Colonial Southeast Asian Military History

Introduction

This bibliography focuses on the military history of colonial Southeast Asia from the beginning of the 20th century, the period after the late colonial wars of the 19th century covered in the Oxford Bibliographies in Military History article “Precolonial Southeast Asian Military History” by Michael Charney. By the time that most of Southeast Asia was brought under European rule at the end of the 19th century, the African interior was in the process of being carved up. The intersection of timing between African exploration, campaigning, and adventuring on the one hand, and the emergence of a large literate public on the other, meant that when Europeans imagined colonial warfare, they most likely thought of Africa and not Southeast Asia. Indeed, by comparison with Africa, colonial Southeast Asia seemed passive and uninteresting, at least until the Japanese occupation of 1942–1945. Military historians have mainly been interested in colonial Southeast Asian militaries in order to explain Japan’s easy successes in the region in 1942. Colonial Southeast Asian military history thus suffers from a weaker and more divided historiography than the fields of precolonial indigenous warfare and the military history of the region from 1942. The statuses of the armies in this period as colonial armies and of the rebels as insurgents has reinforced assumptions that both the region’s militaries and their methods of waging war do not stand out as exceptional in terms of weaponry, culture, religion, or ways that make precolonial indigenous warfare so exciting. To a degree, Southeast Asian militaries during this period were modern, subject to European drill and Western tactics, and they followed military procedures outlined in handbooks issued from London or Paris. But in ways perhaps subtler than in the past, colonial militaries in the region, in the case of indigenous soldiers, were still informed by their own history and culture, and white soldiers and officers found that accommodations had to be made with local cultural and geographical realities in military practice.

General Overviews

While precolonial Southeast Asian warfare seems unable to escape across-the-board generalizations, colonial Southeast Asian warfare seems to be completely immune to such efforts. In some ways, the military history of the region benefits from the absence of sweeping treatments, as local peculiarities can be examined on their own terms without the need to demonstrate their correspondences to an artificial regional singularity. Discussions of colonial militaries also tend to take place in imperially rather than colonially framed discussions, as in the groundbreaking Perry 1988. Efforts to understand colonial Southeast Asian experiences can be aided by examinations of imperial military experience, for as shown in Jackson 2010 (cited under Technology), the kinds of institutions involved and the means of circulation of military knowledge and organizational technology were the same throughout the possessions of a given European power. However, it has also been increasingly recognized that seeking to understand the regional context will bear fruit as well. Military historiography broadly concerned with developments in colonial Southeast Asia begins with the publication of Killingray and Omissi 1999. A little over half a decade later came the edited work Hack and Rettig 2006 specifically devoted to colonial militaries in Southeast Asia. Together these two works still remain benchmarks on the state of the field generally, although work on specific subthemes has moved substantially further in some areas. See also the examination of the military history of a particular colony over the full length of colonial rule in Murfett, et al. 1999. Work on specific colonial militaries in the 1930s and after, however, very easily loses itself in the quagmire of nationalist historiography/hagiography and postindependence developments that have very little to do per se with military history.

Hack, Karl, and Tobias Rettig, eds. Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203414668Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The editors bring together a number of papers on various aspects of colonial armies in Southeast Asian history. The definition of “colonial” and of “military” here is broadly considered and some of the chapters would not normally fit both of these categories. The other chapters mark the state of the field at the time of publication and are included separately in the present bibliography.
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Killingray, David, and David Omissi, eds. Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.
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This collection draws upon various examples of colonial militaries throughout Africa and Asia (it includes two out of ten case studies on Southeast Asia, alongside one on the Pacific, two on India, and five on Africa). Military historiography on Southeast Asia has followed suit and has more frequently than not pursued local case studies in the region to understand broader, worldwide imperial phenomena rather than understand colonial military history across the region.
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Murfett, Malcolm, John Miksic, Brian Farrell, and Chiang Ming Shun. Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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This is one of the general surveys of the military history of a particular colony and country during this period.
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Perry, F. W. The Commonwealth Armies: Manpower and Organisation in Two World Wars. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988.
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Perry provides an overview of the military recruitment practices of the British Empire.
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Bibliographic and Other Reference Resources

Bibliographic and other resources on the history of the colonial militaries in Southeast Asia are eclectic. Enriquez 1919 was produced in the colonial period for the convenience of European officers commanding Kachin soldiers. Meixsel 2003 and Rasor 1998 provide comprehensive coverage of particular areas of the region, the first for the Philippines under American rule up to 1942 and the latter for what became the China-Burma-India theater in World War II. While Internet resources abound, few provide the kind of detailed coverage of their respective topics as Forten Info.

Enriquez, C. M. Kachin Military Terms. Rangoon, Burma: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1919.
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The author, at the time a major in the 85th Burma Rifles, produced this dictionary for English-speaking officers and soldiers, sincemuch of the Burma Military Police was manned by Kachins.
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Forten Info.
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Colonial Fortifications Bibliography: an online bibliography on colonial fortresses around the world including Southeast Asia. Covers broadly the different European empires and is a useful starting point for comparative research on colonial fortifications. In Dutch.
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Meixsel, Richard. Philippine-American Military History, 1902–1942: An Annotated Bibliography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.
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A useful bibliography covering the breadth of the American colonial period, from the end of the Philippine War to the occupation of the Philippines by the Japanese in 1942.
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Rasor, Eugene L. The China-Burma-India Campaign, 1931–1945: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.
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Extensive overview of the chronology and works published on the China-Burma-India theater that came to encompass much of the British and Commonwealth war effort against the Japanese in Southeast Asia during World War II. An essential starting point for research on colonial armies in Southeast Asia during World War II.
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Military Installations

Southeast Asia was home to two internationally famous bastions for defense of the strategic waterways that pass through the region. The first was Singapore, whose role as a fortification is most thoroughly examined by MacIntyre 1979. The implications of the existence of Singapore as a naval base and fortified position are explored in Neidpath 1981 and Parkinson 1956. Berhow 2012 provides a detailed discussion of the history, equipment, and men of the Corregidor installation while Meixsel 2002 examines the history of Clark Air Field, also in Luzon. Smaller fortifications and fortified positions, such as Monkey Point in Rangoon, could be found throughout the region but have not received the extensive attention granted Singapore in particular.

