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.
WW2
Biographies, at least in English, about Japanese who played key roles in the Second World War are relatively rare. Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin—each the subject of dozens of biographies—have all attracted a great deal of attention. General Tojo Hideki, Japan’s leader for most of the war, has however had only several books dedicated to him. For the leader of an empire that held Manchuria in its grip, overran much of China, occupied French Indochina, and seized throughout Southeast Asia the colonies of the Americans, British, and Dutch before going down in defeat, this relative lack of attention is remarkable.
Kay Enokido was the longtime president of the stately Hays-Adams hotel in Washington, DC, hosting dignitaries like the Japanese monarchy and the Obama family before the president was sworn in. But before she was a hotelier, and before that a journalist, she had another, earlier story, one that provides the heart of her book, Phantom Paradise: Escape from Manchuria.
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”.
On 19 February 1942, President Franklin D Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the Western US, sending them to cramped, hastily-constructed camps like Manzanar and Amache. One such Japanese-American was Karl Yoneda, a well-known labor activist–and the husband of Elaine Yoneda, a Jewish-American woman. Elaine soon followed her husband to the Manzanar camp, after authorities threatened to send her three-year-old mixed-race son, Thomas, to the camp alone.
September 2nd will mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender to the United States aboard the USS Missouri, ending the Second World War. The US decision to drop two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—what drove Japan to surrender, at least in popular history—is still controversial to this day.
Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin is an epilogue of sorts to his epic global history of the Second World War from 2021, Blood And Ruins. This new work focuses on the final months of the war in Asia, something that has been a topic of other recent books, such as Mark Gallichio’s Unconditional (2020) and the early parts of Judgment at Tokyo by Gary Bass. Overy’s approach is to consider the air war, starting with the conventional bombing campaign against Japan’s cities, then moving on the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally looking at how this history contributed to Japan’s surrender.
During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air.
Frederick Rutland—”Rutland of Jutland”—was a war hero, renowned World War I aviator … and a Japanese spy. In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Rutland shared information on US aviation and naval developments to the Japanese, desperate for knowledge of US capability.
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.
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