张学良口述历史 (唐德刚)

This book carries great promise, if not responsibilities. Alas, it did not deliver on either. It was not that the author did a bad job, it was a project that failed because the object of the book, Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang (张学良) did not understand the nature of oral history and was therefore uncooperative. In the end, the author published the verbatim interview scripts, responsibly allowing future scholars access to the raw data for their own analysis and hopefully be able to come to an informed conclusion about Zhang, his life and times.

Zhang was an important person. His life was a colourful one, not only was he intimately involved in the many important events in the modern history of China (for example the Manchurian Incident), he was the co-mastermind of the Xi'an Incident (the other was Yang Hucheng 杨虎城). Much controversy still surrounds the event, with China (mainland) and Taiwan having different narratives about the incident and interpretations of the man's motivation and therefore his attitudes.What better way then to hear from the man himself?

It was with this expectation that I started the book. But what I read in the preface dampened my enthusiasm considerably. This book that was supposed to answer questions would not. If you watch the video of the interview, you would understand why. Zhang, in his old age, was no unlike many others; he has the tendency to boast about his achievements and his extra-marital affairs, he suffers from lapses in memory, and at times kept repeating the same thing over and over again. What I find most amusing are the occasions when he would say "I can't tell you who this person is", and almost as sure as the sun will rise, he would follow his next sentence with the name of the person whom he could not tell.

Yet despite its failure to live up to its expectations, the book is not without value. He did help to clarify a few things if only through one's own analysis. For example, when he told the author that there were people who asked him why he bothered to come to Wang's help after a failed attempt at Wang's life (pg. 236), the reader could immediately tell that many preferred Wang dead. He was also the best person to give insights into the workings of the Northeastern Army (奉军) and also some of the personalities (pg. 362). But personally, I think the most valuable part of the book is the epilogue provided by the author. This is a good piece of analytical work that is persuasively argued and engagingly written. This book would have been worth the read just for that part.

Like the author, my impression of the Young Marshal was deeply discounted after reading the book and watching the video mentioned above. He had a colourful life that is only available to people who were born in his times. He was involved in some of the most defining events of modern Chinese history. Yet as an old man, he was like many others, and his failure to maintain respectability during these interviews washes off the mystic that has accompanied him throughout his life, even and especially in detention. Perhaps like what the author said, if not for the  Xi'an Incident, Zhang Xueliang is nothing.

PS. The book came with a few pictures of Zhang and also his calligraphy. I wonder why he wrote his own name in simplified Chinese. I cannot explain that.

The Forgotten Highlander (Alistair Urquhart)

This is the first time I read a first-hand account of a POW involved in the Malayan Campaign. I am greatly affected by it, despite being brought up on a diet of Japanese atrocities in Asia in World War 2. Much is said about the killing, maiming, raping and torture, but a reader is usually left to imagine the magnitude of these atrocities through the statistics; this book describes in graphic details the actual behaviours of the Japanese and their equally brutal Korean subjects and the horrible conditions the POWs were subjected to.

The author escaped the fighting in Malaya and Singapore as he was assigned to administrative work in the Battle Box in Fort Canning but was taken prisoner after the surrender and hence went on to suffer more than three years in various ordeals including building the notorious Death Railway in Thailand and Burma, being torpedoed in 'hellships' and then almost being close enough when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He survived to tell the story and the story was all the more stirring precisely because it was not told with heroics in mind. He told an honest story of how he survived and how he tried to go on, he also told a story of how he eventually became almost immune to the death and suffering that was happening around him. But while this book can be read as a superficial description of one man's experience, there are hints of bigger issues that worth exploring. One of these is the author's attitudes towards the Japanese.

It is no surprise that the author loathed his enemies, especially the camp guards who tortured them no end, yet there was one interesting episode that he mentioned briefly near the end of the book that could have given the readers much to think about - he and Dr Mathieson attended to a sick Japanese girl towards whom he felt no animosity. How does a POW, having gone through such systematic inhumane treatment, feel towards another of 'the other'? This complex attitude of the POWs, even if just that of the author, would have added much to the richness of the book.

Another one is the Koreans who were conscripted to serve in South-East Asia. The Koreans today generally still harbour great dislike of the Japanese owing to the bad legacy Japan left as their colonial master. Yet, in the treatment of the POWs and the populace of South-East Asia, Koreans are known to be no less harsh than the Japanese. In fact, the author even alluded to the Japanese being more measured when it came to beating the POWs (pg. 219). The Koreans today paint themselves as the victims of the Japanese imperialism and in the current K-pop wave, most Asians other than the Japanese, are eager to agree. But were they? This is one subject that is worth exploring (together with the attitudes of the Taiwanese who were also conscripted and served in South-East Asia).

The final one is the parallel that I could not help drawing between the author's experience in signing the agreement with the Japanese in the Selarang Incident and with the British government when he returned to Britain. He described himself signing a name that would not identify him, only in this case if he were to be like his comrades who signed 'Mickey Mouse' in Selarang, he would surely blow his own cover. That bitterness in how he was treated upon his return would stay with him. This is not the first time I came across this theme, it was how General Percival was treated upon his release.

This book resonates a lot with me, mainly because it describes the experience of a soldier who was in Singapore in the days before I was born. His description of the sights and sounds of Singapore then gives me much to imagine. The bumpy road he rode along from 'Singapore' (known as 'town' today) to Changi has long since been replaced by an expressway (our term for 'highway') but it was still there when I was young, so is Selarang camp, which I drive past on occasions just to see the white buildings since its so near home. Now I know it was once home to the Gordon Highlanders as well.


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Singapore And After: a study of the Pacific Campaign (Joseph Montague Kenworthy and Lord Strabolgi)

This book was published in 1942, immediately after South-East Asia fell to the Japanese and when India and Australia were threatened. What it means is that much was still not known when it was written. Not only was the final outcome of the Second World War a few years away, most of the documents related to the Campaign were still not released. The reader therefore cannot expect a book that is filled with facts substantiated with data nor one that critically analyses the Campaign. The author did not claim this book to be one, and from the length as well as the tone of the book, I get the impression that this book was written to inform the people in the United Kingdom of what had just happened to the colonies in the Far East, not just Malaya and Singapore, for the book includes a survey of Burma, the Philippines and the Dutch Indies.

This book was written in a hurry because on my copy, inside the front cover, an earlier owner had dedicated the book to her son/daughter with the date 2nd April 1942 written on it. The rush to get the book published resulted in inaccuracies in many places. Some of these are error of facts, for example the number of artillery batteries in Singapore (definitely more than two) (pg. 88) and Chiang Tso-lin dying in 1918 (it was in 1928). There are others relating to names of places; many of these I reserve my judgement because they could be spelt differently from how they are now due to the Romanization of the names for example Tjilatjap instead of Chilachap as spelt today. But there is one I find unacceptable - Tengate (Tengah) Aerodrome in Singapore (pg. 93). It took me a while to conclude that he was referring to Tengah.

Other faults include the rather random pictures that appear in random places throughout the book, for instance, why would a picture of Georgetown, Penang appear in the chapter on the Philippines and a Japanese submarine in the middle of the Appendix? Even more perplexing is Appendix I - A short chronology of Chinese History. Yet there is something that I must commend about the editing - mis-spelt names of places may be a result of ignorance of the Far East (it was 1942 after all), but beyond these, I did not come across any other editorial mistakes such as a spelling error. Why do I think this is amazing? Some of the printing is of such quality that reminds me of a facsimile typed on an old typewriter that did not have a clean set of strike bars. That reminded me that those were the days without spell-checkers. In 1942 under such dire conditions, someone (not the author, I think) has done a really good job.

The author's position was quite consistent in this book: no matter which theatre he was referring to, he would lament the lack of conscription in the years before the war to prepare the locals to fight the enemies. He did not blame the lack of foresight, he felt it was a misguided policy that deliberately excluded the locals. Another area where he was consistent was in his scathing attack of the British politicians' handling of the war and conversely his praise of both the Dutch and the Americans.

