// We don't talk about the war in Asia which was a messy, complicated conflict//

On the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, broadcaster Kavita Puri – presenter of a new BBC Radio 4 series on the Second World War in Asia – considers why this was the conflict's forgotten theatre

-  MATT ELTON

Matt Elton Your new series, exploring fighting on the Asian front during the Second World War, is called The History Podcast: The Second Map.

Why did you choose that name?

Kavita Puri It came to me after I met a man called Peter Knight, who is now 98. At the time of the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941], he was a 14-year-old boy living in a terraced house in Bromley, a southeastern London suburb. He had been following the war in Europe using a map posted on the wall alongside his dresser.

After Pearl Harbor, he put up another map on the other side of the dresser - a map of Asia and the Pacific. He would sit down every evening with his mum and grandparents to listen to the BBC bulletin, hearing about places for the first time, and about this other war on the Asian front, in British colonies. And he would trace what was happening on that second map.

So he was now updating two maps in tandem: one covering the war in Europe against the Nazis, and the second encompassing the war against Japan in Asia.

Why has the war against Nazi Germany come to dominate how we view this conflict, at least partly to the exclusion of the conflict in Asia?

I think it’s understandable: that war was close by and involved places whose names were more familiar to people in Britain. And it affected people here more directly: Peter Knight had experienced the Blitz, for example. So the European war was close to home, whereas this other war was far away.