Nomonhan 1939 (Stuart D. Goldman)

To most, WW2 started on 1 September 1939 with Germany's invasion of Poland. However Japan's involvement in WW2 is considered to only start on 7 December 1941 after they attacked Pearl Harbor. Yet the Japanese had been fighting for years in a more regional war in China because of their annexation of Manchuria. It wasn't only the Chinese they were fighting though, because of the unclear boundaries between what was then Manchukuo and Mongolia, the Japanese ended up also fighting a 'limited' war with the Russians. A serious one occured just before WW2 started in Europe, between May and August 1939 in a place known as Nomonhan to the Japanese, or Khalkhin Gol to the Russians.

This book by Prof. Stuart D. Goldman describes this relatively unknown incident called the Nomonhan Incident (or the Battle of Khalkhin Gol). But more than just describing the incident, the author put forth an important thesis: this battle, while relative small compared to others yet to come, and confined to a tiny, obscure area in the plains of faraway Mongolia, had a profound impact on how WW2 eventually developed. In particular it was because of this battle that Japan became convinced that they should avoid another conflict with Soviet Union, giving more force to those who argued that they should go down south for the resources that they need. And to prevent the US from intervening, they had to destroy the US fleet in Pearl Harbor, the rest, we all know.

The author developed his argument by taking the reader down two tracks. The first being the history associated with the Kwantung Army leading to the border disputes with the Russians. The second is the global context, setting out what was happening in other parts of the world (especially in Europe) and situating this incident within that larger context. With these in place, the author then explained first why the conflict took place and then how it led to subsequent developments in WW2.

Following the first track, besides the history related to the formation of the Kwantung Army, which was informative in itself, the author took pains to explain the concept of Gekokujo (下克上, literally "lower level overcoming upper level") which has been associated with the Japanese Army (less the Navy) and most frequently with the Kwantung Army. This is a strange concept that, as far as I know, is only present in the Japanese Army where mid-ranking officers either manipulated or openly defied their senior officers' commands to do what they wanted. The further away they were from the central command in Tokyo, the worse the transgressions. The author showed with many examples how this manifested itself in the Kwantung Army.

Further to their tendency to exhibit Gekokujo, they also had a sense of invulnerability which was heightened by their perception that the Russians were weak. And at one point indeed they appeared to be (pg 17). This together with the ineffective commands from Tokyo that the Kwantung Army commanders were determined to ignore, and the purposely vague border protection policies issued by the Kwantung Army commanders (pg 89) made for an inevitable showdown with the Russians - the question is what would the Russians do?

By way of introducing the Changkufeng Incident a year before the Nomonhan Incident, the author explained to the readers that the Russians probably felt that the time had come to put their foot down in their dealings with the Japanese, especially with the Kwantung Army. When the Japanese acted against the Mongolians (the allies of the Russians) in Nomonhan in 1939, the Russians decided that they had to teach the Japanese a lesson. The story then went on to describe in good details about the campaigns that took place in that period of  four months, at an exciting pace for a scholarly work. More importantly, throughout the description, the author kept an eye on Stalin's responses and decisions, which in contrast to the Japanese's perspective, was wide in its geopolitical considerations. And who can blame him, for the Soviet Union spanned both Europe and Asia and could find herself potentially fighting a two-front war which Stalin was determined to avoid.

The Japanese had no such worries, although they should. While arguably in the same theatre, 1939 was also when Japan was beginning to be caught in the quagmire in China. So while the Tokyo wanted to play down the Nomonhan Incident, the Kwantung Army would have none of it. But in an almost ridiculous fashion, the Kwantung Army could be so compelling that even Tokyo went along with them despite an Imperial Order.

General Nakajima, deputy chief of AGS (Army General Staff), flew to Hsinking with Imperial Order 343, commanding Kwantung Army to hold its position near the disputed frontier with "minimal strength" to ensure a quick end to hostilities and a prompt diplomatic settlement. But in meeting with Nakajima, the KwAHQ (Kwantung Army HQ) Staff, led by the Operations Sections, clung passionately to its convictions. Incredibly, Nakajima was won over by the staff's fervent spirit and gave verbal approval for Kwantung Army's general offensive to begin on September 10. (pg 150)

And so the slaughter on both sides started.

The author paid a reasonable attention to the Russian forces as well, never hiding the fact that their loses were equally appalling and that the incident, while celebrated for the bloody nose it gave to the Japanese, did not come at a small price for the Russians. Particularly enjoyable was to read about Marshall Zhukov who was given the first significant command of his career, coming in the wake of Stalin's purge of his more experienced commanders.

For a book that is no more than 180 pages, persuading readers about his thesis is an ambitious feat for the author. But he succeeded admirably. This is not to say that other scholars could not find reasons to disagree with him as he himself admitted in the Preface but at least in terms of academic rigor and logic, his case was compelling. Although many pieces of his evidence were circumstantial, the use of the dates of various events on the side of the Russians seemed to suggest that Russian reactions to the geopolitical scenario in relation to Germany, Japan and subsequently to Poland hinged much on the Nomonhan Incident and its conclusion.

On the Japanese side according to Colonel Hayashi Saburo, one of the General Staff officers, there was general recognition that they should leave Russia alone and from then on, and should only make their move south (into Southeast Asia).  This compares well with what was said by Japanese Scholar Kazutoshi Handō (半藤一利) in Showa Shi (昭和史), where both Masanobu Tsuji and Takushiro Hattori were said to have decided that "in future, go south." And going south meant going after Pearl Harbor too.

This book is surely a good place to start for those of us wanting to get an introduction to the Nomonhan Incident. But to say that it is but an introductory book is unfair because it comes with a huge amount of information, all organised logically, and presented persuasively.

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Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Peter Harmsen)

Most Chinese take 7 Jul 1937, the day of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (卢沟桥事变) as the day when China officially went to war with Japan. Immediately after the incident, Chiang Kai-shek found himself out of an excuse to not confront the Japanese on Chinese soil. He decided to make his stand in Shanghai and this book is about that battle, known in the Chinese literature as 淞滬會戰.

At 300 pages, this is a fairly short book by normal standards. The brisk and flowing style adopted by the author made the book an enjoyable read. This book is obviously based on good research and has the merit of showing many good archive pictures. On top of that, it also provides the answer to a question I have had for many years - why do Chinese soldiers that appeared in movies I saw as a child wear German helmets? Does it not make them the bad guys? This book is the only one I have come across that gives a good account of the close relationship between the Chinese government and the Germans, explaining the many German military advisers used by the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) in the 1930s.

The author, Peter Harmsen, is particularly good at articulating scenes of various types (although I suspect that this is helped by my own exposure to the pictures and movies I watched as a child). I would point to two examples, the first one was what went on in the Great World Amusement Centre, taking readers into the place itself, almost helping one to see what various vendors were doing. I thought I could hear the music coming out of the crackling grammaphone. The other, in contrast, was the gruesome fighting scenes of death and destruction. I confess again, that being exposed from young to pictures and movies made of that era has helped me to visualise (maybe inaccurately) what the author described, but that should not take anything away from his ability to attend to the smallest yet important details.

There are however lapses that reduces my enjoyment of the book. The prologue talked about the Xi-an Incident in which Chiang was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal as he was called, in a bid to force Chiang to come to terms with the Communists to fight the Japanese together. For such an important event, I wonder why the author did not mention it by name, and the greater ommission was Zhang Xueliang's name. Yet he would bother to interject his otherwise flowing narrative with stories that seem to come at the wrong time, or which are of no use to the reader. An example of such was the story on Dai Li (pg 145) which interrupted what was an exciting description of the brutal battle that was going on.

The author also made a strange comment on pg 64 about the tragedy of the Black Saturday. This was when the Chinese bombers sent to bomb the Japanese cruiser Izumo dropped their bombs in the most crowded parts of Shanghai instead, killing only Chinese civilians. The author said that 'the tragedy could have been prevented by Japan.' I cannot appreciate the thoughts behind what he said; was he trying to be sarcastic or ironic, or was he really putting the blame on the Japanese? I hope he had not said it.

