Latimer, J. (2004). Burma: The forgotten war. London: John Murray. 610 pages.

The longest land campaign of the Second World War took place from 1942 to 1945 in the villages, cities, plains, jungles, wetlands, rice paddies, and mountains of Burma, a British colonial holding crushed in its turn after the Japanese ripped Singapore from Britain's tired imperial hands. Jon Latimer recounts the story of that campaign in Burma: The forgotten war. The British soldiers fighting in the campaign rightly felt overshadowed by the exploits of the Allies in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. History gives little attention to the campaign. The Allies won the war against Japan in the Pacific. And they won the war against Germany and Italy in Europe. Perhaps more accurately, they dominated the Axis powers with superior industrial capacity and manpower. In Burma, resources remained limited for all involved, though the Americans sent a relative fortune over 'the hump' of mountains between Burma and China to reinforce the static army of Chang Kai-Shek; but all that wealth never encouraged his active participation in the war against Japan; instead, he harbored his resources for the slow-burning fight against domestic communist forces. Meanwhile, the British and Japanese scrapped together whatever forces they could muster and uselessly grappled for control over a country that wanted nothing to do with them. Though the Japanese conquered Burma, they never gained a significant foothold along the east Indian frontier.

Yet Latimer's reuse of the phrase 'forgotten war' seems a misnomer. His book makes use of characters that captured the popular imagination for years. Mountbatten, Aulincheck, Wavell, and Slim were the last great generals of the British Empire. American general 'Vinegar' Joe Stilwell spat at the 'limeys' and hacked at the 'Japs' in a largely fruitless attempt to stir the Chinese forces into action. Orde Wingate made enemies with nearly every other British officer in the Indian Army, but while fighting deep behind the Japanese lines with his 'Chindit' guerrilla forces; after his death, Stilwell gained command of the Chindits and threw them against some of the strongest Japanese defenses. And the Japanese Lieutenant General Mutaguchi drove his 65,000 strong force so incessantly against the Indian frontier that 50,000 of his soldiers died, mostly of starvation and disease. The remnants of the Japanese forces dug in throughout Burma but put up little effective resistance. These characters do not speak softly. Nor are they easily forgotten. Yet the horror and meaninglessness of the campaign speaks to a nihilism so aware and so sharp that it must be human, and so incessant that it trivializes the heroics of its participants.

In the opening pages, Latimer explicitly ties himself to the theme of budding Burmese nationalism, but the subsequent chapters only lightly pursue that topic. In the main, the book examines the four year land and air campaign waged across the Burmese landscape, principally by British and Japanese forces. Without a doubt, Latimer shows that the multi-ethnic citizens of Burma suffered tremendously during the course of the war, but Latimer's gaze usually focuses on colorfully rendered wartime experiences of soldiers, usually at their most dramatic moments of their lives. Thus, Latimer fills page after page with farewells to dying friends and rapid-fire character sketches gleaned from diaries, reports, and published memoirs of the war. He also conveys the multi-ethnic nature of the British forces, and the hardships faced by the poorly equipped Chinese forces that Stilwell dragged into Burma. Yet contrary to the author's stated theme, the Burmese people make almost no appearance.

The book contains no maps. The absence of maps proves a boon for spurring the reader to imagine the terrain from the ground, rather than like a god. But maps helpfully express the relationship between martial forces, as well as political, social, and geographic variations. When properly prepared, maps can also dispel any notion of a linear battlefield narrative, which certainly did not occur in Burma. So the decision seems puzzling. [The BBC, however, has produced a useful series of animated maps about the campaign.]

While not quite a comprehensive study of the Burma campaign, Latimer's volume proves both able and useful for any scholar interested in the 'feel' of the fighting. He strongly depicts the horrors of close combat, as well as the wild emotional swings between defeat and victory that each side faced in turn. He deserves credit for his depictions of Japanese soldiers; he never shies away from their brutality, but also reveals their humanity. His explicit theme--the Burmese struggle for independence--hides too much in the corners of the book, but the hefty remainder proves worthwhile.

In the critique above, I did not integrate some of the most engaging ideas I found in Latimer's volume. I will list a few of them here in the form of quotations. 

"While what is presented here is fundamentally a military history, the war in Burma does not lend itself well to a single treatment. Nevertheless, a single theme runs through it: the struggle of the Burmese people for independence after sixty years of occupation" (1).

"Some time after the war a memorial was unveiled near Rangoon dedicated to the '27,000 men of the Commonwealth forces who died in Assam and Burma in the defence of freedom ...'. Given the terrible regime in Burma for most of the time since, one might question whether the war fought between 1941 and 1945 was for 'freedom.'" (1-2).

"By 1941, with 1 1/4 million men in China and 1 million in Formosa, Korea and the home islands, Japan lacked large manpower reserves and to provide five armies (corps) to strike south meant scraping the sides of the barrel, with age limits widened in both directions and student deferments cancelled. Brutality in training became yet more harsh and standards of discipline diluted, resulting in an attitude that crime against superiors was far more serious than crimes against natives. Despite its modernity, much Japanese equipment compared unfavourably with Western models ... funnelling of manpower into the infantry and their ability to live off the land meant the Japanese appeared far more numerous than Allied forces ... Plainly the Imperial Japanese Army was not on a par with that of 1905, or even 1937" (39). 

"Although overshadowed by the fall of Singapore, the battle of the Sittang on 22/23 February ranks as a defining moment in the decline and fall of the British Empire" (58).
[While it's true that Slim called the defeat at Sittang bridge the 'decisive battle of the first campaign,' Latimer's rhetoric overstates the case. The importance of Sittang bridge cannot measure up to Singapore, the largest capitulation in British military history.]

