Programs & Events

Consul General Gave Speech at Shenyang Consulate WWII memorial ceremony

CG gave Certificates of Appreciation to Li Lishui.

It is a privilege today to represent the U.S. government in honoring the courage of the Allies 60 years ago in bringing to an end the most terrible war the world has ever known. American, Chinese, and Russian forces endured terrible suffering and terrible losses to free the nations of East Asia from a terrible occupation.

Almost sixty-four years ago, two fascist powers, imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, declared war within days of each other on a United States that had wanted never to go to war again. Japan made its declaration in the most unmistakable way possible, with the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that killed more Americans than any other attack on American soil until 9-11. America was far from the first, however, to suffer Japanese attack; China had been under assault followed by an expanding occupation since 1931, and the Japanese had already invaded Indochina at the time of Pearl Harbor. The October 1941 coup of Japanese war-party leader Tojo Hideki had set Japan unalterably on a collision course with the rest of the Pacific nations.

December 1941 was the beginning of a grim period for the peoples of East Asia. Shanghai, Manila, Singapore, Java, Burma, and the Philippines fell in quick succession to well-planned Japanese campaigns. The Soviet Union was suffering its own horrific occupation, which had begun when the Soviets’ supposed ally, Germany, launched its invasion of western Russia and the Ukraine in June 1941. The Netherlands and large parts of northern France were also under Nazi occupation by the end of 1941, and Great Britain faced the threat of imminent invasion as well. Of all the major Pacific powers, only the United States could rally major forces to oppose the Japanese onslaught at this time.

The noted 20th-century military historian Basil Liddell Hart sums up the situation of the Pacific theater at the end of 1941 in the following words: “On the map there appeared to be numerous alternatives [for any countermove towards Japan that the Western allies attempted] but in closer analysis these were few. The north Pacific route was ruled out by the lack of bases….A counter-offensive from Soviet Russia’s position in the Far East was annulled…as long as Russia was hard-pressed by the German attack on her western flank. An Allied countermove through China was made impossible by the difficulties of supply…The still more distant route of return through Burma was nullified by the extent to which the British had been driven back…and their all too evident lack of resources….Thus it soon became clear that any effective counteroffensive must depend on the Americans.”

In the months and years that followed, the United States was the first to reverse Japan’s military advance, in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, when American carriers engaged and blocked a Japanese invasion force headed for Port Moresby on New Guinea. On June 3, 1942, the U.S. Navy defeated another Japanese invasion force headed for Midway Island, an engagement in which Japan lost four of its aircraft carriers and the flower of its Air Force. American forces destroyed to more Japanese battleships and many smaller Japanese craft in August 1942 when we launched the first Allied offensive against Japan with the landing of U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal.

The Japanese fought back with tremendous tenacity. In Nov. 1943, American troops suffered losses of 1000 troops at Tarawa Atoll when the Japanese 5000-man garrison refused to surrender until all but 17 of them had been killed. It became clear that the Japanese no-surrender policy could only result in horrific casualties on both sides. As American strategy shifted to the so-called island-hopping in the central Pacific, many Japanese strongholds were effectively skipped and cut off from resupply rather than attacked directly. With the American capture of the Marianas from Japanese forces in Nov. 1944, it became possible to launch Allied bombing raids on Japan itself with the new American B-29s bombers. Between March and August, 1945, the incendiary bombs dropped by American B-29s destroyed over 600 major Japanese war factories, at a cost of tens of thousands of Japanese killed and several million left homeless. But Japan’s no-surrender policy remained in force; in April and May, 1945, as our forces retook Okinawa, we lost 12,520 dead or missing, more than a quarter of the total of 41,322 American combat deaths in the Pacific war, while over 110,000 Japanese troops were killed. In the end, it took the dropping of the first atomic bombs, and the Soviet August Storm campaign in Manchuria at a cost of 12,000 Russian lives, to force Japan’s surrender and the end of the Pacific war.

It is often forgotten today how strong Chinese-American ties were in the early years of the twentieth century. American universities, physicians’ groups, and philanthropists like the Rockefellers contributed much to the establishment of China’s modern universities and medical schools. Americans did business in China, read and even wrote books about it, and respected the tenacity of the Chinese people in the face of almost unimaginable hardship. It was their American allies who saw to it that China was included in the Yalta agreements. The distinguished American historian of World War II, Herbert Feis, sums up: “Our full induction into this last World War followed our refusal to let China fend for itself. We had rejected all proposals which would have allowed Japan to remain in China and Manchuria….Japan had struck – rather than accept frustration. The American people, in a war which they had not sought, had full right to feel that they had been not only true to their ideals but most faithful defenders of the people of China.” (‘The China Tangle,’ 1953, Chapter 1).

Chinese-American cooperation in defense of liberty has a proud history to live up to. The modern world demands no less from us. May we as the descendants and the beneficiaries of the heroes of World War II dedicate ourselves to achieving this goal.