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

by Rana Mitter

In the summer of 1940 the Zero managed to knock out all of the aircraft that protected Chongqing from the sky, leaving the city even more vulnerable to air raids.3 As had happened so often before, an initially successful Nationalist assault had turned into a disaster. Chiang’s troubles were made even worse by events some eight thousand kilometers away in Europe. In the late summer of 1939 two events changed the face of the conflict: the expected outbreak of war between Germany and Britain along with France, and the unexpected outbreak of peace between Germany and its ideological foe the USSR. The latter was marked by the announcement on August 23, 1939, of the signing of a nonaggression pact between Moscow and Berlin, perhaps the most astounding ideological reversal of the twentieth century. A week later, on September 1, Nazi Germany’s troops invaded Poland, and war with Britain and France followed two days later. At a stroke, the attention of the European powers was concentrated on their own fight for survival. The war in East Asia, already a secondary concern for them, now became a minor matter indeed.