Liberation in China and the Pacific
LIBERATION IN CHINA AND THE PACIFIC RANA MITTER, PHD (Image: National Archives and Records Administration, 520868.) Between 1937 and 1945, war raged between Japan and its planes destroyed. More devastating, the Japanese attack enemies, first China, and then the United States and the killed 2,403 and wounded 1,178. President Roosevelt, British Empire. The war ended in Asia only with the atomic announcing the news to a shocked nation, declared it a bombings of Japan, but the continent failed to find peace “day which will live in infamy.” as new Cold War conflicts emerged from the rubble. When Japan decided to declare war on the United States, it ORIGINS OF THE WAR IN ASIA knew that it was taking a huge risk. One leader compared the decision to throwing himself off the Kiyomizu-dera World War II began on July 7, 1937—not in Poland or at Temple in Kyoto. However, Japan’s leaders were gambling Pearl Harbor, but in China. On that date, outside of Beijing, on winning this war swiftly by crippling America’s naval Japanese and Chinese troops clashed, and within a few capacity in the Pacific, thus preventing the United States days, the local conflict had escalated to a full, though from interfering with Japan’s expansion into Southeast undeclared, war between China and Japan. Asia. They knew, as did Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill and China’s leader Chiang Kai-shek, that the industrial capacity of the United States meant that it could The war between China and Japan was at first a conflict win a war through its sheer capacity to renew its supply of in which no western powers were openly involved.
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