Between 1936 and 1939, German advisors helped retrain, reequip and prepare part of the National Revolutionary Army, the military arm of the KMT and Chiang Kai Shek. The Japanese invasion in 1937 cut short two projects. 1) the final elimination of the CCP, which had been driven to near extinction by the last NRA offensive and the 2) the continued building of a 50 division central force under Chiang. This was because while the NRA was the core, the majority of forces were made up of allied warlord armies which the NRA couldn't defeat and the assimilated armies of defeated warlords. This meant that across the NRA, there were different divisional organizations, training and standards, weapons and leadership. The 87th and 88th Divisions were re-equipped along German lines, with German and Czech weapons and equipment. Unfortunately, the 87th and 88th were gutted during the Battle of Shanghai and from acting as the rearguard during the retreat to Nanjing. After 1937, there were few troops still uniformed and equipped to the German standard. The Japanese equated a Chinese division to an IJA regiment, a corps to an IJA division. It wasn't until 1942 that with Chinese troops being trained in India and re-armed by the US and Britain, that units capable of defeating the IJA on a closer to 1:1 basis were created. In late 1944, the reorganized, trained and led Chinese divisions in India covered Slim's northern flank in Burma and with the US troops reopened the Burma Road, whereupon US advisors began training and equipping twenty more divisions for the recovery of southern and central China and its coastal cities from the IJA and the collaborationist troops.
