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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Nov 23, 2013 22:50:23 GMT

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Post by Admin on Nov 23, 2013 22:50:23 GMT

Japan’s imperial ambitions in East Asia inexorably collided with Western interests in the region, and Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany, though of little operational significance, further alienated the Western powers. The Pacific War arose out of Japan’s aggression in Southeast Asia, which was presaged by its occupation of southern Indochina in July 1941.

Had Tokyo confined its aggression to Northeast Asia, it almost certainly could have avoided war with Britain and the United States, neither of which was prepared to go to war over China. The U.S. insistence, after Japanese forces moved into southern Indochina, that Japan evacuate China as well as Indochina, as a condition for the restoration of trade relations, thus made no sense as a means of dissuading the Japanese from moving south. On the contrary, the demand that Japan quit China killed any prospect of a negotiated alternative to Japan’s conquest of Southeast Asia (e.g., restored trade in exchange for Japan’s withdrawal from Indochina). In effect, the United States went to war over China rather than Southeast Asia—a volte-face of enormous strategic consequence since it propelled the United States into a war with Japan over a remote country for which the United States had never been prepared to fight. The fate of China, even of Southeast Asia, did not engage core U.S. security interests, especially at a time when Europe’s fate hung in the balance. A war with Japan was, of course, a war the United States was always going to win, but Japan was not the enemy the Roosevelt administration wanted to fight. The United States could have settled its accounts with Japan after Hitler’s defeat had been assured. Was denying Japan an expanded empire in Southeast Asia more important, in 1941, than defeating Hitler?

The roots of Japan’s decision for war with the United States were economic and reputational. The termination of U.S. trade with Japan that followed Roosevelt’s freezing of Japanese assets in July 1941 threatened to destroy Japan economically and militarily. A small, resource-poor, and overpopulated island state, Japan in the 1930s sought economic self-sufficiency and great power status via the acquisition of empire—just as Great Britain had done. (The United States could preach about the evils of imperialism and “spheres of influence” because, as a huge, resource-rich, continental state, it had no need for an overseas colonial empire; nor was its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere effectively challenged by other great powers. Indeed, the Japanese viewed the Monroe Doctrine as justification for their imperial ambitions.) Kenneth Pyle, in his masterful assessment of modern Japan’s behavior in the evolving international system, identifies “a persistent obsession with status and prestige—or, to put it in terms Japanese would more readily recognize, rank and honor.”122 From the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, “Japan strove and struggled for status as a great power. Other countries in Asia were aware of their backwardness, but nowhere else was this awareness so intense and so paramount that it drove a people with such singleminded determination. It became a national obsession to be the equal of the world’s great powers.”123 A fusion of state-centered honor and popular nationalism occurred in Japan that prompted “an instinctive need for recognition of its status in the hierarchy of nations, and the values of hierarchy provided a behavioral norm that focused and intensified the realist drive for national power. Establishment of Japan’s honor, of its reputation for power in relation to other nations, became a goal sanctioned by inherited values and and norms.”124

Yet the end result of this drive for power, honor, and reputation was Japan’s complete destruction and subsequent occupation by the United States. There can be no justification for a foreign policy that consciously propels a state into a war against an inherently undefeatable enemy. By the late 1930s, a fatal abyss had opened between Japan’s imperial ambitions and its material capacity to fulfill them. Japan simply did not have the resources to police Korea and Manchuria, conquer China, invade Southeast Asia, and defeat the United States in the Pacific. Japan lacked the necessary industrial strength, and what modest manufacturing base it did possess critically depended on imported oil and other commodities from the United States. Indeed, Japan’s expanding war on the Asian mainland made it more dependent on imported U.S. commodities and finished goods. Japanese leaders refused to recognize the limits of Japan’s power, despite the warnings of Nomohan and a continuing war in China they could never bring to a satisfactory conclusion. The very fact that Japanese leaders would consider sequential wars with the United States and the Soviet Union at a time when Japan was already militarily overstretched in China testifies to a fatal blindness to the strategic necessity of maintaining some reasonable harmony between political ambitions and military capacity. Like the Germans in both world wars, the Japanese seemed to believe that superior prowess at the operational level of war could and would—somehow—redeem reckless strategic decisions.125 And again like the Germans, the Japanese, in the celebration of their own nationalism, were utterly insensitive to the nationalism of others.