Berhow, Mark. American Defenses of Corregidor and Manila Bay: 1898–1945. Oxford: Osprey, 2012.
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A useful if brief overview of the history, fortifications, weaponry, and soldiery of the defenses of Corregidor and Manila Bay from the beginning of the American presence in the Philippines until the American return at the end of World War II. Includes a useful bibliography for further reading.
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MacIntyre, W. D. The Rise and Fall of the Singapore Naval Base, 1919–1942. London: Macmillan, 1979.
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This study focuses on the history of why there was a “Fortress Singapore” and what it represented in terms of long-term British imperial defense policies in the Indian Ocean.
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Meixsel, Richard. Clark Field and the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Philippines. Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 2002.
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Covers the prewar history of Clark Field from the establishment of Camp Stotsenburg to the period just prior to the Japanese attack in December 1941. Comprehensive study, with special emphasis on life in and around the base, including the most notorious aspect of life around colonial military bases, venereal disease.
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Neidpath, James. The Singapore Naval Base and the Defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire, 1919–1941. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981.
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Agrees with the historiographical school that holds that prewar imperial defense policies were indeed responsible for the insufficient naval and air power that sealed Singapore’s fate, but argues that the limitations of these policies were fully understood by planners working within a very tight economy.
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Parkinson, C. Northcote. “The Pre-1942 Singapore Naval Base.” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 82.9 (1956): 939–953.
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An early survey and brief overview of the history of the Singapore naval base prior to World War II.
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Colonial Military Recruitment in Island Southeast Asia

The composition of colonial militaries varied greatly across colonial era island Southeast Asia. Winsley, et al. 1938 and Ramli 1965 provide good introductions to the colonial militaries of Singapore and Malaya. Hack 2002 shows how local colonial military recruitment reflected the place of the colony in the imperial system of defense. On colonial military recruitment during the war, Sundaram 2006 has focused on how prewar racist attitudes among British officers motivated captured Indian troops to join the Indian National Army. van Kessel 2005 (cited under Ethnicity and Martial Races) examines the introduction of ethnic minorities across empires for colonial militaries, focusing on the use of African troops in the Dutch East Indies. Teitler 1980 considers the changing ethnic and racial composition of the colonial military in the Dutch East Indies.

Hack, Karl. “‘Biar mati anak: jangan mati adat [Better your children die than your traditions]’: Locally Raised Forces as a Barometer for Imperialism and Decolonization in British South East Asia, 1874–2001.” South East Asia Research 10.3 (2002): 245–275.
DOI: 10.5367/000000002101297071Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hack approaches British Southeast Asia not just as an appendage of the Raj, but in terms of its role in supporting the imperial system of defence more broadly.
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Ramli, Dol. “History of the Malay Regiment 1933–1942.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 38.1 (1965): 199–243.
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Very comprehensive look at the precolonial background of military recruitment in Malaya and the creation of the first Malay Regiment in 1933 and its history up to the Japanese invasion.
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Sundaram, Chandar S. “Seditious Letters and Steel Helmets: Disaffection among Indian Troops in Singapore and Hong Kong, 1940–1941, and the Formation of the Indian National Army.” In War and Society in Colonial India, 1807–1945. Edited by Kaushik Roy, 126–160. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Argues that Indian soldiers were alienated by British leadership and colonial racism, making them vulnerable to Japanese recruitment.
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Teitler, Gerke. The Dutch Colonial Army in Transition: The Militia Debate, 1900–1921. PhD diss., Comparative Asian Studies Programme, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 1980.
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This monograph provides a look at changing policies in the makeup of the Dutch colonial army leading up to the introduction of native militias in the 1920s.
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Winsley, T. M., Thomas Shenton Whitelegge Thomas, and William Dobbie. A History of the Singapore Volunteer Corps, 1854–1937. Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1938.
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Colonial era survey of a locally recruited military unit.
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Colonial Military Recruitment in Mainland Southeast Asia

The mobilization of local populations for colonial military service began on the mainland in Southeast Asia during the First Anglo-Burmese War as shown in Bu 1923; lowland Arakanese were organized into a military unit. Womack 2006 shows how the considerable ethnic diversity within colonies was exploited by the colonial powers, applying the dictum “divide et impera.” French Indochina had the Garde Indigène de l’Indochine (later renamed the Garde Indochinoise) or “Native Guards of Indochina” in Laos, Cambodia, Annam, and Tonkin (which included a French contingent); paramilitary auxiliaries in Annam and Tonkin to aid the Gendarmeries; and a Garde Civil de Cochinchine in Cochinchina. Alongside these were numerous other smaller paramilitary and police elements, including the Police Rurale du Laos and the Partisans du Tonkin. France even raised an additional armed unit known as the Garde Urbaine de l’Indochine, mobilized mainly for service during World War I. At a minimum, most other colonial militaries were officered by Europeans, at least among commissioned officers; Eckert 2006 shows how colonial military recruitment had political implications for the colonial regime in French Indochina. Some colonies had sufficiently large populations of white colonials to mobilize local Europeans at least on a reserve basis. The Burma Officer Reserves, for example, were all local Europeans, often veterans, although their military value was questionable, their meetings representing more of a social club than serious training venues. Sadan 2013 has applied a critical approach to the assumed motivations of ethnic minorities joining the colonial military in Second World War Burma, looking at the Allied side. Treatment of the Siamese (Thai) military during this period is provided in Battye 1974.

Battye, Noel Alfred. The Military, Government, and Society in Siam, 1868–1910; Politics and Military Reform during the Reign of King Chulalongkorn. PhD diss., Cornell University, 1974.
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Siam (later Thailand) was of course not a colony, although it is often argued to have colonized itself (i.e., introduced similar western-style policies as elsewhere in colonial Southeast Asia). Changes in its military organization and recruitment thus deserve inclusion here. The present dissertation is the sole study available outside of Thailand of the pre–World War I Thai military.
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Bu, San Shwe. “The Arakan Mug Battalion.” Journal of the Burma Research Society 13.2 (1923): 129–135.
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The Arakanese “maghs,” the Bengali word for Arakanese Buddhists, settled at what became Cox’s Bazar after they fled Burmese rule at the end of the 18th century. They were mobilized by Campbell Robertson and organized into what became known as the Arakan Mug Battalion, giving them an ethnic identity.
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Eckert, Henri. “Double-Edged Swords of Conquest in Indochina: Tirailleurs Tonkinois, Chasseurs Annamites, and Militias, 1883–1895.” In Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, 119–145. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
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Shows the consequences for local indigenous military recruitment of metropolitan politics, setting Indochinese colonial militias into an imperial context. This chapter was originally published in an alternate version in South East Asia Research 10.3: 2002.
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Sadan, Mandy. “Ethnic Armies and Ethnic Conflict in Burma: Reconsidering the History of Colonial Militarization in the Kachin Region of Burma during the Second World War.” In Special Issue: Colonial Histories in South East Asia: Papers in Honour of Ian Brown. Edited by Rachel Harrison and John Edmonson. South East Asia Research 21.4 (2013): 601–626.
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Examines colonial military recruitment among the Kachin in northern Burma during World War II in order to understand their actual motivations for joining.
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Womack, Sarah. “Ethnicity and Martial Races: The Garde Indigène of Cambodia in the 1880s to 1890s.” In Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, 100–118. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
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The French saw the value of strategic ethnic deployments in support of a divide-and-rule approach to dominating Indochina and made an exception in using the “Annamite” (Vietnamese) Civil Guard to suppress rebellion in French Cambodia.
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Ethnicity and Martial Races

Politics increasingly complicated local military recruitment as the colonial period wore on. The fears of employing majority populations led some colonial administrations to exclude the majority ethnic group in favor of ethnic minorities that were now portrayed as members of martial races, as demonstrated in Haron 1990, de Moor 1999 and Teitler 2006, while Laurie 1989 examined the emergence and deployment of the Philippines Scouts in the Philippine’s Muslim south. Some of the martial race ideology had already developed elsewhere, as in the case of the subcontinent and its application to Burma and Malaya. In Burma, as Dun records, Karens, Kachins, and Chins were well represented in the colonial military after efforts in the 19th century to use the Mon (described in Grantham 1920). The martial race ideology’s widespread utility was in its effectiveness in dividing local populations against each other on ethnic grounds, one ethnic group feeling privileged, important, and strong and the other feeling suppressed, meek, and second class. This kind of recruitment built up considerable resentment by indigenous populations against minorities on the one hand and convinced them of the importance of developing their own national army on the other (Callahan 2002); it goes far in explaining many of the divisions that would cause prolonged civil war in the case of Burma as well as similar political problems elsewhere.

