(This takes approximately four minutes to read.)

Quoting Barak Kushner’s Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice, pages 189–191:

In fact, at the early part of 1949 memory of the war against the [Axis] seems to have been quickly replaced in the minds of high-level KMT staff with conflict against the Chinese Communists. In conversations between Okamura and KMT General He Shili, when the topic turned to World War II, He remarked, “Let’s just let bygones be bygones.” Many KMT military officials wished to focus on the military crisis of the moment: the Nationalists' desire to fight the [Communist Party of China] and retake the mainland.²⁰

To this end KMT Major General Cao Shicheng led several other members of the Republic of China diplomatic mission to Japan and approached Okamura and several other high-ranking former [Axis] army officers in July 1949 to start up a group of Japanese officers to assist the Nationalists against the [Communist Party of China].

Major General Cao and his men brought a message from Chiang Kai-shek to the effect that the civil war was not going well for the KMT. Nationalist military and political leaders were planning on retreating to Taiwan and reorganizing for a future assault on the mainland.

While regrouping to retake mainland China, Chiang requested the help of old former [Axis] military “colleagues,” those Japanese who had trained and studied with their Chinese fellow students at prewar Japanese military schools.²¹

Several former members of the White Group claimed that Okamura’s release from a serious war crimes trial in China was a quid pro quo for promising such a team to Chiang in return for his freedom and repatriation. Whatever the exact circumstances, the result was that four former [Axis] officers, General Okamura Yasuji, Lieutenant Colonel Ogasawara Kiyoshi, Lieutenant General Sumita Raishirō and Lieutenant General Sogawa Jirō, banded together and sought out other former [Axis] officers to staff the White Group.

Japanese participants adopted Chinese aliases to throw the American occupation authorities off the scent. The group took its moniker from the surname of its first leader, former [Axis] army Major General Tomita Naosuke, whose Chinese alias was “Bai Hongliang.”

The Chinese word for “white” is bai and “group” is tuan, so the group was called baituan. In various conversions from Chinese to Japanese it was also known as paidan and similar corruptions. The other reason the White Group was chosen as the nom de guerre for the group was because white stood in opposition to the red color of Communism.²²

The goal of the baituan was to retrain and help the KMT army regroup for a later extensive assault on the mainland. Records suggest that this arrangement supplied the KMT with acutely needed military expertise and offered […] former [Axis] soldiers an income in penurious times.

Just as many may have joined out of ideological passion, other former [Axis] officers also reasoned that they were keeping former colonial lands out of the hands of the Communists, which had been a supposed goal of Japan’s imperial policy.

The White Group established military education classes, and training was conducted near Beitou, just north of Taipei city and the site of a colonial-era Japanese hot springs resort. Chiang Kai-shek came by frequently to observe, and sometimes so did his son, future leader of Taiwan Chiang Chingkuo (Jiang Jingguo). Japanese recollections of their own activities suggest that U.S. military advisors either did not see that there were Japanese using Chinese aliases or were unaware, even though they came into contact with each other in Taiwan.

Japanese participants at the time strongly believed that during battles over Jinmen (Quemoy) Island (a small island sandwiched between the Chinese mainland coast and Taiwan but within visual distance of the mainland) the KMT destroyed two [Communist] military divisions precisely due to Japanese retraining.²³ Chinese sources remain relatively mute on the issue, while CIA records imply that most of the Japanese efforts held little value.

Similar groups that were funded directly through Major General Charles Willoughby’s team within the American occupation forces in Japan failed to deliver on intelligence gathering, and the efforts of Japanese former military men often amounted to veiled thievery.

Moreover, “from the U.S. perspective, results of the Taiwan operations were not much better,” especially concerning military efforts to retake the mainland.²⁴ One reason behind Japanese participants’ high estimation of their activities was that former [Axis] soldiers were very pleased with their postwar “special relationship” with Nationalist Taiwan because it supposedly verified that what Japan had fought for during World War II was not lost.

Chiang Kai-shek’s aims were oriented to his own advantage, and it is doubtful that he saw Japan’s imperial goals in the same manner. Consequently, this intersection of postwar Sino-Japanese interests and the overlap with treatment of former [Axis] high-ranking officers shed new light on a story normally expressed in much more black-and-white terms.

The story of the White Group enhances our understanding of an area of Sino-Japanese convergence, where the employment of former [Axis] soldiers intersected with Chinese foreign policy objectives. Although this discussion is obscured in most standard KMT and [Communist] histories of the era, the episode remains important in its depiction of the rapprochement between the Chinese Nationalists and Japan in pursuit of a common enemy: the [Communists].

As opposed to the American postwar impression of Japan as a vanquished and debased nation, the conquered Japanese military was now being recruited by the very Chinese Nationalist forces that supposedly defeated it. What did this mean?

Chinese Nationalist leaders were nothing if not practical. They did not devalue the defeated [Imperial] military but, instead, saw Japan’s potential as a military ally against the Communist threat. Historian Zhang Hongbo suggests that unlike Japanese officers and leaders in areas where the United States or other Western nations took over postwar management, in mainland China Japanese military leaders were often treated well and maintained longer relations with the groups to which they were supposedly surrendering.²⁵

In essence, in the China sphere Japan lost the war but rode out the peace because surrender did not end its relations with the Chinese. The White Group is an example of this wartime-to-postwar continuity.²⁶ In fact, the relationship of the Japanese military to the KMT was eminently consistent in the continuation of their mutual stance against Communism.²⁷

(Emphasis added. Men to Devils, Devils to Men goes on for umpteen more pages about the Chinese anticommunists’ relations with former Axis personnel, which I am omitting for the sake of brevity.)

See also: ‘Korea, China, and the United States: A Look Back’