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Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945
In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.
616 pages, Hardcover
First published September 30, 2004
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About the author
C.A. Bayly
34 books36 followersChristopher Alan Bayly was a British historian specializing in British Imperial, Indian, and global history. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. He was knighted in 2007 for achievements as a historian.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
October 25, 2015
A superb but terrifying book
This can be fairly described as a “terrifying” book because it tells, in often horrific detail, what can happen to entire nations when they prove unwilling or incapable of recognising threats and challenges and do not have the institutions in place to deal with them. The focus is on the British colonies of Malaya (now the peninsular portion of Malaysia), Singapore and Burma, and on the eastern provinces of India – Bengal, Assam and what is now Bangladesh . The title is significant as the “Armies” referred to are not alone the formal military forces of Britain and Japan (and of the United States and China as they relate to the Burmese campaigns) but also the innumerable informal and ad-hoc groups that appeared after the conquest of the area by the Japanese. Such groups, whether nationalist, communist or pure-opportunist, had to face the dilemma of whether to collaborate with the Japanese, to oppose them actively, or to adopt a neutral stance. In some cases, as the war progressed, such groups adopted each one of these stances at some stage. The book opens with a survey of these countries in the 1930s and one is struck – indeed depressed – by the extent that the colonial administrations were operating “on auto-pilot”. Much of the British governing class seemed to have been stuck in a comfortable time warp, with a world view more attuned to forty years earlier and with little vision – and probably less interest – about what the future might bring. This future had two components – the almost wholly ignored threat represented by Japan, and the rise of nationalist groups with a wide range of political persuasions. The response was that of the ostrich. Defence-thinking was inadequate and the possibility was ignored of these territories being all but indefensible in the event of a future war in which Britain would be fighting for its life closer to home. “Mediocre” and “complacent” would be over-generous descriptions of much of the colonial administration, its personnel in many cases being less intelligent and less dynamic than many of the people they ruled and often despised. When the collapse came in late 1941 and early 1942 it was for the civilian no less than the military populations one of apocalyptic horror. Administration broke down quickly under merciless Japanese attack – the events in Penang were described by one survivor as “H.G.Wells’s War of the Worlds brought to life” – and many with governing responsibilities were focussed on personal survival to the point of unashamed cowardice. The account in this book of the vast migration on food of tens of thousands of refugees from Burma to India is harrowing in the extreme, all the more so as the greatest privations were suffered by the very poorest class of Indian labourers and their families. Life under Japanese occupation continued the nightmare – the sections in the book dealing with the treatment of the Chinese community in Singapore make especially upsetting reading – and even those groups which tried to find an accommodation with the Japanese found that it was impossible. The courage of thousands of unknown people of all races was the only counter to barbarism and cruelty on a vast scale but the price paid was a very high one. The British resurgence and the re-conquest of Burma in 1944-45 obviously represents a major thread in the story, as does the role of the Indian Army and the almost insane heroism of the hill peoples of Northern Burma and Assam. A parallel story – and a very distasteful one – is however the role of the “Indian National Army”, recruited from prisoners taken by the Japanese and fighting actively for them. Even more distasteful if the role played by Gandhi and his supporters who in 1942 who tried to sabotage efforts to stem the Japanese advance towards the frontiers of India. By the end of the whole sorry story, in which few British leaders – other than Slim, Wavell and Mountbatten – come out of it with any credit, one is left with an impression of a creaking structure that was doomed to disaster because of lack of vision and of any sense of realism.
The most telling quote in the whole book is from the writer and diplomat Harold Nicholson in 1942: “It is not merely the immediate dangers that threaten us… It is the dread that we are only half-hearted in fighting the whole-hearted. It is even more than that. We intellectuals must feel that in all these years we have derided the principles of force on which our Empire is built. We undermined confidence in our own formula…. The intellectuals of 1780 did the same.”
The applicability of these words to our own time needs no emphasis. This chilling book details the price of such unwillingness to recognise threat. I recommend to anybody interested not only in the Second World War but in the evolution of the world we now live in.
This can be fairly described as a “terrifying” book because it tells, in often horrific detail, what can happen to entire nations when they prove unwilling or incapable of recognising threats and challenges and do not have the institutions in place to deal with them. The focus is on the British colonies of Malaya (now the peninsular portion of Malaysia), Singapore and Burma, and on the eastern provinces of India – Bengal, Assam and what is now Bangladesh . The title is significant as the “Armies” referred to are not alone the formal military forces of Britain and Japan (and of the United States and China as they relate to the Burmese campaigns) but also the innumerable informal and ad-hoc groups that appeared after the conquest of the area by the Japanese. Such groups, whether nationalist, communist or pure-opportunist, had to face the dilemma of whether to collaborate with the Japanese, to oppose them actively, or to adopt a neutral stance. In some cases, as the war progressed, such groups adopted each one of these stances at some stage. The book opens with a survey of these countries in the 1930s and one is struck – indeed depressed – by the extent that the colonial administrations were operating “on auto-pilot”. Much of the British governing class seemed to have been stuck in a comfortable time warp, with a world view more attuned to forty years earlier and with little vision – and probably less interest – about what the future might bring. This future had two components – the almost wholly ignored threat represented by Japan, and the rise of nationalist groups with a wide range of political persuasions. The response was that of the ostrich. Defence-thinking was inadequate and the possibility was ignored of these territories being all but indefensible in the event of a future war in which Britain would be fighting for its life closer to home. “Mediocre” and “complacent” would be over-generous descriptions of much of the colonial administration, its personnel in many cases being less intelligent and less dynamic than many of the people they ruled and often despised. When the collapse came in late 1941 and early 1942 it was for the civilian no less than the military populations one of apocalyptic horror. Administration broke down quickly under merciless Japanese attack – the events in Penang were described by one survivor as “H.G.Wells’s War of the Worlds brought to life” – and many with governing responsibilities were focussed on personal survival to the point of unashamed cowardice. The account in this book of the vast migration on food of tens of thousands of refugees from Burma to India is harrowing in the extreme, all the more so as the greatest privations were suffered by the very poorest class of Indian labourers and their families. Life under Japanese occupation continued the nightmare – the sections in the book dealing with the treatment of the Chinese community in Singapore make especially upsetting reading – and even those groups which tried to find an accommodation with the Japanese found that it was impossible. The courage of thousands of unknown people of all races was the only counter to barbarism and cruelty on a vast scale but the price paid was a very high one. The British resurgence and the re-conquest of Burma in 1944-45 obviously represents a major thread in the story, as does the role of the Indian Army and the almost insane heroism of the hill peoples of Northern Burma and Assam. A parallel story – and a very distasteful one – is however the role of the “Indian National Army”, recruited from prisoners taken by the Japanese and fighting actively for them. Even more distasteful if the role played by Gandhi and his supporters who in 1942 who tried to sabotage efforts to stem the Japanese advance towards the frontiers of India. By the end of the whole sorry story, in which few British leaders – other than Slim, Wavell and Mountbatten – come out of it with any credit, one is left with an impression of a creaking structure that was doomed to disaster because of lack of vision and of any sense of realism.
The most telling quote in the whole book is from the writer and diplomat Harold Nicholson in 1942: “It is not merely the immediate dangers that threaten us… It is the dread that we are only half-hearted in fighting the whole-hearted. It is even more than that. We intellectuals must feel that in all these years we have derided the principles of force on which our Empire is built. We undermined confidence in our own formula…. The intellectuals of 1780 did the same.”
The applicability of these words to our own time needs no emphasis. This chilling book details the price of such unwillingness to recognise threat. I recommend to anybody interested not only in the Second World War but in the evolution of the world we now live in.
April 14, 2022
I liked the word “magisterial”, as used to describe a book by Robert Gordon. Magisterial books are written by people who’ve written a lot of arcane stuff, have a certain vintage, and have then decided to write so that a larger number of people can understand them (as opposed to citing them without necessarily reading them). Bayly and Harper’s Forgotten Armies is a magisterial work, also meaning that it covers an important swathe of space and time and speaks to topics that other have left untouched. Well, the time span is four years, but these four years in what the authors call “the great crescent” (Calcutta to Singapore) affected the future of a large part of the world: China, India, the regions called South East Asia (which was treated as an entity for military reasons during the events described the book) and First World Asia (a term I suspect bankers or their paid economists invented; some countries in SE Asia are also in First World Asia).
This is not a people’s history, because it does end up deifying a few people – Mountbatten, Slim, and others – but it is a very well-rounded and complete history, and since its publication in 2004 (I got to it very late), it has surely had a lot to do with educating people about the great crescent in 1941-1945.
Some reviews that I saw were a bit disappointed by the lack of detail of major military actions. There are other books that cover those, and – more importantly – those military accounts underplay the effect of war on people who did not wear military uniforms. As the authors remind us, there was a silent army of women institutionally coerced into military brothels, euphemistically called comfort women, by the Japanese. And the Japanese was not the only army that needed services of prostitutes. The desperation of the famine of Bengal, triggered in part by the Raj’s scorched earth policy, reduced boys to pimping for women in their family. More women were forced by “the insidious operation of famine and the ‘free market’” into prostitution in the Raj-administered territories than by physical force in the Japanese occupied ones. (Note, for avoidance of doubt, that writing this is not condoning Japanese war crimes, which Japan has not properly atoned for.) The Japanese death railway project and the Allied Ledo Road project caused huge losses of lives of prisoners, soldiers (disproportionately Black Americans), and civilians. The Japanese project was founded on much harsher slave labour, of course. The exodus of Indians from Burma in 1942 was another horror created by the inept bunch of administrators that many Indians now fondly remember as “the steel frame” of what they think was a golden era but was actually quite shitty.
Bayly and Harper bring important characters – Aung San, Ba Maw, Chin Peng and Lai Teck, Subhash Chandra Bose – together with names probably better known to global readers such as Chiang Kai Shek, Joseph Stilwell, Louis Mountbatten and William Slim. Their cast of military armies includes the Burma Independence Army, the Indian National Army (INA), the communist guerrilla army in Malaya, and tribes including Chins, Nagas, and Shans apart from the Japanese army, British 14th Army, and the Chindits. Their brief acknowledgment of the INA’s gallant action at Mount Popa does more justice to the INA than Raghavan’s India’s War.
Though it ends in 1945, Forgotten Armies documents how the disastrous rout of the British Raj in the face of the Japanese invasion set the stage for the end of the Raj. The myth of the white man’s superiority was smashed as much by the lightning speed of the Japanese advance in 1941-42 as by the cretin-like behaviours of the white establishment in Asia.
There were a couple of jarring notes. At one point, there was this puzzling sentence: “British India seemed to have survived once again as it had survived every challenge since the Maratha invasions of the eighteenth century.” It made me wonder. A relatively minor point is that the last stand of the Malay Regiment in Singapore took place not at Bukit Panjang, as the text asserts, but at Pasir Panjang.
