One of the most fascinating characters to emerge on the rebel side of the conflict was Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi. I have followed her story for many years, and enjoyed visiting her fort, and palace, at Jhansi. The Rani was one of the first state leaders to decide to side with the rebels. She had every reason to be angry with the EIC. In 1854 Jhansi had suffered from Governor General Lord Dalhousie’s notorious ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ and the old feudal kingdom transferred to the ownership of the Company. This was a policy that insisted that every state without a biological heir (an adopted heir wouldn’t cut it) would ‘lapse’ to the EIC. The Rani’s husband died without leaving a surviving heir and because Dalhousie did not accept the rights of the adopted son the ownership of Jhansi accordingly transferred to the Company. Outrageous? Certainly. It challenged not only accepted Mughal practice, but also the old Hindu law that allowed a ruler to appoint an heir. Neither cut much ice with the EIC. The fact that Dalhousie may have wished to avoid uncertainty or even fratricide or civil war following the death of an heirless feudal leader did not remove the fact that this bureaucratic mechanism to seize power (and therefore income) was a ruthless stratagem for power, storing up (along with the annexation of Oudh, and others) a level of resentment that would one day burst into flames of rebellion and war. In 1854 Lakshmibai thus lost the kingdom in exchange for an EIC pension, losing any chance of being able to hand Jhansi over to an heir of her choosing. She had plenty to be aggrieved about, therefore, and in the recovery of her feudal privileges one can understand her motivation for agreeing first to join the rebellion and then to take a leading role in military opposition to Company rule.

A month after 85 soldiers of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry had refused a lawful order at Meerut to train with the new Lee Enfield rifled musket and its controversial ammunition, she had declared for the rebels. A fascinating dimension to the rebellion was the fact that she had been brought up in the court of the old Maratha Peshwa, Baji Rao II, who had been exiled by the EIC to Bithur, near Cawnpore (Kanpur). One of the Peshwa’s sons was Nana Sahib II, and one of his nephews was Tantia Tope. Each of these individuals played significant roles as military leaders in the rebellion. It cannot have been a coincidence that all three had been raised in the same Maratha household, and were as close as family. It is also interesting to acknowledge that all three were heirs of the now defunct Maratha dynasty, bought to an end in 1818 by the victorious EIC following the Third Anglo-Maratha War. When the Maharajah Nana Sahib II (the British had allowed his father to keep the title, and Nana Sahib assumed it) was invited by the rebels at Cawnpore to be their leader after the mutiny began, he immediately agreed. If Nana Sahib had a grievance against the EIC for the loss of his father’s kingdom and his own inheritance, how much doubly so was it for Lakshmibai, who was grieving the loss not only of her Maratha heritage, but also her Mughal inheritance at Jhansi. Her anger at these losses, and desire for retribution and perhaps revenge, would have been extreme. If these emotions explain something of the killing by Nana Sahib of Europeans at the Satichaura ghat and subsequent slaughter at the Bibighar following the end of the siege at Cawnpore then the killing of the 66 European men, women and children on 8th June at Jokan Bagh, following their negotiation of safe passage from Jhansi fort, is at least understandable.

Lakshmibai was a talented and resourceful individual. Being a woman in a man’s world would not have been easy (though Rani’s were not uncommon), but all the evidence suggests that in addition to possessing superior skills as a horsewoman and swordswoman, she was a natural leader. If the definition of a leader is a person who effortlessly attracts followers, the Rani was one such. For the eight or nine months following the start of the rebellion she organised her resources and prepared for the inevitable clash with the forces of the EIC. During this time she mustered at least 11,500 troops to defend Jhansi. But being a talented political leader does not infer qualities of generalship. Lakshmibai fought like a tiger, but was outclassed in battle by General Sir Hugh Rose when the confrontation between her forces and those of the EIC took place in late March and early April 1858. Rose’s Central India Field Force comprised a significant proportion of troops gifted to the EIC by the Nizam of Hyderabad, demonstrating that in the patchwork of late Mughal feudal baronies not all princely states saw the future quite as Nana Sahib, Lakshmibai and Tantia Tope did. Indeed, the neighbouring state of Orchha, where I spent a pleasant night a few days ago, the Queen Regent of Orchha engaged in her own (not very successful) war against Jhansi, and when Sir Hugh Rose arrived with his small army of 4,500 men, Orchha gifted him another 7,000. Likewise, the Maharajah of Gwalior saw the world differently to Lakshmibai and remained a friend of the EIC through the entire imbroglio. People had their own motivations for supporting or opposing the EIC during the rebellion, but retaining or recovering feudal privileges was a central consideration to all.

Following Rose’s successful breaching of the formidable walls of Jhansi fort on 3rd April 1857 and its capture the following day, a stupendous military achievement given that with a fraction of his force Rose had also beaten and dispersed the much greater forces of Tantia Tope at the Battle of Betwa on 1st April, Lakshmibai managed to escape from the fort, to continue the fight in the weeks that followed. She was a serious minded, persistent and courageous fighter, bringing her forces and those of Tantia Tope together despite their respective defeats in battle. Desperation would undoubtedly have been a feature of her attitude in these days. She had little to lose. The pattern of the rebellion, the extreme positions adopted by each side and the ferocity of the fighting had already demonstrated that if captured she would almost certainly forfeit her life. So she fought on, being killed in a sword fight in the midst of battle outside Gwalior on 18th June. So died a forceful woman, and valiant fighter. It is commonly recorded that Rose said of her that ‘the Indian Mutiny had produced but one man, and that man was a woman.’

The story of Lakshmibai’s opposition to the EIC was a compelling model for subsequent advocates of independence. Her exploits were woven into this story not merely by V.D. Savarkar in 1909, but in a popular poem of 1930 ‘Jhansi Ki Rani’ written by the independence activist Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, specifically designed to provide a patriotic model for resistance to British colonial rule. The eighteenth and final stanza goes:

The People of India Will Remember This Debt of Yours (O! Rani Lakshmibai), May you be blessed, dear Rani,

Your This Life Sacrifices Will Awake an Indestructible Soul of Freedom in the People,

History May Be Made Silent and If Truth Is Hanged and Killed, and If the Drinkers Become Victorious and If They Destroy Jhansi with Cannonballs,

You, by yourself be the memorial of Rani (Queen of Jhansi) because you had been an eternal token of courage.

When in 1943 nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose raised his Indian National Army in Singapore he called his regiment of women volunteers the Rani of Jhansi Regiment. Her story has an enduring appeal, and it is easy to see this in an India keen to create a coherent narrative of the struggle for independence. Like that of Robin Hood, the fact that part of the story is mythical does not detract from the power of the message it conveys.

I first came across Peter Weaver’s other daughter, Susie, many years ago when I went to Burma in part to find the site her uncle, Ken Baker, was killed in the fighting for Mandalay in 1945. You can read his story here. Sadly, Susie passed away this year, but thanks to Joey and Dr Ward, the remarkable story of their father has come to life for the first time.

I popped into the museum at the Red Fort in Delhi today. I hadn’t been here since 2019, and I’d been told that the museum had been revamped. I was pleased, because the last time I’d been here it was tired. But what I encountered was both shocking and worrying. I am all for having a divergence of opinion on historical matters, and I am as conscious as anybody of the sensitivities that exist on the subject of 1857. Likewise, we all increasingly aware of the heavily-biased historical narratives forced on people in various parts of the world, and worry about them. I have been acutely aware of the ‘decolonisation’ process in India in recent years. But I wasn’t expecting to find such flagrant nonsense being perpetrated in the holy-of-holies of Indian independence, the Red Fort, today.

But nonsense it was, displayed in bold, assertive strokes, designed to present a definitive account of the birth of modern India from the trauma of British colonialism.

The first was a warning that naughty British historians still pushed a line contrary to the truth known to all true Indians that the ‘war of independence’ was a popular rebellion against rampant imperial oppression:

That this is chock full of contestable assertions should be obvious to all but a few unhinged Oxford academics (you know the ones I mean) and the Guardian.

There are three floors of this stuff. As one enters a fascinating definition of colonialism is presented:

I wonder what the Romans would have made of this silliness.

