Category Archives: Southeast Asia

by | 24 August 2026 · 5:42 am

Far Western Reaches of Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 67-73:

We do not yet know how products from Nusantaria came to arrive at the plush homes of a literate, urbanized Babylon. But that merely says how little we know about unwritten history. Sailing techniques which took Austronesians to Samoa were equally capable of taking them to the west coast of India where people from Harappa, the city of the Indus valley civilization which flourished between about 4500 and 3900 BP, had a settlement in Gujarat. At the least, sailing to the south-east coast of India from Sumatra or the Malay peninsula would have been well within their reach. There is evidence that the single outrigger sailing craft found in southern India was brought from the east around this time. The use in Arabic and Persian of Dravidian- rather than Sanskrit-derived words for Indian items such as ginger and rice indicates very early south Indian connections, and Nusantarians may also have taken coconut cultivation to Sri Lanka and southern India.

Other indications of trade links between the eastern archipelago and the west come from ancient Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek sources. An Egyptian text from around 1500 BCE refers to an expedition to the Land of Punt, most likely a kingdom on the Horn of Africa and source of various exotic products including gold, ivory and fragrant woods from tropical regions, possibly a reference to aloeswood which came only from the islands, peninsula and the far south of China. The expedition also returned with an item believed to be cinnamon, possibly from south India but more likely from the Malay peninsula or Sumatra. There are also Hebrew references to cinnamon from the seventh century BCE and a Greek one from the fourth century BCE. Hebrew texts from the time of King Solomon (around 950 BCE) make references to sandalwood, which may have come from south India, but the best came from drier places like Timor in the eastern archipelago. The first century CE Jewish historian Josephus mentioned trade expeditions sailing to the east from the Red Sea which took three years to complete.

…

Roman ships, built of cedarwood planks and with pitch caulking and lead-lined hulls, carried an average 220 tonnes of cargo according to the Musiris document but could be up to 35 metres in length with a deep draught and have a capacity of 350–500 tonnes.

Major Roman exports were wine, glassware and metals, but imports were invariably greater in value, so the difference had to be paid in silver. In addition to luxury items such as ivory, tortoiseshell, pepper, frankincense and silk, the Romans even imported special sands from India and Africa to facilitate the cutting and polishing of marble for their many magnificent buildings.

The Romans had several trading bases with semi-permanent settlements on the Malabar coast of India, and at least one on the Coromandel coast: Arikamedu, near Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu. This was active from the second century BCE or earlier until the third century CE. Although trade would have suffered as Roman power declined in the face of rebellions and the onslaughts of Germanic tribal confederation, access to the east remained on such a scale that large quantities of pepper and silk were among the demands of Visigoth leader Alaric in return for not sacking Rome in 408.

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Filed under Africa, economics, language, Mediterranean, South Asia, Southeast Asia, travel

by | 23 August 2026 · 7:45 am

Peopling Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Even at the lowest sea levels of the last ice age, there was deep water between Bali on the edge of the Sunda Shelf [SE Asia] and the Sahul Shelf [Australia, New Guinea]. But the distances were small enough for humans – though not for many animal species – to cross. It was during the last great glaciations that modern humans reached Australia, most likely arriving via Wallacea [between Borneo & New Guinea]. New Guinea was reached about the same time and became, around ten thousand years ago, probably the first place on earth – long before Egypt or Mesopotamia – where settled agriculture was practised.

… The sea rise also created a genetic and cultural rift. By modern times there was a clear racial divide between the Malay-Polynesians, speaking Austronesian languages, and Papuan-Melanesian physical types and cultures. Despite their remarkable east to west dispersal, the former left little trace in lands that were relics of the Sahul Shelf other than in the Bismarck Archipelago. However, some Melanesians remained further west. Findings from Niah cave in Sarawak dated to about 40,000 years ago and at Tabon on Palawan dated to 25,000 years ago have genetic characteristics similar to ancient Australians and Melanesians. So it is likely that the first Homo Sapiens in the region were of the same stock as the Australo-Melanesians who settled the forests and highland valleys of New Guinea and the bush country and great deserts of Australia. The Tabon caves were inhabited from around 30,000 BP, but while they now overlook the sea they were once on a hillside far from the shore. Thus far, no similar finds have been made on other islands, which may suggest that Tabon man walked there and that early man in that region had yet to gain sufficient skills to cross from Palawan to Mindanao or the Visayas.