If the book suffers from the faults mentioned above, there are a few things that make me think well of the author. First of all, some of his reading of the Japanese's intentions were quite accurate. His conclusion that the Japanese did not intervene in Russia despite Operation Barbarossa was due to their experience in Nomonhan (which he got the year wrong, it was 1939, not 1938) bore out in a well-argued book on the subject written decades later. Secondly, I like his sense of optimism and courage that never falter throughout the book. Remember, this author was not talking with hindsight, he wrote the book immediately after the Far East fell like dominoes, yet he totally believed that Japan would lose. He wrongly predicted  that the loss would result from a combination of the pincer on the Japanese coming from Australia in the south and China in the north but he never wavered in his belief that Japan would lose. He was a courageous man, I have never come across another soul who would take Churchill's famous exhortation of his countrymen to fight the enemies 'in the streets, on the beaches and in the hills' to be a reflection of defeatism. He asked instead why they should not fight in the enemy's streets, beaches and hills.

I am going to keep this book. Not because it is a resource that I think I would return to but for the historic value of the copy I own and as a source of optimism and courage whenever I need them. We don't just read for knowledge do we?


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Did Singapore Have to Fall?: Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress (Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn)

How does one answer the question - Did Singapore have to fall? Was the final outcome a result of a breakdown in discipline in the Commonwealth troops in the final days of the campaign? Was it because of poorer generalship? Was it because geopolitical events overtook the original considerations despite there being political will? Or was materiel committed yet wrongly deployed? Or perhaps Singapore was doomed from the start, going back to when it was wrongly conceived as a naval base and then wrongly perceived as an impregnable fortress? This book written by a pair of academics then teaching in the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore looks at the outcome from these angles and came up with a highly readable and persuasively argued book that took recently-available documents and literature into consideration.

The book spends a chapter looking at each of the questions asked above but in the reversed order. That the world was hit hard by the Great Depression in the 1920s was well-known. That delayed the construction and eventually down-sized the Singapore naval base. It also paved the way for the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. Some have argued that Britain's financial situation and ratification of the treaty prevented her from building a large enough navy to counter the Japanese when it mattered and so one can say that Malaya was doomed from that moment. The authors studied this in depth and concluded that this might not be so. In addition they also addressed other issues such as the diversion of a few hundred fighter planes from the thousands going to Russia to Malaya and the commitment of tanks to the defence of Malaya and Singapore. In each case, they concluded that not only was it hard for Whitehall to justify their moving materiel to Malaya, particularly when the Russians were fighting and losing in Europe, the earlier neglect of Malaya would make these too little too late.

Much was also made of Operation Matador, the plan to move troops into Songkhla and Pattani in Thailand to counter a Japanese landing. Whether it would have made a difference, we would not know but Map 4.1 on page 59 of the book shows the options that the Japanese had which would have rendered Matador ineffective even if it had been put into action. If all these were not able to make a crucial difference, it would be down to the defence preparations, the handling of the campaign and the quality of the troops to win the battle.

Even when I was in school, we were told that the guns that were deployed along the southern coast of Singapore were 'pointing the wrong way', implying first of all that the British were not expecting the Japanese to invade from the north, and that the guns were not able to traverse. This, through meticulous research, the authors were able to debunk (right down to the number of degrees the guns were able to traverse and which ones actually fired at the enemy). I wonder how this 'pointing the wrong way' myth can still stand after this book. Unfortunately these guns were actually built for the purpose of coastal defence and were given the wrong type of rounds (armour piercing rather than high explosives). Their contributions were therefore limited.

If the static defences were ineffective, it would be down to the troops to win the war. Alas, it is known that many of the troops were not properly trained nor equipped. Yet there exist plenty of examples of those who performed admirably well. Still that was not enough to make the fortress, if Singapore ever was one, impregnable. However, as a Singaporean reader, my sympathy is with the soldiers who fought, suffered and even died, whatever the objective judgement of them. Even if there exist plenty of evidence of untrained, indiscipline and incompetent soldiers, they died trying to defend this island. Those who did not would suffer years in the POW camps or worse, building the Death Railway.

I live very near Changi, no more than 3 miles away from the Johor Battery and the Changi and Selarang POW camps featured prominently in this book. Most of all, my son is now doing his national service in Changi Airbase, right where much happened. The Singapore Armed Forces has helped to preserve much of 'old' Singapore and I can still ask him about the places in his camp that were referred to in the book. This makes the experience of reading this book a lot more real. Plenty of Australians still visit the Changi Museum and the surroundings when they are in Singapore, I believe many of them have relatives who served in Singapore during the campaign. I cannot bring myself to criticise the men whatever other sources claim, I do not claim to be objective.

This book is well worth reading, particularly for those who are interested in understanding the campaign and the issues related to it more broadly. It is well-researched, logically argued, and clearly presented. This book does not focus on the tactical aspects of the campaign, for that, readers can refer to Colin Smith's Singapore Burning or Masanobu Tsuji's Japan's Greatest Victory/Britain's Greatest Defeat, books that are no less enjoyable.


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李宗仁回忆录（上） / （李宗仁/唐德刚）

Li Zongren (李宗仁) is an important person in the history of modern China. A member of the Kuomintang (KMT) government, he rose to the position of Vice-President of Taiwan, next only to Chiang Kai-shek. What made him even more interesting was his eventual return to mainland China in 1965 breaking ties with the KMT.

This is the first of his two-volume autobiography and covered events all the way from his childhood years (which he considerately limited to the first two chapters) to the end of the Northern Expedition, rounding off with a brief mention of his role in Zhang Xueliang's (张学良) submission to the central government in what is known as the 'Northeast changing of flags' (东北易帜).

This book is invaluable for the details that he provided about the various important events that he was involved in such as the unification of Guangxi and Guangdong and the string of battles in the Northern Expedition. I regret not having anticipate this level of details otherwise I would have brought a map with me to follow the advances.I would also prepare myself to take notes for future reference. Beyond the historical facts that he wrote about, the book was also decorated with plenty of insider information and his opinion of the people that are known to us. The most scathing of his criticism was reserved for Chiang who came across as petty, suspicious, and devious, but highly savvy politically. There are other events which I hope he had given more coverage, for example the Shanghai Massacre in which many Communists were tortured and murdered in the name of cleaning up the Kuomintang and 东北易帜 mentioned above. Li being one of the insiders would have been able to throw much light on these events instead of the superficial treatment which he gave to them.

The reader would not fail to notice and surely lament on the condition that China was in at that time. Warlords, big and small, ran amok throughout the land. Some provided some semblance of governance, others were just exploiting the common men for what they were worth, every one of had to maintain a huge army, all of them hoping to exploit the weaknesses of the other to consolidate and expand their territories. The various regional armies were constantly going through 新编 (formation or constitution), 收编 (absorption by another army), or 重编 (re-consitution); that tells the reader how volatile and unreliable the warlord governments were. And almost exactly like how it was like in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, alliances of convenience were easily formed and just as easily betrayed. Former enemies could one day sit down and reminiscent about the 'good old times' when they fought battles on opposite sides while seemingly paying no attention to the thousands who had died in those years, Han Chinese against Han Chinese. It is no wonder modern Chinese governments are most paranoid about not letting China descend into factions again. One wonder how the Sino-Japanese War would pan out had it not been for the wasteful civil wars fought in the decades prior to 1937.

The writing style is not easy for the modern reader. Although the style is not classified as traditional Chinese (文原文), it is by no means the modern Chinese that is used today. This makes reading difficult at first until I started getting used to it, and in fact started to appreciate the beauty of it.Readers must also be ready for the image that Li has portrayed himself in this book. He has made himself looked like an idealistic follower of Sun Yat San's revolution and had no interest in politics and power. Too many times, he also gave himself the roles of the wise seer who was able to counselled the right moves at critical junctures. Although I do not know enough to dispute these, I find too many of such incidents mentioned to make this book somewhat self-serving. But if you look beyond these, this hugely rewarding book is a must-read for all students of the modern history of China.

