When the end came in 1945, China was, in Mr. Even as their position in the Pacific deteriorated, the Japanese maintained forces in China that might otherwise have been deployed against the U.S Marines. It was the Japanese who ensured that China would play a key role in ending World War II. In a diary of his own, Chiang wrote in 1943, “I saw Stilwell today he disgusts me. Stilwell’s postwar diary would document his toxic relations with Chiang, but it was a two-way street. Stilwell as his chief of staff, but their relationship soon deteriorated. Chiang reluctantly accepted Roosevelt’s offer of Lt. In the years that followed, the United States sent advisers but comparatively little material aid, much of which had to be flown “over the Hump” from India. … The soldiers of the Japanese Central China Area embarked on an uninterrupted spree of murder, rape and robbery.”īy 1941, Nationalist forces had been driven to China’s deep south, some 500 miles from Yanan. Mitter’s words, “the Japanese troops seem to have abandoned all constraints. The occupation of Nanjing in December 1937 triggered a display of barbarism remarkable even by standards of the China war. Brutality was commonplace, as most Japanese regarded Chinese as racial inferiors.

The Japanese required little time to occupy China’s coastal cities. According to journalist Theodore White, about 500,000 peasants were driven from 2,000 communities “to await rescue or death on whatever dry ground they could find.” Seeking to slow the Japanese advance, the Nationalists breached dikes that controlled the Yellow River.

Rana mitter forgotten ally