Ten Thousand Day War

The Japanese army's brutal occupation of the city of Nanking during the 1937 Sino-Japanese War is known, for good reason, as "the rape of Nanking". As they slaughtered an estimated three hundred thousand people, the invading soldiers raped more than twenty thousand women -- some estimates run as high as eighty thousand. Hua-ling Hu presents here the amazing untold story of the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, whose unswerving defiance of the Japanese protected ten thousand Chinese women and children and made her a legend among the Chinese people she served. Vautrin, who came to be known in China as the "Living Goddess" or the "Goddess of Mercy", joined the Foreign Christian Missionary Society and went to China during the Chinese Nationalist Revolution in 1912. As dean of studies at Ginling College in Nanking, she devoted her life to promoting Chinese women's education and to helping the poor. At the outbreak of the war in July 1937, Vautrin defied the American embassy's order to evacuate the city. After the fall of Nanking in December, Japanese soldiers went on a rampage of killing, burning, looting, rape, and torture, rapidly reducing the city to a hell on earth. On the fourth day of the occupation, Minnie Vautrin wrote in her diary: "There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today.... Oh, God, control the cruel beastliness of the soldiers in Nanking". When the Japanese soldiers ordered Vautrin to leave the campus, she replied: "This is my home. I cannot leave". Facing down the blood-stained bayonets constantly waved in her face, Vautrin shielded the desperate Chinese who sought asylum behind the gates of the college. Vautrin exhausted herself defyingthe Japanese army and caring for the refugees after the siege ended in March 1938. She even helped the women locate husbands and sons who had been taken away by the Japanese soldiers.

-- Relive history on an 8,000-mile journey to historic airfields in a classic aircraft -- Meet the men who fought World War II above the clouds -- An aviation travel book similar to best-sellers Biplane (Bach) and The Cannibal Queen (Coonts) but the first to weave in the stories of the pilots who flew these planes decades ago Imagine what it would be like to talk and fly with the men who flew the airplanes of World War II. What was in their minds as they made their first solos? And what was air combat like? Flying through Time is the closest many of us will come to understanding what it was like to be a WWII aviator. Tens of thousands of America's pilots during World War II trained in the Boeing Stearman biplane. For most, it was their first airplane in a series of larger, faster, and more dangerous aircraft that they used to fight the war. The pilots would never forget their first flights in a Stearman and the adventures that followed. Jim Doyle, owner of a restored 1941 Stearman, retraced the wartime journeys of his plane, crossing the country twice, flying over California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and touching down at each of the eight bases at which it served. Flying through Time is the story of Doyle's challenging flight, of the uncertainties of piloting a sixty-year-old biplane almost 8,000 miles. His experiences meeting, talking, and flying with the men who flew the legendary Stearman paint a vivid picture of the intense, emotion-filled days of World War II. The pilots' recollections, refreshed for many when they took the controls of Doyle's plane, are woven throughout thenarrative of his trip. These anecdotes, and new information from an archive discovered during the flight, tell of fears, courage, humor, and the sheer adventure of the events that owned the veterans' youth.