Category Archives: U.S.

by Joel | 17 March 2026 · 6:54 am

Early Little League Sponsors in Japan

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Japanese society had not yet reached the level of affluence sufficient for parents to afford registration fees, so leagues had to be fully supported by sponsorships and donations. Each team required from $200 to $300 in 1959 dollars for equipment, uniforms, insurance, and charter fees. For their original Tiger squad, Hatch and his wife bought the uniforms from Takada and sewed on the team name and Little League patches. With more kids wanting to play, soon enough it became apparent they needed sponsors if they were going to equip all their teams adequately. Hatch was lucky in that among the first journalists to cover his team was Bobby Hirai, a colorful Canadian-born reporter for the Mainichi Newspapers who had an entrepreneurial bent. Hirai helped Hatch make important connections in the Japanese and foreign business and media communities.

Hirai had a long career as a facilitator between Japanese and foreign celebrities and corporations. The son of the chief officer at Mitsui Bussan’s Toronto Office before WWII, Bobby grew up with a love for ice hockey and dancing. Repatriated to Japan as a teenager with his family in 1940, he began two years of intensive study, including formal Japanese, at Keimei, a special school set up by the Mitsui family for returnee children, followed by a year at Waseda’s International School before beginning Keio University. During the wartime era of animosity toward the English-speaking world, his mother insisted he keep a secret English-language diary to maintain his fluency, and despite official government policies mandating frugality—“luxury is the enemy,” as the slogan went—he routinely visited the Philippine embassy carrying a change of clothes so as to enjoy their surreptitious dance parties. Immediately after the war his natural English ability was quickly recognized by two reporters for the G.I. newspaper Yank, one of whom was the famous postwar literary agent Knox Berger. As a gofer and translator, for about half a year he scrounged everything from printing presses for the G.I. publication to lodgings for his reporters. It was during this stint that he was present when former wartime Prime Minister Gen. Tōjō Hideki famously shot himself in an attempted suicide moments before his arrest for war crimes. After returning to and graduating from Keio University, Hirai worked as a journalist for Mainichi. Eventually he created a career for himself handling logistics for visiting foreign celebrities and mediating between Japanese and foreign, mainly U.S., corporations.

Although Hirai never served in the U.S. military, his Canadian background and Occupation-era interpretation services made him a member of what historian Guthrie-Shimizu calls a community of entrepreneurial, transnational brokers like “Cappy” Harada that helped mediate American and Japanese baseball interests. Men like Harada and Hirai benefited from connections in a “new military-sanctioned sports entertainment business that would become a cultural manifestation of the American overseas military presence and a staple of American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.”

In the post-Occupation 1950s, the conditions favorable to American-led sports initiatives still applied for Little League, and Hirai helped Hatch tap into these resources. In addition to favorable coverage Hirai came to Hatch’s aid when he was having trouble getting the official league rules translated. And Hirai arranged for Hatch to meet a number of key expat businessmen who provided essential support for his teams.

First among these American supporters was Davey Jones, a longtime Pan-American public relations executive based in Tokyo, and “one of the boys” in Bobby’s group of cronies in Tokyo. Pan-American had a history of supporting sporting events in Japan, and Jones proved an ally of Hatch’s Little League. Following Hirai’s introduction, Jones and Pan-Am sponsored a luncheon meeting with many other members of the American business community in Tokyo on July 12 in that first year. These business leaders created a board for the Kunitachi Little League, with Hatch as its president and officers from Pan-American, the Tokyo Lions Club, as well as the Kunitachi city government. Pan-American and the Lions Club (#503) became the main sponsors in 1959, and the new league’s four team names reflected their sponsorship: After the Tigers, the other teams were the Lions, the Clippers, and the Orions (the last two after Pan-Am’s legendary prewar pan-Pacific service and icon).

