That count includes hundreds of thousands of deaths due to drowning, disease and starvation after the Chinese nationalist army breached massive holes in dikes holding back the Yellow River to stymie the Japanese advance in 1938.
Having prepared for many years for the inevitable war with China, Japanese soldiers possessed an inherent brutality that came into effect in their treatment of civilians and prisoners of war. Japanese soldiers were instructed that if captured by the enemy they would not only dishonour the army, but also their parents.
According to British historian Mark Felton: The Japanese murdered 30 million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule. About 23 million of these were ethnic Chinese. It is a crime that in sheer numbers is far greater than the Nazi Holocaust.
Though far weaker and poorer than the mighty United States or the British Empire, China played a major role in the war. Some 40,000 Chinese soldiers fought in Burma alongside American and British troops in 1944, helping to secure the Stilwell Road linking Lashio to Assam in India.
China was treated as one of the Allies. However, the country had far fewer resources than the other Allies, and this led a real divergence in the viewpoints of the west and China toward the Chinese contribution to the war.
Nazi Germany and the Nationalist government of the Republic of China maintained bilateral relations between 1933 and 1941. The Chinese Nationalists sought German military and economic support to help them consolidate control over factional warlords and resist Japanese imperialism.
Axis powers. The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
World War II
The war pitted the Allies and the Axis power in the deadliest war in history, and was responsible for the deaths of over 70 million people.
During the eight years of Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) suffered 1.1 million military casualties, killed, wounded and missing in China. The Chinese lost approximately 3.22 million soldiers. 9.13 million civilians died in crossfire, and another 8.4 million as non-military casualties.
War crimes trials, in which Japanese guards were tried for acts of brutality, were held throughout south-east Asia. In Australian trials, 922 men were tried and 641 were found guilty. Of 148 sentenced to death, 137 were actually executed.
November 13, 2013: Former Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio offered personal apology for Japan's wartime crimes, especially the Nanking Massacre, "As a Japanese citizen, I feel that it's my duty to apologize for even just one Chinese civilian killed brutally by Japanese soldiers and that such action cannot be ...
BRUTALITY AND LABOR IN CHINA DURING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION
When civilians neglected to do this they were viciously slapped. Chinese men who showed up late for meetings were beaten with sticks. Chinese women were kidnaped and turned into “comfort women”---prostitutes who serviced Japanese soldiers.
China was neutral at the start of the war, as the country was financially chaotic, unstable politically, and militarily weak. Shikai attempted to hold China's neutrality in the war, an idea that was favored by the German chargé d'affaires in Peking, Adolf Georg von Maltzan.
The Soviet Union suffered the highest number of fatalities of any single nation, with estimates mostly falling between 22 and 27 million deaths. China then suffered the second greatest, at around 20 million, although these figures are less certain and often overlap with the Chinese Civil War.
According to the National World War II Museum, some 5,600,000 Polish civilians were killed -- many in the Holocaust -- while a staggering 24,000,000 Soviet civilians also died. This stirring data-visualization, below, reinforces the extent to which the Soviet Union bore the brunt of World War II's butcher's bill.
Table ranking "History's Most Deadly Events": Influenza pandemic (1918-19) 20-40 million deaths; black death/plague (1348-50), 20-25 million deaths, AIDS pandemic (through 2000) 21.8 million deaths, World War II (1937-45), 15.9 million deaths, and World War I (1914-18) 9.2 million deaths.
According to historian Niall Ferguson, France is the most successful military power in history.
Denmark has lost the most wars, at one point Denmark was only a single city.
The Japanese used many types of physical punishment. Some prisoners were made to hold a heavy stone above their heads for many hours. Others might be forced into small cells with little food or water. Tom Uren described how a young Aboriginal soldier was made to kneel on a piece of bamboo for a number of days.
This book documents Japanese atrocities in World War II, including cannibalism, the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war, rape and enforced prostitution, the murder of noncombatants, and biological warfare experiments.
Secret wartime files made public only in 2006 reveal that American GIs committed more than 400 sexual offenses in Europe, including 126 rapes in England, between 1942 and 1945.
Conflict in Asia began well before the official start of World War II. Seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. By 1937 Japan controlled large sections of China, and war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace.
Teaching of the second World War in Chinese schools focuses on the political and military developments before and during the war. It deals with the “what” and “how” like the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, the growth of anti-Semitism, and the effects of German fascism.
World War II proved so traumatic to China that its Nationalist government collapsed soon afterward and a radical communist government successfully conquered the mainland in 1949. Yet overall, the major legacy of World War II in Asia was that it ended the era of imperialism on the continent.