The Garden of Evening Mists (Tan Twan Eng)

This is an award winning book which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. Written by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng, the story is set in the Cameroon Highlands in Malaysia and is about the main protagonist, Teoh Yun Ling's effort to discover the truth behind the people she met and her own experience as a prisoner in a Japanese camp during the Second World War.

Many good reviews are available on Goodreads and I encourage you to read those. I intend to write my own reflection after reading the book, not a review.

The last time I went to the Cameroon Highlands must have been 40 years ago, I haven't been back since. But reading this book certainly brings back a lot of memories and for once, I was able to visualise the place described by the author, fictitious maybe, but real enough for me. I must confess that I am not an avid reader of local Singaporean literature and this is the first time I venture into Malaysian literature. The experience of trying to imagine the place as described is an interesting one, familiar, yet not being able to call my own. It is not only the places, the language also has that same effect on me. The author made liberal use of Bahasa Malaysia, a language which I cannot claim to be fluent at but still knowing enough to make out what was being said. Others, like Cold Storage is also comfortingly familiar though could pose a problem to readers unfamiliar with the supermarket chain that has been around for more than a hundred years.

I came to know of this book after sitting through two back-to-back paper presentations in a conference that focused on this book. I read it because one of them referred to this book as 'fiction augmenting history', in particular WW2 history. A huge part of the book focuses on the time a few years after the war, when Yun Ling took up an apprenticeship with Aritomo. This was augmented with significant parts of contemporary times, and completing it were small sections on Yun Ling's experience in the internment camp. Among the few thread that ran through the book, the evolution of Yun Ling's attitude towards her captors struck me most. How she must have first hated the Japanese because of their treatment of her and her sister, to slowly embracing the culture (gardening and archery amongst them) and finally as she reached her own retirement age, being more interested in finding the truth than settling scores.

This is how people in Southeast Asia have changed over the 7 decades after the war, except that, most of us have moved on to another phase - consigning the whole national experience to history whether we know the truth or not. Just like the two goddesses mentioned in the book, Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory and her twin sister, the goddess of Forgetting, whose name we cannot remember anymore, some things we choose to remember, others we choose to forget.

Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Michael A. Barnhart)

This is a book that explores why Japan went to war in China in the 1930s and got herself entangled in a war with the British, Dutch, and most of all, the Americans, guaranteeing their own eventual destruction. The story takes the reader back to the end of the First World War when the the military learned two lessons from Germany's defeat:

1. The army should avoid politics so that politics would not interfere with the army.
2. Japan needs to find a way to keep herself economically self-sufficient or risk an inevitably decline given the rapid grow in her population.

Ironically, the former, instead of keeping politics out of the army, the army came to dominate politics so much so that the political system in Japan almost ceased to exist by the late 1930s. And in the case of the latter, the quest to avoid decline would eventually lead to her near-annihilation.

Japan's story in the 1920s and 30s is quite an amazing one. Today, depending on how they see that period of their history, people are still arguing whether Japan waged a war or aggression or self-preservation. Japan was facing a population explosion at that time, they needed land to emigrate their people to and they needed resources which Japan scarcely had. Couple this with her recent victory over both China (1894/5) and Russia (1905), not only did the opportunity presented itself in the shape of Manchuria, it also gave the army the confidence to pursue what they deemed the politicians were not capable of. When the early policies of bribery and working with the regional warlord (in this case Zhang Zhuolin) did not work out, the Japanese murdered him, driving his son to eventually align the Northeastern provinces with the central government of Chiang Kaishek. That developed into the Manchurian Incident giving the Japanese the opportunity to occupy the provinces which later unexpectedly led to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. One thing led to another, and in no time the Americans were openly showing displeasure with the Japanese.

This book looks at the events from both the Japanese and American perspectives. It was like a movie jumping from scene to scene, alternating between what the Japanese were contemplating and how the Americans were responding. If one wants to know how politicians in the US engage in discussions, arguments and decision-making, this book has it all. Many people are familiar with the doctrine of "graduated escalation" McNamara introduced in the lead up to the Vietnam War. It is not that different in the Second World War; the Americans would respond to a Japanese escalation, who in turn would take some measures in the belief that the Americans were go to suffocate them. The Americans, on seeing the Japanese not backing down, would consider them belligerent and take more severe measures, in the end, Pearl Habor was quite inevitable, and so would the Japanese's surrender.

This very detailed book is full of important information and would be of immense interest to the enthusiast who wants to know the longer story of Japan's step-by-step journey to war with the Americans. In a sense this is more complete than an earlier book that I read, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta. However, this one is much harder to reader compared to Hotta's book which was written in a more story-telling style. Still, a reader who makes it through the book will be rewarded with a good understanding of the unfortunate circumstances that drew both the Japanese and Americans into the final showdown.


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Empires in the Balance (H.P. Willmott)

This is a book that tries to address the problem with the frequent singular emphasis on individual theatres in the Pacific War. The British perspective of the war at the end of 1941 in the Far East is invariably on the Malayan Campaign and the subsequent fall of Singapore. The American view starts with the attack on Pearl Habor and in terms of land campaign, is centred on the Philippines. There are two other theatres that are given less attention, the Burma Campaign and the war in the Dutch East Indies. To the author, these are not individual campaigns but are linked particularly in the eyes of the Japanese as one big operation. And in order to get a better idea of the tremendous success of the Japanese, one has to look at their multiple engagements together. With this book the author tries to give the reader a broader and more complete view of the war in the Far East once Japan unleashed its military might in the region.

In the early chapters the author explored the question of why Japan went to war in the Far East. Not much was spent on Japan's involvement in China and Manchuria despite these being the major factors which first induced Japan's imperialism and then necessitated her to move south to the South East Asia, and finally condemning her to a war with the United States of America which she had no hope of winning. The author's detailed investigation of the situations of the allies in detail (Great Britain, the US and the Dutch; the French having the dubious honour of being more of a collaborator of the Axis). I, being Singaporean, naturally paid most attention to the situation in Malaya and Singapore and here, the author gave a most damning appraisal of the British in the inter-war years. Not only was there much complacency, the reality of a cash-strapped Treasury ensured that the naval base would not be fully operational by the time the war started. And when the war did start, the constraints on all sides ensured that when the chiefs of staff realised the impossibility of sending the fleet to defend Malaya, "they turned to air power in order to economize on troops, and in the end they sent troops to economize on aircraft" (pg. 105). To the author, Singapore was lost before the war even started.

The Americans fared better in the Philippines, putting up a spirited fight that lasted months after Singapore was lost. The main criticism was on MacArthur who boasted much but did not have the results to show for it. The Dutch, with what was left of their home, were most under-manned but stout-hearted in the defence of what they had left. Throughout the book, the author, a British, reserved the most scathing criticism for the British; less for those who did the fighting but more for the decision makers in Whitehall and also Wavell. There were many occasions when I felt the author overdid the sarcasm (for example on pg. 221, 229, 322, 404) but he probably felt strongly enough about it.

That aside, the writing throughout the book is thoroughly enjoyable. This is not a short book, standing close to 500 pages, yet at no point was I bored. The battles were described with an equal dose of energy and frustration, the author's own analyses throughout the book were engaging and well considered. This is not a book that skims the surface and tries to pass off as a go-to book for the war in the Pacific; the details provided in the book at the various fronts attest to the breadth of knowledge the author possesses.

The title made it clear the book ends its coverage at April 1942, now generally regarded as the point beyond which the Japanese started tasting defeat. It was by no means clear then, and at the end of the book, the author tried to assess the various options open to both the Japanese and the Allies. This final chapter is well-worth reading, for the scenarios considered by the author might actually have happened. This book is highly recommended especially if one is looking for a book that gives a good survey of the months immediately after Japan made it 'southward advance'. It may just be the best book I read for the year.

