A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words. A Danger Shared is a collection of photographs taken by Melville Jacoby, an American exchange student and later war correspondent in China, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines (for Henry Luce’s Time and Life magazines) in the mid-to-late 1930s and early 1940s. Author Bill Lascher’s text accompanying the photographs tells Jacoby’s story against the background of the gathering storm, and later when the storm breaks over the Asia-Pacific.
Author: Francis P Sempa
Wars produce confusion and panic that often result from fears—rational and otherwise—among government officials and populations subject to war’s vicissitudes. During World War II, British officials in India and their colonial subjects feared a Japanese invasion of the sub-continent that never occurred. Krea University philosophy professor and former editor of The Hindu Mukund Padmanabhan tells this fascinating story in his debut book The Great Flap of 1942.
India’s former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to China Vijay Gokhale in his new book Crosswinds offers a fascinating account of India’s diplomacy in four specific events during 1949 through 1959: the formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Indochina War, and the two Taiwan Strait crises. India’s diplomatic role was encouraged by the British and Chinese, but mostly disdained by the Americans who came to view India as too partial to China and unappreciative of the US goal of containing communism in Asia. Gokhale believes that the events of that decade can shed some light on the current US-China confrontation in the South China Sea, and India’s role in today’s geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific.
Over the course of two centuries (between 133 BCE and 89 CE), China’s Han empire fought a series of conflicts with a confederation of nomadic steppe peoples known as Xiongnu. As Scott Forbes Crawford notes in his fast-moving, readable narrative history The Han-Xiongnu War, the Han and Xiongnu were east Asian “superpowers” whose struggle for power impacted smaller city-states, such as Yiwi, Loulan, Khotan, Yarkand, and Kashgar in what is now northern and western China. The Han empire brought to the conflict greater resources and organization, while the Xiongnu’s strengths were speed, mobility, and maneuverability. In the end, the Han’s superior numbers won out.
The late S Kalyanaraman was one of India’s foremost strategic thinkers until his untimely death in 2022 due to complications from COVID-19. He worked as a research fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. His last book, India’s Military Strategy, concisely explains and assesses the evolution of India’s military strategy towards Pakistan as manifested in their repeated clashes between 1947 and the early 21st century.
It is a battle that has been called “the Stalingrad of the East”, but a more accurate description might be“India’s forgotten battle of World War II”. The Battle of Kohima, which was fought between British/Imperial and Japanese troops during 4 April through 6 June of 1944, according to author Mmhonlümo Kikon, “shaped world history”. It marked the end of Japan’s effort to invade India and join forces with the Indian independence forces against the British Raj. Kohima, Kikon writes, “saved the British empire and the Allied forces from defeat and brought them out from the jaws of death into an uncertain glory carved into their history books.”
Narrative history at its best, Adrian Goldsworthy’s Rome and Persia is informative, readable, carefully sourced, and cautious in its judgments about events that occurred between 90 BCE and the 600s CE in the Mediterranean world, north Africa, and western Asia. It is also instructive about imperial rivalries, geopolitical competition, and human nature across the ages—including our present one.