In memory of Armed Force Day! Forget Not the Pyrrhic Victory of Anti-Japanese War and the ROC Army’s Contributions to World Peace!
Translated by BWP
…former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt…once commented exclamatorily that without China(ROC), or if China had been defeated, many more Japanese divisions would have been deployed to other areas and they would have been able to occupy Australia and India immediately without any trouble, and then push to the Middle East. Thus, the future of WWII would be disastrous. General George Catlett Marshall, Jr(1880～1959) also specified in his Report on the War that if China was defeated earlier, then all the precious resources in China would be taken effortlessly by the Japanese. And as the US and the British finished their job in Europe and planned to attack the Japanese home islands afterwards, the Japanese government would escape to China and continue to engage in wars on the vast territory of abundant resources. Lloyd E. Eastman, an US professor of history and modern Chinese studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is traditionally indisposed towards the Chinese Nationalist Party. He once acclaimed, depart from his normal behavior, on the Nationalist actions in the resistance war against Japan in his book Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937-1949. He said,” Let the Nationalist army receive its due. It persisted for eight years in a war against an enemy force that was decidedly superior in organization, training, and equipment. By comparison with the French (whose resistance to the Germans collapsed after only six weeks of fighting) and the British (who received substantial material assistance from the United States), the resistance of the Chinese army was a marvel of determination and self-sufficiency. Completely frustrating Japanese expectations of a quick and decisive victory, it actively fought at Shanghai, at Nanking, and on the plains of North and Central China, incurring frightful losses. Then, having retreated from the coast, beyond the reach of the major transportation networks, the Nationalist army shifted to a strategy of attritional warfare that mired the Japanese army in the vastness of the Chinese nation. This dogged resistance contributed significantly to the total Allied war effort against the Axis powers. It tied up approximately a million Japanese troops on the continent of Asia—troops that might otherwise have been used to combat the island-hopping armies of the Western allies in the Pacific. If in some way history had been kinder to the Nationalists after 1945—if there had been no civil war, and if the Nationalists had succeeded during the post war years in creating a stable state on the mainland—historians would now treat the Nationalists’ resistance to Japanese aggression as a heroic epic of dauntless sacrifice. In the light cast by the postwar debacle, however, the positive contributions of the Nationalist army during the war are inevitably overshadowed by the evidence of its deterioration.”
According to The Unofficial History of Mobilization Between China Incident and The Great East Asian War edited by the Japanese First Restoration Bureau (literal translation) after the WWII, the minimum of Japanese troops stationed in Chinese battlefields was 1.26 million in 1944 and the maximum was 1.98 million in 1945. It took up the lowest of 31 percent and the highest of 65 percent of the total strength. In other words, from the Mukden Incident in 1932, the Chinese government pinned down at least one million of Japanese army by scorched earth strategy and bogged them down deeply in the mud of Chinese battlefields. Comparing with the Pacific front, the Japanese Southern General Army vanguard, Rinmei detachment, had landed successfully in Kota Bahru which located in the northern part of the east coast of the British Malayan peninsula by December 8, 1941 and occupied the major city Mandalay in central Burma by May 1, 1942. It took only 20 percent of the Japanese army, that is 200,000 troops of 10 divisions, 3 independent mixed brigades and regiments and a tank regiment in total. The Japanese spent only four months in conquering Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, The Philippines, Dutch East Indies, and extended southwards to the Guadalcanal of the Solomon Islands, which was not far away from the northeastern Australia. It seized ten times of the Japanese home islands, controlled abundant resources and huge lands of more than 150 million of populations. Furthermore, the Japanese could attack the Australia with just one step closer. It is obviously that the Chinese had a decisive influence to the result of WWII.
From the enrolling of the first cadet class in 1924 to the twenty third at the end of October 1949, Whampoa Military Academy had trained more than 230,000 cadets (totally including the main campus, branch campuses and the perpherial training classes). Most of the graduated cadets participated in the battlefields of the Eastern Expedition, the Northern Expedition, and the Anti-Japanese War. 150,000 of them were killed in action then.
(Extracted from The stories you might not familiar with Modern Chinese vol. 1)
(English translation of 紀念93 勿忘抗戰勝利之艱辛與中華民國國軍對世界和平的貢獻！ See the original text at: http://goo.gl/Q1VNrw
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