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The Order of the Death's Head (Heinz Hohne / Richard Barry)

This monumental book on the SS is one I believe many will not want to miss. For the uninitiated like me who thinks that the SS is but a single organisation of uniform people, this book will almost confuse you with the divisions and sub-divisions within the collective SS outfit. Riding along the history of the SS is the inescapable history of the Third Reich, this book therefore does more than one job.

The Introduction to the book was written like a literature review in a thesis with a good survey of the then available literature. The research questions were given at the start:

1. What is this organisation and how do they go about the tasks that defined their existence? ("But the outer world was never allowed to know anything of what went on inside the SS...) (pg 2).


2. What turned the SS into this machinery that turned the ethnic cleansing doctrine into reality? ("...it did not explain the source of power which enabled the SS to turn the racial fantasies of the National-Socialist regime into dreadful fact.) (pg 4).

The author then spent the rest of the book trying to answer these two questions, which he did admirably. It is obvious that the author researched the materials very well and was meticulous about the smallest details. Unfortunately, I became quickly lost in the many names that appeared in the book, some making but a fleeting appearance. At first I tried to follow the names and developments as closely as possible, but found it tough-going and sometimes lost sight of the larger story. I then resorted to only paying attention to names associated with major events or incidents.

A book on the Third Reich will always evoke questions about how it came to be. How did a bunch of people who started off on the fringe, identified more with a group of hooligans than stately politicians came to gain total control over Germany and almost dominated Europe? The author did not explicitly answer these questions but gave clues for the readers to make their own conclusions. It was not that nobody was able to see the sinister side of the Hitler, but the law, which might have stopped him, failed to be exercised. The generals had their chances but would never take the fateful step when the time came (pg. 250) and eventually would have to relent to the Einsatzgruppen’s lawlessness, and then be themselves implicated after the war (pg. 298).

There are a few chapters that are particularly worth reading. Examples of these are the one on Heydrich (Chapter 8) and especially the one on the Final Solution (Chapter 14). The latter gives a raw depiction at the heart of the Nazi regime, one that is defined by violence. Many readers would have known about the camps and the number of people who died. But this chapter presents the torture in graphic details and most important of all, it tried to capture the warped and 'schizophrenic' nature of the SS. They are shown as 'ordinary' people who could go back to their families after killing hundreds in the camp - it's all in a day's work. What to me is the scariest is not that they didn't know what they did was morally wrong, not even that they tried to justify it based on their need to obey commands from the top, but their romance about the sacrifice they were making by doing something evil for the greater good, so that others would not have to do it. And I always believe that the interest in understanding the Nazis is precisely because we know that we might be like them.

More interestingly is how people deal with the issue of the SS after the war. The author hinted that the Germans were very quick to recognise the existence of the SS, not to glorify them, but rather to paint them in as bad a light as possible, thereby shifting their collective guilt to the SS, absolving themselves of blame (pg. 7).

What of the surviving members of the SS then? The reader is invited to find out for himself/herself in this book, one that is not easy to read, but is nevertheless an important source of almost all aspects of the SS.


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昭和史第二部（下）(半藤一利/林錚顗)

In this very last instalment of Showa Shi, the author focused on the 'after post-war' period of Japan. The forty years between 1950 and 1990 in Japan was characterised in different decades by different political climates, these are all narrated by the author from his personal perspective and experience.

1950s in Japan was constantly caught in political turmoil with different cabinets trying to achieve different ends. Add on to this, Japan, then under American occupation also had to have its political development swayed and sometimes imparted by the geopolitical developments, particularly the US's position in the Cold War vis-a-vis the USSR and China. As a result, the 'clean up' of militarism was incomplete and confusion in the interpretation of Article 9 in the new constitution became a permanent feature of Japan's politics. But once the people started getting tired of all the political upheavals and protests, they decided that they should "find a job" (示威结束，找份工作吧) (pg. 131). This is the author's very interesting way of describing how the Japanese decided that they should start to put emphasis on the economy, turning away from politics. The results are stupendous, at least until the bubble burst in 1990.

From this point, the author's description of the improvement in the standard of living among the Japanese takes an interesting turn. Instead of adopting an academic tone, he started to use many anecdotal examples to give readers an idea of the actual situation among ordinary Japanese. This included the amount of electrical equipment that a household owned (pg. 148), the popular movie (pg. 156), and my personal favourite, the popularity of Ultraman (pg. 185). As I have mentioned in an earlier review, this author did not claim to be an academic and so did not aspire to write a scholarly book. He was therefore not bound by the academic writing style to only cite other academic work. Besides using anecdotal examples, there were even occasions when he speculated outright (the section on the conversation between General MacArthur and the Emperor). The reader is cautioned about interpretation of events and facts.

Besides his obvious love and respect for Emperor Hirohito, the author was unbiased towards all other parties, be they right-wing or Communists, the US, Class A war criminals, or politicians from any party. He reserved his criticism only for the media industry, despite (or because) he himself having worked all his life as an journalist and editor. To him, the industry lacked spine and so was easily swayed, frequently changing their position, and always intimidated. This criticism is not uncommon, also described in another book, and depicted in a movie.

Of the four books in this series, I enjoyed the first one most. This is a personal preference because of my own area of interest. This fourth one is to me the least enjoyable, particularly in the middle when the author talked about the political in-fighting. It was not the writing, just personal interest (or lack of). But all things considered, this series is a very good one for those of us who want to understand the Showa period in Japan, that sixty fateful years.


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永远的零 (百田尚樹/王蘊潔)

I had earlier introduced readers to the movie based on this book. I finally got down to reading the Chinese translation of the book and it did not disappoint. Unsurprisingly, the book surpasses the movie in terms sensitivity and nuance. Readers, unlike movie audience, have the opportunity to pause and reflect. And reflect they must for not only is this book balanced and thought-provoking, it also challenges the common image of the Kamikaze pilots, one of youths brain-washed and while absolutely courageous, were never able to consider the futility of their mission.

The story is simple. A pair of siblings found out from their mother that she was the step daughter of their grandfather and the real grandfather died in the Second World War as a Kamikaze pilot. She wanted to learn more about him and asked her children to see if they could find any about him. They tried and in the process managed to interview a few of their grandfather's old comrades who encountered him at different theatres and had diverse views of him. While they all agreed that he was an exceptionally skillful pilot, they were less consistent when talking about his courage.

The story is written following a rough chronological order with the siblings coincidentally first meeting people who came across their grandfather in the early stage of the Pacific War and then progressively finding people who knew him in the later stage of the war. Parallel to this is the narrative which started with accusations of him being a coward ending up with him looking more like a good husband and father who refused to die, only because he wanted to go back to his family. Yet he volunteered himself as a Kamikaze pilot, a vocation without hope of survival, and died just days before Japan surrendered. Why did he do this? His reason would be used by the author to try and draw the readers into the wider motivations of the people who became Kamikaze pilots.

While it is easy for people to fall under the spell of some 'isms', the Kamikaze concept takes things into the extreme. You are given a mission that guarantees death with or without success. It is impossible for any sensible person to imagine agreeing to such a mission, yet they did, so for a long time after the war, when historians consider the state of mind of these pilots, they could only conclude that they have been brain-washed and therefore volunteered for such a fanatical vocation. This book did not try to dispute that, but takes the reader through the experience of those who volunteered and the mental and emotional struggle they had to go through especially if their names appeared on the charts in the morning.

Almost everyone in the book, whether relating their own experiences or the experiences of others said that they would not volunteer for such a stupid vocation. But in many instances, they had to make the choice openly at the parade square when everyone else was there. Few would dare to say no for fear of immediate reprisals. Intriguingly, many of those who were given the chance to indicate their choices in a close ballot said yes. There appears to be a climate of fear that nothing was secret, their superiors would know their choice and the reprisals would be unendurable. However, it is certain death we are talking about, what could be worse?