Callahan, Mary P. “State Formation in the Shadow of the Raj: Violence, Warfare and Politics in Colonial Burma.” Southeast Asian Studies 39.4 (2002): 513–536.
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The article examines the decisions made to exclude Burmans from the Burma Army at various stages, emphasising a colonial army dominated by ethnic minorities as part of a divide-and-rule policy.
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de Moor, Jaap. “The Recruitment of Indonesian Soldiers for the Dutch-Colonial Army, c. 1700–1950.” In Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964. Edited by David Killingray and David Omissi, 53–69. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.
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Although this article casts an eye over the entirety of the Dutch recruitment of soldiers in the archipelago, it importantly focuses some attention on the production of an artificial martial race in the Ambonese and their subsequent diminished place in a reconfigured early 20th century colonial army built around the “mixed company.”
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Dun, Smith. Memoirs of the Four-Foot Colonel. Data Paper Southeast Asia Program 113. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Department of Asian Studies, 1980.
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These are the memoirs of a Karen officer in the prewar Burma Army who rose to become general and first commander of Burma’s Armed Forces after independence in 1948. Offers an insider’s view of the transformation of the ethnic minority niche in the Burma Army over the course of the transition from colony to independent nation.
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Grantham, Stanley George. “A Burmese Regiment: The Pegu Light Infantry.” In Studies in the History of Tharrawaddy. By Stanley George Grantham, 1–8. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1920.
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A rare look at an obscure military unit organized in British Pegu in 1853, put into the context of the isolation of Burmans, as opposed to other Burmese ethnic groups, from military service under the British.
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Haron, Nadzon. “Colonial Defence and British Approach to the Problems in Malaya, 1874–1918.” Modern Asian Studies 24.2 (1990): 275–295.
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Examines the organization of early colonial military formations in Malaya that drew upon particular ethnic groups.
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Laurie, Clayton D. “The Philippine Scouts: America’s Colonial Army, 1899–1913.” Philippine Studies 37.2 (1989): 174–191.
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Detailed history of the recruitment of Macabebes from Pampanga and their transition into what would become from 1899 the Philippine Scouts, including their importance in the suppression and garrisoning of the south.
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Teitler, Gerke. “The Mixed Company: Fighting Power and Ethnic Relations in the Dutch Colonial Army, 1890–1920.” In Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, 146–160. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
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Examines the Dutch colonial army, exploring its multiethnic membership and recruitment, the majority of the soldiers having been recruited from amongst the Javanese and Amboynese.
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van Kessel, Ineke. Zwarte Hollanders: Afrikaanse Soldaten in Nederlands-Indië. Amsterdam: KIT, 2005.
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This is Kessel’s broader study of African troops employed in the Dutch East Indies. Includes useful color reproductions of period paintings of the African soldiers in uniform in the archipelago, as well as discussion of various related topics, including perceptions of the Ashanti, from whom many of these soldiers were recruited, as a martial race.
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Mutinies

One of the common experiences with colonial militaries in the region was the mutiny of indigenous or other non-European forces against their white officers. The earliest and perhaps the best known was the Cavite Mutiny in 1872, sparked by a levy of taxes but carried out in expectation of a national uprising in the Philippines against Spanish rule. Although it failed and its leaders were executed and followers exiled, it was an important event leading to the revolution twenty years later and the establishment of the Philippine Republic. French Indochina experienced a mutiny by the Garde Indochinoise in 1908 as did Singapore in 1915. Van Kessel 2003, and Rettig 2002 show that such mutinies had the potential to inspire nationalist hopes far in excess of the actual size of the forces involved and thus highlighted the social, cultural, and religious factors that made complicated the use of the indigenous populations for colonial military purposes. Harper and Miller 1984, Meixsel 2006, and Tarling 1982 detail the implications of these mutinies for subsequent colonial security arrangements.

Harper, R. W. E., and Harry Miller. Singapore Mutiny. Singapore and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
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One of the very few detailed studies of the mutiny, but focuses mainly on colonial reactions with little attention to the Indian mutineers themselves.
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Meixsel, Richard. “American Exceptionalism in Colonial Forces? The Philippine Scout Mutiny of 1924.” In Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, 162–184. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
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Although the Philippine Scouts were being organized like formal American military units, their pay was not the same as that of regular army units and hence they mutinied, although the fact that no changes to pay or rationing ensued indicated that they remained in the eyes of the Americans second-class soldiers. This chapter was originally an article published in South East Asia Research 10.3 (2002).
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Rettig, Tobias. “French Military Policies in the Aftermath of the Yên Bay Mutiny, 1930: Old Security Dilemmas Return to the Surface.” South East Asia Research 10.3 (2002): 309–331.
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Rettig argues that the French colonial administration implemented reforms in Indochina in the aftermath of the Yên Bay mutiny to shore up their position there, but those reforms actually damaged French-Vietnamese relations. They also deleteriously affected the French imperial defense of Indochina.
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Tarling, Nicholas. “‘The Merest Pustule’: The Singapore Mutiny of 1915.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 55.2 (1982): 29–59.
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Widely considered the best examination of the details of the Singapore mutiny, this is a necessary starting point for research on the topic.
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van Kessel, Ineke. “African Mutinies in the Netherlands East Indies: A Nineteenth-Century Colonial Paradox.” In Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History. Edited by Jon Abbink, Mirjam de Bruijn, and Klaus van Walraven, 141–169. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2003.
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In the 1830–1872 period, the Dutch recruited from Ashanti and the Gold Coast thousands of Africans for their colonial army in the Dutch East Indies. Despite promises of fair treatment otherwise, African troops in both Java and Sumatra staged mutinies that led the Dutch to change their policies on employing African troops for Asian service.
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Internal Security and Rebellions

By the 1890s, colonial militaries in Southeast Asia generally had few immediate cross-border threats. In the late 19th century, colonial militaries were useful for putting down the remnant armies of older states and imposing rule on outlying states where central control had historically been weak even before the colonial conquest. Fourniau 1989 and Schulten 1988 examine this phase of colonial military activity for Vietnam and the Dutch East Indies respectively. In the 20th century, however, the main threats to the colonial order came from the inside: not from elites and highland ethnic groups, but from the lowland masses who were beginning to come together with radical students coming out of colonial schools, having been exposed to a range of ideologies, including communism, socialism, and even fascism. Colonial militaries thus played an important role in the process of ensuring internal security in monitoring and suppressing indigenous organizing against colonial rule. Lockhart 1989 and Zinoman 2000 have examined these developments in part in Vietnam, while Linn 1997 and Linn 1999 provide the most thorough coverage of the Philippines for the same period. Some colonial militaries were used across colonial boundaries within imperial domains. Womack 2006, for example (cited under Colonial Military Recruitment in Mainland Southeast Asia) points to the French use of the Annamite Garde Indigène to suppress the Cambodian Insurrection in 1885–1886; it was possibly because of this insurrection that Cambodia did not get its own Garde Indigène until 1904.