Honor may have dictated the Japanese decision for war in 1941, but “suicide before dishonor” was a policy choice the Japanese might have avoided had Tokyo been willing and able to temper its imperial ambitions and accept some measure of economic dependence on the United States. For Japan, the prosperous and relatively democratic 1920s and the postwar decades as an economic powerhouse and ally of the United States demonstrate 20th-century possibilities other than the path of autarky through aggression. The 1930s and 1940s were a tragic and—for Japan’s victims—murderous detour from what might have been—and later was. For Japan in the 20th century, good relations with the United States were always a prerequisite for a secure Japan, whereas war with the United States was always going to be a disaster.

Still, it cannot be denied that, in threatening Japan’s economic destruction (and consequent military impoverishment), the United States placed the Japanese in a position in which the only choices open to them were war or subservience. “Never inflict upon another major military power a policy which would cause you yourself to go to war unless you are fully prepared to engage that power militarily,” cautions Roland Worth, Jr., in his No Choice But War: The United States Embargo against Japan and the Eruption of War in the Pacific. “And don’t be surprised that if they do decide to retaliate, that they seek out a time and a place that inflicts maximum harm and humiliation upon your cause.”126 Roosevelt called the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor “unprovoked.” Was it?

Record, Jeffrey. Japan's decision for war in 1941: some enduring lessons. Strategic Studies Institute, 2009.

Last Edit: Nov 24, 2013 5:16:57 GMT by Admin

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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Nov 25, 2013 0:37:34 GMT

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Post by Admin on Nov 25, 2013 0:37:34 GMT

Year Zero: A History of 1945. By Ian Buruma. Penguin Press, 2013, 384 pp. $29.95.

For decades, World War II suffused the hearts and minds of the American generation that experienced it as “the good war,” in which Allied virtue eventually triumphed over fascist evil. Today, Western societies are mature enough to adopt a more nuanced perspective. There remains no doubt that “our side” deserved to win; terrible consequences would have befallen the world following an Axis victory. But the Allied cause was morally compromised by the need to enlist the services of Joseph Stalin’s tyranny in order to defeat the forces of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo.

A French woman has her head shaved as punishment for consorting with the Germans, Montelimar area, France, August 29, 1944.

Moreover, in almost every belligerent society, there were profound fissures and differences of attitude toward the rival powers, often reflecting splits between left- and right-wing opinion. Many people in France, for instance, disliked and feared communism more than fascism and shared the Nazis’ distaste for Jews. Even when it became plain that the Nazis were conducting an unprecedented persecution of the Jewish people, many people around the world, Americans included, displayed little sympathy for their plight and certainly refused to tolerate a large influx of Jewish refugees -- even to save their lives.

The United States and the United Kingdom celebrated V-E Day in May 1945 and then V-J Day three months later with unparalleled exuberance. In their eyes, the end of the struggles with Germany and Japan represented closure: the dawning of peace, the resumption of what passed for normality, and the lifting of fear and the threat of violence. But for tens of millions of others around the world, there was no such happy ending, nor even an early prospect of one. In formerly occupied nations, divisions were brutally exposed and recriminations indulged. Summary justice or often injustice was imposed on those who had picked the wrong side. In imperial possessions, of which British India was the largest, new struggles began in efforts to secure independence from colonial mastery, provoking sustained turbulence. And in the vanquished states, people scrabbled for existence amid starvation and humiliation.

Ian Buruma seeks to tell this sweeping story in Year Zero: A History of 1945. His book’s most substantial merit is its grasp of the moral, social, and political confusions that pervaded every nation following the war. How could Germans, for instance, recover their self-respect when so many German women had been raped by the Red Army and their men had failed the most basic of all tests of masculinity, that of warriorhood? Meanwhile, France was riven. Buruma quotes the British historian Tony Judt’s observation about both the French Resistance and the Vichy collaborators. “Their main enemy, more often than not, was each other,” Judt wrote. “The Germans were largely absent.” In almost every society affected by the war, factional rivalries, tensions, and hatreds overlaid the confrontation between the Allies and the Axis. Buruma has much to say about the shifting sands of loyalties as the Nazi and Japanese empires collapsed and the dominions of the old European imperialist powers tottered.

When the Japanese were told that it was no longer appropriate to worship their emperor, many decided instead to worship General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. occupation, although Buruma shows MacArthur to have been an even less suitable object of veneration than Emperor Hirohito. The Allied war crimes court at Nuremberg included among its presiding judges one of the Soviets who had conducted Stalin’s show trials. No wonder most of mankind found the world in 1945 even more bewildering than it had been during six years of brutal war.

MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR

Buruma, a Dutch journalist and academic who teaches in the United States, opens Year Zero with some family history: the liberation of his father, a former law student, after two years as a forced laborer in Germany. He had refused to sign a loyalty oath to the Nazi government of the occupied Netherlands. Buruma draws on his father’s experiences to make the point that violence did not stop when the Nazis surrendered. Since the Allies lacked the troops to supervise the defeated German units that remained in the Netherlands, for several weeks they allowed German officers to hold on to their weapons and their authority. The results were predictable. On May 13, for example, less than a week after V-E Day, the Germans enjoyed the privilege of executing two deserters in Amsterdam: anti-Nazis, one of whom had had a Jewish mother and had foolishly supposed it was safe to emerge from hiding. In France, the settling of scores between embittered factions caused the executions of thousands during the so-called épuration légale, or “legal purge,” the cleansing of Vichy society.

But the period wasn’t entirely grim. One less violent way that the newly liberated societies celebrated their freedom was with unprecedented sexual promiscuity, much of which involved the hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers suddenly idled by the end of the war. One French woman quoted by Buruma, Benoite Groult, extolled the perceived physical beauty of Americans as compared with the pallid charms of her own countrymen and gave thanks for the liberators’ ability to provide food along with sex. Lying under one GI’s body, she wrote later, was like sleeping with a whole continent, “and you can’t refuse a continent.”

Of course, all this sex came with consequences. In Paris, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases in 1945 rose to five times its 1939 level. In the Netherlands, illegitimate births tripled. But there were other side effects as well. Buruma says it is no coincidence that most European societies soon felt obliged to enfranchise women who had already empowered themselves in other respects. “Postwar conditions upset the old order,” he writes. “Women were no longer under male control. Perhaps that was their greatest sin.”

In Germany, the end of the war introduced what every occupied country in Europe had experienced in varying degrees during the war: hunger. Germans only really started to suffer from it in May 1945; before that, Hitler had ruthlessly starved the continent to feed his own people. Germans responded to the new privations in various ways, including the development of a black market that thrived for years to come, enriching more than a few Allied soldiers, as well as native traders. Polish peasants dug in the ashes of Treblinka in search of gold teeth that had belonged to slaughtered Jews. In many places, cigarettes became a more useful currency than bank notes.

JUDGMENT DAY

Meanwhile, the Holocaust, as it is perceived today, was still little understood in 1945. Appalled by what they found in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, British soldiers assumed that it represented the worst Nazism could do; they did not realize that Bergen-Belsen was not even an extermination camp, where conditions were even more dire. The Allies did not know how to deal with the camps’ eight million inhabitants, refugees who had been uprooted from their homes and societies and whom the Allies now gathered in displaced persons camps, some of which offered conditions little better than those the refugees had experienced under the Nazis.

Some historians have criticized the way in which many of those people were relocated. Buruma approaches the controversy with nuance and explains its context. The British government, for example, has been maligned over the past nearly 70 years for forcibly repatriating Soviet soldiers and refugees to the Soviet Union at the war’s end, where many faced imprisonment or execution under Stalin. But the British feared that if they balked, Stalin would halt the repatriation of thousands of former British prisoners of war who remained in Soviet hands. Furthermore, most of those the British sent back had been captured in German uniform, making them doubtful candidates for pity.

Many who today pass harsh judgments on the Allied governments’ mistakes both during and after the war fail to understand the muddle, ignorance, moral exhaustion, and practical difficulties faced by those in charge in London and Washington. Many of the Cossacks sent back to Stalin, for example, who have inspired widespread Western sympathy in the past few decades, were responsible for horrific war crimes in Italy and Yugoslavia while wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. There was no right or wrong decision about their repatriation, only an intractable judgment call.

Across Europe, efforts to come to terms with the war’s other atrocities were no less compromised. In Germany, “denazification” was a clumsy, halfhearted process. Self-pity, rather than guilt, dominated the emotions of Hitler’s former followers, encouraged by the physical devastation inflicted by Allied bombing. The war crimes trials at Nuremberg, which started in November 1945, swiftly lost their capacity to shock and descended into a parade of “the banality of evil,” in the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s phrase. The British writer Rebecca West described the courtroom at the Palace of Justice as “a citadel of boredom,” and so it seemed to many of her fellow spectators.

As Buruma observes, although some minor war criminals were executed, many big fish, especially industrialists, escaped punishment. Only several hundred essentially symbolic capital sentences were carried out, and sometimes for dubious reasons. Buruma notes the case of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, “the Tiger of Malaya,” who was hanged for inflicting military humiliations on MacArthur in the Philippines, rather than for his doubtful personal guilt on war crimes charges.