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Filed under baseball, Canada, economics, Japan, U.S.

by Joel | 16 March 2026 · 2:07 am

Little League Startups in Japan

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 6-8:

The book’s narrative structure is chronological. Chapter 1, “On Base: Little League’s First Days in Japan,” explores the introduction of Little League for the families of military personnel attached to U.S. bases to the west of Tokyo in the Kantō Plain from 1954. Little League was argued to be a wholesome, distinctively American activity especially suitable for the families living away from the home country, and a method to discipline the bodies and character of youth. Several base leagues across the archipelago experimented on their own initiative with inviting local Japanese communities to field teams in their leagues, but these experiments ended when these bases reverted to Japanese control after the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960.

Chapter 2, “ ‘Mr. Sarge,’ the Red-Headed Giant: Bill Hatch and the Original Little League in Japan,” follows Airman William “Bill” Hatch’s pioneering creation in the summer of 1959 of the first extant Japanese Little League, Kunitachi, as noted above the first Japanese league to send a team to the World Series in 1962. Hatch and his wife Akiko’s efforts were celebrated by both the Japanese and U.S. governments as exemplars of Cold War cultural diplomacy, and were enthusiastically supported by local businesses as well as by U.S. military and American expat business and service organizations in Tokyo. The Hatches success in creating two local leagues set the foundation for Little League’s Far East Region Directors to proactively encourage Japanese participation in base leagues as well as form their own programs.

Chapter 3, “A League of Japan’s Own: The Early Innings,” explores the creation of a national Japanese Little League organization in 1964, and their successful efforts to overcome government institutional inertia that prevented Japan’s 1963 team from traveling to Williamsport. Restrictions on elementary school competition were a durable legacy of prewar bureaucratic management of baseball as a form of education, and of postwar reforms intended to counter elitism of any form in the interest of democratizing Japan. Despite a visit to Tokyo by Little League International President Peter J. McGovern, and growing popular enthusiasm for youth athletics in the year of the Tokyo Olympics, the Ministry of Education still demurred from granting an exemption in late summer 1964. But a resourceful Kondō Takeshi, a twenty-something trading company white-collar worker and future Japanese ambassador, found a work-around to this bureaucratic intransigence in what he called the democratic tactic of “constituency politics,” getting the Foreign Minister to issue passports anyway.

Chapter 4, “Fly Balls and Daring Plays: The Middle Innings,” follows itinerant Little League promoter Mitsuyasu Momotarō’s intentional creation of Little League in the four cities of Musashino, Koganei, Mitaka, and Chōfu in the western Tokyo suburbs in 1966 and 1967. Under the mentorship of elementary school teacher Kamei Ryō, Musashino City had the strongest of the four teams in what constituted the “West Tokyo” Little League that won Japan’s first World Series title in 1967. For unknown reasons, half of the West Tokyo team sent to Williamsport in 1967 consisted of players from the better organized and presumably better funded Kansai region of Japan, and Kamei was replaced by Chōfu construction company owner Hayashi Kazuo. Enthusiasm over West Tokyo’s success led to large numbers at tryouts for each of West Tokyo’s constituent teams, with each team expanding into their own leagues in 1969. Hayashi grew Chōfu’s program into the powerhouse league of the 1970s, becoming the face of Little League in Japan, even being inducted into Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame soon after his passing in the early 2010s. Mitsuyasu’s role was forgotten.

Chapter 5, “Mgr. Kōno Goes to Williamsport: A Provincial Coach and City Make Good,” describes Osaka entrepreneur Yoshikura Toshio’s organization of a vibrant Osaka-based Little League regional association, known as the Kansai Renmei, and the respective ways provincial city Wakayama fielded teams from 1966 through 1968. Wakayama, located on the other end of the Nankai Railway Line from Osaka, had its fair share of entrepreneurial energy characteristic of this era of high-growth Japan, and it had a rich history of baseball at both the high school and, in the form of nanshiki rubber baseball, the elementary school levels. An ad hoc all-star team chosen from that summer’s Wakayama City nanshiki tournament represented Japan in the 1966 Little League World Series. In 1968, an independently organized Wakayama Little League team practiced together every day from March through the summer to earn Japan’s second, consecutive, victory in the World Series. Based on extensive interviews with players, we learn how the team formed and trained intensively under their manager, Kōno Yoshio, who later gained fame for leading Wakayama Tōin High School’s team to the pinnacle of Japan high school baseball at the Kōshien tournament.

