Forgotten Wars Read Free Page A

ostensibly in order to disarm the Japanese. But this revivified British Empire attempted to recreate itself in conditions vastly different from those that had prevailed a few years earlier. The British now faced a variety of powerful, armed and embittered nationalist leaderships determined to claim immediate independence.
    Forgotten Wars
tells the story of how Burmese resistance and the collapse of the British Raj in India brought Burma to independence in 1948, but how that independence was corroded by inter-ethnic conflict and the irresistible rise of the Burmese army which remains dominant in the country today. It shows how Britain was able to maintain its grip in Malaya and Singapore only because it garnered and received the support of conservative Malay and Chinese leaderships which feared the powerful Malayan Communist Party whose cadres Britain itself had helped to arm during the conflict with Japan. It charts the beginning of the long Indo-China war which culminated in the American defeat in southern Vietnam in 1975 and the bloody and little-understood lurch towards Indonesian independence after the fall of Japan. In the process, the book analyses the emergence of the Cold War in Asia. To the north of the region, China became a communist monolith. To the east, North Vietnam seized independence from the French. But to the south, Britain’s rigorous campaign of counter-insurgency against the Malayan communists determined that the future states of Singapore and Malaysia would remain pro-Western and capitalist. These events sowed some of the seeds of East Asia’s great economic miracle which was to blossom in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Burma took a unique road to isolation and stagnation as its leaders battled both communist insurgency and the demands of minority peoples for autonomy.
    This book describes the struggles of proconsuls, colonial military commanders and nationalist leaders. But, like
Forgotten Armies
, it also tells the story of many ordinary people, both Asian and British, who were swept up in the violence of insurgency and counter-insurgency, communal rioting and renewed economic privation. The four years after the fall of Japan were Asia’s time of revolution. Amidthe turmoil, people still looked forward to an age of plenty when they would ‘dance among showers of gold and silver’, according to a Burmese verse. This bright future was still long decades away in the year 1949. Many people are still waiting.
    In writing this book we have accumulated many more debts than we can possibly recount here: research has been undertaken in many places and over a long period of time. Historical research depends on dedication and specialist expertise, and the staffs of archives and libraries in Asia and Britain have consistently provided both. We would like to mention Kevin Greenbank of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, and Rachel Rowe of the Centre and the Royal Commonwealth Society Collections in the Cambridge University Library. Our thanks to the librarians and archivists in the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum, the Liddell Hart Centre in King’s College, London, and the library, archives and Burma Star Collection in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta. In Southeast Asia, the Perpustakaan Universiti Malaya, the Arkib Negara Malaysia, the National Archives of Singapore, the National Library of Singapore and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore have been particularly helpful.
    We owe a special debt of thanks to Simon Winder, who has not only been a patient and indulgent editor but has also plied us with historiographical queries like the most genial of research supervisors. Katherine Prior once again contributed the index and helped us to clarify important questions. Thanks are due also to Chloe Campbell, Michal Shavit and Trevor Horwood for their editorial help over the