Fourteen years before Pearl Harbor, China was already fighting Japan alone. What the United States sent once it joined — a timeline, before the support record picks up where this leaves off.
Japan seized Manchuria in September 1931 and installed a puppet state there the following year. Full-scale war began on 7 July 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing. For more than four years afterward, China fought without a single foreign ally in the field.
Claire Chennault, a retired US Army Air Corps officer, organized the American Volunteer Group from serving US military pilots released to fly for China under contract. They flew their first combat mission in December 1941, defending Kunming and the Burma Road before the United States had formally entered the war.
Full account, and the reprisal that followed, is on the record.
Japan cut the Burma Road in spring 1942, closing China's last overland supply route. The US Army Air Forces' Air Transport Command answered by flying cargo over the eastern Himalayas from airfields in Assam to Kunming — a route so dangerous, with unmapped peaks and unpredictable updrafts, that aircrews simply called it the Hump. It ran for the rest of the war.
Full account is on the record.
The Cairo Conference brought Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek together for the only wartime summit China's government attended as a full partner. The declaration that followed committed the Allies to strip Japan of territory seized from China since 1894, including Manchuria and Taiwan.
China's war against Japan had run fourteen years by the time it ended — longer than any other Allied power's war, and longer than the war in Europe. It held more than a million Japanese troops on the Asian mainland who could not be sent to fight anywhere else.
14 years — from the Mukden Incident in 1931 to Japan's surrender in 1945.
What the United States kept sending after the surrender, and what it stopped sending, is its own case in the support record.