Chapter 6, “The Great Little Schism and Mitsui/Sankei Sponsorship: Two Youth Hardball Programs Instead of One,” explores the frustrations that Kansai Renmei founder Yoshikura experienced as he chafed under Little League rules he felt were overly simplified and not suited to Japanese realities, at the same time Mitsui Bussan trading company and the Sankei media group became long-term corporate sponsors. In 1970 Yoshikura decided to abandon Little League and form his own Boys League that became Little League Japan’s major competitor. Meanwhile, a young Mitsui employee in the Public Relations department was tasked with negotiating Kansai media rights from Sankei rival Yomiuri, but he found himself first having to negotiate Little League out of an unorthodox fundraising arrangement with the local underworld.

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Filed under baseball, economics, education, Japan, military, U.S.

by Joel | 15 March 2026 · 7:28 am

Baseball Research in Occupied Japan

Here’s a book that appeared just in time for the latest World Baseball Classic and the latest Asian Studies Association meeting. I’ll have to restrain myself from sharing too many excerpts from it.

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 4-6:

American faith in baseball as constitutive of “all that was good” led the authorities during the U.S. Occupation of Japan immediately after World War II to sponsor its resurgence. Baseball in Japan had come on hard times under wartime austerity partly because it was the enemy’s game, and partly because it was thought to be indulgent, a kind of luxury that was also called the “enemy” in a wartime slogan, zeitaku wa teki (“luxury is the enemy”). The Americans assumed baseball would help democratize postwar Japan because of its intrinsic American-ness. But it wasn’t as if baseball was a foreign pastime. It had been a vibrant part of Japanese life since the late nineteenth century. Japanese went along with the American discourse on baseball and democracy for their own reasons, but mainly so they could play and watch baseball again. In my capacity as president of a small-town league I had already been primed to consider the social impact of youth baseball. As a historian I perceived an opportunity to examine how two distinctive national cultures imbued the game with different values.

An alternative and immediately more obvious research question was, simply, why were the Japanese teams that arrived in Williamsport so consistently among the best? Over the course of my research the American popular press reported what I already knew, that Japanese teams practiced year-round and dawn to dusk on weekends. But surely there was more to it than that. There is a vibrant community of scholars and knowledgeable fans writing on the Japanese high school and professional games, but a literature survey showed no scholarship on Japanese Little League—none in English, and very little in Japanese. The Japanese-language studies focused for the most part on the deleterious effects on young arms throwing hardball, plus a few sociological studies from the 1970s. For a historian, it is exciting to come across a topic that no one has written about. And I felt I had special insight since postwar Japanese history was my specialty and I had a half dozen years’ experience helping to run a Little League in the United States.

A visit to Little League’s Peter J. McGovern Museum suggested reconstructing this history was going to involve much more than the archival work of conventional history research. Apart from some marginally relevant correspondence, a smattering of mentions in Little League newsletters, and the occasional recent testimonial by visiting U.S. veterans who happened to have played some small role in its origins, not much documentation remained from the early years. As archivist Adam Thompson explained, Little League had moved offices every few years as the international program grew, and likely much of the documentation was simply tossed.

Although Little League Japan had been founded in 1964, their head office was small and had no archive. What I discovered on my first visit to Tokyo was that no one knew much, and those that knew a little often mis-remembered, usually because of logical but faulty assumptions. The Little League Japan leadership provided a vague explanation that Little League got started on American military bases and from there spread to local Japanese communities, and that at some point the trading company Mitsui Bussan and the media company Fuji Sankei began to support the program, as they still do. But beyond that, memories of dates and names for the early years were as misty as a riverside field on a cool autumn morning. For example, the website for the Kunitachi League, the first Japanese team to play in the World Series, indicated that the Little League got started in that western Tokyo suburb in 1949; but a search of back numbers of the U.S. military’s Pacific Stars and Stripes revealed that Little League did not appear in Japan until 1954, and then only inside the American military dependent community. In 2015, when prominent Chōfu Little League and Little Senior (teenage) League president Hayashi Kazuo was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, it was stated that he started the formal Little League organization in 1964 with Mitsui and Fuji Sankei support. But one of my earliest contacts from Mitsui with firsthand knowledge insisted his company didn’t get involved until 1969. So, I knew if I embarked on this project, the first steps would demand an old-fashioned kind of history. Before considering the big questions, I had to deduce the nitty-gritty developments from as many sources as I could: newspaper clippings, old commemorative pamphlets, municipal histories, contemporary sociological studies, interviews with former players, as well as the various baseball episodes in contemporary literature, film, school readers, and the graphic youth cultures of manga and anime.

