How does one make any sense of the end of the Second World War in Asia in 1945, a war that ended just as quickly and unexpectedly as it had begun? Thirty-nine agonizing months separated the Japanese invasion of southeast Asia in December 1941 and the collapse of its ill-fated attempt to secure an Asian empire in August 1945. Those months could very well have been a century or two, given the vast changes that were brought about because of this most egregious of wars, one that, we need to remind ourselves, began as far back with the Japanese adventure in China in 1931, ten years before. Few of the characteristics and consequences of this total war had previously been envisaged, by policy makers or soldiers. Indeed, no one could have realistically foreseen the horror of these years before they actually occurred. The vast amount of blood shed in Japan’s vainglorious attempt to subdue the region – some 20 million dead – was one such, as was the sudden, shocking arrival of the atomic age. It seemed that all of a sudden the world emerged, blinking into a very different landscape than that which had existed in November 1941. European empires found themselves shadows of their former selves while a new one – the United States – had emerged from its pre-war insularity with the greatest military capability and capacity of any country in world history, though it was to take another war five years later in Korea for it to realise it. The discombobulation in 1945 can best be seen by battalions of Japanese soldiers serving directly under British commanders in the post-war Indian Army restoring law and order in the French and Dutch colonial possessions of Indo China and Java, Kalimantan and Sumatra respectively. Who would have thought this possible?
The way Phil Craig has decided to answer the question about how to think about the end of the war is to look at the great events of 1945 through the eyes of a range of participants, in India, Borneo, Formosa and elsewhere: British and Indian. It’s a good way to do it, for while histories that trace movements and wars that shape the destinies of billions are important it is only by understanding how people thought about the great events they were immersed in that we can appreciate the great issues of the age. It is a method that accepts that people’s views are as different as their backgrounds but as equally important to the political firmament then and the historian now. One of the problems of some contemporary historical discourse is the assumption that it was the big events that mattered, that individual thought and aspiration was never so important as the big movements. Sensible people know this to be an ideological deceit. Everyone living had agency and to an extent, a voice, whatever the variegated nature of their experience. The war that ended in 1945 gave expression to many different ones, and Craig traces a few of them in this endlessly interesting book. His big narrative is how some empires ended, and others emerged; the small narrative is the voices of a handful of those who experienced this tumultuous and epoch-making year. Ranging from Europe to Asia – though focused very much on the later – this fascinating book has many stories to tell.
Robert Lyman is a historian and the co-author of .