The deep water gaps between Wallacea and the Sahul and Sunda landmasses had a huge impact on fauna and flora. Until later introduced by humans, large placental mammals never crossed that divide from Sundaland to Wallacea nor did large marsupials move in the other direction. Wallacea had its own separate but rather limited indigenous fauna and flora due to its weak links to the great landmasses and the distance in time since it had drifted from Gondwanaland [continental Southern Hemisphere].

The ending of the last ice age must have been a catastrophe for many of the people of Sundaland, the relatively flat land between what is now the Asian mainland and the coasts of Sumatra, Java and Borneo. While global warming enabled areas such as northern Europe to become habitable, in Asia it destroyed large numbers of human settlements in a region which previously should have been very conducive to habitation. By the same token, the creation of many islands and a huge expansion of coastlines produced the environment for the world of the Nusantarians, living on and by the sea, developing sailing craft and navigational prowess and building the coastal exchange networks which eventually evolved into ocean-spanning movements. They were behind the expansion of human settlement and of trade around half the globe. The same people, originating from Nusantaria, settled almost every island between Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Madagascar, between Taiwan and New Zealand.

Today, the majority of people from Nusantaria are defined as ‘Austronesians’ – a Greek-derived word meaning ‘southern islands’ but now applied to a language group. Austronesian is in the first instance a linguistic marker though also with shared genetic and cultural characteristics. As a language group it was the world’s most widely dispersed until Europeans settled the Americas 500 years ago. Austronesian expansion across the Pacific and Indian oceans was enabled primarily by mastery of the sea and driven forward by the confines of their many, mostly rugged, islands.

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Filed under language, migration, Pacific, Philippines, Polynesia, South Asia, Southeast Asia

by | 22 August 2026 · 6:13 am

Languages of Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 29-31:

Language is also a divide between maritime and mainland. The island and peninsula people all speak very similar atonal Austronesian languages, as did those of much of Vietnam and Taiwan until relatively recent times. Mainland South East Asia on the other hand is the domain of Austro-Asiatic, Thai and Sinitic languages, all of them tonal.

Maritime and mainland have some history in common, with the sea as a link. But they are otherwise divided by geography. The mainland has broad, fertile river basins such as the Mekong, Ayeyarwady and Chao Phraya, and are able to support large populations and urban development. The islands are often mountainous, with a limited amount of good alluvial and volcanic soil and many experiencing excessive rainfall that leaches the soil. Their populations tend to be small and their political entities fragmented. Vast China has mostly looked inward. It has always generated much of the trade which supported the maritime states. Its coastal people have long interacted with the Nanyang, but China overall shares limited history and culture with Nusantaria.

As boatbuilders and navigators the maritime peoples were also suppliers and carriers of the spices and tropical forest merchandise which attracted global demand. These successively brought Indian culture, Muslim religion and western domination in their wake.

This is also the story of their seafaring gifts to the world, with many ideas copied by or exchanged with India, Arabia, China and the west. It is a story of their adaptation of imported artistic, religious and political ideas to their own circumstances, and accomplishments such as the Borobudur temple. This is the story of communities mostly living on or close to the sea, of loose and changing political entities but communities sharing common cultural traits, such as cockfighting, betel chewing and the takraw ball game. They have the same linguistic roots and have long been reliant on trade with each other as well as with the outside world. Traditionally, the sea was for many the primary means of survival and transport. Apart from in Java and Bali, where fertile soil and self-sufficiency accounted for what have been called their ‘quiet habits and contented dispositions’, the island peoples were ‘maritime and commercial, devoted to speculation of gain, animated by a spirit of adventure, and attached to distant and hazardous enterprises’. The bigger picture was that neither Java nor the myriad other islands could be important without the interaction between them.