There are bigger issues. The more I read about history, even about a period as well documented as WWII, it seems that historians have made a Rashomon-like thing of it. If one just read this book, one would hold Mountbatten in a kind of awe, as a leader who let Slim do the fighting and provided steady political leadership, especially in the delicate stage when the Burma Independence Army switched sides en masse. General Slim appears to have been universally admired by his troops. His reputation survives by word-of-mouth among Indian Army officers that I have talked to. In Quartered Safe Out Here, a pretty straight-talking war memoir, Fraser is all praise for him.
Mountbatten is another story. My views of Mountbatten changed completely after reading a couple of magnificent Hindi novels, Kitne Pakistan (translated into English as Partitions) and Jhootha Sach (This is not that Dawn). In Indian Summer, von Tunzelman narrates how, earlier in Mountbatten’s career when he was in charge of a destroyer, the Kelly, he pulled off remarkable feats including ramming his ship into another. Worse, he had the blood on his hands after the fiasco at Dieppe. And there is Wolpert’s Shameful Flight, which the author starts with Mountbatten’s admission (decades later) that he "fucked it up”, and then spends considerable energy in showing how badly. The partition of India was one of the great horrors of the modern world. Of course these events happened before or after the 1941-45 period of this book, but Bayly and Harper could have alluded to them.
Another missing perspective is that, as Max Hastings put it, the land war in the great crescent “could have no significant influence at all on the Japanese surrender, because the Americans had already fought the decisive battles in the Pacific.” (I recall that Peter Ward Fay in his magisterial work, The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-945 also wrote something similar, but I couldn't trace the passage.) The war in the great crescent and all its forgotten and silent armies remain significant not because of their direct impact on the end of the war, but because of how they shaped history after WWII.
The horrors of WWII in the great crescent need to be understood. On the whole, this is a book that brings out the horrors, the plain facts, and the arch of history in a narrative that flows exceptionally well.
The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945
This is not a people’s history, because it does end up deifying a few people – Mountbatten, Slim, and others – but it is a very well-rounded and complete history, and since its publication in 2004 (I got to it very late), it has surely had a lot to do with educating people about the great crescent in 1941-1945.
Some reviews that I saw were a bit disappointed by the lack of detail of major military actions. There are other books that cover those, and – more importantly – those military accounts underplay the effect of war on people who did not wear military uniforms. As the authors remind us, there was a silent army of women institutionally coerced into military brothels, euphemistically called comfort women, by the Japanese. And the Japanese was not the only army that needed services of prostitutes. The desperation of the famine of Bengal, triggered in part by the Raj’s scorched earth policy, reduced boys to pimping for women in their family. More women were forced by “the insidious operation of famine and the ‘free market’” into prostitution in the Raj-administered territories than by physical force in the Japanese occupied ones. (Note, for avoidance of doubt, that writing this is not condoning Japanese war crimes, which Japan has not properly atoned for.) The Japanese death railway project and the Allied Ledo Road project caused huge losses of lives of prisoners, soldiers (disproportionately Black Americans), and civilians. The Japanese project was founded on much harsher slave labour, of course. The exodus of Indians from Burma in 1942 was another horror created by the inept bunch of administrators that many Indians now fondly remember as “the steel frame” of what they think was a golden era but was actually quite shitty.
Bayly and Harper bring important characters – Aung San, Ba Maw, Chin Peng and Lai Teck, Subhash Chandra Bose – together with names probably better known to global readers such as Chiang Kai Shek, Joseph Stilwell, Louis Mountbatten and William Slim. Their cast of military armies includes the Burma Independence Army, the Indian National Army (INA), the communist guerrilla army in Malaya, and tribes including Chins, Nagas, and Shans apart from the Japanese army, British 14th Army, and the Chindits. Their brief acknowledgment of the INA’s gallant action at Mount Popa does more justice to the INA than Raghavan’s India’s War.
Though it ends in 1945, Forgotten Armies documents how the disastrous rout of the British Raj in the face of the Japanese invasion set the stage for the end of the Raj. The myth of the white man’s superiority was smashed as much by the lightning speed of the Japanese advance in 1941-42 as by the cretin-like behaviours of the white establishment in Asia.
There were a couple of jarring notes. At one point, there was this puzzling sentence: “British India seemed to have survived once again as it had survived every challenge since the Maratha invasions of the eighteenth century.” It made me wonder. A relatively minor point is that the last stand of the Malay Regiment in Singapore took place not at Bukit Panjang, as the text asserts, but at Pasir Panjang.
There are bigger issues. The more I read about history, even about a period as well documented as WWII, it seems that historians have made a Rashomon-like thing of it. If one just read this book, one would hold Mountbatten in a kind of awe, as a leader who let Slim do the fighting and provided steady political leadership, especially in the delicate stage when the Burma Independence Army switched sides en masse. General Slim appears to have been universally admired by his troops. His reputation survives by word-of-mouth among Indian Army officers that I have talked to. In Quartered Safe Out Here, a pretty straight-talking war memoir, Fraser is all praise for him.
Mountbatten is another story. My views of Mountbatten changed completely after reading a couple of magnificent Hindi novels, Kitne Pakistan (translated into English as Partitions) and Jhootha Sach (This is not that Dawn). In Indian Summer, von Tunzelman narrates how, earlier in Mountbatten’s career when he was in charge of a destroyer, the Kelly, he pulled off remarkable feats including ramming his ship into another. Worse, he had the blood on his hands after the fiasco at Dieppe. And there is Wolpert’s Shameful Flight, which the author starts with Mountbatten’s admission (decades later) that he "fucked it up”, and then spends considerable energy in showing how badly. The partition of India was one of the great horrors of the modern world. Of course these events happened before or after the 1941-45 period of this book, but Bayly and Harper could have alluded to them.
Another missing perspective is that, as Max Hastings put it, the land war in the great crescent “could have no significant influence at all on the Japanese surrender, because the Americans had already fought the decisive battles in the Pacific.” (I recall that Peter Ward Fay in his magisterial work, The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-945 also wrote something similar, but I couldn't trace the passage.) The war in the great crescent and all its forgotten and silent armies remain significant not because of their direct impact on the end of the war, but because of how they shaped history after WWII.
The horrors of WWII in the great crescent need to be understood. On the whole, this is a book that brings out the horrors, the plain facts, and the arch of history in a narrative that flows exceptionally well.
The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945
October 1, 2024
(revised, but opinions and views expressed unaltered, in October 2024).
When I first posted about this book I said: 'Antoionne Vanner's review is so excellent there is nothing further I can add or say about it'. On revising my review I would reiterate my praise for Vanner's review (which was originally posted in October 2015 and as of August 2023 is still the top review of this book on Goodreads) but I now find there are things I want to say, particularly as I will be reviewing 'Singapore Burning' by Colin Smith and will be referring back to Bayly's book.
The most brilliant thing about Bayly's book is that it puts the story of the collapse of Britain's Asian empire, and the fall of Singapore in 1942, back within a regional context and also puts India and Burma back into the overall story. It relates the story of the two month conquest of Malaysia and the fall of Singapore with a narrative verve and a coruscating eye on the miserable failure of Britain and its colonial residents, administrators and soldiers to do what they always claimed they would do when the faced with disaster, behave like the gentlemen on the Titanic, stand back for the women and children to get in the boats and go down like gentlemen, or 'white men' (see my footnote *1 below) as it would have been put in the clubs or at the long bar of Raffles Hotel in Singapore.
Of course in Malaya, unlike on the Titanic, there was nobody keeping the third class tidily locked away until the last half empty (so as not to inconvenience by overcrowding the first class passengers) lifeboat sailed (those unfortunate third class passengers drowned couldn't, and those that survived never had, voice their views about more first class male passengers having seats in the lifeboats then third class children). Unfortunately in Malaya there were too many 'natives', 'other ranks' to keep out of sight and plenty of journalists on hand to observe the cream de la cream of the empires financial and administrative elites failing to behave 'white' as they pushed their way to the front of the queue for lifeboats stepping on and over everyone to get away, for it be completely covered up or forgotten, particularly by those they pushed in front, stepped over or pushed over and out of the way, the people of Malaya. 'White' men might have helped a white woman and child but no others, certainly not if they were Indian, Chinese or Malay. In Penang if they were already on a boat when the British, including soldiers, arrived they were thrown off. The entire story of the collapse of Malay, Singapore and Burma is one of shame. Although enquiries were promised at the time, but postponed because of the war, so the subject was buried for years and then forgotten - the truth was so shameful that no one wanted to admit it.
Bayly's captures these stories as well as the ridiculous inefficiencies of the prologue to disaster as various authorities of varying grandeur and dripping in elaborate chivalric baubles and initials managed not to prepare in any competent way for a war they all feared was coming. Bayly shows this with a splendid attention to the most salient detail. I will only mention one - when the Japanese landed at Kosa Baharu the British planes had to wait an hour and a half before taking off and counter attacking because the local commander couldn't get through to HQ for permission to launch as there was only secure line and HQ was continuously engaged. That the whole invasion could have been halted if a boom had been strung across the river delta is incontestable - but when it was proposed the local commander was told there was no steel available. I won't bother to tell you how much steel was captured when Singapore fell (ok that was more than one thing but they were sort of related, anyway I couldn't resist).
The problem with apportioning blame is that none of the various local commanders was particularly bad or incompetent, but even the best of them were mediocre and they were there because they weren't considered fit for or wanted elsewhere. The entire system was based on bluff and lies, millions were wasted on 'fortress' Singapore which was designed to be the base for a far eastern squadron of the Royal Navy which never existed.
Britain gave promises of protection to its, white, colonies and dominions, and this protection was a major justification for their remaining as one of the benefits for remaining subjects of the empire. No one in Whitehall wanted to lose Malaya, Singapore, Burma or Australia but they weren't going to invest any substantial amounts of money to prevent it and accepted that loss of these territories might have to be suffered (of course the people making that admission didn't have to do the suffering) temporarily until the war with Germany was won.
This is a brilliant history of those years and the war fought there presented within a context that prepares the reader to understand not only what happened but what was going to happen post war.
*1 Somerset Maugham's short story 'The Yellow Streak' brilliantly captures the racism and the fragile carapace of deceit and hypocrisy underneath so much colonial life. Maugham's stories from Malaya and elsewhere in Britain's far eastern territories are sharp and brilliant mini-portraits of the empire's deep rooted seated prejudices and failures.
When I first posted about this book I said: 'Antoionne Vanner's review is so excellent there is nothing further I can add or say about it'. On revising my review I would reiterate my praise for Vanner's review (which was originally posted in October 2015 and as of August 2023 is still the top review of this book on Goodreads) but I now find there are things I want to say, particularly as I will be reviewing 'Singapore Burning' by Colin Smith and will be referring back to Bayly's book.
