KEY POINTS:
Two years after Japan surrendered in 1945, there were still some 80,000 Japanese prisoners of war in the hands of British South East Asia. General Douglas MacArthur wanted to repatriate them and dissolve Japan's broken army, but Britain refused.
It preferred cheap conscript labour and seemed to enjoy
humiliating these legions of the lost. They existed on only half a normal PoW diet; men were routinely forced to kneel and beg their captors for food. Nearly 9000 of them died of malnutrition or disease. The last remnants of "Operation Nipoff", as it was malignly known, didn't get home until as late as 1948.
So it is not just forgotten, small wars that came with surrender in the Pacific: it is forgotten cruelties and forgotten atrocities. And the more Bayly and Harper dig through the archives, the more you see that forgetting is not merely no excuse, but also something of a misnomer. Too much that followed Hiroshima - in Malaya, Burma, Bengal and throughout the region - was simply never reported. Scan the appendices and observe a British media mostly gone Awol.
There were some excuses: acute problems of time, expense and complexity. This wasn't war in Europe, this was war far away, often fought by surrogate divisions in the name of an empire fast disintegrating.
But in 1945, London wanted to put the old world back together again. It had a fit-for-purpose army assembled in India (substantially made up of Indians), and thought it could go back to colonial business as usual.
Even Attlee's sainted government took time to realise that there could be no going back; that years in the shadow or grip of Tokyo control had changed hearts, minds and ambitions forever. However inchoately, Asia wanted to decide its own future, and Britain, used to ruling by consent at a distance, had no real means of saying nay.
Some of the great set pieces of this retreat have already been exhaustively chronicled - Mountbatten's vice-regal turn, Gerald Templer's suppression of Malaya's communist insurgency - but some barely register on any British responsibility scale.
There is little understanding of the mess that was made of old Burma, the incapacity of understanding or resource that condemned Rangoon to more than half a century of military rule.
Bayly and Harper sense and seek a new beginning as they list the things that the occupying powers forgot; their thesis is clear enough.
Since the Thirties, Asia itself, a mighty continent full of strength and ingenuity, has been racked by war. And though this war has been artificially divided into separate struggles, it has also essentially been one huge, amorphous, eddying quest after self-discovery. Would democracy in an Asian form win the day? Might communism best express the will of teeming millions?
We know some of the answers to those questions. We begin to feel the heat of Asian prosperity and resolve. But Bayly and Harper's strength, apart from lucid, inexhaustible scholarship, is to show us what a mazy, murderous path Asians and their colonial occupiers were forced to walk. And everything connects: not just in braided dictatorships, but in continuing wounds, such as the futility of India's bomb ranged against Pakistan's bomb and the terrible tragedy of Kashmir.
History, on such majestic form, is all about resonances. When we look at the debris of Baghdad, and the wreckage of Iraqi society, it's easy enough to dole out the blame, to condemn the imbecility of invasion and the profound stupidity of Viceroy Bremer's rule. But come back to earlier times of miscalculation and botch. Stir self-knowledge and humility into the pot.
Remember afresh what so many prefer to forget: that good intentions and bad outcomes go hand in hand. That victory, as the PoW begs on his knees, is also a natural outrider for defeat.
* Published by Allen Lane
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