This is where we gain some insights into the psyche of the pilots - volunteering does not imply certain call-up. Volunteering puts you in the 'eligible' list, if you were lucky, you might not be called up. Not-volunteering volunteers you for certain transfer to the most hopeless theatres as an infantry soldier where conditions were the worst, which was equivalent to certain death plus a period of suffering before the end comes. And so they took their chances. Those who did not find their names in the list in the morning heaved a sigh of relief and lived for one more day. Those who did tried to psyche themselves up by convincing themselves that their sacrifice would not be in vain, mostly without success. The pilots interviewed talked about to the letters written by the pilots before their missions (now kept in the Chiran Peace Museum) which convey a sense of loss, helplessness, frustration, and love for their families. This helps to humanise the Kamikaze pilots who would then go on to the most inhuman missions. There is always a contradiction in considering the plight of these pilots. In this book they appeared to understand the hopelessness of their cause and the uselessness of their death, yet many would have been documented to fanatically throw their lives away for their emperor. How should one reconcile the two contradictory sides of the Kamikazes?

I always think that the Japanese culture is a very nuanced and multi-layered one. It is easy to misinterpret them (although sometimes I suspect misrepresenting them serves some political purpose) and so as a nation they look really unrepentant, with the constant visits to pay their respects to Class A war criminals in the Yasukune Shrine and their irresponsible textbooks. Perhaps in trying to read their history, one should suspend our judgement for a while and then try and see if there are more shades than we know before we pass an overly simplistic judgement. The author himself displays some of this nuance in this book. As a one being called a right-winger, I was surprised that in the book he wrote (through one of the characters) that "A country that sends good people to their death like this might as well be destroyed."

This book serves the reader at different levels. One can take it as a simple historical fiction book, or a book that induces some reflection and contemplation, or even a book on the Pacific War from the Japanese perspective. Personally, I think the value of the latter should not be under-rated just because it is fiction. I believe that the author did his work in researching and interviewing when writing this book. I wish that it would be translated into English soon so that more readers can read it and make their own judgement.

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The Stalin Organ (Gert Ledig/Michael Hofmann)

This is not a book about the Katyusha rock launcher, it is a novel about the fighting in the Eastern Front graphically described. The author, Gert Ledig, was a veteran in the war at the Eastern Front and so what he described in the novel is probably from his experience in the war.

What strikes the reader immediately is the brutality of the conditions of the battle. A Russian advance bogged down, the Germans on the other hand had run out of everything, food, water, ammunition and replacements. Combatants from both sides were lost, some surrendered, if just to get away from that constant bombardment or in the case of the Runner, to avoid another run between the frontline and the Battalion HQ. Those who were injured and could not get away were either treated or ravaged, depending on the random deal of luck. And then there was the absurdity of the command, some of which appeared to have come out of "a children's storybook." (pg 79), though nothing beats the attempt to carry out a court-martial in the middle of raining bombardment and strafing planes (pg. 138).

The author's success in the graphic descriptions is helped much by his ability to describe, using the most imaginative words and sentences. Take for example:

A geyser of earth from a shell impact swallowed him up and spat him out again. (pg. 9)

The reader immediately imagines earth and dust shooting out of the ground and 'him' having miraculously survived, emerging from the cloud of thick dust and shrapnel. Examples like this are found throughout the book.

The one failing I find was the attempt at a love story which while might just have been real enough, didn't sit well anywhere in the book and feels unnecessary. Besides that, I think this short book is a good read and one that allows readers to get a good idea of what the fighting at the Eastern Front was like. Since there does not seem to be many English (or translated) novels set in that theatre, this one is recommended for anyone who is interested.

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Main Fleet to Singapore (Russell Grenfell)

This relatively short book has an interesting title: Main Fleet to Singapore which gives one the impression that it is about the naval decisions concerning British dispositions in the Far East. This is largely correct if one were to look at the proportion of the book dedicated to the events and decisions leading up to the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. But it has a sub-title: An Account of Naval Actions of the Last War. This suggests that the book is more ambitious and it indeed covers the Dutch Indies which fell after Singapore, going all the way to the Battle of Midway. A book that is a little more than 200 pages might not be able to give adequate cover to the naval aspect of the Malayan Campaign, let alone the naval campaigns leading up and including the Battle of Midway. Readers should therefore not expect too much if it is the strategic and tactical details they are looking for. But what make this book invaluable are critical analyses and therefore persuasive arugments and great writing.

The first few chapters of the book detailing the situation in the Far East including the rise of Japan and the Singapore Base is largely a historical account. From Chapter 9 Inquest on the Disaster (the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse) onwards however, the author's incisive analysis starts to come through and he was able to persuade the reader as to why the situation was rather precarious for the British after the loss of Southeast Asia to the Japanese - the Japanese would be able to move into the Indian Ocean against a weak British naval force and do untold damage to the Indian subcontinent and would potentially be able to link up with the Germans in the Middle East. Indeed the Japanese had attacked Ceylon from sea and was simultaneously moving to India through Burma overland; this theory is not far-fetched.

From this point on, the author concluded subsequent chapters with equally thoughtful analyses. In the final chapter he presented his views on how British naval domination for centuries were handed over to the Americans. He traced how it happened to the British sentiment at the turn of the century when it became increasingly pacifist, even rejoicing at the outcomes of the Washington Conferences where the naval treaties were signed. That would not be the only reason for the subsequent difficulties that Britain found herself in when defending her interests in the Far East but I would leave readers to get the rest from the book.

What I particularly enjoy about the book is the writing. That the writer has a great command of the language is beyond doubt. His combination of adjectives, verbs and other elements of the English language is greatly appreciated if not educational. I shall share three examples:

"If fortune was against the Japanese that day, they had invited its disfavour." (pg. 173)

Referring to how military people tend to look at defensive tactics with disfavour:

"And a system that leads to the destruction of the highest proportion of enemy warships cannot have much wrong with it, whatever it is called." (pg. 206)

My personal favourite is this. Referring to Admiral Spruance's realisation that he might be able to catch the Japanese carriers unready at the Battle of Midway:

"... a chance had opened out to catch the enemy carriers when they were embarrassed with the recovery of the Midway force." (pg. 198)

I could not help imagining the carriers with their pants down.

All in all, a very readable book that is informative and engrossing if a little dated. Yet, if the reader is going for a critical perspective rather than the history, he will not be disappointed with this enjoyable book.


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Percival and the Tragedy of Singapore (Sir John Smyth, V.C.)

The title of this book accurately describes the foci of the book: General Percival and the fall of Singapore. However, the objective of tying the man and the campaign together can only be achieved if the narrative is weaved carefully and in this, there were points when the book risked achieving neither.

The book started off fine enough, concentrating on General Percival's early military career, detailing his time in Northern Ireland, his time in staff college and his first stint in Singapore where he made some good calls about what the defence of Singapore would entail should the Japanese ever attack south. All went well until the middle section of the book on the Malayan Campaign. Here it became less clear if the book was about the General Officer Commanding (GOC) or if it was about the campaign. Of course, as the GOC, he was intricately tied to the campaign, but the author focused overwhelmingly on the Japanese's tactics and the British's countermeasures and only gave the GOC passing mentions. Part of the reason could be the author's attempt to show the hopelessness of the situation right from the start and so to absolve the GOC of responsibilities for the inevitable outcome.

But once the campaign was over, the focus went back to the General and on his years in captivity and the post-war life, closing on a bitter-sweet note on his passing on January 1966. Again, if the book is on the General, the post-war section should receive as much attention as the pre-war part which is unfortunately not the case. I found this part well worth reading for it allows me to know a little more about his life after the war. Equally interesting is the author's description of his work with the general in the Far East Prisoners of War Association which was set up to support the POWs taken in Malaya/Singapore and Burma.

Since the publication of this book (1971), a lot more information has become available, scholars have published many articles on the subject, and other books have also been written on the Campaign. If it is the Malayan Campaign that a reader is interested in, this is one that can be considered: Singapore Burning by Colin Smith. For one written from the Japanese perspective, readers can consider Japan's Greatest Victory/ Britain's Greatest Defeat by Masanobu Tsuji. There is a more recent (1993) book that takes on a similar thread Scapegoat: General Percival Of Singapore by Clifford Kinvig that readers may want to consider as well.