The transience of states is one reason why the region’s history is poorly known. Modern states prefer to build their own identities, which may require ignoring the past, especially if it is inconvenient in the context of religious, border and other contemporary issues. Another is the lack of pre-colonial written history. Of the little that exists almost all comes from outside sources, many of which make references to places whose identity can only be guessed at. Yet another is the absence of major archaeological remains other than temples, and they are significant only in Java and coastal Vietnam. Indigenous work such as writings on palm leaves and palaces of wood rotted away long ago.

Modern archaeology and attendant scientific advances in genetics and the origin of materials are gradually filling some gaps. Aerial photography and new dating systems are gradually adding to knowledge. But there remain huge blank spaces between the written references to cities, power and wealth found in foreign texts and what can be proven. Even archaeology can mislead. Ceramics are a favoured marker because they survive better than any man-made product, but that can lead to an over-emphasis on the importance of particular designs as cultural markers, or on the role of China as principal exporter in historic times. Almost certainly, cotton textiles and forest products were for centuries the prime traded goods, not ceramics. Even bones decay quickly in tropical climates and acidic soils.

A vast amount of scholarly material exists on specific topics, such as ceramics, linguistics, genetics, boatbuilding, religious art, anthropology, folk myths, music and botany, as well as on the various written sources. Weaving the strands of knowledge – not to mention the many areas of academic disagreement – into a readable but coherent whole is the goal of this book written by a non-specialist who acknowledges his debt to the many experts cited in the footnotes and bibliography. Such a book for the general reader is needed, to acknowledge better the peoples of Nusantaria’s shared identity and their role in world history.

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Filed under economics, language, migration, Philippines, religion, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Taiwan

by | 21 August 2026 · 7:08 am

Naming ‘Maritime Southeast Asia’

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 29-31:

This region is often referred to as ‘maritime South East Asia’, with the more general term ‘South East Asia’ dating only to World War II. Although Japan used the term ‘Tonan Ajiya’ (‘South East Asia’ [lit. ‘East South Asia’]) from the late nineteenth century, in European languages its use did not become widespread until the 1950s, bringing together mainland states between China and India with the islands. The formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 added to the notion that mainland and maritime were one, yet in practice they have divergent interests and religion, now as in the past.

Europeans had long termed the islands the ‘Indian archipelago’ or ‘Insulindia’. Alternatively they referred to them as the ‘Malay archipelago’, neither term distinguishing between the Indonesian and Philippine island groups. The area corresponded roughly to ‘Nusantara’, a name dating to the thirteenth century and the Java-based Majapahit empire. Nusa is a Sanskrit-derived word meaning ‘island’.

‘Nusantara’ defined the region of islands and coasts over which Majapahit rule, tribute or mercantile influence extended. It covered most of what is now Indonesia, part of the Philippine archipelago, the central Vietnam coast and the Malay peninsula. Beyond its Javanese heart it did not rule directly but held sway over the many small mercantile states of the region. ‘Nusantara’ in Malay today has a narrower meaning: ‘archipelago’, specifically the Indonesian archipelago. So this book uses ‘Nusantaria’ to denote a broader zone, the single maritime region between the northern entrance to the Melaka and Luzon straits, and the Banda islands in the extreme east of the archipelago. While predominantly describing the wider Malay world, and touching too on Taiwan, Madagascar and the Marianas, Nusantaria links to the coastal Thai, Chinese, Tamil and other players in the history of the exchange of goods, people and ideas both within the region and with peoples to the west and north-east. It corresponds also to the use by the distinguished archaeologist of South East Asia, Wilhelm Solheim, of the term ‘Nusantao’ to define the mostly Austronesian-speaking peoples of the ancient trading networks of the islands and coasts (tao means people in many Austronesian languages).