Part of the problem was that if strict justice had been meted out in Germany and Japan, hundreds of thousands of punitive executions would have been required, which nobody had the stomach for. On Stalin’s jocular 1943 proposal to shoot 50,000 German officers, Buruma writes, “Stalin had a point. Even if there is no such thing as collective guilt, there are far more guilty people than can possibly be tried. But justice must be seen to be done.” There was also the large practical issue that if all collaborators were removed from their posts in bureaucracies, industries, or utilities, the machinery of society would grind to a halt: “Punishment of the guilty had to be balanced by other interests. Too much zeal would have made the rebuilding of societies impossible.”

In most former Axis-occupied nations, the Allies favored restoring to power conservative politicians and industrialists, many of whom had collaborated enthusiastically with their occupiers, even as left-wing forces continued to fight and lead new resistance after the war. In the Philippines, Huk guerrillas who had fought the Japanese were driven back into the jungle, from where they then fought the new government installed by the Allies. In Greece, a civil war pitting communists against a conservative administration backed by the British and the Americans raged for four years.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Allied commander of Southeast Asia, begged the authorities in The Hague not to try to restore a colonial administration in the Dutch East Indies, but he was ignored. As a result, as also occurred in French Indochina, the liberators found themselves fighting fierce battles with nationalists, in which Japanese troops participated on both sides. On November 10, 1945, Allied aircraft bombed and strafed the East Indies city of Surabaya after nationalists killed a British brigadier. In Saigon, during the autumn, defeated Japanese troops opened their armories to the Vietminh nationalists. Some of Hirohito’s officers joined their ranks either from conviction -- “Asia for the Asians” -- or to escape war crimes prosecutions.

In September, thousands of Vietnamese armed with knives, spears, and machetes spontaneously attacked French people where they found them. The waiters at Hanoi’s grand Metropole Hotel assaulted French guests in their rooms and barricaded them in the dining room. An orgy of violence and counterviolence ensued, which progressively degenerated into the all-out war that continued for almost a decade and ended with France’s expulsion from Indochina.

PIONEERING FOR PEACE

Buruma’s book reflects his character as a writer: humane, perceptive, and whimsical. Buruma focuses on some people, places, and issues that catch his interest, while saying little or nothing about others. He ignores Spain, where Francisco Franco was permitted to sustain a brutal fascist dictatorship to serve the West’s new conveniences in the Cold War. He says little about the Soviet Union’s campaign of murder and oppression in Poland and Ukraine to suppress dissent against Stalin’s new imperialism. And much of the material Buruma cites is already familiar to students of the period. He offers only an introduction to the huge issues he identifies, rather than a comprehensive narrative or analysis.

Still, Buruma conveys a powerful sense of the horror and chaos of 1945, especially in Europe. He writes movingly, as when he discusses Sir Brian Urquhart, a British wartime army intelligence officer who went on to become one of the guiding spirits of the United Nations. Urquhart helps Buruma illustrate how 1945, for all its horrors and disappointments, was also  a time of hope and purpose for many idealists. “It is hard to recapture the freshness and enthusiasm of those pioneering days,” Buruma quotes Urquhart recounting. “The war was still vivid in everyone’s mind and experience. Many of us had been in the armed forces, and others had only emerged from underground resistance movements a few months before. To work for peace was a dream fulfilled, and the fact that everything had to be organized from scratch was an additional incentive.”

Buruma ends his narrative as he opens it, with his family. He and his sister went to Berlin on New Year’s Eve in 1989 to celebrate at the Berlin Wall with their father, who had been in that city 44 years earlier as a forced laborer. They lost one another in the rejoicing crowd, and only many hours later did Buruma’s father reappear at their hotel, his face bandaged: “Round about the stroke of midnight,” the son writes, “pretty much on the same spot where my father once had to dodge British bombs, Stalin Organs [Katyusha rockets], and German sniper fire, a firecracker found its way to him and hit him right between the eyes.” Buruma tells a story of horrors and tragic disappointments, but this note of humanity defines his book.

www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140166/max-hastings/the-spoils-of-war

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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Dec 16, 2013 1:55:46 GMT

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Post by Admin on Dec 16, 2013 1:55:46 GMT

Professor Matthew Johnson spoke about "Wartime Origins of China's Propaganda State" on August 6. Matthew Johnson is the Assistant Professor of East Asian History at Grinnell College, and is faculty chair (interim) of the Peace Studies Program.