The most brilliant thing about Bayly's book is that it puts the story of the collapse of Britain's Asian empire, and the fall of Singapore in 1942, back within a regional context and also puts India and Burma back into the overall story. It relates the story of the two month conquest of Malaysia and the fall of Singapore with a narrative verve and a coruscating eye on the miserable failure of Britain and its colonial residents, administrators and soldiers to do what they always claimed they would do when the faced with disaster, behave like the gentlemen on the Titanic, stand back for the women and children to get in the boats and go down like gentlemen, or 'white men' (see my footnote *1 below) as it would have been put in the clubs or at the long bar of Raffles Hotel in Singapore.
Of course in Malaya, unlike on the Titanic, there was nobody keeping the third class tidily locked away until the last half empty (so as not to inconvenience by overcrowding the first class passengers) lifeboat sailed (those unfortunate third class passengers drowned couldn't, and those that survived never had, voice their views about more first class male passengers having seats in the lifeboats then third class children). Unfortunately in Malaya there were too many 'natives', 'other ranks' to keep out of sight and plenty of journalists on hand to observe the cream de la cream of the empires financial and administrative elites failing to behave 'white' as they pushed their way to the front of the queue for lifeboats stepping on and over everyone to get away, for it be completely covered up or forgotten, particularly by those they pushed in front, stepped over or pushed over and out of the way, the people of Malaya. 'White' men might have helped a white woman and child but no others, certainly not if they were Indian, Chinese or Malay. In Penang if they were already on a boat when the British, including soldiers, arrived they were thrown off. The entire story of the collapse of Malay, Singapore and Burma is one of shame. Although enquiries were promised at the time, but postponed because of the war, so the subject was buried for years and then forgotten - the truth was so shameful that no one wanted to admit it.
Bayly's captures these stories as well as the ridiculous inefficiencies of the prologue to disaster as various authorities of varying grandeur and dripping in elaborate chivalric baubles and initials managed not to prepare in any competent way for a war they all feared was coming. Bayly shows this with a splendid attention to the most salient detail. I will only mention one - when the Japanese landed at Kosa Baharu the British planes had to wait an hour and a half before taking off and counter attacking because the local commander couldn't get through to HQ for permission to launch as there was only secure line and HQ was continuously engaged. That the whole invasion could have been halted if a boom had been strung across the river delta is incontestable - but when it was proposed the local commander was told there was no steel available. I won't bother to tell you how much steel was captured when Singapore fell (ok that was more than one thing but they were sort of related, anyway I couldn't resist).
The problem with apportioning blame is that none of the various local commanders was particularly bad or incompetent, but even the best of them were mediocre and they were there because they weren't considered fit for or wanted elsewhere. The entire system was based on bluff and lies, millions were wasted on 'fortress' Singapore which was designed to be the base for a far eastern squadron of the Royal Navy which never existed.
Britain gave promises of protection to its, white, colonies and dominions, and this protection was a major justification for their remaining as one of the benefits for remaining subjects of the empire. No one in Whitehall wanted to lose Malaya, Singapore, Burma or Australia but they weren't going to invest any substantial amounts of money to prevent it and accepted that loss of these territories might have to be suffered (of course the people making that admission didn't have to do the suffering) temporarily until the war with Germany was won.
This is a brilliant history of those years and the war fought there presented within a context that prepares the reader to understand not only what happened but what was going to happen post war.
*1 Somerset Maugham's short story 'The Yellow Streak' brilliantly captures the racism and the fragile carapace of deceit and hypocrisy underneath so much colonial life. Maugham's stories from Malaya and elsewhere in Britain's far eastern territories are sharp and brilliant mini-portraits of the empire's deep rooted seated prejudices and failures.
October 29, 2015
Saw a Commanders of Singapore show on the history channel and it piqued my interest, particularly in the pre-war era of Southeast Asia. A positive review of this book set me on its tracks. This book takes a perspective from about 20,000 feet. It discusses the battles, but not a blow by blow account. though the fall of Singapore is covered in some detail. The focus is more on the political interplay and the effects on
colonization and de-colonization. I found it all fascinating.
This book does a great job of setting the scene of the pre-war years, the nostalgia of a land riding its high tide and blindly unaware of the complete disaster that is in the offing. Much like the mood in 'From Here to Eternity' regarding Pearl Harbor. Amazing array of characters are covered, all trying for some type of control of the various lands contained in British Southeast Asia.
The locals were inspired by the defeats of the white man and initially welcomed the invaders, though the Japanese soon wore out their welcome.
Interesting insights on India, which was treated rather roughly during the war by the British.
The authors reference many other books that look good regarding before, during and after the war.
I've already taken up the Malayan trilogy by Anthony Burgess.
As it is a contemporary book, I looked about a bit on the web on how to contact the authors to tell
them how much I liked it, I've never done that before, but couldn't find any good clues. If anyone else has a link, I'd like to hear it.
May 28, 2015
Professor Bayly and Dr. Harper have produced a superb history of an important corner of the Second World War. It provides important insights into the South East Asian present.
War changes everything. We see first a decadent British Empire run, in Burma and what would later be called Malaysia, by self-satisfied prigs whose failures would be all-to-evident in an early crushing defeat.
Then, we have the new nationalisms of the region (though only these two countries and more tangentially, India, are covered) ready to fight imperialism alongside and against the new ideology of communism.
The war was transitional at so many levels. It showed how surprisingly easy it was to drive out the undoubtedly racist British through the sheer will power and brutal energy of the Japanese lust for power.
But it also showed that the same machinery of empire may have been ruled by fools at the margins but it was also equally ruled by brutally pragmatic men of great energy and resource at the centre.
Though stretched to the limit and on the point of being overtaken by American wealth and superior management, Mountbatten's British-led SEAC halted the Japanese advance and drove it back beyond Rangoon.
The truth is that the Atomic Bomb against civilians in Japan probably did stop the deaths of hundreds of thousands (or more) if brutalised Westerners really did have to crush brutal Easterners in the field.
This front was as deeply monstrous as the European Eastern Front. The behaviours similar - only the deliberate machinery of the extermination camp was missing.
There are so many levels to this story that it is quite an achievement for the two authors to hold it together as a single narrative - even if this falters a little in one area.
The authors are at pains to tell us all they can about resistance movements and 'forgotten armies' - radical anti-imperialists who fought with Japan much as Vlasov fought with Hitler.
Some flipped sides at just the right time. Others (the Communists, the Chinese and most of the hill peoples) backed the British on the basis that my enemies' enemy is my friend.
The problem is that these forces were, like Vlasov's, historically important for the future but much less so in that particular present and the sections on some of these can read like abridged monographs.
Yet some of the detail is absolutely necessary for a full understanding of what will be the second half of the story - imperial European recapture and then negotiated loss of its Eastern hegemony.
Indeed, Bayly and Harper have produced that very sequel ('Forgotten Wars') so these detailed longueurs must be accepted as a necessary prologue to the meat of the next act in the drama.
But the truth is that the Indian National Army, the Burma Defence Army and the much lauded behind-the-lines guerrillas and special operations may have been disruptive but were not central to the imperial struggle.
In fact, these units were about as important as the resistance in much of Europe - making life difficult for the invader or causing additional pain to SEAC but not decisive.
Such units were aspects of the political - the real story was of Japan reproducing the methods and atrocities of their German allies but doomed to lose bloodily once it had blundered over Pearl Harbour.
Much as we have seen in Edgerton's work, the ultimate triumph of the West was not going to be in doubt but these chancers in Tokyo might still have come out of it well if they had caused an Indian revolt.
It is India that matters. The book is not about India but India looms over the story nevertheless and its story has to be told to make sense of what goes on between Chittagong and Singapore.
The British military were so unnerved by the speedy fall of their South East Asian Empire and troubled by dissent in the Raj that they considered shifting the base of the fight to Australia.
The question is not answered - how on earth did the British hold on to a whole sub-continent for so long? And the answer is that its hold was no more certain than this consideration suggests.
The same question arises in relation to Western domination of every non-Western polity - China springs to mind but so does Burma itself and the Malay States. And the answer is uncomfortable.
It really comes down to the old saying that 'in the land of the blind, the one eyed man was king'. These second and third rate products of minor public schools were just a bit cleverer than their charges.
The British ruled because they ruled over more politically primitive peoples so the political, social and military education of Indians, Burmans and Malays in war was sufficient death knell for empire.
The book, like all intelligent histories of the Second World War, is riddled with atrocity - with an added element of the most appalling racism, sexual exploitation and arrogance on both imperial sides.
The tension between 'modern' Britain and its furthest colonies was simply the tension of the former realising just how much its own civil service and local military had 'gone native'.
Mountbatten and Slim would be recognisable in today's British military - highly intelligent men with the ability to inspire - whereas types like Dorman-Smith were little more than arrogant local potentates.
The unjustified self regard of the British locals (satirised by Maugham and others from the metropolis) continued after the war in the detemination to treat its own suffering as somehow unique.
Yes, some 14,000 European men died horribly on the Burma-Thailand Railway but this was perhaps 5-10% of the total deaths caused by the panicking Japanese on this project. The rest were 'natives'.
The story of the comfort women is also well told now but the scale of it will help explain why Japanese failure to 'atone' (unlike democratic Germany) makes it so deeply unpopular even today.
For all its claims of Asian for the Asians, the Japanese militarist onslaught was like the German - a grab for power that misused local nationalists and left its naive or corrupt quislings high and dry.
We have the civilian deaths from the bombings of Singapore and Rangoon (twice), the terrible fate of refugees, the avoidable famine in Bengal in 1942/1943, inter-ethnic pogroms and evil collective punishments.
Bayly and Harper's account of the mass exodus from Burma as the Japanese advanced should be read by every Briton who thinks the values of our ancestors were based on some code of honour.
The conduct of the British community was more than self-preservative, it was totally dismissive of the lives of even those of mixed race descent who had given exceptional service. One is ashamed.
The Japanese often reached dizzy heights of evil but then, alongside the treatment of British prisoners, we have the mistreatment of Japanese in India and the British 'no prisoners' policy in 1944.
The sheer scale of dislocation and death, the sheer malice and brutality of the Japanese invaders and the sheer incompetence of the old imperial elite makes this a depressing read at times.
There are some heroes - Major Seagrim surerendered himself to certain death rather than see Karen villages destroyed in reprisals - but most of the story is just of men and women driven to hell and back by fate.
And at the end - the Japanese rightly beaten and humiliated but the British and other colonial empires now unsustainable. Oh, the scale of suffering needed to oust a bunch of minor public schoolboys!
May 7, 2019
The objective of "Forgotten Armies" is to tell the story of the Japanese invasion of Britain's Asian territories between Calcutta and Singapore during WWII, the subsequent occupation and the reconquest by the British. Bayly and Harper argue that during the episode, the British behaved so badly that they lost all credibility with the local populations which meant they would quickly form their own independent countries in the aftermath of the Japanese defeat.
