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

by Rana Mitter

By early 1942, however, Nehru and Gandhi were increasingly concerned that Indian political and military backing for the British cause was not being translated into a concrete timetable for independence. Relations between the British and Congress became fraught, particularly after the outbreak of war in Asia in December 1941.21 The connection with India was of vital importance to the survival of Chiang’s government. One of the consequences of war between Japan and the British Empire was that the Burma Road might well close. Chiang had had a foretaste of what this meant when Churchill’s government had shut it for three months under Japanese pressure in the summer of 1940, but at the end of that year it was still supplying China with some 20,000 tons of goods per month.22 With the loss of those supplies, the airlift of material over the Burma “Hump” from India became ever more important, and Chiang was increasingly concerned that the British hold on India should not be weakened before Japan had been defeated. Chiang proposed a visit to India to meet the Congress leaders. The idea outraged Churchill, but it was eventually arranged thanks to the intervention of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador in Chongqing.