War, Conflict and Security in Japan and Asia Pacific, 1941-1952 PDF Download

Author: Louis Allen
Publisher: Global Oriental
ISBN: 9004212760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
It was Louis Allen’s work on Japan which dominated his prodigious output as a scholar, researcher and writer and which received greatest attention internationally. This collection of his writings focuses entirely on his principal fields of research, viz, Japan and the Pacific War, the post-war conflicts in Burma, Malaya and Indochina, and the immediate post-war years in the context of Japan, security and reconciliation. Importantly, in addition to the 24 essays brought together here from both known and unknown sources, we are pleased to publish for the first time Louis Allen’s own undated autobiographical paper entitled ‘Innocents Abroad: Investigating War Crimes in South-East Asia’, providing a unique, first-hand account of his war-time life and activities. This volume also includes a complete bibliography of Louis Allen’s writings covering all disciplines.

Author: Dr. Jeffrey Record
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786252961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.

Author: Gregg Huff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108916082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
From December 1941, Japan, as part of its plan to build an East Asian empire and secure oil supplies essential for war in the Pacific, swiftly took control of Southeast Asia. Japanese occupation had a devastating economic impact on the region. Japan imposed country and later regional autarky on Southeast Asia, dictated that the region finance its own occupation, and sent almost no consumer goods. GDP fell by half everywhere in Southeast Asia except Thailand. Famine and forced labour accounted for most of the 4.4 million Southeast Asian civilian deaths under Japanese occupation. In this ground-breaking new study, Gregg Huff provides the first comprehensive account of the economies and societies of Southeast Asia during the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation. Drawing on materials from 25 archives over three continents, his economic, social and historical analysis presents a new understanding of Southeast Asian history and development before, during and after the Pacific War.

Author: Philip Woods
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350271659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book explores how the media was used by the armed forces during the India-Burma campaigns of WWII to project the most positive image to domestic and international audiences of a war that often seemed neglected or misunderstood. Discussing how soldiers were, for the first time, able to access newspapers and radio broadcasts relating stories of the campaigns they were actively fighting in, Managing the Media in the India-Burma War reveals not only the impact that the media had in maintaining troop morale, but how the military recognised that the media could be a valuable arm of warfare. Revealing how troops responded to reports of their operations, Philip Woods demonstrates the role of the media in creating the 'Forgotten Army' syndrome, which came about in the last two years of the Burma campaign. Focusing on the British Media, but with examples from the United States and India, including Indian war correspondents, it discusses India's role in the Second World War in relation to social, economic and political developments at the time. Honing in on India and Burma at a turning point in their road to independence, this book offers a fresh angle on a well-known military conflict, unpicks the various constraints and influences on the media in wartime, and links the campaign to India's crucial role in WWII.

Author: Saki Dockrill
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349231290
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
'The most significant issue that Dockrill addresses is that of how Japan views the war in retrospect, a question which not only tells us a lot about how events were seen in Japan in 1941 but is also, a matter still of importance in contemporary East Asian politics.' Antony Best, London School of Economics This multi-authored work, edited by Saki Dockrill, is an original, unique, and controversial interpretation of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific. Dr Dockrill, the author of Britain's Policy for West German Rearmament, has skilfully converted the proceedings of an international conference held in London into a stimulating and readable account of the Pacific War. This is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the subject.

Author: Kerstin von Lingen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319531417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This innovative volume examines the nexus between war crimes trials and the pursuit of collaborators in post-war Asia. Global standards of behaviour in time of war underpinned the prosecution of Japanese military personnel in Allied courts in Asia and the Pacific. Japan’s contradictory roles in the Second World War as brutal oppressor of conquered regions in Asia and as liberator of Asia from both Western colonialism and stultifying tradition set the stage for a tangled legal and political debate: just where did colonized and oppressed peoples owe their loyalties in time of war? And where did the balance of responsibility lie between individuals and nations? But global standards jostled uneasily with the pluralism of the Western colonial order in Asia, where legal rights depended on race and nationality. In the end, these limits led to profound dissatisfaction with the trials process, despite its vast scale and ambitious intentions, which has implications until today.

Author: Edwin Palmer Hoyt
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815411189
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
Tracing the history of Japanese aggression from 1853 onward, Hoyt masterfully addresses some of the biggest questions left from the Pacific front of World War II.

