Reckoning in the East: How World War II Unmade Empire

Phil Craig’s stunning ‘1945: The Reckoning’ restores Asia’s war to the centre of Empire’s collapse.

Subhas Chandra Bose in Germany

In the immediate years after 1945, the story of the Second World War was primarily told through a Western lens. The canonical narrative unfolded on the beaches of Normandy or in the skies over the Ruhr. Even the Eastern Front, where the war’s outcome was truly decided and tens of millions perished entered popular imagination only later, through a slow reassessment of Soviet sacrifice and strategy. Against such grand theatres of mechanised slaughter, the British Indian Army, the jungles of Burma or the ridges of Kohima seemed small and remote. If remembered at all, it was through the faintly patronising epithet of the “forgotten army” fighting in a forgotten theatre.

Serious scholarship on the South Asian theatre was scant and, where it existed, resolutely Anglo-centric. Memoirs of generals such as William Slim and Louis Mountbatten dwelt on the immense logistical challenges of fighting in trackless jungle, and on the eventual triumph of British planning and grit. While works like Louis Allen’s Burma: The Longest War, 1941–45 (1984) offered detailed operational accounts of campaigns stretching from the retreat of 1942 to the reconquest of Rangoon, the focus remained narrow: battles and brigades. The millions of Indians, Burmese and Malayans whose fates were bound up in the conflict remained near-invisible.

In recent decades, this long-neglected front has emerged as one of the most fertile fields of Second World War scholarship. It is now recognised as a crucible in which both the future of Asia and the fate of empire were forged. Bestselling author and award-winning filmmaker Phil Craig’s ‘1945: The Reckoning’ is the latest and among the most nuanced – certainly the most riveting – of these attempts to tell that story. It does so not by retreading familiar ground, but by situating the personal dilemmas of towering personalities such as Subhas Chandra Bose and Gen. K.S. Thimayya, as well as frontline soldiers, nurses, civilians within the broader collapse of imperial authority.

Craig’s fabulous work resists easy answers. He shows how the war was less a clean fight between good and evil, and more a collision of interests, ideologies and aspirations. Through fascinating personal microhistories, Craig reveals how the imperatives of empire were enforced with ruthless pragmatism, the emergence of nationalist figures both flawed and inspiring, and the human cost of the transition from war to a post-colonial order.

K.S. Thimayya

It was not until the 1990s and early 2000s that historians began to connect the war in South-East Asia with the wider story of decolonisation. Spearheading the charge were Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, whose twin volumes ‘Forgotten Armies’ (2004) and ‘Forgotten Wars’ (2007). transformed the field.

Bayly and Harper shifted the perspective from London to Rangoon, Singapore, Hanoi and Delhi. Their work placed civilians, insurgents and Asian soldiers at the centre of the story. The Japanese advance, the Allied retreat and the eventual reconquest of Burma were not isolated episodes, but part of a wider unravelling of colonial structures.

By embedding the Asian campaigns in the history of empire’s decline, Bayly and Harper gave the region’s wartime experience a significance it had long been denied.

Later narrative histories emphasised memory, morality and trauma in this theatre of war. Fergal Keane’s ‘Road of Bones’ (2010), centred on the desperate battle for Kohima in 1944, offered not just a military history but a meditation on endurance and loss.

The formidable Robert Lyman, a former British Army officer, brought both analytical rigour and moral clarity to the debate with a string of excellent and influential works which has done much to restore the Asian theatre and its stakes in public consciousness. In his magisterial ‘A War of Empires’ (2021), Lyman showed how the Asian theatre was one of the most ideologically charged of the entire conflict.

It is into this rich and evolving field that Phil Craig steps with ‘1945: The Reckoning.’ With a pace worthy of a thriller, Craig approaches the final year of the war in a ‘forgotten frontier’ with empathy, rigour and unflinching candour.  

His luminous pen-portraits of K.S. Thimayya (‘Timmy’) and Subhas Chandra Bose’s complex nationalist fire illuminate how loyalty, nationalism, military pragmatism and empire collided in 1945 and how that collision shaped the post-war world.

Not just these, but several others remain etched in one’s mind, like the British nurse Angela Noblet and Douglas Peterkin, the doctor at Belsen.

To anyone who has read ‘Trafalgar’ and ‘Finest Hour’ (which he co-authored with Tim Clayton), Craig’s cinematic writing style should come as no surprise. His sheer narrative power, propulsively driving the reader along even as he tackles knotty political questions, recalls the intensity of popular WWII histories like Cornelius Ryan’s ‘The Last Battle’ and John Toland’s ‘The Last 100 Days (both 1966).

Beginning with Colonel Thimayya’s Burma landing in early 1945 and retelling the fierce combat on Hill 170 with matchless verve, Craig goes on to frame the Bengal famine and other difficult truths in a tone both restrained and morally exacting, challenging the comfortable triumphalism about WWII’s end.

Craig builds on the scholarship that has reframed Asia’s wartime experience as central to decolonization. He follows in the footsteps of Bayly and Harper’s focus on anti-colonial awakenings, Keane’s emotional, human storytelling and Lyman’s examination of ideological and nationalist stakes in the Asian arena.

But Craig takes this further. His narrative is less about sweeping structural shifts or single battles and more about individual choices and moral tensions.

His portrait of Bose avoids both nationalist hagiography and imperial vilification. Bose emerges as a figure of brilliance and hubris, whose willingness to align with fascist powers stemmed less from ideological affinity than from a gambler’s conviction that Japan’s bayonets might pry open India’s shackles. The INA, in Craig’s telling, was an earnest, albeit flawed attempt at self-liberation whose symbolic weight far outstripped its battlefield effectiveness. Long dismissed in British accounts as ‘traitorous collaborators,’ Craig acknowledges the moral ambiguity of Bose’s alliance with Japan but clearly shows how the INA’s appeal lay in its assertion of Indian agency. The Delhi trials of 1945–46, when INA officers were arraigned for treason, turned public opinion sharply in their favour. The British, already exhausted by war and facing mutinies in their own Indian Navy and among army units, realised their hold on the subcontinent was slipping.

Craig’s rendering of K.S. Thimayya, a professional soldier in the British Indian Army who later became India’s Chief of Army Staff, is perhaps the most vivid portrait etched of the man yet. Thimayya embodies the paradox of the Indian nationalist who fought loyally for the Raj, convinced that discipline, honour and service could one day be turned to the advantage of a free India.

Equally memorable is Craig’s spotlighting of lesser-known episodes: an Australian Special Forces campaign in Borneo (Operation Semut) clandestinely orchestrated from London; the unsettling reality of British generals arming Japanese prisoners in Indochina and the East Indies to reassert colonial rule.

Craig’s sweeping canvas stunningly reconstructs the chaos of the final months of war - Australian special forces in Borneo; British officers arming Japanese prisoners in Indochina and the Dutch East Indies to hold back nationalist uprisings; the uneasy moral compromises of victory. In Craig’s vignettes, the moral clarity of 1945 fades, to be replaced by the moral murk of empire’s end.

Craig’s humane reconstruction of 1945 captures a moment when the boundaries between liberation and domination blurred, and when loyalty, nationalism and conscience collided on the battlefield. In reminding readers that the end of the Second World War was also the beginning of Asia’s modern age, he ensures that this once-forgotten frontier will be neglected no longer.