*This isn't a quote, but it seems like an important point of emphasis in Latimer's book. Churchill swapped Auchinleck and Wavell in 1941. Auchinleck won a fresh round of North African victories shortly thereafter. Back in Burma, the Japanese declaration of war forced Wavell into a fighting retreat while at the head of soldiers he barely knew. Wavell insisted that his forces maintain an aggressive posture, and that they counter-attack at every opportunity. Latimer finds Wavell out of touch with the situation on the ground, as offensive action was virtually impossible for the poorly prepared British Indian Army; to some extent, Latimer sneers at what he considers Wavell's foolish refusal to organize a more effective retreat. But the British Indian Army was a totally different force that that on the shores up North Africa, whatever the similarities on paper. Both commands featured imperial forces of mixed ethnicity. Both were motorized. The language barriers might be the same, and pose similar problems of command, but the appropriateness of the training, equipment, and logistics for the particular environment differed completely. AJP Taylor suggested in Warlords that Churchill's sacking of commanders helped spur action and relieve exhaustion. True. But Churchill's action also inspired massive confusion. 

A quote from Wavell: "It is lack of this knowledge of the principles and practice of military movement and administration--the 'logistics' of war, some people call it--which puts what we call amateur strategists wrong, not the principles of strategy themselves, which can be apprehended in a very short time by any reasonable intelligence." (121 in Latimer; also in Wavell's 'The Good Soldier).

"The Japanese did not penetrate as far as Tamu, even with patrols ... In reality no more than a village, it was strewn with hundreds of abandoned vehicles ... filled with grisly emaciated figures who had reached the village after the monsoon had broken" (121).

"Japanese victory was devastatingly complete: British prestige had suffered another hammer blow, discrediting their concept of protecting, civilizing and supervising in Asia" (121).

"[Wavell] was experiencing difficulties with Stilwell, who planned operations without reference to Wavell, 'and I think, without much reference to his staff here who seem to know little ... His senior staff officers here gives me the impression of being overawed by Stilwell and afraid of representing the true administrative picture.' Wavell felt he was effectively communicating with Stilwell through Washington. Certainly Stilwell never showed any interest in administration or logistics, realities that constantly exercised Wavell's mind ..." (131).

"... Orde Charles Wingate's character was a blend of mysticism, passion and complete self-confidence tinged with darkest depression; he was obsessive rude and overbearing. But as things stood, the scheme proposed by this 'broad-shouldered, uncouth, almost simian officer', as Major Bernard Fergusson noted, offered the only prospect of action. In 1946 Fergusson wrote: 'Wingate would do any evil that good might come. He saw his object very clearly in front of him, and to achieve it he would spare no friend or enemy; he would lie; he would intrigue; he would bully, cajole and deceive. He was a hell of a great man and few people liked him.'" (Latimer 155-156; Fergusson, Beyond the Chindwin, pp.20-21). 

"It was Burma's misfortune to have been used as a base for the Japanese 'March on Delhi' and to have suffered from concentrated Allied air attacks against railways and other transportation facilities from 1943 onwards. All the cities along the main north-south axis suffered partial demolition, and the countryside was strewn with ordnance left by both sides ... the Burmese who sought to lead their country to the sunny uplands of Independence found they had to take over a ruined country" (431).

Sometimes Latimer's historical opinion lacks a clear perspective. When writing about allied victories at Mandalay and Meiktila, for example, he notes that the Japanese defenders "had orders to resist to the last--orders that were largely futile since, as Kimura admitted later, 'the only reason it was held at all was for its prestige value'" (392). In what sense is prestige ever futile? He seems to imply 'prestige' lacks strategic value. But it seems to me that prestige is a fundamental spur to war-like action. His writing seems strange, or possibly meaningless in the wider context of the Burma campaign. 

Dutt, B.C. Mutiny of the Innocents. (1971). Bombay: Sindhu Publications.

B.C. Dutt's Mutiny of the Innocents offers a razor sharp first-person account of a forgotten episode in the history of India's long struggle against foreign rule. In the early months of 1946, low-ranking sailors in the Royal Indian Navy began supporting Indian independence, but only after years of loyal service to the wider empire. Their sudden change of heart bewildered both British military leaders like General Claude Auchinleck and Indian politicians like Mahatma Gandhi.

Dutt's story, however, begins with his entrance into the Royal Indian Navy as a teenager. A radio and signal operator, Dutt and his fellow Indian sailors served loyally throughout the war, but lost enthusiasm for their task as profligate racism sets a clear divide between themselves and white service members. Despite the racism, Dutt worked hard, and took pride in his work. He was a cog in a wheel, but thrived in his own way. At the end of the war, Dutt found himself stationed at the HMIS Talwar, the shore establishment where he first learned his trade as a signalman. For Dutt, and his fellow veterans, the future looked bleak. The post-war navy offered few opportunities for advancement; outside the military, jobs were scarce. And many Indians viewed the sailors and soldiers of the Indian military as mercenaries more interested in lining their pockets with British coin than serving their homeland. Dutt's experiences with racism, and his own questions about his role in the British empire, eventually led him to take action in support of Indian independence. Gathering in the canteen of the Talwar, Dutt and a few like-minded conspirators engaged in well-timed acts of minor sabotage. For the most part, they merely distracted sentries and pasted revolutionary slogans on barrack walls. They timed their subversive activities to maximize the embarrassment of their officers.

In February 1946, the authorities caught Dutt. But he refused to cooperate or name his fellow conspirators. Further, he declared himself a political prisoner, rather than an insubordinate sailor. In a political situation already fraught with tension, this caught his superior officers off guard. They tried to respond with restraint in order to keep the situation quiet. But the opposite happened. Dutt's slight success catapulted him into the spotlight. Other naval ratings used a common complaint--the poor quality of navy chow--to rally other sailors to the cause. The ensuing rebellion more resembled a student protest or worker strike rather than a violent insurrection. What began as small demonstrations of discontent expanded into a brief (but bright) flame of outright rebellion, and came to be known as the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny. It ultimately involved upwards of 12,000 ratings (low-ranking sailors). The ratings seized ships and shore establishments throughout Bombay; ratings in Calcutta, Karachi, and elsewhere also gained control of their vessels. The ratings adopted the language of the nationalist leaders, and formed a strike committee to lead the way. The ratings offered to hand over the navy to nationalist leaders in Congress and Muslim League, but received a cold response from everyone except the Communists Party.  