Bayly and Harper describe three serious offences that caused the British to lose their moral authority in the region:
-1- their defence against the Japanese invaders was both incompetent and cowardly. The British simply panicked and fled of the face of the Japanese invasion. The Japanese seizing Malaya in a two-month campaign running from December 8, 1941 to January 31, 1942. By the end of May, they had secured Burma.
-2- they failed to protect their army, civil servants and the many immigrants that they had encouraged to settle in the region. The British failed to evacuate their civil servants and members of their armed forces before the Japanese advance leaving them to spend WWII in internment. Many but not all of the white colonial administrators and their families were evacuated. Nothing was done for the locals working in the civil service. The Indians in the British army were also abandoned. Nothing was done for the Indians and Chinese that the British had encouraged to settle in the area over the previous half century to work in industry and agriculture.
-3- the "scorched earth" retreat policy had devastating effects . The British chose to pursue a "scorched earth policy" as they withdraw destroying boats and motor vehicles as well as killing elephants. This was done not only in Burma and Malaya but also in Bengal where it result in the great famine of 1943 in which 2.0 million to 3.0 million Bengalis perished.
Bayly and Harper paint a very damning portrait of British India. The Anglo-Indians were profoundly racist and obsessed with privileges. At the eve of WWII, the military commanders and colonial administrators thought that Indian society had not changed since the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.
felt that the world had not changed since the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. They felt that they could control India simply by respecting the rules regarding food and caste.
Bayly and Harper take a very dim view of the societies that were occupied. At first many were delighted to see that the Japanese, an Asian people, had so thoroughly routed the English. They as considerable competition to become the political leaders of the collaborationist regimes. A Burmese Defense Army was formed to assist the Japanese in a invasion of India. A group of soldiers from the British Indian Army formed the Indian National Army for the same purpose.
The Burmese and the Malayans soon came to dislike the Japanese who were not as good at respecting the local rules and traditions as their British predecessors. Their practice of face-slapping was particularly hated. All of this was tolerated however because only the Chinese Communists in the Malayan pension were willing to raise a partisan force to resist the Japanese.
When it became clear in 1944, that Japan would lose the war, the Burmese Defence Army joined with the small Burmese Communist Party and switched sides rebranding itself as the AFO (Anti-Fascist Organization).
The Indian National Army started to experience defections back to the British side as the Japanese started to retreat but most remained to be taken prisoner when the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a quick and unexpected conclusion.
Bayly and Harper do an outstanding job of telling what is an extremely complex and little known story of the great global conflict that was WWII. In so doing they shed tremendous light on today's southeast Asia. I heartily recommend this book as well as "Forgotten Wars" which describes how the British granted independence to Burma, Malaya and Singapore between 1945 and 1960 after failing to re-assert their authority following the defeat of the Japanese.
Bayly and Harper describe three serious offences that caused the British to lose their moral authority in the region:
-1- their defence against the Japanese invaders was both incompetent and cowardly. The British simply panicked and fled of the face of the Japanese invasion. The Japanese seizing Malaya in a two-month campaign running from December 8, 1941 to January 31, 1942. By the end of May, they had secured Burma.
-2- they failed to protect their army, civil servants and the many immigrants that they had encouraged to settle in the region. The British failed to evacuate their civil servants and members of their armed forces before the Japanese advance leaving them to spend WWII in internment. Many but not all of the white colonial administrators and their families were evacuated. Nothing was done for the locals working in the civil service. The Indians in the British army were also abandoned. Nothing was done for the Indians and Chinese that the British had encouraged to settle in the area over the previous half century to work in industry and agriculture.
-3- the "scorched earth" retreat policy had devastating effects . The British chose to pursue a "scorched earth policy" as they withdraw destroying boats and motor vehicles as well as killing elephants. This was done not only in Burma and Malaya but also in Bengal where it result in the great famine of 1943 in which 2.0 million to 3.0 million Bengalis perished.
Bayly and Harper paint a very damning portrait of British India. The Anglo-Indians were profoundly racist and obsessed with privileges. At the eve of WWII, the military commanders and colonial administrators thought that Indian society had not changed since the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.
felt that the world had not changed since the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. They felt that they could control India simply by respecting the rules regarding food and caste.
Bayly and Harper take a very dim view of the societies that were occupied. At first many were delighted to see that the Japanese, an Asian people, had so thoroughly routed the English. They as considerable competition to become the political leaders of the collaborationist regimes. A Burmese Defense Army was formed to assist the Japanese in a invasion of India. A group of soldiers from the British Indian Army formed the Indian National Army for the same purpose.
The Burmese and the Malayans soon came to dislike the Japanese who were not as good at respecting the local rules and traditions as their British predecessors. Their practice of face-slapping was particularly hated. All of this was tolerated however because only the Chinese Communists in the Malayan pension were willing to raise a partisan force to resist the Japanese.
When it became clear in 1944, that Japan would lose the war, the Burmese Defence Army joined with the small Burmese Communist Party and switched sides rebranding itself as the AFO (Anti-Fascist Organization).
The Indian National Army started to experience defections back to the British side as the Japanese started to retreat but most remained to be taken prisoner when the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a quick and unexpected conclusion.
Bayly and Harper do an outstanding job of telling what is an extremely complex and little known story of the great global conflict that was WWII. In so doing they shed tremendous light on today's southeast Asia. I heartily recommend this book as well as "Forgotten Wars" which describes how the British granted independence to Burma, Malaya and Singapore between 1945 and 1960 after failing to re-assert their authority following the defeat of the Japanese.
July 25, 2023
***1/2 for A very political, very Burma/Indian National Army centric look at the British colonies, unlike Louis Allen's "the longest battle, Burma 1941-45".
August 14, 2019
Wow. The best moments of this history bring the reader into a world more complex and fantastic than the most imaginative fiction writer could create. The story of WWII in Southeast Asia, which was not covered at all in my high school history classes, has something for everyone. For those interested in adventure and strategy, double agents, attacks from behind, and jungle battles abound. For those interested in social justice, there are stories of the free market brothels of the British and the fascist 'comfort women' abductions of the Japanese, the dizzying racial hierarchies of both empires, and the caste and class divides brought to the fore by crisis and the collapse of empire. And for the politicos, there are rich details of communist parties, independence movements, and shifting coalitions.
After slogging through sections on troop movements, my interest in the book would erode. The authors also made frequent use of long paragraphs that tried to make multiple, unrelated arguments. I also felt that some base level of knowledge of WWII and the current political situations of the countries covered (particularly Singapore, Malaysia, and Burma) was assumed, which made parts of the book difficult to follow and made many of the figures difficult to keep track of, despite the glossary of characters.
Despite these shortcomings, the introduction to multiple overlooked episodes of history makes Forgotten Armies an easy recommendation for any history buff. Most importantly: Churchill's racism and role in the Bengal famine, the Indian National Army's fraught alliance with the Japanese, the sook ching purge of Chinese by the Japanese - and the 'gift' of $50 million which brought it to an end (the whole story of the Overseas Chinese is fascinating), and the decadent cluelessness of the Europeans in Southeast Asia as bombs fell around them and their servants fled. Of course, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of "Southeast Asia", which only became a unified concept during this period.
On a personal note, my four great-grandfathers (and many of their fellow Tamil businessmen) were in Burma and Malaya when the Japanese invaded. I had heard vague stories of their refugee treks back to India, their sudden loss of wealth (gained from exploitation), and the diseases that damaged (or ended) their lives. I was gratified to see their stories depicted by a Cambridge historian.
After slogging through sections on troop movements, my interest in the book would erode. The authors also made frequent use of long paragraphs that tried to make multiple, unrelated arguments. I also felt that some base level of knowledge of WWII and the current political situations of the countries covered (particularly Singapore, Malaysia, and Burma) was assumed, which made parts of the book difficult to follow and made many of the figures difficult to keep track of, despite the glossary of characters.
Despite these shortcomings, the introduction to multiple overlooked episodes of history makes Forgotten Armies an easy recommendation for any history buff. Most importantly: Churchill's racism and role in the Bengal famine, the Indian National Army's fraught alliance with the Japanese, the sook ching purge of Chinese by the Japanese - and the 'gift' of $50 million which brought it to an end (the whole story of the Overseas Chinese is fascinating), and the decadent cluelessness of the Europeans in Southeast Asia as bombs fell around them and their servants fled. Of course, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of "Southeast Asia", which only became a unified concept during this period.
On a personal note, my four great-grandfathers (and many of their fellow Tamil businessmen) were in Burma and Malaya when the Japanese invaded. I had heard vague stories of their refugee treks back to India, their sudden loss of wealth (gained from exploitation), and the diseases that damaged (or ended) their lives. I was gratified to see their stories depicted by a Cambridge historian.
February 20, 2012
This is a social history of peoples populating the 'crescent' ranging from Calcutta to Singapore during the war. It's meant to be read together with the sequel, Forgotten Wars, but I'm not sure if I can afford the time right now...
While India and Thailand are touched on, Burma and Malaya are the twin mainstays of the narrative. Most of the 'hot' events covered in here - the fall of Malaya, the Bengal famine, the routing of the British and so-called shattering of the white supremacy myth - are probably well known to anyone with a secondary school education in the history of the region. They are basically founding pillars on which our local nationalist histories have been built. Bayly and Harper chose to focus on the thoughts, feelings and actions of the disparate local societies (inc. the European 'men on the spot') of what was soon to be known to outsiders, for the first time ever, as 'Southeast Asia'. The Burmese narrative is less well known. Both the civilian and military aspects of government are covered but as mentioned already, the narrative stops at 1945, even prior to Aung San's assassination, making it difficult to forge any substantive connection with the contemporary scene. There is disappointingly little on the motives and thoughts of the Japanese occupiers themselves - I am not sure why.
The narrative is at times almost hypnotic. Minus the usual footnotes, bibliography, etc., it clocks in at 465 pages, but still feels far too short (a good thing).
While India and Thailand are touched on, Burma and Malaya are the twin mainstays of the narrative. Most of the 'hot' events covered in here - the fall of Malaya, the Bengal famine, the routing of the British and so-called shattering of the white supremacy myth - are probably well known to anyone with a secondary school education in the history of the region. They are basically founding pillars on which our local nationalist histories have been built. Bayly and Harper chose to focus on the thoughts, feelings and actions of the disparate local societies (inc. the European 'men on the spot') of what was soon to be known to outsiders, for the first time ever, as 'Southeast Asia'. The Burmese narrative is less well known. Both the civilian and military aspects of government are covered but as mentioned already, the narrative stops at 1945, even prior to Aung San's assassination, making it difficult to forge any substantive connection with the contemporary scene. There is disappointingly little on the motives and thoughts of the Japanese occupiers themselves - I am not sure why.
The narrative is at times almost hypnotic. Minus the usual footnotes, bibliography, etc., it clocks in at 465 pages, but still feels far too short (a good thing).
