Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War began on 7 July 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident near Beijing, a clash between Chinese and Japanese troops that rapidly escalated into a full-scale Japanese invasion of China, marked within the same year by the Battle of Shanghai and the fall of the Chinese capital, Nanjing, followed by the mass killing of Chinese civilians and prisoners known as the Nanjing Massacre. Japanese forces continued to advance through 1938, capturing the city of Wuhan, but by 1939 the war had settled into a costly stalemate, with Japan unable to defeat Chinese Communist forces in Shaanxi, who waged a sustained campaign of sabotage and guerrilla warfare, while China's Nationalist government relocated its capital to Chongqing to continue the fight from the interior. The conflict, already the largest war in Asia in the twentieth century, became fused with the wider Pacific theater of the Second World War after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States into direct support of China through the Lend-Lease Act, alongside British efforts to keep supply routes open through the Burma campaign. Japan's surrender on 2 September 1945 ended the war with a Chinese victory and the recovery of territory lost to Japan in earlier conflicts, and the war is widely regarded by historians as marking the true beginning of World War Two in Asia.