Most of the scholarly works on British policy in the years preceding World War II have neglected events in the Far East in favor of those in Europe. Any study of recent British diplomacy is, of course, seriously hampered by the lack of Foreign Office documents and by the generally uninformative nature of British memoirs. Nevertheless, the sources which do exist give a picture which, while still incomplete, is interesting for its own sake in showing how the Chamberlain Government met the problems of the Pacific, and also for the light which it sheds on Anglo-American relations in this period. Perhaps nowhere else was there as much consistent misunderstanding and disappointment between London and Washington as over the questions raised by the Sino-Japanese War. The Manchurian episode had left a legacy of distrust between the two countries; just enough was known about the approaches made by the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, to the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, so that many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that Britain had rejected American offers for joint action against Japan in 1932, and that as a result nothing had prevented the Japanese advance. When Stimson's The Far Eastern Crisis appeared in 1936, it was read by many with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and seemed to confirm these views. In Britain it provided ammunition for the critics of the Government, while in the United States it increased the suspicions of those unwilling to trust Britain, and strengthened the trend to isolation.
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