In 2012, Murali Ranganathan, a historian and translator of Gujarati and Marathi, came across the memoir of Nariman Karkaria, a Parsi from Gujarat, titled Rangbhoomi par Rakhad, published in 1922. The book recounts Karkaria’s travels throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and his experiences in the First World War. The memoir, Murali Ranganathan writes, “is the only Indian war memoir from the First World War to have been discovered thus far.” Though initially skeptical of Nariman Karkaria’s story, and unable to independently confirm the accounts of Karkaria’s war experiences, Ranganathan believes the accounts therein are genuine.
Military history
The history of India and Pakistan since Partition has been marked by countless skirmishes—and four major wars. The second conflict—the 1965 war between India and Pakistan along the long land border—featured some of the largest tank battles since the Second World War and some of the first skirmishes between the Indian and Pakistani air forces. It reshaped regional and global geopolitics, pushing India closer to the Soviet Union and Pakistan closer to China.
The World War II fighting on Mindanao, the southernmost and second-largest island of the Philippine archipelago, rarely gets mentioned in conventional histories of the Pacific War, even in those histories that focus on the battles in the Philippines. Still less do those histories recount the heroic struggle of the Moro resistance fighters who conducted a costly insurgency against the conquering armies of Imperial Japan from 1942 to 1945. Thomas McKenna, an anthropologist who lived and worked in Moro communities on Mindanao, tells the story of one of the unsung heroes of the resistance, Mohammad Adil, in his new and groundbreaking book Moro Warrior.
Sometimes the further away in time you get from an event, the clearer it becomes. Time often enables historians to learn more facts and circumstances about, and fosters a more dispassionate view of, historical events like wars. The Vietnamese wars against France in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and against the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, have far too frequently been analyzed through ideological and political lenses, with both sides ignoring or downplaying facts that do not fit within their ideological-political agendas. The greatest merit of Christoper Goscha’s splendid history of the First Indochina War (1945-1954) is his unsparing devotion to letting facts inform his assessments and conclusions.
“World War II in the Asia Pacific created the modern world,” writes Peter Harmsen in the beginning of Volume 3 of his War in the Far East, which examines the final twenty months of the War in the region and its immediate aftermath. The United States emerged from the war as the leading world power, and the defeat of Japan led to a renewal of civil war in China, the coming to power of the Chinese communist regime, and ultimately China’s emergence as the world’s other superpower. And China’s rise, Harmsen contends, is “the defining event of the 21st century.”
The “Great Game” is the name commonly assigned to the 19th-century’s strategic rivalry between Great Britain and Russia for predominance in Central Asia. It was a geopolitical clash between two expansionist empires–the world’s greatest sea power versus its largest land power. Riaz Dean’s Mapping the Great Game is about one aspect of that struggle: the exploration and mapping of the geographical region encompassed by the Indian subcontinent’s northern frontier.
Shiv Kunal Verma, an acclaimed historian and filmmaker, has written an encyclopedic history of the 1965 India-Pakistan War, which began when Pakistan attacked Indian forces in the Rann of Kutch in April 1965, stalled as a result of a temporary ceasefire brokered by the British, and restarted in August when Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar by crossing the Ceasefire Line (CFL) into Indian Kashmir, and formally ended on 10 January 1966, when the Soviet Union mediated a peace agreement in Tashkent.
December 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the Second World War. In fact, this interview was recorded on 12 December: the 80th anniversary of Japanese troops landing on the Philippine island of Luzon.
War is messy. Guerrilla war is even messier. Most conventional histories of the Second World War’s Pacific theater detail Japan’s invasion and conquest of the Philippines in December 1941 and early 1942, and then jumping to US General Douglas MacArthur’s return in October 1944 and America’s retaking of the islands. James Kelly Morningstar’s new book War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1944 fills an important historical gap by detailing the guerrilla war waged by Filipino insurgents and US soldiers who refused to surrender or avoided captivity during the Japanese occupation.
On March 9, 1945, American B-29 flying fortresses firebombed Tokyo, Japan, in what Malcolm Gladwell in his new book The Bomber Mafia calls the “darkest night of the Second World War”.
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