 Congress leaders, especially Sadar Vallabhbhai Patel, quickly organized a truce between the mutineers and the British authorities. Very few ratings lost their lives, and only a few ships were damaged. But for enthusiastic participants like B.C. Dutt, the short-lived mutiny taught them an indelible lesson on the limits of India's revolutionary politics. The nationalist leaders had struggled for decades to achieve Indian independence. Now the leaders could already see the finish line, and yearned to reach it. The British were clearly on the way out. The mutiny, rather than helping the nationalist leaders achieve their objective, threatened to disrupt the delicate balance of power of domestic politics. Besides, the nationalist leadership consisted of lawyers and industrialists and cloaked themselves in the mores of non-violence; they distrusted military personnel out of habit, and the young naval ratings now asking for their help were no exception. Thus, the complex realities of nationalist politics quickly eclipsed the RIN mutiny.

A year and a half later, India won its independence from imperial rule, but at the cost of an independent Pakistan. Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan, kept an earlier promise and allowed Muslim mutineers to apply for positions in the Pakistan navy. In India, however, newly-minted Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (and the rest of the Congress leadership) opted to keep the mutineers out of the service. The Royal Indian Navy discharged D.C. Butt quickly and quietly; he tried to join Nehru's navy, but without success. He eventually made his way back to Bombay and became a reporter with the Free Press Journal, the newspaper that most closely covered the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny.

We do not often think of mutineers as innocents, but B.C. Dutt's book makes a convincing case that these young men truly did not know what they were getting themselves into. The book begins with a forward from S. Natarajan, the editor of the Free Press Journal at the time of the mutiny. He describes his own interest in the mutiny, and his careful decision to chronicle the efforts of the naval ratings when a few members of their party appeared on his doorstep on 18 February 1946. Though the mutiny ended in meekness, it shared dangerous echoes with rebellions that began elsewhere in the world. When the book transitions to Dutt's voice, the account assumes an uncanny charm. He records the events without malice or resentment. He articulates the views of his enemies with remarkable generosity and restraint.

In particular, Dutt chronicles the motivations of the Indian officers that remained loyal to the navy, and the actions of Commander King, a white officer whose racist language helped the mutiny spiral out of control. In other accounts (including Banerjee's The RIN Strike and Sarkar's Towards Freedom series) King stands a mysterious and foolish monster. But in Dutt's account, Commander King emerges as a complicated and surprisingly sympathetic figure that lacked the political wherewithal and leadership skills to contain the misbegotten mutiny. Like Dutt and King, the ratings and officers initially caught in the strike simply lacked the political sophistication to achieve their objectives.

B.C. Dutt published Mutiny of the Innocents in 1971. Reflecting on his actions of twenty-five years prior, Dutt comes across as an astute observer of human nature. He also has the wisdom to reassess his actions in the rearview mirror, and place them in historical perspective. At times, a sense of humor shines through the book's pages, as when after a late-night attempt at revolutionary graffiti, naval sentries catch Dutt with his hands covered in glue.

Dutt's book stands as a riveting account of political failure in waning shadows of the British raj. Dutt managed, for a short time at least, to rally sailors to take a political stand against the British empire; the rebellion's failure, as Dutt states at the close of the book, was probably inevitable. His revolution failed, but his book succeeds. 

Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. CUP, 1985 (1994).  

The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, perhaps accrues more condemnation than any other leading figure of Indian nationalism. Ayesha Jalal challenges the orthodox British and Indian interpretations of Jinnah with The Sole Spokesman, a book that examines Jinnah within the context of the All-India Muslim League and the Gordian knot of Indian politics. One of the most successful lawyers in the British empire, Jinnah began his political life as an Indian nationalist, not a Pakistani separatist. But Gandhi's religious revivalism offended Jinnah's taste for secular legalism; in response, Jinnah drifted out of the Indian National Congress as Gandhi rose to power in the 1920s. Jinnah began pursuing a policy of protected electoral rights for Muslims. Opponents found Jinnah unwilling to break even after substantial electoral defeats that revealed the tenuous grip he held over typical Muslim interests. Despite the odds, he "stayed in the saddle" and relentlessly pursued his objective of securing Muslim political rights throughout the subcontinent (and not just in the eventual regions of Pakistan). He played a dangerous game, and though he never got what he wanted--constitutional protections in a united India--he did not quite lose. His political positions sometimes appeared foolish (even dangerous), but not from the slim purchase that served as his foothold for power--he created a perceived need for a strong Muslim center.

            The British empire, throughout the early twentieth century, enhanced the power and status of India's provincial governments in order to undermine the drive for nationalist politics under the banner of Indian National Congress or the Muslim League. Strong provincial politics, the British thought, could prevent a national revolution. But in response, the Muslim League began to whisper communalist fears into the ear of Muslim majority provinces such as Punjab and Bengal; the Muslim League hinted that only a strong nationalist Muslim movement at the center could protect Muslim interests in the periphery. The Muslim League consolidated their gains during the Second World War, when the Congress National Party rallied behind Gandhi's 'Quit India' movement, which quickly led the British to arrest all the major figures of Congress. The League, on the other hand, offered wider support for the war effort. As the war concluded in Allied victory, the raj freed the leaders of Congress and pursued further negotiations for a transfer of power, thus ending the Muslim League's brief dominance in the politics of domestic India.

