China-Burma-India WWII

 Poorly-equipped Chinese Soldiers

Most Americans don't think of the war in China as part of the Pacific war. In fact, the fighting in China was much more intense and bloody than what Americans faced in the Pacific. Casualties in China were in the millions, both before and after Pearl Harbor. It was Japan's invasion of China (which began in 1931 or 1935 or 1937, depending on how one wishes to count various "incidents") that eventually got the United States into World War II in the first place. Japan had been making steady inroads in China and Korea since the 1880s. The Japanese generals running the show in China became more and more independent of the government back in Tokyo. Using subversion and threats, Japanese military leaders gained control over larger portions of China. Through the 1930s, over a million Japanese settlers moved into Manchuria. Yet the Japanese government never made any serious attempts to rein in their ambitious generals in China. In 1936 there was an attempted coup by junior army officers. Several senior civilian officials were assassinated in Tokyo before the coup was suppressed. Those junior officers wanted even more support for the Chinese war, and they got it.

In 1937, Japan began large-scale warfare against China. Attacking from enclaves in Manchuria and along the coast, the Japanese advanced into central China. Japan had 300,000 troops in China at the time, plus 150,000 Manchurian and Mongolians under Japanese officers. The Chinese had over 2 million troops under arms, but these were much less well equipped, trained, and led than the Japanese invaders. For two years the Japanese advanced deeper into China. But progress was slow and casualties mounted. In 1939 they decided to return to their earlier subversion and attrition tactics. This continued until 1944, when they again advanced to overrun U.S. airfields in central China (between May and November). As with the 1937 campaign, the 1944 operation was hampered by logistical problems and constant resistance from the Chinese population. Moreover, China had been receiving more military aid and training from the United States since 1941. The 1944 offensive exhausted Japanese forces in China and made them ripe for rapid defeat by the Russians in the summer of 1945.

Throughout the Pacific war, most of the Japanese Army was in China. While the Chinese troops were not active much of the time, many of Japan's best troops were thusly occupied rather than being sent against Allied troops in the Pacific or in Burma (although later in the war, Japan lacked the shipping to move many of those units anyway). So China's role, though generally neglected, was critical to the Allied victory.