<p>The <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/">Second World War</a> still plays a massive role in our national mythology in Britain. But if I were to ask you: “Who was the fourth ally?” I imagine that most readers would have to think twice. The answer is China. </p><p>China fought the entire war – and longer – and suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union. Frank Capra’s <em>Why We Fight </em>documentaries, which included a 1944 film called <em>The Battle of China</em>, saw the war with Japan as part of “the struggle of freedom against slavery, civilisation against barbarism”. Films in the series close with the hope that a victory for the democracies – Republican China in the 1930s, don’t forget, had been a fledgling democracy – will bring about “the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan”. </p><p>Today, history is a big deal in China. Since 1949, the Chinese view of modern history has centred on the ‘century of humiliation’ following the First Opium War (1839–42), when foreign powers carved up the country. But more recently, the Second World War has assumed a powerful new role in Chinese nationalism. There’s a museum to the war in Beijing, the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and a harrowing memorial to the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre. At the China Modern History Museum in Nanjing, you can dress up in nationalist Kuomintang or communist uniforms and have your photo taken in wartime dioramas. The Chinese view of the conflict has shifted towards showing the country as a heroic participant in a war that was moral and just.</p><p>The Chinese had been engaged in hostilities with Japan since 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. The conflict proper lasted from July 1937 until 2 September 1945 – the 80th anniversary of the conflict’s end is being marked this year. So the Second World War effectively started earlier, and lasted longer, here than in Europe. And without China, the course of the wider war might have been very different.</p><ul><li><strong>Read more | <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/membership/michael-wood-on-a-treasure-trove-of-medieval-documents/">Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life</a></strong></li></ul><p>The Chinese lost a million soldiers, but civilian deaths numbered somewhere between 10 and 15 million, maybe more. Hitherto enemies, the Kuomintang and the communists both resisted the invader, but afterwards fought a deadly civil war that was won by the communists, whom the war had turned into a national liberation movement. (Mao later claimed that the communists might never have won victory without the Japanese.)</p><p>So China played a leading role in the creation of our postwar world. As one of the four victorious powers, they should have been able to articulate their own vision of east Asia. The problem, of course, was that in 1949 China became a communist country – and in the Cold War, communism was an enemy of the so-called ‘Free World’. The Chinese Communist Party was not formally recognised as the country’s government by the US till 1979.</p><ul><li><strong>Read more | <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/ww2-british-burials-with-nazi-flags/">Why were these British Second World War burials draped with Nazi flags?</a></strong></li></ul><p>There are many incredible stories of wartime China. One involves a young British hero, who is also being celebrated on the 80th anniversary this year. George Hogg was an adventurer who, in January 1938 – shortly after the Nanjing Massacre began – travelled to Shanghai. He helped a New Zealand nurse, Kathleen Hall, smuggle medicine and food to the communist resistance. Witnessing first-hand the brutality of the Japanese imperial army towards the Chinese people, on impulse he decided to stay and help – a story he told in his book<em> I See a New China</em>, published in 1944 and adapted into the film <em>The Children of Huang Shi</em> in 2008, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. </p><p>In Hogg’s most famous adventure, he saved 60 Chinese boys orphaned during the war and led them west to Gansu, mostly on foot – 700 miles through dangerous passes, on snow-covered mountain roads. In the end he commandeered six trucks to complete the journey to Shandan county where he created a safe haven for war orphans, founding a school that still exists. </p><p>Hogg died in Gansu on 22 July 1945 after contracting tetanus. His tomb in Shandan has a traditional Chinese grave stele with four lines of a poem Hogg loved: <em>Into Battle,</em> by the <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/">First World War</a> poet Julian Grenfell, who was killed on the western front in 1915, the year of Hogg’s birth. Recently there has been huge interest in China about the Briton who selflessly gave his life for the Chinese people. Just one story – but what a story.</p><p>So, as China commemorates the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in September, should we not invite our Chinese friends to join us in the rituals at the Cenotaph, to lay a wreath on behalf of our forgotten ally? It would be high time.</p><p><em><strong>This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/bbc-history-magazine/">BBC History Magazine</a></strong></em></p>