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by Joel | 27 February 2026 · 6:56 pm

Pressure on Adm. Horthy, 1944

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 298-300:

The pope had not been able to utter the word ‘Jews’, or to make his plea public, but his meaning was clear enough. The American president, meanwhile, was not quite so squeamish. The very next day, 26 June, and just as the truth of Auschwitz was becoming ever more public thanks to the press coverage coming out of Switzerland, Roosevelt had his secretary of state deliver a message to Horthy:

The United States demands to know whether the Hungarian authorities intend . . . to deport Jews to Poland or to any other place, or to employ any measures that would in the end result in their mass execution. Moreover, the United States wishes to remind the Hungarian authorities that all those responsible for carrying out those kind of injustices will be dealt with . . .

The pressure, unleashed by the publication of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, was unremitting. On 30 June, the king of Sweden, Gustav V, wrote to Horthy with a warning that, if the deportations did not stop, Hungary would become a ‘pariah among other nations’. But it was that US warning, that war criminals would be held to account, that seemed to concentrate the regent’s mind.

‘I shall not tolerate this any further!’ Horthy told a council of his ministers the day Roosevelt’s message arrived. ‘The deportation of the Jews of Budapest must cease!’ Tellingly, that exhortation did not apply to the deportations outside Budapest. Those continued. The next day, 27 June, would see 12,421 Jews shipped to Auschwitz in four separate transports. The deportations would continue the next day and the next.

Despite his royal title, Horthy was not the master of his kingdom: issuing a command did not make it happen. There now ensued a power struggle inside the Hungarian government, as those bent on continuing to do the Nazis’ bidding, collaborating in the effort to rid the country of its Jews, sought to resist the regent’s edict. The security forces themselves were split: there was a tank division loyal to the regent, battalions of provincial gendarmes loyal to the Final Solution.

If Horthy was to prevail, he would have to move fast. Adolf Eichmann and his local fascist allies had drawn up a plan to ensnare the last major Jewish community still untouched by the hand of the SS: the 200,000 Jews of Budapest who were the last Jews of Hungary – and, in effect, the last Jews of Europe.

This is how it would work. On 2 July, thousands of Hungarian armed police would gather in Budapest’s Heroes Square on a pretext designed to arouse minimal suspicion: a flag ceremony to honour their comrades. Then, once the formalities were over, the gendarmes would quietly spend their three days of supposed leave making themselves familiar with the locations of the single-building mini-ghettos known as ‘yellow-star houses’, in particular working out how to block off potential escape routes for any Jews minded to flee. The trains carrying Budapest’s Jews to the gas chambers were scheduled for departure on 10 July.

Except events did not run to plan. On 2 July, the 15th Air Force of the United States dropped 1,200 tons of bombs in or near Budapest, killing 136 people and destroying 370 buildings. The bombs’ targets were, in fact, factories south of the capital, but that was not how it looked from inside Hungary’s ruling circles. To them, it seemed as if Roosevelt was making good his threat to hold the Hungarian political leadership responsible for the slaughter of the country’s Jews. Those at the top trembled at the prospect.

By 5 July, Horthy had installed a loyalist as the chief military commander in the capital and instructed him to take ‘all measures necessary to prevent the deportation of the Budapest Jews’. That same night, he sent in the tanks. As the army moved in, the provincial police, there to round up Jews, were pushed out.

