Er í dálitlum vandræðum með að meta þessa bók.
Annars vegar er hún ágætlega rannsökuð og fjallar vel um ólguna í kjölfar síðari heimsstyrjaldarinnar í rústum japanska heimsveldisins í Asíu.
Hins vegar segir Spector einungis hluta sögunnar og greinir ekki frá því hvers vegna hann fjallar eingungis um sum ríki en sleppir öðrum né finnst mér hann taka saman niðurstöður sínar með fullnægjandi hætti.
Spector greinir frá aðstæðum og ólgu í Kína, Kóreu, Indókína, Malyasíu og Indónesíu við uppgjöf Japana. Hvernig Bandamenn brugðust við uppgjöfinni með því að senda hersveitir til þessara svæða fyrst og fremst til að bjarga stríðsföngum og afvopna Japani.
Í ljós kemur síðan að þeir verða oft að fá japönsku hersveitirnar til að berja niður þjóðernissveitir heimamanna með valdi allt til 1947 en japönsku hermennirnir gengu líka stundum í lið með þessum sveitum. Þá lentu gömlu nýlenduþjóðirnar í miklum vandræðum með að ná aftur tökum á nýlendum sínum á svæðinu.
Helstu niðurstöður höfundar eru þær að bandamenn fóru algerlega þekkingarlausir til landanna, t.d. var enginn í herliðinu sem fyrst fór til Kóreu sem kunni tungumálið og þeir höfðu einungis nokkrar blaðsíður úr ferðabók frá 1905 til að styðjast við sér til upplýsingar. Spector bendir á hve aðstæður líkjast hernámi Íraks síðar meir.
Að lokum var ég sáróánægður með hvers vegna höfundur tiltók ekki hvers vegna hann fjallaði ekki um aðstæður í Filippseyjum, Japan, Suður-Kyrrahafi og Tævan í kjölfar stríðsins. Umfang slíkrar bókar hefði vissulega verið gríðarlegt en samanburður eða skýringar ættu vel heima. ( )

Ronald Spector is author of Eagle Against the Sun, an acclaimed one-volume history of World War II in the Pacific. With In the Ruins of Empire, he takes on the aftermath – the attempts by the Allies to restore local or colonial governments to Korea, China, Indochina, Malaya, and Indonesia from the end of the war to 1950 or so.


When I was growing up in the 1950s the conventional political wisdom was that the US had “lost” China to the Communists (but fortunately we have saved South Vietnam and South Korea). Ma Zedong, Ho Chih-Min and Kim Il-sung were Soviet puppets and brutal dictators, and only Reds and Pinkos believed otherwise. By the time I was of draft age in the 70s, the same three were patriotic nationalists who only turned to Communism after their advances to the United States were rebuffed, and only reactionaries and John Birchers believed otherwise. And nobody cared about Malaya or Indonesia. Spector has a more nuanced take on the whole thing.

The Allied priorities in all the occupied areas was (1) aid and repatriate POWs (plus a significant number of interned Dutch civilians in Indonesia); (2) repatriate Japanese military and civilians to Japan and (3) set up civilian governments. (These are the Western Allied priorities, of course; the Soviets and Chinese had other ideas). Item number one went fairly well; American teams parachuted or air-landed in Korea and Manchuria and although there were some tense incidents involving Japanese troops (and in Manchuria, Soviet troops) the POWs were sent home without too much hassle (an American officer, John Birch, looking for POW camps in Manchuria was killed by Chinese Communists). The Vichy government of Indochina reached an agreement with the Japanese that lasted until almost the end of the war; French civilians were never interned and the French government continued to operate under Japanese supervision. There wasn’t any Allied POW presence to speak of. Malaya also went fairly smoothly as far as POWs were concerned, although this time it was Commonwealth and Indian troops that moved in. Indonesia, though, was problematic. The Allies agreed that Australian (Borneo) and British and Indian troops (everywhere else) would take care of initial occupation, to be replaced by Dutch as soon as the Netherlands recovered from its own occupation; the Indonesians weren’t having any of it. (Spector notes that the Dutch had been fighting a desultory guerilla war in parts of Indonesia even before the Japanese occupation). Landings were resisted and substantial numbers of Dutch civilians survived four years of internment by the Japanese only to be killed by Indonesians before they could be rescued.


Repatriation of Japanese didn’t go very smoothly anywhere. The Allies (except the Soviets and Chinese, again) found that they need Japanese troops to maintain order; thus in many cases they were allowed to retain their weapons and conduct police work until the Allies could get enough of their own troops in. This went reasonably well in most of the occupied areas but not at all in Indonesia. The Japanese had promised Indonesian independence and had behaved with less brutality toward Indonesians than they had in other occupied areas; huge quantities of Japanese weapons were turned over to Indonesians outright or simply abandoned intact where they could be collected by locals. There was also a substantial number – nobody is quite sure how many but probably in the thousands – of Japanese “stay behinds” that joined up with various Indonesian paramilitary units.

