Second Sino-Japanese War - The Largest Asian War in the 20th Century

Second Sino-Japanese War -

The Largest Asian War in the 20th Century

The Second Sino-Japanese War (July 7, 1937  September 9, 1945) was a military conflict fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Nazi Germany (until 1938), the Soviet Union (1937-1940) and the United States (see American Volunteer Group). 

After the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, the war merged in to the greater conflict of World War II as a major front in the Pacific Theater. The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the twentieth century. It also made up over 50% of the casualties in the Pacific War.

 Although the countries had fought intermittently since 1931, full-scale war started in earnest in 1937 and ended only with the surrender of Japan in 1945. The war was the result of a decades-long Japanese imperialist policyowner aiming to dominate China politically and militarily, and to secure its huge raw material reserves and other economic resources, food and labor. Simultaneously, the rising tide of Chinese nationalism and notions of self-determination stoked the coals of war. Before 1937, China and Japan fought in small, localized engagements, so-called "incidents". Yet the sides, for a variety of reasons, refrained from fighting a total war. In 1931, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria by Imperial Japan's Kwantung Army followed the "Mukden Incident". The last of these incidents was the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937, marking the beginning of full scale war between the countries.