The dream of a glorious new Empire ended in two blinding nuclear flashes

WHAT began with blood and pride ended in ashes and bone.

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The dream of a glorious new empire run from Tokyo, in which the peoples of Asia would gratefully accept the protection of Japan's unstoppable young warriors, culminated in August 1945 amid a storm of fire and then two blinding nuclear flashes.

Nobody knows the true casualty count of the Second World War in the East. But if we include the 15-year campaign in China - as we should it's likely to eclipse even Hitler's Eastern Front. An estimated 20 million Chinese died, to which we should add at least three million Japanese, hundreds of thousands of British, American and Indian troops, plus millions more who died because of famine generated by war, and the civilians of the numerous towns and cities that were fought over, from Jakarta to Hanoi.

No war is ever civilised but the campaigns in this region were distinguished by a level of irrational cruelty that almost defies description. And they started long before Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had been fighting China in Manchuria since 1931 but when the Second Sino-Japanese War erupted in 1937 it took the conflict to a horrific new level.

Caught up in a civil war between communists and nationalists, China faced a confident and technologically superior enemy. And as city after city fell, the Japanese revealed what lay behind all its propaganda about "Pan-Asian co-prosperity and brotherhood" - namely a vicious and explicitly racist bloodlust.

During a six-week rampage in 1938 that went down in infamy as the "Rape of Nanking", soldiers of Emperor Hirohito indulged in crimes that even now are too upsetting to recount in detail. Coming from a society renowned then as now for its discipline and decorum, something truly bestial took hold as Japanese soldiers targeted young and old, especially women and children, and inflicted upon them acts of sexual violence on a scale as spectacular as it was stomach-turning.