Asia’s long war against Imperial Japan

Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia,  Hans van de Ven, Basic Books, £30

I really wanted to enjoy this book. The enthusiastic endorsements from Rana Mitter, Antony Beevor and Richard Overy raised my expectations considerably. Yet by page eight of Blood Dawn  I felt as uncomfortable as the proverbial curate confronted with a rotten egg.

The author aims to provide a narrative that ‘contributes to a gradual shift in our understanding of the significance of World War II’. This is admirable. A more Asian-centred interpretation of the conflict is certainly needed, as the war is still too often viewed through a Eurocentric or North Atlantic lens. Historians such as Rana Mitter, Jonathan Fennell and Richard Overy have already helped redress this imbalance. It is unquestionably true that the conflict began with Japanese aggression in China as early as 1931 and that the war both began and ended in Asia.

The problem is that the book insists that the central dynamic of modern Asian history is a nationalist struggle to escape imperialism and colonialism. While both undeniably shaped Asia, it is a considerable stretch to explain the region’s political development primarily through resistance to empire. The author correctly notes that many Asian political movements saw the war as an opportunity to cast off colonial rule, but he greatly overstates their role in determining the war’s outcome.

Consequently, the analysis neglects the broader dynamics of power – local, regional and imperial – that shaped Asia before, during and after the war. The author assumes that modern Asia is the product of ‘Asian peoples’ continuing struggle to overcome the legacies of empire’. That seems reductive. A more convincing interpretation would describe modern Asia to be the result of a power-based confrontation among declining powers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands, a rising Japan, a developing China, and the emerging superpowers whose ideologies would shape postwar Asia: the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was principally caused by one rising empire, Japan, seeking to assert its dominance regionally and to replace existing empires.

As a result, some empires disappeared, others expanded, and many colonial territories gained independence as competing political elites seized opportunities created by wartime upheaval. Where those struggles could not be resolved peacefully, civil war followed. One may call this nationalism or self-determination, but it was power politics nonetheless.

In the postwar period, Asians were often less concerned with abolishing imperial legacies than with creating new centres of power controlled by local elites. Since 1945, Asia has been shaped by competing powers, some imperial in nature, such as China, the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States, and others nationalist and local.

A similar lack of nuance appears in the treatment of imperialism. British imperialism is lumped together with that of France and the Netherlands, with little appreciation for their differences. British involvement in 19th-century China is presented primarily as the cause of China’s problems rather than as part of a broader interaction with a declining and dysfunctional Qing polity. Imperialism was certainly influential, but so were domestic developments, including China’s internal sclerosis and Japan’s response to modernity, which produced its own imperial ambitions in China, Korea, Manchuria and the Pacific.

The author’s ideological predispositions are impossible to miss, and the book frequently descends into crude Anglophobia. We are told, for instance, that ‘British elites, who liked (and like) to think of themselves as natural and gifted rulers, found a new outlet for their yearning to govern India’. Such statements are simplistic, if not puerile. Similarly, discussing the collapse of the American-British-Dutch-Australia Command (ABDACOM) in 1942, the author remarks that ‘the Dutch were abandoned to their fate. Retreat is an underappreciated military skill, and the British were practiced masters of it, as they had shown at Dunkirk’. This is the sort of cheap point-scoring that would weaken an undergraduate essay, yet here it appears in a supposedly serious work of history.

The treatment of India is particularly problematic. The narrative focuses heavily on the Indian National Congress and consequently overlooks the diversity and complexity of the independence movement. There is little recognition that what Congress often described as British obstruction was, in part, a debate within Britain (especially the Conservative Party) about the form an independent India should take. The same debate also took place within Indian circles considering the subject.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the central political question in India was often not whether independence would occur but what form it would take and, crucially, who would benefit from it. The Quit India movement of 1942 followed the Cripps Mission, which had already offered India Dominion status after the war. Congress sought immediate separation, but many of its leaders privately supported the Allied war effort, believing correctly that victory would hasten independence. One could even argue that Congress’s greatest unintended achievement was not independence but the partition and communal violence that accompanied it. The book fails to engage adequately with these complexities.

