The War and the Changing Chinese Views

Abstract

The Japanese tide of conquest in South East Asia in the first half of 1942 was followed by an ebb in the Pacific later on. Having failed to extend their control to the American and British bases in the Hawaiian Islands and Australia, they were now on the defensive. Only in Burma did they pursue offensive operations against the Western Allies with the hope of frustrating a British counter-offensive from India. Indeed, it was here that the season’s campaign ran a very different course from the Allies’ expecta-tions. It formed, as Liddell Hart observed, ‘a depressing contrast to the now rapid Allied advance in the Pacific, especially the central Pacific’.¹ The main feature of the war in Burma was another Japanese offensive — the only one in the war that saw the Japanese cross the Indian frontier. This operation, though eventually un-successful, had the strategic effect of postponing the British advance into Burma until 1945.