Sideshow or Pandora's box? Ending the Pacific War in Southeast Asia, 1945

Abstract

The end of the Pacific War in Southeast Asia exposed the war’s defining characteristic: that neither Imperial Japan nor the Western Allies ever resolved how to relate that struggle to Japan’s wider war with China. By the second half of 1944, the Japanese lost control of communications between Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. While they dominated Southeast Asia before December 1941, they saw the region through national policy silos rather than as a connected space. As a result, while the principal Allies involved – the United States, Britain, China, Australia, and the Netherlands – saw the region as vital to waging war against Japan, they all did so for different reasons. And by mid-1944, Allied grand strategy threatened to relegate Southeast Asia to a strategic backwater. The results, by October 1944, were striking. This chapter considers how the last phase of war in Southeast Asia affected both the end of the conflict overall and what came next. To do this, it will engage four themes: grand strategy, strategic geography, coalition politics and command decisions, and the final campaigns in Southeast Asia.