1945, The Reckoning

A review of Phil Craig's new book

I’ve read lots of good books lately, and there are still more I’m looking forward to over the summer.

One, which I’ve found hard to categorise, is Phil Craig’s excellent 1945: The Reckoning. Its essentially a story of how the imperial world of some (but by no means all), was transformed by the arrival of Allied victory in 1945, and how the stories of empire and of war varied between participants. One of the great characters of the Indian Army, for instance, Kodandera Subayya ‘Timmy’ Thimayya, a man who would one day be the Chief of Staff of the Indian Army, had a brother who was serving in the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose. There were clearly two rival efforts to secure independence from the UK in Burma in 1944-45. The problem with Bose’s was that it was undertaken in the full support of Japanese imperialism. What form of imperialism was better? Most Indians did not believe that Japan provided the answer, with its much vaunted claim to offer an ‘Asia for the Asiatics.’ It is instructive that 2.5m men and some women decided to join the Indian Armed Forces during the war to defeat fascism and Japanese imperialism, to fight with the British Empire because it, rather than Japan or the INA, promised the quickest route to promised independence and democracy when the guns fell silent.

My review in the ever-excellent Aspects of History magazine is below.