Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"

Matt Elton: Your new series, exploring fighting on the Asian front during the Second World War, is called The History Podcast: The Second Map. Why did you choose that name?

Kavita Puri: It came to me after I met a man called Peter Knight, who is now 98. At the time of the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941], he was a 14-year-old boy living in a terraced house in Bromley, a south-eastern London suburb. He had been following the war in Europe using a map posted on the wall alongside his dresser.

After Pearl Harbor, he put up another map on the other side of the dresser – a map of Asia and the Pacific. He would sit down every evening with his mum and grandparents to listen to the BBC bulletin, hearing about places for the first time, and about this other war on the Asian front, in British colonies. And he would trace what was happening on that second map.

So he was now updating two maps in tandem: one covering the war in Europe against the Nazis, and the second encompassing the war against Japan in Asia.

Why has the war against Nazi Germany come to dominate how we view this conflict, at least partly to the exclusion of the conflict in Asia?

I think it’s understandable: that war was close by and involved places whose names were more familiar to people in Britain. And it affected people here more directly: Peter Knight had experienced the Blitz, for example. So the European war was close to home, whereas this other war was far away.

It was also a messy, complicated war – and not just because it was fought in jungle terrain, and soldiers were dying of malaria and other diseases as well as in combat. It wasn’t a neat good-v-bad situation, like the war against the Nazis. The war with Japan was essentially about two empires competing with each other, so it’s a much harder story to explain. It also involved a lot of troops from the colonies, as well as from Australia. So again, it’s a story about our empire.

Historians such as Rana Mitter, who helped me with the making of this series, argue that actually we should see the origins of the Second World War not in the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but much earlier in the early 1930s, with Japanese activities in China. Another aspect of that war on the ‘second map’ that we still don’t talk about much was the fact that the Chinese also fought with the Allies against Japan in some of the major battles.

So do you think we struggle to see the Asian war as also being a story about the British empire?

Yes – and I do think that part of the reason we don’t talk about the war in Asia is because many places that were attacked had been part of the British empire for more than a century, and the losses were humiliating. Winston Churchill said as much when Singapore fell in February 1942, describing it as one of the worst military defeats in British history. A lot of the soldiers who fought and won back places such as Burma [now Myanmar] were soldiers from the empire – and sentiments are complicated by the fact that India then won its independence in 1947.

In the series, you make the point that the evacuation of Burma isn’t well known. Could you talk us through what happened there?

Many people think of the war in Asia and the Pacific in terms of two incidents involving the US: Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki three days later. They don’t really know much about what happened in between. Particularly, one element that’s not often discussed is that British colonies, including Malaya and Singapore, were attacked at almost exactly the same time as Pearl Harbor.

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Again and again in the oral testimonies, I heard how the British saw themselves as racially superior. I think it was hard for them to understand how their colonies could be overrun by people that they considered inferior. Yet as well as possessing superior tanks and aircraft, the Japanese also used bicycles: they were nimble and they moved very, very quickly. Not only was the loss of Malaya and Singapore humiliating, but it resulted in the capture of around 130,000 British and Indian troops and other colonial and Commonwealth soldiers as prisoners of war.

Then Japan set its sights on Burma. Rangoon [now Yangon] fell in March 1942, and the rest of the country was lost as early as May. The result was that soldiers had to trek across vast stretches of terrain in a devastating retreat. General William Slim, who later commanded the Fourteenth Army in Burma, described men who were just completely exhausted.

It wasn’t just soldiers retreating, but also colonial civilians – Europeans and Indians, about a million of whom had been working in Burma. Along with some Burmese who were afraid of Japanese reprisals, they headed for India. But the evacuation was quite racialised. White British and European people were given priority and assistance. If you were Indian or Burmese, particularly if you didn’t have means, you were on your own. And that journey was so difficult: it involved walking barefoot with whatever you could carry across very challenging terrain, much of it jungle. You had very little food. You might encounter crocodiles or elephants.

An estimated 600,000 refugees were on the move but, though it was such a major event, there was so much going on – not only in that region but in the wider war – that this story has often been obscured in popular memory. It was really quite difficult for me to find testimonies of people who had made that journey.

Why have stories of this event not been told before?

