New York Times
April 16 2005

‘Forgotten Armies’: Their Lousiest Hour
By BENJAMIN SCHWARZ

FORGOTTEN ARMIES
The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945.
By Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper.
Illustrated. 555 pp. The Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press.
$29.95.

EVERAL hours before the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941,
Japanese troops stormed the beaches of southeastern Thailand and
northern Malaya. Their goal was Singapore, some 400 miles south,
among the world’s richest and most cosmopolitan cities, and, along
with Gibraltar, the most heavily defended piece of land in the
British Empire. Just over two months later that supposedly
impregnable fortress was in Japanese hands. A garrison of more than
85,000 troops had surrendered to a Japanese assault force numbering
about 30,000. Singapore’s capture, Winston Churchill said, was ”the
worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.” By
April the Japanese were bombing Calcutta, and India was preparing to
be invaded. Britain’s ”great crescent,” which had stretched from
India’s border with Burma down the Malay peninsula, was lost.

In ”Forgotten Armies” Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, two
Cambridge historians, explore these events and their intricate and
often terrible repercussions from the perspectives of both the
British and the Asian peoples of the region. A work at once scholarly
and panoramic, it is as precise in dissecting, say, the logistical
problems the Japanese Army confronted during the 1944 campaign in
northern Burma (”the worst defeat in Japan’s military history”) as
it is arresting in examining such sweeping events as the 1942 trek of
some 600,000 Indian, Burmese and Anglo-Indian refugees from Burma
through the high passes of Assam into India, fleeing the advancing
Japanese.

Hundreds of monographs have examined aspects of this story, but Bayly
and Harper’s is the only history that matches the scope and nuance of
novels like J. G. Farrell’s ”Singapore Grip,” Paul Scott’s ”Raj
Quartet,” Anthony Burgess’s ”Enemy in the Blanket,” Orwell’s
”Burmese Days” and Amitov Ghosh’s ”Glass Palace.” Their 70-page
prologue is a triumph of scene setting. The great crescent between
Calcutta and Singapore was, Bayly and Harper show, a multinational
and multiethnic stew. Indians, Chinese, Malays and Burmese toiled in
the factories and oil fields of Burma and the rubber plantations and
tin mines of Malaya; Chinese merchant princes ruled the trading
houses of Penang and Malacca; Japanese owned shops in virtually every
small town on the Malay peninsula, controlled Malaya’s iron mines and
dominated Singapore’s fishing fleet.

At the apex of this world, of course, the British ruled. ”Forgotten
Armies” artfully evokes their prewar idyll: the string of posh
hotels; the mountaintop golf courses carved out of the jungle; the
torpor of the hill stations (exacerbated by chronic gin-swilling),
where expats speaking an ”outmoded English slang” saw to it that
”the ova of trout were carted up on ice” to stock the streams; and,
most memorably, what Lady Diana Cooper characterized as the
”Sino-Monte-Carlo” atmosphere of Singapore — a strikingly clean
and modern city of snobbish clubs, air-conditioned cinemas and a glut
of playing fields, populated by Arabs, Armenians, Jews, Parsis and
White Russians, as well as Indians, Malays, Burmese, Chinese,
Japanese and their British overlords.

The ignominious British and Australian rout down the length of the
Malay peninsula (the retreating soldiers sardonically adopted the
theme from the Hope and Crosby movie ”The Road to Singapore” as
their marching song) and Singapore’s subsequent fall have already
been described, memorably, in Farrell’s novel and in a host of
military histories, most notably Alan Warren’s ”Singapore 1942,”
but Bayly and Harper’s account is both vivid and authoritative. One
of their great contributions lies in their stinging appraisal of the
debacle — all but inevitable given Britain’s competing strategic
priorities, but made worse in every conceivable way by the
fecklessness, dithering, incompetence, jealousies and cowardice of
commanders on the spot. A second is their chronicle of the nearly
complete moral collapse of British colonial society and civil
administration throughout the great crescent. That collapse, they
convincingly show, began just eight days after the Japanese invasion,
with the shameful European evacuation of Penang, in which Britons
abandoned the Asians they ruled to an utterly vicious conqueror.
British imperialism certainly had its high-minded and responsible
aspects, but at the time and place ”Forgotten Armies” recounts it
revealed itself to be selfish, unlovely and, in the parlance of the
time, unmanly.

This British failure of nerve enormously strengthened the region’s
national independence movements during and after the war. The
Japanese, of course, tried to exploit anti-imperialist sentiment in
the name of pan-Asian solidarity, but Bayly and Harper, though
plainly unsympathetic to Britain’s imperialism, make clear that
Japan’s was incomparably worse. The Japanese systematically executed
70,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore and southern Malaya. They sexually
enslaved well over 50,000 of the great crescent’s women, and raped
tens of thousands more; 14,000 Allied prisoners of war died as slave
laborers on the Thailand-Burma railway (an ordeal made famous in
”The Bridge on the River Kwai”), along with possibly 20 times as
many Indians, Burmese, Chinese and Malays, who were starved and
worked to death. (Bayly and Harper should be praised for making plain
a grim fact of war that nearly always goes unsaid: ”The scale of
animal fatality was colossal.”) The British of course temporarily
took back their Southeast Asian empire, but only with the help of
their erstwhile subjects (Asians and Africans made up 70 percent of
the soldiers in William Slim’s victorious 14th Army). In the terrible
choices war gave the inhabitants of the great crescent, the craven
hypocrisy of the British was infinitely preferable to the medieval
sadism of the Japanese.

Benjamin Schwarz is the literary editor and national editor of The
Atlantic Monthly.