That said, the perceptive author provided much for a reader to reflect upon.

The first of these was about the city itself. What was Shanghai really like in that era? If there was a 'limited war', I would say that this battle was the most 'limited' insofar as territory is concerned. With Japan's total restrain concerning the International Settlements, one got the surreal sense that the battle could be raging along one side of a fence maiming people indiscriminately, while on the other side, people, safe behind the fences of the International Settlements, watched on. Foreign reporters could still be staying in a five-star hotel that continued to operate as normal.

But 'limited' is also a misnomer in this battle, as with all others involving the Chinese. For Chinese commanders always seemed to believe that there were unlimited Chinese to die. Those frontal attacks against well-entrenched enemies in movies looked like propaganda, only that they were unfortunately accurate (pg 53). No one was called to account for the fiasco of Black Saturday. A captain, who claimed to be involved in it, even gave an interview to the press and tried to explained why it happened (pg 63).

I also could not help noticing that the one thing the that the Chinese Army seemed to consistently do successfully was to withdraw quietly at night from a salient they held in the day. The Japanese sometimes did not even know until days later. The one exception was battle for the Sihang Warehouse where some 425 Chinese soldiers took a last stand against the Japanese. This battle was described very well in the book.

Overall, this book is a good read. Although I have my complaints, these are probably due to my unfair expectations of it being more scholarly when it was written as a 'popular' history book. This book is recommended if for none other reason than there being very few English language works on the war in China during this era.

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Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Matthew Hollis)

This book does not belong to the genre that I normally read, in fact I didn't even know who Edward Thomas was. I bought this book for two reasons: it was in the discount bin in the bookstore, heavily discounted, secondly the artillery pieces on the cover of book misled me somewhat into thinking that this book would be skewed towards WWI action. It was left on my bookshelf for more than a year since I bought it and I only picked it up to read because this is the centennial year of the start of WWI.

 Let me first get my complaints out of the way.

For a book centred on Edward Thomas, he only got the first passing mention on page 14 and it was not only until Page 16 when the story started to centre on him; this is not a book written straight to the point. Worse, a book so-titled made no mention of WWI until pg 142, almost halfway through, after which it meandered through other issues before reaching the last quarter when Thomas finally enlisted in the army. This book could have taken a number of other titles, "Edward Thomas and his Friend Robert Frost" would be a much less romantic but nevertheless more accurate one.

But there is much to like about this book. First of all, the writing. The first dozen pages started with the opening of the Poetry Bookshop in London and detoured to a description of the poetry scene in London through the different reigns. But what writing! One is left to wonder if Mr Hollis' knowledge of the poetry genre meant an active interest in poets and poetry, and the lyrical tone has found its way into his prose. (I found later that Hollis is indeed a poet himself.) Take this graphical depiction of the poets' quirks in the public reading of their works for example:

Yeats recited to a sell-out audience, Wilfrid Gibson performed in a droning monotone; W. H. Davies suffered nerves (cured when he was encouraged to think of the whisky afterwards), Sturge Moore forgot his lines; Ford Madox Hueffer read hurriedly, Rupert Brooked inaudibly, and Ralph Hodgson, who could not tolerate so much as a mention of his own work, simply refused to read at all, while simply no one could silence the actorly John Drinkwater.

There are many more examples of beautiful, lyrical writing that is unfamiliar to me. But reading this book through the usual lenses with which I used to read my other books, I got a little impatient wondering when all roads were going to lead to France. A big part of the book was on Thomas's unhappy family life, a not-so-successful career, his friendship with Frost, and then his struggle whether or not to enlist and to become a poet. In the end, France occupied but some 20 pages of the book, but lest I forget, this book is not about France, but all roads leading to France. And all that happened to him, as carefully developed by the author were roads leading to France, and tortuous as they were to Thomas, they were beautiful to the reader.

I would like to briefly talk about Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken. Personally, I hated this poem, unfairly, of course, as I hardly knew anything about it. But those last two lines, "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." are quoted to death by anyone who wanted to show that they had the courage to take a 'less traveled path' that it irritates me no end. I once came across a newspaper article where the journalist quoted this to show that she had taken the "path less traveled" by being a - journalist.

However, after one had been educated by the author on the context under which this poem was written, Frost's own mischievous caution to his audience, Thomas's strong reaction to it, and most of all the author's own perceptive questions about the poem (pg 234), one can't help but fall in love with it. Perhaps feeling a little snobbery too (now that I know it better than that journalist). But the rejoinder that came on page 261 in the form of Thomas's Road was equally powerful, especially when the author broke up the poem, starting with "Now all roads lead to France". Yes, now all roads lead to France, in Thomas's own words, he would be going to France.

In the epilogue, the author went back to describing those who in Thomas's circle and what happened to them during and after the war, much like how he described them at the beginning of the book in the Poetry Bookshop. Before that, he touched ever so softly on Thomas's own death when it came, never over-playing it, and one is left to feel sad, yet happy that "[h]e fell without a mark on his body."

A poet who joined the army to fight a war, these are two ideas that I can never associate together. Yet in Thomas's case, and indeed those around him, this almost seemed like the only right thing to do. How did they, and in particular, Thomas come to this? It took another poet to tell us the story of this poet.

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Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost (Jonathon Fenby)

At one time in China's recent history, Chiang Kai-shek came close to unifying and ruling it. This book by Jonthan Fenby talks about the man and provides some insights into why he failed. By taking the readers through the different stages in his life and exploring how he overcame the challenges and treacheries along the way, the author managed to weave an interesting and rather gripping account of Chiang's life in this book.

This book was structured chronologically as with most biographies, but it was also divided into major sections covering Chiang's childhood, the period when he consolidated his power, followed by the time when he ruled from Nanking, to fighting the Japanese proper after Xi-an, and concluding with how Chiang fought and lost the civil war. What I particularly liked was the weights given to the different sections, putting less attention on Chiang's childhood which I am not quite interested in, but a lot more on the most important parts in his life, and then almost nothing on Chiang's life in Taiwan after 1949. In doing so, the author helped readers to focus only on the consequential parts of Chiang's life and avoided diluting his work with less important or interesting details.

A book on an essentially military person, one can expect the book to talk about many military operations, and because of this, maps are important. In this, the author has done a decent job, providing maps of the major campaigns such as the Northern Expedition and the war with Japan, but one can always ask for more.

My complaint is the lack of a glossary. I do not know if the author knows the Chinese language, somehow I suspect that he didn't because he seemed to have quoted from many translated sources instead of providing his own translation and interpretation of the original Chinese words and the lack of a glossary makes this a big problem.  Take for example what is lian zuo fa? Not having the explanation provided, I was hoping that I could at least see the Chinese characters in the glossary, as I would when reading books on China or Japan. But the absence of the glossary means that words and phrases like this become meaningless to most readers. I also feel that the failure to provide the proper context when quoting from Chiang's diaries made some of the things he wrote sounded stupid. For instance, take this sentence quoted from Chiang's diary: "At a time of national humiliation we should lie in faggots and taste gall." "Lying in faggots and taste gall" sounded almost ridiculous at a time of national humiliation, but if one were to know that Chiang actually wrote "卧薪尝胆", he would realise that Chiang was using a Chinese idiom, formulated by someone caught in a somewhat situation in the past. Things like this make me feel that the author was just quoting blindly from a secondary source, without knowing what actually was written.

There were also parts in the narrative of the story that I felt the author did not fill with enough details to let his readers appreciate the actual drama. For example when talking about Wang Jin-wei's formation of a puppet regime in collaboration with the Japanese, the author brought this important event up almost casually despite having talked about Wang on numerous occasions due to his obvious affiliations to Chiang. Mitter (2013) provided a much better description of the intrigue and dilemma Wang faced in taking that fateful step.