Partly because most refugees arrived in Bengal, where a terrible famine was developing. If you were an Indian or Burmese person, you were just one of many trying to survive. In addition, that was a tumultuous time in India. There was the famine, the Quit India movement, and the Great Calcutta Killings [deadly riots in 1946], then the violence in the run-up to partition – when, again, millions were on the move, a million people died and two new countries were created. So the story has been obscured in India, even though many Indian nationalists were infuriated at the racialised nature of the evacuation from Burma. It became one of the causes underpinning the Quit India campaign.

In Britain, too, it’s a very difficult part of our war story to recall: not just the retreat and defeat, but also the racialised aspect undermining the moral underpinnings of empire.

In the series, you speak to relatives of people held in prisoner-of-war camps, including civilians. Can you tell us about the experiences of Shelagh Brown?

Shelagh was 25 when the Japanese took Singapore, where she’d been born and had lived all her life. And hers had been a grand life, like lots of colonial families. Before the invasion, Singapore had been largely untouched by the war, unlike Britain. But it was bombed just a couple of hours after Pearl Harbor, and life changed very quickly for her. Even at that point, though, she didn’t think she would have to leave.

It was only when British soldiers began to cross the causeway, retreating from Malaya, that her family realised things were really serious and tried to evacuate Shelagh and her mother. They got on a small boat, hoping to get to Australia, but were bombed from the air. Shelagh was adrift at sea for 19 hours before Japanese forces caught her and she was interned for the rest of the war. In fact, it wasn’t until six weeks after the war had ended that news reached the internment camp.

She died some time ago, but her daughter shared some cassette tapes (never broadcast before) on which Shelagh told her story of survival while being moved from camp to camp. It’s difficult to listen to, particularly because Shelagh’s mother died in the camps, but it’s also remarkable – particularly in how the women kept up their spirits. Shelagh had been in a choir, and her father had been the choir master. So the women formed a vocal orchestra, which was really moving: she said that the notes they were singing were the only free things they had. The Japanese guards would stand outside and listen, and were moved by what they heard.

Another way that she dealt with the situation was that she somehow got hold of little bits of paper on which she wrote lavish recipes in minute detail, like cakes with 12 eggs. The funny thing is that her daughter said Shelagh had never cooked before in her life, because she had servants in Singapore. But because they were really malnourished, it was just a way to deal with their hunger.

So it’s an emotionally complicated story. And the stories of women like her haven’t really been well remembered.

Can you tell us about the experiences of Ursula Graham Bower?

Ursula’s incredible story is told in an interview with her that we found in the archives. A young woman from north London, at the start of the war she was in her mid-twenties, working as an anthropologist in the tribal regions of north-east India near the border with Burma. She was living with a group called the Nagas when Pearl Harbor was bombed, after which she was recruited to work with Naga people gathering intelligence, monitoring what was happening across the border.

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When the Japanese tried to invade India at Imphal and Kohima in 1944, she found herself on the front line. She cabled headquarters to request weapons – and a box arrived containing grenades and guns – and she used them fearlessly. She was a remarkably brave woman – but so were the Naga people who fought alongside her.

Military historian Peter Johnston says that the Fourteenth Army was possibly the greatest that Britain ever put into the field. Why don’t we hear more about the story of this ‘Forgotten Army’?

The Fourteenth Army was formed after the defeats of Singapore and Malaya. It mostly comprised colonial soldiers – predominantly Indians, but also soldiers from west and east Africa as well. By the end of the conflict, it numbered around a million troops. By then, the British had learned lessons about how to lead these soldiers, who were treated much better than colonial troops had been previously. The extraordinary battles that they fought in such challenging terrain, and the conditions that they endured, are remarkable.

Even at the time, people such as Lord Mountbatten and even the army’s commander, General Slim, joked that it was a forgotten army, fighting a far-away war. Partly, that’s because the Burma campaign and the battles at Imphal and Kohima were fought around the time of the Normandy landings, which of course dominated the headlines. I think there is probably a racialised aspect to it, too. The majority of soldiers in the Fourteenth Army were colonial subjects.

Equally, I spoke to children of some of the soldiers in the Fourteenth Army, and they didn’t talk about it much, either. After independence, people in India and Pakistan found it hard to remember their soldiers who had fought with the British – that was not the story they wanted to tell about the Second World War. Another factor is that the collection of oral histories hasn’t been done much in India or Pakistan.

