jazzeum
Four Star General
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2005
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This book was reviewed in last Sunday's New York Times, which I thought might be of interest. Ronald Spector wrote a very good book about the war in the Pacific several years ago and this can probably be seen as a companion piece.
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An unidentified British officer observed in late 1945 that “all the blood spilt in Java since the Japanese occupation will never be known.” But some of the worst was still to come. When the Japanese formally laid down their arms in mid-August 1945, the entire continent of Asia immediately became shrouded in a thick fog of peace, its new geopolitics distinguished more by confusion, mixed signals and lost opportunities than by wise diplomacy. And as new alliances took shape around old enmities, chaos, mayhem and anarchy engulfed the region. A generation of new wars followed.
Good historical writing — and Ronald Spector is an excellent writer — ought first to help us see the past more clearly. In the particular slice of the past that is the subject of “In the Ruins of Empire,” Asia after Japan’s high-flying ambitions crashed and burned, Spector has a great deal to sort out. The questions at the time were many. Who would be liberated? Dutch and French colonials from the Japanese, or Indonesians and Vietnamese from the Dutch and the French? Would Korea find its own role? Would the Soviets control Manchuria? Under whose flag would China unite? Everything was up for grabs.
Friends and foes became hard to distinguish. Before they could be repatriated, some idealistic Japanese soldiers — and not a few who feared indictment for war crimes — deserted the Imperial Army and stayed behind to battle for Indonesian independence. Others fought alongside the Vietminh against the French and the British in Vietnam, while those still wearing the Imperial chrysanthemum stood guard — fully armed and with bayonets fixed — when United States forces landed at Inchon to begin the occupation of Korea. Many of Chiang Kai-shek’s generals, having attended the Japanese military academy, used Japanese troops to fight the Communists. Spector, a professor of history and international relations at George Washington University, reports that the Japanese patrolled rail lines and broke a Communist-led strike in Shanghai and that as late as November 1946, 80,000 or more Japanese troops were operating under Chiang’s command.
Often the victors were simply clueless, trying to govern with limited intelligence as they groped around in the dark. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru once mocked the United States occupation in Japan for “its generally happy ignorance of the amount of requisite knowledge it lacked.” And Japan was the country American officials knew best! Despite the services of a very competent O.S.S. (the forerunner of the C.I.A.), the United States was remarkably ignorant of the region. Armed only with “a few pages on Korea” from a 1905 travel guidebook, for example, and with no knowledge of the language, American occupation forces hired former Japanese occupiers and suspected Korean collaborators to explain life on the peninsula to them. A confused United States proconsul in Seoul declared to a stunned Korean populace that the Japanese would continue to govern the country. It took months to undo the damage.
We all know the cliché about how “history repeats itself,” but successful historians show us how. Iraq casts a long, dark shadow across every page in Spector’s book, starting with Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s declaration in a radio address that “today freedom is on the offensive, democracy is on the march.” Strewn in liberty’s path, however, were a “tar pit of China’s internal wars,” native fighters in Indonesia unintimidated by modern weapons, unresolved policy disputes between the State Department and the Defense Department, “bales of American dollars,” alliances of convenience with corrupt warlords, and local militias of unknown provenance led by “whiz-bang” demagogues. Much of this will sound familiar to modern readers living through the Iraq war, and there’s still more: Washington pursued ambiguous policies that officials on the ground knew were doomed; fewer troops were deployed than commanders requested; tours of duty were extended for war-weary soldiers who were “unprepared temperamentally or by training to become part of a great social and economic reconstruction project”; and support from the American public declined sharply for adventures in Asia.
But Spector’s book is not only about the past and the present. He also enables us to imagine the future. His description of Gen. George C. Marshall’s call in 1946 for huge aid packages to stimulate economic reconstruction of China and his account of how American marines stood aside and allowed Chinese Nationalists and Communists to fight to the bitter end are rich in implications for what may yet become the policy of the United States.
With “In the Ruins of Empire,” an unruly, hopelessly complicated Asia comes alive. Spector etches memorable portraits not only of the major characters but of several minor ones as well, like the particularly imperious French general in Indochina who, Spector says, “stood slightly to the right of Louis XIV,” an officer who “inspired homicidal thoughts” even among his American allies. Spector’s snapshot of Marshall struggling in vain to negotiate a truce between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists, including his dramatic visit to Yenan to meet Mao Zedong, is one of many poignant and gripping vignettes.
There were many possible endings for Spector’s book. He has elected to cast a glance at Iraq while summarizing the disparate strands of his narrative without ever really knitting them together. One regrets that he didn’t choose instead to explore the relevance of his story for contemporary East Asia. For it is a region where the tectonic plates of geopolitics have never stopped shifting, one that continues to feel the impact of decisions made in 1945 and roads not taken.
