Though the Japanese dominated the China war against the corrupt regime and ill-equipped armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, they suffered debilitating attrition, including 185,000 dead by the end of 1941. Even a huge deployment of manpower—a million Japanese soldiers remained in China until 1945—proved unable to force a decisive outcome upon either Chiang’s Nationalists or the communists of Mao Tse-tung, whose forces they confronted and sometimes engaged across a front of 2,000 miles.