Fourniau, C. “Colonial Wars Before 1914: The Case of France in Indochina.” In Imperialism and War: Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa. Edited by J. A. de Moor, 72–85. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1989.
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This chapter examines wars fought by the French in Indochina up to the beginning of World War I.
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Linn, Brian McAllister. Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
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This is the most comprehensive study of colonial era military history in the Philippines to date. Among its many contributions is its demonstration that awareness of a Japanese threat to the security of the Philippines had been perceived even during the Philippine War and that American military planners had developed a number of contingency plans with which to deal with a Japanese attack (including the often cited Plan Orange).
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Linn, Brian McAllister. “Cerberus’ Dilemma, the US Army and Internal Security in the Pacific, 1902–1940.” In Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964. Edited by David Killingray and David Omissi, 114–136. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.
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The US Army put into place a very substantial intelligence gathering apparatus in the Philippines from the Philippine war on that was intended to root out rebels and identify networks through knowledge of their families and connections; this presages American intelligence gathering elsewhere in the decades that followed.
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Lockhart, Greg. Nation in Arms: The Origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1989.
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Although the scope is broader, the initial paragraph focuses on the colonial military.
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Schulten, C. M. “Tactics of the Dutch Colonial Army in the Netherlands East Indies.” Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire 70 (1988): 59–67.
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This article examines the tactics used by the Dutch colonial army in the Aceh War in three stages from 1873 until 1913.
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Zinoman, Peter. “Colonial Prisons and Anti-colonial Resistance in French Indochina: The Thai Nguyen Rebellion, 1917.” Modern Asian Studies 34.1 (2000): 57–98.
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Although focused on colonial prisons, has substantial detail on the rebellion and the colonial countermeasures that put those rebels there.
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Technology

The circulation of military technology and knowledge has not received the attention in the historiography that it should in part because of the range of linguistic skills necessary to unveil the multinational networks that were often at work at the time in an effort to circumvent colonial restrictions. There is, however, also the problem that this kind of knowledge transfer, as with logistics, is often not viewed as military history proper. Nevertheless, understanding how this occurred and how new learning was manifested on the battlefield is of crucial importance in identifying the factors for military success and defeat in the region. Jackson 2010 examines not only the role of colonial militaries in imperial defense, but also how organization, tactics, and other military knowledge circulated around the empire. A more regionally focused study is Goscha 2003, which directs primary attention to the indigenous networks stretching across Asia and through which military technology and ideas flowed, thus adding indigenous agency to the historiography on military technology transfer in Asia. The movement of gunpowder and its contribution to the development of a military revolution across Asia, including Southeast Asia, is examined in Lorge 2008. Military medical history in the region during the colonial period remains another topic that has been underexplored in the literature, but not for want of source material; de Moor 1989 is an important though aging contribution to this literature. Young 1995 has provided one of the few studies of the emergence of military aviation in the colonial era military history of the region.

de Moor, J. A. “An Extra Ration of Gin for the Troops: The Army Doctor and Colonial Warfare in the Archipelago.” In Dutch Medicine in the Malay Archipelago, 1816–1942. Edited by G. M. van Heteren, A. de Knecht-van Eekelen, and M. J. D. Poulissen, 133–151. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989.
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The article mainly looks at the presence of the military medical officer among the troops during expeditions, although there is a lengthy section on the nature of colonial war in the archipelago as well.
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Goscha, Christopher. “Building Force: Asian Origins of Twentieth-Century Military Science in Vietnam (1905–54).” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34.3 (2003): 535–560.
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This article examines military technology transfer to Asia through the case study of Vietnam.
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Jackson, Ashley. Distant Drums: The Role of Colonies in British Imperial Warfare. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2010.
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An important examination of the role of colonial military formations in the defense of the empire, including the means by which imperial military knowledge was circulated and communicated through joint imperial actions.
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Lorge, Peter A. The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb. New Approaches to Asian History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511816598Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Lorge is mainly interested in the long-term history of gunpowder weaponry in Asia, including Southeast Asia during this period.
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Young, Edward M. Aerial Nationalism: A History of Aviation in Thailand. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1995.
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This is one of the few studies of the development of air forces within Southeast Asia. Siam (Thailand) being the only independent state at the time, these efforts coincided not with colonial control but instead with nationalism. With a forward by William M. Leary.
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Philippine-American War, 1899–1902

The Philippines’ peaceful transition to independence in 1946 from Commonwealth status has meant its “national revolution” occurred far earlier than in other colonies in the region. This revolution was the republican effort under Aguinaldo at the end of the 19th century against the Spanish and was followed by several years of conventional and then guerrilla war against the Americans. Technically the Filipino forces were not rebels once Spain withdrew and the fight between them and the invading Americans is most accurately portrayed as a war between independent states. However, the asymmetrical nature of the war and its transition from conventional war to guerrilla war in 1902 rendered the struggle almost indistinguishable from other colonial conflicts of the era. This struggle, most widely called the Philippine War, has received the lion’s share of attention in indigenous Filipino historiography and that of international scholarship on conflict in the Philippines. The works listed in this section are representative examples, but the available work is too extensive to incorporate in full here. Early historiography on the Philippine War was highly partisan and very little reliable historiography was produced until later in the 20th century. What reliable historiography there was tended to focus on the Spanish period in the fighting in the Philippines, such as Cosmas 1971. The later stages of the ongoing war in Vietnam fostered greater interest in rural insurgents and how to beat such insurgencies, which led to greater attention to the US Army’s role in winning the population over through public works as examined in Gates 1973. Linn 1989 helped to usher in a stream of modern, objective historiography on the campaign, examining American counterinsurgency operations. This study was expanded upon in Linn 2000, which directed attention to the Filipino side of the fighting as well, and remains the best account of the war.

