REVIEW: Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (October 2007)

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper. _Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945_. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. xxxiii + 555 pp.  illustrations, maps, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-6740-1748-X; $18.95 (paper), ISBN 0-6740-2219-X.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Steven Patterson, Department of History, Lambuth University

Still Forgotten

_Forgotten Armies:  The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945_ by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper has quickly established itself on the must-have list of British imperial history.  The work is a magisterial and panoramic account of the war in the Far East, focusing on the region stretching from Calcutta to Singapore.  This crescent of the British Empire produced an abundance of rubber, tin, rice, gold, and oil, which in turn supported a very narrow elite who sought (ultimately in vain) to retain their prestige, even while the Japanese overran Malaya, "impregnable" Singapore, and Burma.  For the British, the loss of "face" in the East was perhaps as important as the military losses, and the apparent ease of these Japanese conquests would reverberate long into the postwar world, since defeat and dishonor could never be compatible with empire.  The death rattle of the British Empire could be heard by almost everyone but the victim, who blissfully tried to cling to its worldly possessions and to its reputation for avenging every defeat suffered at the hands of Asians.  Accordingly, one of the most important themes of _Forgotten Armies_ centers on the ascension of the Japanese as they were transformed, in the British imagination, from being misfits in modern society to relentless and frightening exemplars of military technology.

Bayly and Harper ably untangle the strategic issues in the Far Eastern theater, which rarely seem straightforward, since the "good war" of World War II historical imagination has never seemed fully applicable to the campaigns in the region, neither at the time of the fighting nor during the recent deification of the "greatest generation."  The British armies in India and Burma dubbed themselves "forgotten" early in the war, and they are to a large extent still forgotten today. According to Bayly and Harper, British officers quickly realized that the Far Eastern Theater was not the place to make one's reputation, and even General William Slim, one of the ablest commanders of the war, was dismissed by  Winston Churchill for being a "sepoy general," since Slim had been a Gurkha officer.  Moreover, some of the historical neglect of this theater can perhaps be attributed to the nature of the two governments fighting for supremacy in the East.  In a war between Japan and England, portraying this theater as a Grand Crusade proved to be difficult, especially when Churchill had decreed that the Atlantic Charter and self-determination for all peoples did not--curiously--apply to Indians, nor to the Burmese or Malayans ostensibly to be liberated by the British and returned to the imperial fold.  In the Far East, the war against fascism and totalitarianism was bound to reveal the contradictions of one empire fighting against another, as two authoritarian governments squared off, with disastrous consequences for those caught in the middle ...