In the clash of wills, the regent had won. To be clear, his prime motive was self-preservation and the assertion of his own authority, rather than the saving of Jews. The deportation of the Jews of Hungary had not especially troubled him until that moment. Indeed, it would continue for the next three days, at the same intense pace as it had throughout May and June: there were five transports from the provinces on 9 July alone. There was one more on 20 July.

But the rest were stopped. One train bound for Auschwitz was even turned around and sent back, on Horthy’s orders. Eichmann was livid: ‘In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me before,’ he raged. ‘It cannot be tolerated!’ Under Horthy, there would be no deportations from Budapest.

The Jews of the capital city were saved, for now. There were many explanations – starting with the shifting calculus of Hungarian politics, as Germany began to look like the losing side in the war – but a crucial role was played by a thirty-two-page document, written by two men, one of them a teenager, who had done what no Jews had ever done before and escaped from Auschwitz. They had crossed mountains and rivers, they had hidden and starved, they had defied death and the most vicious enemy the world had ever seen. Their word had been doubted, it had been ignored and it had been suppressed. But now, at last, it had made the breakthrough they had longed for. Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler had saved 200,000 lives.

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Filed under Germany, Hungary, migration, military, Poland, religion, Scandinavia, U.S., war

by Joel | 21 February 2026 · 5:34 am

Mincemeat and Mussolini

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 291-293:

The most significant victim in the fallout on the Axis side was Mussolini himself. From the first Allied footfall in Sicily, Il Duce was doomed, though he refused to acknowledge it. Goebbels noted: “The only thing certain in this war is that Italy will lose it.” The Pact of Steel was cracking up. By July 18, the Allied front line had moved halfway up Sicily. That day, Mussolini sent an almost defiant cable to Hitler: “The sacrifice of my country cannot have as its principal purpose that of delaying a direct attack on Germany.” The Führer summoned him to an urgent meeting. Il Duce did not care to be summoned anywhere but went meekly. The two fascist leaders met in Feltre, fifty miles from Venice, where Hitler launched into a long harangue, lambasting the “inept and cowardly” Italian troops in Sicily and insisting: “What has happened now in Sicily must not be allowed to happen again.” In the midst of the tirade, an aide interrupted to inform Mussolini that Rome was under massive air attack, the first time the capital had been targeted. Mussolini sat impassively through the two-hour monologue. The great Italian bull seemed to be fatally gored, diminished, and distant. At the end of the excruciating meeting, he said simply: “We are fighting for a common cause, Führer.” It sounded more like an epitaph than a statement of solidarity. On July 22, Palermo fell to Patton’s American troops. Three days later, Mussolini was outvoted by the Fascist Grand Council, summoned by King Victor Emmanuel III to a private audience, and toppled. “It can’t go on any longer,” said the king: Mussolini must resign at once, to be replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the former chief of the armed forces. Italy’s deposed dictator left the royal Villa Savoia hidden in an ambulance, and the new government in Rome began the secret task of extracting Italy from the war and Hitler’s poisonous embrace. In Badoglio’s words: “Fascism fell, as was fitting, like a rotten pear.” The next day, Rommel was recalled from Greece to defend northern Italy.

Would it have fallen so fast, or rotted so quickly, without Operation Mincemeat? The invasion of Sicily was a far from perfect military operation, bedeviled by poor planning and personal rivalries between selfish and powerful men. A relatively small contingent of German troops successfully held up the advance of an Allied host seven times larger and then evacuated the island to continue the battle up mainland Italy. The fight for Sicily was grim, bitter, and costly. But how much worse would it have been had the Nazi high command been prepared for it? What if, say, the full-strength, battle-tempered First Panzer Division, instead of being dispatched to Greece to await an imaginary invasion, had been deployed along the coast at Gela?

It is impossible to calculate how many lives, on both sides of the conflict, were saved by Operation Mincemeat, or exactly how much it contributed to hastening the end of the war and the defeat of Hitler. The Allies had expected it would take ninety days to conquer Sicily. The occupation was completed on August 17, thirty-eight days after the invasion began. Looking back after the war, Professor Percy Ernst Schramm, keeper of the OKW war diary, left no doubt that the fake documents had played a critical role: “It is well known that under the influence of the letters, Hitler moved troops to Sardinia and southern Greece, thereby preventing them from taking part in the defence against [Husky].” In September, Italy formally surrendered, although the war in Italy would not end until May 1945.