Cosmas, Graham. An Army for Empire: The United States Army and the Spanish-American War. Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 1971.
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An early example of the historiography that concentrated on the Spanish period of the conflict in the Philippines, for which it remains a useful account, in particular for its coverage of the Battle of Manila.
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Gates, John M. Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1899–1902. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973.
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Gates, writing at the end of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, sheds light on America’s first ‘winning hearts and minds’-style campaign through development of infrastructure and the establishment of public schools.
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Gates, John M. “The Limits of Power: The U.S. Conquest of the Philippines.” In Great Powers and Little Wars. Edited by A. Hamish Ion and E. J. Errington, 125–144. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993.
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Challenges the popular and negative impressions of American atrocities as the predominating feature of counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines. The US Army from the start engaged in serious and sincere efforts intended to improve public well-being, but never really achieved long-term stability. The major failing was that the United States never devised a means to protect the Philippine Islands from external military threats, explaining the collapse of US and Philippine forces there in 1942.
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Linn, Brian M. The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
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This study marked the beginning of a number of studies by Linn both of the war and of various other aspects of the history of Philippines’ defense in the colonial period. The study is noted for its nonpartisan approach.
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Linn, Brian M. The Philippine War 1899–1902. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000.
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This is today the standard work on the Philippine War and offers a comprehensive overview. It focuses detailed attention on the war throughout the archipelago, rather than focusing on Luzon, and places this multicentered analysis into the context of the war as a whole, offering broad discussion and a chronologically oriented narrative. Linn also raises questions concerning the degree and frequency of alleged American atrocities in the conflict, for which it has become known.
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May, Glenn A. Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War. Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 1993.
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This work offers one of the best available examinations of the history of the war in one of the outer islands.
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Mojares, Resil B. The War Against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu 1899–1906. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999.
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As with May 1993, this work examines the conflict in Cebu and not in Luzon and also takes its lead from other historiography in tackling some of the myths that have emerged about the conflict generally.
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Quesada, Alejandro de. The Spanish-American War and Philippine Insurrection 1898–1902. Illustrated by Stephen Walsh. Men At Arms 47. Oxford: Osprey, 2007.
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As with other Osprey “Men at Arms” series items, this book provides a useful introductory overview of the military context and detailed coverage and illustration of the weaponry and uniforms used in the campaign.
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The Japanese Conquest and Occupation, 1941–1945

The outbreak of war in Southeast Asia followed Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, and elsewhere on 7 December 1942, and the subsequent Japanese occupation of the entire region. Earlier treatments of the fate of colonial armies in Asia during this period, such as Prasad 1952, focusing on the Indian Army, and Kirby, et al. 1957–1969, looking more broadly at the overall Allied war effort in Asia, remain important for their command of detailed treatment of the military side of the campaign. More recent works, such as Bayly and Harper 2005, examine the retreat, rebuilding, and return of colonial armies in British Asia in their broader political and historical context. Tarling 2001 examines the same period from the angle of the Japanese occupation. Most of the literature on this period seeks to explain why Western colonial and imperial military forces failed so miserably at first in order to explain how colonial military organizational, logistical, and other changes led to the eventual Allied victory, as in Dunlop 2009. Shores, et al. 1992–2005 through the mobilization of rich detail and chronological reconstruction, shows the same process for the colonial and Allied air forces in the theatre. There is a wide range of literature on particular battles and engagements during this period, such as Morris 2000 on the fall of Corregidor in 1942.

Bayly, Christopher, and Tim Harper. Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan. London: Penguin, 2005.
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A rare account that looks at the fall of British Asia as a whole, Southeast Asia forming the major part of this story. Recommended as an introduction to the period and events.
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Dunlop, Graham. Military Economics, Culture, and Logistics in the Burma Campaign, 1942–1945. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009.
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Dunlop’s main concern is Burma, but he provides a necessary look at the neglected issue of logistical development that is relevant to the entirety of Southeast Asia Command operations in the region from 1943 to 1945.
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Kirby, S. Woodburn, ed. The War Against Japan. 5 vols. London: HMSO, 1957–1969.
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This is the official history of the war in Asia by the British Army. Although considerable new work has questioned some of the assumptions and details, its comprehensiveness and level of detail generally means that it continues to be an essential starting point for research on the military history of the war in Asia.
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Morris, Eric. Corregidor: The American Alamo of World War II. New York: Cooper Square, 2000.
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Engaging book, told diary style through snippets of local experiences in different venues on different dates in the lead-up to the Japanese siege of Corregidor.
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Prasad, Bisheshwar, ed. The Official History of the Indian Armed Forces in the Second World War 1939–45. 8 vols. Delhi: Combined Inter-Services Historical Section (India & Pakistan), 1952.
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This work includes volumes devoted to the various theaters of war, including several essays on Burma, Malaya, and Singapore, and is the most comprehensive account available of the Indian Army’s experiences in the region (and outside of it) during the war.
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Shores, Christopher, Brian Cull, and Yasuho Izawa. Bloody Shambles. 3 vols. London: Grubb Street, 1992–2005.
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The three volumes of this work are devoted to a detailed look at the air forces involved in the war on both sides, the planes used, and daily renderings of the various air operations and actions across the region from 1941 until 1945. This is the recommended starting point for any research on air campaigns in Southeast Asia during the war.
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Tarling, Nicholas. A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, 1941–1945. London: Hurst, 2001.
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Tarling provides an overview of the military expansion of Japan in the region from late 1941.
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The Malayan Campaign and the Fall of Singapore

Of studies on the fall of Malaya and Singapore, several highlight the weaknesses imposed on imperial defense by Britain’s declining ability to afford its gargantuan empire. Such causes were identified as being decades in the making in Kirby 1971, which looked at the failings of successive British governments since the end of the First World War, and Hack and Blackburn 2003, which focused more on Churchill’s failings. Callahan 2001 focuses on similar problems in detail more specifically within the 1940 to 1942 timeframe. Farrell 2005 compares various explanations as to why Singapore fell, whether it was because it was starved of resources to support the British effort in the Middle East, poor decision making by Lieutenant General Percival, or a range of other possible reasons. Aside from why Singapore fell, the narratives of that fall or other subthemes of the campaign have been pursued by other works: Warren 2002 and Farrell 2005 provide the most comprehensive and best-researched operational accounts of the campaign, while Frei 2004 has directed more attention to other aspects, including everyday soldiers’ experiences on both sides. For more general treatments see Elphick 1995 and Farrell and Hunter 2002.