The Imperial War Museum has been trying to gather oral testimonies, but it’s very late now – most of the people involved have died. There are some really important stories that we will never capture now.

Was there a turning point when people in Britain started to find out about these wartime experiences?

I’m not sure that ever happened. When I tell people that I’m working on a series about VJ Day, most people ask: what’s that? Or: is that the American War? Yet there are thousands of homes in Britain where a family member was part of this story but didn’t talk about it.

I was interviewing one 98-year-old veteran, when he said to me: “I’ve got a suitcase in my study. Why don’t you go and have a look?” His daughter said: “I didn’t know about this suitcase.” I don’t know if that generation didn’t talk about it because they saw difficult things, or if they just thought, well, everyone has a war story, what’s the point of talking about mine? Or perhaps because people wanted to hear about the war in Europe. Shelagh Brown’s daughter told me that she was the only one she knew in Chichester who put out a flag for the 75th anniversary of VJ Day – no one else knew why.

I think broadly people don’t know about the war in Asia, what it was about, why it was a British war, and how our country was connected to it. Yet many south Asians in postwar Britain had their own connections to that war, too, as well as British families.

One thing I’ve realised making these programmes is that each generation asks different questions about the Second World War. But it’s a race against time to capture these memories – and, it pains me to say, it’s almost too late now.

How is the war remembered in Japan? Are these kinds of conversations happening there at all?

It was very important for me to include Japanese voices in the series. I found recorded testimony from a young kamikaze pilot in his early twenties. He was just a kid who was told that he had to undertake this mission. He wanted to do good things for his country, but he also wanted to live. He wanted to get married, have a normal life.

But, interestingly, Japan doesn’t really remember the Asian war, focusing instead on the war in the Pacific. They see the conflict particularly through the prism of America, because the US rehabilitated Japan very, very quickly after the war. During the Tokyo War Crimes Trials [1946–48], Emperor Hirohito was not part of proceedings, and he built the pacifist constitution in the postwar years. An expert I spoke to for the series observed that it took decades for the Japanese people to talk about the atrocities that their forces committed, and that talking about war memory has become very politicised. But he does say that the new generation is looking at it in a different way.

Now that few from the generation who lived through those events are still alive, maybe the Japanese today are freer to talk about things they weren’t able to before. For example, when their soldiers came back, they were traumatised and humiliated. They were told not to talk about it. And the children of those families are now opening up about the levels of domestic violence inflicted by some of those men. It can free you up to talk and ask some really difficult questions about your country and the people who led it at the time.

So many of those who took part in the war in Asia found it difficult to talk about these events – as you say in the series, it’s almost like a confession for them. Is that one reason why it remains obscure in the countries involved?

It was hard to talk about for lots of reasons, not least the traumatic nature of the events. Whether you were a PoW or a civilian, or witnessed action in battle, it was difficult. So people who came back home didn’t talk – but, also, people didn’t ask. I’ve spoken to family members who were explicitly told not to ask.

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When one PoW, Maurice Naylor, returned home to Manchester, his family were advised not to talk to him about his experiences – that it would be too much for him. His daughter found some sketches that he’d made. She asked her mother: what is this? And her mother said: don’t ask your father – he was in a PoW camp, and he has nightmares. She thought it had been a Nazi concentration camp, because that was the only kind she knew about. She didn’t even know that there were Japanese PoW camps. So one generation was told not to ask. But I would also say that not only do you need a public space for people to speak, but people also have to know what to ask. If your children are not learning about it in school, and if collectively we don’t know about that history, we won’t know the questions to pose.

And now, because people didn’t ask, there is often a sense of regret. That’s what I meant by confession. They know something happened. They know a relative saw something, and it was probably not a good thing. I think there is a guilt in not having asked – and now not being able to ask.

Were there other factors that added to the complications of remembering this story?

Perhaps one reason is the simplified narrative we tell ourselves about our war: we fought the Nazis, and they were bad; we were good, and we were heroic. And that’s not wrong – but there was also this other war that we fought, and we need to understand that – not least because it touched many thousands of families in Britain.

This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine