Diaries

Very few diaries of directors and senior managers of the Big Four railways have survived to enter the public domain. There are, however, two notable Southern Railway diarists whose records have been available in archives for some years, but have been largely ignored by historians; Southern Railway General Manager Gilbert Szlumper and Director Leopold Amery. Their remarkable diaries are addressed in this insightful book, which gives a slightly different view of the company in contrast to the almost sanitized histories by some writers.

During the infamous “Rape of Nanking,” a brutal military occupation of Nanking, China, that began in December 1937, it is estimated that Japanese soldiers killed between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women.