Callahan, Raymond. The Worst Disaster: The Fall of Singapore. Singapore: Cultured Lotus, 2001.
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One of a number of analyses of the fall of the island fortress in 1942 that attributes the fall to problems between military and civil authorities and problems within the military command structure.
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Elphick, Peter. Singapore, The Pregnable Fortress: A Study in Deception, Discord and Desertion. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995.
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This study examines the military state of Singapore and the internal reasons for its fall in February 1942.
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Farrell, Brian. The Defence and Fall of Singapore, 1941–42. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2005.
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This is among the best analyses, as well as the most comprehensive to date, of the Malayan campaign and the fall of Singapore.
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Farrell, Brian, and Sandy Hunter, eds. Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited. A Selection of Papers Presented at a Conference Held in Singapore 15–17 February 2002. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2002.
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On the 60th anniversary of the fall of Singapore, various views that fully take into account recent research are offered.
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Frei, Henry. Guns of February: Ordinary Japanese Soldiers’ Views of the Malayan Campaign and the Fall of Singapore, 1941–42. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004.
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One of the first works in English to look at the Malayan campaign from the perspective of the everyday Japanese soldier. Makes extensive use of Japanese-language and nonconventional source material.
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Hack, Karl, and Kevin Blackburn. Did Singapore Have To Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.
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A fairly comprehensive look at the fall of Singapore, with special emphasis on Churchill’s thinking and misconceptions about the island fortress.
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Kirby, S. Woodburn. Singapore: The Chain of Disaster. London: Cassell, 1971.
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Masterful account that looks at the long background of the weaknesses built up over decades that cumulatively caused the fall of Singapore.
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Warren, Alan. Singapore 1942: Britain’s Greatest Defeat. London: Hambledon, 2002.
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Warren, using Japanese and British sources, attributes the fall of Singapore to Japanese General Yamashita’s superior strategic abilities relative to those of Lieutenant General A. E. Percival.
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Burma, 1941–1945

The war in Burma lasted for a little over three and a half years, but was internally broken up into different phases or campaigns. For a broader overview of the entire conflict in Burma, the best study remains Allen 1984. Slim 1956 is an insightful, if dramatic insider’s account by a commander and actual participant in the 1942 campaign. The First Burma Campaign, as the five months of the Japanese invasion and conquest of Burma are known, was more prolonged than the Malaya Campaign and conducted in its last half with very little air support for the defenders. Carew 1972 and Lunt 1989 examine the retreat out of the colony in 1942, while Grant and Tamayama 1999 look at the First Burma Campaign from the perspective of both sides in the conflict. The role that the Australian refusal to send a division to Rangoon played in the collapse of the defense is examined by Callahan 2007. Burma’s fall was perhaps less shocking that Singapore’s. Nevertheless, the fall of Burma put India at greater risk of a Japanese land invasion and this fear helped to influence the conduct of the campaign. Ultimately, the Indian Army and other imperial forces were withdrawn across the mountains to preserve it and prevent the loss of another mass of men as POWs to the Japanese. Unlike Singapore Burma would see a return of Allied forces before the war was out, with several failed invasions of Arakan followed in late 1944 by a three-pronged counteroffensive that finally succeeded in taking the colony back from the Japanese. Marston 2003 examines the revival of the Indian Army over the course of these campaigns, including its return to Burma in 1944–1945.

Allen, Louis. Burma: The Longest War 1941–1945. London: Phoenix, 1984.
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Allen was one of the intelligence officers given a crash course in Japanese and sent east to serve in the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (India) in 1942. His knowledge of Japanese language and culture makes up for his book’s inability to consult certain files then classified by the British government. This remains one of the classic treatments of the entire campaign.
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Callahan, Raymond A. “Winston Churchill, Australia, and the Defense of Rangoon.” World War II Quarterly 4.3 (2007): 4–19.
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Callahan examines in detail the political maneuvering that led Australia to avoid dispatching an Australian division to Burma and thus, in the civil government’s eyes, sealing Rangoon’s fate.
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Carew, Tim. The Longest Retreat: The Burma Campaign 1942. London: Mayflower, 1972.
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Although meant for a popular audience, Carew’s volume long remained the chief account of the failed first Burma campaign.
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Grant, Ian Lyall, and Kazuo Tamayama. Burma 1942: The Japanese Invasion; Both Sides Tell the Story of a Savage Jungle War. Chichester, UK: Zampi, 1999.
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This work provides views of the campaign from both the Japanese and the British and Commonwealth sides, making extensive use of diaries and other firsthand accounts.
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Lunt, James. The Retreat in Burma 1941–1942. Newton Abbot, UK: David & Charles, 1989.
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Although this is a general view of the campaign, as the author was a participant, it is partly autobiographical.
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Marston, Daniel P. Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
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Marston examines the mauling, retreat, and then revival and return of the Indian Army in Burma.
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Slim, William. Defeat into Victory. London: Cassell, 1956.
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This is the firsthand memoir of the Burma campaigns written by the British commander, Field Marshal William Slim.
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The Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945

Ahmad 2006 and Lebra 1977 provide General Overviews of how many Southeast Asians found themselves reorganized into new armies for common purpose from 1942–1945, either as armies in exile, such as the remnants of the Burma Army in India, or the Heiho (defense armies) raised under the Japanese in occupied Southeast Asia. Lebra 1971, Sundaram 1995, and Havers 2005 examine the Indian National Army (INA) eventually led by Subash Chandra Bose and organized by the Japanese out of Indian Army POWs captured in Malaya and Burma. Ghosh 1969 also examines the INA, but mainly in terms of the political ramifications of its emergence. Southeast Asian highlanders aided Allied guerrilla activity but by and large remained outside the scope of direct military activities. However, there was also substantial Southeast Asian guerrilla activity in particular colonies, such as Philippine Scout holdouts in the Philippines and Malayan Chinese Communist guerrillas. Raffin 2005 sheds light on youth mobilization for paramilitary forces in French Indochina during the war. Reynolds 2005 remains the main account of Allied intrigue regarding Japan’s reluctant ally Thailand during the war.

Ahmad, Abu Talib. “The Impact of the Japanese Occupation on Colonial and Anti-Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia.” In Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, 202–226. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203414668Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
From 1943 the Japanese had to rely increasingly heavily on locally recruited militias because of their weakening positioning in Southeast Asia as the war progressed. More significantly for the trajectory of the region’s political history, the Japanese infused these local armies with spirit (seishin) that also encouraged them after the war to resist the attempts by the European colonial forces, despite the latter having superiority in weaponry.
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Ghosh, K. K. The Indian National Army: Second Front of the Indian Independence Movement. Meerut: Meenakshi Prakashan, 1969.
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An important study of the INA’s political and diplomatic aspects.
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Havers, Robin. “Jai Hind! The Indian National Army, 1942–1945.” In Exile Armies. Edited by Matthew Bennett and Paul Latawski, 55–67. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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Examines the INA as an example of an army organized in exile. Complements Sundaram 1995.
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Lebra, Joyce. Jungle Alliance: Japan and the Indian National Army. Singapore: Asia Pacific Press, 1971.
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This is a key study of the military aspects of the Japanese organization of the Indian National Army.
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Lebra, Joyce. Japanese-Trained Armies in Southeast Asia: Independence and Volunteer Forces in World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
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This is the only text examining, in their entirety, indigenous armies trained and sponsored by the Japanese in Southeast Asia during the Second World War.
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Raffin, Anne. Youth Mobilization in Vichy Indochina and Its Legacies, 1940–1970. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.
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The Vichy French mobilized over a half million Vietnamese into its paramilitary Youth Corps during World War II. This book examines how Vichy convinced them that they were doing so on Indochina’s behalf and what the long-term implications of this effort were.
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Reynolds, E. Bruce. Thailand’s Secret War: OSS, SOE, and the Free Thai Underground During World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511497360Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the role of special operations in Thailand, an Axis minor state, leading to connection and collaboration with political forces that forced the collapse of the Phibun government.
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Sundaram, Chandar S. “A Paper Tiger: The Indian National Army in Battle, 1944–1945.” War & Society 13.1 (1995): 35–59.
DOI: 10.1179/072924795791200187Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sundaram’s article is an important assessment of the INA’s military performance in the last year of World War II.
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The Early National Revolutions and Decolonization