August 15, 2023
While there is much valuable scholarship on display in this history of Britain's South East Asian empire in the Second World War, it is marred by three considerable faults: one, it is overly teleological, viewing too many of the events and personalities through the prism of postwar independence and decolonialisation; two, its framework is within a Marxist paradigm, providing explanations in only either class or racial structural terms; and, three, in its anti-imperialst tenor, it is partial and prejudicial to the British institutions and officers that governed the prewar Empire, and while presiding over the defeats of 1941-2, were also to the fore in the victory over the Japanese in 1944-5.
In their survey of prewar India, Malaya and Burma, the authors lose no opportunity to disparage the British and their society, portraying them as either Blimps, racists, or drunks (often all three), casting everything in terms of racial oppression and ignoring the complicated and sophisticated nature of British colonialism and the difficulties of government in societies riven by inter-communal rivalries and hatreds, many of which over seventy years of independence has not eradicated. Unfortunately, this simplistic picture weakens the value of this first section and undermines much of the rest, particularly as it leads to a false equivalence between British imperialism and that of the Japanese in 1942-5 (since imperialism is bad sine qua non, it follows that both British and Japanese imperialism were equally wrong even if their practice was markedly different). Whatever the many faults and too many horrors of British rule, nothing was as brutal as the militarism of the Japanese or the racism and murderous nature of their occupation, while the British, alongside their exploitation of local resources and native labour, could also point to many constructive and long-lasting achievements that their temporary successors, whose interests were entirely nationalistic, could not.
The book correctly identifies Singapore as the key to British rule in the South Asian crescent, something known to both its military defenders and attackers. However, by its emphasis upon the supposed decay and corruption of prewar British colonialism, it fails abjectly to address the strategic and tactical reasons why Singapore fell so quickly and why that led to the collapse of the eastern Empire (for a work with 'Armies' in its title, the lack of interest in or understanding of military matters is a disadvantage). The fall of Singapore was not due to the arrogance of gin-fuelled planters and their memsahibs or incompetent army officers, although there were plenty of those. It was because the whole Singapore defence strategy was fatally flawed, and more of a bluff, one the Japanese called in December 1941, than a proper plan of defence. The entire strategy depended upon an Eastern Fleet that did not exist, on a naval base that was too small to accommodate it even if it existed, and upon an army plan to defend Singapore in northern Malaya that was inoperable in practice because the political situation would never allow its most basic part - the movement of III Indian Corps into neutral Thailand to take up a defensive position to deny the Japanese beachheads BEFORE they attacked (Operation Matador) - until it was too late (as it was Matador was never put into action and the British were forced into engaging the Japanese not only after their successful landings but also in defensive positions that were suboptimal and without any plans for strategic withdrawal, as opposed to the rout and piecemeal retreat that took place). The truth was that because of post-1918 contingencies, particularly financial, but also political, Singapore could not be held against a determined enemy, which meant, with the lynchpin pulled, neither could the crescent from Bengal through Burma to Malaya against an army which could defeat the British in detail, held the advantages of surprise and local superiority, and which was supported by total command of the surrounding waters by the Japanese Imperial Navy after the destruction of Force Z. It wasn't effete corruption or racist attitudes which doomed the British in South East Asia, but the fact that after 1918 the UK could no longer afford the minimum necessary to defend its empire. After the Great War, the Empire was always on borrowed time. And it was not anti-imperialist politics or Fabian socialism which brought about its end, but ruthless Japanese aggression combined with superior tactics. The fall of Singapore and Burma in 1941-2 cannot be understood unless the context of 1918-41 is taken into account, requiring more than just a partial impression of these societies as they were upon the brink, and it is ridiculous not to build into any assessment of the British position the global strategic position in December 1941, with the Germans at the gates of Moscow, and the Royal Navy engaged in both the Atlantic and Mediterranean, meaning that the ultimate bulwark against Japanese invasion - an Eastern Fleet - was simply impossible (it was after all the parlous strategic position of Britain in 1941 which made possible the Japanese attacks). The British Empire did not collapse in the East in 1941-2 due to internal contradictions, but because, engaged in a life-or-death struggle in the home isles, it was militarily defeated by a force capable of taking advantage of its adversary's wartime weaknesses.
Bayly and Harper focus much, through their limited view, on the collapse of the British in Malaya and Burma in 1941-2, although with little attention to the military campaigns themselves, but they are less willing to examine the remarkable achievement by which the demoralised and defeated British Indian army of 1942 was turned into the superb fighting force of 1944-5, probably, as even they admit, the finest field army Britain has ever deployed, and this imbalances their narrative of 1942-5, finding in the resistance movements against the Japanese an explanation for the victory of 1945, which, while these played an important part, ignores the huge military power exerted by SEAC and particularly the superb fighting qualities of the British and Indian soldiers of 14th Army under the leadership of Slim and his impressive generals (Frank Messervy gets a mention, but not the importance of or the brilliance of the defence at Admin Box in the Arakan in February 1944, a turning point in the war). The problem with the authors' imperial decay thesis is also that it is shown up by the administrative and martial resurgence of the Raj after 1943 and the achievements of 14th Army, a reason why these are ignored or belittled. The one army left forgotten in this book is the most important army: the Forgotten Army. And while the story of the other 'forgotten armies' is important, focussing upon them and ignoring the rebuilding, re-training, and re-equiping of the Indian army, and its development and implementation of new doctrines and superior tactics, totally imbalances the history of the Japanese defeat by relegating the main players to walk-on parts. Just as the British were comprehensively defeated militarily by the Japanese at the beginning of the war, so were the Japanese armies defeated by the British Empire forces at its end. Ultimately, South East Asia in 1941 to 1945 is a military story and it must be understood as such.
In the horrors and misery or the war against the Japanese, the authors do find time for their heroes, although, coming as they do from the traditional anti-impetialist school, these are Subhas Chandra Bose and Thakin Aung San. The problem with this is that not only are these plaster saints, but in order to fit the anti-colonial archetype, the complexities and contradictions in their personalities are smoothed over. Bose was an outlier in the Indian independence movement, and his efforts to bring about the defeat of the British through military overthrow not only led him, and the soldiers of the Indian National Army who followed him, into dependence upon the imperialist Japanese, but would, had his forces been able to fight into Bengal, have provoked civil war - there was no military, only a political, route to Indian independence. Similarly, Aung San, a more realistic nationalist, made common cause with the Japanese, only in his, wiser, case to defect when defeat became likely, but even so, just like Bose, he and his forces were only partially representative of national opinion, and in his case heavily dependent upon one ethnic group. Both were politicians who saw the Japanese invasion as an opportunity to advance their nationalist aspirations, but without considering both the human and moral costs that involved.
This history, therefore, remains a disappointment, being partial and driven by ideology and an excessive focus upon the political as seen as a manifestation of racial and class structures (to refer to the other ranks of the British Army as a 'white proletariat' makes clear how little interest the authors have in the British military or the men who form it). The 'forgotten armies' are abstracts for the authors, simplified archetypes upon which an anti-imperialist narrative can be constructed, in a book, which despite its detail, remains distant and impersonal, with no feel for the climate geography, and environment in which a titanic struggle was fought between and within many different peoples, all a consequence of Japan's aggression. The authors are so keen to advance their post-colonial thesis of the war in South East Asia as part of a greater anti-colonial struggle that at times they are prepared to regard the Japanese invasions and occupations in a positive light and to suggest that Japan's aggression was a necessity which made possible the end of the British Empire and the emergence of independent states, as a good end which justified the appalling means. Such moral vacuity may satisfy university common rooms de jour, but in a history which should be impartial, it breeds both a bias of analysis and an overarching teleology such as to make of what is a fascinating subject an under-achieving book.
In their survey of prewar India, Malaya and Burma, the authors lose no opportunity to disparage the British and their society, portraying them as either Blimps, racists, or drunks (often all three), casting everything in terms of racial oppression and ignoring the complicated and sophisticated nature of British colonialism and the difficulties of government in societies riven by inter-communal rivalries and hatreds, many of which over seventy years of independence has not eradicated. Unfortunately, this simplistic picture weakens the value of this first section and undermines much of the rest, particularly as it leads to a false equivalence between British imperialism and that of the Japanese in 1942-5 (since imperialism is bad sine qua non, it follows that both British and Japanese imperialism were equally wrong even if their practice was markedly different). Whatever the many faults and too many horrors of British rule, nothing was as brutal as the militarism of the Japanese or the racism and murderous nature of their occupation, while the British, alongside their exploitation of local resources and native labour, could also point to many constructive and long-lasting achievements that their temporary successors, whose interests were entirely nationalistic, could not.
The book correctly identifies Singapore as the key to British rule in the South Asian crescent, something known to both its military defenders and attackers. However, by its emphasis upon the supposed decay and corruption of prewar British colonialism, it fails abjectly to address the strategic and tactical reasons why Singapore fell so quickly and why that led to the collapse of the eastern Empire (for a work with 'Armies' in its title, the lack of interest in or understanding of military matters is a disadvantage). The fall of Singapore was not due to the arrogance of gin-fuelled planters and their memsahibs or incompetent army officers, although there were plenty of those. It was because the whole Singapore defence strategy was fatally flawed, and more of a bluff, one the Japanese called in December 1941, than a proper plan of defence. The entire strategy depended upon an Eastern Fleet that did not exist, on a naval base that was too small to accommodate it even if it existed, and upon an army plan to defend Singapore in northern Malaya that was inoperable in practice because the political situation would never allow its most basic part - the movement of III Indian Corps into neutral Thailand to take up a defensive position to deny the Japanese beachheads BEFORE they attacked (Operation Matador) - until it was too late (as it was Matador was never put into action and the British were forced into engaging the Japanese not only after their successful landings but also in defensive positions that were suboptimal and without any plans for strategic withdrawal, as opposed to the rout and piecemeal retreat that took place). The truth was that because of post-1918 contingencies, particularly financial, but also political, Singapore could not be held against a determined enemy, which meant, with the lynchpin pulled, neither could the crescent from Bengal through Burma to Malaya against an army which could defeat the British in detail, held the advantages of surprise and local superiority, and which was supported by total command of the surrounding waters by the Japanese Imperial Navy after the destruction of Force Z. It wasn't effete corruption or racist attitudes which doomed the British in South East Asia, but the fact that after 1918 the UK could no longer afford the minimum necessary to defend its empire. After the Great War, the Empire was always on borrowed time. And it was not anti-imperialist politics or Fabian socialism which brought about its end, but ruthless Japanese aggression combined with superior tactics. The fall of Singapore and Burma in 1941-2 cannot be understood unless the context of 1918-41 is taken into account, requiring more than just a partial impression of these societies as they were upon the brink, and it is ridiculous not to build into any assessment of the British position the global strategic position in December 1941, with the Germans at the gates of Moscow, and the Royal Navy engaged in both the Atlantic and Mediterranean, meaning that the ultimate bulwark against Japanese invasion - an Eastern Fleet - was simply impossible (it was after all the parlous strategic position of Britain in 1941 which made possible the Japanese attacks). The British Empire did not collapse in the East in 1941-2 due to internal contradictions, but because, engaged in a life-or-death struggle in the home isles, it was militarily defeated by a force capable of taking advantage of its adversary's wartime weaknesses.