Likewise, I hesitate to describe the following as history, let alone an intelligent analysis of the economic impact of colonialism. When I first came across the subject at university in the 1980s it was presented as the Marxist view of history. It was vacuous and unintelligent at the time, and remains so today:

On the Christianity point, I’ve done my own count and have calculated that from a population of 200 million across the sub-continent at the time there were 120,000 Britons (including 40,000 troops) and of this number about 450 were ordained. It was going to take a long time to Christianise India on this basis…

And finally, I wonder what the very large numbers of people who refused to fall victim to the anarchy of 1857/8 would think of this:

I understand that we all need national cultural and political narratives, but much of what I saw today was barefaced historical buffoonery. I am sure that all 1.48 billion citizens of modern India, many of whom I call my friends, would be better served by presenting even contested history in a slightly more balanced way.

The actions of the Greek Government in the period leading up to the 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey are another such. An excellent new book by Andrew Southam has been published on the subject. I commend it to you. A short review in Aspects of History follows. Please do subscribe to this excellent online journal.

As a young soldier I served in Cyprus in 1981, only seven years after the Turkish invasion of the northern half of the island, and the subsequent partition of the country. Sadly, at the time my 18-year-old self had only a transitory understanding of the conflict. When in later years I taught War Studies my focus was on the earlier Greek EOKA campaign, rather than on 1974, so it has been a particular pleasure to read Andrew Southam’s account of a very confusing period of recent history.

Southam gives away his central thesis in his sub-title. What a cock up! The book is an argument about causation. He sets out successfully to demonstrate the intractable nature of nationalist cultural imperatives (something we Brits know only too well from calls on our small islands for various kinds of Celtic separatism) and highlights the absurd human follies that so often act as the causus belli for war.

It’s a fascinating story. Southam tells it well. The basic story is that on 15th July 1974 the Cypriot National Guard staged a coup d’état against president Archbishop Makarios III. Cyprus had received its independence from Britain in 1960, which retained, as it does today, a number of Sovereign Base Areas on the island. The rebels installed a pro-Greek government which had the ultimate objective of enosis, or union with Greece. This was too much for Turkey, which was concerned that this would prejudice the rights of the Turkish Cypriot minority (180,000, or 18% of the population) as well as undermine its own strategic position in this part of the Mediterranean. Turkish troops invaded, and the country was cut in half. Over 150,000 Greek Cypriots fled or were forced from the north to the south, and about 50,000 Turkish Cypriots moved from the south to the north.

The journey to war is always inherently interesting. Southam’s central proposition is that the catastrophe of 1974 was the result of a succession of misjudgements, competing national objectives, inadequate intelligence and institutional distraction. Despite there being many external actors playing on the Cypriot stage, there was no outside master plan (i.e. from NATO, the UK or the dastardly CIA) for the partition of Cyprus. Hence the ‘no control, no conspiracy’ sub-title. Southam demonstrates that once the genie was out of the bottle, it could not thereafter be controlled. On Cyprus, the very worst of Cypriot and Turkish cultural, political and religious exceptionalism collided and no one, not NATO, nor the Greeks, nor the Turks, nor the Brits or Americans were able to control the outcome. The result was chaos. The UK, as the old colonial power and with security commitments on the island, did not want to get involved in a war with two fellow members of NATO. The UK in fact had far less influence on events that some have subsequently alleged. If there were an upside to the debacle, it was the collapse of the Greek military junta and a return in that country to democracy. But it came at a huge cost: Turkey retains control of 37% of what should have been a Greek island. For the Greek hotheads demanding enosis (the real culprits of disaster) the lesson has to be, once again, to ‘be careful what you wish for.’ The coup overthrew the legitimate Cypriot government, created enormous uncertainty, provided Ankara with a justification for intervention and destabilised Greece. The junta therefore produced the very strategic crisis it was trying to avoid. The coup represented an existential threat to Turkey, which accordingly acted to assert its prerogatives, not merely to protect those on the island of Turkish heritage. This was, for Turkey, a war of national interest. Aren’t they all?

This is a fascinating account of a long forgotten war with geographical, national and strategic implications that remain in play today. I still remember patrolling the Green Line in 1981 wondering at the fact that the Turkish conscripts on the other side of the wire were from a country that was part of NATO, just as were those whom we, on the Greek side, were attempting to protect. Just how complex can international relations get? Very.

Charlotte had the crazy idea a few years back to recreate the withdrawal of her grandfather battalion over 39 hours to Kohima. Its an extraordinary story, but is often lost in all the noise that is accompanied by the great battle of Kohima itself. I agreed to be one of her first guinea pigs, and completed the first walk in 2024. It was quite an experience, especially since it followed my stroke (in July 2022) and subsequent heart surgery. It just goes to prove that there is life in the old dog yet. This is me, close to Kohima, with only 16km of 125km left to do, after an epic non-stop 30+ hour walk described by Charlotte in the book.

39 Hours is beautifully published by Chiselbury. Let’s hope it will prompt Charlotte to get down to writing a full account of the battalion in these three battles (Kharasom, Jessami and Kohima). Oh, and by the way, I will be visiting Jessami again in mid-November. If you ever want to join me on these trips (I’ll be back out again DV in November 2027) contact Bertie Lawson at Sampan Travel for details.

Do consider joining us. You head out under your own steam and organise your own accommodation (loose coordination is applied), following us around the battlefields of 1918 and 1940 and learning how to connect the British Army’s victories in 1918 with the failures of 1940. The tour is based on our book Victory to Defeat.

We’ve changed the itinerary slightly for the 2027 tour, travelling out to Sedan to examine the 1940 crossing of the Meuse.

For further details please contact me by email. I look forward to seeing you in France!

I read and enjoyed Edward Abel Smith’s A Hateful Decision earlier this year and subsequently wrote a quick review on here and for Aspects of History. Soon after I was contacted by Bill Whiteside, who’s Operation Catapult was also published this year by the Naval Institute Press. It is a happy coincidence that these two books have come out in the same year as the new two part biopic on Charles de Gaulle, the second part of which I am eagerly looking forward to watching tonight.

In my correspondence with Bill it became clear that the story his account told differed in a number of respects from that of Edward Abel Smith’s. He encouraged me to read his book, which I have now done. I have also crossed referenced it with the account in Colin Smith’s superb England’s Last War with France, a book I have long admired.

So, what did I find?

I admit that the findings have surprised me, for it is clear that A Hateful Decision massages the story in a way that in some cases materially changes the facts and makes his dramatic account more akin to a novel than a serious work of history. In my review of A Hateful Decision, I observed: ‘Edward Abel Smith tells that remarkable story, in a fresh and helpful way, taking us through these fratricidal events by means of participant’s dialogue. The device works well.’ Perhaps too well I might subsequently observe, as some of conversations he quotes simply did not happen. In the Author’s Note, Edward Abel Smith is certainly clear that he has reconstructed dialogue from the evidence of contemporaneous records. This is fair enough. What he tends to do, however, for dramatic effect, is to re-create some conversations on the basis of imagination, not fact. We are used to this in the cinematic reimagining of historic events. This appears to be the case here. The issue is, therefore, whether this book should in fact be regarded as one of fiction rather than non-fiction.

The first problem I came across was a misapplied quotation by Winston Churchill. On Page 21 of A Hateful Decision the author tells us that on the early hours of 3 July 1940:

Elsewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, in his cabin aboard HMS Hood, Vice Admiral Somerville had also been unable to sleep. For the whole night he had been restless. A memorandum he had received from the Prime Minister the previous evening had been ringing around his head. ‘If the French refuse to parley,’ Churchill had ordered, ‘they must be treated as traitors to the Allied cause’. Leaving no ambiguity, he instructed that ‘the ships must be bombed’, before concluding, ‘in no circumstances must these ships be allowed to escape.’

However, examining Martin Gilbert’s biography of WSC it is clear that the statement about the French refusing to parley was in fact spoken at a meeting of the War Cabinet on 22 June, nearly a fortnight earlier and long before the plan for Operation Catapult was constructed. Equally, this statement did not refer to Mers-el-Kebir at all, but about two entirely different French battleships, the Richelieu and the Jean Bart, neither of which had any bearing on the story of Mers-el-Kebir. At the meeting of the War Cabinet on 22 June Churchill had stated:

The most important thing to do was to make certain of the two modern battleships Richelieu and Jean Bart. If these fell into the hands of the Germans, they would have a very formidable line of battle….