            At the close of the war, the Muslim League's siren call of 'Hindu India' exacerbated communal tensions (and led to real bloodshed), but gave Jinnah an increasingly powerful stake in the politics of self-rule vis a vis the British raj and Congress. Interestingly, Jinnah did not speak the same language as the Muslims in Punjab and Bengal--the very Muslims he tried to cater to ensure they supported his drive for a strong center. Ensuring the capitulation of Punjab and Bengal into the house of the Muslim League required some manipulation on the part of Jinnah, for he gambled with their money. "The Punjab and Bengal would never vote to partition their provinces," Jalal writes, "and if they realised that a vote for Pakistan was a vote for partition, they would reject Pakistan." Thanks to Jinnah's party operatives, voters on the periphery never quite gathered that this would be the eventual outcome of a Pakistan's independence. Indeed, Jinnah did not want such an outcome, but he came to accept it when Mountbatten and Nehru rushed the process along in the spring and summer of 1947.

            As the hour sounded on Indian independence, Jinnah found himself at the head of a Pakistan that poorly suited the interests of most Muslims--a 'mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan' that perpetuated communal and inter-state violence well into the twenty-first century. Jinnah fought for Muslim rights in India, but instead he received Pakistan. Viceroy Mountbatten, the last leader of the British raj, receives a poor score from Jalal for failing to understand Jinnah's complex political position, and instead ripping apart Pujab and Bengal in the drive towards Indian independence. The penultimate viceroy, Archibald Wavell, receives a compassionate and high score for his astute understanding of Jinnah's political position as well as the federalist structure required to ensure maximum Muslim League cooperation. In Jalal's argument, the partition of India was a horrible mistake, not a political necessity.

            The book's arguments require its author to justify Jinnah's action ex post facto; Jalal's detective work makes use of her sources to paint an overwhelmingly vivid portrait of Muslim politics (though Jinnah himself could use a little more color). In Jalal's book, Jinnah stands as a preference-reading politician facing exceptional circumstances--a depiction that stands somewhat odds with more compassionate sketches of him, such as found in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. At her best, Jalal reveals the political limitations of Jinnah, and the personal limitations of figures like Gandhi, Nehru, and Mountbatten when confronting Jinnah's complex legal mind. The book represents an important corrective to the popular depictions of Jinnah as an uncompromising man hell-bent on creating 'Pakistan' in a search for political power. Jinnah, rather, attempted a practical and legal approach to Indian independence, but found that Hindu and Muslim revivalism created a slick slope that he could not easily slalom. Many thousands perished upon the birth of an independent India and Pakistan, but Jinnah--the 'sole spokesman'--cannot bear the sole blame for the complex realities of the region's post-colonial politics. From village, to province, to nation, and from Congress, to Raj, to League, Ayesha Jalal's study traces a witheringly difficult path through India's colonial history.

Gopal, Sarvepalli. Jawaharlal Nehru: a biography, Vol. 1.  HUP (1976).     
 
In the final years of the British raj, Jawaharlal Nehru emerged as India's preeminent statesman and as a model of pragmatic leadership. The journey to that position led Nehru though the lecture halls of Harrow and Cambridge, but also a discipleship under Mahatma Gandhi, and nearly ten years imprisonment in British gaols. He emerged, in the end, as India's first prime minister and one of the longest tenured statesmen of the last century. 

The first volume of Sarvepalli Gopal's three volume biography emphasizes Nehru's steadfast development from a romantic nationalist into a courageous pragmatist. In the process, Nehru navigated four tense decades as a leading member of the Indian National Congress, the nationalist organization which used the tools of non-violence and non-cooperation to pry India away from an exhausted British empire. 

The independence of India was not an historical inevitability. Nationalist aspirations lacked shape and spirit prior to Mahatma Gandhi's entrance on the scene in 1915. In the shadow of Gandhi's lean, ascetic frame and his unyielding emphasis on social reform, Nehru and Congress overcame their association with British privilege and gave Indian nationalism a distinct, powerful, and popular voice. Their campaigns of non-cooperation and non-violence ebbed and flowed the like a tide throughout the interwar years. They rallied the uneducated masses, and rattled the nerves of the British raj. 

After years of struggle, the world-wide political conflicts surrounding the Second World War served as a catalyst to the fall of the British raj. The war opened the final chapter in Nehru's struggle for independence. The United Kingdom relied upon India as the second pillar of its military efforts; Britain brought India--a fifth of the world's population--into the war unasked. The war also depleted the resources of the Indian civil service, and required the British to hand increasing portions of power to domestic Indian interests and domestic Indian bureaucrats. Winston Churchill, Britain's war-time leader, nevertheless attempted to hold on to India with the mass arrest of Congress leaders and offers of post-dated settlements for independence. But the war strained the British to the breaking point and made a rapid compromise towards independence the only honorable political recourse. 

Nehru's Congress led the negotiations. Against Gandhi's wishes, Nehru accepted Muhammad Ali Jinnah's demands for a separate Pakistan. In the face of rising communal violence, Nehru firmly held the reins of Congress, and prevented the emergence of a strong ethnic Hindu party. Nehru merged social reform into Indian independence, and thus paved the way for a more liberal, democratic India even as Congress rejected further British intervention. He channeled the forces of nationalism, revivalism, and modernization as he and his allies established one of the largest countries on Earth. Gopal's first volume concludes at the dawn of an independent India on 14 August 1947; Nehru served India as prime minister until 1964. His premiership eventually wrestled with the creation of Pakistan, violent tensions with communist China, and all the challenges of the Cold War.

Gopal's biography expertly evokes the political environment surrounding Nehru's development, but the author also soberly demonstrates how personal attachment moderated Jawaharlal Nehru's political life. With touching devotion, Nehru's father and mother abandoned bourgeois comforts to follow their son into the dangerous politics of swaraj. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal's father, emerges as a moderate and patient hero in the first half of the book; he openly acknowledges his relentless pride in his son's efforts, yet helps to curb Jawaharlal's radical, youthful tendencies. With the backing of his parents, Jawaharlal devoted himself to the cause of an independent India, and began disciplining his political ideas with a cautious ear towards Gandhi's sympathy for the Indian poor. Gopal also rises to the occasion when depicting the troubled but deeply felt marriage between Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru. Nehru's personal relationships with his father, mother, wife and mentors conditioned his political involvement with touches of humanity and sudden bursts of patient compromise. 

