A photo exhibition in Moscow, Russia, commemorates the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War on July 24 (XINHUA) 

As the age-old saying goes, “History is written by the victors.” Few historical episodes illustrate this more clearly than World War II, a conflict that claimed tens of millions of lives across continents, yet is often viewed through a perspective largely established by the United States and its Western allies. 

In this prevailing account, the U.S. is often portrayed as entering the war in 1941 and single-handedly turning the tide against fascism. This narrative, burnished through Hollywood films, commemorations and political rhetoric, has become a foundational part of the historical understanding for many in the West.

However, this story can sometimes overshadow the immense sacrifices of other nations. A more comprehensive view must consider the complexities of the pre-war period and the ways in which the post-war geopolitical landscape influenced how this history was recorded and remembered.

During the Nanjing Massacre, a Japanese soldier stood amidst countless remains at a massacre site on the outskirts of Nanjing (FILE/XINHUA)

When did the war begin? 

In the American imagination, World War II began with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared it a “date which will live in infamy,” and so it has, etched into U.S. cultural memory as the moment the world’s fate hung in the balance until America answered the call.

But this framing ignores the lived experience of millions for whom the war began far earlier. In China, the conflict started in 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria, setting off a brutal occupation that would last 14 years. By 1937, full-scale war had erupted between China and Japan, a conflict marked by atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre and devastating civilian casualties. By the time the U.S. entered the war, Chinese cities had been bombed, entire provinces occupied, and tens of millions displaced or dead.

Likewise, in Europe, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of Hitler’s war machine long before the Normandy landings. From the siege of Leningrad to the Battle of Stalingrad, the Eastern Front consumed Nazi resources on a scale unimaginable in the West. The Soviet Union lost an estimated 26 million lives between 1941 and 1945, compared to roughly 400,000 American deaths over that same time period. China’s death toll was at least 35 million. Together, these two nations paid the highest human price for defeating fascism.

Southeast Asia and colonial subjects 

If China and the Soviet Union have been pushed to the margins of Western memory, Southeast Asia barely features at all. Yet the region became one of the most brutal theaters of the Pacific War. From the Philippines to Burma, from Malaya to the Dutch East Indies, millions of Asians endured invasion, massacres, forced labor and famine.

Consider the fall of Singapore in February 1942, often described as Britain’s “greatest military disaster.” When Japanese forces swept down the Malay Peninsula, the British Empire, long presented as an unshakable guardian of Asia, crumbled with stunning speed. Colonial troops, many of them Indian and Malayan, fought valiantly but were under-resourced and poorly led. British forces capitulated, abandoning civilians and leaving entire colonies exposed to Japanese occupation.

The same story unfolded across the region. In Burma, tens of thousands of Indian laborers and Burmese villagers died during the retreat of the British army through the jungle. In the Dutch East Indies, Japanese occupation led to famine and forced labor, with hundreds of thousands conscripted as romusha--slave laborers for Japan’s war effort. Across the region, women were coerced into sexual slavery as “comfort women.”

These were not peripheral tragedies. They shaped the political map of post-war Asia. The collapse of European colonial power in the face of Japanese invasion shattered the myth of white invincibility and ignited independence movements across Southeast Asia. Yet Western narratives rarely acknowledge this dimension. Instead, they frame the Pacific War as an American epic--Pearl Harbor, Midway and Iwo Jima--erasing the lived experience of colonized peoples whose lands were battlefields and whose bodies bore the heaviest suffering.

America's inconvenient past 

This selective storytelling also masks some uncomfortable truths about U.S. behavior in the 1930s. Far from opposing fascism from the outset, many in the American political and business elite viewed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as potential bulwarks against communism. U.S. corporations, including Ford, IBM, Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, Associated Press, Kodak and Coca Cola, maintained profitable ties with Germany well into the late 1930s.

Even as Japan waged an expansionist war in China, the United States remained its largest supplier of strategic materials. In the late 1930s, American exports provided Japan with vital scrap metal, iron and petroleum, the very lifeblood of its war machine. The embargo that eventually cut off these supplies only came in mid-1941, mere months before Pearl Harbor.

Nor were ideological sympathies absent. Prominent American figures openly admired aspects of Hitler’s regime in the 1930s, viewing it as an effective model of national revival. This is not to suggest that the U.S. government embraced fascism wholesale, but the notion that America stood as an unwavering moral opponent from the beginning is pure myth.

Why the narrative matters 

Why does this matter today? Because the way we remember World War II is not neutral. It has always been political. After 1945, the United States emerged as the preeminent global power. Europe lay in ruins, colonial empires were crumbling, and the Soviet Union, though victorious, was framed as the new existential threat.

In this context, an American-centric narrative of World War II served two critical purposes. First, it legitimized U.S. global leadership by casting America as the benevolent liberator, the savior of civilization from barbarism. Second, it provided the West with a moral alibi at a time when colonialism’s atrocities were increasingly indefensible. Instead of being remembered as exploiters of Asia and Africa, Western powers could drape themselves in the mantle of wartime heroism.

Hollywood became the cultural engine of this narrative. From The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, popular culture enshrined D-Day as the ultimate turning point of the war. The message was clear: Freedom triumphed because of American courage and sacrifice.

The silence of others 

In elevating this narrative, the voices and experiences of others have been silenced or smothered. China’s 14-year struggle against Japanese aggression is barely acknowledged in the Western canon. The Soviet sacrifice, though grudgingly recognized, is often overshadowed by Cold War antagonisms that recast the USSR as villain rather than victor.

And what of Southeast Asia? The millions who endured the horrors of occupation, the collapse of colonial regimes and the false promises of “liberation” remain absent from Western memory. Their sacrifices were doubly erased, first by colonial powers that abandoned them, and then by the victors’ narrative that cast the Pacific War as an American drama.

None of this is to deny the bravery or suffering of American and Western European soldiers and civilians. Their sacrifices were real and significant. But the moral arithmetic of the war--who bore the heaviest burden, who paid the highest price--cannot be understood through a Hollywood lens.

As we move further into the 21st century, it is time to confront the distortions of memory that have long underpinned Western hegemony. World War II was not a Western epic with America as its protagonist; it was a truly global cataclysm, fought across continents by diverse peoples whose sacrifices demand recognition. Until we acknowledge that truth, we remain trapped in a story that serves power rather than history, a story where victors write the script, and everyone else fades to black.

The author is an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and a senior fellow at Taihe Institute, China  

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon  

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