Francis Pike is a historian and author of Hirohito’s War, The Pacific War 1941-1945 and Empires at War: A Short History of Modern Asia Since World War II.
At the end of February, 1945 about 1,000 surviving Japanese soldiers based on Ramree Island off the coast of Arakan, a province in western Burma, fled the onslaught of the British Army commanded by Lt General William Slim. A squadron led by the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth had bombarded Japanese positions on Ramree. The 26th
In 1996, I flew to Dhaka to meet Sheikh Hasina, the newly elected prime minister of Bangladesh, to discuss her economic strategy. It was not a pleasant experience. Hasina was humourless, arrogant and bitter – by a long stretch, the most unlikeable politician I’ve met in the sub-continent. By contrast her diminutive niece, Tulip Siddiq, Labour’s anti-corruption minister who has just resigned over
Over Christmas, president-elect Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social site that: ‘For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.’ Trump’s overture, while highly unwelcome to the Danes, is not a new idea. He made the
As the media alarms us about an approaching ‘quad-demic’ of diseases this winter (Covid-19, Flu, RSV, Norovirus) it is a timely moment to think about the travails of our mediaeval forebears. Their common scourges were typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, anthrax, scabies and syphilis – all untreatable at the time. And then there was the plague. The
Yesterday afternoon South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol made the shock TV announcement that he was putting his country under martial law. According to Article 77 of South Korea’s constitution, the People’ Power party President was within his rights. But why? Yoon wheeled out the standard coup trope that he needed ‘to restore order’. He
I had a nasty shock when I switched on my TV on Sunday. It was clearly a propaganda film with hijabed women standing amidst the rubble of their former homes extolling Hezbollah’s victory over the invading forces of Israel. Except it wasn’t a propaganda film; it was a BBC news report from Lebanon highlighting the
When you think of great naval engagements, the Battle of Leyte Gulf does not immediately spring to mind, despite it being the largest naval battle in modern history. Leyte Gulf, which celebrates its 80th anniversary today, took place in the Philippines in 1944. Even my well-educated American friends, the CEO of a major publishing company included,
On the 15 November Xi Jinping will mark the 12th anniversary of his becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party – the sixth paramount leader in China since Mao Zedong established communist rule in 1949. One of the consistent features of Xi’s rule has been China’s hostility to India. People’s Liberation Army incursions across Indian
In the third century BC the city of Rhodes, in celebration of the defeat of Demetrius I of Macedonia, built the Colossus, a 30-metre-high statue of the sun god Helios. It became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now there is a new Colossus to wonder at, not a statue but a
Now that Sir Keir Starmer has unilaterally decided to give up British ownership of the Chagos Islands, the last vestige of our imperial inheritance in the Indian Ocean, it seems an appropriate moment to look back at the long-forgotten history of this remote possession. Mauritius will be the happy recipient of the Chagos Archipelago, which
While the West obsesses about whether or not China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, is going to invade Taiwan, the Taiwanese seemingly have other concerns. Today the hot issue is statues. To be precise, statues of Chiang Kai-shek, the post-war founder-dictator of independent modern Taiwan. In an inventory taken in 2000 it was estimated that there
Voting in India’s national elections started last Friday. It will take six weeks to complete, which is less of a surprise when one considers that in a population of 1.4 billion people there are 969 million voters, 2,600 political parties, 28 states and 780 languages. It is a logistical task of dazzling scale, not only
Donald Trump should spare a thought for Imran Khan. If the former US president feels overrun by lawsuits, he could comfort himself with the thought that they are a mere bagatelle in comparison with those against Pakistan’s former prime minister. Since being deposed in a parliamentary vote of no confidence in 2022, Khan and his
Tunnel fighting has always been a problem. As Israel battles in Gaza against some 5,000 Hamas fighters embedded in buildings, ruins and 300 miles of tunnel, it seems an appropriate moment to look at the history of tunnel warfare and its difficulties. Jewish history is not unfamiliar with the fighting of defensive wars in
For reasons that not even Czechs can explain, in the past they developed a habit of throwing their rulers out of windows. It started in the early 15th century, but it was in Prague in 1618 that the word ‘defenestration’ entered the English language. The word derives from the Latin word for window, fenestra. A year earlier
Of all the ‘practice’ wars that preceded the main events of the second world war, including the Spanish civil war and the winter war between Finland and the Soviet Union, the least well known is the four-month war on the Mongolia-Manchurian border between the Soviet Union and Japan that ended in September 1939. This is not surprising, perhaps, because British attention was
Two weeks ago, VJ day (Victory over Japan day) celebrated the end of the Pacific War. On 15 August 1945 Emperor Hirohito, with his high-pitched voice and arcane royal language, which was heard by his people for the first time, announced Japan’s surrender. Huddled around their radios the Japanese heard Hirohito say: ‘We have ordered
The online TaiwanPlus news agency reported recently that a new memorial had been unveiled in southern Taiwan to commemorate the thousands of Taiwanese youths who volunteered to help the Japanese war effort in the second world war. It is estimated that some 30,000 Taiwanese died while fighting for Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial army during the Pacific
Some wars get forgotten (viz Korea and Malaya); others are constantly refreshed in memory. As the manager of an Asian investment trust in the late 1980s, some 44 years after the Second World War, I was asked by my board to cough up a large sum of money to fund a statue of Field Marshal,
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice. Sadly, in the British media it will be forgotten that Great Britain and its Commonwealth forces, roughly some 104,000 troops in total, were America’s junior partner in the United Nations force that took on the defence of South Korea. The United Nations’ call to arms