And, of course, we know what happened to the attempts to set up civilian governments. In Korea, the US was handicapped by an almost total lack of anybody who spoke Korean; there were only a handful, who were mostly sons of former missionaries. There were, of course, not very many Koreans who spoke English either. Although the Americans initially received an enthusiastic welcome relations quickly deteriorated. Korea was an extremely unpopular duty station for American troops; Spector notes that almost every officer assigned to Korea requested transfer elsewhere. The military command put Korean towns off-limits to American troops for “health reasons”. Koreans complained that the few elite who happened to speak English were favored by the occupiers and noted that many of these had been collaborators with the Japanese. Things eventually got more or less straightened out, but there was never any accommodation with the Soviets. (Spector reports without comment a claim made by an unnamed American officer who had been a liaison with Manchurian guerrillas during the war: that Kim Il-sung was an imposter. Supposedly the Korean guerrilla he’d met was a man of about 50 while the “national hero” the Soviets presented was about 35, “fat, dissipated and pasty-looking”. I’ve never heard of this before and Spector doesn’t go anywhere with it).


The Americans landed Marines in China, which was a much more popular duty station than Korea; old hand “China Marines” told the younger ones all sorts of stories. The Marines also received an enthusiastic welcome; there were some gunfire interactions with Communists but the Communists always apologized afterward. However, things went haywire here too. Two Marine enlisted men had too much to drink at a 1946 Christmas party and went out looking for some action; they encountered Shen Chung, a nineteen-year-old university student. The Marines either thought Shen Chung was a prostitute or were too drunk to care. After Shen Chung was examined by a Navy doctor, the Marines announced the two men would be tried for rape. Thousands of protestors showed up; Spector notes that at the time in China, rape was a more serious crime than murder. The Marines were aggressively prosecuted; one was sentenced to 15 years for rape and the other was found guilty of assault. A number of senior Chinese politicians had noted that public opinion in China would be satisfied if the men received severe sentences. Then the US Department of the Navy overturned the sentences and restored both men to active duty. Needless to say, this didn’t help popular opinion much; Spector notes that until this case Communists hadn’t much influence with students or urban Chinese and that the KMT was doing fairly well (Mao Zedong, never much of a military strategist, had insisted on defense of some fixed positions in Manchuria over the protests of his generals and the KMT had crushed them. But it was all downhill for the KMT after that).


In Vietnam (technically, there wasn’t any Vietnam yet; the French colonies were Tonkin, capital Hanoi; Annam, capital Hue; and Cochin China, capital Saigon – plus Laos and Cambodia) initial occupation of the north was done by the Chinese. The situation was very muddled, with Viet Minh, French, Japanese, Chinese and various nationalists groups fighting each other (and a handful of Americans concerned with getting POWs out). There was some contact between the Viet Minh and Americans but they were in no position to overrule the French. Eventually the French landed enough troops at Hanoi and brought others up from the south and things settled down somewhat; we all know how it ended up in the long run.


The Malayans had their own Communist guerillas, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). The MPAJA had considerable success against the Japanese, especially after the British began air-dropping weapons. However, they were mostly ethnic Chinese in a Malay and Muslim country, and alienated the locals by taxation and violence. It still took the British a long time to root them all out but Spector doesn’t go that far in his discussion.


The situation in Indonesia was the most surprising to me; I hadn’t realized that much fighting went on. The British and Australians in Indonesian found themselves in an even more complicated situation than the Americans in Korea; they weren’t even initially greeted as liberators and had to fight their way ashore. There were numerous air strikes and naval bombardments of Indonesian positions and fairly large unit actions that resulted in substantial casualties on both sides. British troop morale was poor; the men had been fighting for years and wanted to go home, not fight some more on behalf of the Dutch. The Australians had it better in Borneo and western Indonesia; however Australian dockworkers went on strike and refused to load military supplies. Eventually the Dutch got enough of their own troops in and thing s settled down but Indonesian did get independence quickly.


This is a relatively short summary of an interesting book; I’ve left out a lot of the politics among the various Allied nations and the locals. Most histories of WWII in the Pacific end on the deck of the Missouri; I never appreciated what went on afterward and which still resonates in international relations. ( )

This is a very good book about the initial American occupation of Japanese conquests after World War II. The author provides a comprehensive summary and analysis for what went wrong and what went right. He breaks the work down by region and time. The regions include China, Korea, Vietnam, Malaya and Indonesia. His larger points are that there was no organized plan and very little consistency. Most decisions were made by the commanders on the ground as Washington (and Moscow) flip-flopped over whether to cooperate or compete.

In many cases, the conditions on the ground dictated the success or failure of the occupation rather than American policy. The Koreans were already hostile to the American occupation force, especially when the occupation government put in place policies very similar to the Japanese in terms of fixing prices and requisitioning food. In China, the US was trying to prevent a costly civil war, but could not overcome the mutual distrust and hatred between the Nationalists and Communists. In Vietnam, the Americans were stuck between wanting to support national self-determination for the Vietnamese and wanting to support their French allies.

He also discusses the overlooked aspect of the occupation -- what to do with the Japanese? In most of these places, they were the ones keeping the peace. Letting them continue to do so, as they did in Korea, drastically undercut their credibility with the locals. Yet not doing so would create a power vacuum and potentially chaos.

Spector is clearly writing with an eye towards lessons for Iraq, as he states in his conclusion. Yet he cautions against making sweeping generalizations. The detail of his work provides some very specific lessons learned from the post-WWII occupation that can be applied, but he shows that larger generalizations are risky. If there is one that he is willing to accept, it is that occupying powers must have a plan for getting in and getting out as quickly and painlessly as possible (an allusion to the Powell Doctrine).

The writing and research are top notch. This is one of the easiest history books I've read in a while. It is essential for someone wanted to understand post-WWI east Asia. ( )