Bayly and Harper focus much, through their limited view, on the collapse of the British in Malaya and Burma in 1941-2, although with little attention to the military campaigns themselves, but they are less willing to examine the remarkable achievement by which the demoralised and defeated British Indian army of 1942 was turned into the superb fighting force of 1944-5, probably, as even they admit, the finest field army Britain has ever deployed, and this imbalances their narrative of 1942-5, finding in the resistance movements against the Japanese an explanation for the victory of 1945, which, while these played an important part, ignores the huge military power exerted by SEAC and particularly the superb fighting qualities of the British and Indian soldiers of 14th Army under the leadership of Slim and his impressive generals (Frank Messervy gets a mention, but not the importance of or the brilliance of the defence at Admin Box in the Arakan in February 1944, a turning point in the war). The problem with the authors' imperial decay thesis is also that it is shown up by the administrative and martial resurgence of the Raj after 1943 and the achievements of 14th Army, a reason why these are ignored or belittled. The one army left forgotten in this book is the most important army: the Forgotten Army. And while the story of the other 'forgotten armies' is important, focussing upon them and ignoring the rebuilding, re-training, and re-equiping of the Indian army, and its development and implementation of new doctrines and superior tactics, totally imbalances the history of the Japanese defeat by relegating the main players to walk-on parts. Just as the British were comprehensively defeated militarily by the Japanese at the beginning of the war, so were the Japanese armies defeated by the British Empire forces at its end. Ultimately, South East Asia in 1941 to 1945 is a military story and it must be understood as such.
In the horrors and misery or the war against the Japanese, the authors do find time for their heroes, although, coming as they do from the traditional anti-impetialist school, these are Subhas Chandra Bose and Thakin Aung San. The problem with this is that not only are these plaster saints, but in order to fit the anti-colonial archetype, the complexities and contradictions in their personalities are smoothed over. Bose was an outlier in the Indian independence movement, and his efforts to bring about the defeat of the British through military overthrow not only led him, and the soldiers of the Indian National Army who followed him, into dependence upon the imperialist Japanese, but would, had his forces been able to fight into Bengal, have provoked civil war - there was no military, only a political, route to Indian independence. Similarly, Aung San, a more realistic nationalist, made common cause with the Japanese, only in his, wiser, case to defect when defeat became likely, but even so, just like Bose, he and his forces were only partially representative of national opinion, and in his case heavily dependent upon one ethnic group. Both were politicians who saw the Japanese invasion as an opportunity to advance their nationalist aspirations, but without considering both the human and moral costs that involved.
This history, therefore, remains a disappointment, being partial and driven by ideology and an excessive focus upon the political as seen as a manifestation of racial and class structures (to refer to the other ranks of the British Army as a 'white proletariat' makes clear how little interest the authors have in the British military or the men who form it). The 'forgotten armies' are abstracts for the authors, simplified archetypes upon which an anti-imperialist narrative can be constructed, in a book, which despite its detail, remains distant and impersonal, with no feel for the climate geography, and environment in which a titanic struggle was fought between and within many different peoples, all a consequence of Japan's aggression. The authors are so keen to advance their post-colonial thesis of the war in South East Asia as part of a greater anti-colonial struggle that at times they are prepared to regard the Japanese invasions and occupations in a positive light and to suggest that Japan's aggression was a necessity which made possible the end of the British Empire and the emergence of independent states, as a good end which justified the appalling means. Such moral vacuity may satisfy university common rooms de jour, but in a history which should be impartial, it breeds both a bias of analysis and an overarching teleology such as to make of what is a fascinating subject an under-achieving book.
March 12, 2025
It took me two years to finish this book, but it was worth it. "Forgotten Armies" is the most illuminating book on World War II I've ever read.
Once upon a time, the British sailed beyond their little island, traveled to distant lands on the other side of the world, planted their flag and called it empire. India, Burma, Malaysia - those are just a few of the countries that were colonized by the British, but combined they account for a quarter of the global population today. Millions of lives fell under the sway of British rule by way of military and technological might, capitalist logistics, and an unwavering belief in racial supremacy.
It was a model that the Japanese sought to copy.
Japan's rapid modernization from a feudal agricultural-based country to an industrial superpower was an economic miracle. When the Japanese defeated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese war of the early 1900s, it was - at the time - a point of pride for all Asiatic people. The Japanese proved to the world that the Orient could in fact, stand toe-to-toe with a European power and win. It was an event that inspired anti-colonialist nationalist groups all across Asia who dreamed of independence from British rule. In India, it would be Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army. In Burma, it would be Aung San and the Burma Indepence Army. In Malaysia, it would be Ibrahim Yaacob and others. So long had they suffered under the British, that when the Japanese came, they not only welcomed them, they took up arms to fight alongside them.
Their story is not the only one covered by "Forgotten Armies", there is also the guerilla rebels of the Naga, the Malayan communists, the Overseas Chinese Association, and others, but it is the story of the collaborators, those deluded into believing that the Japanese would really grant them their independence, that takes center stage in "Forgotten Armies". Their tale is one so steeped in tumultuous tragedy, it hurts to read, but is impossible to ignore.
The breadth and depth of detail of "Forgotten Armies" is unparalleled. Contained within these pages are communiques between Japanese high command and spies fostering rebellion in Burma. Diary entries of British well-to-do ladies running humane societies for prostitutes whose main clientele are their British husbands. Letters between English gentlemen complaining about incompetent governors who only got their job because of this-or-that family connection. News articles desperately trying to spin a disastrous battle into a heroic retreat. On and on, no aspect of colonial or wartime life is left ignored. All together it paints such a complete picture that a diligent reader cannot help but come away with a broadened perspective.
The lead-up to war, the outcomes of battles, and the fate of countries is determined by thousands of different factors and effects millions of lives. No one seems to understand this better than Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, the co-authors of this book. So much of this history - the stories of millions! - has been neglected, and to see it so brilliantly fleshed out is incredible.
If you have any interest in South East Asia, WWII, the follies of colonialism and imperialism, or just the character of people during historic events, read "Forgotten Armies".
Once upon a time, the British sailed beyond their little island, traveled to distant lands on the other side of the world, planted their flag and called it empire. India, Burma, Malaysia - those are just a few of the countries that were colonized by the British, but combined they account for a quarter of the global population today. Millions of lives fell under the sway of British rule by way of military and technological might, capitalist logistics, and an unwavering belief in racial supremacy.
It was a model that the Japanese sought to copy.
Japan's rapid modernization from a feudal agricultural-based country to an industrial superpower was an economic miracle. When the Japanese defeated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese war of the early 1900s, it was - at the time - a point of pride for all Asiatic people. The Japanese proved to the world that the Orient could in fact, stand toe-to-toe with a European power and win. It was an event that inspired anti-colonialist nationalist groups all across Asia who dreamed of independence from British rule. In India, it would be Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army. In Burma, it would be Aung San and the Burma Indepence Army. In Malaysia, it would be Ibrahim Yaacob and others. So long had they suffered under the British, that when the Japanese came, they not only welcomed them, they took up arms to fight alongside them.
Their story is not the only one covered by "Forgotten Armies", there is also the guerilla rebels of the Naga, the Malayan communists, the Overseas Chinese Association, and others, but it is the story of the collaborators, those deluded into believing that the Japanese would really grant them their independence, that takes center stage in "Forgotten Armies". Their tale is one so steeped in tumultuous tragedy, it hurts to read, but is impossible to ignore.
The breadth and depth of detail of "Forgotten Armies" is unparalleled. Contained within these pages are communiques between Japanese high command and spies fostering rebellion in Burma. Diary entries of British well-to-do ladies running humane societies for prostitutes whose main clientele are their British husbands. Letters between English gentlemen complaining about incompetent governors who only got their job because of this-or-that family connection. News articles desperately trying to spin a disastrous battle into a heroic retreat. On and on, no aspect of colonial or wartime life is left ignored. All together it paints such a complete picture that a diligent reader cannot help but come away with a broadened perspective.
The lead-up to war, the outcomes of battles, and the fate of countries is determined by thousands of different factors and effects millions of lives. No one seems to understand this better than Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, the co-authors of this book. So much of this history - the stories of millions! - has been neglected, and to see it so brilliantly fleshed out is incredible.
If you have any interest in South East Asia, WWII, the follies of colonialism and imperialism, or just the character of people during historic events, read "Forgotten Armies".
July 26, 2024
American histories of World War Two in the Pacific rarely do more than take a cursory look at the armies, navies, air forces, and battlefields that were not dominated by American forces except perhaps to suggest that ‘we would have done it better’. But that’s neither historically accurate or realistic, but it means that for a more complete picture of the war in the East you need to look for the work of historians of other nations to expand the narrative. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper present a lot of information about what was happening across British India, Burma, Malaya, and into Thailand, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) with special attention to the pre-war and wartime events and those that followed the war as colonial empires retreated across the region.
Identifying key players, locations, and events, it begins by recalling the shocks – because they just kept coming – of the Japanese conquest as it kept rolling onwards through the first half of 1942. Britain’s war in 1942 was in a number of ways more complex than that of the USA because Britain was already engaged in an air war, a desert campaign in North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, etc., even as US forces were only just getting started. The war in the Far East also relied heavily on the forces raised within the region itself especially the Indian Army and it was a long hard effort to get its war moving in the right direction again. Interactions between the Japanese occupiers and their subject populations didn’t go smoothly given their conflicting agendas – independence from colonial authority versus accepting their role within a Japanese lead Asian empire in which Tokyo made the decisions. As a result, many of the key figures across the region found themselves sliding from one role into another as allegiances and objectives shifted. The British authorities could be flexible about behaviors early in the war as long everyone pulled together against the Japanese at the end.
The ten chapters, almost 500 pages of text, more than 40 pages of End Notes, an extensive bibliography plus an index presented by the authors, might seem like a lot to tell the story of just five years of war even across such a region. But this is not just the story of how the war happened and turned out, it’s the beginning of the story of what happened next for multitudes of Britain’s former colonial subjects. It might have been nice though if the authors could have gotten it right that the US Navy sank 4 Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway vice the 3 reported in this book – representing 4 of the 6 Japanese carriers that had attacked the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Recommended.
Identifying key players, locations, and events, it begins by recalling the shocks – because they just kept coming – of the Japanese conquest as it kept rolling onwards through the first half of 1942. Britain’s war in 1942 was in a number of ways more complex than that of the USA because Britain was already engaged in an air war, a desert campaign in North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, etc., even as US forces were only just getting started. The war in the Far East also relied heavily on the forces raised within the region itself especially the Indian Army and it was a long hard effort to get its war moving in the right direction again. Interactions between the Japanese occupiers and their subject populations didn’t go smoothly given their conflicting agendas – independence from colonial authority versus accepting their role within a Japanese lead Asian empire in which Tokyo made the decisions. As a result, many of the key figures across the region found themselves sliding from one role into another as allegiances and objectives shifted. The British authorities could be flexible about behaviors early in the war as long everyone pulled together against the Japanese at the end.