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Filed under Britain, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mediterranean, military, U.S., war

by Joel | 6 February 2026 · 6:53 am

After we settled into our window seats in our 1st class compartment, headed for a weekend in Wrocław on our way to a conference in Szczecin, two men in their 50s settled into their seats at the other end of the 6-seat compartment, by the door to the aisle. They were roofing contractors returning home to Oława after a builders convention in Kielce. (Oława is also the name of a river that flows into the Odra at Wrocław.)

We quickly established that we spoke English but not much Polish, while they spoke Polish but not much English. But they soon proved to know quite a lot of English words, and I had also been exposed to a good bit of Polish vocabulary, even if neither of us could form many coherent sentences in our weaker languages. But we were able to explain why we were living in Kielce for a year, and they explained why they had come to Kielce and were headed home.

They had brought beers on board to enjoy 3 happy hours on their way home. They laughed and raised their beers every time they heard the announcements about the lack of a bar car on that train. We conveyed our regrets that we couldn’t join them. I was still under doctor’s orders. The owner was on my side of the compartment and his top assistant sat opposite him. The owner initiated most of the conversation topics, including that his son was good at math but a slacker at schoolwork and language-learning, and really needed a good English tutor.

Without cell phones, it would have been a quieter ride. But we all resorted to Google translate a good bit, and as the evening wore on, we shared photos of our families and our many travels. The boss was particularly excited when I showed him the photos my father had taken in Gdansk in 1945 (on my Flickr site). He asked for copies and we sent him links to download them. When I showed him a photo of my paternal grandparents holding me as a newborn (in 1949), he got quite wistful, regretting the scarcity of family photographs among Poles of his and earlier generations, apart from rare ceremonial events.

His coworker was an avid fisherman (in lakes, not the Odra or Oława rivers) and showed us photos of a huge pike (szczupak) he had caught and a huge carp (karp) his son had caught. (He couldn’t remember the English word for ‘lake’, but I recognized jezioro.) He never initiated English, but recognized a lot of English words. It turned out that he had worked several years in the U.K. (in London, Manchester, and Bristol). Whenever the boss’s wife would call about plans for their coming-home dinner, the boss would stand up to talk to her, and his coworker and I would smile and exchange military salutes. The coworker had to use the toaleta several times to empty his beers and he explained that his boss had stronger kidneys (nerki). (Cashew nuts are called nerkowiec in Polish.)

Despite our language hurdles, it was a warm and friendly conversation between strangers of a kind that is reputed to be rare in Poland. We all shook hands and hugged and exchanged contact information before they got off at Oława.

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Filed under labor, language, Poland, travel, U.K., U.S.

by Joel | 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 Joel | 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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by Joel | 28 January 2026 · 9:54 pm

How to Feed British Indian Troops

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 50-52:

These 500,000 men had to be fed three meals every single day and, because of the castes, religions, tribes and nationalities involved, an added complication was the thirty different ration scales needed to feed the army. Fresh meat was difficult both to source and to transport, and refrigeration was limited to say the least, so for those who could eat meat the only solution was to provide them with tinned corned beef, or bully beef as it was called, although this was monotonous and lacked the nutrients of fresh meat. Hindus and Muslims, however, could not eat tinned meat, so they had to go without altogether. The trouble was, acceptable substitutes, milk and ghi – clarified butter – were not available in the right quantities either. Much of the tinned milk sent from Britain and America simply did not survive the long journey. The result was a severe shortage of food supplies. At the Assam front, [Gen. William] Slim discovered that instead of the 65,000 tons that should have been stored at the base depot in Dimapur, there were just 47,000 tons, a deficiency of nearly 30 per cent, and much of the shortfall worked against the Indian troops. ‘The supply situation was indeed so serious,’ wrote Slim, ‘that it threatened the possibility of any offensive.’