The maritime zone is now mostly associated with its largest component, the South China Sea. But even that is a misnomer. The Chinese themselves used the term ‘Nanhai’ or ‘Nanyang’ (‘South Sea’ or ‘Southern Ocean’) for seas that included the South China Sea but could also refer to southern seas generally. Likewise, the Vietnamese used geographical location, calling it the ‘East Sea’ as it lay to their east. More recently and in response to Chinese claims to almost the whole sea, the Philippines has begun to refer to at least its adjacent water as the ‘West Philippine Sea’. The term ‘Philippine Sea’ had been used by early seventeenth-century European mapmakers. Indonesia refers to its portion as the Natuna Sea, after the island group of that name off the Borneo coast. This includes its archipelagic seas north of the islands, which fall within China’s extravagant claims to sea extending 1,600 kilometres from its mainland.

The name ‘South China Sea’ is a European invention of relatively recent date. When the Portuguese first got there in the sixteenth century they called it the ‘Cham Sea’, after the mercantile state which had long existed on the coast of what is now central Vietnam. Arabs at one time called the southern part of it the ‘Malay Sea’ or the ‘Spice Sea’ because it was close to the Spice Islands.5 The more northern part was known as the ‘Sanf Sea’, a reference to Champa.6 Others called it the ‘Luzon Sea’ after the main island of today’s Philippines. Westerners long referred to these seas as part of the Indian Seas. The name ‘Indonesia’ (‘Indian islands’) reflects this. ‘China Sea’ only came into western use around 1800. ‘South’ was added in the early twentieth century.

A few hundred years ago, before the territorial expansion of China to Taiwan and southwards by Vietnam, Nusantaria was almost entirely Malay – to use the term ‘Malay’ in its broad cultural and linguistic sense. Even today these generic Malays of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei own most of its coastline. They are peoples who have traded with and occasionally paid tribute to China, and have absorbed Chinese immigration but, at least until very recently, have been more influenced by ideas from India, the Arab and Persian worlds and Europe than by China.

To the Chinese, the whole region was the ‘Nanyang’, meaning ‘Southern Sea’, a region inhabited by darker-skinned people and thus often seen as inferior in a system that associated skin tone with social status. For many Indians it was an overseas extension of their Hindu-Buddhist culture. Even now the marks left by Indian religion, writing and art are more evident than those of China. As for the peoples who actually lived in this region, they mostly saw it in terms of individual entities, of spheres of political influence, religion and trade, which had long been linked through dynasties and rivalries.

The maritime zone now comprises two modern archipelagic states: all of the Philippines and most of Indonesia, Brunei and the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo. To these island entities must be added the Malay peninsula, where Malays remain in charge, and, until quite recently, much of coastal Vietnam. These last two share similarities to the island states because their peoples are wedged between forest and water and so traditionally looked seaward.

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Filed under China, economics, language, migration, nationalism, Philippines, religion, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Taiwan

by | 20 August 2026 · 4:17 pm

Empire of the Winds Introduction

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 27-29:

In 1498 the crew of the ships of Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama became the first people known to sail between Europe and India, landing at Calicut on the south-west coast of India. By 1512, the long arm of Portuguese merchant adventurism had reached almost 5,000 kilometres further, to its ultimate eastern destination, the Banda archipelago, most distant of the fabled Spice Islands.

But this historically crucial surge of European expansion was a minor navigational achievement compared with those of the maritime peoples whose lives the Portuguese were now disrupting. Some 1,500 years earlier sailors from this region had pioneered voyages which linked the Spice Islands to India and China and on to the coasts of Arabia and Africa. These were the pioneers who settled Madagascar, traded along the African coast and may well have sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and north as far as the Gulf of Guinea.

By 500 CE, and probably earlier, the sea, not the more famous overland Silk Road, was the pre-eminent mode of east–west trade. The sea was unquestionably hazardous, but it was easier and sometimes quicker to move 50 tonnes of goods on a ship compared with having to lead camels and pack animals over mountains and deserts, fending off robber bands, and across political boundaries where rulers were eager to extract tolls. According to Roman estimates it was 27 times more expensive to transport goods by land rather than water. Similar estimates were made for eighteenth-century Europe.