Gopal is somewhat less successful in explaining Nehru's early rise to power in the United Provinces. Nehru's appeal as a well-travelled, well-educated, mid-career nationalist emerges clearly, but why did Gandhi and Annie Besant devote so much attention to the young man as early as 1914?  These connections remain somewhat mysterious in Gopal's present volume. Ostensibly, Motilal's connections as a powerful and wealthy lawyer played a decisive role helping his son meet these individuals, but the nature of the connections stands uncertain to a reader (such as myself) less familiar with the early years of the Indian nationalist movement.

Despite that one difficulty, Gopal presents the story of Nehru's development with candor and confidence. 

Many statesmen marshaled nationalist sentiment in the twentieth century: Churchill, Hitler, and Roosevelt; Stalin, Mussolini and Mao. Among them all, Gopal's Nehru emerges as the most effectively peaceful and virtuous in his rise to power, and the most magnanimous in his use of authority.

Taylor, A.J.P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. Penguin Books (1963). 

[Jon Singer Sargent. 'Gassed.' 1919. @ The IWM.] 


The First World War began in 1914. It officially concluded on 11 November 1918. The war brought Europe to a new awareness of the consequences of modernity: the expendability of men, the ruthlessness of technology, and humanity's terrible ability to undertake warfare. Some of this, of course, was merely a reminder of age old problems. But some genuinely new horrors appeared during the First World War. Poison gas, submarine warfare, complex trench systems, and the widespread use of the machine gun all left an indelible mark on human thought.

Many nations were involved (though hardly the whole world) and the political actions surrounding the conflict can easily overwhelm the specialist and non-specialist alike. Therefore A.J.P. Taylor, one of the great popular historians of the last century, worked with Penguin Books to create The First World War: An Illustrated History, a book that aims at popularizing knowledge about the 'war to end all wars.'

To understand the causes and motions of the First World War, Taylor must paint a complex picture. Complexity is sometimes inhumane--we cannot process all the relevant facts. In the face of complexity (regardless of its honesty) the mind simplifies reality into a handful of abstract components; the human mind then easily creates, distributes, manipulates, misinterprets, and discharges these poor components. Taylor therefore inserts photographs into his narrative, for it is harder to forget a fact when it's tied to a face. The process amplifies themes otherwise forgot. The photographs bring home the disparities between the soldier's life in the trenches and the general's life in the tent. But they also effortlessly track the development of technology, the comforts of union work, the thrill of enlistment, and the uncertain motions of mass populations. [In a written summary, I cannot do justice to the effect of mixing photographs with serious history; suffice to say, 'It works.' It is not enough to look at the photographs; to understand their content and full meaning, one must closely read the book.]

Why did the war begin? The first gunshots flew into the body of the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to Habsburg Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and his wife. The shots symbolized a threat to the increasingly moribund Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and its prestige as a Great Power of Europe. In pursuit of imaginary conspirators in the Serb government, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia with the backing of Germany. These countries did not intend for the invasion to start the First World War. Against the views of other historians, Taylor argues that tension in international relations was relatively low at the outbreak of European-wide war, especially compared with previous years. So again, why did it happen? Was Germany war-mongering? Were France and Russia? Can we blame capitalism, or the generals?

"Men are reluctant to believe that great events have small causes," Taylor notes. "Therefore, once the Great War started, they were convinced that it must be the outcome of profound forces. It is hard to discover these [profound forces] when we examine the details. Nowhere was there conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated. They used the instruments of bluff and threat which had proved effective on previous occasions. This time things went wrong."

After Austria-Hungary's violent (and supposedly face-saving) diplomatic maneuver, it was Russia's turn to act. Russia thought of itself as the defender of the Balkans, but also worried about Central Power dominance over Constantinople; in pursuit of secure access to the Mediterranean, Russia declared war.

"Now intervened a vital factor of high strategy... The plans for mobilizing [millions of conscripts] rested on railways; and railway timetables cannot be improvised. Once started, the wagons and carriages must roll remorselessly and inevitably forward to their predestined goal."

General mobilization could, conceivably, lead to defensive build ups along the border rather than outright war. But at the time, everyone believed in the value of offense over defense. They could have learnt otherwise from the Russo-Japanese war, or the Balkan Wars, or the American Civil War. Tragically, they did not. The most important country to partake in this error was Germany, for Germany believed it could not win a war on two fronts against Russia and its ally, France. The late General Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff from 1892 to 1906, had generated a plan to mitigate the problem of a war on two fronts. The Germans would put nearly "all their armed weight into the west to knock out France before the slow machine of Russian mobilization could lumber into action." So once Russia mobilized to threaten Austria-Hungary, the Germans looked at their timetables and determined that they must declare war on France and knock it out of the war before Russia could complete its muster.

Taken to caricature, the Schlieffen Plan calls for arguing with one fellow, and then immediately turning and slugging his silent little brother. Perhaps the French were not quite as innocent as a little brother. Anyhow, innocent or not, France got slugged.

The First World War, then, seems to have been imposed upon statesmen by railway timetables and grand strategies drawn up by dead men. Que será, será. Germany declared war on France; Germany's invasion of France required passing through Belgium; the Belgians refused; Germany invaded Belgium; Britain declared war on Germany; Germany invaded France; Britain sent over an expeditionary force; France mobilized; Russia mobilized; Austria-Hungary (eventually) mobilized; the Ottoman Empire entered the war; Italy entered the war; others entered the war; 37 million people died. ¿Que será, será?

The generals never intended to engage in trench warfare, and the men were completely unprepared. The railroads allowed generals to move men up to the front with unprecedented swiftness, but once there the soldiers could only slog through the mud to reach their objectives. Thus, the railroads could help the generals rapidly reinforce their defensive positions, but the railroads did not help nearly as much when going on the offensive. Stalemate ensued. By stalemate, I mean the inability to knock one's opponent out--sort of like a stalemate in chess, only with poison gas, mass bloodshed, and even more massive bombardments.

