Allies of a kind

Although it is over thirty years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, numerous important questions regarding the Far Eastern war of 1941 to 1945 have not been fully explored until now. To what extent, for example, was it a race war? In what ways did the racial factor figure in relations among the states and people who were fighting against Japan? It is true that Britain's Far Eastern Empire had been ripe for the picking when Japan struck in 1941? How significant was the commercial factor within the war-time policies of the United States and Britain in Asia, and how great was the sense of commercial rivalry between them? Were the numerous American officials and officers right who regarded their country's political and strategic policies in the Far East as being b serious conflict with those of Britain? Is it true that the Americans fought simply to obtain victory, while the British, more selfish and looking further ahead, fought a 'political' war? How did their relations with each other in the Far East, complicated as they were by the involvement of the Australians, Dutch and French, affect the Anglo-American partnership as a whole?In this remarkable new study Christopher Thorne has provided the most thorough and searching enquiry yet into the West's conflict with Japan. He explores the involvement of not only the United States and Britain but of Australia, New Zealand, France and the Netherlands; not only of foreign policies in the more restricted, 'political' sense of the term, but strategic and military affairs as well. Developments are followed in India, Australasia and Southeast Asia, as well as in China, Japan and the Pacific. At the same time the author sets Far Eastern issues and events within the context of the West's involvement in Asia, from the arrival of Vasco da Gama to the American defeat in Vietnam, and of the entire war-time relationship between the United States and Britain. In order to do this he has made use of a mass of unpublished official material in the countries concerned - much of it revealed here for the first time. In addition, he has investigated over sixty collections of private papers, and has interviewed many of the leading figures who were involved in wartime developments.The result is a book which offers a great deal of startling evidence and many provocative conclusions. We learn, for example, of President Roosevelt's extraordinary ideas for developing a programme of racial inter-breeding in the Far East, and of some of the secret intelligence activities that were being carried out - which, on the part of Britain, included breaking one of the main American diplomatic codes. Or again, there is the remarkable extent to which United States officials misunderstood British policies in the Far East, and the suspicion and hostility that resulted. At the same time, Winston Churchill, so great a leader in many ways, is shown to have been the major obstacle to the development of new and constructive policies for the future of the country's territories East of Suez. Churchill's racialism and fierce reactionary views, it is argued, left him completely out of touch with the nationalist world that was emerging with new vigour in Asia - an Asia where, Christopher Thorne suggests, Japan in one important sense did not lose the war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki notwithstanding.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.