With good reason did the soldiers of General William Slim's Fourteenth Army call themselves the “forgotten army” of the war against Japan. More broadly, the war against Japan has been paid much less attention than its counterpart in Europe, and celebrations of its conclusion have been decidedly more low-key. The increasing use of the term “V-P Day” rather than “V-J Day” has tended to marginalize those areas where the Japanese impact was greatest. In the popular mind, the war years have tended to be dominated by the events surrounding the fall of Singapore and even more so by images of prisoners of war, whose horrific experiences at the hands of their Japanese captors have spawned a minor publishing industry. In considering the long-term impact, the effects of the war against Japan were arguably greater than those of the war in Europe. Although it does deal with postwar developments, this book looks in detail at the events that led to the fundamental changes that occurred in Asia in the twentieth century.

The book's focus is on the collapse of British power in Asia, from Burma through the great arc to Malaya and Singapore, with the jewel of the imperial crown, India, lurking on the sidelines. In telling this story in great detail, Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper's emphasis is not simply on the highest levels of government and the military but across the whole spectrum of the various societies caught up in the struggle against Japan and, in some cases, the struggle against British imperial rule. Slim's “forgotten army” takes its rightful place in the story, but even more so do the various armies and resistance groups across the region: the Burma Independence Army, the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army, the British Force 136, and the Indian National Army.

The picture of British rule both before and during the war is one of complacency, corruption, and incompetence. The authors are scathing—and rightly so—of the prejudiced, racist, and exploitative nature of British imperialism. In one of many telling phrases they write of the opium trade that “the British crescent in Asia was supported by narco-colonialism on a colossal scale” (33). Those expatriates who recalled their life in prewar Malaya did so through a haze of “frangipani-fringed nostalgia” (59). Blissfully unaware of the fragility of their position, they failed to notice the increasing level of Japanese interest and commercial activity in Malaya and Singapore, and until the fall of Singapore they blindly trusted in the fortress mentality on the one hand and the stereotype of the Japanese soldier as a buck- toothed, myopic Oriental on the other. The fall of Singapore was a stunning blow to British pride and sense of superiority, but it hardly dented their born-to-rule belief in empire. However dramatic the last days of the British forces in Singapore, the authors suggest that the moral collapse of the British in southeast Asia came with the “ignominious”’ flight from Penang (120). Churchill's emissary, Duff Cooper (whose wife, the vacuous socialite Lady Diana Cooper, had arrived in the region with more than 100 pieces of luggage), announced that “the majority of the population had been evacuated” (121). If ever there was a demonstration of what the authors call the “politics of racial segregation within colonial society … taken to their brutish extreme” (120), this was it. Lord Mountbatten, who as Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command (SEAC), breathed life into a moribund and dispirited military organization, was not immune, arranging for a barber from his fashionable London salon to be called up and sent to SEAC headquarters rather than use a local (i.e., native) to do the job. The authors refer to the “pervasive mean spiritedness” (88) of prewar colonial society in Rangoon, but their description could well apply to the whole of the imperial crescent in Southeast Asia.

The retreat—or rather, headlong flight—from Burma brought out the best and worst of the imperial mentality. The authors detail many acts of kindness and personal sacrifice, but these are offset by their descriptions of the complacency and incompetence of the authorities. Nowhere was this more vividly demonstrated by their mishandling of the Bengal famine of 1943. The destruction of the Burmese rice bowl, caused as much by the scorched-earth policy of the retreating British in 1942 as by natural disasters, brought famine to Bengal on a scale not witnessed for generations. Pleas to divert some of India's own food production were met with a blunt refusal from London, inspired by what the authors call Churchill's hostility to India and Indians, whom he regarded as second only to the Germans in being the worst people on earth: “The Germans he was prepared to bomb into the ground. The Indians would starve to death as a result of their own folly and viciousness” (286). The callous attitude of most of the authorities, and their tardy and bungled response to the mounting tragedy, exposed the myth of British efficiency in a sea of Oriental incompetence (281).

Meanwhile, the various armed groups throughout Southeast Asia were engaging the Japanese or merely existing until the day that circumstances would enable them to push their own political agendas. It was one of the great ironies that the Japanese program of pan-Asianism did not so much advance the imperial ambitions of Japan as to create the conditions for anticolonial forces to grow to the point that they posed a real threat to their colonial overlords, of whatever color and race.

A short review cannot do justice to this magnificent book. Its essentially narrative approach, peppered with colorful and striking turns of phrase, rests on a mastery of a huge range of archival and published sources. In particular it uses many personal accounts that would be largely unfamiliar to most readers. The result is a richly textured account that is gripping and saddening This book derives from a course offered for several years at Cambridge University; I can only envy those students lucky enough to have taken it.