Christopher Alan Bayly (1945–2015)

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, show more 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! show less

During the second world war, events sowed the seeds of the end of the British Empire in South Asia and South East Asia. When the Japanese defeated the British Forces in South East Asia, they broke the myth of British invincibility.

Historians have not focussed on the events of the wars and armies of the times. However, these events were crucial in the history of SE Asia and South Asia. These events provided the foundation for future events.

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper have written a show more detailed account of the times. The book is fascinating and important for us living today. Too many politicians manipulate the past and this book serves as an excellent reminder of what took place.

The authors have woven a coherent tale from a complex web of interconnected stories. Kudos. show less

A pleasant surprise. Ordered sight-unseen; I figured from the title it would be about the Malaya campaign, the battles in Burma, Imphal and Kohima, and the final Japanese retreat. As it turns out, there’s practically no military history – the battles are mentioned but that’s about it; in fact the authors give the impression that they don’t really know or care very much about military history. Instead, it’s a political history of the various resistance movements, the Indian National show more Army, the attitude of the quasi-neutral Malayan sultanates, etc.

The collapse of Malaya came as a sudden shock, not only to the British, but to the native peoples in the entire Far East. The British (in fact, the majority of troops involved were Australian or Indian) displayed singular ineptitude in the campaign, but it’s doubtful that even the best general could have stood up to the Japanese. The civil service, most of whom were based in Singapore and Rangoon, all evacuated, leaving Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Malays, and Anglo-Burmese behind to their fate (which usually wasn’t very pleasant). All the affected territories up to the Indian border were polyglot, and, as is often the case, the original natives – Burmese, Malay, and various tribal groups – took advantage of the situation to loot, rape and murder Chinese, Indians, and anybody else who was in the wrong neighborhood. Indians in Burma suffered heavily, with thousands dying trying to evacuate to India overland.

The Japanese wooed surrendered Indian troops and Indian residents of Malaya and Burma, forming the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose; Burmese to form the Burma Independence Army; and the Malaya sultanates. The Malayan attempt went poorly from the start; the Japanese ceded the three northernmost Malayan states to Thailand, which didn’t do much to endear the remainder, and attempts to get Muslim cooperation ended when the imams met and concluded that it would be perfectly proper to conduct a jihad against the British – provided the Emperor of Japan converted to Islam. (Alternate history fans are invited to run with that one).

Although the other “liberation army” attempts initially had more success, they foundered on Japanese racism. The Japanese didn’t understand Hindu dietary customs, entered mosques and pagodas without removing their shoes, took to physical abuse of recruits (the Japanese habit of face-slapping as a disciplinary measure was particularly offensive to the Burmese) and generally acted as if they were trying to destroy whatever goodwill they had earned as quickly as possible. There was a wholesale massacre of Chinese, who didn’t help matters much by quickly dividing into Communist and Kuomintang factions that spent more time betraying each other than fighting Japanese.

Just to be even-handed, authors Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper are harshly critical of Allied efforts as well. British residents evacuated to India from Burma and Malaya acted as if nothing had changed, dressing for dinner and meeting at the club while Bengal was undergoing one of the worst famines in history (which is quite an accomplishment for Bengal). Indian Army officers stayed Kiplingesque, with unchanged prejudices about “martial races”, and, ironically, exercising excessive caution about their troops’ dietary requirement (the troops were willing to forego some of these but their officers weren’t – resulting in the bulk of the Indian Army rank-and-file being malnourished). The Indian Congress Party was antifascist (although Gandhi’s approach of passive resistance to fascism probably wouldn’t have worked very well), which didn’t save them from being jailed. The Americans come in for criticism for being arrogant (which we probably were) and callous about the Bengal famine. There’s what might be some subtle racism; it’s my impression that Bayly and Harper are particularly critical of black GIs, who reportedly spent money freely, mingled with Indian women, and, in what’s perhaps the best illustration of the author’s ignorance of military details, “drove around in enormous jeeps”. All Americans came in for contemporary criticism for their relationships with Indian and Anglo-Indian women – not that the relationships existed, but that the Americans didn’t understand that they weren’t supposed to be seen publically with their native girlfriends and mistresses – just isn’t done, old chap. The Americans, in turn, were critical of the British for seeming to be more concerned with the preservation of the British Empire than winning the war and for slowness in following up retreating Japanese (this last is illustrated by one of the rare displays of Japanese humanity – RAF POWs in Rangoon were released unharmed, even though the Japanese burned one of their own military hospitals with the patients still in it rather than let them suffer the indignity of becoming prisoners. Even though the British conducted daily air reconnaissance over the abandoned city, they were very slow in the advancing on it. Eventually the disgruntled and starving RAF men painted “EXTRACT DIGIT” on the roof of the former POW barracks and the Army showed up).

The meat of the book – although it takes some chewing – is in the details of political interaction, particularly in Burma. The Burmese puppet leader, Ba Maw, seems to have been a transvestite whose main focus was eliminating political opponents. The Burmese tribal groups – Karen, Shan, and Naga – uniformly supported the Allies, although the British were reluctant to supply them with modern weapons. The Naga, in particular, organized under a sort of female-Lawrence-of-Arabia, anthropologist Ursula Graham Bower, who I definitely want to read more about. Burmese gradually shifted from being pro-Japanese to being pro-Allied (or, more exactly, pro-Burmese) and the Japanese-organized Burma Independence Army eventually fought on the Allied side.

The authors also point out something that had never occurred to me – despite the hardships, the war was really the making of modern India. Industrialization took off, with India manufacturing the whole range of modern weapons and equipment locally, and the railroads, road network, and harbor facilities were all tremendously enlarged (this often being the work of the USA). An India that hadn’t experience the Second World War but still achieved independence would be a very different place.

The writing style isn’t inspiring; although it’s basically chronological, there quite a bit of shifting around in geography – from Burma to Malaya to India and back. The maps are good, but would be better if inserted at relevant places in the text rather than as front matter; there’s a handy list of principal characters – although it doesn’t include any Americans, even Stilwell. The main virtue of the book is that this is information I’ve never run across anywhere else; if SPI was still around the political plus military interaction would make a fantastic multiplayer game. show less

Bayly & Harper are at their best writing about the social situation in Britain's Asian holdings on the verge of the deluge, on the initial period of Japanese occupation, and on how the subject populations found themselves caught between political awakening and abject suffering. These portions of the book are truly enlightening.

Where the authors seem to have trouble is with integrating the story of the war's impact on the local populations with the actual course of the war. At the very least show more some sloppy writing regarding military events creeps in, with the cherry on top of the sundae coming when the authors make a throwaway comment about Finns fighting the Nazis, which only occured at the tail-end of World War II! show less