In 1970, serious trouble boiled up again when the Prince Sihanouk was knocked off the throne by a Cambodian communist guerilla force called Khmer Rouge. This brutal, well-organised…
Category: History of the Far East
The importance of being Okinawa
In April, 1945, the 2nd World War was very far from over. A huge invasion of the French mainland was planned for June. Japan, however, was seen by…
War in the air Part III: the Pacific
The carrier-based Japanese air force began the war in the air over the Pacific Ocean by attacking without prior warning the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. The…
The Enigma of Hirohito
This controversial Emperor of Japan was born in the same year (1901) Queen Victoria died, and the two monarchs shared much the same mystique. The Emperor was the…
The Pentagon Papers
More than forty documents detailing United States involvement in the East, with the emphasis on Indochina, starting during the Second World War and finishing around May, 1968. Students…
The Khmer Rouge (and Pol Pot)
A great deal more is known about the Khmer Rouge than about Cambodia’s Pol Pot. To most history-subjected magazines Pol Pot was just another of those dictators who…
Appeasement
A bit of a dirty word since 1938 but it shouldn’t be. There is enough appeasement going on now over the disgusting situation in Syria to fill the…
Coup de Shanghai
In 1927, Jiang Jieshi a.k.a. Chiang Kai-shek (q.v.) tried very hard to eliminate the Chinese Communist Party, which we will call the CCP. This is hard to understand…
Who was Richard Sorge?
He was a German-born spy who served in the trenches during the Great War. Like many others who survived this hell on earth, he admired Communist efforts in…
The ‘Meiji’ Restoration & the Satsuna Rebellion
Meiji means enlightened rule, and this was shown throughout the reign of the Japanese Emperor Mitsuhito, ruling from 1868 to 1912. After the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate,…