Rana Mitter (Oxford University) began the workshop with a presentation on the importance of history in shaping East Asian modernity, as well as on the vital role played by the Hoover Institution’s modern China collections in formulating new connections between the past and present in China. Using the Sino-Japanese war (1937–45) Mitter argued that the ghosts of the war with Japan have not yet been laid to rest in China, with Chinese leaders still calling on that past war as a stick with which to beat their neighbor. How China will deal with its old enemy will be crucial in shaping the region in the twenty-first century. Mining Hoover’s rich historical holdings, Mitter avers, will be an important step toward understanding the complex issues involved.

Looking back to the origins of China’s propaganda state during World War II, Matthew Johnson (Grinnell College) demonstrated how state-society relations, market forces, and China’s diverse socioeconomic and physical terrain helped shape state propaganda, extend its reach, make it possible for the Chinese Communist Party to achieve its policy goals. The Hoover Archives houses rich collections related to the above complex and important issues, including the Poster Collection, the Zhongguo Gong Chan Dang Issuances, the Jan Rowinski Collection, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution Collection.

Professor Rana Mitter spoke about "China's Wartime History and Contemporary East Asia" on August 5. Mitter is a professor of the history and politics of modern China and a fellow at Saint Cross College, University of Oxford.

Mitter discussed the importance of Hoover's modern China collections to shaping East Asian modernity, as well as the vital role Hoover's historical treasures have played in forming new connections between the past and present in China. Rana Mitter's forthcoming book, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-45, carefully researched and explored some of Hoover's unique collections, including the personal papers of Nym Wales and T.V. Soong, the personal diaries of Chiang Kai-shek, and the records of Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) to illuminate how the Sino-Japanese war helped create modern China and how the circumstances of that war made the concept of the nation, as well as personal identification with it, urgent and meaningful for the Chinese people. The ghosts of the war with Japan have still not been laid to rest in China, with Chinese leaders using the past as a stick with which to beat their neighbor. How China, now in a position of strength, will deal with its old enemy will be crucial to shaping the region in the twenty-first century. Mining Hoover's rich historical holdings, Mitter avers, will be an important step toward understanding the complex issues involved.

Last Edit: Jan 13, 2014 7:17:40 GMT by Admin

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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Dec 29, 2013 16:55:12 GMT

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Post by Admin on Dec 29, 2013 16:55:12 GMT

A pre-war Guardian correspondent who exposed the notorious Nanjing massacre by Japan's occupation army in China in 1937 has become the target of Japanese historians seeking to prove that it never took place. Harold Timperley, the China correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (the newspaper's original name), chronicled the massacre in his dispatches from Shanghai and in a widely read book, The Japanese terror in China. His cables reporting the massacre were censored by Japanese officials in Shanghai, provoking a diplomatic protest.

The record of burials, said one observer quoted by Timperley, showed that "close to 40,000 unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of Nanjing, of whom some 30% had never been soldiers." Timperley, an Australian journalist who had worked for the Guardian in China since 1928, was known for being dedicated to his work and fighting injustice. In Shanghai he organised medical aid for hundreds of apprentices who worked without pay in industrial sweatshops. He urged help for the families of refugees from the Japanese invasion who were sleeping in alleyways "with only a thin ragged cotton blanket as protection".

The revisionist scholars accuse Timperley of inventing an improbably high total of 300,000 civilian deaths: the figure now used officially in China for the Nanjing massacre. The controversy about the number is then used to cast doubt on whether a massacre occurred at all. But evidence found in the Guardian archives shows that Timperley used this figure to refer to the much larger number of civilian deaths throughout the Yangtze valley, rather than claiming that it was the death total for Nanjing alone.

Timperley's telegram regarding the Nanking Massacre, intercepted and decoded by the Americans

In a crucial cable - the first of three censored by the Japanese in Shanghai - he wrote on January 16 1938: "a survey by one competent foreign observer indicates [that] in [the] Yangtze delta no less than 300,000 Chinese civilians [have been] slaughtered, [in] many cases [in] cold blood." The cable was copied by the Japanese foreign office to its embassies, warning them to expect criticism of the massacre. But Timperley's reference to the Yangtze delta was omitted, and this misleading version is the one which has been misquoted ever since.

What War Means: the Japanese terror in China. A documentary record. Compiled and edited by H. J. Timperley

Timperley's book, far from being "commissioned" by the Chinese intelligence service, as some Japanese scholars now insinuate, was prompted by members of the "international committee" of foreigners in Nanjing. It was they who asked him to cover other massacres in the delta area as well. "We feel that there is a certain moral necessity to make known the terrible facts," a missionary, Miner Searle Bates, wrote. The book would help to "impress a distant public with the brutality of warfare waged as this one has been".

