Intelligence failures are quite common in the history of warfare. During the First World War, according to a new book by Arabist and author Eamonn Gearon, British intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara (in what later became Iraq) against troops of the Ottoman Empire spurred the creation of the Arab Bureau, which Gearon describes as an organization that “revolutionized the way in which intelligence operations were conducted in complex cultural environments, and pioneered methods that would influence approaches to intelligence work …for decades, … even up to the present day.”
Author: Francis P Sempa
World War II birthed the anti-colonial Indian National Army (INA), a force composed of former imperial troops and civilian recruits that fought with Japan against the British and helped to accelerate India’s independence from Great Britain. Like most aspects of World War II, these developments were messy, complicated, and filled with tragedy. Gautam Hazarika, a former banker turned World War II historian, tells the story of one of the war’s lesser-known tragedies—the fate of Indian prisoners of war in the aftermath of Japan’s conquest of Malaya and Singapore.
Robert Strange McNamara was arguably one of the worst public servants in post-World War II American history. Decades after the Vietnam War ended, McNamara, who served as US Defense Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, admitted that as early as 1965 he believed that the United States could not win that war yet he orchestrated and publicly supported the Americanization of the war, sending more than 500,000 American servicemen to fight in what he believed was a hopeless cause. All the while, he kept telling the American people that the US was winning, even as he quietly recommended bombing pauses, troop ceilings, and negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
On 9 August 1965, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia, which had itself only become an independent country two years earlier. But Malaysia insisted that Malaysian troops be permitted to remain in Singapore. Singapore’s future Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew later said that Malaysia’s insistence “stiffened our resolve” to “build up the Singapore Armed Forces”. The person primarily responsible for doing that is the subject of Ramachandran Menon’s new book Kirpa Ram Vij: The Volunteer Who Launched an Army.
Wars are always replete with tragedies, and the World War II Battle of Manila, fought between 3 February and 3 March 1945, is one of history’s greatest tragedies. An entire city was destroyed, millions of people were made homeless, and more than 100,000 civilians were killed as Allied forces liberated the Philippine capital from Japanese rule. Naval War College Professor Nicholas Sarantakes, with meticulous research and vivid prose, has written the definitive history of this battle, which was an American victory but, in his words, a “poisoned victory”.
At the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union combed the intelligence agencies and scientific institutes of their defeated enemies to find and enlist skilled personnel to, in author Stephen Mercado’s words, “work in the shadows of the Cold War.” While much has been written about the postwar recruitment of German spies and scientists, Mercado’s new book, Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons, focuses on Japan’s Noborito Research Institute—its origins, its work for Imperial Japan during the war, and America’s use of the Noborito’s veterans in the early Cold War years.
Despite the title of India and China At Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History, Vappala Balachandran’s new book mostly discusses internal Indian politics. Other than the first two chapters and the book’s conclusion which deal with the diplomatic and strategic history of Sino-Indian relations, the bulk of Balachandran’s observations are devoted to the “competing visions” of India represented by the conservative Hindu nationalist/populist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) political movement that supports current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Indian National Congress (INC) or Congress Party that ruled India for decades after independence.
Between 5 November and 31 December 1945, three officers of the Indian National Army (INA) were tried by a British military court on charges of murder and waging war against the British king. Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon were found guilty of committing treason against the Crown, Khan was found guilty of murder, and Sahgal and Dhillon were acquitted of murder charges. But instead of imposing the required sentences of life or death, all three defendants were cashiered from the British Army and had their pay and allowances forfeited. As longtime journalist Ashis Ray explains in The Trial That Shook Britain, British authorities made a decision to effectively grant clemency to the officers due to the political and civil turmoil that surrounded the trial. Although the officers were physically in the dock, it was Indian independence that was on trial.
Enakshi Sengupta’s The Silk Route Spy is billed as a “true story” of her husband’s grandfather, Nandlal Kapur, who simultaneously spied for the British Raj and helped the Indian independence movement in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It is a story passed down from Nandlal Kapur to his grandson Vijay Kapur, who in turn conveyed what he recalled to the author.
Tokyo-based American author Ronald Drabkin has written a riveting, fast-paced account of a Beverly Hills-based spy who engaged in intelligence collection for Japan and provided the Japanese Navy with naval aviation technical expertise before Japan’s attack on American ships, planes and forces at Pearl Harbor.
You must be logged in to post a comment.