"The machine gun completed the contrast between the speed with which men could arrive at the battlefield by rail, and the slowness with which they moved once they were there. Indeed they did not move at all. The opposing lines congealed, grew solid. The generals on both sides stared at these lines impotently and without understanding. They went on staring for nearly four years."

Few generals, nevertheless, saw an alternative to offensive warfare; despite its near universal futility, the generals justified their offensives in various ways. Joffre wanted to keep the British under his wing, Haig wanted to prove his loyalty to the French, Nivelle 'formed a picture' of victory, and Ludendorff felt Germany was running out of time (though the Germans had, to their limited credit, rediscovered the lost art of surprise and tactical initiative).

The politicians and civilian ministers could not counter the generals; the generals could not influence the politicians. Thus, hare brained schemes were beaten back and forth like a tired pony rather than like a tennis ball; there was no play and much cruelty.

Incessant warfare required incessant support from home. Politicians rallied the masses to uncertain causes; later in the war, the masses would rally politicians to uncertain causes. Decisive victory, a useful promise for ensnaring support, also ensnared the promisee.

The Americans, meanwhile, preached peace and idealism from the other side of the world, and yet profited tremendously from the war effort. The Germans ineptly stumbled into war with the Americans, first by yielding to the German admiralty and allowing unrestricted submarine warfare, and second with the idiotic Zimmermann telegram that suggested (weirdly) that Mexico's revolution-weakened government declare war on the United States. The Americans eventually lost 88,000 men. Their excellent timing ensured they partook in Allied victory. Wilson, before the American congress turned on him, helped end the war with the idealistic tone with which it had begun. Clemenceau, the French Prime Minster, noted that while God only needed Ten Commandments, Wilson ambitiously suggested Fourteen Points.

Wartime turbulence led to social revolution in Russia and political revolution in Germany; it facilitated the Easter 1916 uprising in Ireland; Austria-Hungary tumbled into pieces; the Ottoman Empire collapsed into Turkey; Britain and France carved up the Middle East to protect their interests in the Far East and Africa. While Britain and France seemed to gain, it must be kept in mind that political revolution could and did happen in Europe in the early twentieth century. The idea of overturning the capitalist-democratic political order was much more alive at that time then it is today, and this influenced the actions of statesmen. Taylor does not play much with counterfactual, but he strongly suggests the contingent nature of history. France and Britain could not assume survival, much less complete victory, even as late 1918. Perhaps the most significant political event was the sudden emergence of Soviet Russia; many of the allies sent soldiers into Russia to prevent the communists from winning the civil war in Russia--they failed to stop Lenin, but they did create lasting animosity and distrust between Soviet Russia and the rest of the world.

Taylor writes history with characters, not just faceless social forces. And to that effect, Taylor constructs pen-portraits of the various leaders. He sketches the sad eyes of a helpless Kitchener, the highest ranking officer to die during the conflict. He tracks, in images and words, the clever political wheeling of Lloyd George on his way to becoming Prime Minister of Britain. He crosses the channel to present Joffre, Neville, and Petain, as well as Moltke and Hindenburg. It would be helpful to have a more thorough presentation of the leaders and the political forces in Russia and Austria-Hungary. But then again, a book intended as a quick read already stretches to 295 pages.

Taylor's sympathies lie with the "Everyman," especially the Everyman that served in the trenches; he holds less regard for the Everyman that worked in the factories, and perhaps even less for the countless bureaucrats that put together efficient timetables for troop deployments, but no timetables for withdraw (and certainly no realistic timetables for victory).

"In all countries, the majority served and suffered for unselfish causes which they did not fully understand. The war was beyond the capacity of generals and statesmen alike." Donkeys led lions.

With the war over, the Allies rejected Wilson's pleas for conciliation and demanded justice through retribution. In hindsight, the terms of justice left such a scar on Germany as to help bring Hitler to power. But no one saw this at the time. With the war over, Lloyd George needed votes, and so he led Britain in joining the call for retribution.

Taylor writes: "In the age of mass warfare, nations had to be told that they were fighting for some noble cause. Perhaps they were. At any rate, the peoples could not be told to forget their crusading beliefs merely because the war was over. The statesmen who had won the war had to make peace with the same emotions and the same weapons."

And so the cry rang out: 'Hang the Kaiser! Make Germany pay!' The Kaiser abdicated his power in the throes of revolution. Germany never proved able to pay very much at all. But the emotion of injustice never need stem from truth. Lloyd George did, however, persuade both allies and constituents to wait for quieter days to determine reparations; the interwar wrangling over reparations created much ill-feeling.

Paradoxically, even as the First World War "cut deep into the consciousness of modern man," it failed to dramatically alter the European way of life. States toppled, but not as many as one might expect for the unprecedented cost in flesh and blood. No nations were enslaved, and no capital cities erased from the map. The battles were largely confined to small geographic spaces, especially when compared with the Second World War, a massive conflict with truly global influence that broke out only twenty years later. 

     
       In Judith Brown's Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, revered political leader and social reformer Mahatma Gandhi wrestles with numerous Indian crises of modernity, from early battles against racism to the violent sunder of the Indian subcontinent into diverse new nations. Born in India but trained as a London barrister, Gandhi began life split between the influence of two cultures, one east and the other west. In his life in India, he entered a traditional arranged marriage while only a child, and stumbled into an early adulthood with his family's hopes upon his back. His family sent him to London to study law and secure an income suitable to his position in India's rigid caste system. He struggled to find his place in London, but achieved his family's aim and became a lawyer. Returning home, Gandhi's shyness and virtual absence of professional contacts prevented his attainment of a successful legal career in his homeland; as a consequence he traveled to South Africa for a slight commission.

The results of that journey changed his views, his life, and our world, forever.