Notwithstanding these, the author was successful in directing me to consider some important people and issues surrounding Chiang. Firstly Sun Yat-sen and Zhang Xueliang. Contemporary Chinese history has portrayed these two men very positively; Sun, in particular, is hailed 国父, the father of the nation. Alas, he is but human and has his faults. We were told not only of his lack of political acumen and ability to manage, there were hints throughout that he was even a womaniser (all of which Chiang bettered). Similarly Zhang Xueliang is considered by many as a patriotic figure who risked his life to get Chiang to agree to fight the Japanese rather than the Communists. But one has to remember that Zhang was from Manchuria and has his fortunes tied up there so the possibility of him trying to use the Nationalist army to evict the Japanese from Manchukuo cannot be discounted.

And then there was Soong Meiling, who seemed to mesmerise every man that came into contact with her. I think she was obviously smart, and being educated in the US stood her out from all the Chinese women and most men in China. But almost all descriptions of her was of her beauty, and on occasions with cursory links to the word 'sex'. Current Chinese sentiments of her are not positive, in China for obvious reasons. But even in Taiwan, I do not get the sense of people seeing much in her. In this book, the author's treatment of her was guarded, he acknowledge her contributions and efforts in helping Chiang to rally the Chinese to resist the Japanese and then the Communists. At the same time, he also cited instances of her belligerent behaviours. However not once did he praise or criticise her in his own accords. Praise and criticism always came from other sources he quoted.

In addition to these, the author also talked about Chiang's relationship with the US. It is difficult to fault the US in their handling of their relationship with Chiang. My impression from the book is that the Americans who were on the ground (in China) clearly knew the state of the country, its army, and its leadership. But caught in their own wars in Europe and the Pacific, it was hard to see through the curtain of mist pulled down by Chiang and his relatives (Soong Meiling and T. V. Soong). Eventually they did know who they were dealing with, if for no other reason than Chiang's seemingly insatiable appetite for cash.

The other subject that the author in my opinion rightly put enough emphasis on is that of the warlords. One is able to learn a great deal about them in this book. Not only were descriptions of them scattered throughout the book, depending on when they appeared in Chiang's life, the author also dedicated a chapter to them, it was an educational one.

In so far as Chiang, the subject, was concerned, what the author successfully did was to provide enough information on him to persuade the readers to consider (or re-consider) the person. A lowly peasant-class man by birth, Chiang must be quite something to overcome his unprivileged birth and significant lack of education (at least compared to Soong Meiling) to rise to the position of the person who almost ruled an almost united China. Along the way he had to overcome political enemies, the ever untrustworthy warloards, and even unfaithful relatives. Yet he would lose almost everything to the Communists and his nemesis, Mao Zedong. Many today still think of him as a traitor for not standing up to the Japanese earlier, but he appeared to have a case for going after the Communists first, which was validated by his own defeat in their hands.

Today Taiwan is still in an awkward position in international relations, even though as an entity on its own it is almost self-sufficient, and has a very enterprising, cultured, creative, educated and likeable people. How much of it is due to Chiang? Can one hold Taiwan as an example of what China would be had he succeeded? These are questions readers, especially Chinese readers would think about. But the other question all readers would surely ask themselves is why did Chiang fail? I do not think I can provide an answer, but suspect that this line quoted from the book (pg 349) encompassing a mix of incompetency, delusion, and deceit goes some way into giving a hint.

'Inflation,inflation! There is no inflation in China! If people want to pay twenty five dollars for a fountain pen, that’s their business, it’s not inflation. They’re crazy, that’s all. They shouldn’t pay it.’ H.H. Kung, Finance Minister

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Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Victor Sebestyen)

1989 was an amazing in the history of the Cold War. It was the year when the satellite states of the Soviet Union in East Europe rid themselves of Communist Parties that have been ruling them for more than 40 years and decided that they deserved a better life. This book, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen was a very good introductory reader for anyone wanting to have an overview of the events in the various states.

A journalist who covered the events in Eastern Europe in 1989, Sebesteyn was able to capture the mood of what was happening in the various states at that time very well in the book. His pace was brisk, increasingly so as we near the final section of the book detailing the unfolding events in different states. His perspective was not only from that of high politics, or that between the West (particularly the US) and the Soviet Union, but also down to the people's level, as with his description of Anna Walentynowycz and her wrongful dismissal from her job. This has the benefit of informing his readers of the sentiments at the ground, but more interesting was his description of the festering anti-establishment organisations (or lack of, in the case of Romania) in the different countries just waiting for the the right time to strike and how they were harassed before that. In this, it must also be said that the author gave a fair treatment to his subjects, describing their incompetence and ill-preparedness when it was due (e.g., Solidarity's lack of foresight resulting in the arrest of many of its members) and giving praise when it is deserved.

A reader of this book, upon reflection, would not fail to recognise some questions as he reads the book, all of which I cannot address in this review, but would invite readers consider them for themselves:

1. While Gorbachev appeared to be the hero in the book, what did the Russians really think of him?
2. Despite the rhetoric of the Cold War, it appeared that stability meant more to the West than the dissolution of the empire (see how even West Germany was worried about the instability that would be caused by East Germany's ousting of the Communists).
3. Were the Soviets not using the same arguments in deciding whether or not to leave Afghanistan as the Americans when they argued about leaving Vietnam, and perhaps even Iraq - how do you answer to all those who have died? That they died for nothing? This question would no doubt be asked again by future governments, despite the 'black-hole' outcome that inevitably shows up.
4. Does ideology actually matter? No matter how zealous the party apparatchiks were about their ideology, when they came to realise that it could no longer be saved, all went back to their most basic instincts, self-interest. Machiavelli knew something, and Hobbes was right.

This is an ambitious project and for anyone to want to cover so many countries in a 400-page book, the treatment of each country cannot be comprehensive, and thus my comment earlier about this being a book that provides an overview. The author brought in different players, anti-establishment organisations, the rulers in the different countries, the Soviets (especially Gorbachev), and the Americans, both Reagan and the succeeding president, Bush. However he purposely left the critical question unanswered: Why did the empire fall? Was it because of the popular movements driven by the people? Or were the rulers in the various states so weakened by then that they would have imploded anyway? Or was it Gorbachev who decided to embrace Perestroika and Glasnost because he could not longer sustain the Union otherwise (given the hemorrhage in Afghanistan? Or was it the wisdom of Reagan who decided that he should bet on the sincerity of Gorbachev contrary to all the advice that he was receiving (pg. 224)?

More importantly, why would this revolution be successful where others fail. It was only months prior to this that the students in China gathered in Tiananmen demanding change. That failed, brutally crushed. Was it because Chinese would do to their own what Eastern Europeans would not? Twenty years hence the optimistically called 'Arab Spring' fizzled out in some cases and reverted to other dictators in others. What ingredient was missing in these cases?

The author made no attempt to answer the question in the case of the Soviet empire, therefore providing no leads for us to consider these cases.

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Ishiwara Kanji and Japan's Confrontation with the West (Mark R. Peattie)

Ishiwara Kanji was not well-known as an important personality in the literature of WW2. One reason could be his diminished role by the time the Pacific War started. However one can argue that he played an instrumental role in pushing Japan eventually into the war. This is not an implausible argument, the title of the book alludes to this. Japan’s isolation before the war and eventual aggression in South-East Asia and the Pacific had roots in Manchuria. Ishiwara Kanji was one the orchestrators of the formation of Manchukuo (a “state” created by the Kwangtung Army out of Manchuria meant to be a showcase for Japanese colonialism) and should share some blame for what eventually happened to Japan. But today the name Ishiwara Kanji is only associated with two things: his exploits (or insubordination) in the Kwantung Army, and his book "On The Final War".

