Western military powers in East Asia

There are important lessons to be learnt in the Malayan campaign, and it is an essential part of the history lessons for Singaporean students including myself, I grew up in Singapore.

The larger picture of these wars should also be told: it was possible for the British (and Australians and New Zealanders) to have avoided defeat at the hands of the Japanese. I wonder how that would have changed the history of the war. Because of the brutality of the Japanese, we were used to thinking of them as the bad guys, while the British were relatively benign. But the Japanese were also, not without reason, seeing themselves as liberating Asians from western rule. When I read the history books, I saw that there was co-operation between the Japanese and the anti-British Indians. (Strangely enough, Japan and India, who were conspiring against the Western Powers during WW2, would many years later be allied with them as members of the Quad.)

It is useful to think of southeast Asia during WW2 as being in a very similar situation to the Ottoman empire and the Balkans: just as WW1 had obliterated the Austro Hungarian and Ottoman empires, and caused the downfall of the Russian monarchy, WW2 would obliterate the British, French and Dutch empires in southeast Asia.

The outcome of the wars involving western powers in East Asia are as follows:

Japan defeated the British in Singapore / Malaya / southeast Asia.

Japan defeated the French in Vietnam (or rather some annexation took place)

Japan defeated the Dutch in Indonesia in WW2

Japan and China were fighting throughout WW2

Japan and British were fighting in Burma throughout WW2

The USA, with the only incident of nuclear weapons used in combat so far, defeated Japan

Indonesians defeated the Dutch and British in the war of independence after 1945.

The Korean War was fought to a stalemate and standstill which continues today. North Korea is a permanent buffer zone between US armed forces in South Korea and NE China. This was a proxy war between the US and China / USSR.

Vietnamese defeated the French in the 1950s.

Britain and Malaysia defeated the communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s

The US were defeated in the Vietnam War.

The record suggests that western powers will find it very hard to achieve military victories in East Asia. However, during the Cold War, authoritarian regimes in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea helped to keep those countries friendly to US and the West.

The bigger picture I am suggesting is that: you could analyse the Malayan campaign and point out this or that thing that the British could have done to improve the performance against the Japanese. But was there any alternate history where the British could have defended Malaya, and then held onto it indefinitely, or was the end of the British empire in southeast Asia inevitable? Seen from certain angles, the fighting in SE Asia in WW2 is actually part of a larger series of wars of independence for several countries in the region, against the British, French, Dutch, Japanese and even American empires.

What was the role that the locals played in these military campaigns? The Malaya and Singapore campaign was a very big turning point in the history of Singapore because it was the last major military conflict where the locals had little or no part to play. In the wars that followed, in Indonesia, Malayan campaign, Vietnam war, Korean war, the locals played decisive roles. In our histories, the Japanese occupation and the Malayan campaign in WW2 are portrayed as a call to arms: no more shall the fate of Singaporeans and Malaysians depend solely on the whims of our overlords.

All these histories will have resonances when we look forwards in time to the next conflicts that are brewing in our seas: the impending conflicts in the south China sea, in Taiwan, in the Japan sea and the Senkaku islands. We will be asking the same questions: the large Eastern states, the Western powers and the smaller Asian countries will be involved. The conflicts will be part proxy wars, and in part locals deciding which foreign powers they will side with.