(I could not find a picture of the cover of this book, so I used the most dignified picture of General Percival available.)

Choosing War (Fredrik Logevall)

In this book, Prof. Logevall argued that the US's involvement in Vietnam was not inevitable, there were opportunities where the US could have left Vietnam, none better than the months immediately after Lyndon Johnson was elected as President. Unfortunately he was not of the temperament to read the signals coming from his own electorate or the international community. In the end, he would have to bear a big part of the responsibility for bringing the US into war.

Whether one agrees with the thesis, this is an excellent book. Extensively researched, logically argued, and fluidly written, the book takes the reader through an exploration of the circumstances surrounding Vietnam after the French left. It takes a broad frame of reference, tackling the issues including presidential leadership, their advisers, the attitude of the electorate and the international political climate. He examined the options available at each point between 1964 and 1965 and whether a different decision could have been made. 'Yes', he argued, and in hindsight might not have been difficult, but no, these roads were not taken.

The different questions he explored include: Would JFK keep the US out of the war had he lived as some came to argue (e.g. McNamara in his book In Retrospect)? Were the attitudes of the elites at that time as they said they were after the war (eg. George Bell)? Did the 'Domino Theory' really hold? To the first of these questions, the author examined JFK’s fundamental doubts about the US’s agency in dealing with the political issue in Vietnam (pg. 37) and compared it against his actual actions. In that section the author started one of the paragraphs with these two words: And yet. That’s the author's lament. JFK, despite his doubts, first adopted a wait-and-see attitude, but would later boxed himself in with his rhetoric. The author systematically dismantled the enduring myth that JFK would have kept the US out of the war if only he had lived.

Of more interest is why LBJ, despite having won a large mandate from an electorate that expected him to keep the US out of the war, continued to stay the course and in fact progressively up the stakes, eventually Americanising the war. This the author explored in detail, taking care to explain that it was not because he felt that LBJ had managed the situation worse than JFK would have, but because he had a much longer time in the game and so was able to make many more decisions. I shall not spoil the plot by leaking his conclusions here, enough for me to say that the argument was convincing.

The final chapter of the book is a summary of the arguments but the author also expanded it to consider a few counterfactual scenarios. The fact that Prof. Logevall revisited questions he asked earlier and gave them a somewhat different treatment shows the nuance he employed in investigating this important issue of why the US ended up caught in Vietnam. The Vietnam War receive a lot of attention by historians, journalists and people who fought and suffered in the war. In all cases the motivation is to understand why and how it happened and hopefully we are able to avoid getting in such a situation in future. How much we have succeeded we still do not know, but if this book has gotten it right then we are looking at a complex mix of flawed logic, personality, arrogance and career management. Any one of which can lead any nation down this unfortunate road.

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Yamashita's Ghost (Allan A. Ryan)

This book is about the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita in the Philippines at the end of the Second World War. It is not a simple narrative of the events that took place during the trial. The author argued that the trial was a show done to satisfy the vanity of General Douglas MacArthur. As a result, the first trial of its kind, saddled with the destiny to set a precedence, was relegated into a theatre that contravenes all manner of good legal process (pg. 88).

The book started with the concept of a military tribunal, stressing that it is a challenging one. While it is grounded in legal practice, the process is often carried out by people not trained in the legal profession. More importantly, the idea of laws governing behaviours in wars is a tenuous one. Therefore it is easy for a tribunal to end up miscarrying the justice it is supposed to uphold. This appears to be the case with the tribunal trying Yamashita.

Yamashita was charged with failing in his duty as commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines to prevent them from committing atrocities in the dying days of the war leading to what is called the Rape of Manila. The author raised two questions to this charge: the first is whether Yamashita indeed knew about what was going on, and if he did, whether he could do anything about it. The answers to both questions appear to be a resounding ‘no’. Yamashita did not know about the rampage of that was going on in Manila because he had ordered all troops to vacate the city and was not informed of any atrocities that took place later. Secondly, even if he had known, by then the American forces had so effectively cut off his communication lines that there was no way he could stop the troops even if he had wanted to.

In the end Yamashita was found guilty and sentenced to death, a verdict the author felt was unjust, conceived through a ‘legal’ process flawed in so many ways. Most of his dissatisfaction however, is directed at the presiding judge, Maj. Gen. R. B. Reynolds. To him, General Reynolds was unfit to preside over the tribunal and was portrayed as incompetent (pg. 121, 161, 244) and unfair. On numerous occasions, he allowed the prosecution the latitude that would not have been in a proper trial. He admitted ‘hearsay’ and even double or triple hearsay to be admitted as evidence and when asked to make a judgement on the legality of the prosecution’s methods, could only say “sustained”. Yet, this might not have been the case had it not been for General MacArthur’s haste in wanting the tribunal to conclude quickly, therefore the sub-title “MacArthur's Justice”.

This is a book that requires careful reading and reflection; the author can easily be accused of being a revisionist arguing that a high-ranking Japanese officer was not responsible for the suffering of prisoners-of-war and civilians. To the author, war crimes tribunals is a self-contradictory concept. Wars are started for different reasons but killing of soldiers and civilians are implicit, to put it within the framework of law is oxymoronic. However, we intuitively think that people who perpetuate atrocities must be brought to justice, the question is whether it can be done properly. Despite the difficulties there is value to a war crimes tribunal (which the author argued in the last chapter of the book) and when it is convened, it has to be done properly, and given the self-contradictory nature, carefully. This was obviously not the case in the Yamashita tribunal. I do not think that the author is sympathetic to the Japanese, but he recognised that a tribunal that is not carried out properly would allow those sympathetic to the defendants to claim that it was “victors’ justice” (as argued by Maurice Bardèche in his book, Nuremberg or the Promised Land).

At the end of the book, I asked myself what would have been the right thing to do. While I agree with the author’s argument, I found it impossible to imagine that Yamashita would be acquitted in that climate where everyone who suffered under the Japanese occupation wanted to see something done to members of the Japanese military. The author did not deny the Rape of Manila, he in fact showed data and described the atrocities without any attempt at whitewashing. To him the one that was responsible was Iwabuchi who openly ignored Yamashita’s order to vacate Manila. But Iwabuchi was killed in Manila with almost all his troops. As such, there should not be a tribunal. Yet I cannot imagine this whole issue to不了了之 (a Chinese phrase to describe a situation where something is left unclosed and eventually forgotten). I can, being born a generation later, buy into the author’s argument, but I cannot imagine my grandparents or even parents accepting it. In the immediate aftermath of the war, it was politically untenable. Yamashita would have to be executed, even if purely out of vindication, whatever the consequences. This was acted out in the Chinese movie The Tokyo Tribunal where China’s representative on the prosecution, Mei Ju-ao, wondered to himself at the end of the movie – “I cannot imagine what would happen had we not gathered enough votes to put the accused to death.” This scene is probably made-up, but it reflected the sentiments at the time. The judges could judge according to the logic and spirit of the law, the people wanted their own form of justice.

I came across a book on the Tokyo Military Tribunal – Beyond Victor’s Justice where in the foreword, Sir Gerard Brennan who was involved in the trial of General Nishimura in Australia claimed that it was the first time he came across the passing of the death sentence and it was appalling to him. This was despite Nishimura being quite clearly implicated in the massacre of wounded Australia troops left behind in Parit Sulong, Malaya. This is a contrast to the emotions that civilians who suffered under the Japanese experienced then. We see therefore on one side, a defence that would not convict an accused over slightest doubt in the interpretation of an order but on the other, the people who had suffered untold atrocities who would not care who had to pay for it.

This is a very thought-provoking book. The last few chapters of the book are short and are not on Yamashita’s trial. They are there to show the legacy of that trial and the impact it would have right up to modern times. The last chapter is where the author shared his thoughts on the concept of war crimes. If the rest of the book are well-worth reading, this last chapter is invaluable. Readers like me who are not familiar with this tribunal or the concept of war crimes will find this a very good introduction and will be richly rewarded for reading it.