Though he served in Manchuria in the Kwantung Army, Kanji's obsession was not on the conflict with China, not even Russia, but the US. His thesis was that Japan would eventually go into a conflict with the US since both were pursuing expansionist policies at the same time. His impression that the US was following an expansionist policy was a result of his extension of what happened in the Philippines and also an extrapolation of the increasing power of the US. But he knew that compared to the US, Japanese resources and industrial prowess were meagre and so a protracted conflict with the US would surely be unsustainable. To increase the odds in Japan's favour, Manchuria, with its vast natural resources seems like a good place to exploit, a policy coming straight out of his 'war can maintain war' ideology, thus started his ambitious, bold, and brilliant plan to create Manchukuo. In doing so, he displayed not just the opportunism that later served him, but also blatant insubordination worthy of court martial. Yet this coincided precisely with the rise of nationalism in Japan that had been riding a rising tide since Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War. The successful exploits of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria generated so much zeal and pride back home that even the Tokyo high command was wary of disciplining him for out-rightly disregarding the command not to escalate matters in China. And so he made his reputation for daring and brilliance, which eventually contributed to his undoing.

Kanji was a prolific writer, and the author of this book, Mark R. Peattie, studied Kanji's writings to develop a picture of how Kanji's own thoughts changed over the years. The picture that emerged was one of an enigma of a man who seemed to hop from one position to another vis-à-vis different countries. For one known as the architect of Manchukuo, his change of heart towards relationship with China and later to his constant warnings about Russia all seemed to make him looked like one who did not appear to have a consistent view of Japan's position in East Asia. However if we were to explore his motives for the change in heart, it would not be difficult to find that these were all considered 'irritants' that must be eliminated in preparation for the Final War - with the US. It was not until near the end of WW2, when he clearly saw that Japan was going to lose the war that he started to shift and declared that continuing the war with the US would only bring Japan to her knees. He was not one to expound 'fighting to the last man', he thought Japan should just surrender and his thoughts were already on rebuilding Japan after the war. An opportunist by nature, he even had the delusions about being asked to serve in post-war Japan for the occupying force.

Unfortunately, by then, he was almost totally out of favour and no one wanted to listen to him. There were a few reasons for this. Firstly, his transgressions during his time in the Kwantung Army, though applauded by many, were resented by some in the Tokyo high command. While they could not do anything to him earlier, they did not forget the humiliation. When the chance came, they seized upon it to sidelined him. Secondly, while he was originally idolised by many young officers for his exploits in Manchuria, his refusal to support them during the Young Officers' Revolt also made them feel that he had sold them out, giving them the inspiration to 'do the right thing' but hanging them to dry when they did it. He was in fact the one given the responsibility to deal with the young officers in revolt. Finally, he lost himself in his big ego, particularly after he was not punished but commended for his actions in Manchuria. He thought he was above military regulations and was openly criticising higher decisions and policies so much so that he became "an embarrassment". That he finally was not even tried for war crimes in the Tokyo Tribunal attests to how much his influence had waned in the closing years of the war.

This is a well-researched book, focusing on just the right bits of Ishiwara Kanji's life, starting from the time he joined the Kwantung Army till the end of his life in 1949, only some 20 years. Some readers may prefer a more comprehensive work that details more of his life, and I think these are probably available in Japanese. For my purpose, this is good enough. The author has an academic way of writing which does not make for easy reading. But the author structured the book well, focusing on major subjects rather than chronology, making it easy for those who want to study the various aspects of Kanji's life, be it his stint in various commands and positions, or his writings. What are invaluable about this book are the analyses the author added at the end of every chapter, culminating in a final chapter that encapsulates the author's overall evaluation of his subject. Given the dearth of English literature on much of Japan's war in East Asia, this old book is an important resource for those seeking to understand the events of the time. More importantly, for those who want to see how broken down the political system and army discipline had been in Japan in that era, the subject of this book could not have epitomised it better.

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John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life (Robert Dallek)

This single volume biography of John F. Kennedy is an ambitious project trying to cover as many aspects of his life as possible, reasonably giving more coverage of his presidency compared to his life before being elected. To someone who wants to learn about the President, this book is a very useful read. The coverage is rather complete, and the tone unbiased. While giving to attention to much of the President's vision and efforts in realising them, the author has also not left out the human failings frequently associated with the President, namely his womanising. Beyond this, the author has given a great amount of details on the medical and physical conditions of John F. Kennedy, helping us to understand a lot more of what he had to endure physically while going through the grueling demands of a presidency.

It is obvious that the author did a great amount of research. Unfortunately, I found the writing in this book rather patchy. There were too many parts in the book where he almost quoted conversations after conversations in his attempt to relate the story. I found this sloppy. Although he was able to string enough quotes from different people to tell the story, I felt it lacking in effort. This was especially the case when relating the Cuban Missile Crisis. The author did not attempt to give his own voice, preferring to quote conversations wholesale, perhaps hoping that this would present the raw data to the readers.

Fortunately this was not always the case and there were in other chapters in the book when he did show his commendable ability to write. On page 605, I found his transition about the "trouble" very smooth and well-executed. Another example was when he included his thesis (at least this was the first time I heard it put this way) was when he was describing JFK's dilemma about Vietnam and Diem, bringing into consideration the US' decision to continue supporting Chiang Kai-Shek in China years earlier when he they knew he was corrupt and was not the one to win the war, and in Korea when US' intervention saved Seoul.

In the epilogue, the author went into an interesting speculation about the 'what-ifs', a 'must-do' for JFK biographers. This is an exercise that is fraught with danger because there is just no way anybody can know for sure. However, the author's attempt was a logical, reasonable and sound, making an extrapolation based on JFK's known positions about various issues, moderated by factors such as no longer having to worry about another election and possible developments in world events. Again, there is just no way to tell and so there always remain the possibility of one making an overly optimistic prediction based on our own over-estimation of the President.

As this book made clear, scholars who took a scientific approach to evaluating the achievements of JFK were normally underwhelmed. Perhaps one of the reasons people continue to think much of him is the belief that the world would indeed be a better had he lived. But perhaps it was because he died young, like Ayrton Senna who would always be the greatest F1 driver in many people's eyes. Yet if there was one thing that we ought to give JFK credit for, we should all remember that despite the tremendous pressure he faced during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he played a significant role in not letting it happen.

Briefings of McNamara tended to be sessions where people tried to fool him, and he tried to convince them they cannot.

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Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy (Eri Hotta)

Those who are interested in understanding of the events that led to Japan's fateful decision to attack Pearl Harbor will find this book an important one to read. It is one that is packed with information carefully written in an engaging way to provide great insights into how the Japanese eventually went into war with the US. What this book does is to show that such a momentous decision was not arrived in a clinical and logical fashion, rather  readers of this book would not help noticing how illogical, convoluted, and even preposterous the decision process was.

It should be stressed that the book's focus is more on the decision process, rather than the decision itself, which as a bad one was a given. That it was a bad decision was not only clear in hindsight, you will see from the book that there were more people (including the emperor) who believed that it was a bad decision to go to war with the US than those who believed it was right, which only makes it more perplexing. Representing those who were really pushing for war with the US was the Imperial Army and very vocal too. The rest, represented by the Imperial Navy, successive prime ministers, and other members of the cabinet knew it would be disastrous to go down that road, but as the story developed, the reader gets to see how the strange behaviours among the 'doves' eventually made their own positions untenable, and had to be driven along to war with the US.

The author used the concept of Honne to Tatemae to throw some light on these behaviours. This is the concept of saying something or saying something is a certain way but carrying with it an intended meaning. In simple terms, the opposite of "calling a spade a spade". The trouble with doing this was that the listener who did not understand this might misinterpret what the speaker was trying to say, but more seriously, as shown in this book, it could be maneuvered by the listener to mean something else totally. And many a times it was used to good effect by those who advocated war while everyone else looked helplessly at each other, hoping that someone else would find this one small gap to exploit so that they could heap on more doubts and hoped that it snowballed into something big enough for all to decide that war was a bad idea, apparently even the army faction was hoping for that while advocating war (p.g., 210).