As a result, Churchill had no compunction in asserting:

If the captains refused to parley, they must be treated as traitors to the Allied cause. The ships might have to be bombed by aircraft from the Ark Royal or they must be mined into their harbours and naval forces stationed outside to prevent the minefields being swept up. In no circumstances whatever must these ships be allowed to escape.

Churchill did not insist that these ships ‘must be bombed.’ Nor is it correct to insinuate that he said anything of the kind about the fleet in Mers-el-Kebir. This is a simple fabrication, done so admittedly to create narrative drama. But facts matter.

Other attempts to create personal drama from the historic record are also apparent in the text. I will highlight a few more here.

First, on pages 221-222 A Hateful Decision merges a letter from Admiral Somerville to his wife, written in July 1940, with a letter that Admiral Andrew B. Cunningham wrote in 1959 to form an entirely imagined exchange between Somerville and the Admiralty. After providing the details of Holland’s letter of resignation, A Hateful Decision states:

Somerville sympathized but did not seem to take the resignation seriously. He took the request to the Admiralty, writing in his covering letter, ‘Poor Hookie Holland is so upset that he’s asked to be relieved of his command in HMS Ark Royal.

‘I think he is just being highly strung,’ Admiral Cunningham replied unsympathetically. And with that, the conversation was over. It fell once again to Somerville to rectify the situation.

‘I persuaded him to withdraw [his resignation],’ he wrote to his wife.

But this conversation is entirely manufactured. It was not contemporaneous. The ‘Poor Hookie…’ letter was not sent by Somerville to the Admiralty but to his wife. On 5 July he wrote:

Poor Hooky Holland is so upset that he’s asked to be relieved of his command in Ark Royal. I persuaded him to withdraw it but have sent on a letter to the Admiralty saying in all fairness he ought to be relieved as the strain of it all after his close association with the French must inevitably prove too much for him.

While Cunningham did consider Holland to be highly strung (Bill tells me that the evidence is clear in notes in the Somerville Papers) this opinion about Holland was written in 1959, not in 1940. At the time Cunningham commanded the British Mediterranean fleet in Alexandria. He was not appointed First Sea Lord in the Admiralty until October 1943. In other words, A Hateful Decision takes a comment from a letter written by Cunningham in 1959 to create a fabricated contemporaneous exchange between Somerville and the Admiralty in July 1940.

Second, the text from a letter that Somerville sent to his wife is massaged into an imagined conversation between Somerville and his secretary, Bill Farrell, purportedly conducted in the bay outside of Mers-el-Kébir on the morning of 3 July 1940. A Hateful Decision imagines this conversation at length:

I begged the Admiralty not to order that I go to the lengths of opening fire on the French,’ said an exasperated Somerville, not listening to his secretary’s attempts to comfort him.

‘I know, sir,’ replied Farrell sympathetically, having read Somerville’s letter of concerns the previous day.

‘I warned the Admiralty that this will be the biggest political blunder of modern times, and that it will rouse the world against us.’

‘I know, sir,’ Farrell repeated

This is a fascinating conversation, but is constructed from Somerville’s letter to his wife. There is no evidence that it was conducted with Farrell. The entire incident has been, it appears to me, inserted as an artistic device to add colour to the event. Is this appropriate in an historic account such as this? I’ll leave you to judge. Exciting, yes. Dramatic, certainly. Factual? No. The author suggests the incident happened, despite the fact that we know it was contrived from a letter Somerville wrote to his wife. The citation in question says:

The conversation between Somerville and Bill Farrell was recounted in a letter from Somerville to his wife on 4 July 1940 and kept at the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, SMVL 3/22.

That’s something of a stretch. The letter is in the archive, but it wasn’t an account of Somerville’s conversation with Farrell. Somerville’s letter of 4 July reads:

Expect you have heard about this battle at Oran. Before we left Gib. I begged the admiralty not to go to the lengths of opening fire on the French as I felt sure it would be disastrous….

But, as I warned the Admiralty, I think it was the biggest political blunder of modern times and I imagine it will rouse the world against us.

A further example of re-imagining is the entirety of Chapter 41, an account of a purported meeting between Admiral Somerville and Captain Holland on the evening of 6 July, in the aftermath of the attack. The story goes:

Somerville too was extremely shaken by the experience, but what shocked him more than anything was the visible impact it had on Holland.

‘Given more time, Captain,’ he replied reassuringly, ‘I believe you might have succeeded in converting Vice Admiral Gensoul to our point of view.’

Holland shook his head, tears now blurring his vision, as he stoically tried to hold himself together.

’Had I been able, as was my intention, to present the case verbally on the lines indicated I feel a peaceful settlement might have arrived,’ he said, the words coming out in staccato bursts, ‘in this way, the proposals would have come to him gradually, and my considered opinion is that he might have accepted one of them.’

‘I agree, said Somerville comfortingly….’

‘The blame must ultimately sit with me,’ Holland replied sombrely.

‘I consider, Captain Holland, that you carried out your difficult task with the greatest tact, courage and perseverance. That you failed in your mission is not your fault.’

‘Sir …’ Holland tried to interject frustratingly.

‘That you so clearly succeeded is greatly to your credit.’ Somerville continued.

Holland shook his head. He looked down at the envelope he had been fingering anxiously throughout the conversation. Without being able to muster another word, he stood up, handed it to Somerville, saluted and then left the vice admiral’s quarters.

Somerville’s official recap of the activities at Mers-el-Kébir appears in his Report of Proceedings. The section in which Somerville’s half of the supposed conversation is as follows:

I believe that given more time Captain Holland might have succeeded in converting Admiral Gensoul to our point of view….

I consider that Captain C.S. Holland carried out his most difficult task with the greatest tact, courage and perseverance. That he failed in his mission was not his fault – that he so nearly succeeded is greatly to his credit.

Captain Holland’s report says:

20. The action of Admiral Gensoul in refusing to see me on arrival made the task of reaching peaceful solution in the short time available extremely difficult since he received the terms by letter through the hands of an intermediary, this eliminating all possibility of a friendly interview and amicable discussion. Had I been able, as was my intention, to present the case verbally on the lines indicated in Appendix D, I feel a peaceful settlement might have been arrived at.

21. As can be seen, I had intended before putting forward any proposals, to outline the reasons for my visit, impressing on the Admiral the fact that, while we trusted him and all the French Admirals to endeavour by every means in their power to prevent any of their ships falling into enemy hands, since they had promised they would do so, this guarantee to us was insufficient in view of the treachery of the Germans and Italians who would by every means of trickery try to forestall their plans. I would then have outlined the three proposals that I was instructed to make and discussed them in a friendly spirit. If, after this, he had not accepted one of the three terms, I would have requested him to sink his shops within six hours. Finally, should he have refused even to do this, but until then, I would have informed him that H.M. Government would be obliged to use force if he did not comply shy of the terms proposed.

22. In this way, the proposal would have come to him gradually, and my considered opinion is that he might have accepted one of them.

The dramatic effect developed in A Hateful Decision is entirely absent in these reports. The inference of Hollands mental fragility is, therefore, a reimagining based not on facts but on the desire to create drama for which no evidence exists.

Another instance of the remarkably casual relationship between the narrative and the facts an be found in Chapter 43. The chapter begins with the words:

In Britain, Churchill had been warned continually about the fallout from Operation Catapult, including by the highly respected Admiral Sir William Pleydell-Bouverie, Head of the British Naval Mission in France, who wrote to the Prime Minister that ‘it is quite certain that political reaction of such a course might be adverse and be very far reaching.’

Incidentally, the Head of the British Naval Mission in France in June and July 1940 was Captain Edward Pleydell-Bouverie, not Admiral Sir William. The problem was that the passage quoted by the author is not a warning about ‘fallout from Operation Catapult’ as it was sent on 26 June, well before the details of Catapult were even formed. Nor was it sent to the Prime Minister. And most significantly and specifically, according to Professor Arthur J. Marder’s book From the Dardanelles to Oran, Edward Pleydell-Bouverie’s statement was a note of caution about prospective “British naval action to prevent the [French] Fleet from reaching its home ports” to comply with German armistice terms, and thus had nothing to do with Operation Catapult. Marder writes:

Finally, there were two reports from the former Head of the British Naval Mission in France, Pleydell-Bouverie. Among the salient facts that stood out in the experience of his last days in France were that the Fleet and its commanders had great faith in Darlan and would obey his orders in all circumstances; that the Government was entirely concerned with stopping the war; and that there was considerable fear among the officers and men about the consequences to their families if they failed to obey the armistice terms. ‘The conclusion that I come to from these facts is that it seems likely that the French Fleet will be ordered by Admiral Darlan to its “Home Ports”, there to be disarmed under the terms of the Armistice but that insufficient preparation will have been made for the eventuality which is almost certain to happen.’ What action could be taken to prevent the French Fleet going to its home ports? There were two answers: the setting up of a French government in Africa, which would take control of the Fleet, or British naval action to prevent the Fleet from reaching its home ports. He had no opinion on the feasibility of the former. The latter possibility ‘bristles with difficulties and it is quite certain that political reaction of such a course might be adverse and be very far reaching.

