I agree. If Chiang got that much L-L aid and support, there might have been enough weight to do counter-offensives in 1943.
While some of this has the ring of truth, be very careful about what you "know" about Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists from books written 1945-1990. There is a lot of mythology out there. There has been a lot of scholarship recently that has exposed a lot of this mythology for what it is.
HOWEVER, (ahem) IIRC though, the issue wasn't so much materiel as political reliability vs competence in the KMT forces after CKS purged the leftist wing of KMT officers and partisans in the late 1930's and thus gutted the morale and effectiveness of his army.
This is wrong. There was no purge in the late 1930s although there was one in 1926-1928. The Whampoa officer corps after that was still highly trained and very loyal to Chiang and the Nationalists. What destroyed the effectiveness of the army was that Chiang lost most of the pre-war officer corps and his elite "German trained" divisions in the Battles of Shanghai and Nanking. After that, Chiang was heavily dependent on warlord forces that had only dubious loyalty to Chiang or the ROC.
I'm going off of impressions of long-forgotten articles and books about the Chinese Civil War but CKS couldn't care less how effective his army was as long as it was loyal to him. He tolerated warlords that needed to stretch a rope or get with the program IMO, but according to Chinese politics, what he did made perfect sense as he was playing long ball against the Communists and Japanese to do all the threatening for him.
Your facts are partially right. Chiang did indeed value loyalty over competence, but there was a reason for this. Loyal officers were the ones who actually followed orders. The other ones, no matter how talented, didn't follow orders. So they didn't attack the Japanese, or were known to retreat without warning, or do any number of things with the intention to avoid combat with the Japanese so that their own forces would continue to survive and preserve their power base. Chiang was forced to deal with this situation, and it is perfectly understandable why Chiang did was he did. Why give a competent enemy control of your forces if all he is going to do is sabotage the war effort? The only problem you can really blame Chiang for are situations where he had good, loyal generals, but which he unfairly suspected as being disloyal.
Of course, you can ask why he tolerated warlords at all, and the answer is that without them, he lost most of his army. There was a very real possibility that some of them might not only not fight at all, but could defect to the Japanese. Internal politics were that bad. In retrospect, Chiang probably could have made several moves that would secured more loyalty and eliminate some of the worst generals while still keeping things safe, but it would be making a great deal of risk given the times.
The various US military and State missions despaired of how moribund, corrupt and incompetent the KMT forces were at the highest levels.
This is true, although it's worth pointing out that much of the dysfunctionality of the US military mission in China is due to Joseph Stilwell who acted terribly in his role. The man was doltish in many ways. He spent more time absorbed in ridiculous coup plotting against Chiang and politics than actually doing his job. Sending him to China was a major mistake. Things improved incredibly after Stilwell was replaced by Wedemeyer who somehow managed to make things work where Stilwell couldn't despite internal Chinese politics still being a complete mess.
Your KMT platoon through battalion leaders were actually pretty good, but they were constantly being extorted for bribes just to get supplies and anyone who dealt with the ARVN twenty years later would have had horrible deja vu whammies of how the KMT operated.
This is true too. In order to keep the warlords loyal, Chiang more or less gave the supplies and salaries of soldiers directly to the warlords, who kept most of it, letting their troops starve or be without supplies. Chiang should have instituted a centralized payment system and supply network. It would have eliminated most corruption immediately. Chiang even knew he had to do this, but kept putting it off thinking he had time to deal with internal enemies in the KMT after the Japanese and Communists were defeated. He didn't. Biggest mistake of his life. After fleeing to Taiwan, it was practically the first thing he did.
Long story shorter, pretty much everyone from Lord Mountbatten on down in theater considered CKS a total waste of resources except they wanted to do something to keep the Chinese somewhat in the game against Japan.
Well, if Chiang ever got resources, they might have had a point. After the Burma Road was cut off, China was almost totally isolated. It received virtually no aid until 1945. What supplies were sent over the Hump went towards the American air force in China rather than the ROC Army. What aid it did receive - notably loans and credits - only fueled inflation because there was nothing more it could buy. The fact is China was totally on its own, and after fighting the Japanese by itself for 4 years could not do a lot more. The British were exceptionally selfish and arrogant jerks who botched the defense of Burma, and had no interest in helping China at all because of their imperial views. The China-Burma-India theatre was certainly the least important of all Allied theatres in the war, and probably would have been even if the Burma Road was open. Nevertheless, a lot more could have been done had the Road remained open and aid actually rendered.
If you want a railroad, maybe one from Bombay or Bandar Abbas to Soviet Central Asia then through Chinese Turkestan would've been more viable than trying to hack through the Himalayas and rainforest from Burma to Yunnan.
It's not as goofy as the Friesland D-Day nightmare as far as wasting time, $, and energy so hundreds of thousands of Allied troops are sitting ducks on coastal barrier islands, but it'd be a mighty engineering challenge plus the USSR'd have to be really secure about its southern flank which strikes me as ASB after Barbarossa and Khalkin Gol.
What could go wrong building a railroad that could carry hundreds of thousands of troops, megatons of supplies, probably also have pipelines and power lines alongside it?
Could that be an invasion route with a fully capable port at one end of it out of range of Soviet aircraft and artillery? Nahhh!
You need to check the map again. A railroad from Burma to Yunnan does not go through the Himalayas. It would go through the Hengduan Mountains just as the Burma Road did.
The
Yunnan-Burma Railroad was being built and was due to be completed by late 1942 or 1943. And of course, the Ledo Road was completed in our timeline under similar terrain and under worse conditions. If the French could build a railway between Hanoi and Kunming 30 years earlier, certainly the British could build this.