China, Burma, India

Factual Questions
1

Why don’t you hear more about this theater during WW2?

I just watched a DVD called Stillwells Road from a DVD compilation called called Remember Pearl Harbor about the war in the Southwestern Pacific. Paid 10 bucks for the 4 DVD collection. WW2 buff s should look for it.

Why do you hear so much about Europe and the naval war in the Pacific? Do historians not view the theater as important? It was truly a United Nations war with troops from everywhere. Conditions there were truly horrific. Why is it the forgotten front?

2

Relatively few American troops involved, if I remember correctly. We (here in the US) don’t dwell much on Europe’s Eastern front either, despite the massive scale of operations and horrific casualties, 'cause we weren’t directly involved.

What awareness there is of CBI seems to be in the form of quirky anecdotes like the Flying Tigers and the “Hump”.

You didn’t ask about further reading, but I’d recommend looking into Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45.

3

You may want to search for books, movies, or websites about
Merrill’s Marauders if you’re interested in Burma and WWII.

4

Which of course doesn’t answer the OP not at all. Sorry.

5

Not all that much happened in China’s case after Pearl Harbor. Most of the important battle had been fought before 1941. Japan had already gotten almost as far as it could and was having a hell of a time trying to knock Chiang out of Chongqing and the communists out of Yanan.

China lacked the technology and infrastructure to seriously fight the Japanese head on, so they spent most of their effort fortifing their mountain positions and engaging in guerilla warfare (as well as fight each other). The Japanese task of keeping the supply routes open in a massive county like China with constant guerilla harrassment was extremely difficult. China’s main mission in the alliance was simply not to fold (the Japanese repeatedly tried to bring Chiang to the table), forcing the Japanese to divide its limited man supply between the two fronts.

Meanwhile the US was able to take on the Japanese empire island by island. Even as the atomic bomb were droped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese were still in control of most of eastern China.

6

I second Stilwell and the American Experience in China (nice quote there DR). [Laying the Peanut Low, a poem about Chiang Kai-shek included in the appendix is a personal favorite of mine.]

At the end of the day, not that much American involvement in these theaters. The US action was in island hopping.

7

This war zone was ignored by the media of the time, being more concerned woith the UK home front and events in Russia to such an extent that it became the forgotten war, and the conbined British, Chinese, Indian units became the “forgotten army”

Many of the greatest victories against the Japanese came shortly after the D-Day landings so in many ways this part of the conflict was overshadowed, but the achievements made under General Slim who took a thouroughly demoralised and defeated army back to first class operation capability and then led it on to victories that are in many ways the far-east equivalent of what Russia was doing to the Germans, these achievements should be much more widely known.

http://www.burmastar.org.uk/overview.htm

The link will give you some idea of the conflict, two years of continous defeat by the Japanese, followed by around a further year where things were much more even, and finally about 10 months of rapid advance and destruction of Japanese military capability.

The distances involved are not generally widely understood by most folk, but the retreat must have been well over 2000 miles overland, and this partly led to the resupply problems of the Japanese and thus their subsequent defeat.

Possibly the most bitter fighting of the entire war took place at Kohima and Imphal, the distance between the opposong fornt lines was the width of a tennis court, literally, but the British held out killing tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers.

http://memorabilia.homestead.com/files/Burma_1945.html

I think perhaps one more reason that the war in Burma did was not as widely noticed was that in the fianl analysis, it was not the critical theatre in the far East, however for a relatively small outlay of allied resources, it tied up a huge amount of Japanese military assets, due to the great distances involved and the problems it then caused in resupply.
In that sense it turned out to be more of a war of attrition, had there not been the surrender of Japan due to the atomic bomb, the allied advance into Thailand anf the rest of S-E asia would have probably been very rapid as the whole of the Japanese Asian war effort was collapsing completely.

8

Of course, the movie “Bridge on the River Kwai” deals with this theater of war quite well, showing how the Japanese used POWs (mainly British, but some Dutch, Aussies, and Americans as well) to build a railroad from Singapore to Burma during the war. It was a smash hit when it came out in 1957, winning several Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

9

I worked with a guy in Tokyo who was one of three survivors of a massive battle in Burma. The opposing British forces didn’t realize there were only three Japanese left and retreated. Ito-san ended up walking from Burma to Bangkok after the Japanese surrender. Because he was a fluent English speaker, Ito-san was about the last Japanese repatriated out of Bangkok after the war.

10

The Americans and the British don’t talk about the China theatre because there was relatively little American or British involvement in that theatre. The Japanese don’t talk about it because they don’t like to talk about the war. The Chinese don’t talk about it because WWII was immediately followed by the Chinese Civil War and that’s had more effect on current Chinese affairs.