One of the best works of post-World War II history, Ronald H. Spector's "In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia," is now available in a trade paperback edition (Random House, $16).
In my review of the hard cover edition on November 5, 2007, (http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/071105-kinchen-columnsbookreview.html) I said that Spector's readable and well documented look at the continuation of World War II in Asia, after Japan's surrender, shows it's "far easier to get into a war than to get out of one.... defeating a foe's armed forces is often only the beginning of a long struggle."
"We should have learned the lessons of World War II, Spector points out... Presidents have a way of ignoring facts that don't agree with their conclusions," I said. The book is a cautionary tale of the dangers of nation building--a lesson that we seem to have to keep learning war after war after war.
Relying on recently available firsthand accounts from Japanese, Chinese, British, and American sources and declassified U.S. intelligence records, Spector shows what a truly messy situation prevailed after the Japanese surrender. In several cases, Japanese troops were used by Nationalist China to fight the communists. It was almost as if the SS had been used by the Allies in Europe to fight insurgencies there.
It's a book worth reading, and now the trade paperback edition makes it even more accessible.
David Kinchen resides in Port Lavaca, Texas, and is editor of 