Timperley had, not surprisingly, developed close professional links with officials in the nationalist government during his work in China. The Guardian archives show that although he was critical of Chiang Kai-shek's "one-man-band" style of authoritarian rule, he was impressed by the "spirit of patience and fortitude" shown by the ordinary Chinese citizen. Timperley helped to set up a neutral "safety zone" in Shanghai with the support of local Japanese friends, which provided refuge for thousands of Chinese. Many other foreign correspondents felt sympathy for China in the face of what was seen as brutal aggression. Timperley left journalism to become an adviser to the Chinese ministry of information in 1939, but continued to be consulted by the editor of the Guardian, WP Crozier.

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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Feb 13, 2014 23:04:59 GMT

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Post by Admin on Feb 13, 2014 23:04:59 GMT

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the Japanese had promised them. Neither Communism nor Islam much appealed to the nationalists, who were led by Achmed Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta. Sukarno, the son of a school-teacher and Theosophist, had little time for religion or ideology and believed himself a man of destiny. He had been imprisoned and exiled by the Dutch. So had Hatta, a Sumatran with a Rotterdam University degree in economics. Both had collaborated with the Japanese and helped to organise a Japanese-backed Indonesian army.

Equipped with Japanese weapons, the nationalists waged an armed struggle against the Dutch, who had powerful economic reasons for recovering the East Indies and believed that most Indonesians wanted them to return. Dutch forces made substantial headway in Java and Sumatra, but there was fierce criticism in the United Nations, and the United States pressed for a negotiated solution. Eventually a conference of 120 delegates assembled at The Hague in August 1949 under the chairmanship of the Dutch prime minister, Willem Drees. The nationalist delegates were skilfully led by Hatta. On November 2nd, after ten weeks of haggling, the conference reached an agreement which transferred Dutch sovereignty to the United States of Indonesia, with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands as titular head of a new Netherlands-Indonesian Union, Sukarno as Indonesian president and Hatta as prime minister. The thorny question of Dutch New Guinea (Irian Jaya) was put aside for later. The Dutch released thousands of political prisoners before independence was formally celebrated on December 27th. The new Indonesia, with a population of 78 million on an archipelago approaching 2 million square kilometres of land, immediately became an important factor in the Southwest Pacific.

The occupation of Indonesia by Japan for three and a half years during World War II was a crucial factor in the subsequent revolution. The Netherlands had little ability to defend its colony against the Japanese army, and within only three months of their initial attacks, the Japanese had occupied the Dutch East Indies. In Java, and to a lesser extent in Sumatra (Indonesia's two dominant islands), the Japanese spread and encouraged nationalist sentiment. Although this was done more for Japanese political advantage than from altruistic support of Indonesian independence, this support created new Indonesian institutions (including local neighbourhood organisations) and elevated political leaders such as Sukarno. Just as significantly for the subsequent revolution, the Japanese destroyed and replaced much of the Dutch-created economic, administrative, and political infrastructure.

To gain cooperation from Indonesian population and to prevent resistance to these draconian measures, the Japanese put Sukarno as head of Tiga-A mass organisation movement. On March 1943, the Japanese formed a new organisation called Poesat Tenaga Rakjat (POETERA/ Center of People's Power) under Sukarno, Hatta, Ki Hadjar Dewantara, and KH Mas Mansjoer. The aim of these organisations were to galvanise popular support for recruitment of romusha forced labor, requisitioning of food products, and to promote pro-Japanese and anti-Western sentiments amongst Indonesians. Sukarno coined the term, Amerika kita setrika, Inggris kita linggis ("Let's iron America, and bludgeon the British") to promote anti-Allied sentiments. In later years, Sukarno was lastingly ashamed of his role with the romusha. Additionally, food requisitioning by the Japanese caused widespread famine in Java which killed more than one million people in 1944–1945. In his view, these were necessary sacrifices to be made to allow for future independence of Indonesia.[13] He also was involved with the formation of Pembela Tanah Air (PETA) and Heiho (Indonesian volunteer army troops) via speeches broadcast on the Japanese radio and loud speaker networks across Java and Sumatra. By mid-1945 these units numbered around two million, and were preparing to defeat any Allied forces sent to re-take Java.

Last Edit: Mar 7, 2014 1:45:25 GMT by Admin