Part of the problem was bad management at Delhi, and Slim and Snelling were appalled to discover that the system of peacetime financial control was still in place when it came to procurement. Incredibly, if large quantities of dehydrated food were ordered from Indian contractors, demands for tinned supplies from Britain were then cancelled. On the face of it, that was fair enough, but it had been decreed that dehydrated vegetables were, in terms of scale of issue, a quarter that of tinned goods. In other words, for every 100 tons of dehydrated goods ordered in India, 400 tons of tinned veg orders from Britain were cancelled. This was bad enough, but made worse because there was always a massive discrepancy between the quantities ordered in India and those that were ever actually delivered. Consequently, shortages had been allowed to escalate quickly.

To try to solve this, Slim and Snelling had gone to see Auchinleck in person, who vowed to deal with the supply issues as a matter of urgency. By cutting red tape and tightening the administration of food supply, Auchinleck’s staff at Delhi were able steadily to increase the flow of rations. In fact, just acknowledging earlier shortcomings was a marked step in the right direction.

Despite this improvement, both Slim and Snelling realized they needed to adopt a very hands-on approach themselves; it was no good depending on Delhi to sort out their supply issues. As a result, other sources of meat, such as sheep and goats, were reared locally where possible. They also hired some Chinese to set up duck-rearing farms for both meat and eggs, while along the Imphal front 18,000 acres of vegetables were cultivated.

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by Joel | 28 January 2026 · 10:29 am

Driving Tanks into Burma, 1944

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 10-12:

Before taking over 7th Indian Division, Messervy had been Director of Armoured Fighting Vehicles in New Delhi and had been a vociferous advocate of more tanks in theatre. It had taken much beating of drums, but eventually he had managed to prove to his superiors that medium tanks such as US-built Lees and Shermans could operate in South-East Asia. The 25th Dragoons had been the first to equip with these 30-ton machines, and it had been planned some days earlier that during the night of 4/5 February the regiment would cross over the Ngakyedauk Pass and report for duty with 7th Division to the east of the Mayu Range, ready to take part in Messervy’s planned assault on Buthidaung.

Later that night, C Squadron also crossed the pass. Among them was twenty-year-old Trooper Norman Bowdler from Dunchurch in the English Midlands. Just a week before, Bowdler had been the loader in his five-man crew, but when the driver had got sick he had taken over and now was responsible for getting their mighty Lee up and over this treacherous pass – and in the dark. He found it a terrifying experience. Above them, Allied aircraft were flying over in order to disguise the sound of the tanks, which would have easily carried to the Japanese positions in the still night air. ‘It was a bit dodgy,’ Bowdler admitted. ‘I mean, getting a thirty-ton tank round these S-bends – well, some of the bends were so severe that you had to go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards to negotiate them.’ He was keenly aware that for all the feat of engineering the creation of the pass undoubtedly was, it was little more than a widened mule track and certainly a long way from being a proper road. In some places, parts of it were bridged by laid tree trunks and Bowdler was worried that at any moment stretches of it would simply crumble away and they would tumble down one of the sheer precipices to the ravine floor 200 feet below. ‘It was so narrow,’ he said, ‘and the tank so heavy – we were fully loaded with ammo, fuel and everything.’ At times, one of the tank’s tracks was actually overhanging the edge of the road as he slewed the beast around a corner. At best there was little more than a yard or so either side of the Lee, and the margins were especially tight around corners that offered very, very little room for manoeuvre.

As a result, it took them much of the night to cross. Bowdler found it more difficult going down the reverse side without the natural braking effect of the climb. Low gears helped, but he was very mindful that this huge weight, crunching over a road that would not pass muster in most people’s book, and being hurried by gravitational pull, could all too easily slip out of his control. The levels of concentration needed were immense, but at long last the road began to level out and in bright moonlight they emerged into an area of paddy, criss-crossed with bunds – the paddy walls – and then eventually leaguered up in an area of elephant grass. Not so very far to the south, Bowdler could hear small arms firing and even the occasional shout. He’d already been in battle before, but here, in the milky darkness of the 7th Division Administrative Area, there was a distinct air of menace.

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