The Malayan Emergency of 1948–1960 has been scrutinised for 'lessons' about how to win counterinsurgencies from the Vietnam War to twenty-first century Afghanistan. This book brings our understanding of the conflict up to date by interweaving government and insurgent accounts and looking at how they played out at local level. Drawing on oral history, recent memoirs and declassified archival material from the UK and Asia, Karl Hack offers a comprehensive, multi-perspective account of the Ma...

This book explains why British defence policy and practice emerged as it did in the period 1941-67, by looking at the overlapping of colonial, military, economic and Cold War factors in the area. Its main focus is on the 1950s and the decolonisation era, but it argues that the plans and conditions of this period can only be understood by tracing them back to their origins in the fall of Singapore. Also, it shows how decolonisation was shaped not just by British aims, but by the way communi...

This book provides a sophisticated summary of up-to-date knowledge on the Fall of Singapore, including the critical tensions between Churchill and local commanders. A focus on the role of Churchill, and on his understanding of the guns and Singapore's fortifications, makes the Fortress central to understanding why and how Singapore fell as it did. The book includes a range of quotations that give the flavour of the time and the essence of the debates. No other book allows the reader to get...

Colonial armies were the focal points for some of the most dramatic tensions inherent in Chinese, Japanese and Western clashes with Southeast Asia. The international team of scholars take the reader on a compelling exploration from Ming China to the present day, examining their conquests, management and decolonization.The journey covers perennial themes such as the recruitment, loyalty, and varied impact of foreign-dominated forces. But it also ventures into unchartered waters by h...

Experiences of captivity in Japanese-occupied Asia varied enormously. Some prisoners of war (POWs) were sent to work in Japan, others to toil on the ‘Death Railway’ between Burma and Thailand. Some camps had death rates below 1 per cent, others of over 20 per cent. While POWs were deployed far and wide as a captive labour force, civilian internees were generally detained locally.This book explores differences in how captivity was experienced between 1941 and 1945, and has been reme...

John Curtin, prime minister during the darkest days of the Second World War, is remembered as the reluctant hero of Australian politics. In the Australian story he is the recovering alcoholic and the accidental prime minister who saved Australia from invasion by Japan, overrode the opposition of Churchill and Roosevelt to bring home Australian troops from the Middle East, and created the Australian alliance with the United States. However, there is much more to the Curtin story than this.

Red Star Over Malaya is an account of the inter-racial relations between Malays and Chinese during the final stages of the Japanese occupation. In 1947, none of the three major race of Malaya - Malays, Chinese, and Indians - regarded themselves as pan-ethnic "Malayans" with common duties and problems. With the occupation forcibly cut them off from China, Chinese residents began to look inwards towards Malaya and stake political claims, leading inevitably to a political contest with the Mal...

British Army counterinsurgency campaigns were supposedly waged within the bounds of international law, overcoming insurgents with the minimum force necessary. This revealing study questions what this meant for the civilian population during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, one of Britain's most violent decolonisation wars. For the first time Huw Bennett examines the conduct of soldiers in detail, uncovering the uneasy relationship between notions of minimum force and the coloni...

Half a million Australians encountered a new world when they entered Asia and the Pacific during World War II: different peoples, cultures, languages and religions chafing under the grip of colonial rule. Moving beyond the battlefield, this book tells the story of how mid-century experiences of troops in Asia-Pacific shaped how we feel about our nation's place in the region and the world. Spanning the vast region from New Guinea to Southeast Asia and India, Lachlan Grant uncovers affecting...

The Japanese occupation of both British Borneo – Brunei, Sarawak and North Borneo – and Dutch Borneo in 1941 to 1945 is a much understudied subject. Of particular interest is the occupation of Dutch Borneo, governed by the Imperial Japanese Navy that had long-term plans for ‘permanent possession’. This book surveys Borneo under Western colonialism, examines pre-war Japanese interests in Borneo, and analyses the Japanese military invasion and occupation. It goes on to consider the nature of...

Head-aches. Dizziness. Can't sleep. Bad dreams (never have been released). The rice jungle had some compensation to some of us who just don't seem to make a success of our return — ROBERT, A RETURNED POWThis landmark and compelling book follows the stories of 15,000 Australian prisoners of war from the moment they were released by the Japanese at the end of World War II. Their struggle to rehabilitate themselves and to win compensation and acknowledgement from their own co...

This book examines Borneo, both British Borneo – Brunei, Sarawak and North Borneo – and Dutch Borneo in the period 1945-1950. Borneo then was at the crossroads. Following the Japanese Occupation, the likely future status of the various Bornean territories was not at all clear, and the book discusses the various factions and powers, both local and international, who were contending for control in this period. It examines the effects of the Japanese surrender, the impact of the subsequent in...