This fact distinguishes Britain from France and the Netherlands, which were generally far less willing to surrender their empires. Yet the author suggests that ‘Western hopes for restoration of the pre-war imperial order’ were frustrated after 1945. In Britain’s case, this is misleading. Britain intended to leave India; it simply believed that winning the war had to come first. By the late 1930s, most British politicians accepted that independence was inevitable. The Second World War accelerated rather than initiated that process. The election of the Labour government in 1945 effectively guaranteed independence.

The work is weak on constitutional history. It omits significant developments, such as the Government of India Act of 1935 and simplifies debates that were far more nuanced than presented here. Even after offering a relatively balanced account of the Bengal Famine, and acknowledging failures by the Government of Bengal, the author eventually falls back on the claim that the disaster resulted from ‘conscious strategic decisions’ made by the US and UK governments. Churchill receives similarly predictable treatment. We are reminded that he harboured racist views and told that his supposed use of hunger as a weapon of war demonstrated indifference to Bengal. Such arguments flatten an enormously complex historical debate into a familiar moral caricature.

Interestingly, there is no discussion in the book of postwar Malaya, perhaps because it might upend the author’s simplistic views on imperialism. Independence was granted in 1960 only after the military threat posed by the Malayan Communist Party had been overcome in 1957. Stability and eventual independence were achieved through a conscious British effort to end colonial rule on sustainable terms. Whatever criticisms may be made of that process, the subsequent success of Malaysia and Singapore suggests it was not entirely ineffective.

If the constitutional history is poor, parts of the military history is no better. For example, the author describes Pearl Harbor as a ‘brilliant strategic manoeuvre’. Operationally, perhaps. Strategically, however, it was disastrous, as it brought the United States into the war and ensured Japan’s eventual defeat. Elsewhere, Rommel is credited with ‘cunning tactics’, while the Indian Army is at one point confused with Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA), an astonishing error. The crucial importance of the Hump air route in sustaining China and meeting the terms of Allied strategy is not discussed.

Most striking is the failure to address the contrast between the volunteer Indian Army of approximately 2.5 million men and Bose’s INA, which numbered about 16,000 rather than the 30,000 claimed. The Indian Army is dismissed as little more than a colonial manpower reservoir. This ignores the agency of millions of Indians who volunteered to fight. As one veteran explained to me: ‘We knew about Nanjing, and didn’t want the Japanese here.’

The INA achieved little of military or political significance during the war itself, though it has since acquired considerable symbolic importance in Indian political discourse. By contrast, the Indian Army played a decisive role in defeating Japanese forces at Kohima, Imphal, Mandalay and Meiktila. It was this army, not the INA, that more accurately reflected how many Indians viewed their future.

Although the author draws on some useful scholarship, including Pike, Khan and Raghavan, he frequently misunderstands the Burma campaign. Churchill’s reluctance to fight there arose not from indifference but from a strategic preference for operations against Malaya. The Allied return to Burma was driven substantially by the need to maintain Chinese support and re-open communications through the Burma Road.

Even more extraordinary is the claim that Britain fought in Asia primarily to preserve control of India. Such assertions resemble the old joke that SEAC (the acronym for Britain’s South East Asia Command) actually stood for ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’. They reduce a highly complex coalition war to a single ideological explanation.

Several factual errors compound the problem. The book claims Stilwell demanded the Ledo Road when Chiang Kai-shek was the principal advocate. Kohima is reduced to a two-week grenade duel rather than the 64-day battle it actually was. Mandalay is said to have been bypassed in 1945, a statement unlikely to impress the soldiers who fought to capture it.

The most surprising aspect of the book comes in its conclusion, where the author briefly acknowledges that European imperialism was ‘not the sole source of discontent’. That admission undermines much of the argument that precedes it. If imperialism was not the sole cause, then what other forces mattered most? The book never adequately answers that question. That, ultimately, is its greatest weakness.