It was these sailors who guided the Portuguese from Melaka to the Bandas. That was a journey through the heart of a zone which rivals the Mediterranean as a locus of global trade and cultural interaction. This region comprises the almost countless islands and coastlines of the interlinked South China, Java, Sulu, Sulawesi and Banda seas and is joined to the Indian and Pacific oceans by the straits of Melaka, Sunda, Lombok, Makassar and Luzon. Its land is primarily composed of the islands of the vast Malay archipelago but includes the Malay peninsula and touches modern Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as southern coastal China. India is a hop away across the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal.

This is a story of seafaring, of the drivers of global commerce, of cultural interchange and of the rise and fall of states and political systems. It is the story of a sea-girt region that remains predominantly Austronesian-Malay by language and original culture but has been subject to successive waves of influence from India, Islam, the west and China. It is the story of a sea which enabled ancient Rome to know cloves and camphor, of sailboats and of navigators who linked Maluku to the Bab el Mandeb and the coast of Africa and settled Madagascar. While ships and goods moved westward other ships and merchants moved eastward, bringing Indian and Islamic cultures to east Asia. Trade in spices was also the spur to Europe’s involvement in the region, which began more than 500 years ago. Nusantaria lost its leadership in boatbuilding and navigation, but to this day remains at the heart of global commerce, supplying some 40 per cent of merchant marine crews.

Despite its illustrious past, the region’s sense of identity is not what it was even in the 1880s when mariner and novelist Joseph Conrad was sailing its seas and José Rizal was awakening the nationalist aspirations of a wider Malay world. Steamships, airplanes and, above all, new nation states created from maps drawn haphazardly by western empires have eroded its sense of itself. Religious divisions have done the same. The economic dominance of western and east Asian countries has for now marginalized indigenous Nusantarian strengths. Many books of ‘South East Asian’ history are written with scant, if any, acknowledgment of the separate identity of the Austronesian linguistic and cultural heritage of the islands and coasts. For their different reasons, Indian, western and Chinese writers tend to generalize about ‘South East Asia’ mainly by reference to the mainland. Although the populations of states of the archipelago and Malay peninsula outnumber by 40 per cent those of the mainland they receive far less attention, partly because of a shortage of early documentary history.

But nothing can obliterate the common history and shared culture of the maritime region. So this is a book which largely ignores modern state boundaries to give a picture over time of the region, of the role of the sea and of the peoples who have lived near its shores for the past 2,500 or so years.

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Filed under China, economics, language, migration, Philippines, Portugal, religion, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Taiwan

by | 4 February 2026 · 8:15 am

Parajutes in Burma, 1944

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 329-330:

Watching the ground operations at the airfields, [Gen. William] Slim was surprised by the range and flexibility of Snelling’s air supply. Rations, fuel and ammunition were, for obvious reasons, the priority, as well as mail, grain for animals and a host of other supplies. ‘The emergency and fancy demands made,’ he noted, ‘were also met with the promptitude and exactness of the postal order department of a first-class departmental store.’ These included blood plasma, instruments, drugs, spare parts for guns and other weapons, boots, clothing, the daily issue of SEAC (the new troops’ newspaper), typewriter ribbons, cooking pots and even replacement spectacles. The sheer range and logistical effort was mind-boggling.

From 2.30pm that afternoon, the first of a number of Dakotas and Commandos dropped supplies over the Admin Box. The multicoloured parachutes had been another bit of clever forward-thinking. Snelling had been unable to get enough parachutes supplied from India and there was no hope of acquiring the number needed from back home in Britain; SEAC was still bottom of the priority list for parachutes, as for everything. The answer was to make them of paper or jute instead – there were a great many paper mills in Calcutta and Bengal was the jute capital of the world. Paper parachutes, it turned out, would not work, but jute ones would. Slim now contacted the leaders of the British jute industry in Calcutta, asking for their help. He told them that to save time they were to deal with him and Snelling direct and warned them that he had no idea when exactly they would be paid. Despite this, within ten days they were experimenting with various types of ‘parajutes’, as they called them. By trial and error they soon arrived at the most efficient shape and weight of cloth, and within a month they had parajutes that were 85 per cent as reliable as normal silk parachutes. It was agreed they would be colour-coded – red, green, yellow, black, blue and orange, each denoting a different type of load. The cost of producing a parachute was around £20 at that time; the cost of a parajute was £5.

