Japanese occupation in most of Asia was brutal across their period of rule. In 1937 the Japanese took the Chinese capital of Nanjing, and in 1945 they retreated from the Filipino capital of Manila. In both cases, Japanese troops massacred many thousands of civilians.
Japan formally surrendered on 2 September 1945, following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. China was recognized as one of the Big Four Allies during the war, regained all territories lost to Japan, and became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
When Japan was finally defeated in 1945, China was on the winning side, but lay devastated, having suffered some 15 million deaths, massive destruction of industrial infrastructure and agricultural production, and the shattering of the tentative modernization begun by the Nationalist government.
Had China surrendered in 1938 as expected, World War II's entire trajectory would have changed, according to Mitter. “The escalation that Japan had to go through in the following years because of Chinese resistance would never have happened.
How did China lose so many in WW2? China lost many people in WW2 because they were invaded by Japan. Japan was able to conquer a large part of China and had control of a decent amount of the larger Chinese cities of the time.
According to Rummel, in China alone, from 1937 to 1945, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations and a total of 10.2 million Chinese were killed in the course of the war.
China had been at war with Japan since 1937 and continued the fight until the Japanese surrender in 1945. The United States advised and supported China's ground war, while basing only a few of its own units in China for operations against Japanese forces in the region and Japan itself.
The Chinese Nationalists sought German military and economic support to help them consolidate control over factional warlords and resist Japanese imperialism. Germany sought raw materials such as tungsten and antimony from China.
Conflict in Asia began well before the official start of World War II. Seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. By 1937 Japan controlled large sections of China, and war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace.
China is estimated to have endured the second-highest number of total casualties in WWII. As many as 20 million people died in China, including up to 3.75 million military deaths and 18.19 million civilian deaths.
Firstly Japan simply did not have the manpower and resources to occupy all of China. Even in the territories she had Japan usually stuck to the major cities and rail hubs. Japan even needed collaborator troops just to hold onto this.
The official death toll for Japanese soldiers killed in China between 1937 and 1945 is 480,000. China was a quagmire that forced Japan to squander vast amounts of resources that put it on a collision course with the Allied powers and undermined its Pacific War effort.
Russo-Japanese War, (1904–05), military conflict in which a victorious Japan forced Russia to abandon its expansionist policy in East Asia, thereby becoming the first Asian power in modern times to defeat a European power.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of China's attack on India, the only war Communist China has won despite involvement in multiple military conflicts since 1950. Its decisive victory over India, however, failed to end bilateral disputes, with the war's legacy continuing to weigh down the relationship.
It was true that China's armies were weak, but many of the best troops had been sacrificed in major battles such as Shanghai and Xuzhou. China felt it was being asked to bear the burdens of a major ally without the finances or resources that the U.S., Britain or even the USSR could call on.
Operation Matterhorn was a military operation of the United States Army Air Forces in World War II for the strategic bombing of Japanese forces by B-29 Superfortresses based in India and China. Targets included Japan itself, and Japanese bases in China and South East Asia.
Japan believed it had a sovereign right to rule, to become the “Light of Greater East Asia” and ultimately the “Light of the World”. The Japanese felt that by conceding ground their country would be humiliating itself in front of the world.
Japan had the best army, navy, and air force in the Far East. In addition to trained manpower and modern weapons, Japan had in the mandated islands a string of naval and air bases ideally located for an advance to the south.
World War II began on July 7, 1937—not in Poland or at Pearl Harbor, but in China. On that date, outside of Beijing, Japanese and Chinese troops clashed, and within a few days, the local conflict had escalated to a full, though undeclared, war between China and Japan.
China entered into diplomatic relations with Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Maldives in Southeast Asia and South Asia, seven countries including Iran, Turkey and Kuwait in West Asia and the Middle East and five countries in South Pacific such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
The previous spring Japan in fact had almost experienced a military coup. As he mulled it over, Hitler envisaged an alliance with Tokyo primarily for what it meant in the struggle against “Jewish” Bolshevism. This was to be a pact emphatically denouncing Marxist revolution.
The two nations fought each other during Korean War. The US refused to recognize the legitimacy of the PRC and continued to recognize the ROC based in Taiwan as the legitimate government of China.
1950: Korean War
Soon after the start of the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur led U.S. forces across the 38th Parallel and drove north towards China, which brought China into the conflict and precipitated the first military clash between U.S. and Chinese forces since the Boxer Uprising of 1900.
The U.S. destroyed far more Japanese troops than any other Allied nation. According to a report by the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, in the period between Pearl Harbor and the end of the war, the total number of Japanese troops wiped out on the Asian Front was 1.5 million.