Seeing the whole picture

Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Madame Chiang at the Cairo Conference in 1943.[Photo provided to China Daily]

"Britain would very likely lose India ... the Soviet Union might have had to fight Nazi Germany and Japan on two fronts ... and the United States would probably lose another 1 or 2 million soldiers to beat the Japanese in the Pacific."

But China's role was somewhat neglected, wittingly or unwittingly, by its Western allies as China and Japan changed their blocs in the ideological confrontation of the Cold War.

To a certain extent, wartime history is also crucial in shaping present-day China.

"The war's legacy is all over China today," writes Mitter.

"In Nanjing, a huge combined museum and memorial commemorates the occupying Japanese army's massacre of many thousands of Chinese civilians in December 1937.

"On television, documentaries remind viewers of the record of the Communist Eighth Route Army and its resistance against Japan in northern China, and soap operas with a wartime setting tell the stories both of the Nationalist army and of the Communist. "

Five books give glimpses of war