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东京审判:被忘却的纽伦堡 (Etienne Jaudel/杨亚平/程兆奇)

This book on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East is translated from French, originally titled Le procès de Tokyo: Un Nuremberg oublié by Etienne Jaudel. It is a small volume and reads more like a dissertation than a book. Short as it is, this book has its value; for those who have not read much about the Tribunal, this book gives a very good overview of the various aspects of the tribunal, such as the prosecutors, the accused, the judicial proceedings and the criticism of the various aspects of the Tribunal since. More than that, the author actually has a thesis – the Tribunal, as flawed as it was, was important in giving closure to the victims and the families who suffered terribly in the hands of the Japanese in the Second World War.

Many political scientists and legal experts who study the Tribunal questioned the legality of the proceedings. This became especially so after Richard H. Minear published Victors' Justice: Tokyo War Crimes Trial which got many to start looking at the convicted as victims of miscarried justice. Jaudel gave a good account of the difficulties and disagreements in the literature. These include the sparing of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito (pg. 5, 32); the concept of Crime Against Peace having no precedence (pg. 67); the procedural issues (pg. 12, 52) and the suitability of the general prosecutor, Joseph Keenan (pg. 13).

His perspective is different however. To him, a crime so great deserves punishment for those accountable and while the proceedings were not without flaws, the defendants were given due representation including the provision of fifteen defence lawyers (pg. 35). And although the type of evidence admitted was not like those in a usual criminal trial, the circumstances and the deliberate destruction of documents by the Japanese at the end of the war made it necessary for personal diaries and evidence not produced under oath (pg. 52) to be admitted. Furthermore, the author asked, could one expect that the accused be only convicted after there was no longer any doubt in any part of the proceedings? He reminded readers that the accused had all the legal rights accorded by the prosecution and more importantly, the prosecution had the moral grounds to prosecute because they represent countries that did not commit the same crimes (pg. 148).

Admittedly this Tribunal was different from the Nuremburg Trials because the political structure in Japan and Germany were different. In the case of Germany, it was much easier to identify the culprits because they reigned supreme during the war. Japan on the other hand, had ten prime ministers in that time. With power seemingly diffused among the Emperor, the cabinet and the military, it is hard to establish who should take overall responsibilities for the war and the atrocities resulting from it. From the start, the Tribunal was besieged with the problem of whether it was individual crimes or collective crimes the accused were prosecuted for (pg. 39) and with such a confusing administrative structure, the author felt that it was just to convict the accused so long as the prosecution could prove that the accused have direct or indirect involvement in the policy-making process involving the war.

Two judges in the panel of 12 needs special mention here. The first is Judge Radhabinod Pal who was dissenting and would later write a book to explain his position (Pal, 1953). He was accused by a Japanese author, Saburo Ienaga, of being partial to the accused because Pal was anti-communist and China was slowly drifting towards Communism during the trial (Saburo Ienaga, pg. 201). This is hard to prove especially when Ienaga himself was accused of being a communist. However, the credibility of the Judge took a bit of a hit when it was revealed here that he missed 109 days out of 423 during the trials, making him the biggest absentee (pg. 47).

The second judge is Judge Bert Röling who was also dissenting. He was among the people who believed that it was right not to put Emperor Hirohito on trial because he was just a figure-head and did not really have a say (pg. 143). This is ironic because it was precisely because of this that many felt that the Tribunal was a farce (pg. 145). This case is instructive for it highlights the fact that while people many agree that the Tribunal was less than impeccable, they were of the opinion for different reasons. This lack of agreement among the critics of the Tribunal may actually strengthen its legitimacy.

This book is marred by lapses, some of which are minor like the exact dates when Yamashita left for the Philippines which had no material impact on this book (pg. 33, 78, 80, 137, 151) but others  are major  (pg. 37, 49, 60, 62) such as the date that Japan withdrew its membership of the League of Nations (pg. 78). Fortunately, the translator, 程兆奇 did a good job checking the facts and correcting them in the footnotes. What I personally like about the author was his willingness to consider non-scholastic work which he qualified (pg. 20). I think pure scholarly work done in the scholastic tradition is important because it is on this that future knowledge is built. Unfortunately this always leaves the output dry and the physical scenes incomplete. I found myself constantly forming images informed by pictures from books or even scenes from the television programmes especially when reading works on China in that era. I hope more scholars would consider non-scholastic works but of course with qualifications and proper citations.

Finally, two points made by the author is worth repeating here. First of all, he, in response to Minear’s term ‘Victors’ Justice’, proposed that the Tribunal could also be called ‘Losers’ Justice’ because the judges in the Tribunal were all from countries that have suffered under the Japanese, they therefore represent their civilians who have suffered when they were losers (pg. 65). Secondly, a position not widely considered, is the fact that the outcome of the Tribunal ironically relieved the Japanese of their war guilt, for now they can say that it was the responsibility of those convicted (pg. 150) that perpetuated the atrocities and cruelty throughout Asia and brought Japan to the brink of destruction.

Reference
Ienaga, S. (1979). The Pacific War, 1931-1945 : A Critical Perspective on Japan's Role in World War II. NY:The Pantheon Asia Library.

Pal, R. (1953). International Military Tribunal for the Far East: Dissentient Judgement. Kolkata:Sanyal & Co.

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太平洋戰爭 (家永三郎/何欣泰 ) The Pacific War 1931-1945 (Saburo Ienaga)

To many, the Pacific War is geographically limited to the eastern side of the Pacific Ocean, extending furthest south to the Coral Sea and west to the Philippines. It is also chronologically limited to the period between 8th December 1941 and 2nd September 1945. To the Japanese and Chinese however, the Pacific War extends to China and Southeast Asia and started on 18th September 1931, when the Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria. This distinction is important: to many Americans, Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack, requiring a full retaliatory response. To the Japanese, it was the outcome of the sanctions that the USA placed upon them, and having no  way out, they had to attack the USA in the hope they would sue for peace. These sanctions were put in place in step with the escalation of Japan's conquest in China, leading to the most drastic embargo of oil as Japan invaded Indochina, which could be traced back to Japan's actions in China. To the Japanese, the Pacific War is a 15-year war and their ultimate near-devastation is to be traced to 1931, which is why the characters that appear in Japanese and Chinese literature on the war is a lot more colourful and well-developed than the fleeting mention that they get in Western literature.

This book by Saburo Ienaga is a survey of the events leading to Japan's ultimate defeat and the conditions in Japan throughout that period. The author's motivation is to educate the post-war generation about Japan's recent past, and more importantly, to counter the resurgent right-wing narrative in Japan. In doing so, not only did he discuss the military and cabinet decisions, he also provided a view into the controls the military put place to ensure that the populace remained docile and abiding and would not raise any objections to the military's adventures.

In the 1920s and throughout the 1930s, militarism was pervasive and this started to make inroads into schools through systematic perversion of the school curriculum as well as the increase in imperialistic-mindedness of the teachers. There were those who tried to resists, but by 1940, there was largely no more open dissent (pg. 117) and even the "intellectual community not only caved in under pressure but accommodated with alacrity to the new order" (pg. 121). This being the case, and with the constant bombardment of news of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy scoring victories after victories over any adversaries, it became impossible for the Japanese civilian to know the truth.

The author's main concern was that there never seemed to be a time when the post-war Japanese society evaluated Japan's history in the early part of the 20th century. War memories started to fade and there are even signs that the war apologists were beginning to make a come back. Indeed, there were even people who advocated the reassessment the war because excessive emphasis on war responsibility "would produce a guilt-ridden nation," (pg. 253). And as if to prove his point, Inenaga published a draft of a Japanese history textbook for high school based on his New Japanese History. The draft was rejected by the Ministry of Education in 1952 because they did not like the way he depicted certain events, this resulted in him bringing a lawsuit to the ministry.