Yet they did attempt to find a way out of the situation, initiating many contacts with the US which unfortunately led to nowhere. They attempted to have a summit and when that was not progressing well , Sato Kenryo was quoted in the book saying "What idiots they are in Washington! If they agreed to meet with Konoe without any conditions, everything would go their way." For many it would be hard to imagine staging this summit between two heads of states when everything Japan was saying and doing was pointing towards preparing for war. But for the Japanese leaders, there was no contradictions, they have to keep up the appearance while trying to avert war - Honne to Tatemae.

Dr Hotta wrote an earlier work Pan-Asianism and Japan's War 1931-1945 which I had enjoyed very much. It was written in the academic style and was not so easy to read. This one, Japan 1941, is clearly meant for lay-readers and is therefore much more readable. Unfortunately I think I was spoilt by her earlier book and had hoped that she would repeat that feat. She did in contents, but she had to avoid going into too much analysis in a book thus positioned. Still I must commend her for being very immaculate, for example she used "U.S." and not "US" and implanted her reasoned voice throughout. The inclusion of the timeline of major events in the book was of great value and the Prologue makes a compelling introduction to the whole book. I was however unsure about the purpose of including characters like Richard Sorge, the poet Kafū Nagai, and Soldier U. These are important people in their own rights but while it has added colour to the book, they were not important to the development of the author's narrative and sometimes came out distracting.

The author, being Japanese, has a nuanced understanding of her own culture and therefore was able to explain the behaviours of the Japanese in 1941 exceptionally well. Paradoxically it can be misinterpreted as an attempt to excuse their behaviours and so she would sometimes have to illuminate her own attitudes towards them and the war itself by criticising them severely. I think it is something that she had to do in order for us not to dismiss her too quickly.

We read history in the sometimes vain hope of learning from it, so that we do not repeat it. The lessons in this book were most obviously "what not to do / how not to behave when making an important decision." Many readers would take the series of events as too ridiculous to conceive that we would ever do the same. Yet we have to be careful; as illogical and unimaginable as they have behaved in 1941, would we not have done the same? How many of us would really stand up and confront a seemingly stupid idea? Have we not come across situations in which everyone sitting in a meeting knew that a course of action was disastrous but finding everyone quiet, kept to our own counsel? I certainly have. Somehow the long-term and more severe pain cannot make me suffer the short-term embarrassment. And we will go out of the meeting whispering to each other that the decision taken in the meeting was a wrong one. Everyone suddenly appeared to agree to something opposite of what was agreed upon in the meeting, but no one was really at fault, because "someone" else pushed everyone along.

Pay attention to all the conversations in the meetings in the book, pick a character who disagreed with the war, then ask what you would do if you were him.

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昭和史第一部（下）(半藤一利/林錚顗)

In this second volume, the author concentrated on the early part of 1940 and all the way to 1945 when Japan surrendered after the dropping of the atomic bombs. The style of the author has been discussed in my earlier entry reviewing the first first volume of the work and has remained largely similar. In this volume, whether he meant to do it or not, the central theme is the behaviours of the policy makers and the military personnel in Japan in those years.

Starting from the late 1930s Japan has rearmed, having withdrawn from the League of Nations. They were then caught in something of a quagmire in China and while events in Europe have been increasingly dangerous, the Sino-Japanese War have been left largely as a side-event in the minds of the West. However, one can't help feeling that events in Asia have taken a life of its own. Japan increasingly felt isolated and was under pressure from the US whom exported most of the oil that Japan needed. Japan wanted to avoid conflict with the US and at the same time wanted to find a way to end the war in China for it was already beginning to take its toil domestically. Finding no support from the US, the UK and their other allies, Japan gravitated towards the Axis and finally entered into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Japan's reason for entering the Pact (suggested by Germany) was not clear nor compelling, indeed there were those in Japan that had not supported Japan's entry into the Pact. But it appeared that those who supported it all did it for their own selfish reasons. Take this entry from Kazushige Ugaki's diary (pg 25) whom the author accused of supporting the Tripartite Pact in order to get more resources for the army. But whatever their personal motivations, one does not get the impression that something this important was seriously considered before the final decision was made.

Another example was how they were ready to enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union. One can argue that Japan's involvement in Manchuria was partly due to the need to check the Soviet Union. This got them into a stalemate in China which soured their relationships with much of the rest of the world, and yet later in having to continue the war in China they wanted an alliance with the Soviet Union (after Nomomhan to boot). It is a little hard to square the logic in all these.

Worse was their decision to bomb Pearl Harbor. There was almost a consensus that Japan could not have a prolonged war with the US, including the Admiral Yamamoto who planned the operation. Yet it was almost as if everyone allow one event to lead to another and just went along with it without voicing objections until it was a done deal. The worst of this behaviour would come when Japan wanted to end the war. The way they went about talking about how to go about it and never quite getting down to it was tragically comical. But the author did us a favour by discussing one relatively small event, quoting from two commanders' diaries he showed us why a coming to a decision was hard, even between (or especially between) Japanese.

Referring to the Battle of Kohima when Japan suffered a huge defeat, it appeared that the two commanders Renya Mutaguchi and Masakazu Kawabe knew they stood no chance to winning and their forces were about to be annihilated. Yet both of them would not order a retreat. Post war, this was what they wrote in their respective diaries:

• Renya Mutaguchi: Although I wanted to say that it's already time to quit the fight in Imphal, when these words reached my mouth, I just couldn't get them out. I could only hope that someone would be able to tell from my expression.

• Masakazu Kawabe: I got the impression from Mutaguchi's expression that there was something he wanted to say but just could not bring himself to. I didn't probe, and the meeting ended that way.

Personally I found this to be what was so valuable about the book. It is hard sometimes for us to understand how a nation tactically so superior to many of its adversaries could be so strategically blundering. However when it comes from a Japanese, who incidentally was a young lad during the war and could even remember his job in one of the torpedo factories, one gained this special insight and know, especially for an Asian, that it could very well be us.

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Hiroshima Nagasaki (Paul Ham)

Judging by the two extremes ratings that this book received in Amazon, one can tell that this is a rather controversial book. The author did not think that the atomic bombs made Japan surrender which in turn avoided the loss of lives of many Americans who would otherwise have to invade the main islands of Japan. But his position was not just that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary, he went further to obliquely imply that the reason for dropping the atomic bombs were for the pure purpose of killing civilians.

The author argued that the atomic bombs were unnecessary by showing that:

Fire bombing was not an effective strategy to make an enemy surrender
In support of this argument the author spent a chapter on the fire bombing of cities in Germany. Meant originally to bring Germany to its knees, the effectiveness was questionable and eventually Germany capitulated not because of the destruction of any of the cities or even all of them, but because of the land forces of the allies that reached Berlin.

The Japanese cabinet was not swayed by the atomic bombs
The author argued strenuously that the Japanese cabinet, especially the three (of six) representing the military, the War Minister Korechika Anami, the admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy Soemu Toyoda and general in the Imperial Army Yoshijiro Umezu. They did not change their minds after the two bombs were dropped. It was actually the entry of Soviet Union into the war that convinced the Japanese cabinet that all was lost and surrender was inevitable.

The Japanese were going to surrender anyway
Citing the futile and delusional efforts at getting Russia to play the role of the intermediary for an end to the war, the author showed that the Japanese were already seriously contemplating an end of the war (in contrast to unconditional surrender). It would be a matter of time, given Japan’s lack of ability to deploy air or naval power, that they would collapse.

These would have made for a persuasive case but Ham went further and opined that despite all these, the US bombed Japan anyway and it was not really because the decision makers (short of President Truman) wanted to save American lives, but because “total war had debased everyone involved…” (pg 158) and made it easy to contemplate the destruction of properties and lives on a grand scale, not helped by many who were spoiling to demonstrate the new power of the US.