Finally, I was intrigued to see on page 234 the use of a single word changed in A Hateful Decision to distort the intent of a letter from Admiral Darlan to Winston Churchill. In a discussion of reactions in the aftermath of the attack at Mers-el-Kébir, the text says:

The most senior member of the French Admiralty, Admiral François Darlan, also spoke little about Mers el-Kébir. He made his feelings clear to Churchill in a letter in 1941, in which he told the Prime Minister that ‘I follow my role without attacking [you]. I ask for reciprocity.’

But the real quotation in Churchill’s Their Finest Hour, along with additional context from several preceding and subsequent sentences, provides a demonstrably different understanding of Admiral Darlan’s statement. It reads:

I have the conviction that all Frenchmen who now fight against Germany each in his own manner will finally achieve a general reconciliation, but I believe that for the moment they must continue their separate action. There is a certain resentment, notably in French West Africa, which is too active for me to obtain more, as you know. I follow my rôle without attacking anyone, I ask for reciprocity. For the moment, the only thing which counts is to defeat the Axis; the French people when liberated will later choose their political régime and their leaders.

Admiral Darlan’s reference to ‘anyone’ was directed toward the disparate French factions in north Africa, not to Winston Churchill. The reciprocity that Darlan sought was from those factions, not from Churchill. By intentionally changing ‘anyone’ to ‘[you]’, the real meaning of Darlan’s statement is distorted. Further, Darlan’s letter was sent in 1942 (shortly before his assassination), not in 1941.

Historians rightly spend considerable time building their arguments on the basis of facts and their reasonable interpretation. The recreation of the evidence for dramatic purposes is not history, but cinema. For this reason, and on the evidence, A Hateful Decision should in my view be more reasonably labelled a work of fiction. Fascinating and dramatic no doubt, but dodgy history.

I am delighted that Andrew Kilsby’s new book on Walter Gamble is being published by Chiselbury. Andrew came across the story of Gamble when he was writing an earlier book, with Daryl Moran, on Australian involvement in the Burma campaign.

Walter Morris Felix Gamble had a remarkable military career – one that crossed continents, frontiers, and jungles, spanning the defining conflicts of his age.

From the Gallipoli Campaign, where Gamble was among the last to evacuate the Peninsula; before serving with distinction on the Western Front in France, where acts of conspicuous gallantry saw him awarded the Military Cross in France. Between the wars, he was drawn toward the wilder edge of British India, serving with the 8th Punjab Regiment and the South Waziristan Scouts on the North-West Frontier.

But it was Burma that shaped him most profoundly. Gamble returned there again and again – in 1918, 1930-34, and finally during the darkest days of 1942 through the end of 1944.

As Japanese forces swept north, the British/Indian Army fell back in wholesale retreat. Yet, alone in northern Burma, Gamble commanded the Northern Kachin Levies – the only British force actively operating against Japan in Burma, at a time when the map of empire itself appeared to be collapsing.

His previously unpublished first-hand account from that campaign forms the unvarnished core of this history. His actions in northern Burma earned him the OBE. He later commanded the Tripura Scouts in 1944 in the Arakan, building highly effective guerrilla operations for which he was Mentioned in Dispatches.

Andrew managed to find the only intact copy of Gamble’s unpublished memoirs, a page of which is shown here.

To give you an inkling of the story, here is Gamble describing the inauspicious beginnings of his guerrilla empire, in 1942:

Early on the morning after my arrival a large scruffy-looking Officer came to my room, and, having given me a very smart but unorthodox salute said, “I`m Leach, Sir, and I`ve come to report for duty.” I bid him good morning, and told him I was delighted and that it was the first I’d heard of it.

“Well Sir,” he said, “actually we reported the Colonel Stephenson and he crashed, I hope we don`t have the same effect on you.” “Don`t worry,” I said,” you won`t. But, are you trying to tell me that I have more than one Officer?” “Oh yes,” he said, “there is the quarter-master, Captain De Silva, and Lieutenants Girsham and Rosner; I am your Adjutant.” “That’s fine,” I said. “now, tell me who you all are.”

“I’m not a soldier,” he assured me. “I was doing a sociological study of the Kachins for the Government of Burma when war broke out. De Silva and Girsham were in the Burma Forests Service and Rosner was a junior Government servant. We have been filling in our time here sorting and folding maps and I have been teaching them map reading. I have done a course of sorts, they haven`t.” “Where is this Army of mine?” I asked. “It`s waiting outside,” he said. “I`ll call it.”

Three Anglo Burmans came in and gave three varieties of salute were common at this time. They were decent-looking fellows, and if they had no military training I soon found out that they were intelligent and game. The rest was up to me. Some attempt had been made to organise a base in Assam and it was intended to establish a “cloak and dagger” training centre there. For weapons we had six .22 automatic rifles for which Manton’s in Calcutta had been asked to design silencers.

“V” Force, a guerilla organisation which was to stay behind in the event of the Army moving out of Assam, had undertaken to hand over to us 1200 shot guns with an appropriate number of cartridges for the breach loaders and powder and shot for the muzzle loaders! There were 60,000 rupees standing to our credit in the local Bank and, to cap it all, De silva produced a string bag containing 250 golden sovereigns!

A rediscovered voice from lost battlefields, A Remarkable Gamble is this story told at last – an unforgettable journey through war on different continents, remote frontiers, and the jungles of Burma where he successfully led guerrilla irregulars against the Japanese. Andrew is to be congratulated for bringing Gamble’s remarkable story, and that of the Kachin irregulars, back to life.

Back to the issue. We have all become inured to the current UK government’s defence horror show. It is seriously off the charts of incompetence, strategic ineptitude and underfunding, so it came as no surprise to hear last week that the Army was to cease certain elements of collective training, to save money. On hearing this I threw my hands into the air. Here we go again. When an army isn’t fighting, it is training. When General Lord Dannatt and I wrote Victory to Defeat in 2021, the story of how the British Army moved from battlefield success in 1918 to something less than this in 1940, we identified a failure of collective training to be at the heart of the British Army’s performance inadequacies. British military training used to the the envy of NATO: I know, because I was involved in quite a bit of it, and was part of a training team to a foreign government for a while. We were good at what we did, and they liked us for it. We saw good results.

So what to do? The first is to ring the alarm bells, loud enough for anyone to listen. Ben has done this, in an excellent article penned for The Spectator. Ben is the best person to write this. A fellow of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, he is the author of the Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025, which is coming out in an expanded second edition in November. With his permission I have copied the article lock, stock and two smokin’ barrels below. Read it and weep.

The army’s soldiers and officers are greatly disappointed by the suspension of much necessary army training and cuts to the activity of the part-time army reserve. No amount of naive spin or over-simplistic briefing by ‘defence officials’ can disguise the inconvenient truth that these cuts lessen the fighting power, credibility and lethality of the army, reducing its ability to deter the Russian army and influence the US and Nato. Military expertise and fighting power will inexorably erode and become more difficult to sustain. In war, achieving mission success will become more difficult and casualties will increase.

Since 1990, successive governments’ reductions in defence spending greatly reduced the armed forces’ ability to fulfil their national and Nato tasks. Lord George Robertson led the MOD’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review. Its plan to rebuild and modernise military capability that had shrunk to dangerously low levels commanded the respect of the forces – provided that it was fully funded and rapidly implemented.

But the government’s handling of the Defence Investment Plan was a masterclass in dither, delay and dysfunctional debate that resulted in a very modest increase in defence funding, much of which has yet to be sourced. The forces welcomed the extra funding, but were quietly disappointed that it was insufficient to restore readiness quickly enough. As they have so often have done, they gritted their teeth, and set out to make the best of a bad job. But these unforeseen cuts mean that the army has just been kicked in the teeth.