******
An unidentified British officer observed in late 1945 that “all the blood spilt in Java since the Japanese occupation will never be known.” But some of the worst was still to come. When the Japanese formally laid down their arms in mid-August 1945, the entire continent of Asia immediately became shrouded in a thick fog of peace, its new geopolitics distinguished more by confusion, mixed signals and lost opportunities than by wise diplomacy. And as new alliances took shape around old enmities, chaos, mayhem and anarchy engulfed the region. A generation of new wars followed.
Good historical writing — and Ronald Spector is an excellent writer — ought first to help us see the past more clearly. In the particular slice of the past that is the subject of “In the Ruins of Empire,” Asia after Japan’s high-flying ambitions crashed and burned, Spector has a great deal to sort out. The questions at the time were many. Who would be liberated? Dutch and French colonials from the Japanese, or Indonesians and Vietnamese from the Dutch and the French? Would Korea find its own role? Would the Soviets control Manchuria? Under whose flag would China unite? Everything was up for grabs.
Friends and foes became hard to distinguish. Before they could be repatriated, some idealistic Japanese soldiers — and not a few who feared indictment for war crimes — deserted the Imperial Army and stayed behind to battle for Indonesian independence. Others fought alongside the Vietminh against the French and the British in Vietnam, while those still wearing the Imperial chrysanthemum stood guard — fully armed and with bayonets fixed — when United States forces landed at Inchon to begin the occupation of Korea. Many of Chiang Kai-shek’s generals, having attended the Japanese military academy, used Japanese troops to fight the Communists. Spector, a professor of history and international relations at George Washington University, reports that the Japanese patrolled rail lines and broke a Communist-led strike in Shanghai and that as late as November 1946, 80,000 or more Japanese troops were operating under Chiang’s command.
Often the victors were simply clueless, trying to govern with limited intelligence as they groped around in the dark. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru once mocked the United States occupation in Japan for “its generally happy ignorance of the amount of requisite knowledge it lacked.” And Japan was the country American officials knew best! Despite the services of a very competent O.S.S. (the forerunner of the C.I.A.), the United States was remarkably ignorant of the region. Armed only with “a few pages on Korea” from a 1905 travel guidebook, for example, and with no knowledge of the language, American occupation forces hired former Japanese occupiers and suspected Korean collaborators to explain life on the peninsula to them. A confused United States proconsul in Seoul declared to a stunned Korean populace that the Japanese would continue to govern the country. It took months to undo the damage.
We all know the cliché about how “history repeats itself,” but successful historians show us how. Iraq casts a long, dark shadow across every page in Spector’s book, starting with Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s declaration in a radio address that “today freedom is on the offensive, democracy is on the march.” Strewn in liberty’s path, however, were a “tar pit of China’s internal wars,” native fighters in Indonesia unintimidated by modern weapons, unresolved policy disputes between the State Department and the Defense Department, “bales of American dollars,” alliances of convenience with corrupt warlords, and local militias of unknown provenance led by “whiz-bang” demagogues. Much of this will sound familiar to modern readers living through the Iraq war, and there’s still more: Washington pursued ambiguous policies that officials on the ground knew were doomed; fewer troops were deployed than commanders requested; tours of duty were extended for war-weary soldiers who were “unprepared temperamentally or by training to become part of a great social and economic reconstruction project”; and support from the American public declined sharply for adventures in Asia.
But Spector’s book is not only about the past and the present. He also enables us to imagine the future. His description of Gen. George C. Marshall’s call in 1946 for huge aid packages to stimulate economic reconstruction of China and his account of how American marines stood aside and allowed Chinese Nationalists and Communists to fight to the bitter end are rich in implications for what may yet become the policy of the United States.
With “In the Ruins of Empire,” an unruly, hopelessly complicated Asia comes alive. Spector etches memorable portraits not only of the major characters but of several minor ones as well, like the particularly imperious French general in Indochina who, Spector says, “stood slightly to the right of Louis XIV,” an officer who “inspired homicidal thoughts” even among his American allies. Spector’s snapshot of Marshall struggling in vain to negotiate a truce between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists, including his dramatic visit to Yenan to meet Mao Zedong, is one of many poignant and gripping vignettes.
There were many possible endings for Spector’s book. He has elected to cast a glance at Iraq while summarizing the disparate strands of his narrative without ever really knitting them together. One regrets that he didn’t choose instead to explore the relevance of his story for contemporary East Asia. For it is a region where the tectonic plates of geopolitics have never stopped shifting, one that continues to feel the impact of decisions made in 1945 and roads not taken.