The President wanted it for political reasons; saving American lives was one reason, but more likely to use it as a chip to get concessions from the Russians, if not to get them to be more agreeable. Major General Leslie Groves, the one in charge of the Manhattan Project wanted deliverance of his project. The Foreign Secretary, James Byrnes, just wanted it. The sole conscience of the administration, the War Secretary, Henry Stimson, was brushed aside because he did not say things that the President wanted to hear, and the stance of the scientists involved in the creation of the bombs was ambiguous. Therefore despite the fact that the bombs were going to kill many thousands, not to mention destroying many properties, no one would check the momentum of the project. Worse still, the desire to check Russian territorial ambitions with the bombs was not successful because they would shortly have their own atomic weapons and all that was achieved was a prolonged and sometimes perilously dangerous Cold War.

The author then went further to imply that putting the blame on the Japanese for not surrendering despite the warnings was wrong because the Allies kept insisting on ‘unconditional surrender’, a term which at first confused the Japanese and later became the only stumbling block to their agreement to surrender because they were afraid that the Americans would try the Emperor as a war-criminal. In the end unconditional or not, was this not what the Japanese got? Knowing this the Americans should have just relented earlier, let the Japanese know, let them surrender and the bombs and the resulting carnage would have been spared. And if the Americans had really wanted to drop the bombs, the morally right thing to do was to give warning by demonstrating the power of the bombs given that it was so much more destructive than anything anyone knew then. Finally, even if one argues that Hiroshima was necessary and effective, there was no need for Nagasaki.

And since the bombs were used despite all reasons against their use, the author brought us through the aftermath of the bombs, how many civilian targets were destroyed and how many civilians were killed, maimed or suffered the radioactivity for years while the military targets were somehow missed (pg 410). To add insult to the injury, the victims were denied medical help and were in some cases treated as exhibits for research into the effects of radiation. Finally in the years following the end of the war, the main players could only manage incoherent narratives as to the reasons and effects of the bombs, further attesting to the difficulty in justifying their use.

The author was indeed persuasive. However as I read the book, I could not help wondering if the problem is one of hindsight. Take for example the case of area bombing. Its limits in persuading the enemy to surrender are recognised now because it was used then. Given that prior to the Second World War there was no precedence for one to learn from, it was reasonable that, looking at how much fear it could instil in the enemies, this could be an effective way to get the enemy to surrender. Similarly while it is increasingly recognised that the Soviet Union’s invasion of Manchuria greatly accelerated Japan’s capitulation, how could one know then what we know now? And it fact it was many years after the end of the war that the Russian archives were opened that allowed scholars to piece things together coherently. Also, peace feelers were probably abundant then and by design they were purposely vague and came from unlikely sources. It would be hard to verify the authenticity of each of them to conclude that the Japanese were seriously considering surrender and the only stumbling block was the term “unconditional surrender”. If only we knew then.

How then, given the confluence of factors, should the US respond? Not having the benefit of all these facts the author has now, it was certainly not easy to make the right decision (not that dropping the bombs was a wrong decision), the US probably made the “best” decision and considering everything, this looked like a good option. To accuse the President of not being a character of “unearthly will, vast authority and transcendent moral vision” (pg 475) and therefore not resisting the “fatal momentum of the atomic project” was to expect him to remove one option the outcome of which few if anyone, knew then.

The author also did not give complete consideration to the whole context of the situation, for example it was not that the Japanese military had retreated from island to island and finally were confined to their main islands. They were still in Manchuria and also countries in South East Asia. To blockade them to starvation would mean a more prolonged occupation of these places. If I were my parents and were living under the Japanese then, I would wish for the bomb.

One important question was whether Nagasaki was necessary. There was a sense in the book that people realised the devastation the first bomb did to Hiroshima and were no longer that elated about Nagasaki, seeding some doubts in the readers’ minds about the correctness of its use. How should one decide whether or not to drop the second bomb given that the first one did not seem to get the Japanese to surrender? Did they need more time or did it just didn’t move them enough, in which case perhaps another bomb was in order? Or should all these considerations be superseded by the by then known effects of an atomic bomb?

The “if we knew then” argument that I used here is supported by the results of the Gallup poll did in the immediate aftermath of the bombs and written about by the author in the book (pg 459). It showed that most Americans supported the use of the bombs while much fewer supported the use of other forms of weapons such as poison gas possibly because of “the ghastly memory of mustard gas used in World War I and the emerging horror of the Nazi death camps and gas chambers.” In other words, they were not bent on killing Japanese in the most grotesque manner. Once they knew of the effects they would no longer be so supportive of the weapon, and it did play out in the Cold War.

Questions aside, there were a few chapters in the book that I like very much. The first one being the chapter on the science and scientists behind the atomic bomb which brought back good (and not so good) memories of my school years. The second one was the chapter discussing the Japanese’ deliberations over how to end the war, it was a very nuanced discussion about the Japanese psyche (which I cross-examined with Kazutoshi Handō’s Show Shi). There was this element of (pardon me) “smoking their own dope” where they would know clearly the undesirable outcome if the Russians were to invade Manchuria. And since it was undesirable, it should not happen, and if it should not happen, then it would not happen. Therefore it was conceivable to get the Russians to mediate an end to the war.

The author also gave a very vivid description of the condition of the victims in the two cities immediately after the bombs were dropped. These represented the two times so far that atomic weapons were used on cities. Alas as tragic as they were, it failed to arouse in me the feeling of sympathy and I even felt that the descriptions were slightly over done, especially when he gave some statistics on civilian versus military casualties. I could not help wondering if he was steering readers to the conclusion that the bomb was selective by itself, dropped on a city with both civilian and military targets, the civilian targets would be obliterated while the military ones intact. The indifference I felt towards the victims was curious to me given that I bear no hatred towards the Japanese today. This has made me re-examine my attitude towards Japan today. While I am not going to discuss it here, I have to give the author credit for doing this for me.

The other thing that I was made to re-examine was this: how does one rate a book? A one-star in Goodreads represents “I did not like it”, but what did one not like about it if he/she had given a book a one-star rating? Was it a disagreement with the position of the author or was it because the content was poorly researched and inaccurate, or was it the writing style? The singular metric used to rate a book cannot take into account the different dimensions that one evaluates a book with. In the end one might take an average of the ratings given for the different dimensions. I decided not to give this rather ambiguous rating to this book. I think this book was well researched (although I would really appreciate proper citations, minus one star for that), well argued, and well written. While I could not help feeling a little manipulated, I urge potential readers not to dismiss the book too quickly just because of the possible difference in positions they may have from the author.

A reviewer in Amazon said that this book is only for people who can think for themselves. I would not say that, I would encourage people to read this book but temper it with other books to put things in a better context.

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Pan-Asianism and Japan's War (Eri Hotta)

In this book the author, Eri Hotta, explored the notion of Pan-Asianism and its relation to Japan’s wars in Asia between 1931 and 1945. First of all, it is important to understand what Pan-Asiansim stands for and the author did a very good job of dissecting the term, not semantically, but really explaining how Japanese of that era looked at Japan in relation to the rest of Asia, particularly China. It turns out that Pan-Asianism in Japan was not just an ideology about the unity of Asians, in fact there were three major strands of Pan-Asianism: the Teaist strand, the Sinic strand and finally the Meishuron strand which eventually became the most dominant strand. The Meishuron strand believed that Asia was weak and should stand together to counter Western imperialism with Japan as the leader of the movement.

There was a reason why this strand displaced the other two as the dominant strand. India, incorporated by the Teaists as a partner in the enterprise was unclear in their position vis-à-vis anti-imperialism. There were surely those who fought for independence from Great Britain (e.g., Subhas Chandra Bose) but many more Indians appeared to be fine with the status quo. China, an obvious partner in the enterprise and even treated as equals by the Teaists and the Sinics, was suffering greatly under the Western powers, especially after the Boxer Rebellion. But she was a torn and fragmented country with no unifying government. One can hardly expect China to play a significant role in the rise of Asia. It is therefore left to the most developed and stable country then, Japan, to take the lead.

