VJ Day: the forgotten war

New Statesman​

10 hours ago

General Arthur Percival (bottom, middle), British defender of Singapore in 1942, recently released from a Japanese prison camp, salutes as the US general Douglas MacArthur (bottom, right; facing camera) prepares to sign the document of Japan's surrender aboard the battleship Missouri. Photo by Dave Davis/Getty
It's interesting to see how countries choose to remember their wars. It's even more revealing to reflect on the wars they have tried to forget.
Earlier this year, Donald Trump delivered a brisk history lesson on social media. 'We did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II,' the president declared on his Truth Social platform. 'I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I. We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance… We are going to start celebrating our victories again!'
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the British government was quietly trying to roll up its 80th anniversary events for VE Day (Victory in Europe Day, 8 May) and for VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day, 15 August) into one week in May, with commemorations built around the early May bank holiday. That way, cynics observed, the productivity-conscious Labour cabinet could avoid conceding Britain's workers another day off.
The relegation of the Asian half of Britain's Second World War to virtually a postscript was perhaps understandable. The struggle against Japan was not Winston Churchill's finest hour. On the contrary, it signalled the end of the empire to which he had devoted his life. More than that: it heralded the end of all the European empires in Asia over the following decade. It also marked the onset of a cold war in Asia that was very different in shape and intensity from bipolar Europe, creating geopolitical tensions that still wrack our world today. The story defies a simple 'we won, they lost' dichotomy.
Britain's Asian debacle was the almost inevitable flipside of its European finest hour. By the 1930s the British empire rested precariously on a mixture of sea power and bluff, and in 1940-41 the bluff was called, first in Europe and then in Asia. In May 1940 Nazi Germany attacked France, Britain's main continental ally, not through Belgium but by sending almost all its armoured divisions through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes Forest and around the French army's southern flank. They then drove straight for the Channel coast, encircling the bulk of the French and British armies. The French high command lost its nerve and, within a month, France had surrendered. Mussolini's Italy seized its opportunity and jumped into the war on Germany's side – tying down Britain in the Mediterranean.
Such is the myth of the irresistible Nazi Blitzkrieg that the sheer audacity of Hitler's Ardennes gamble is now often ignored. Even less appreciated is the strategic magnitude and technical brilliance of the operations mounted by imperial Japan across a vast arc of the Pacific and south-east Asia on 7-8 December 1941. Most notorious is the devastating surprise air raid on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, but this was only one of a series of attacks from Hong Kong to the Philippines, Thailand to Korea, Guam to Malaya – at the same time as Japan was fighting a major war in China. What now seems arrant folly was deemed strategic necessity by the militarists controlling Japan in 1941. In order to continue the struggle for China they needed the strategic raw materials, especially oil and rubber, controlled by the Western colonial powers – the US, Britain and the Dutch.
Japan's campaign in Malaya began the endgame of British power across India and south-east Asia. On 7 December an expeditionary force of some 60,000 men led by General Tomoyuki Yamashita landed at Kota Bharu on the north-east coast of Malaya. The British assumed the region was an impenetrable jungle, but it had some good roads, and the Japanese troops – many of them hardy coalminers – had been issued with bikes, shorts, light shirts and plimsolls. They cycled and fought their way south towards Singapore, averaging 20 kilometres a day for 55 days. Not quite the bravura of Hitler's Panzers, but the same mind-blowing mobility.
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Malaya and Singapore had been starved of troops and aircraft because of Churchill's preoccupation with the Mediterranean. In any case, he did not take the Japanese threat very seriously, dismissing them as 'the wops of the Pacific'. At the end of October 1941 he had sent a token fleet of two battleships and a supporting aircraft carrier to Singapore, hoping this could serve as a 'decisive deterrent'. But the carrier was delayed for essential repairs, and the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were sunk on 10 December by Japanese torpedo bombers – a sensational blow to British prestige.
