Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (review)

This outstandingly readable book is a self-assured and persuasive account of the fate of British South and Southeast Asia during the Second World War. Recent works like Ong Chit Chung's Operation Matador: Britain's War Plans against the Japanese (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1997), on Britain's attempt to foil the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore, Colin Smith's Singapore Burning: Heroism and Surrender in World War II (London: Viking, 2005), Jon Latimer's Burma: The Forgotten War (London: John Murray, 2005), and Julian Thompson's The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Burma (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2005) have taken on aspects of the war in British Asia. Forgotten Armies tackles a much broader canvas.

The historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper of Cambridge University have eschewed the desiccated style of conventional political or military histories. Their book is a fascinating and panoramic account of how individual lives and social relations changed from the heyday of the colonial patchwork in British Asia to the rise and fall of Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Using a wide range of official source material, from the Oriental and India Office Collection in the British Library to the National Archives of Singapore, the authors also mine the diaries, letters, memoirs, and novels written by the men and women on the ground in India, Malaya, and Burma. The latter group of sources often provide a telling anecdote or relevant phrase "to make sense of the divergent fortunes of different communities and of the infinite textures of personal experience" (p. 329). Above all, the authors have achievd the difficult task of writing a history in short, pithy sentences that combines the personal stories of those swept along by unexpected and catastrophic events (e.g., the successful Japanese invasion of most of colonial Southeast Asia in 1941–1942) without losing sight of the broader strategic aims of the British, American, and Japanese high commands.

Who are the forgotten armies of the book's title? They certainly include Britain's 14th Army led by General Sir William Slim that eventually triumphed in Burma; the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose that fought alongside the Japanese to liberate India; the Burma Independence Army (later the pro-Allied Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League) of nationalist Aung San, the father of today's courageous Burmese democracy activist, Aung San Suu Kyi; the largely Chinese Communist Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) led by Chin Peng; and even the huge forces thrown by the Japanese against India in 1942. Accordingly, this book spans a huge territory from India to Malaya, the heart of the British Empire in the East, focusing primarily on the connected crescent of land between Calcutta and Singapore that was the pivot of the fighting. As the authors remind us, by the summer of 1941, when both Britain and the Soviet Union were distracted by the war against Germany, the Japanese had to break out of what they called "the ABCD encirclement." The initials referred to America, Britain, China, and the Dutch East Indies. In building an even bigger empire in Asia, Japan's military leaders planned to finish off the Nationalist Chinese and seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies, along with the mineral resources and rubber of French Indo-China and British Malaya.

Yet this "collapsing house of cards" was to lead to much more than a war between the British, Americans, and Japanese. It would also see a series of bloody civil wars among the Indians, Burmese, and Malayans, the consequences of which reverberated into the postwar world. In Burma alone, the Allies had somehow to mobilize the resistance of the various hill tribes in the north, most of whom were hostile to the majority Burmese who in turn disliked their Indian and Chinese populations. All of them, however, were increasingly united against the brutal Japanese occupation. The collaborationist Burmese...