As Japanese forces surrendered across the region in 1945, Southeast Asian defense armies or guerrilla forces, depending on the area, moved to resist the return of European rule. Broad surveys of the region are available in Bayly and Harper 2008 and Jackson 1986. As Hack 2006 shows for British Asia and Groen 1993 shows for the Dutch East Indies, this phase overlapped with the first nationalist revolutions of postwar Southeast Asia. This region was a swath of different kinds of militaries with pre-independence roots. Although the early national revolutions would seem to fall outside the scope of a colonial warfare bibliography, the Europeans, who admittedly began to change how they presented themselves—from returning colonizers to anti-Communists seeking to preserve freedom on behalf of indigenous client states—relied heavily on military units recruited locally who were at first intended to be colonial forces. There were also armies that had emerged out of rebel forces as well as legacy armies from the Japanese period. Some countries inherited a myriad of ethnic or religious armies that had organized on their own. Postcolonial states would have to deal with these legacy armies and paramilitary forces; in the mid-1950s, Ngo Dinh Diem had to deal not only with the communist forces, but also with the paramilitary forces of the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects. Burma had a bevy of ethnic insurgent armies who were often led by men who had served in colonial armies. Works focusing on the military implications of imperial retreat are not generally available for the region as a whole, with the exception of short overviews by Hack 2006. However, in terms of these broader imperial retreats, broader analyses are available, the best and most useful being Jackson 1986.

Bayly, Christopher, and Tim Harper. The End of Britain’s Asian Empire. London: Penguin, 2008.
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This is the follow-up to the authors’ well-regarded Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2004) and provides an equally comprehensive look at the fall of Britain’s Asian possessions in the postwar world.
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Groen, Petra. “Militant Response: The Dutch Use of Military Force and Decolonization of the Dutch East Indies, 1945–50.” In Special Issue: Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945. Edited by Robert Holland. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21.3 (1993): 30–44.
DOI: 10.1080/03086539308582905Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Provides especially useful information on the military conditions awaiting the Dutch in Indonesia, including all the masses of Indonesian youth mobilized by the Japanese to resist the returning Allies.
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Hack, Karl. “Imperialism and Decolonisation in Southeast Asia: Colonial Forces and British World Power.” In Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, 227–253. London; New York: Routledge, 2006.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203414668Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although Southeast Asia is often viewed as a region that drew upon imperial resources for defense, Hack shows how the region was vital to the broader imperial system of defense through fortifications and insurance of trade route security and particularly through financial resources. These realities influenced the peculiar ways in which the British managed their possessions in Southeast Asia up to and including independence.
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Jackson, W. G. F. Withdrawal from Empire: A Military View. London: Batsford, 1986.
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This is a comprehensive survey of the British retreat from empire and its military implications and experiences during that process. Attention is also given to the Brunei Revolt in 1962.
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The Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960

This conflict saw the intersection of the legacy of armies raised against the Japanese occupation during the war, the onset of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and moves toward independence. Much of the literature related to this conflict thus focuses either on its relationship to constitutional developments or to the emerging Cold War and the growing US presence in Vietnam. Short 1975 and Jackson 2008 provide general coverage of the Emergency. Clutterbuck 1967, Leary 1995, and Hack 2000 focus on the British counterinsurgency effort, Hack focusing on an examination of intelligence gathering and Leary on the use of Orang Asli tribesmen.

Clutterbuck, Richard. The Long, Long War: The Emergency in Malaya, 1948–1960. London: Cassell, 1967.
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Examines the British side of the military (counterinsurgency) campaign against the Malayan Communists over the course of the twelve years of the struggle.
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Hack, Karl. “Corpses, Prisoners of War and Captured Documents: British and Communist Narratives of the Malayan Emergency, and the Dynamics of Intelligence Transformation.” In The Clandestine Cold War in Asia, 1945–65: Western Intelligence, Propaganda, and Special Operations. Edited by Richard Aldrich, Gary Rawnsley, and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley, 211–241. London: Frank Cass, 2000.
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Hack sheds light on the transformation of intelligence gathering by the British during the Malayan Emergency, moving it from an ineffective tool of war in 1948 to a highly useful weapon central to counterinsurgency success by the end of the 1950s.
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Jackson, Robert. The Malayan Emergency and Indonesian Confrontation: The Commonwealth’s Wars 1948–1966. Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Aviation, 2008.
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This is a capable rendering of the Malayan Emergency. Despite the title, it provides insufficient coverage of the Indonesian Confrontation.
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Leary, John. Violence and the Dream People: The Orang Asli in the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960. Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1995.
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Examines the use by the British of the Orang Asli tribesmen in the Emergency to supplement the British forces deployed.
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Short, Anthony. The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948–1960. London: Muller, 1975.
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This book was originally commissioned in 1960 by the Malaysian Government as the official history of the Emergency; they gave Short full access to all the government documents on the subject, but then denied the book’s publication for years. When it came out in 1975, other historiography had already been introduced which made much of this account redundant. Nevertheless, there remain some details in this book that cannot be found in earlier works.
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First Indochina War, 1949–1954

Although from 1949 the French fought in Indochina on behalf of a nominally independent Associated State of Vietnam, in reality the end of French rule in Indochina did not come until 1954. Early accounts are dominated by journalists’ coverage such as Fall 2005, which benefited from privileged access to information unavailable to others, but suffered from poor understanding of the actual military dimensions of the conflict. The First Indochina War saw one of the last deployments of colonial troops (from elsewhere in the French Empire) in Southeast Asia and this conflict was thus one of the last colonial wars in the region. The literature on this conflict is so extensive, however, that only a few general works emphasizing military conflict (rather than politics) can be listed here as a guide. Vaise 2000 and Koburger 1991 together provide the best accounting of the French strategies, tactics, and equipment in the war. Duiker 1981 provides the best examination of the popular side of the Communists’ military struggle with the French, while Goscha 2012 provides the best coverage of the state’s role in the Viet Minh struggle. Davidson 1988 provides an operational account of the war that deals with this conflict not from the perspective of the end of colonial rule but as the first of several Cold War conflicts staged in Vietnam. Roy 1965 remains a standard account of the last battle of the conflict, that of Dien Bien Phu.

