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By Root 4364 0

deserted rubber estates of the interior, and there amid a wrack of military machinery and surrounded by the spoils of war – furniture, bedding, refrigerators, carpets – they sat waiting for the end. They became ‘Japanese surrendered personnel’, a term of art introduced by the British in order to avoid implementing the Geneva Conventions’ protocols towards prisoners of war. Although a few remained arrogant and uncooperative, the majority were compliant and patient. But it was still unclear what was happening to the more remote garrisons. Some of Itagaki’s officers tried to flee to Sumatra, where there was rumoured to be last-ditch defiance. One Japanese officer of the Imperial Guard in northern Sumatra, who had fought down the length of the Malay peninsula and into Singapore in late 1941, wrote that after the announcement the mood was so mutinous that it was dangerous for officers to walk in the barracks.18 As the Allies brought ahead plans to reoccupy the region, it was still unclear whether or not large numbers of Japanese would fight to the death.

These events can no longer be viewed as a minor theatre of a global war centred upon Europe. This was the Great Asian War: a connected arc of conflict that claimed around 24 million lives in lands occupied by Japan; the lives of 3 million Japanese, and 3.5 million more in India through war-related famine. The Great Asian War was longer and ultimately bloodier than Europe’s civil war. The number of European, American and Australasian casualties – substantial, tragic as they were – was perhaps 1 per cent of the total. The first skirmishes began in 1931, erupting into open war in China in 1937, and in 1945 it was not yet at an end. Its impact was all the more dreadful for the fact that many of these societies had not known war on any large scale, still less the full ferocity of modern mechanized conflict. The Great Asian War was the most general conflict in Southeast Asia since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, and the most intense since the great struggles for primacy on the mainland of Asia in the seventeenth century. And it had its serial holocausts, in the extermination of civilians, the coercion of slave labour, and mass rape.

For Asians, the horror of the bomb was accentuated by the fear that their war had merely paused. The Europeans, Americans and Japanese had ceased fighting, but Asians would be embattled with each other and, from time to time, with Europeans and Americans for the next generation or more. None of the fundamental causes of the Great Asian War had been eradicated. Imperialism, grinding poverty and ideological, ethnic and religious conflict continued to stalk the land. In many ways, they had been strengthened by the destruction and butchery of combat. It was plain to see that the war was continuing under another guise. Those huge forgotten armies of malnourished soldiers, prisoners of war, guerrilla bands, coolie labourers, sex slaves and carpetbaggers were still on the march. They were to march on for decades more as the British Empire dissolved and new nations were born amid racial and religious strife. A new ‘great game’ of diplomacy and subversion broke out between communism and capitalism, and provoked some of the most tragic, and forgotten, wars of the twentieth century.

The pivot of this long struggle was the crescent of land that stretched from Bengal, though Burma, the southern borderlands of Thailand, down the Malay peninsula to Singapore island. It was the hinterland of the Straits of Malacca, one of the world’s greatest arteries of oceanic trade that separates the Indian Ocean from the South China Sea. In 1941, this vast crescent was under British control: the apex of a wider strategic arc that encompassed Suez and Cape Town in the west and Sydney and Auckland to the south. Even the independent kingdom of Thailand had for a hundred years been under the sway of the British diplomats and the expatriate business community in Bangkok. In the late nineteenth century, imperial visionaries had dreamed of blasting a new Suez Canal through