Worse followed. The 'great fortress' of Singapore had immense heavy guns, but they faced seawards – Churchill was shocked to discover this late in the day – and British defences against an attack from the Malayan side were minimal. In a telegram from London on 10 February 1942, the prime minister demanded heroics: 'The battle must be fought to the bitter end and at all costs… Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops.' But shelling and air raids were relentless, the streets became piled high with corpses, and the military authorities were out of their depth. One joker in the garrison summed up the mood in mock Churchillian verse: 'Never before have so many/Been fucked around by so few/And neither the few nor the many/Have fuck all idea what to do.'
With the Japanese controlling the reservoirs, further resistance seemed suicidal, and General Arthur Percival was given discretion to cease resistance. Yet Yamashita's troops had sustained heavy losses in crossing from Malaya to Singapore, and his artillery men were down to their last hundred rounds. In the words of the historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, 'the Japanese invasion of Singapore island was a gigantic and wholly successful piece of bluff'. The bluff worked superbly: photos and film of Percival and his officers in their baggy shorts being marched off to Japanese prison camps were shown around the world. Among the prisoners of war were troops of the 18th Infantry Division – mostly from East Anglia – who had landed in Singapore only a few days before. More than a third would die in captivity.
Churchill declared in his memoirs that the surrender of Singapore on 15 February 1942 was 'the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history' – adding caustically that 'defeat is one thing; disgrace is another'.
[See also: The warning of VE Day]
The rest of the Asian war was a huge and bloody effort to reverse Japan's dramatic victories of the winter of 1941-42 – an effort that is often overlooked because of the American preoccupation with the Pacific war, running from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the 'Great Asian War' claimed around 24 million lives in countries occupied by Japan, plus three million Japanese and three-and-a-half million in India through war-related famine.
Japan's victories shredded polities and societies. The colonial powers' reconquests after 1945 created new turbulence, as did the wars of national liberation that eventually overthrew colonial rule. This three-stage pattern was common across the region, but the timings varied enormously. Speediest was the transition in the vast archipelago of the Dutch East Indies (encompassing much of modern Indonesia), which the Japanese occupied from March 1942 until the end of the war. The Dutch tried to re-establish domination after 1945 but were confronted by an organised national movement under President Sukarno, who won independence for Indonesia in 1949.
Similar events in French Indochina were longer, more tortuous and appallingly bloody – stretching out over 30 years. After Japan's wartime occupation of the colony, the French returned in 1945 and were confronted with the communist leader Ho Chi Minh's declaration of independence. After a decade, the French abandoned the struggle and in 1955 Vietnam was partitioned, leaving the communist party in control of the north. That was unacceptable to Cold War America, which increasingly propped up South Vietnam with economic and military aid, and then later, by vast bombing campaigns and US combat troops. But the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal destroyed Richard Nixon's presidency, and during 1975 US forces were driven ignominiously from all of Indochina.
The lurid backdrop of Indonesia and Indochina allows us to see the British withdrawal from south Asia more clearly. Although Britain fought a protracted counterinsurgency before conceding independence to Malaya in 1957 and then similarly to the enlarged Malaysia, it generally managed to avoid the travails of the Dutch and the French. Crucially, the Indian Raj was never invaded and occupied by Japan. Equally significant, Labour's victory in the July 1945 general election replaced the diehard Churchill with Clement Attlee. Whereas Churchill's experience of India ended in 1899, Attlee paid extended visits there in 1928 and 1929 with a parliamentary delegation. He had no doubt that India – a chequerboard of princely states and areas under direct British rule – should eventually follow Australia and New Zealand down the path to self-government and then full independence. He saw this as part of a shift in global power that had been accelerated by the Asian war, telling the cabinet in 1942 that 'the East is now asserting itself against the long dominance of the West'.
But trying to surf the tides of history was a perilous business in a polity as vast and volatile as India. Attlee and Labour placed too much faith in the Hindu-led Congress Party, which dominated the interim government formed by Britain in September 1946. Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League demanded a greater role, and the escalating communal violence cost thousands of lives. Attlee was also grimly aware of the financial costs of victory, including debts priced at £4.7bn, the sale of £1.1bn worth of overseas assets, and exports down to a third of their 1938 level – no basis for an assertive foreign policy. Over cabinet opposition, he announced a firm date of 30 June 1948 for the end of British rule in India and was then obliged to abandon hopes of a unified country – fabricating instead the states of West and East Pakistan, a thousand miles (1,600km) apart. (The latter broke away in 1971 to form Bangladesh.)