The rank racism and writhing injustice of South African society sparked Gandhi into a career of peaceful yet rigid resistance against political and social oppression. He searched for fuel for his struggles; he found it in traditional Hindu philosophy, but also in Western ideals of equality and brotherly love; Gandhi had the audacity to insist the British empire live up to its ethos of equality, liberty, and self-government. As Gandhi fought South African injustice, he fused his influences into a wholly unique and inimitable outlook. And with that new outlook, he turned his gaze back to British India. Heeding his 'inner voice,' he reinvented Indian customs regarding family and marriage, and wholly devoted himself to the causes of a nascent Indian nation. He spurned modernization in favor of communalism, and pushed back against both capitalist and socialist economic policies. Throughout his life, Gandhi created symbolic images that riveted the imagination of the world: the furious bonfires of South African registration cards, the simple rotations of a wooden spinning-wheel, and a pilgrimage for salt on the shores of the village Dandi in defiance of British law. He ultimately perished at the end of an assassin's gun, itself an image suggesting humanity's rejection of Gandhi's pious obsession with non-violent satyagraha--truth force.

Judith Brown's biography expertly evokes the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian nationalist leader and multi-faceted genius who introduced a new sense of social reform, political opposition, and spiritual idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. The book charts Gandhi's intellectual, political, and spiritual development throughout his life, cradle to grave. In the process she unveils not only a uniquely powerful leader, but one caught in the maelstrom of rapidly evolving and modernizing political and social environments. She thus provides a complex interpretation of her subject's mind and times. 

Brown's Gandhi chose his political actions with a cultivated political instinct; but once he made a choice, he perceived that the Truth of that choice turned the selected action into a religious imperative. And until a greater religious imperative demanded that he take an alternative course of action, the Truth mired him in the political tides that naturally envelop any policy. Most political actors seem beholden to constituencies--but Gandhi was beholden to his soul, which proved no less a master. Thus, Gandhi confounded observers (Linlithgow, Wavell, even sometimes Nehru) as either an idiosyncratic charismatic leader or else a crafty Machiavel; but Brown sketches Gandhi as someone altogether human--someone possessed of a unique and ascetic blend of religion and political philosophy who forged the ultimately uncontrollable consciousness of the Indian nation.

Louis, Wm. Roger. Imperialism: the Robinson and Gallagher controversy. New Viewpoints (1976).                 

While many academic arguments suffer a stillborn-death, others crawl out of their initial environment and cheerfully permeate the field. The arguments of Robinson and Gallagher's Africa and the Victorians decidedly fit the latter category. The debates surrounding their arguments consumed many subsequent volumes, conferences, and journals. To assist in tracking the discussion (and to celebrate its proliferation) Wm. Roger Louis presents Imperialism: the Robinson and Gallagher controversy, a collection of articles and essays that wrestle with the themes of continuity, informal empire, and indigenous-European collaboration. Robinson and Gallagher challenge the notion that the major European powers felt a sudden, dramatic urge to divide and conquer Africa in the late 19th century. Rather, the authors argue that an impulse for economic expansion remained a constant throughout the entire Victorian era. Further, the official character of the expansion shifted between informal and formal empire not because of changing domestic opinion in European states, but because of changing local conditions among indigenous non-European territories. African politics especially determined the character of Victorian political practice, and not the other way around. From the fog of Victorian history, one principle emerges: "It is only when and where informal political means failed to provide the framework of security for British enterprise... that the question of establishing formal empire arose." The arguments of Robinson and Gallagher hold interest for three separate cliques of historians: economic historians, historians of Africa, and historians of generalized European imperialism. It seems that previous historians greatly over-estimated the 'divide and conquer' impulse of the late Victorian era, and incorrectly perceived the mechanics of imperial power. 

Robinson and Gallagher's theme of an incessant and expansionist Victorian spirit attacked the assumptions of economic historians of both the Leninists and free-market variety, both of which assumed that the Victorian political objectives drastically changed in the last decades of the 19th century. The theme of indigenous cooperation challenged the assumptions of African studies in regards to the mechanics of European hegemony. And all the themes together created a picture suggesting that historians of European imperialism greatly over-estimated the 'divide and conquer' aspect of the late Victorian era. As Louis writes, "This is history written with a vengeance."

The debates surrounding Robinson and Gallagher raise many interesting questions: Did industrialization lead to a continuous and constant 'spirit of the age?' Should academic history concern itself with generalized theory? More practically, to what extent should historians consider the influence of individual 'characters' like Disraeli, Gladstone, or Leopold II? Such questions plow the field and keep it fresh for future students of history. Casual readers, however, may have trouble digesting the book's engagement with the particulars of Leninist and liberal economic theory.  

          Why, after centuries of neglect, did Britain and the other European powers rush to appropriate nine-tenths of the African continent within sixteen years? In Africa and the Victorians, Robinson and Gallagher sought to provide a new answer, one that firmly refuted the traditional diagnoses of both the economic historians and the popular imagination. The authors (with the aid of Alice Denny) sought evidence from the records of late-Victorian cabinets and consuls. "If the workings of the mind of government can be deciphered," they argue, "it may then be possible to translate back from the symbols of policy-making into the terms of why the partition really took place." In doing so, they uncovered the workings of what they termed 'the official mind.' They discovered that the Evangelical revival and the rise of secular liberalism construed the spirit of the age, and that the spirit never experienced a sudden shift towards imperialism, but rather armed itself with formal imperialism only when informal efforts faltered against rising African nationalism. The late-Victorians sought, in each case, to safeguard the precious routes to India and the eastern empire. Contrary to the economic historians, simple statistics showed that African markets could not possibly explain the onrush of late Imperialism. Instead, Egyptian nationalism sparked the 1882 Suez intervention, and the Suez intervention in turn sparked the division of Africa. "The so-called imperialism of the late-Victorians began as little more than a defensive response to [indigenous] rebellions... the 'imperialism' of the late-Victorians was not so much the cause as the effect of the African partition." The Europeans, it seems, stumbled (rather than strode) into possession of Africa.

