Thailand's Secret War: OSS, SOE, and the Free Thai Underground During World War II (review)

Much of the experience of Thailand during World War II remains obscure in the West, aside from the horrors of Japan's railroad across the north. Even in modern Thailand attitudes towards the war and Thailand's role in it remain ambivalent. Thailand sought to preserve its independence, as it had successfully done during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but this policy led the authoritarian-leaning premier, Field Marshal Phinbun Songkhram, to ally Thailand with Japan. The alliance allowed Japan to use Thai territory to attack the British colonies of the Malay States and Burma. As the war turned against Japan during 1942, Thais feared their own nation would be brought down with Japan.

Author Reynolds's earlier book, Japan in Thailand, looked at the complex relationship between the two nations during the war. In the current volume, he looks at the opposite side of Thailand's experience in the war. Thai leaders remaining loyal to Phinbun, as well as those working with the Allies, sought a course that would not result in postwar domination by either China or Britain—the Allies with the longest involvement in the region. Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) was hampered in its relations with the Free Siam movement, recruited from Thais living in the U.K., by London's insistence on punishing Thailand for siding with Japan. Following Thailand's declarations of war against the United States, Britain, and China, only Britain responded in kind. The U.S. was less burdened by history and ignored Thailand's alliance with Japan, giving the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) greater flexibility with its own Free Thai group. Britain planned to occupy Thailand and take control of the strategic Kra isthmus following the war, whereas both China and the U.S. pledged to respect Thailand's territorial integrity.

Reynolds has mined American archives, Thai memoirs, and for British involvement, newspapers and secondary sources, to reconstruct covert operations. He also conducted several interviews with Thai participants. Thailand's Secret War is engaging, well documented, and includes an especially thought-provoking epilogue. The book's strength is in its treatment of the internal workings of the American OSS Detachment 404, and the British SOE Force 136, and the sometimes difficult relationship between these two services. Reynolds is less successful with his treatment of the Thai underground. Although the Thai regent, Pridi Phanomyong, who became more prominent in Thailand after the ouster of Phinbun, plays a central role in the book, the thousands of Thais who trained in Thailand to oppose the Japanese remain largely faceless.

This study of the military relationship between Thailand and the Allies during World War II is especially timely because Thailand is an area where the United States largely succeeded politically. Although the Thai army can be criticized for a lack of commitment to civilian government after the war, Thailand largely avoided the fate of its neighbors, such as the repressive military government of Burma or the 1970s bloodbath in Cambodia. Since World War II Thailand has remained one of America's most dependable allies. Reynolds has produced a balanced and nuanced account of a backwater of the war where covert actions and inter-allied politics allowed Thailand to emerge from the war relatively untainted by its earlier association with Japan, and fulfill most American goals for postwar Thailand.