Why is military training so important? War is bloody and chaotic – a dynamic and unpredictable contest where opponents are constantly seeking advantage over each another. The ‘fog of war’, fear, stress and physical effort mean that activities which are easy in peacetime can become very difficult in conflict.

Troops all need to be trained in their individual roles so they can fight and survive on an increasingly hostile battlefield and properly use their weapons and equipment.

But they have little military value unless the team they belong to is trained in its role. This begins at the basic level, such as with the infantry fire team, armoured vehicle crew or gun crew. Training then needs to build up, climbing the levels of command, through company to battalion, brigade and division. This is known as collective training. It not only increases the effectiveness of the unit or formation, but also builds teamwork, comradeship and cohesion. I have myself experienced the intangible benefits such as the amazing sense of pride and confidence that comes from succeeding in well-run, challenging training in high-tempo armoured warfare, using live ammunition on the vast and harsh Canadian prairie.

Land warfare is very complex, requiring synchronisation of many capabilities, including armour, infantry, artillery, engineers, helicopters, drones, air defences and logistics. Just as sports teams need to practise together to counter demanding opponents, so armies need to train on realistic and challenging field exercises. But imagine a game of football or rugby in which both sides carry knives to attack each other. The fear and uncertainty would rise considerably.

In the Cold War, army battalions and regiments were highly trained, as were the brigades they belonged to. There was a regular cycle of training for the building blocks of the army’s three armoured divisions. This laid the foundations of the army’s high performance in both Iraq wars, Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone. But after the army was committed to simultaneous counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, brigade war fighting exercises ceased. And when the army withdrew from Afghanistan in 2014, British brigade exercises did not restart – due to insufficient funding.

This was in contrast to the US army. From 2014 it resumed conducting brigade-level field exercises. Ten armoured brigades a year rotated through the US National Training Centre at Fort Irwin. Between 2014 and 2024, the British Army never achieved that level of brigade training. This gap in armoured and mechanised brigade exercise caused a generation gap in expertise in formation manoeuvre.

In 2025 the Army chief, General Sir Roly Walker, directed the army to better train to take on ‘bigger and better-equipped foes’. A discreet way of saying Russian forces. A new Land Training System was organised to annually exercise every single regular company, battery and squadron for 10 weeks training in their operational role. In the first year of the programme, almost all of the Army’s 460 companies, squadrons and batteries did this. And exercises for battalions and regiments increased.

Concurrently the army resumed exercising its manoeuvre brigades. Over the last two years half a dozen of these took place in England, Germany and Canada. They have been welcomed by the troops. The commanding officer of an infantry battalion on the 7 Brigade’s recent exercise in Germany observed that it was the first brigade exercise he had participated in during his 20-year career. By comparison, in the first 20 years of my career between 1976 and 1996, I participated in eight British brigade exercises.

The middle and senior leadership of the army includes many people who had served through the difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rising to the challenge. But their combat experience ceased in 2014. This could be seen by the very few campaign medals on the chests of younger troops at the Queen’s funeral and King’s coronation. The army of 2026 therefore includes very few people under the age of 35 who had fought against the Iraqi militias or the Taliban.

The training that is being cut is not an ‘inessential’ luxury. It is the absolute bedrock that the army needs to succeed in the missions that the government has accepted Britain should carry out for Nato. Cutting it will mean that the collective expertise of the army in fighting war will decline. This will be greatly welcomed in the Kremlin. As will the reduction in training levels of the army reserve. All of its units have a war role to perform, especially providing logistic and military support. The reserve is already struggling to find enough volunteers. These cuts will make this worse.

Defence Secretary Wes Streeting’s time as health secretary should have taught him the importance of training of medical staff as individuals, who then learn to work together as teams, in operating theatres, wards and A&E departments. If invited to approve a cut to the training of surgeons, operating room teams and A&E staff, would he have agreed to the increased risk of mistakes, accidents and avoidable deaths? Can he explain why he has just approved a similar measure for the army? He might also explain why he cannot close the reported £30 million gap in funding army training from elsewhere in his defence budget of £62 billion.

For those who havent seen the article in The Critic, it is also copied below.

The Government is pressing ahead with plans to repeal aspects of the 2023 Conservative legislation dealing with the legacy of the Troubles. In doing so, it is embarking on a course that could have profound consequences for the relationship between the State and those who serve in its armed forces. In my view, it is a grievous mistake with serious ramifications for the future.

The central concern is that the proposed changes will expose servicemen and women, many of whom have already undergone judicial scrutiny for actions undertaken during the Troubles, to further litigation and investigation. In practice, this is likely to encourage a new wave of cases brought by individuals seeking to revisit or reinterpret events from a campaign in which terrorist organisations such as the IRA and INLA were ultimately defeated.

The immediate implications are troubling enough. The longer-term precedent, however, is far more serious. If this legislation proceeds, it will send a clear message to today’s servicemen and women, that even after they have acted lawfully, completed investigations, and fulfilled their duty to the State, they may still face renewed legal jeopardy in later decades. It undermines the fundamental bond of trust between those who serve and the government that sends them into harm’s way.

Every member of the British Armed Forces operates within a strict and clearly defined legal framework. These rules, embodied in the Laws of Armed Conflict and implemented through Rules of Engagement (RoE), govern the use of force in military operations. During my own service, I spent countless hours learning these rules, teaching them to my soldiers, and ensuring they were followed in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and elsewhere.

This debate is not about whether soldiers should be above the law. Of course they are not, nor should they be. Rather, it is about whether the rules that governed military operations at the time can be retrospectively reinterpreted after a conflict has ended. The concern is that former adversaries will be able to pursue legal action against veterans for actions that were considered lawful under the Rules of Engagement in force at the time.

Today, Policy Exchange published an excellent report examining this issue in relation to former members of the SAS who served in Northern Ireland. The report sets out the problem clearly and persuasively, concluding that the proposed changes should be abandoned. I agree.

Predictably, some MPs have defended the legislation. Diane Abbott, for example, has argued on X that opposition to the changes amounts to “a call for armed forces personnel to be placed above the law.” That characterisation is deeply misleading. The debate has never been about exempting soldiers from the law. It is about subjecting veterans to repeated investigations and additional layers of judicial scrutiny many years after the events in question, often in ways that were never demanded of those they fought against on behalf of the nation.

At its core, this issue is one of fairness. It raises questions about double standards, retrospective judgment, and the constant shifting of the goalposts. Veterans who served under one set of rules are now being told that those rules may no longer be sufficient protection against further legal action.

The implications for future military operations are especially concerning. As the Policy Exchange report notes:

“The message this treatment sends to today’s armed forces is corrosive: lawful service at the State’s direction may, decades later, be treated as the subject of criminal investigation under standards that did not exist at the time. This will have significant detrimental consequences for recruitment, retention, and operational confidence, especially in special forces.”

I agree.

I spent more than two decades serving my country, including operational tours in Northern Ireland. Like every soldier, I understood the risks involved and accepted them willingly. I and my soldiers knew the Rules of Engagement and conducted ourselves accordingly because those were the rules. Simple. In any free society, citizens need clarity and certainty in the law. Soldiers are no different.

But what I never anticipated in my wildest imagining was the possibility that those rules could be revisited and effectively rewritten years after a conflict had ended, exposing veterans to renewed threats to their liberty. That prospect is troubling enough on its own. It becomes even more contentious when viewed alongside the so-called “letters of comfort” issued to more than 100 former paramilitaries. It is not difficult to understand why many veterans see a profound imbalance in the way they are being treated in this legislation compared to their former adversaries.

Throughout my military career, I believed that the government stood behind those it sent into danger. Like many of my colleagues, I trusted that if we acted lawfully and within the Rules of Engagement, the State would honour its obligations to us. Where mistakes were made, and there were some, military personnel were investigated and, where appropriate, prosecuted. Quite rightly so. No soldier has a licence to act outside the law. The British military is founded on discipline, accountability, and restraint.

I can recall patrols on operations when I would remind my soldiers of precisely what the law allowed and prohibited. I saw friends die and was at the receiving end myself of attempts by bad people to do me harm. Yet through all of it, I believed that the government had our backs.

Looking back, I now fear that trust was misplaced.