Author: Sangaralingam Ramesh
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031670043
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Author: Raymond A. Callahan
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700624279
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In the spring of 1944, on the eastern front of India near the Burmese border, the seemingly unstoppable Imperial Japanese Army suffered the worst defeat in its history at the hands of Lieutenant General William Slim's British XIV Army, most of whose units were drawn from the little-esteemed Indian Army. Triumph at Imphal-Kohima tells the largely unknown story of how an army that Winston Churchill had once dismissed as “a welter of lassitude and inefficiency” came to achieve such an unlikely, unprecedented, and critical victory for the Allied forces in World War II. Long the British Empire's strategic reserve, the Indian Army had been comprehensively defeated in Malaya and Burma in 1941–1943. Military historian Raymond Callahan chronicles the remarkable exercise in institutional transformation that remade the British Indian forces to reverse those losses. With the invaluable help of the American DC-3 on the Burma front, Slim overhauled the British XIV Army with the Imperial Japanese Army's strategic weaknesses in mind; namely, an utter disregard for logistics and an unrelenting addiction to the attack. Callahan shows how, on an enormous battlefield—over five hundred miles from north to south—the XIV Army surmounted the challenges of terrain, disease, wretched communication, and climate to draw the Imperial forces under Lieutenant General Mutaguchi Renya ever deeper into ever stronger British defensive arrays until the Japanese Army's vaunted offensive aggression finally exhausted itself. Following this epic battle from build-up to aftermath, this book brings overdue detailed attention to Lieutenant General William Slim's handling of perhaps the most complex battle any Allied commander fought during World War II—and to the long-belittled British Indian Army that became the magnificent fighting force that triumphed at Imphal-Kohima and went on to reconquer Burma.

Author: Jeffrey Record
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781461107880
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
The Japanese decision to initiate war against the United States in 1941 continues to perplex. Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? How did they expect to defeat the United States? The presumption of irrationality is natural, given Japan's acute imperial overstretch in 1941 and America's overwhelming industrial might and latent military power. The Japanese decision for war, however, must be seen in the light of the available alternatives in the fall of 1941, which were either national economic suffocation or surrender of Tokyo's empire on the Asian mainland. Though Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, the road to Pearl Harbor was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations, most of them mired in mutual cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Japan's aggression in China, military alliance with Hitler, and proclamation of a "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" that included resource-rich Southeast Asia were major milestones along the road to war, but the proximate cause was Japan's occupation of southern French Indochina in July 1941, which placed Japanese forces in a position to grab Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Japan's threatened conquest of Southeast Asia, which in turn would threaten Great Britain's ability to resist Nazi aggression in Europe, prompted the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to sanction Japan by imposing an embargo on U.S. oil exports upon which the Japanese economy was critically dependent. Yet the embargo, far from deterring further Japanese aggression, prompted a Tokyo decision to invade Southeast Asia. By mid-1941 Japanese leaders believed that war with the United States was inevitable and that it was imperative to seize the Dutch East Indies, which offered a substitute for dependency on American oil. The attack on Pearl Harbor was essentially a flanking raid in support of the main event, which was the conquest of Malaya, Singapore, the Indies, and the Philippines, Japan's decision for war rested on several assumptions, some realistic, others not. The first was that time was working against Japan-i.e., the longer they took to initiate war with the United States, the dimmer its prospects for success. The Japanese also assumed they had little chance of winning a protracted war with the United States but hoped they could force the Americans into a murderous, island-by-island slog across the Central and Southwestern Pacific that would eventually exhaust American will to fight on to total victory. The Japanese believed they were racially and spiritually superior to the Americans, whom they regarded as an effete, creature-comforted people divided by political factionalism and racial and class strife. U.S. attempts to deter Japanese expansion into the Southwestern Pacific via the imposition of harsh economic sanctions, redeployment of the U.S. Fleet from southern California to Pearl Harbor, and the dispatch of B-17 long-range bombers to the Philippines all failed because the United States insisted that Japan evacuate both Indochina and China as the price for a restoration of U.S. trade. The United States demanded, in effect, that Japan abandon its empire, and by extension its aspiration to become a great power, and submit to the economic dominion of the United States-something no self-respecting Japanese leader could accept.