Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

by Rana Mitter

kilometers to the northwest. In January 1940, as Paris prepared itself for a German invasion, Japanese diplomats had sent messages to their French counterparts demanding that the colony’s railway be shut down. The Japanese repeatedly bombed the railway, and when the French ambassador in Tokyo protested, Matsuoka Yôsuke, the foreign minister, replied that “the Japanese Government intended to continue bombarding the French railroad from Indochina until the French should stop sending supplies to Chiang Kai-shek.”25 France fell in June 1940, and like most of its colonies, Indochina came under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime. As this new government was supposed to be neutral, it continued to allow supplies to be sent to Free China via the railway. Throughout the summer of 1940, the Japanese put the Vichy colonial authorities under pressure to close the railway, but the French refused to do so, although they agreed in August that a limited number of Japanese troops (no more than 6,000) could be stationed within Indochina. But the Japanese were not in the mood to compromise. On September 22 Japanese troops under Lieutenant General Nakamura Akihito invaded Indochina. The fighting ended within a few days when