The ten chapters, almost 500 pages of text, more than 40 pages of End Notes, an extensive bibliography plus an index presented by the authors, might seem like a lot to tell the story of just five years of war even across such a region. But this is not just the story of how the war happened and turned out, it’s the beginning of the story of what happened next for multitudes of Britain’s former colonial subjects. It might have been nice though if the authors could have gotten it right that the US Navy sank 4 Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway vice the 3 reported in this book – representing 4 of the 6 Japanese carriers that had attacked the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Recommended.
November 14, 2021
Superb work. For me it was a fitting complement to At Dawn We Slept and Miracle at Midway. I did not have a good grasp of WW II in Southeast Asia. This is a comprehensive examination of the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, Burma and the eastern provinces of India Bengal Assam and what is now Bangladesh. It covers the political landscape in the 1930s, the Japanese invasion in 1942, the grinding war and horrific atrocities that followed, the defeat in 1945 and the rise of nationalism that led to independence in the aftermath of the war. Just excellent.
April 11, 2024
One of those solid books on a theater no one talks about. This book makes the British empire look rightfully weak. It also makes me want to read a ton more on the pacific war (which I have done and will continue to do).
August 18, 2010
Forgotten Armies is a lively history of the Second World War years in the British crescent that ran from Calcutta through Assam, Burma and Malaysia to Singapore. Its focus is on political and social history, on the moulding of new identities, the overturning of old structures, the rise of new leaders, and the other changes that were to set the region on a new course.
Bayly and Harper begin with pre-war society, describing the imperial heyday of the 1930s, based on surprisingly fragile foundations, and the stirrings of nationalism and other discontents. (Strangely, Malaysia is covered in "Prologue Part II" and India and Burma in chapter one.) They also describe the Japanese penetration into Southeast Asia through informal and formal networks, through traders and tourists and spies. There isn't room for much background history here, however: those unfamiliar with the region should be able to follow Forgotten Armies, but some context would help.
Forgotten Armies describes the Japanese attack, the ignominious British defeats in Malaysia, Singapore, and Burma, and the slow Allied recovery and victorious return. It is not, however, a military history. The battles for Kohima and Imphal are described in just a few pages, and the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse in one; there are no low level accounts of battle; and there are only passing mentions of key technologies such as the Japanese use of tanks, the early successes of Hurricanes, or the withdrawal of the radar system from Rangoon.
Bayly and Harper do an excellent job covering the broader and arguably more important aspects of war: the "malaria, monsoon and morale" that were key on the Burmese front, the armies of labourers behind the lines, the reformation of recruitment and management in the Indian army, and so forth. They also cover the tensions between British, American, Chinese and local leaders, and between civilians and military; on the other side, the differing attitudes of Japanese leaders to nationalist movements and leaders, and the conflicts with, and within, the Burma Defence Army, the Indian National Army, and other organisations.
A myriad of details help to convey a picture of Malaysia and Burma under Japanese occupation, and of India mobilised for war: the Chinese community in Singapore, faced with massacres and a huge fine; the terrible situation of refugees along the India-Burma border and the plight of Anglo-Burmans under the Japanese; bourgeois Singaporeans fleeing to the new jungle settlements of Bahau and Endau; the Bengal famine; the importance of cloth in Burma; currency and counterfeiting; the poor health of Indian labourers on the Assam front; and much more.
All this encompasses a fascinating array of people. The obvious figures include Allied commanders and officials like Wingate and Mountbatten and Dorman-Smith and Stilwell, nationalist leaders like Aung San and Subhas Chandra Bose and Ba Maw, and more distant figures such as Gandhi, Nehru and Churchill. There are also a host of lesser known figures: Japanese colonel Suzuki Keiji, who organised pre-war intelligence networks across Southeast Asia; Tan Kah Kee, unofficial leader of the Malay Chinese; the anthropologist Edmund Leach, carrying out fieldwork in the Burmese hills; the mysterious Lai Teck, the Malaysian Communist Party leader who was also a Japanese agent; and many more.
Bayly and Harper draw on a broad range of sources, notably a large number of memoirs and diaries, starting with Jean Cocteau's comments on British Southeast Asia during a round-the-world trip in 1936. One big limitation of Forgotten Armies, however, is its dependence on sources in English: the only Japanese perspective given prominence is that of an interpreter "Mr Nakane", known through a crude English diary.
The narrative stops abruptly with the Japanese surrender; it covers events after the Allied return in Burma but not in Malaysia. The explanation for this is that Bayly and Harper have a forthcoming book Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia, which will cover the post-war conflicts and the achievement of independence by Malaysia and Burma. I'm looking forward to it.
Bayly and Harper begin with pre-war society, describing the imperial heyday of the 1930s, based on surprisingly fragile foundations, and the stirrings of nationalism and other discontents. (Strangely, Malaysia is covered in "Prologue Part II" and India and Burma in chapter one.) They also describe the Japanese penetration into Southeast Asia through informal and formal networks, through traders and tourists and spies. There isn't room for much background history here, however: those unfamiliar with the region should be able to follow Forgotten Armies, but some context would help.
Forgotten Armies describes the Japanese attack, the ignominious British defeats in Malaysia, Singapore, and Burma, and the slow Allied recovery and victorious return. It is not, however, a military history. The battles for Kohima and Imphal are described in just a few pages, and the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse in one; there are no low level accounts of battle; and there are only passing mentions of key technologies such as the Japanese use of tanks, the early successes of Hurricanes, or the withdrawal of the radar system from Rangoon.
Bayly and Harper do an excellent job covering the broader and arguably more important aspects of war: the "malaria, monsoon and morale" that were key on the Burmese front, the armies of labourers behind the lines, the reformation of recruitment and management in the Indian army, and so forth. They also cover the tensions between British, American, Chinese and local leaders, and between civilians and military; on the other side, the differing attitudes of Japanese leaders to nationalist movements and leaders, and the conflicts with, and within, the Burma Defence Army, the Indian National Army, and other organisations.
A myriad of details help to convey a picture of Malaysia and Burma under Japanese occupation, and of India mobilised for war: the Chinese community in Singapore, faced with massacres and a huge fine; the terrible situation of refugees along the India-Burma border and the plight of Anglo-Burmans under the Japanese; bourgeois Singaporeans fleeing to the new jungle settlements of Bahau and Endau; the Bengal famine; the importance of cloth in Burma; currency and counterfeiting; the poor health of Indian labourers on the Assam front; and much more.
All this encompasses a fascinating array of people. The obvious figures include Allied commanders and officials like Wingate and Mountbatten and Dorman-Smith and Stilwell, nationalist leaders like Aung San and Subhas Chandra Bose and Ba Maw, and more distant figures such as Gandhi, Nehru and Churchill. There are also a host of lesser known figures: Japanese colonel Suzuki Keiji, who organised pre-war intelligence networks across Southeast Asia; Tan Kah Kee, unofficial leader of the Malay Chinese; the anthropologist Edmund Leach, carrying out fieldwork in the Burmese hills; the mysterious Lai Teck, the Malaysian Communist Party leader who was also a Japanese agent; and many more.
Bayly and Harper draw on a broad range of sources, notably a large number of memoirs and diaries, starting with Jean Cocteau's comments on British Southeast Asia during a round-the-world trip in 1936. One big limitation of Forgotten Armies, however, is its dependence on sources in English: the only Japanese perspective given prominence is that of an interpreter "Mr Nakane", known through a crude English diary.
The narrative stops abruptly with the Japanese surrender; it covers events after the Allied return in Burma but not in Malaysia. The explanation for this is that Bayly and Harper have a forthcoming book Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia, which will cover the post-war conflicts and the achievement of independence by Malaysia and Burma. I'm looking forward to it.
June 5, 2007
The war with Japan in SE Asia was, at the same time, the death rattle of Britian's colonial rule there.
March 6, 2011
Excellent history book, perfectly balancing drama and narrative with clear and fascinating background.
January 17, 2013
We've all heard the story of how the Japanese surprised the English in the way they invaded Singapore... now here's the rest of the story. Bayly's a master.
September 10, 2013
Informative and well-researched, shedding light on an oft-neglected side in World War Two but hugely affecting subject in South East Asian history.
March 6, 2016
Great book that tackled a huge history that might be forgotten to people in the West,but it's consequences and the history is important to region.
August 2, 2021
“The sun never sets on the British Empire”
- Before the start of World War II, 3rd September 1939
Before the horrors of World War II, the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the death marches of the Japanese Empire, the bloody battles of the Pacific between America and Japan, the vicious sand twisted fights in the deserts of North Africa, the devastating atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the eventual day of victory for the Allies on May 8th 1945, the British Empire ruled over a vast, powerful and profitable realm. This was an empire that stretched from the grassy wildlands of Canada to the dense, lush but humid jungles of Malaysia in south-east Asia. Having endured for hundreds of years and ruled over dozens of countries, the British Empire seemed to be an empire without end, an empire that could not and would fall to the vagaries of time, history or pernicious politics.
All that changed with the invasion of the Japanese Empire in 1940.
Within brief, bloody months, Britain’s colonial treasures, gained from years of brutal conquest and ruthless imperialistic strategies, fell in a dizzying haze of violence, rape and gunfire to the might of Japan and its own domineering, elitist empire. The fall of the Empire invited despair and disbelief in equal measure from both the British and their colonial subjects. How could this be? How could Great Britain, one of the richest and most powerful nations in history, be defeated by non-European enemy in such a quick and unstoppable fashion? Was it arrogance or hubris? While the British argued and fought amongst themselves and their allies, their colonial subjects looked on and wondered whether now the time was to strike for independence.
This is the story that “Forgotten Armies” seeks to tell.
Written in 2005 by accomplished authors and historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies is a serious, highly interesting and in-depth book about the society, culture, history and politics of Britain’s South-East Asian Empire, how it fell to the power of the Imperial Japanese army from 1940-44 and how Britain and the Allies eventually regained British former colonies in South-East Asia. It is a chronological re-telling of the historical, social, cultural, political and racial hierarchical contexts that defined and shaped the world of Britain’s South-Asian Empire as it entered its glorious and decadent twilight years before its crushing fall to the Japanese Empire. The book itself deals with the Forgotten Armies narrative by using different and diverse perspectives to the final days of the Britain’s South-East Asian Empire which can range from Chinese, Eurasian, British, Burmese, Karen, Japanese and Indian outlooks on World War II.
