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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . f o r e w o r d ........................................................... Mark Parillo World War II ended sixty-five years ago, and yet more and more works on the subject are appearing in bookstores all the time, many of them personal memoirs such as the present volume. One is tempted to ask what is to be gained by spilling more ink and killing more trees to present such stories to the twenty-first-century reader. It is a fair question. A good part of the answer lies in the impact World War II has had on world history. Indeed, we are still dealing with the fallout. In 1945, much of Europe, master of the globe for centuries, lay in physical and economic tatters. From east and west the Soviets and Americans, linked in an uneasy alliance, swarmed across the continent to dominate the remains of ruined empires. The story of the erstwhile Allies’ falling out and their subsequent bitter, if mostly indirect, hostility forms the backbone of much of the rest of the history of the twentieth century. Yet it is to Asia that the war has bequeathed its most profound legacy. Japan, like its Axis partners, experienced a smashing defeat that brought with it tremendous loss of life and property, foreign occupation, and the scrapping of the old sociopolitical order. But it was Japan’s early victories rather than its ultimate defeat that irrevocably altered the face of East Asia. Japan’s appetite for markets and resources, an appetite that had been growing by leaps and bounds when the government began forcing the nation to industrialize in the late nineteenth century, touched off the war in Asia. Friction with the West, especially the United States, over Japan’s aggressive foreign policy measures, including outright war with China, to gain access to those markets and resources eventually prompted the Japanese to seize control of the resource areas themselves. The most vital resource of all was oil, a commodity in which the Japanese home islands were noticeably poor, while other areas, including most especially the Dutch colony in the East Indies, were remarkably rich. The attack on Pearl Harbor, spectacular though it was in military and psychological terms, was but the prelude to the real Japanese tide of victory. The raid was intended to remove the U.S. Pacific Fleet as a threat to the string of operations planned for the next six months, and in that regard it was an unqualified success. But it was only the opening act of the Japanese plan. The Japanese victories following the Pearl Harbor raid were enormous in their military and geographic scope. Amphibious forces waded ashore on the Malayan peninsula, and in six weeks they drove the numerically superior British and Indian forces back five hundred miles, until the Allies abandoned the mainland for the refuge of the supposedly impregnable island bastion of Singapore. The Japanese then crossed the Straits of Johore to Singapore itself and subdued the Allied forces there in a week’s time. Meanwhile, the Japanese mounted another major invasion in the Philippines . As an American colony working toward self-rule, the archipelago was defended by a joint U.S.-Filipino force. The Japanese soon overwhelmed the defenders, who withdrew to the rugged Bataan Peninsula on the northern island of Luzon to fight a valiant but ultimately doomed delaying action. The starving defenders capitulated in early April 1942, and a month later a daring Japanese assault captured the last American stronghold in the islands, the small but well-fortified island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. Having already occupied the French colony of Indochina, the Japanese cajoled neighboring Thailand into an uneasy alliance allowing the passage of troops. Three Japanese divisions moved through Thailand and over its thickly forested western mountains into Burma, another strategically located British colony. Again surprising their adversaries with the speed and tactical excellence of their operations, the Japanese swept over Burma, a land the size of Texas, in six months. They all but destroyed the hastily assembled hodgepodge of British, Indian, and Chinese forces that tried to halt them. The Burma Road, the Allies’ ‘‘back door’’ to China, was severed. And the Japanese, as one would expect, wasted little time in pursuing the great prize, the Dutch colony in the Indies. They swept down both coasts of rugged Borneo, took rubber-rich Sumatra with airborne and seaborne assaults, and overwhelmed a hastily assembled Allied naval force in the Battle of the Java Sea, paving the way...

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