As part of the protracted Allied campaign in the China-Burma-India theater, Chinese forces under Wei Lihuang engaged Japanese positions along the Salween front, part of a grinding multi-year effort to reopen supply lines into China. Though less famous than Pacific island battles, this theater tied down substantial Japanese forces and sustained China's ability to keep fighting after the fall of coastal ports.
By 1943 the Burma Road, once China's vital overland supply artery, had been severed by Japanese forces for nearly two years, forcing the Allies to rely on perilous airlift flights over the Himalayas — the route flyers grimly nicknamed 'the Hump.' Chinese Expeditionary Force units, trained and equipped in part by American advisors under Joseph Stilwell, pushed along the Salween River front in a grinding campaign to reclaim the route.
The fighting here rarely made headlines outside Asia, overshadowed by the Pacific island campaigns and the European front, but it absorbed hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops that could otherwise have reinforced other fronts. Terrain was brutal: steep gorges, monsoon rains, and disease killed as many soldiers as combat did.
The campaign's slow, costly progress through 1943 and 1944 eventually helped reopen the Ledo Road and restore a ground supply line into China by early 1945. It remains one of the least-remembered major theaters of the Second World War in Western popular memory, despite involving well over a million combatants across its duration and being crucial to keeping China in the war against Japan.
Key people: Wei Lihuang