INTELLIGENCE AND THE WAR AGAINST JAPAN

A detailed study of the formation and interactions of both the British and American intelligence agencies in the Pacific theater

of WWII. Aldrich (Politics/Univ. of Nottingham) begins his argument by suggesting a critical disparity between British and American diplomacy at the advent of WWII. The British, desperately trying to maintain their empire in a post-colonial world, carefully balanced their reliance on American military and industrial power against the increasingly influential US commitment to anti- imperialism in the region. Due to the public friendship between Churchill and Roosevelt, this Anglo-American uneasiness manifested itself most prominently in the clandestine efforts of the two nations’ secret services. Further exacerbating these tensions throughout the Pacific theater were the additional clashes of ideologies resulting from indigenous communist and Soviet efforts in the war against fascism. These covert organizations, operations, and personalities, created by divergent international interests and granted a tenuous autonomy due to the Allied focus on the defeat of Germany, became a nightmare for British and American diplomats. This same predicament is reflected in Aldrich’s text as his narrative is occasionally eclipsed by the sheer mass of specific research about operations in India, Southeast Asia, and China that he incorporates into the book. He loosely ties the divergent threads together in his conclusion, suggesting that lessons learned from the disarray of WWII’s covert operations served as a starting point for the postwar secret services as America pursued policies of anti-imperialism and containment of communism. Despite a dry style and a tendency to lose the narrative thread in a glut of meticulous research, Aldrich provides an important supplemental history in an area that has been long dominated by a western focus on WWII’s European theater. (21 b&w

illustrations, 6 maps)