MacArthur hardly appears. The spies were rank amateurs. But once you get past the misleading title, MacArthur’s Spies is a well-written piece of work with a lot to say about life in occupied Manila during World War II.
Author: Bill Purves
Ronald McCrum is a retired British army officer, and in his prologue he sets out his conviction that in previous accounts of the fall of Singapore too much blame has been attributed to the military and not enough to the “seriously flawed” civil administration.
After the collapse of the Manchurian empire, Japan was keen to expand its holdings in Korea and the Pacific into Manchuria and eventually into Mongolia and the Russian Far East. Their argument was that Japan had to feed its huge population with scarce resources, so imperialist expansion was a matter of life and death.
A century ago China was at the height of its warlord period. The nascent Republic of China had 26 prime ministers in 12 years as one warlord after another gained ascendency in their internecine struggles.
Little wonder, then, that China remained neutral as the First World War raged, signing up with the Allies only in the last year of the conflict. The Japanese too, though formally allied with the Entente powers, provided little practical assistance. Japan invaded Tsingtao and defeated the German garrison in one of the war’s first battles, but after that Japan declined to provide much support when importuned by its hard-pressed allies. Late in the war, once the defeat of the Central Powers seemed likely, Japan supplied some war materiel under the terms of secret treaties assuring British and French support for its colonial ambitions after the war. Its aim was to be anointed Germany’s successor in control of its Pacific colonies, including continued occupation of Tsingtao.
China and the United States did most of the heavy lifting in defeating Japan during the Pacific war. After the war neither was much interested in running prisoner of war camps, and most captured Japanese were quite quickly repatriated. Two groups who did not return promptly were those captured by the Red army in Manchuria as they delivered the coup de grâce at the war’s end, and a few soldiers defending Japan’s Pacific islands who were neither killed, captured nor committed suicide when the islands fell. The Soviet Union shipped its captives to work camps in the Soviet Far East and set them to work mining, logging and building railroads, releasing them only years later. Some of the holdout island defenders lived on in the jungle for decades, nominally as guerilla fighters though in fact struggling to survive.
Here we have a real curiosity—a history of Nagaland up to August 1943. Nagaland is a state in the extreme northeast of India bordering Myanmar, and the history is a curiosity because the only event of much significance to ever happen there was the battle of Kohima in 1944. Why would someone write a history of Nagaland without mentioning the battle? The answer is that Lyman is an experienced historian with 14 books to his credit. One of them deals specifically the battle and its aftermath. Among the Headhunters is the back story.
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