An obvious question that one would ask would be whether Pan-Asianism, especially the Meishuron strand, caused Japan’s war. The author made no such claims but demonstrated how the adoption of Meishuron affected how the war and post-battle treatment of the conquered were carried out, both at the macro and the micro levels. At the macro level, in the early stages it led Japan to feel that they could not count on China to act as an effective partner, if not to check the Soviet Union’s likely southern expansion then at least as a buffer for a while. Japan therefore had to do it herself, and coupled with the need for room to house its expanding population and need for resources, found the occupation of Manchuria to be a perfect solution.

At the micro level, it explained the behaviours of the Japanese soldiers and commanders towards the peoples under their occupation. Firstly there must be a pent-up frustration amongst the Japanese soldiers towards the people they conquered because Japan was trying to bring respect to Asia, liberating these countries from the Western Imperialists, paying the price with blood, and yet facing a perplexingly hostile reception from fellow Asians. Secondly in the view of this strand, Japan and Japanese are superior, as seen by their ability to ‘liberate’ the other Asians, and these ‘sub-humans’ can be treated as such.

However in assigning herself this responsibility, the author demonstrated clearly the paradoxical Japanese psyche that was prevalent at that time where on one hand Japan felt a sense of superiority and mission in relation to her other Asian neighbours, but on the other felt inferior and victimised by the West, described by the author as a “curious blend of arrogance and self-consciousness” (pg. 207). The perceived sense of victimisation can be traced to their humiliation by the West in the wake of the Treaty of Portsmouth and the Washington Conference when they realised the ‘Hobbesian nature’ (pg. 53) of world affairs. The sense of superiority on the other hand was a result of their realisation of their advancement in comparison to their neighbours as mentioned above. This psyche became a justification in many Japanese’ minds resulting in a sense of righteousness in their subsequent behaviours in the occupied territories.

While this book is centred around the theme of Pan-Asianism, the author also touched on the other factors that played equally important roles in the war including the role that the Soviet Union played (albeit briefly), the losing of control of the military, the internal fighting within the factions of the military, and most important of all, the dead ends that Japan eventually found herself in after attacking Pearl Harbor. Despite these, the author never let Pan-Asianism out of sight and in the end led one to ask whether it also had a role in Japan’s defeat. To this the author showed that there were perhaps two pitfalls that eventually led to Japan’s failure.

The first was their surprise that China would actually resist. Japan might have expected China not to either because the Chinese were thought to be too impotent to do so or because they might really buy into the ideology of Pan-Asianism. The reality was although China could not mount a successful defence against Japan, the vast expanse of China meant the tying down of a big number of Japanese troops.

The second was while the decision makers in the military might be under no delusions of eventual defeat and were only carrying on because they had promised an East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and were therefore unable to dismount, there were actually others who “saw reforming implications in what they were doing” (pg. 136). The machine therefore grinded on until it was utterly destroyed by the US.

This book must be read carefully because readers from countries that suffered under Japanese occupation might be quick to dismiss it as a revisionist effort to re-present history. The reader may accuse the writer of trying to justify Japanese soldiers’ brutality by pleading that the intention was good, and the brutal ways that were used on the occupied peoples were exactly the same ones used on Japanese themselves. The author did not have the intention of excusing Japan for her treatment of the people in the occupied territories, rather, she wanted to take an open-minded look at the Pan-Asianism ideology and how it influenced Japanese attitudes and decisions during the war. That the outcome of the ideology was bad for Asia in general and Japan in particular serves as a lesson for us in not examining our own reactions to the ideology, it does not imply that any attempt to understand it is an attempt to excuse the perpetrators of a brutal and ultimately tragic war.

This book is not an easy read; the fact that I am the first reviewer since the book was published in 2007 attests to it. It was not written in a “popular history” style where the author tried to inject life into characters by describing for example “he was tossing and turning in his bed”. What this author did instead was to adopt the academic writing style, citing references where they were due, describing events as they were, and making no effort to add colour to the characters. However for those who would make the effort, they can be sure of being richly rewarded with not just knowledge of events and people, but an expanded vocabulary (of which Hotta’s range was huge) and an insight into how an expert does critical analysis. It is well worth the effort.


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The Battle for Singapore (Peter Thompson)

This book is an attempt to explain why the "impregnable fortress" of Singapore fell to the Japanese even while the Commonwealth forces hugely out-numbered the Japanese.

The book covers a lot of ground; the author, Peter Thompson, started by introducing the main characters, the defence situation in Malaya and Singapore, and the command structure. He then went briefly into the psyche of the different parties charged with the defence, particularly how they viewed the Japanese, carefully laying the groundwork for the later part of the story. When the fighting proper began he described the progress of each battle in sufficient details for one to get a good picture of the terrain and environment, the arms that were used on each side, and the mistakes that were made along the way.

The author wrote in a engaging manner, moving the book along very well thereby making the book an easy one to read. There were also many interviews with both military and civilian survivors adding richness to the account, and highlighting well the very human side to the tragedy. For someone like me who is just starting to explore the history of this event, this book provides a very good overall description helping to define the different dimensions when exploring this history.

To his credit, the author did not claim this to be a scholarly work despite citing references throughout. However there were a few things that disturbed me in regard to citations. There were times when information was presented which would benefit from citations but were not referenced. One example was when he said that "Japanese sources" claimed a certain number of troops had landed in Singapore without clarifying what these sources were (pg. 424). A related problem I have is with the many instances when the author quoted other sources verbatim. To be sure, sometimes this adds to the narrative, but too much of it gives the reader the impression that he is reading a collection of works already published. The author was occasionally not careful about being precise with facts. The Zero fighter was so named because it entered service in 2600 according to Japan's Imperial Year, not because of the big zeros painted on the fuselage as written in the main text. Although it was clarified in the notes at the end of the book, for readers who do not refer to the notes, this would be what they thought was the reason the plane was so named. The author's credibility is also eroded by the occasional dramatisation of the events such as the description "Sir Robert Brooke-Popham's proclamation flapped in the wind..." (pg. 236).

The title of the book is true to its contents, where the first portion was devoted to setting the scene followed by the bulk of which on the battles, if not solely in Singapore. Unfortunately the last hundred pages or so (out of 600) were wasted on an overly brief treatment of life in Singapore under the Japanese occupation. I would prefer that it be taken up in a separate volume in more detail. I also wished that there was more coverage on what was happening on the Japanese side, from the Japanese perspective. I counted but one instance of this (pg 418).

So in the end did the author fulfilled his aim as spelled out in the last question in his first chapter - "The unanswered question was: how had it happened?" One can read this in different ways. One of which is to interpret from the book that there is a complicity of reasons, including poor leadership, inferior weapons, raw recruits, Britain's engagement in multiple theatres, or under-estimation of the enemies. The other is to say that the author was vague and so it became hard to tell what he was attributing "how had it happened" to. Either way I did not get the impression that the author wanted to state clearly his position, perhaps preferring to let his readers make their own judgement.

Overall this is a very readable book which gives a good introduction to this part of history, including the main characters, the armies, and the location of the battle. The description of the pain and sufferings that soldiers and civilians underwent is also vivid. For a person making my first foray into this area, I have certainly benefitted from reading the book.

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It is hard for me to understand how the West can under-estimate Japan when they beat the Russians on a few decades before and was quickly developing technologically since then.

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昭和史第一部（上）(半藤一利/林錚顗)

Showa Shi (昭和史), roughly translated to The History of the Showa Period was written by Kazutoshi Handō (半藤一利). This work comes in two parts in a total of four volumes, covering the period between 1926 and 1989. This review is only on the first volume in the first part, spanning 1926 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The edition I read was Chinese translation by 林錚顗, a history graduate from the Department of History in the National Taiwan University and the Tokyo University.

The trouble with reading a translated book, besides having things lost (or gained) in translation, is that it is unclear how authentic the book is in its translated form. When one finds an impressively written sentence or phrase, he cannot tell if this was written by the original writer or was just well translated because the language that it has been translated into happened to have more appropriate words or idioms that can be used conveniently. In this review I shall assume that everything was translated as the original author intended.