One of my sons went on to join my former regiment and enjoyed five rewarding years of service. It pains me to say it, but under the current circumstances I would struggle to encourage young men and women to follow the same path. I reach that conclusion with a heavy heart. Not because I have lost faith in the Armed Forces themselves, but because I increasingly question whether the Government values though who serve and appreciate the sacrifice of those prepared to step into harm’s way for the sake of the security of our country. If they did so, they would not be pursuing this deeply unfair legislation.

Some years ago I researched the story of the Cockleshell Heroes. The book was published as Operation Suicide.

Its an amazing story of grit and fortitude. Of the 12 men who set out to attack German ships in Bordeaux harbour, only two survived. Against all odds Blondie Hasler and Bill Sparks completed their mission and made their way, thanks to serendipity and the Marie Claire escape line, across the Pyrenees to Spain and back to Blighty.

BBC Radio 4 has now produced a 30-minute radio show on the raid narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, which can be heard here.

Buy it! It is very good.

You won’t be able to read this, so I’ve added it below.

Collapse – A Global History of the Second World War, 1931-1941

Jonathan Fennell

Viking £30

‘Do we need yet another multi-volume history of the Second World War?’ I was asked when a visitor saw Jonathan Fennell’s weighty new tome on my desk. Actually, single-authored multi-volume treatises on the war as a whole are vanishingly rare, the stand out one being by a chap called Winston S. Churchill, and I’m sure that he had lots of help writing his. There are many more single volume histories of the war.

So, the clear answer to the question which surprised us both, is that Jonathan Fennell’s three volume foray into the market, the first volume of which this is, is an uncommon thing. He has bitten off a significant challenge, but in Collapse his first-rate scholarship and a fine writing demonstrates that he more than has the wherewithal to make the entire trilogy a success. Pleasingly, as the sub-title attests, Fennell anchors the start of the Second World War in 1931, in Asia. This is surely correct, and thus passes the Rana Mitta test (i.e. of not excluding China in his evaluation of the war). Most people still don’t appreciate that the course of global bloodletting that we call the Second World War began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, two years before the Nazi party secured power in Germany. Who knew for instance that up to 1941 the Chinese suffered vastly more casualties to aerial bombing than did Britain? The London Blitz, for instance, is a key part of British historical sensibilities. Fennell encourages us to include the five bombing campaigns by the Japanese armed forces against Free China in the same way. He is right to do so.

Fennell’s achievement is a detailed, ground up description of what happened and why. A particular strength lies in including the agency of the individual in the fighting, whether that was the African fighting for their colonial masters, the Japanese fighting a war of such barbarity in China that even Tokyo was terrified of the home population discovering the extent of it, or the German soldier marching through Ukraine, shooting Jews in ditches on the way. His descriptions are fascinating and conclusions challenging. One of many is that in totalitarian or militaristic states such as Germany, Italy and Japan the restraints of civilized behaviour were quickly jettisoned, war becoming not a contest of military wills but of annihilation. The challenge for the Western democracies was fight to their fullest extent, but within the bounds of the law. Is this ever possible in total war? The answer of course must be a resounding ‘Yes’, though in the period to the end of 1941 it was relatively easy for the Allies (at this stage the United States hadn’t joined the war as a belligerent) to uphold the laws of war. The period from 1943 which saw area bombing by the Allies in Europe would come to challenge the comfortable assumptions that the West always its wars lawfully, as the utilitarian challenge of getting the war over as quickly as possible, despite the vast numbers being killed every day from the air, became overpowering. It will be interesting to see how Fennell deals with this. Collapse is very clear that the war that emerged from 1931 was a one of unprecedented barbarity, as the pre-war world collapsed into one of state organised annihilation. In this sense, Fennell is thankfully, as much a moralist as he is a narrator, for the story he tells is truly terrifying.

At a village near Kohima in May 1944, a young Naga boy named Zhovire witnessed an event that remained vivid in his memory for the rest of his life:

“I heard people shouting, ‘There’s a prisoner, a British soldier.’ I ran out to look at this strange phenomenon. A tall young British soldier, heavily guarded by Japanese soldiers, was being led around the village. A few days later the village crier shouted the news, ‘The Japanese are preparing to behead the British soldier today. All are ordered to come and see.

“My friends and I excitedly ran to the spot. We had never seen a beheading in all our young lives. The Britisher’s hands were tied behind his back and a black cloth covered his eyes. The air seemed pregnant with tension and no one spoke. The Japanese officer unsheathed his sword, its blade briefly catching the sunlight. Soon, he barked out an order, raised the sword high, and brought it down in a single stroke. At the moment steel met flesh, I shut my eyes, too frightened to watch. When I looked again, blood spurted from the prisoner’s neck and splashed onto the officer’s shirt. ‘Esh,’ said the Japanese officer, his face registering disgust.”

The Nagas were deeply unsettled by the cold-blooded nature of the execution. To them, such violence seemed at odds with traditional notions of honour. Naga head-hunting customs had long been governed by ritual and social convention rather than indiscriminate bloodlust. Villagers questioned whether a victorious army should not show magnanimity instead of cruelty. Yet the point of the execution was almost certainly symbolic. The Japanese were demonstrating that their military law sanctioned the killing of prisoners and, more importantly, warning the local population of the consequences of aiding the Allied cause. The spectacle conveyed that the British were now powerless and that resistance to Japan would come at a terrible price.

It is through similar incidents that Orbach explores the causes and character of Japanese military brutality in the decades leading up to 1945. One of the great strengths of his book is its rejection of simple explanations. Rather than attributing Imperial Japanese Army violence solely to a monolithic culture of bushidō, Orbach demonstrates that context mattered enormously. Violence varied according to circumstances, commanders, operational environments, and the perceived identity of the victims.

The execution witnessed by young Zhovire illustrates this point. It was not simply punishment for an enemy soldier. It was a carefully staged act intended to intimidate the Nagas and reinforce Japanese authority. Orbach argues that such violence was often linked to a process he describes as the “banditization” of enemy populations. Once individuals or communities were categorised as “bandits,” they were stripped of any claim to protection or respect. Their elimination became not only permissible but ideologically justified. Under such conditions, brutality escalated beyond military necessity and often took forms intended to demonstrate the victims’ complete degradation.

This framework helps explain some of the most notorious atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. In places where populations were collectively labelled hostile, mass violence followed. The experience of Manila in 1945 provides a particularly stark example. Likewise, Orbach contends that the atrocities at Nanjing can only be properly understood within a system that viewed entire communities as legitimate targets of collective punishment. Where international scrutiny was limited, the restraints on violence weakened still further.

Orbach concludes that Japanese military violence reflected the specific culture of individual formations, the conditions in which they operated, and the leadership they received. This is a persuasive argument. All armies are products of their societies, circumstances, and commanders. Military brutality is rarely explained by ideology alone. One might recall the ferocity displayed by figures such as Hodson and Nicholson during the suppression of the Indian Revolt in Delhi in 1857, when many civilians suffered regardless of their actual involvement in the uprising. The Imperial Japanese Army’s concept of collective responsibility was similarly expansive. In practice, anyone caught in the army’s path could be treated as culpable, a contaminant requiring removal.

The Japanese Army’s treatment of its own soldiers further reinforces Orbach’s thesis. Another Naga witness, Lhoutuo Shüya, recalled seeing a wounded Japanese soldier abandoned during the fighting at Kohima:

His friends tried to help him and they put him on a horse but he fell from it so his friends left him behind. He was crying bitterly as they left and after a while one of them returned and shot him dead with three bullets.

The episode reveals a military culture in which obedience and sacrifice outweighed individual welfare. Brutal treatment of recruits was not incidental but systemic. Physical abuse served as a mechanism of discipline, instilling unquestioning obedience and a willingness to die rather than fail. Such a culture inevitably shaped how soldiers treated enemies and civilians alike.

Orbach’s conclusions closely align with my own after more than thirty-five years of studying the Imperial Japanese Army. The institution was fundamentally brutal, but the degree and expression of that brutality varied according to how local populations were perceived. Civilians regarded as enemies, or potential enemies, faced the gravest dangers. In India during 1944 the Japanese mistakenly convinced themselves that local populations were anti-British and inclined to welcome Japanese forces as liberators. As a result, they never remained long enough in the Naga Hills or Manipur to undergo the same shift in attitude that occurred in China or the Philippines, where initial expectations gave way to suspicion and repression.

