Search Results

This chapter begins a month after the previous chapter, on July, 6, 1945, as President Truman, Admiral Leahy, and Secretary of State James Byrnes departed Washington by train, and then by cruiser USS Augusta, heading for Antwerp, Belgium. The formalization for Japanese surrender was finally to begin. American hatred of the Japanese emperor was balanced by a more generalized desire on the part of most Americans to return to peacetime pursuits. Americans were looking past the surrender of Japan and thinking about life after the war. However, the chapter argues, it wasn’t going to be as cut and dried as that. The chapter provides evidence for the subtleties that existed in the debate in political circles.

MacArthur's successful landing on Leyte meant that he had returned to the Philippines two years and seven months after his infamous withdrawal from Corregidor in March 1942. After setting up a military base at Tacloban on Leyte's northeast coast, he moved around battlefields to free the entire Philippines from Japanese control. For MacArthur, retaking the Philippines was directed at securing a geographically important base for the advance on Japan. At a deeper level, however, it was also designed to wipe out the indignity of having deserted his men when he withdrew from Corregidor. The chapter discusses the advance toward Manila; the recapture of Bataan and Corregidor; the de-Japanization and democratization of the Philippines; the rise of Colonel Courtney Whitney; Japanese surrender; and arrival of a delegation from Japan on August 19, 1945, to discuss the surrender ceremony.

This chapter accounts for the Indian experience in Singapore from July 1943 to the Japanese surrender in August 1945. It examines the impact of Subhas Chandra Bose’s leadership of the Indian Independence Movement in East Asia and the factors that explained why so many Indian civilians in Singapore joined the Movement at this juncture. Concomitantly, the chapter historicises lesser known aspects of the Indian experience, including the effect of deteriorating economic conditions; forced labour on the infamous Thai-Burma ‘Death’ Railway; and Japanese-initiated projects to resettle Indians in neighbouring Riau. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the Indian experience during the Occupation, and the longer term implications of the episode on the socio-political development of the diaspora in the port city.

Chapter 7 focuses on the challenges during the Korean occupation. The US occupation of Korea clearly demonstrated the limitations of the army’s occupation methods when confronted with a situation and environment both more complex and more alien than what the army experienced in Germany and Austria. Events during the Korean occupation also revealed the disconnection between long-term political goals that the American government presumably espoused and the military instrument meant to foster those goals. The army administered military government in accordance with its own doctrinal principles and organization. This was evident in the planning for military government, which focused nearly exclusively on Japan and little on Korea, and in the division of Korea into two zones of occupation along the thirty-eighth parallel, a militarized decision that had little overarching political rationale. The occupation was complicated by the lack of specific training provided to the military government units that performed the occupation and by the lack of political experience and skill demonstrated by the US military proconsul, Gen. John Hodge.

On August 15, BBC. announced the news of the Japanese surrender. Although the citizens of Macao felt triumphant, they obeyed the orders of the government to restrain on public celebrations until the ban was lifted. Macao’s isolation was officially over with the arrival of the first British ship. The newspapers had high praises for what Reeves had done in providing relief to refugees of Allied nations. Macao sent food and money to Hong Kong. The Japanese handed their Consulate as well as their property over and the memoir ends with Reeves leaving Macao.

The Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in September 1945 exemplified so much about the Pacific War and how it had been reported, from the large number of reporters who were finally in the theater to MacArthur’s effort to dominate the show. For once, the army and navy stood side by side without too much tension, but during the war competition between them had often shaped how the home front had received news from the battlefield. Tension had emerged between the services and the reporters as well, while veteran reporters had often evinced a deep disdain for those they considered dilettante interlopers. Conflict was therefore a hallmark of media-military relations during the Pacific War, but in the final analysis the media invariably acted as an important unifying voice, creating a shared narrative about the war that was rarely questioned by partisan politicians.