North Korea is the most tightly controlled country in the world. It is ruled by the Kim family and their control over the country’s 26 million citizens depends on the loyalty of elites of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP)—the communist party that has brutally enforced the Kims’ hold on power since the aftermath of the…
In one sense the title of Xiaobing Li’s biography of Chinese Admiral Liu Huaqing, China’s Mahan, is somewhat misleading because the author concludes that Admiral Liu has more in common with the onetime commander of the Soviet Navy Sergey Gorshkov than with the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Admiral Liu himself stated…
With the US-Israeli war against Iran into its second month, the publication of Homa Katouzian’s history of the 1979 Iranian revolution couldn’t be timelier. The outcome of the current war may decide the fate of that revolution and the Islamic regime that resulted from it. Katouzian’s conclusion mentions the June 2025 joint US-Israeli attacks targeting…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
When thinking about the most important World War II generals on the Allied side, the name Hastings Ismay does not come immediately to mind. But it should. Throughout the war, he was Winston Churchill’s right arm, serving as his chief staff officer in the Defense Ministry, Deputy Secretary of the War Cabinet, and as a…
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War…