The human cost of partition was terrible – scholars estimate one million died and 15 million were displaced. But the Conservatives privately agreed that there was no alternative and even Churchill, despite fulminating about 'socialist scuttle', did not turn India into a political crusade, as he had done in the 1930s. The endgame was briefer and less bloody than Indochina, and the new rulers of India decided to keep their country in the Commonwealth – preserving the fiction of a 'transfer of power'.
[See also: How China is reclaiming history]
The long denouement of the Great Asian War is only part of the story of Japan's defeat. The central drama of capitulation is beyond the scope of this essay, except to note the continuing debate about the relative importance of the two American atomic bombs, dropped on 6 and 9 August 1945, compared with the shock of the Soviet declaration of war on Japan on the 9th. The answer might seem obvious now, but in Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan (2025), the historian Richard Overy notes that Japan had never previously been conquered by a foreign power and that the threat of invasion by a communist state seemed particularly horrendous to the Japanese ruling class – opening up fears of a domestic revolution as in Russia or Germany in 1917-18.
Regardless of which superpower claimed credit for Japan's defeat, the actual occupation of the country (1945-52) was dominated by the US – unlike the endgame in Germany. Stalin's attempt to grab Hokkaido, one of the four main islands, was blocked by President Harry Truman. American administrators in league with Japanese civil servants pushed through demilitarisation, democratisation, land reform, labour laws and also women's rights beyond anything sanctioned in the US. Galvanised by these radical but peaceful reforms, and sheltering under America's defence umbrella, Japan's economy grew exponentially until the country boasted the highest per capita GDP in the world by the 1980s – not bad as the price of defeat.
But the Japanese bubble burst in 1990, and it was followed by two decades of stagnation. Talk of 'Japan as number one' evaporated, and the focus of international attention shifted to China after its Communist Party's brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement in 1989. This brings us back to the roots of Japan's militarist expansion in the 1930s and 1940s. Its conquest of Chinese Manchuria in 1931-32 escalated into full-scale war with China from 1937 to 1945, costing perhaps 15-20 million lives. The War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, as it is known in China, was entangled with the longer on-off civil war between nationalists and communists for control of China itself, which resumed in 1946 and led to the eventual triumph of Mao Zedong in 1949 and the nationalists' retreat to the island of Taiwan.
For Xi Jinping, appointed leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 2012 and now president for life, these historical issues are of central importance in his sustained challenge to the hegemonial position of the US. He has insisted since 2015 on the need to 'reconsider the great path of the Chinese people's War of Resistance' by taking account of the nationalists' war effort and thereby underlining 'the great contribution that the war [of resistance] made to the victory in the world anti-fascist war', which he also referred to as 'the Second World War'. (This was an attempt to move the Sino-Japanese conflict from the margins to the centre of historiographical discourse.)
Speaking in this voice, Xi implied common ground with the nationalists. But that could not override the intolerable fact that their successors still controlled the island of Taiwan – centre of the world's semiconductor production, flanking one of the major global trading arteries, the Taiwan Straits, and a standing affront to the PRC's claim to rule a unified and sovereign state. The possibility that Xi might resolve this dispute by force makes Taiwan one of the world's most sensitive hot spots.
Another of Japan's former wartime conquests falls into the same category. Korea has been divided since the war in 1950-53. North Korea is a totalitarian state with nuclear weapons; South Korea is dependent on US military support. Both claim to be the rightful ruler of the whole Korean peninsula, and they are separated only by the armistice line from 1953.
Taiwan and Korea are sobering reminders that the legacies of the devastating wars unleashed by imperial Japan are still shaping the 21st-century world. VJ Day should not be treated as a mere postscript to VE Day. As for the Trumpian issue of which country won the Second World War, it should be clear by now that a world war is a lot more complex than winning the World Series.
David Reynolds' most recent book is 'Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him'. He co-hosts the 'Creating History' podcasts.
[See also: North Korea's guide to going nuclear]
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