Twilight.(Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945)(Book Review)

Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Belknap, 608 pp., $29.95)

IN the predawn blackness of December 8, 1941, hours ahead of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor 3,000 miles away on the other side of the International Date Line, Japanese troops landed in northern British Malaya. That afternoon Britain's two most powerful warships in the region, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, left Singapore to try to stop them. On December 10, Japanese torpedo bombers quickly sent both to the bottom; on the 11th, planes attacked defenseless Penang. A doctor remembered the panicked inhabitants running away as if in a scene from H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. A week or two later, the Japanese were steadily advancing down the Malay peninsula to Singapore, the supposedly invincible fortress of British Asia. On January 27, 1942, the British rear guard blew up the causeway connecting Singapore to the mainland. A local English teacher heard it and asked some passing boys what the noise was. One of them, young Lee Kuan Yew, answered: "That is the end of the British Empire."

He was right. In less than three weeks, Singapore's 130,000 British soldiers would surrender to a Japanese force less than half their size--the largest surrender in British military history. It sounded not only the death knell of the British Empire east of Suez, but of white colonial rule in Asia. The table was set for new independent states all across the region (Lee Kuan Yew would grow up to become prime minister of Singapore), including India and Pakistan, and for the Vietnam War. Before World War II was over, the British would go from being the masters of Asia to its discredited and demoralized pariahs.

How did this happen? Authors Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper contend that it was the result of an irresistible combination, on the British side, of complacency, incompetence, and moral cowardice. This book, Forgotten Armies, is a brilliant and compelling work. Anyone who likes great disaster stories--and who doesn't?--will love it. But it is also a cautionary tale of what happens when a great power lacks the courage of its commitments, and when moral resources no longer live up to material power--a precursor of what was going to happen to America in Vietnam, or even what might have happened in Iraq and the Middle East if John Kerry had won the 2004 election.

How did the British undercut an imperial position that had taken 200 years to build? First, by their myopic racial attitudes. Their complacent belief in white supremacy certainly led them to underestimate their Japanese opponents. But the rigid colonial color bar also ignored the racial complexities of the multiethnic societies they governed. This meant the British missed crucial opportunities to cultivate allies, such as Burma's Christians, who might have stood with them when the bombs began to fall.

Not that many British were going to stand, anyway. A fashionable pessimism pervaded the elites of the Western democracies in the inter-war years. Many, not to say most, of Britain's colonial officials no longer believed in what they were doing; one in Burma found everything he did swathed in "injustice and illegality." This sense of futility and fatalism, reflected in George Orwell's Burmese Days, was reinforced by the leftist politics of the era. For years socialist intellectuals and the British press had portrayed the empire's "whiskys-willing planters" and "gin-swilling pukka sahibs" as the epitome of Western corruption and oppression; it was not just radical nationalists in Burma or Malaya or India ...