I don’t know if the estimate was accurate or confirmed, but at one point Chiang Kai-Shek wrote to FDR saying that after the Doolittle Raiders were sheltered in China, the Japanese swept through in their wake and killed a quarter of a million Chinese. Entire villages were razed when single people were found with Raider uniform patches or even American dimes.
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"Chiang did not exaggerate. In describing the campaign of retaliation in his memoirs, Gen. Claire Chennault recalled that Japanese forces drove two hundred miles into East China to wreak revenge. Twenty-thousand square miles of Chinese territory were searched; landing fields were plowed up; hundreds of villagers were murdered if there was the remotest suspicion that they had seen or aided the Americans. Chennault reported that entire villages the raiders had passed through were burned to the ground and every inhabitant murdered on the spot. 'One sizable city was razed for no other reason than the sentiment displayed by its citizens in filling up Jap bomb craters on the nearby airfields,' he wrote. 'A quarter million Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed in the three-month campaign.'"
Carroll V. Glines, The Doolittle Raid
The Chinese paid a heavy price for our propaganda victory.