12 World War II Moments (That Hardly Anybody Ever Talks About)

Officially, World War II began in 1939 and ended in 1945. For the Chinese, whose involvement on the Allied side is often unremembered, it began two years earlier in 1937, when Japanese forces began a full-scale invasion of China, having made strides since their annexation of Manchuria in 1931.

The Chinese ranks were disorganised by the Chinese Civil War that had raged intermittently since 1927. On one side were the Kuomintang, supported by America and led by Chiang Kai-Shek, whose association with kleptocrats and sycophants and reluctance to commit to the Burma campaign would frustrate his Allied counterparts for years to come. On the other side were the Communist Party of China, led by Mao Zedong. The two sides eventually came to an uneasy truce to resist the invasion of their homeland, which broke apart in 1940 and led to the two parties defending it independently. Their hostilities would resume after the war’s conclusion, leading to the Communist establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the withdrawal of Chiang to Taiwan.

One of the most definitive atrocities of the war occurred in the city of Nanking (now Nanjing), where the actual civilian murder toll is heavily disputed but proclaimed as 300,000 by the Chinese government. The massacre of the city also included large-scale rape, looting and the destruction of more than a third of the city by arson. It was an eerie precursor of what was to come in both other Japanese occupations and the Holocaust in Europe.