China, Burma and India

The war in China began on the night of 7 July 1937, when Chinese and Japanese troops exchanged fire near the Marco Polo Bridge, some sixteen kilometres from Peking. Japan committed more than 300,000 men to the battle for Shanghai, which lasted from 13 August to 26 November and cost the Chinese army between 187,000 and 300,000 casualties on the Chinese counts, entered Nanking on 13 December, and held Wuhan by October 1938. Chiang Kai-shek's government and armies withdrew to Chongqing, and the Japanese army, which could take the coast, the cities and the railways, never took the Nationalist capital or the province of Sichuan behind it. In December 1941 more than twenty of the army's fifty-one divisions were in China, and the China Expeditionary Army still numbered some 1,050,000 men at the end of the war.

The attack on Malaya and Pearl Harbor in December 1941 opened a second front on the mainland. Japanese troops entered Burma that month, the Burma Army evacuated Rangoon on 7 March 1942, and the Burma Corps fell back about a thousand miles to Imphal, which it reached in the middle of May just before the monsoon broke, in what is usually called the longest retreat in British history. At least 500,000 civilians are estimated to have reached India, and between 10,000 and 50,000 to have died on the way. With the Burma Road cut, the Allies supplied China by air. The Hump airlift flew from April 1942 until November 1945, delivered about 650,000 tons and lost 594 aircraft and 1,659 people killed or missing.

India was the base for every Allied operation in Burma, and in 1943 and 1944 its province of Bengal suffered a famine. Cormac Ó Gráda puts the scholarly consensus at about 2.1 million deaths, within a published range of 800,000 to 3.8 million, and more than half of them occurred in 1944, mostly from disease. The causes are still argued. The fall of Rangoon in March 1942 had ended Burmese rice imports, and the government, expecting a Japanese landing, then removed surplus rice from three coastal districts and confiscated some 45,000 boats, which disrupted the movement of food within the province. Other provinces closed their borders to grain, and when price controls were lifted in March 1943 prices rose to five or six times their level of April 1942. From December 1942 the War Cabinet refused or reduced Bengal's requests for imports, citing shipping. Amartya Sen found that the 1943 rice supply was only about 5 per cent below average and placed the failure in distribution, while Wallace Aykroyd argued for a shortfall of a quarter in the harvest.

Chinese deaths are given as 14 million by Rana Mitter and as about 20 million in other estimates, because no count of the dead was possible in a country at war and the figures differ in whom they include. The same variation affects Nanking, where the Tokyo tribunal found more than 200,000 killed, the Nanjing tribunal of 1947 more than 300,000, and the historian Bob Wakabayashi more than 100,000 but fewer than 200,000.

In China the war ran from the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937 through the fall of Nanking and Wuhan to Japan's offensive of 1944, Operation Ichi-Go. In Burma the Japanese conquest of 1942 was followed by the failed British advance into the Arakan and the first Chindit expedition in 1943, and in March 1944 by the Japanese attack on Imphal and Kohima, which the Fourteenth Army defeated. The Bengal famine ran through the same years behind the lines.

In 1945 the Fourteenth Army crossed the Irrawaddy, took Meiktila and Mandalay and reached Rangoon in the first days of May. The Japanese armies in China surrendered at Nanjing on 9 September.

Allied command was divided among several headquarters. Chiang Kai-shek retained sovereign command of the Nationalist armies from Chongqing, while Joseph Stilwell served as his American chief of staff and commanded United States forces in the theatre. Claire Chennault directed the principal American air effort in China. In Southeast Asia, Louis Mountbatten's command coordinated the Allied war against Japan, while William Slim's Fourteenth Army fought the main land campaign in Burma.

Japan divided the same geographic war between major army commands. Iwane Matsui led the Central China Area Army from Shanghai toward Nanking in 1937; Shunroku Hata later commanded the China Expeditionary Army through most of Operation Ichi-Go. Hisaichi Terauchi directed the Southern Expeditionary Army Group that conquered Burma, and in 1944 Masakazu Kawabe's Burma Area Army and Renya Mutaguchi's Fifteenth Army carried the offensive across the Chindwin toward Imphal and Kohima.

Air transport linked fronts that roads and railways could not reliably sustain. C-46 Commandos carried cargo over the Himalayas to China, and Dakotas dropped supplies to isolated formations in Burma. The same air network became a battlefield system at the Admin Box and Imphal, where Allied troops could remain in place while Japanese formations at the end of long jungle supply routes exhausted their stocks.

The late Burma campaign also depended on conventional firepower and engineering. Lee and Sherman tanks crossed rivers and supported Indian infantry, while 25-pounder batteries followed the advance south. In China and the early Burma fighting, Japanese infantry weapons and army aircraft remained central to operations, while American P-40s gave the Chinese theatre an air arm whose forward bases later became objectives of Operation Ichi-Go.

The British official history is Kirby's five-volume The War Against Japan. The American China-Burma-India volumes by Romanus and Sunderland are the standard account of the Stilwell command and of the supply effort over the Hump. Slim's Defeat into Victory is the Fourteenth Army commander's own account and has to be read as a memoir, although it includes his criticism of the special forces he had to supply.

The Chinese record is divided between archives in Taipei and Beijing, and the historiography has been shaped by which government was being credited with the resistance. Rana Mitter's Forgotten Ally (2013) is the main recent English-language account. Estimates of Chinese deaths, of the Nanking massacre and of the Bengal famine differ by a factor of two or more, because the tribunals, commissions and scholars who made them counted different populations over different periods.