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

by Rana Mitter

of the rail network, sealed highways, and industrial plants created in the first decades of the twentieth century: 30 percent of the infrastructure in the rich Pearl River delta near Canton, 52 percent in Shanghai, and a staggering 80 percent in the capital, Nanjing.9 The war would undo two empires in China (the British and the Japanese) and help to create two more (the American and the Soviet). The narrative of the war is the story of a people in torment: from the Nanjing Massacre (widely known as the Rape of Nanking, December 1937–January 1938), when Japanese troops murdered and looted in the captured Chinese capital, to the blasting of dikes on the Yellow River in June 1938, which bought time for the Chinese Army but at a terrible price for hundreds of thousands of compatriots.