Even where populations were not classified as hostile, they were rarely treated as equals. The Japanese vision of a pan-Asian order remained deeply hierarchical, with Japan firmly at the top. The experience of the Thai-Burma Railway illustrates this reality. More than one hundred thousand Indians, many of them expatriate Tamils from Malaya, were recruited for the project in 1942 and 1943. Tens of thousands died in appalling conditions. Their suffering mattered little to Japanese authorities, who viewed such sacrifices as service to the Emperor and therefore both necessary and honourable.

Ultimately, Orbach reminds us that the purpose of military indoctrination within the Imperial Japanese Army was not obedience for its own sake but a readiness for self-sacrifice unto death. This ethos shaped the army’s conduct toward its own men, its enemies, and civilian populations across Asia. Punishment does not shy away from the horrors this produced. At the same time, it seeks to move beyond moral condemnation alone and to explain how such violence emerged, evolved, and was rationalised. In doing so, Orbach offers a nuanced and important contribution to our understanding of one of the most brutal military institutions of the twentieth century.

I’ve spent this morning read this report by Policy Exchange. You should too.

I am angry. So should you be.

Read the report. If you substitute ‘Servicemen and women’ for ‘SAS’ in the text of the report, you’ll get a sense of the problem. 300,000 men and women served their country in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The overwhelming majority did so honourably and lawfully. Those that did not were dealt with under existing criminal law. I saw this myself. But this new legislation will potentially set all existing judgements aside in a legal free for all that is not merely designed to settle scores but to rewrite the entire history of the Troubles.

That is bad enough. But be under no illusions as to the profound damage that the Troubles Act will do to the concept of military duty, lawfully enacted. No longer will a soldier be able to trust an order to use lethal force against the King’s enemies, because the moral and legal duty of foundation of service - ‘we do the country’s dirty work and if we do so legally and appropriately, as professional soldiers we will be protected by you’ - will have disappeared.

Why have we arrived at this state of affairs? In a phrase, moral cowardice. To quote from the Executive Summary:

The central problem is that the UK Government has uncritically accepted the authority of an ill-conceived body of judge-made human rights law. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (the Strasbourg Court) has misread Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), a misreading which has then been applied retroactively to the conduct of the SAS, and others, decades earlier.

The current government, packed to the rafters by people who do not understand or appreciate the nature of military service, does not wish to challenge the ECHR. Why? Is it because at least some of these people sympathise with the terrorists? I do not wish to suggest motives to the supporters of this Bill other than abject foolishness. Whatever their motives, in pursuing this egregious Act the government is making a political choice. Ex-soldiers (like me) are not going to chase the terrorists who tried to kill them through the courts, but some in the nationalist movement and their families will most certainly do so to us. This isn’t about justice; its about settling scores, about getting their own back when their campaign of terror failed but which the modern narrative of a ‘good war’ is an important part of the grievance brigade’s rewriting of history. It is clear that our government is willing to allow this to happen.

It is hard not to conclude that the Troubles Act is a shameful dereliction by a morally bankrupt government unwilling to defend those who sacrificed their lives to defend it, and their country.

What a remarkable state of affairs. Dwell on the implications. It is that this government does not deserve the loyalty of its servicemen. It has certainly lost the loyalty of the ex-service community, if those in my circle are anything to go by.

Private Geoffrey Curtis, 1LI, murdered in West Belfast on 10 June 1983. What value does the UK now place on your sacrifice? No much it appears.

It is immediately obvious from the first pages of this blisteringly superb book that a dominant undercurrent is the restrained exasperation of the teacher attempting to explain, to uncomprehending dolts, once again, that the earth moves around the Sun because of gravity. This is school teacher Sebag Montefiore at his absolute best. The story he tells is simple, yet complex. It needs, first and foremost, to be understood. To be understood, it needs to be explained.

It has been written to de-sting the viper of ignorance. It could be angry, but is not. Instead it oozes authoritative restraint, lubricated by the sublime use of language. I cannot emphasise enough how the author is the master swordsman of the English tongue.

It is not a dynastic narrative like ‘The Romanovs’, nor an historic travelogue like ‘Jerusalem’. It is, instead, a book written for recalcitrant learners by a still-patient teacher, restraining himself with the exasperated ‘have you not seen, have you not heard?’ of the prophet Isaiah. It’s telling us to ditch our preconceived certainties and embrace the complexity of a world that too much relishes its simplicities.

The narrative sweep is of the recent history of the Middle East (1909-2026), a region that is both the crucible (‘Cauldron’ even) of the world and the repository of its most ancient bigotries. The reshaping of the region following the demise of the Ottoman Empire has seen not merely expressions of power, local, regional and international, but the resurgence of the hatred of Jews, the restatement of Islamist certainties, the emergence of many new powers and, crucially, a rejection of both the idea and the reality of Israel. It also saw, from the ashes of both Constantinople in 1919 and New Delhi in 1947 a series of new & competing nationalisms that have blistered themselves onto ancient certainties and prejudices that, alongside external meddling, keep the region in turmoil. Yet it has also seen pragmatism as well as religious certainty, idiocy as well as genius.

Is this a book about Israel? No, but overwhelmingly, Yes. Israel looms large in the whole. Although Sebag Montefiore’s story is focused on the broad sweep of leadership across the region’s 19 states the centrality of the Jewish question to the recent history of the region makes the book also the story of Israel, and its role in the creation of the region’s modern polity, rivalries and interests.

Pleasingly, one can see how this is a book designed to demonstrate to the dunces in the class that the fervency of the Dalrymple and the simplicities of the Lineker simply do not work. It’s not hard to see its origins in the futile exchanges on Twitter/X in the years since 7 Oct 2023. It will do nothing to change the minds of those cursed with the vilest of hatreds, the warriors of antisemitism who, like Miller and Albanese, are the cavalry of the apocalypse, bloody swords aloft, calling civilisation to its doom, but perhaps it will do something to teach the rest of us that Israel, for example, is the product not of Zionism, but of the very hatreds that fuel the anti-Semitic narrative. Jews of the diaspora came back together for the first time in 2,000 years to secure precisely the protection and freedom that the world had refused to give them and wishes still to dismantle. It was fuelled by the forced exodus of Jews from their Babylonian exile across the Middle East, the product of the very exclusionary hatreds that diminished the countries that expelled them and helped create an Israel that was anchored not in the ghettos of Lvov, but in the Middle East. 1948 was an expression of self-determination, not of colonialism, an end to victimhood and a determination by the world’s most persecuted minority to take their destiny in their own hands, not to allow it to be subject any longer to the ridiculous hatreds of others.

I cannot describe how beautifully this book is written. You’ll need to read it for yourselves to see what I mean.

Its in two parts. You’ll learn much! Part 1 is out now: you can listen to it here.

The trailer can be seen heard here.

It is being aired at 3 pm on Tuesday 1st September.

And, if you want to read more about this crazy raid, do buy my book Operation Suicide, wherever you buy your books.

But what shall I call the book? It is due out mid-2027.

Kate doesn’t like my holding title, which is Kohima, The Greatest Battle. Although this harks back nicely to the debate in 2013, I agree with her. 'The ‘greatest’ seems a bit hackneyed. So what do I call it? The book uses Japanese sources in particular to understand the arguments around the nature and scale of what became Operation U Go, so I’ve suggested to Kate Moore, my editor at Osprey/Bloomsbury, that we call it this:

She likes it, as do I. But what do you, my readers, think? I’d be really grateful for your thoughts, positive or negative. Please let me know!

I will be going back to Myanmar next February if you wish to travel with me.

Booking is now open.

This fabulous trip is organised by Bertie Lawson of Sampan Travel and is the journey of a lifetime. We start in Yangon and get to know this old city, before flying to Mandalay, an even older Bamar town and home of the old Kingdom deposed by the British in 1885. After spending a few days looking at the battles of 1942 and 1945 we travel to the old hill station of Maymyo, before driving across the dry central belt via Meiktila to Bagan on the Irrawaddy. We do it at the same time of year as Bill Slim’s 14th Army reconquered the country in 1945, so you’ll get a good sense of the challenges this remarkable army faced on its way to victory.

I can tell you that you’ll be looked after extremely well by the Sampan team.

The itinerary is here:

We only take small groups to Burma/Myanmar so I’d encourage you to book now before all places are gone.

