On Saturday, much of the world will commemorate the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, which gave Allied forces a beachhead in France and led to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany in April 1945. In that remembrance, the sacrifices of British, European, Soviet, American, and Commonwealth nations are recounted and recognized. The experience and suffering of one World War II ally, however, is often under-reported: that nation is China, which lost 14 million people in the conflict.
In fact, World War II began earlier in China than in any other region. China’s war was fought almost exclusively against the Japanese, who invaded in 1937, coming over the Marco Polo Bridge southwest of Beijing on July 7 of that year. But a handful of Chinese also saw action in the European theater of war.
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