Today, China is celebrating victory over Japan in WWII. Even they were at war with our enemy during this time, did the US consider China an ally? Did the US coordinate battles with them, or give them military and/or economic aid? What was the diplomatic status between the two nations. What about China and Russia?
Roosevelt and Churchill met with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo in 1943, with China’s major interest being that they’d get their captured territories back from Japan and the U.S. and Britain’s interest being that a postwar China wouldn’t have the same expansionist goals as Japan.
The Soviet Union wasn’t technically at war with Japan until August 1945, so they officially stayed out of the Pacific. There’s evidence Stalin funneled some assistance to China to keep the Japanese tied down.
Here’s a little history. It’s worth noting that an estimated 10-15 million Chinese died in the War, more than any other country except for the Soviet Union.
True with what previous poster laid out, but I thought China was pretty unimportant in WWII. I never understood why they were on the UN security council.
It’s been a long time since I read up on that stuff. It’s complicated. The US was allied with the KouMinTang in China; that’s the guys who ended up fleeing to Taiwan. While the KMT and the US were fighting Japan, the communists were fighting the KMT.
What I have said so far is only a bare skeleton of what happened, and possibly erroneous. I’ll step back and wait for somebody who knows more about it than I do.
They were the Republic of China at the time, the commies didn’t take over until 1949.
The OSS was involved with giving military aid to China during WWII, but it was problematic. You see, there were both Nationalist and Communist groups fighting the Japanese there. And each other. So if one group was provided equipment and arms for a particular attack against Japanese forces, one would never know if the group would show up for the attack or not, or how much of the aid they’d bring to the attack if they showed and how much they’d put in caches for use against the other Chinese group.
Of course China and the U.S. were allies. My source: Terry and the Pirates
You gottta remember that Japan started building its empire in the early 1900s. So for the Pacific rim nations what we merely call World War II was for them the culmination of a decades long holocaust (Japan first occupied Korea before World War One!). In fact It’s sometimes refereed to as the western Holocaust because technically the Japanese murdered more civilians than the Nazis. And committed even worse atrocities on an even longer & larger scale (Unit 731 as an example). Worse still, the main perpetrators got away scott-free. Instead of being tried & mostly executed like at Nuremberg the US was so paranoid about the coming Cold War with Russia that we made deals with most of the Japanese officers in exchange for their (ultimately completely worthless) experimental data. War sucks.
And as others have said it wasn’t Mao’s Red China until 1949, it was The Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan today). In fact China’s permanent UN Security Council seat was occupied by Taiwan (it was officially called The Republic of China) until the early 70s when it was considered to de facto belong to the PRC (despite much political protest from the US) and officially switched delegates. Similar to when the USSR dissolved in 1991, its seat was officially transferred to Russia (except Russia was now ***not *** (theoretically at least) a communist empire…)
The US allied with whoever would fight with them against the Japanese. In fact, another of the leaders strongly allied with America was an Indochina group lead by America’s friend and ally Ho Chi Minh. Of course, then then repaid his assistance by handing his homeland back to the French colonial masters.
The Long March, where the Chinese communists escaped the Kuomintang by a 10,000 mile retreat through central and north China is the stuff of legend. It took place while both sides were fighting the Japanese advance. Of course, the US was less inclined to help those calling themselves communist, but everyone was on the same side when fighting the Japanese.
(Recall immediately after the Doolittle raid, the airmen who made it past Japan bailed out in China and were helped by the locals at great expense. The Japanese had minimal compunction about killing Chinese en masse if they felt they had been helping the enemy.)
True so far as it goes, but the Kuomintang (KMT) were fairly ineffective at fighting the Japanese, and it was really the Communists under Mao who did most to drive the Japanese out of China. Indeed, it was this very Communist success against the Japanese that really set them up to subsequently be able to take full control of China and drive the KMT out. It was three cornered fight in China, with the KMT (supported quite directly by America) and the Communists (supported by Russia) fighting each other in a long civil war, and each , separately, fighting the Japanese. In the period before the start of the war, the KMT were in control of the larger part of the country, and the Communists were only beginning to reconsolidate after the disaster (for them) of the “long march”, during which the KMT had chased them from one end of China to the other; by the end, the Communists were perceived (by the Chinese people) as the ones who had really driven the Japanese out, and they were poised to follow up by driving out the remains of the KMT too.
However, as the KMT has control of the larger part of China, and key Chinese cities, at the start of WWII, they were perceived as the legitimate Chinese government by the Western powers throughout the war and beyond, even as they were in the process of losing control of the country.
My parents, who lived through WWII (my father was in the British army) owned an old allied propaganda poster showing the “Big Four” of the alliance: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek, the KMT leader. The poster was divided into quarters, each showing a portrait of one of these leaders. They were each shown at an equal size, implying equal importance (for propaganda and diplomatic reasons, I guess), but, of course, in reality, Chiang Kai-shek, who was rapidly losing control of his own country, and had little energy to spare from his fight against the Communists to devote to the fight against the Japanese, was by far the least important and influential member of the alliance. Nevertheless, he, and the nation of China that he nominally still led, was considered to be a key ally.