There are much better books! Two I would unreservedly recommend are Professor Sarah Paine’s The Wars for Asia 1911-1949 and Rana Mitta’s China’s War. Jonathan Fennell’s new volume on the Second World War, which begins (hurrah!) in 1931 is also strongly recommended.

If for some reason you can’t get to the Engelsberg Ideas link, I’ve copied my review below.

A new history of the Second World War promises to provide a vital Asian perspective on the conflict, but ends up flattening complex events into a simplistic caricature.

Newly arrived Indian soldiers stand at attention prior to inspection at Singapore in December 1941. Credit: D and S Photography Archives

Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia, Hans van de Ven, Basic Books, £30

I really wanted to enjoy this book. The enthusiastic endorsements from Rana Mitter, Antony Beevor and Richard Overy raised my expectations considerably. Yet by page eight of Blood Dawn I felt as uncomfortable as the proverbial curate confronted with a rotten egg.

The author aims to provide a narrative that ‘contributes to a gradual shift in our understanding of the significance of World War II’. This is admirable. A more Asian-centred interpretation of the conflict is certainly needed, as the war is still too often viewed through a Eurocentric or North Atlantic lens. Historians such as Rana Mitter, Jonathan Fennell and Richard Overy have already helped redress this imbalance. It is unquestionably true that the conflict began with Japanese aggression in China as early as 1931 and that the war both began and ended in Asia.

The problem is that the book insists that the central dynamic of modern Asian history is a nationalist struggle to escape imperialism and colonialism. While both undeniably shaped Asia, it is a considerable stretch to explain the region’s political development primarily through resistance to empire. The author correctly notes that many Asian political movements saw the war as an opportunity to cast off colonial rule, but he greatly overstates their role in determining the war’s outcome.

Consequently, the analysis neglects the broader dynamics of power – local, regional and imperial – that shaped Asia before, during and after the war. The author assumes that modern Asia is the product of ‘Asian peoples’ continuing struggle to overcome the legacies of empire’. That seems reductive. A more convincing interpretation would describe modern Asia to be the result of a power-based confrontation among declining powers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands, a rising Japan, a developing China, and the emerging superpowers whose ideologies would shape postwar Asia: the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was principally caused by one rising empire, Japan, seeking to assert its dominance regionally and to replace existing empires.

As a result, some empires disappeared, others expanded, and many colonial territories gained independence as competing political elites seized opportunities created by wartime upheaval. Where those struggles could not be resolved peacefully, civil war followed. One may call this nationalism or self-determination, but it was power politics nonetheless.

In the postwar period, Asians were often less concerned with abolishing imperial legacies than with creating new centres of power controlled by local elites. Since 1945, Asia has been shaped by competing powers, some imperial in nature, such as China, the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States, and others nationalist and local.

A similar lack of nuance appears in the treatment of imperialism. British imperialism is lumped together with that of France and the Netherlands, with little appreciation for their differences. British involvement in 19th-century China is presented primarily as the cause of China’s problems rather than as part of a broader interaction with a declining and dysfunctional Qing polity. Imperialism was certainly influential, but so were domestic developments, including China’s internal sclerosis and Japan’s response to modernity, which produced its own imperial ambitions in China, Korea, Manchuria and the Pacific.

The author’s ideological predispositions are impossible to miss, and the book frequently descends into crude Anglophobia. We are told, for instance, that ‘British elites, who liked (and like) to think of themselves as natural and gifted rulers, found a new outlet for their yearning to govern India’. Such statements are simplistic, if not puerile. Similarly, discussing the collapse of the American-British-Dutch-Australia Command (ABDACOM) in 1942, the author remarks that ‘the Dutch were abandoned to their fate. Retreat is an underappreciated military skill, and the British were practiced masters of it, as they had shown at Dunkirk’. This is the sort of cheap point-scoring that would weaken an undergraduate essay, yet here it appears in a supposedly serious work of history.

The treatment of India is particularly problematic. The narrative focuses heavily on the Indian National Congress and consequently overlooks the diversity and complexity of the independence movement. There is little recognition that what Congress often described as British obstruction was, in part, a debate within Britain (especially the Conservative Party) about the form an independent India should take. The same debate also took place within Indian circles considering the subject.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the central political question in India was often not whether independence would occur but what form it would take and, crucially, who would benefit from it. The Quit India movement of 1942 followed the Cripps Mission, which had already offered India Dominion status after the war. Congress sought immediate separation, but many of its leaders privately supported the Allied war effort, believing correctly that victory would hasten independence. One could even argue that Congress’s greatest unintended achievement was not independence but the partition and communal violence that accompanied it. The book fails to engage adequately with these complexities.

This fact distinguishes Britain from France and the Netherlands, which were generally far less willing to surrender their empires. Yet the author suggests that ‘Western hopes for restoration of the pre-war imperial order’ were frustrated after 1945. In Britain’s case, this is misleading. Britain intended to leave India; it simply believed that winning the war had to come first. By the late 1930s, most British politicians accepted that independence was inevitable. The Second World War accelerated rather than initiated that process. The election of the Labour government in 1945 effectively guaranteed independence.

The work is weak on constitutional history. It omits significant developments, such as the Government of India Act of 1935 and simplifies debates that were far more nuanced than presented here. Even after offering a relatively balanced account of the Bengal Famine, and acknowledging failures by the Government of Bengal, the author eventually falls back on the claim that the disaster resulted from ‘conscious strategic decisions’ made by the US and UK governments. Churchill receives similarly predictable treatment. We are reminded that he harboured racist views and told that his supposed use of hunger as a weapon of war demonstrated indifference to Bengal. Such arguments flatten an enormously complex historical debate into a familiar moral caricature.

Interestingly, there is no discussion in the book of postwar Malaya, perhaps because it might upend the author’s simplistic views on imperialism. Independence was granted in 1960 only after the military threat posed by the Malayan Communist Party had been overcome in 1957. Stability and eventual independence were achieved through a conscious British effort to end colonial rule on sustainable terms. Whatever criticisms may be made of that process, the subsequent success of Malaysia and Singapore suggests it was not entirely ineffective.

If the constitutional history is poor, parts of the military history is no better. For example, the author describes Pearl Harbor as a ‘brilliant strategic manoeuvre’. Operationally, perhaps. Strategically, however, it was disastrous, as it brought the United States into the war and ensured Japan’s eventual defeat. Elsewhere, Rommel is credited with ‘cunning tactics’, while the Indian Army is at one point confused with Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA), an astonishing error. The crucial importance of the Hump air route in sustaining China and meeting the terms of Allied strategy is not discussed.

Most striking is the failure to address the contrast between the volunteer Indian Army of approximately 2.5 million men and Bose’s INA, which numbered about 16,000 rather than the 30,000 claimed. The Indian Army is dismissed as little more than a colonial manpower reservoir. This ignores the agency of millions of Indians who volunteered to fight. As one veteran explained to me: ‘We knew about Nanjing, and didn’t want the Japanese here.’

The INA achieved little of military or political significance during the war itself, though it has since acquired considerable symbolic importance in Indian political discourse. By contrast, the Indian Army played a decisive role in defeating Japanese forces at Kohima, Imphal, Mandalay and Meiktila. It was this army, not the INA, that more accurately reflected how many Indians viewed their future.

Although the author draws on some useful scholarship, including Pike, Khan and Raghavan, he frequently misunderstands the Burma campaign. Churchill’s reluctance to fight there arose not from indifference but from a strategic preference for operations against Malaya. The Allied return to Burma was driven substantially by the need to maintain Chinese support and re-open communications through the Burma Road.

Even more extraordinary is the claim that Britain fought in Asia primarily to preserve control of India. Such assertions resemble the old joke that SEAC (the acronym for Britain’s South East Asia Command) actually stood for ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’. They reduce a highly complex coalition war to a single ideological explanation.

Several factual errors compound the problem. The book claims Stilwell demanded the Ledo Road when Chiang Kai-shek was the principal advocate. Kohima is reduced to a two-week grenade duel rather than the 64-day battle it actually was. Mandalay is said to have been bypassed in 1945, a statement unlikely to impress the soldiers who fought to capture it.

The most surprising aspect of the book comes in its conclusion, where the author briefly acknowledges that European imperialism was ‘not the sole source of discontent’. That admission undermines much of the argument that precedes it. If imperialism was not the sole cause, then what other forces mattered most? The book never adequately answers that question. That, ultimately, is its greatest weakness.