Robinson and Gallagher disagreed with the arguments of the economic historians, but they full-heartedly embraced the 'spirit of abstraction' that accompanies such debates. As a consequence, historic figures like Gladstone and Goldie, Chamberlain and Salisbury, Kitchener and Rosebery peak out from their graves, but never fully come to life. The ideas that inspired them remain mysteriously buried, for the authors offer no intellectual history of Victorian morality and its discontents. Surely such an examination would shed light on how liberalism and Evangelicalism interacted to create the predominate 'spirit of the age' that suffuses Africa and the Victorians as a necessary condition for both formal and informal modes of imperialism. Still, despite the book's brevity and abstractions, it unveils the tension of late-Victorian foreign relations, and provides a fascinating window into the tragi-comedy of imperial foreign policy and its unexpected consequences. 

Though imperialism does not represent one of my research interests, it stands as a dominant theme within the context of British inter-war politics. As a consequence, I necessarily have to understand something about imperialism to speak effectively to British political interests throughout the twentieth century. For that reason, I will post a few book reviews that reflect on British imperialism, particularly the key players involved in Britain's most important colonial holding--India. 

Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Freedom at Midnight. Simon and Schuster, 1975.

In Freedom at Midnight, Collins and Lapierre unveil the story of how thoughtful, intelligent, and willful men brought a negotiated end to an empire, yet unleashed the most massive migration in human history. 

Upon arriving in India in 1947, Viceroy Mountbatten sought a consensus solution for the emplacement of Indian self-rule. "I had to force the pace," he remembered, "[for] we were sitting... on a fused bomb and we didn't know when the bomb would go off." The fuse moved towards an explosive packed with sectarian resentments that might engulf over a fifth of the world's population. Mountbatten sought to leave the subcontinent with all the imperial dignity he could muster. He therefore charmed Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and other Indian political elite into finding a swift solution. As the clock struck midnight on August 15, 1947, those leaders celebrated a historic accomplishment: a bartered transfer of power after hundreds of irrevocable years of colonial experience. The Indian elite smothered the bomb of sectarian strife, but it still went off. Hundreds of thousands perished. 

The book draws to a close after Hindu extremists murder Mahatma Gandhi. Rather than celebrating Gandhi's pious nature, the murderous zealots despised Gandhi as the purveyor of "a coward's philosophy that had vitiated the force and character of the Hindu people." But in the violent season that surrounded Indian independence, it took no courage for the strong to slaughter the weak and helpless. "India was ever a land of extravagant dimensions, and the horror of the Punjab's killings, the abundance of human anguish and suffering that they would produce would not fail that ancient tradition."

Collins and Lapierre present a thoughtful and heartfelt rendering of India's tragic salvation. Their largely successful work contains two irritations. First, the authors suggest the Indian political elite might have better managed the transition to Indian independence. But they present little evidence that historic contingency allowed for any serious alteration of the outcome. Second, they show little empathy for the Eastern concepts of reverence that locked the various factions into cycles of bloodshed; they consider sectarian rivalry as a mere cultural cover for self-interested gain. While that thesis holds a truth, it fails to grapple with the complete complexity of religious psychology. Yet the sweeping power of their epic narrative renders such complaints a marginal matter for academic debate; their biases in no way impede enjoyment of the book. Collins and Lapierre tell a critically important story of power and persuasion, religious faith and political jealousy--and they tell it well.

                                                                      * * * * * *
My task, I suppose, as a writer is to reflect upon how the readings I undertake illuminate or complicate my primary interest as a social scientist--namely, the British use of special operations in the Second World War. 

A few key points emerge from my reading of Freedom at Midnight. First, while I remain an unrepentant admirer of Wavell, the penultimate Viceroy of India, he needed to make way for someone with Mountbatten's charm and energy. Given Wavell's previous use of unorthodox measures in campaigns in the Middle East and Burma, why did he not attempt to attempt unorthodox political maneuvers? His journals make clear that he suffered under a tremendous workload, with little time to think matters over. Further, the Indian civil service, at the time, lacked the ambitious strivers found throughout the British military at the time of the Second World War. If a Wavell does not flag down your car, you never hear about his ideas for Special Night Squads. 

The Second World War eviscerated the Raj's competency as an instrument of British power. It became more and more beholden to domestic Indian industry and wealth. And none of these individuals attempted to intervene with Wavell with particularly bold plans? Prospect theory suggests that I should see Wavell taking risks--but I am of course assuming a domain of losses, when in fact the Viceroyalty represented the highest point of his career from the standpoint of status. It is very difficult to determine whether an individual is in a domain of gains or losses sans highly controlled experimentation. We know how propsect theory works and that it proves useful in many contexts, but it takes a lot of hard work to establish the proper domain in a 'real world' situation. Kurt Weyland and Rose McDermott for example, have established instances in which political leaders opted for risky policy options while stumbling within a the context of a losing situation. Weyland cites examples of this during periods of hyper-inflation in 1990s Latin America [also see his 2004 article]; with the economy spiraling out of control, economists throughout the region pulled the plug on their state-centered economic policies and introduced market liberalization despite a heavy cost to their traditional interests and political networks. In McDermott's case, she established that Jimmy Carter succumbed to risk-taking when attempting to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis; despite slim odds of success, he allowed the military to undertake a risky rescue operation that ended in catastrophe and embarrassment. 

The extremity and uniqueness of these examples suggest how difficult it can be to establish with certainty that a particular cognitive heuristic (or perhaps psychological mechanism) played a role in an individual's decision making at a particular point in time. It's difficult--but not impossible. With practiced discretion, a researcher can apply qualitative methods to establish causal inference so long as the researcher pays close attention to the psychological theory upon which they draw, and rigorously tests the applicability of the theory to a particular case through the objective observation of causal process, juxtaposed against alternative hypotheses.