Despite this, Slim was rebuked for not going through the proper channels in securing these essential additions to the air-supply operation – not that he was bothered; some things were more important, and in South-East Asia they all had to use their initiative and think outside the box, no matter what some desk-wallahs thought. The entire war there was becoming an exercise in lateral thinking.

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Filed under Britain, Burma, economics, industry, Japan, military, South Asia, war

by | 1 February 2026 · 9:46 am

Bengal Famine, 1943

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 112-114:

Most Bengalis lived an extremely precarious existence. Some ten million were utterly dependent on agriculture, but of these more than half held less than 2 acres of land and many none at all. There was charity and relief but no social welfare; they had to fend for themselves. Through the first half of 1943 food prices had increased dramatically. … This was due in part to the shortages in Bengal but also to increased demand for the feeding of troops in India, as well as demand from around the world. It was artisans who suffered first, because as poverty increased so the money available for goods dried up. Then the shortages hit the wider Bengali population, many of whom left the country for the cities. By the time Tom Grounds was on leave in Calcutta, the city was bursting with the influx of impoverished families searching for food.

Yet while the cost of food was certainly a factor, the biggest problem now facing the authorities was how to get food to Bengal and urgently. The state had already been an importer of food for over a decade and most of it had come from Burma, now closed to India. The loss of Burma had been disastrous for Bengal’s fragile economy and the subsequent cyclone had made it catastrophic. Where else could it be sourced? North America and South America were the obvious places, but the amount needed was enormous and would have required a major diversion of shipping at a time when the demands on such seaborne transport had never been greater.

That August, Churchill was not prepared suddenly to release shipping to take food to Bengal; however draconian that may seem, far away in Britain the problems of the Bengalis seemed less pressing than the urgent need to maintain supplies at a crucial moment in the war. Britain and America were fighting in Sicily – an island that could be supplied effectively only by ship; they were about to invade mainland Italy, which also required an amphibious operation and supply; they were preparing for the invasion of north-west Europe; and they were fighting the Japanese throughout the Pacific. Was Churchill really expected to interrupt the war effort, and current operations, with millions of lives at stake in theatres of war around the world? Who was to say what effect such a diversion of shipping would have on the eventual length of the war, with its implications for further loss of life? In any case, ships could not be diverted from the far side of the Atlantic, for example, at the drop of a hat. Churchill was not to blame.

Not all India was facing famine – only Bengal and the north-east. One problem was that in 1935 the government had ceded considerable central power to the provinces, where the regional governments were all democratically elected. The previous year, 1942, these had all agreed to introduce trade barriers between one another. The central government of India now announced there should be free trade in grain, but plans to send relief to Bengal had been obstructed by local government officers, police and other officials who feared their own provinces risked suffering a similar fate to that of Bengal. Wavell, in one of his first acts as Viceroy-Designate, had forced the issue by threatening legal and even military action, and by August substantial amounts of grain had finally begun to arrive in Bengal. It was, however, too little too late to bring a swift end to the humanitarian disaster rising horrifically throughout the region. Relief kitchens hastily set up in Calcutta and elsewhere were simply not enough. With malnutrition came disease; those not dying of starvation were just as likely to succumb to typhus, malaria or cholera, and there were not enough hospitals or medical care to cope.

The famine had certainly been exacerbated by the war and by the fact that the Indian government had prioritized combatting the Japanese above all other matters. Yet the authorities, although slow to react, were certainly not immune to the horrors unfolding and, of course, while the tragedy of human suffering was truly appalling, the famine was yet another massive problem for the Allied command to overcome. It stretched already overstretched lines of supply, pushed the limited medical services to breaking point, affected food supplies to the troops, further sapped the morale of those who witnessed the starving, dying and dead throughout Bengal, and damaged the reputation of the British even more, and all at a time when there was a new Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief.

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Filed under Bangladesh, Britain, Burma, disease, food, Italy, Japan, migration, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 31 January 2026 · 11:31 pm

V Force Intelligence in Burma

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 86-89:

There were code-breakers too, and radio listening, but possibly the most important of all – especially to those now heading to the front – was V Force.

