Glossary   |   Detailed Search   |   About Democracy at War     
Democracy at War: The Collection of World War II Newspaper Articles  
Canadian Newspapers and the Second World War
Introduction Canada and the War Battles and Operations The Holocaust
History of World War 2 Battles
  - The Invasion of Poland, 1939
  - The Battle of the Atlantic
  - The German Invasion of Western Europe
  - The Battle of Britain
  - The Invasion of the Balkans
  - The Bomber Offensive
  - North African Campaigns
  - War in China, 1937-1945
  - Hong Kong, December 1941
  - Dieppe Raid, 1942
  - The Aleutian Campaign
  - The Burma Campaigns, 1941-1945
  - The Sicilian and Italian Campaigns, 1943-1945
  - The North West Europe Campaign, 1944-1945
  - D-Day and the Normandy Campaign
  - The Liberation of the Netherlands
 
  Search the Newspaper Archives     
 
Search for :
Find :

Appearing :
Detailed Search
World War 2 Battles and Military Operations
China First to Fight! - AN19880207-005
China First to Fight!

War in China, 1937-1945

Japan was a powerful nation but also an island nation, without enough food or resources to survive on its own. The most obvious place to exploit was nearby China, weak and chaotic. In 1931 the Japanese army seized control of the Chinese province of Manchuria, turning it into a puppet of Tokyo. In 1937 the Japanese army took charge of much of eastern China - the most fertile, heavily populated parts of the country. By the following year, both the old capital of Beijing and the new capital of Nanking had fallen to the Japanese.

Within China Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government ( Kuomintang ) was fighting off Mao Zedong's rebel Communists. Faced with the threat from Japan, however, the two enemies decided to stop their war to combat the outsider. They waged all but separate wars against the Japanese. The Communists, based in the distant, rural northwest, had considerable support in the countryside and villages, even from areas behind the Japanese lines, but had only the most basic equipment for an army. The Nationalists, in equally remote Szechuan in the west, had a huge army, which was less motivated and less well-led and had only a little more equipment than the Communists. Until 1941 the Nationalists received some equipment from the Soviet Union. The Americans sent some troops, pilots and supplies to the Nationalists from India over the rugged Burma Road until it was cut by the advancing Japanese army in Burma ( see the Burma Campaign, 1941-1945 ). Until a land route was re-opened in 1945, any Allied military aid to China had to be flown over the Himalaya mountains from India.

China was a Second World War backwater. However, the largest part of the Japanese army was tied down in China, maintaining internal order, and this limited what Japan could do in its war against the Allies.

Related Newspaper Articles


English Articles



French Articles