some fairly graphic images contained here that illustrate well the brutality of the invaders before the Chinese manage to galvanise their own resistance under Chiang Kai-shek and fight back. Indeed, the narration suggests their tactics so effective that Uncle Sam took the advice of this “military democracy” following the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. It’s a pretty comprehensive attack on the imperialist aspirations of Japan that uses quite vivid language and photography to ensure that those in North America who were watching were left in no doubt that the war was one against evil. The extent to which the archive has been sourced and incorporated is impressive with some powerful imagery from the interior of the decimated China to ram home the hopeless imbalance between defender and invader. It’s also quite interesting that now, eighty-odd years later, people are still threatening and making war over what lies in the ground.