Don’t tell that to my Dad - he went over first with the AVG (radio) and stayed. He would tell you that without the number of troops and resources Japan had to spend in China, the Enola Gay (which no one knew about in 1941 of course) would have had to fly a durn sight further.
Which is an interesting sidelight. Technically Dad started as Chinese Air Force with Madam Chiang as his “CO”. The US picked him up after Pearl Harbor. Because the US didn’t want to pick sides between the Republic and the communists, he wasn’t allowed to accept several of his Chinese medals. He finally got them and his bottle of rum from his former CO and (I think) her son at one of the conventions in the 70s.
And since I’m think of it – some folks remember the AVG (American Volunteer Group or Flying Tigers) but most forget the RVG and BVG. Originally the way China was setting it (their air force) up, it was “multi-national aide” with
American Volunteers for fighters
British for transport and coordination in India and Burma
Russian for bombers.
That was why my uncle was approached by Chennault and how dad got involved; Unc was old “brown show air corp” and both were fluent in English as well as several Russian dialects.
Allies might be pushing it a bit since China was pretty divided back then, but yes, the US materially supported combatants within China - air dropping or shipping food and weapons, that sort of thing. The US even sent some “volunteers” to fight alongside with them. These on-paper independent civilians happened to bring a fully equipped air wing with them. It’s incredible what a resourceful young man can find under the sofa cushions :).
FTR, the Russians also sent volunteer airmen at first, but those were withdrawn due to the non-interference pact between Japan and Russia of 1941, which allowed Stalin to focus entirely on his Western front.
As for the Chinese, they helped back the way resistance movements do : by sharing info & reporting troop/ship movements, rescuing downed pilots & seamen and helping smuggle them back to Allied territories etc… And killing a whole lot of Japanese, obviously.
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True with what previous poster laid out, but I thought China was pretty unimportant in WWII. I never understood why they were on the UN security council.
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Well, since China is the reason behind the war in the Pacific in the first place, it was *kind *of important, yeah ;).
Actually the Soviets officially and unofficially backed the KMT throughout the war. They told Mao to behave and work with Chiang.
Not really. Indochina was outside of the American occupation zone and we really didn’t see it as a significant region at the time. It was the British and Chinese who occupied Indochina when Japan surrendered and they were the ones who gave it back to France.
You could even say that China was allied with Germany until 37 and even until 1941 when any thought of favour was finally destroyed.
China was not happy with the USA courting Japan … and got no favour from USA or Britain.
There were some OSS operations in French Indochina during WWII.
Yes, there were. But my point was there was never a period before, during, or immediately after the war when the United States had any meaningful control of French Indochina. There were times and places when the French, the Japanese, the British, the Chinese, and various Vietnamese factions had control of parts of the region. But not the United States. So we couldn’t have handed the country over to anybody because we never had it.
The first B-29 raids against Japan were actually flown from bases in China:
These raids prompted the only major Japanese offensive in China since they went to war with the US, Operation Ichi-Go from April to December 1944. It was successful in ending US B-29 operations against Japan from China, but the B-29s had started operating out of the Marianas by then, from which they could reach much more of the Japanese homelands than they could from China, so the ‘success’ of Ichi-Go was a rather moot point.
The only part of this that you could actually say is that China was in a sense allied with Germany up until 1937, the rest is pure rubbish. Sino-German cooperation in the 1930s included Germany providing modern arms and training to the Chinese Army and aid in industrializing the country, but that all came to an end in 1937 when Japan invaded China. See End of Sino-German cooperation:
As to your statements that China was not happy with the US courting Japan and getting no favor from USA or Britain, they are all complete and utter rubbish. The US was certainly not courting Japan with whom it had long standing conflicting interests in Asia, the largest of which after 1937 was China. From the very beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 US-Japanese relations took a steep nosedive. Japan went to war with the US and Britain as a direct result of US actions against Japan over China. The US was providing weapons and aid to China, which prompted Japan to demand the Vichy French government allow them to occupy French Indochina to deny it as a port of entry for aid going to China. This resulted in the US freezing Japanese assets in the US and placing ever greater embargos on Japan, starting with scrap metal and finally embargoing the sale of oil to Japan, which made the outbreak of war between the US and Japan inevitable as Japan was importing upwards of 90% of its oil from the US, which in 1941 was the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil. Japan’s choices were to cede to US demands and leave China, do nothing and have its economy collapse and with it any ability to continue its war in China, or go to war with the US and Britain and seize the oil in the Dutch East Indies and be able to continue its war in China.
It’s kind of sad to be launching “Operation One” 7 years into the war, isn’t it ? 
A recent book on China in World War II calls China the Forgotten Ally in its title.
Then you don’t know much about World War II. The entire fight in the Asian theater was about China.