This volume focusing on the period between 1926 and 1941 tries to address this question – what led to Japan’s involvement in the Second World War? The author started his narrative with the incident in 1928 where the Japanese Kwantung Army murdered Zhang Zuolin (張作霖) by placing a bomb on the train track on which Zhang’s carriage was travelling. Starting his narrative with this event is not just chronologically sensible, it is also the harbinger of a central theme in the book: the Japanese military is rouge and the civilian government is not able to control it. This, together with other factors, eventually led Japan into the tragedy of the Second World War ending in its defeat and destruction.

The circumstances that landed Japan in its final state in 1945 can be understood through the interplay between the external environment and the emerging political philosophies that was eventually embraced by the country. The author carefully described the external environment and situations of that time, the most important of which included the Russo-Japanese War, the Great Depression, and Japan’s desire to be elevated to the status of a major international power. Against this backdrop, the author developed his arguments amid the complexities and intrigues that existed among the various power players, the army, the navy, the civilian parliament, and the advisors to the Emperor. Not only were the relationships among these players complex, within each there were also different factions subscribing to different philosophies, doctrines, and perspectives. Slowly however one of the factions within the army gained the upper hand sometimes through assassinations, other times through coercion. Eventually no one appeared to be able to control the army's field commanders, a situation epitomised by the graphic description of the Marco Polo Incident (pg 188). In the end a certain momentum was gathered and things gained a life of their own.

The style of the author is not one that I’m familiar with. Not having read enough, I don’t know if this is generally how Japanese historical accounts are written or it is just this author. But the prose is a mix of academic, personal, and poetic. For example, his account and analysis of the Nanjing incident is fair and well considered, admitting to the occurrence of the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers, even apologising over it, but arguing with facts why the number 300,000 estimated at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East is a gross over-estimation (I do not intend to get into an argument over the accuracy of these numbers here.) Yet he would pepper his book with “Isn’t it so?” as if speaking directly to the readers. In addition, he could get into trivialities like why a certain politician has a particular nickname (pg 77). At other times he would include conversations between the actors as if he was quoting them verbatim. And then there would be flashes of brilliance, the most impressive of which is the way he described the end of the Young Officers’ Revolt (226 Incident).

可是，计划就在大高少尉与中侨中尉拔枪相向、四目相对之时结束了。。。(pg 164 - 二二六事件)

But the plan ended the moment Second Lieutenant Otaka and Infantry Lieutenant Nakahashi pointed their guns at each other, staring into each other’s eyes…

There is one issue that I have so far avoided, the author’s attitude towards the role of Emperor Hirohito. In this there is no doubt, the author went out of his way to absolve the Emperor of any responsibilities. The Emperor is either not informed of what had happened, misled by the military, or had his hands tied. This was clear from the start of the book when the author explained how the early events determined the limits of the Emperor’s power. The author made extensive reference to the Emperor's own biographical account 《昭和天王独白录》to gain insights into the Emperor’s thoughts. I wonder why I cannot find a translation of such an important record whether in Chinese or English.

If nothing, this book is important for its contribution to our understanding of what went on on the Japanese side throughout the years leading to the Second World War. It is more than just a chronicle of events which is available in many English accounts; it provided many details about how individuals thought, the dynamics between different individuals and groups, and the general psyche of the populace caught in those turbulent times. The author even had access to some of the important players for example Renya Mutaguchi, an important commander in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (pg 189). Not having read enough on this subject, I cannot recommend an alternative to this book, but I feel that most of us will benefit from this book if we are not trying to do scholarly research in this area.

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China's War with Japan (Forgotten Ally) (Rana Mitter)

This book is published in two different titles: 1) China's War with Japan 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival, and 2) Forgotten Ally: China's World War II 1937-1945. This review is made with reference to the latter.

The use of the first title conjures an impression of a chronicle, recording the events that took place in China between 1937 and 1945. In this, the author has more than fulfilled the promise of the title. In fact, to his credit, Dr Mitter even went way back to the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) albeit briefly, an era commonly ignored by scholars. This reminder is important for two reasons. First of all, it was then that the Japanese began to station troops on the mainland (in Korea). Second, it became a base from which Japan fought the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) which really represented when the Japanese infringed upon China's territory.

The focus of the book however starts from 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which started off as 'just another skirmish' but took an unexpected turn when Chiang Kai-shek decided that he would make a stand and opened another front in Shanghai. From there the author took us through all the major events ending eventually with Japan's surrender. In between he culled documents and sources including diaries, official party documents, and reports from journalists to provide vivid details of the Nationalists' feeble attempts to govern 'Free China', their efforts to undermine the Communists, to draw any country into the war to help them, and to manage the aftermath of the defection of important party members, while fighting and initially retreating from city to city. Equally vivid are the descriptions of how the civilians caught in the war suffered from poverty, starvation, rape, and official corruption.

But if the first title reads rather blandly, the second title 'Forgotten Ally' proposes a thesis which the author made very clear - China was the forgotten ally of the allied forces in the Second World War. This powerful position can only come into consideration after Pearl Harbor, when Japan in a span of two days made itself the enemy of at least four other countries, the US, Britain, Australia and the Netherlands. The word Ally therefore was only relevant in the later part of the book. The main argument of the author is the Western powers are now at war with Japan, and China being also at war with Japan has become an ally to them and had even fought alongside them on at least one occasion (Burma). But even if that had not been the case, China has tied about half a million Japanese soldiers which might have been deployed against the Western powers, that would have qualified China as an ally. I do not feel qualified to dispute the thesis, rather I would like to offer my reflection on the significance of the worth Forgotten.

Dr Mitter was clear about who the forgotten party was and seen from the Nationalists' perspective, it would probably aptly describe their sense of indignation. They had been fighting the allies' enemy for six years before the allies themselves entered the war. If China was by then "a battered nation on its knees, waiting for the Americans and British to save it from certain destruction at the hands of the Japanese", it could be partly attributed to, as the book made clear, the fact that they had been fighting the Japanese alone. Yet one can hardly blame the West for seeing it this way, for Japan, while surely on their radar even prior to December 1941, was secondary in relation to Germany then. Had Japan not made the blunder of attacking Pearl Harbor, their invasion of South East Asia would have at most threatened the European colonies, and not the European homeland, it would still have been of secondary importance.

Other reasons also made 'forgotten' inevitable. Firstly, the question of whether China really did contribute to the fighting (when they seem to lose on all fronts, not helped by the opinion of Stilwell)  or whether it was just a corrupt regime always seeking more from the allies (Chiang's request for a US$1 billion loan certainly did not help) also left many questions of China's position and value as an ally in the minds of the US and Britain. Secondly, the cold war narrative also quickly distorted the history of that time, focusing people's attention on China's political ideology rather than their history in the Second World War. Finally, the outcome of the civil war in China meant that certain events must be emphasised, others diminished, and some invented.

Which brings me to this question I had as I read the book - who was forgotten really? If the answer is China, then who in China? The situation in China then reminded me of China during the warring states (between 481 BC and 403 BC) when at one stage China was divided into three kingdoms (三分天下), only this time among the Nationalists, the Communists, and the Japanese (through Wang Jinwei's Reorganized National Government of China). And if the West can be accused of forgetting their Nationalists allies as the author implies, then whatever the Nationalists did right (among the many wrongs) was comprehensively eradicated by the Communists when they came to power (see pg 333-334). And to be fair, post-Second World War and even current Chinese discourse on that part of history hardly give enough credits to the West (used loosely here) too.

I cannot accuse the author of falling short in his effort to support his thesis, he might have felt that the two-thirds of the book before China became an 'ally' was necessary to provide the context but that leaves only the last third of the book to try and develop his argument. I also feel that too little was given on the Communists side of the story, perhaps because in the context of actually fighting the Japanese they haven't done much. One last question was whether Russia was as inconsequential to the events in China as it seemed, for very little was said about them throughout. Still, for anyone who wants a source of information on that period of history in China this book is indispensable. Dr Mitter, with his great scholarship, vivid descriptions, and dynamic style will take you on a throught-provoking ride through his riveting narrative.

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