With Stalin’s approval and Mao’s assistance, North Korea’s forces invaded the unprepared South in an effort to unite the entire peninsula under communist rule. And in late 1949-early 1950, North and South Korean forces clashed along the 38th parallel. The rebellion and its suppression resulted in more than 25,000 casualties among a total population of 280,000 on the island. Spector’s account of the war in Korea is fairly conventional, except for his discussion of what he calls the “first Korean War” that began in April 1948 and lasted until 1949 on the island of Cheju, located southwest of the Korean peninsula, and involved a leftist/communist uprising and guerrilla warfare against the US-backed government of Syngman Rhee. After the armistice that ended the Korean War was signed, Mao renewed his efforts to seize Taiwan, resulting in the two Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s.
Mao planned to attack Taiwan that summer, but when north Korean forces invaded South Korea, the American Seventh Fleet positioned itself in the Taiwan Strait forcing Mao to call off the attack. In the spring of 1950, PLA forces seized Hainan. Spector notes that in October 1949, PLA units successfully seized the coastal city of Amoy, and then moved to assault the island of Kinmen where they were defeated by Taiwanese forces. Chiang’s regime fled to Taiwan, Mao declared the People’s Republic of China, and Americans asked the question “Who lost China?”įrom the moment he took power in Beijing, Mao was determined to seize Taiwan, and ordered his military to begin planning for an invasion. At the same time, he downplays America’s ambivalent support of the Nationalists and the influence of pro-Mao sympathizers within Truman’s government. Spector attributes the communists’ victory to better generals, a more disciplined and ideologically motivated army, and corruption within Chiang’s regime and army. There were plenty of atrocities committed by both sides. Spector calls these battles “bloody slugging matches”, which at times resembled the slaughters of the First World War. Spector describes the fierce fighting in Manchuria, the Huai plain (which Mao called “China’s Gettysburg”), and battles near Beijing and Tientsin. President Truman sent General George Marshall on this impossible task.
In the midst of this civil war, however, the US attempted to become mediators and urged Chiang and Mao to agree to a ceasefire and a coalition government. The Nationalists were supported by the United States, while the communists eventually received aid from the Soviet Union. In China, fighting continued between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, Mao Zedong’s communists, and individual warlords. The lifting of the Japanese imperial yoke resulted in a postwar struggle for power between the old Western imperial powers and nationalist and communist forces within the region that evolved into a process of decolonization which was “accompanied by an extraordinary amount of violence, ranging from localized terrorism and communal massacres to large-scale insurgency to major military campaigns that rivaled in size, duration, and lethality some of the major battles of World War II.”Ī Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955, Ronald H Spector (WW Norton, August 2022) Each conflict grew out of Imperial Japan’s aggression in the 1930s and the Second World War, and each conflict became subsumed in the global struggle between the West and communism. This new book, A Continent Erupts, focuses on four main postwar conflicts: China’s civil war, the Korean War, the first Indochina War, and the Indonesian War of Independence.
Spector is both a veteran of combat with the Marines in Vietnam and a respected historian who has authored seven books, including an acclaimed history of the Pacific War, Eagle Against the Sun. The region became a vast “bloodlands” in which nearly four million combatants and probably close to 20 million civilians died. Instead, as Ronald Spector details in his meticulous and informative military history of the postwar Far East, the region “erupted” as a result of decolonization, civil wars, and the broader Cold War. On 2 September 1945, on the US battleship Missouri, US General Douglas MacArthur concluded the formal surrender ceremony of the Pacific War by stating: “Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world, and that God will preserve it always.” When the guns of the Second World War fell silent in Asia, peace did not return to the peoples of East and Southeast Asia.
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