This is a very well-written, engrossing and engaging book. It has a crisp and clear writing style with deep insights and stark depictions of war, violence and the corruption and cruelty inherent in a colonial and racist society. It is also a deeply researched and highly structured book, based on credible primary and secondary sources and replete with footnotes. There is significant focus on explaining and exploring the social, cultural, historical and racial constructs that underpinned Britain’s colonial Asian heartlands which will be greatly appreciated by intrigued readers. This might be a hard going read for the casual reader or those unfamiliar with history behind Japan’s war with the British Empire during World War II.
Highly recommended!
- Before the start of World War II, 3rd September 1939
Before the horrors of World War II, the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the death marches of the Japanese Empire, the bloody battles of the Pacific between America and Japan, the vicious sand twisted fights in the deserts of North Africa, the devastating atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the eventual day of victory for the Allies on May 8th 1945, the British Empire ruled over a vast, powerful and profitable realm. This was an empire that stretched from the grassy wildlands of Canada to the dense, lush but humid jungles of Malaysia in south-east Asia. Having endured for hundreds of years and ruled over dozens of countries, the British Empire seemed to be an empire without end, an empire that could not and would fall to the vagaries of time, history or pernicious politics.
All that changed with the invasion of the Japanese Empire in 1940.
Within brief, bloody months, Britain’s colonial treasures, gained from years of brutal conquest and ruthless imperialistic strategies, fell in a dizzying haze of violence, rape and gunfire to the might of Japan and its own domineering, elitist empire. The fall of the Empire invited despair and disbelief in equal measure from both the British and their colonial subjects. How could this be? How could Great Britain, one of the richest and most powerful nations in history, be defeated by non-European enemy in such a quick and unstoppable fashion? Was it arrogance or hubris? While the British argued and fought amongst themselves and their allies, their colonial subjects looked on and wondered whether now the time was to strike for independence.
This is the story that “Forgotten Armies” seeks to tell.
Written in 2005 by accomplished authors and historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies is a serious, highly interesting and in-depth book about the society, culture, history and politics of Britain’s South-East Asian Empire, how it fell to the power of the Imperial Japanese army from 1940-44 and how Britain and the Allies eventually regained British former colonies in South-East Asia. It is a chronological re-telling of the historical, social, cultural, political and racial hierarchical contexts that defined and shaped the world of Britain’s South-Asian Empire as it entered its glorious and decadent twilight years before its crushing fall to the Japanese Empire. The book itself deals with the Forgotten Armies narrative by using different and diverse perspectives to the final days of the Britain’s South-East Asian Empire which can range from Chinese, Eurasian, British, Burmese, Karen, Japanese and Indian outlooks on World War II.
This is a very well-written, engrossing and engaging book. It has a crisp and clear writing style with deep insights and stark depictions of war, violence and the corruption and cruelty inherent in a colonial and racist society. It is also a deeply researched and highly structured book, based on credible primary and secondary sources and replete with footnotes. There is significant focus on explaining and exploring the social, cultural, historical and racial constructs that underpinned Britain’s colonial Asian heartlands which will be greatly appreciated by intrigued readers. This might be a hard going read for the casual reader or those unfamiliar with history behind Japan’s war with the British Empire during World War II.
Highly recommended!
August 27, 2024
I really liked this book, even though it can't quite tell the story as fully as I thought necessary. I think maybe the book I was looking for would have to be a Thousand pages and these guys gave out at 464. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper are British Academics with an interest in Empire, Colonialism and the South and South East Asian areas. Here they take on the whole breadth of the British South and Southeast Asian Empire's battle with the Japanese Empire, the fall of Malaya, Singapore and Burma, the Battle for India, and the re-conquest in 1944 and 45. Among the Forgotten Armies are the Armies of Collaborators the Japanese created in all their new possessions, some of whom would go on to fight the original Colonial regime, and those auxiliary forces the British raised to protect the Raj's last bastion. The authors are also able to take the time and set the stage for the debacle and return, explaining the state of Nationalist/Anti-Colonialist/Pro-Independence movements in each region before the war began. I found the book very informative and well worth the time to read. I honestly think both experience Military History reader and the more general audience will both find this an engaging read.
The Japanese lacked the amazingly lighter touch of the Nazis in raising Local Forces, and were More successful in Burma than Malaya and Singapore. It largely depended on whether the locals were paying attention to the decimation of almost all Overseas Chinese communities in the region- and how they felt about that. The Japanese were more successful with the Overseas South Asian Communities, raising the Indian National Army from volunteers among Raj POWs and local Anti British Imperialist youth. The tell was that all these forces only ever dealt with the Japanese Army and Army Intelligence and were never really accorded National status and handled by Diplomats. Allied troops had little respect for "puppet forces" , and all locals lost any love for the Japanese over the passage of the war. By the time the Allies were coming back- everyone seemed to want to help the expulsion. It was fascinating to hear a lot about the Independence movements all over Asia and how they mingled and tried to work with each other.
This book is full of adult themes, and rape and torture abound in its pages, so this is best read by the Junior Reader over 14/15 Year with a historical bent. For the Gamer/Modeler/Military Enthusiast think of this book as better smorgasbord than guide. The Gamer gets to look at all the conflicts of the region, not just British Indian Army V Japanese. Do you want to fight long range penetration games with Chindits, or short range patrols with the Lushan Levies? Armoured Columns from 14th Army- or Us Trained Chinese working with Kachin Insurgents. The modeler will get build and diorama ideas- but still need a lot of other sources, particularly colour ones. It is the Military enthusiast who is the big winner getting even more depth on how the Pacific War was fought on landmasses. A strong rec from this reviewer.
The Japanese lacked the amazingly lighter touch of the Nazis in raising Local Forces, and were More successful in Burma than Malaya and Singapore. It largely depended on whether the locals were paying attention to the decimation of almost all Overseas Chinese communities in the region- and how they felt about that. The Japanese were more successful with the Overseas South Asian Communities, raising the Indian National Army from volunteers among Raj POWs and local Anti British Imperialist youth. The tell was that all these forces only ever dealt with the Japanese Army and Army Intelligence and were never really accorded National status and handled by Diplomats. Allied troops had little respect for "puppet forces" , and all locals lost any love for the Japanese over the passage of the war. By the time the Allies were coming back- everyone seemed to want to help the expulsion. It was fascinating to hear a lot about the Independence movements all over Asia and how they mingled and tried to work with each other.
This book is full of adult themes, and rape and torture abound in its pages, so this is best read by the Junior Reader over 14/15 Year with a historical bent. For the Gamer/Modeler/Military Enthusiast think of this book as better smorgasbord than guide. The Gamer gets to look at all the conflicts of the region, not just British Indian Army V Japanese. Do you want to fight long range penetration games with Chindits, or short range patrols with the Lushan Levies? Armoured Columns from 14th Army- or Us Trained Chinese working with Kachin Insurgents. The modeler will get build and diorama ideas- but still need a lot of other sources, particularly colour ones. It is the Military enthusiast who is the big winner getting even more depth on how the Pacific War was fought on landmasses. A strong rec from this reviewer.
October 9, 2019
Very interesting
This book takes a broad brush view of South East Asia during the war, not least showing how the feeling of South East Asia as a region was a direct consequence of World War II. Much time is spent on the rise of nationalist and Communist movements in counties like Burna (Myanmar) and Malaya (Malaysia), making it an invaluable guide to post war politics as well.
This book takes a broad brush view of South East Asia during the war, not least showing how the feeling of South East Asia as a region was a direct consequence of World War II. Much time is spent on the rise of nationalist and Communist movements in counties like Burna (Myanmar) and Malaya (Malaysia), making it an invaluable guide to post war politics as well.
July 28, 2024
A good account of the period.
February 1, 2022
Bayly and Harper are two of Britain's all time best historians. Their collaboration on this book and its sequel has borne fruit. It is magisterial and comprehensive. Though the narrative style is daunting, it is worth your efforts.
October 17, 2013
Because I have so many connections and friends in Singapore, I decided to read this book about the fall of the British Empire in Southeast Asia. I"m glad I did, it's a good book. It is not a military history, covers the war yes, but it focuses on the social and political aspects of the war, of the almost immediate collapse of the British in 1942, after 200 years, to the coming of the new overlords, the Japanese, to the fall of Japan and the reconquest. But the main point is that the war did not end. In fact all the countries in the "crescent" - including India - continued to fight the British directly or indirectly after World War 2 until they were independent. The author points out that the other powers too - France, Holland, and America - were also expelled.
The style of the book is interesting. It is written with gusto and has many English turns of phrase I've not heard before. It is also blunt and pointed in its opinions. Here's an example: "By the third year of the Japanese war, the army had in place an effective system for rapid training. This taught basic skills to illiterate recruits who as yet had had no contact with machinery beyond the pump of the village well." That the author describing the training of Indians for the Allied forces.
All in all I recommend this book and I only give it three stars instead of four because its subject matter is not exactly mainstream.
The style of the book is interesting. It is written with gusto and has many English turns of phrase I've not heard before. It is also blunt and pointed in its opinions. Here's an example: "By the third year of the Japanese war, the army had in place an effective system for rapid training. This taught basic skills to illiterate recruits who as yet had had no contact with machinery beyond the pump of the village well." That the author describing the training of Indians for the Allied forces.
All in all I recommend this book and I only give it three stars instead of four because its subject matter is not exactly mainstream.
November 2, 2011
The Fall of British Asia is one of the better analyses of how the British Empire came under strain during the course of World War II. This accurately assesses the effect that the Japanese had on the Crescent of British power and a look at what happened to the British islands of the pacific. Although many colonial groups thought the Japanese would be their key to freedom they quickly realized how wrong they were and this book does a great job of not only showing the colonial side but the British and Japanese sides as well. These authors are two of the best within the field and they deliver another winner here. This is a great introduction to what happened to East Asia during world war II and is a great place to start.
July 25, 2011
An account of the British Empire in Asia from its fall to the Japs in late '41 to their surrender in '45. Mainly describing how the defeat and hasty retreat of their former colonial masters helped sow the seeds of nationalism from India and Burma to Malaya. Interesting to learn the duplicity of Indian and Burmese soldiers, who switched sides depending on whether the Japs or Brits had the upper hand during the course of the war. Expected more on the actual battles, but this is as much a social history as a military one, and one can get bogged down in the minutae of rivalries and alliances between the 'forgotten' ethnic and political groups during those grim times.
October 1, 2022
This has sat on my shelves for years and every time I've started I've been overwhelmed by the cast of 1000s introduced in the prologue. Well worth persevering. So many burgeoning nationalities, peoples, political groups and indeed armies emerging in the disruption of Japanese invasion of Malaya and Burma (affecting India also). Such complexity and multifarious suffering marks a contrast with the simple narrative of General Slim and the Forgotten Army, of the British Empire undermined but then defeating Imperial Japan.
October 1, 2015
I enjoyed reading this book. My main reason for choosing it was to have more background information for my great great uncle and for my great grandfather's nephew's family living in Burma. And still racism is a problem not just with the English and Americans but elsewhere in the English speaking and western worlds.
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