Aaltonen, Kullervo Tavno, TSgt

Fallen

Service Photo

Service Details

Last Rank
Technical Sergeant

Primary Unit
1943-1943, AAF MOS 737, 6th Transportation Squadron

Service Years
1940 - 1943

Last Photo

Personal Details

Home State

Michigan

Year of Birth
1912

This Military Service Page was created/owned by SSgt Robert Bruce McClelland, Jr. to remember Aaltonen, Kullervo Tavno, TSgt.

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Casualty Info

Home Town Negaunee, MI; also lived in MA & DC	Last Address Mohanbari, Assam, India

Casualty Date Aug 07, 1943
Cause Non Hostile- Died while Missing	Reason Air Loss, Crash - Land
Location India	Conflict World War II
Location of Interment Manila American Cemetery and Memorial - Manila, Philippines	Wall/Plot Coordinates Walls of the Missing

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	1943, World War II Fallen 1

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World War II/China-India-Burma Theater/China Defensive Campaign (1942-45)
From Month/Year July / 1942	To Month/Year May / 1945
Description (China Defensive Campaign 4 July 1942 to 4 May 1945) The China Theater of Operations more resembled the Soviet-German war on the Eastern Front than the war in the Pacific or the war in Western Europe. On the Asian continent, as on the Eastern Front, an Allied partner, China, carried the brunt of the fighting. China had been at war with Japan since 1937 and continued the fight until the Japanese surrender in 1945. The United States advised and supported China's ground war, while basing only a few of its own units in China for operations against Japanese forces in the region and Japan itself. The primary American goal was to keep the Chinese actively in the Allied war camp, thereby tying down Japanese forces that otherwise might be deployed against the Allies fighting in the Pacific. The United States confronted two fundamental challenges in the China theater. The first challenge was political. Despite facing a common foe in Japan, Chinese society was polarized. Some Chinese were supporters of the Nationalist Kuomintang government; some supported one of the numerous former warlords nominally loyal to the Nationalists; and some supported the Communists, who were engaged in a guerrilla war against the military and political forces of the Nationalists. Continuing tensions, which sometimes broke out into pitched battles, precluded development of a truly unified Chinese war effort against the Japanese. The second challenge in the China theater was logistical. Fighting a two-front war of its own, simultaneously having to supply other Allies, and facing enormous distances involved in moving anything from the United States to China, the U.S. military could not sustain the logistics effort required to build a modern Chinese army. Without sufficient arms, ammunition, and equipment, let alone doctrine and leadership training, the Chinese Nationalist Army was incapable of driving out the Japanese invaders. A "Europe-first" U.S. policy automatically lowered the priority of China for U.S.-manufactured arms behind the needs of U.S. forces, of other European Allies, and of the Soviet Union. The China theater was also the most remote from the United States. American supplies and equipment had to endure long sea passages to India for transshipment to China, primarily by airlift. But transports bringing supplies to China had to fly over the Himalayas the so-called Hump, whose treacherous air currents and rugged Page 4 mountains claimed the lives of many American air crews. Despite a backbreaking effort, only a fraction of the supplies necessary to successfully wage a war ever reached southern China. Regardless of these handicaps, the United States and Nationalist China succeeded in forging a coalition that withstood the tests of time. Indeed, Chinese leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the Allied Supreme Commander, China Theater, accepted, though reluctantly, U.S. Army generals as his chiefs of staff. This command relationship also endured differences in national war aims and cultures, as well as personalities, until the end of the war. The original policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall succeeded, China stayed in the war and prevented sizable numbers of Japanese troops from deploying to the Pacific.