Perfidious Allies and other stories

Recent popular histories of World War II have focused on the war in Asia, where the post-war political trajectories of former colonial empires have been no less consequential than those in Europe.

- KANIKA DATTA

Those campaigns are an uncomfortable reminder that, whatever the evils of Nazi Germany, World War II was essentially a colonial contest, and the empires relied heavily on colonial troops to fight their good fight.

In 1945: The Reckoning, popular historian Phil Craig follows a track set by scholars such as Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Peter Clark and Mark Mazower. He rightly highlights the contradictions of the Atlantic Charter of August 1941. One of its key principles was the right to self-determination of all people to live in freedom from fear and want.

The US understood this to mean a British commitment to give up her colonies; Churchill, unreconstructed imperialist, simply went along to secure American resources for Britain's campaign against Germany.

Mr Craig follows the duplicitous end-game of European allies in their Asian colonies. As he writes, "Britain...fought hard and sometimes dirty to regain control of those parts of it that were temporarily taken over by its enemies." Those retaken colonies ensured that export revenues didn't bankrupt Britain either.

Malaysia (or Malaya) is accorded a paragraph or two, which is odd, given that the British stayed on till the late fifties.

As with Finest Hour, his book on the Battle of Britain, Mr Craig has built this story through personal histories to bring to readers the experience of war by those who lived through it. This technique has some merit.