This extraordinary group of native Burmese under British command operated all along the front and were purely intelligence gatherers and reconnaissance – but they were mightily effective. The commanders had detailed knowledge of the local language, culture and conditions. One of them, based further to the north-east in the Naga Hills, was indicative of the unorthodox approach taken by V Force: Ursula Graham Bower was an anthropologist who had befriended the Naga head-hunters before the war, and, as her Christian name suggested, was a woman.

Another was Captain Anthony Irwin, who was operating in the Arakan, and running his own team under the overall charge of one of the V Force originals, Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Donald.

…

V Force were the eyes and ears of the British effort in the Arakan. While Irwin was dependent on his local recruits to collect intelligence, his task was to be the brains behind the operation. An inadequate brain, it seemed to him to begin with, but he learned quickly enough. On parting, Donald had told him: ‘Trust [your] men with everything you’ve got, and they will never let you down.’ Nearly a year on, Irwin knew those had been wise words indeed.

‘These men’ were Mussulmen – local Muslims who had settled in the area some two hundred years earlier. There was now an ethnic split in the Arakan between Muslim and Maugh, who were Hindu, which had led to civil war in the area as recently as 1941; like any civil conflict, it had been brutal, with entire villages decimated by the opposing factions. The result had been that the southern half of the Arakan was now predominantly Maugh, while the north was almost entirely Muslim. This local tragedy rather played into the hands of the British, however, because the Arakan had been conveniently split into two distinct spheres of influence, something they were able to exploit. Muslims hated Maughs and, because the Maughs were helping the Japanese, they hated the Japanese too. Conversely, the Maughs were willing to work for the Japanese against the Mussulmen and, by association, the British. There were two factors, however, that made this a better deal for the British than for the Japanese. The first was that most of the fighting so far had been in the north of the Arakan, where there were fewer Maughs. The second was that because the Japanese held dear the cult of racial superiority, they treated all conquered people with violent contempt, including the Maughs. Furthermore, because Japanese forces were generally so badly supplied – especially with food – they tended to loot what they could from the Burmese without paying any kind of compensation. This was not conducive to winning trust.

Irwin very quickly became an ardent Burmese Mussulman-ophile. They were tenacious, courageous and had an uncanny knack for remembering data. Details of enemy columns were recalled with accuracy; they could tell Japanese planes from Allied long before Irwin himself could ever distinguish them. They would remember with precision exactly where enemy dispositions were and be able to mark them on a map. ‘If they see a British soldier lying wounded and lost in the jungle, they will get him in somehow,’ noted Irwin. Barney Barnett of 136 Squadron, had first-hand experience of this: ‘If they see a Jap body, they will cut off the head and proudly bring it to me, demanding baksheesh’, he noted.

Once, Irwin was sent a map, beautifully drawn and with Japanese positions clearly marked. Also written on the map was a note. ‘Many Japs are looting the publics,’ had been neatly scrawled in pidgin English. ‘Please tell the bombing mans and bomb nicely. Please tell the bombing mans that there are many good publics near and only to kill the Japanese.’

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Filed under Bangladesh, Britain, Burma, India, Japan, language, military, nationalism, religion, war

by | 30 January 2026 · 5:14 am

RAF & USAAF Eastern Air Command

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 145-147:

Even before Tehran, that a restructuring of the air component was urgently needed was crystal clear to Mountbatten, and the advent of his new command helped provide the impetus for sweeping changes in December 1943. At the Chiefs of Staffs talks in Cairo at the end of November he was able to win the support of General ‘Hap’ Arnold, the Chief of the United States Air Force, for the creation of Allied Air Command. Arnold, along with General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, and General Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, agreed that Mountbatten, as Supreme Commander, should be entitled to reorganize the air forces within his command as he saw fit. This support was absolutely essential, because what Mountbatten wanted was a truly integrated and coordinated new air command.