I cannot claim to be a scholar in Japanese literature on the War, but I observed a few interesting perspectives of Emperor Hirohito from the few works I have read. The right-wing perspective is that the Emperor might have a role in starting the war, but it was a just war and he did the right thing. Among those who disagree with the war and admitted to the atrocities of the Imperial Japanese Army are two different views. One is that the Emperor had no choice and was not really in control of events. Respected academic and author, Kazutoshi Handō is of this opinion. The other perspective, to which this author subscribed, is that the Emperor should bear the responsibilities and at the end of the war, with everyone suffering the most difficult conditions, and the myth of the Emperor shattered, people were ready to indict him had the Allies so decided. Finally, there are those who chose to side-step the role of the Emperor. This is an interesting issue for further exploration and I hope that the book I'm currently reading would help to shed some light.

As a small volume, it is impossible for the author to go into enough details of any events or any aspect of the lives of the Japanese. I started reading the Chinese translation of the book and found it hard, mainly because of the style that I'm not used to. The English translation is much easier to read but seem to lack a certain depth. However, those who are interested in getting one Japanese perspective (a left-leaning one) of the Pacific War will find this book useful.

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Defeat into Victory (William Slim)

This book is about the Burma/India Theatre in the Second World War where the British arguably scored their first victory against the Japanese. While this theatre did not receive as much attention as the Malayan Campaign, the fighting was not less brutal and conditions possibly harder. Resources were scarce, understandable given the secondary status this theatre was accorded (pg. 24). Food was pathetic (pg. 178) and even uniform was not enough at first (pg. 42). Add to this the difficulty of sewing together combatants from different nationalities: British, Indian, Burmese, Nepalese (Gurkhas), American (airmen) and Chinese, the challenge of stopping the Japanese advance into India was formidable. On top of that, some people could be fighting for either side (especially the Indians who served in the Indian National Army) and with a foe that exhibited systematic cruelty and brutality in any theatre (pg. 51, 238), it was no wonder that many felt demoralised and were conditioned to think that there was no way to stop the Japanese.

The central theme of this book is how the Commonwealth soldiers, with the help of the Americans airmen, eventually re-grouped, trained and through small victories scored in patrols, turned their beliefs around and came to recognise that the Japanese were not invincible. The Japanese could be defeated by a side who trained better and planned better, a side that was determined not to be forced into retreat again. The story of how they overcame the lack of resources, broken promises of higher command due to exigencies in other theatres, and maintained and improved their morale makes for a good lesson in leadership and practical intelligence.

The writing is another reason I enjoyed the book. The writer was able to give very vivid descriptions of events (pg. 28), scenes and people (pg. 31) all written in a style uncommon in military history and rare today as we push for the use of Business English. There are a few occasions when I even felt the writing poetic. For that, one should see the author's description of Northern Burma (pg. 246), the opening of Chapter 12, and about the great Irrawaddy (pg. 416), written with such respect. He also had a great sense of humour such that the book is peppered throughout with funny anecdotes (see pg. 44, 61, 141, 330). His reflections on the loss of Burma (pg. 120 onwards) also contain invaluable insights.

Some may accuse the author of being a borderline racist in his writing (pg. 281) based on today's politically correct rhetoric but I personally did not detect disrespect. If he disapproved of his Asian allies or was disappointed by them, he did not link any of this to their race, but to the lack of training or the conditions under which they had to operate. In fact he had high praises for the Indian units fighting for him and maintained the highest respect for the Gurkhas.

The one question that kept coming back to me as I read the book was why this theatre receive so little attention, especially given that it resulted in a convincing victory for the the British. Was it one that really mattered so little in the bigger scheme of things? Wouldn't it be disastrous had Burma/India ended up like Singapore? An earlier book I read had indeed speculated that the outcome of the war might be different had the British been defeated in Burma and India, and India, while geographically huge, might not be difficult to sway towards the Japanese, given the independence movement led by the Congress Party.

But like all speculations, it is hard to predict what really would happen. All we know is that the Japanese were defeated by the British and her allies for the first time and this is part of the general pattern of the war for the Japanese from then on. Interestingly, Japanese sources, both left and right-wing (Handō, 2009; Ienaga 2010; Yakuta & Watanabe, 2013), pay more attention to the defeat they tasted in Imphal, putting the blame squarely on Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi's lack of leadership, capabilities, and decisiveness.

Even if the victory here did not serve the overall cause strategically, there are reasons for one to learn about this theatre if just to know how an army, so lacking in resources could turn defeat into victory against an enemy that seemed so invicincible. And there is no one better to learn from than the one who was instrumental in the victory.

(This review is based on the edition published by The Reprint Society, Ltd.)

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References

Handō, K. (2009), Showa Shi 1926-1945 Volume 2, Heibonsha Limited, Tokyo: Japan.

Ienaga, S. (2010), The Pacific War 1931-1945, Pantheon Asia Library, NY.

Hyakuta, N and Watanabe, S. (2013), Zerosen To Nihontou, Maple House Cultural Publishing, Taipei: Taiwan.

Embers of War (Fredrik Logevall)

The Vietnam War has received extensive studies and spawn a great many books. Most of them focus on the USA's involvement in what the Vietnamese called the Second Vietnam War. Much less emphasis has been given to the First Vietnam War, that between the French and the Vietnamese. This excellent book goes a long way in adding to the small body of literature and does it with style.

The story started in the Second World War. Then, the French had to content with the Japanese. The Japanese wanted to be in Vietnam to stage the action to block aid from going to Chiang through Yunan. while there was initial apprehensions because they did not want a conflict with the US (pg. 41), they did not know that the US would counsel the French to accede to the demands of the Japanese (pg. 32).Yet this would eventually lead the US to make the fateful decision to increase economic sanctions on Japan who, by then, had decided that she had no choice but to secure the resources from Southeast Asia. Which brought it to war with the US, and having to surrender, gave the Vietnamese the opportunity to demand independence.

This book explores the question: how did the US eventually got caught in such a tragic war after the French left Vietnam? In doing so, the author spent a good amount of time focusing on the famous Domino Theory which in hindsight did not materialise. Immediately after the Second World War, the US was at best ambivalent to the Vietnam question and in fact leaned towards asking the French to give independence to the Vietnamese. The French though, would have none of that and was able to cleverly portray the fight against Ho Chi Min as that of a frontier against the spread of Communism which requires the materiel support of the US. The US would be persuaded (pg. 220, 356).

As the US got more involved, they eventually had to confront the dilemma: should they follow their anti-colonial instincts or should they support the French in the larger context of the Cold War? They first chose a position that was a non-starter for the French - to promise independence to Vietnam but at the same time fight the Communist. That was a logical recommendation to an ally helping them to fight a broader war against the spread of Communism; it was fantastical idea if one is fighting to hold on to a colony, which the French was. So the French led the Americans along, and eventually when they felt that the Americans were too bothersome, wanted to shake them off.

And I quote from Jack Higgins's book Touch the Devil: Touch the devil and you can't let go.

By 1952, the French felt that they had had enough. But by then the Americans felt that they had been in the game too deep to let the French quit (pg. 318, 346-347). The French would not be able to shake the Americans off, and would have no choice but to go on with the war, culminating in Dien Bien Phu. The Americans who at first had to underwrite the war would end up taking over from the French. There would be a few years of relative calm as the date of the promised election in Vietnam came and went and the Americans would have their own experience at not being able to let the devil go (pg. 186, 197).

Prof. Logevall is an engaging writer. I particularly enjoy the lead up to Dien Bien Phu with all the suspense and then the fiasco as the French parameters shrunk. But it is not just enjoyable writing that makes this book an important one to read. In it, one will see history rearing its head, the attitudes that the French had (eg. the sunken cost) could also later be seen on the Americans, the belief amongst the Vietnamese that the foreigners would eventually go home would be repeated in the Second Vietnam War. We are left to wonder about ourselves, do we learn?

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