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Although the decade after World War II saw a surge in tensions between the Soviet Union and the West, it was a time of exquisite peace in Europe. Violence had ceased almost entirely on the continent, and the US, which had emerged from the war with the one economy left standing, focused its treasure and energy on putting Europe back together again.
Asia offered a striking contrast, the Far East in particular. As Ronald H Spector tells us in "A Continent Erupts," the end of World War II marked not a new era of peace in Asia but the point at which wars began afresh. Violent anticolonial conflict broke out in Indonesia and Vietnam—against the Dutch and the French, respectively. And the civil war in China—put on hold from 1937 to 1945, during Japanese occupation—resumed with fratricidal gusto. There was a communist insurgency in British-ruled Malaya and, most salient of all, the invasion of South Korea by a ruthless army from the North.
Mr Spector, a prolific historian and an emeritus professor at George Washington University, cites a New York Times correspondent who reported that the enemy [the singular form makes me conclude the word refers to North Koreans or the Chinese] in Korea fought "with a combination of Oriental fatalism and Communist fanaticism." That particular war lasted three years., but its toxic aftermath persists. The Korean Peninsula is today one of the world's most dangerous flash points. Another is Taiwan, poisoned fruit of a civil war that resulted in victory for the Communists. Both Taiwan and Korea, Mr Spector writes, are part of "the long–term legacy" of a decade of "decolonization, a civil war, and massacre in postwar Asia [which is part of the subtitle]."
In his own words, Mr Spector's book is "primarily, though not entirely, a military history." Among the gory details he doesn't spare us are the death counts from the wars in Asia that were fought 1945-55. It will astonish readers to learn that 2,500,000 combatants died in the Chinese Civil War. The French war in Indochina, in the early 1950s, resulted in the deaths of 400,000 soldiers on both sides. Twice that amount perished in the Korean War. At least 50,000 died in Indonesia's war of the independence in the late 1940s. Estimates of civilian casualties vary greatly, but there is general agreement, Mr Spector says, that eight to 16 million people died in China, five million in Korea and 300,000 in Indonesia. (Frustratingly, he doesn't give us a number for Vietnam.)
The US was largely unprepared for these conflicts, some of which took place in colonies that imperial Japan had seized from European powers during World War II and turned into members of the so-called Greater East AsiaCo-Prosperity Sphere. Though the French and Dutch assured the US that the natives would welcome back their former colonial masters, the Asian natimnalist resistance persuaded Washington that a resurrection of the imperial system was a bad idea. After its own flirtation with colonialism in Asia, the US had ceded independence to the Philippines on July 4, 1946. "America buried imperialism here today," Gen Douglas MacArthur remarked. Yet American diplomats failed to persuade European powers to adopt the "Philippine model."
America's instinctive anticolonialism, however, was to butt heads with an ideological counterforce in Vietnam. Mr Spector tells us that no one in Washington was "willing to provoke a quarrel" with France over Indochina by insisting that it let go of its rebellious colony. The demand for independence, after all, was led by the communist Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh movement. As the Cold War took shape, the US became more inclined to tolerate outmoded colonial methods as the price of shutting communists out of power. In fact, so profound was America's anticommunism that the US became a major military supplier to the French (light tanks, howitzers, B-26 bombers) -- colonialism be damned. French planes, Mr Spector says, used American-made napalm bombs against againbst the Viet Minh, a foretaste of America's own actions in Vietnam in the next decade. He quotes a Vietnamese soldier's description of these bombs: "All of a sudden hell opens in front of my eyes." The Viet Minh, armed by the Chinese, had access to weapons left behind by the defeated Japanese army, but they were no match, in materiel, for the French. As Gen Vo Nouyen Giap wrote in his memoirs (cited by Mr Spector), it was not until 1950 that the Viet Minh were able to eliminate spears from the armament of their "first line" regiments. Even so, French lost the war.
Mr Spector's book, true to its word, is rich with battle detail. He overdoses the play-by-play in places, particularly in his sections on the Chinese Civil War. To take but one example: "While the Seventh Army Group had been engaged at Nienchuang, and the Xuzhou relief force was bogged down in its futile efforts, Deng Xiaoping's Central Plains Field Army had captured Suxian in three days of fighting." The sections on the Korean War, by contrast, are almost sprightly, as are Mr Spector's accounts of the French in Vietnam, where aristocratic generals -- used to châteaus back home -- treated themselves to a life that was a touch too sybaritic for wartime.
It is amusing to learn that the multinational force fighting on behalf of the South Koreans was a victualer's nightmare: The Turks (described as "ferocious" fighters) couldn't eat pork and wanted more bread than was logistically convenient; the Greeks needed lamb at all costs; the Indian troops were largely vegetarian. And it is shocking to learn from Mr Spector that not a single US soldier spoke Korean. American newsmen labeled the American military administration in South Korea "government by interpreter" -- with the linguistic middlemen being, ironically, drawn from the ranks of Korea's erstwhile Japanese rulers. The interpreters were also, often, wealthy Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese occupiers. Any difficulty the ordinary South Koreans faced as a result of the occupation paled in comparison with the everyday experience north of teh 38th Parallel, where the Soviets were in control. Soviet soldiers indulged in rape so frequently that North Korean womenm Mr Spector tells us, began disquising themselves as men to avoid Red Army predators.
There is engrossing color in Mr Spector's accounts of the Chinese Nationalist descent on Taiwan, whose natives reacted to Gen Chiang Kai-shek's defeated army with contempt. Not only were his men corrupt and unkempt, as opposed to the stylish Taiwanese, who had lived *and often third) under the Japanese; they were also uncouth in their mainland-Chinese manners, spitting everywhere in public. Chinese officers, writes Mr Spector, were "laughed at and snubbed in restaurants by upper-class Taiwanese."
As their resentment against the Chinese incomers grew, the Taiwanese resorted to strikes and violent protests. The Chinese soldiers reacted with fury, bludgeoning the Taiwanese into submission Young men, writes Mr Spector, were castrated; soldiers broke into homes and shot the first person they encountered. This crushing of Taiwanese happened in February 1947. Seventy-five [sic] years later, it's likely that memories of that day -- when the people of Taiwan were set upon by the brutes from the mainland -- still inform the fear of an island that faces the threat of war with China. In Taiwan, as in the rest of Southeast Asia, the perils of a violent past live on in the present.
Mr Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
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发表于 9-17-2022 11:24:08
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