By the time the SEAC staff and wider commanders in the theatre had returned to Delhi and Chungking, the Tehran Conference was over and the plans to outflank Burma by sea and also invade the Andamans had been cancelled. General Stilwell, needless to say, was furious, believing Mountbatten’s plans would lead to a greater air focus on the British effort and away from China, still desperately in need of Allied supplies. He told Mountbatten he was lodging a formal protest. Joining with him, as an act of solidarity with his immediate superior, was General George Stratemeyer, commander of the 10th US Army Air Force.

Mountbatten responded with decisive firmness, however, safe in the knowledge that he had Arnold’s and Marshall’s support. He told Stilwell plainly that it was, as far as he was concerned, totally unacceptable to have a subordinate commander holding independent responsibilities for combat air operations. ‘I was,’ he told Stilwell, ‘overriding the objections and publishing a directive that day integrating the British and American Air Forces.’

The day in question was Saturday, 11 December, and the Supreme Commander addressed his entire staff of some 250 men at 8.45 am in the new War Room in his New Delhi HQ. As far as he was concerned, it was a historic day. From henceforth, he announced, the RAF’s Bengal Command and the 10th US Army Air Force would become integrated as one into Eastern Air Command. Overall air commander in theatre would be the British Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, but the new commander of Eastern Air Command was to be Stratemeyer, who despite his rather half-hearted protest in support of Stilwell now readily accepted the post.

Importantly for the planned coming offensive in the Arakan, in the days that followed further reorganization was completed. On 15 December, Troop Carrier Command was formed, incorporating both a USAAF transport group and an RAF transport wing under the command of Brigadier-General William D. Old, a tough and indefatigable commander who was well known for frequently flying operationally himself. Three days later, 3rd Tactical Air Force was also formed from the US 5320th Air Defense Wing and the RAF’s 221 and 224 Groups, which included the Woodpeckers and other Spitfire squadrons. Finally, into the mix were added a number of army air-supply companies, which used special signals arrangements to connect forward HQs and delivery airfields with supply and base airfields.

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Filed under Britain, China, Japan, South Asia, Southeast Asia, U.S., war

by | 29 January 2026 · 7:39 am

Fighting Malaria in Burma, 1944

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 54-55:

[A] pragmatic mindset was most definitely needed in the battle against endemic sickness. Slim recognized, just as the new Supreme Commander recognized, that prevention was better than cure. Mountbatten had made bringing new medical advances and research to the theatre a priority – something that was far beyond Slim’s own influence; but he could improve medical practice and discipline at the front and he was determined to do so as a major priority. Up until the autumn of 1943, if a soldier contracted malaria, for example, he was then transported, while his disease was at its height, hundreds of miles by road, rail and even sea to a hospital in India. This, on average, took him out of the line for around five months. All too often he might then be re-employed in India and never return to Burma. To get around this problem, new Malaria Forward Treatment Units – MFTUs – were now set up. These were, to all intents and purposes, tented hospitals just a few miles behind the front lines. A man with malaria would reach these within twenty-four hours and remain there for three weeks or so until he was cured. When fit, he was sent straight back to his unit.

Mepacrine anti-malaria tablets were also issued to the men, but their introduction was met with the rumour that they caused impotence. This was entirely without foundation, and Slim rigidly insisted that regimental officers make sure the men were taking their Mepacrine. He even introduced spot visits where every man was checked; if the result was less than 95 per cent positive, he summarily sacked the commanding officer. He only ever had to sack three; the message got around quickly and, equally swiftly, that autumn cases of malaria began to fall.

The regimental officers were also told to maintain strict medical discipline in other areas. Trousers were to be worn, not shorts; and shirts were to be worn with the sleeves down before sunset when insects were at their worst; minor abrasions were to be treated immediately and before, not after, they turned septic. The fight against sickness, Slim insisted, had to be a united effort: discipline, sound practice and common sense were key. And already, as the year drew to a close, the health of Fourteenth Army was showing signs of improving – not massively so just yet, but on the chart that hung on Slim’s wall in his office at Comilla the curve indicating hospital admissions was beginning to sink.

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Filed under Britain, Burma, disease, drugs, malaria, military, war