Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire
by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper
Allen Lane, HK$400
As the authors of Forgotten Wars say, the story of how the Bomb brought down the curtain on the second world war has been done to death. By contrast, the repercussions that echoed around Asia after Nagasaki and the military decline of the British empire barely get a look in.
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper set out to plug the gap, covering a vast territory in pursuit of the definitive take on the Great Asian War.
Forgotten Wars tells how Burmese resistance and the fall of the British Raj in India led what's now Myanmar to independence in 1948, only for interethnic conflict and the rise of the army to erode that status. The book shows how Britain clung onto Malaya and Singapore, thanks to backing from conservative Malay and Chinese leaders fearful of the Malayan Communist Party, whose cadres Britain had helped to arm during the conflict with Japan.
It also offers a 'new account' of the 1945 British invasion of Vietnam, which foreshadowed the war we know, and Indonesia's bloody lunge for independence after Japan's collapse. The authors weave in the emergence of Asia's unspoken cold war, describing how to the north, China became a communist powerhouse and to the east, North Vietnam drove out France.