Davidson, Phillip B. Vietnam at War: The History, 1945–1975. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988.
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Davidson, who was chief of US intelligence in Vietnam in the late 1960s, has produced here a comprehensive operational account of the various Indochina Wars, the one most relevant here being the struggle between the French and the Vietnamese from 1946 until 1954.
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Duiker, William J. The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981.
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This is the classic history of ultimate communist victory in Vietnam, but provides a necessary overview to both the survival of the communists in the 1930s and later.
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Fall, Bernard B. Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina. Stackpole Military Series. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 2005.
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This is a journalist’s account of the war, originally published in 1961; despite inaccuracies on actual military history, the author benefited from gaining access to information most could not.
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Goscha, Christopher. “A ‘Total War’ of Decolonization? Social Mobilization and State-Building in Communist Vietnam (1949–54).” War & Society 31.2 (2012): 136–162.
DOI: 10.1179/0729247312Z.0000000007Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Goscha focuses on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s efforts to shift to a modern, conventional war and the impact of the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of civilian porters to compensate for the lack of mechanized logistical support for its six army divisions. This forced the communist party to tighten its grip on the mechanisms of the state and in the process changed not only society but the nature of the state itself.
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Koburger, Charles W., Jr. The French Navy in Indochina: Riverine and Coastal Forces, 1945–54. New York: Praeger, 1991.
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A detailed examination of the structure, organization, equipment, tactics, and men of the French sea and river forces involved in the First Indochina War, drawing extensively upon French sources, with particular attention to the river assault groups known as dinassauts.
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Roy, Jules. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Translated by Robert Baldrick. London: Faber, 1965.
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Extensively researched, authoritative account of the battle that ended the First Indochina War by a former French soldier who was critical of French military policies in the conflict. Although superseded by more recent historiography, the book remained highly influential during the American War in Vietnam, in the midst of expansion at the time of publication, and remains one of the most accessible accounts of the battle today.
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Vaise, Maurice, ed. L’Armee Francaise dans la Guerre d’Indochine, 1946–1954: Adapation ou Inadaptation? Actes du Colloque des 30 Novembre et 1er Décembre 1998 Organisé par le Centre D’études D’histoire de la Défense et l’Union Nationale de L’armée Blindée Cavalerie Chars. Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2000.
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The contributors, mostly French military experts, tackle various aspects of the French military effort in the First Indochina War to give a comprehensive view from essentially French sources and experiences.
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The Brunei Revolt and the Indonesian Confrontation

A short-lived rebellion in Brunei in 1962 was quickly put down after the deployment of British troops and Gurkhas based in Singapore. On the inspiration of this rebellion, however, was built the “Confrontation,” Indonesian President Sukarno’s strategy to block the incorporation of northwestern Borneo into the newly emerging Malaysia. This is by most measures Southeast Asia’s last colonial conflict although the British protectorate over Brunei would not end until 1983. The political background to this conflict is provided in James and Sheil-Small 1971. Bullock 1994 and Walker 1997 are memoirs of the conflict. Fowler 2006 provides detailed coverage of the weapons, combatants, and other aspects of the conflict. Smith 1985 provides an examination of the Brunei Revolt and Indonesian Confrontation in the context of counterinsurgency literature.

Bullock, Christopher. Journeys Hazardous: Gurkha Clandestine Operations, Borneo 1965. Worcester, UK: Square One, 1994.
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Account by an officer of a Gurkha Company engaged in the clandestine Claret Operations, based on personal diaries.
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Fowler, Will. Britain’s Secret War: The Indonesian Confrontation, 1962–66. Oxford: Osprey, 2006.
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Covers the weaponry, uniforms, and other details of the last colonial war in Southeast Asia.
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James, Harold, and Denis Sheil-Small. The Undeclared War: The Story of the Indonesian Confrontation, 1962–1966. London: Leo Cooper, 1971.
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A detailed account of the background of confrontation with Indonesia and the men and tactics that staved off Indonesian incursions.
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Smith, E. D. Malaya and Borneo. Counter Insurgency Operations 1. London: Ian Allan, 1985.
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Detailed account of the British counterinsurgency operations that won the campaign.
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Walker, Walter. Fighting On. London: New Millenium, 1997.
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This is an autobiographical account by Sir Walter Walker, the general who commanded British and Malayan forces during this period, which focuses on dealing with the Brunei Revolt and the Indonesian guerrillas who followed.
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Historical Memory

Colonial military history can leave lasing influences in independent countries in a variety of ways. One of the most significant of these is public memory and the place of key colonial military events in the national story. How conflicts and military experiences in the region have been remembered along these lines has received some attention in the military history literature of the region, concentrated mainly in Singapore and Malaysia—for example Lim and Wong 2000—where public history has received more government financial support and showcasing than perhaps anywhere else in the region. Singapore and Malaysia’s different histories during the 1942 Japanese attack have led to contrasting historiography on the military events involved, as shown in Blackburn 2006. Another way colonial military history can have a lasting impact is on military development. Despite early attention to the impact of the Japanese occupation on the history of different national armies in the region, the institutional influence has not been emphasized with some exceptions and remains a major area for future potential research projects. A rare look is Robinson 2006, which links precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial military history to explain violence in Timor L’Este in 1999. Another interesting but neglected area is how the region’s colonial military history can inform counterinsurgency and other military operations in other regions today, as demonstrated in Zaalberg 2013.

Blackburn, Kevin. “Colonial Forces as Postcolonial Memories: The Commemoration and Memory of the Malay Regiment in Modern Malaysia and Singapore.” In Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, 286–309. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203414668Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Blackburn shows how the memories of the Malay Regiment’s stand at Pasir Pajang in Singapore in 1942 have been used as an example of Malay loyalty and martialility by Malaysian nationalist writers, but by Singaporian writers as an example of the heterogeneous Singapore population that stood together against the Japanese invaders.
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Lim, Patricia Pui Huen, and Diana Wong, eds. War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000.
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Although much of the attention of the contributors, including Wang Gungwu and Brenda Yeoh, is focused on the Japanese occupation period, this collection offers perspectives on the social experience of war that are often absent in the explicitly military studies of conflict in the region.
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Robinson, Geoffrey. “Colonial Militias in East Timor from the Portuguese Period to Independence.” In Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia. Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, 255–285. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203414668Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focuses on the Indonesian militias that attempted to prevent the secession of Timor L’Este (East Timor), which had been forcibly occupied by Indonesia a quarter of a century earlier. Robinson places their actions in the context of “repertoires of action” that reflected longer-term martial behavior traceable back to the Portuguese period and before—in other words identifying the continuity of a colonial era martial culture that itself had precolonial roots.
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Zaalberg, Thijs Brocades. “The Use and Abuse of the ‘Dutch Approach’ to Counterinsurgency.” Journal of Strategic Studies 36.6 (2013): 867–897.
DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2012.743463Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article examines the cultivation of a certain view of Dutch counterinsurgency operations and the implications of the application of this approach by the Americans to more recent counterinsurgency operations such as in Iraq.