We often reproach Americans for supposedly knowing nothing about World War II, for thinking they “won it,” when without the Soviet Union Hitler wouldn’t have been defeated. Of course, that’s all true. But it’s just as true that we ourselves know very little about their side of the war.
What can most of us name off the top of our heads? The Normandy landings (which have been chewed over from every angle in movies and in dozens of games)… and then the meeting on the Elbe. Oh right — we might have heard something about Pearl Harbor, and that they fought the Japanese a little bit over there, and that the evil Americans dropped two nuclear bombs, and that was that.
As executive producers, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg decided to tell more of the war through American eyes. First, in 2001, they released Band of Brothers about combat in Europe. And nine years later, in 2010, they followed with The Pacific about a part of the war we barely know at all — because the Soviet Union didn’t take part in it, and so it simply wasn’t something people talked about. (And I very much recommend both series if you haven’t seen them.)
I’ve always been curious why we know so little about that side of the war. And I also wanted to better understand how Japan decided to confront the world’s major powers, and how the war looked from their perspective. I picked out several books, but the one I always put first was Igor Mozheiko’s “West Wind — Fair Weather,” a writer we know better as Kir Bulychev. And after all, his main profession was as an orientalist; under his real name he wrote many articles and books on history (including the no less well-known “7 and 37 Wonders”).
I expected “West Wind — Fair Weather” to be a story about the war through Japanese eyes — apparently because I believed various blurbs. But the book is not really about that. It tells the story of the war across the entire Asian region, and the prerequisites for such a war had been forming as far back as the very end of the 19th century. Mozheiko writes exactly as a historical study should: about the state of the world before the war, how Japan prepared for it, what factors were considered, what possible scenarios existed, and what they depended on. And then he describes, just as painstakingly, the long years of war across different parts of Asia.
The book’s title is no accident. On the eve of the war, the Japanese were preparing for three possible scenarios. And in order to inform everyone quickly which path the empire was about to take, they came up with three phrases that were to be added to every weather forecast during broadcasts. Each phrase signaled who the most likely near-term conflict would be with. “East wind, rain” meant danger to U.S.–Japanese relations; “North wind, cloudy” pointed to the threat of conflict with the USSR; and “West wind, fair weather” meant confrontation with the British. In the end, it was with the British that Japan began to divide spheres of influence — Pearl Harbor came later.
The narrative is structured both by time periods and by geography. The author breaks down how the war unfolded in Malaya (Malaysia), Singapore, the Philippines, and China. In different regions, both the fighting and the resistance of the local population took different forms. In some places the Japanese flirted with the idea of independence; in others they ruled with the whip, without even trying to hide it. In truth, they didn’t treat anyone gently anywhere, squeezing every new territory for all it was worth. But in some places they did receive more loyal support from local officials.
Inside Japan itself there was also constant political infighting — for influence over the emperor and over the strategy of expansion. Depending on which faction gained the upper hand, different decisions were made at the fronts. The author devotes considerable attention to this internal political struggle as well.
In terms of military operations, the book focuses much more on the British than on the Americans. This is largely because the British Empire had numerous colonies in that region, and the French somewhat fewer. As a result, the early stages of the war were aimed primarily at seizing Chinese territories and the colonial possessions of the Old World powers.
What stands out sharply is how short-sighted, pompous, and dismissive of the local population many colonial authorities were. Underestimating the strength and discipline of Japanese commanders, and relying heavily on colonial troops recruited from the local population, British generals suffered crushing defeats. In Singapore, for example, they expected an attack from the sea and did not believe it possible for an army to advance through the jungle. The Japanese did exactly that — pushing through the jungle, emerging in the British rear, and methodically overwhelming poorly defended positions.
At the same time, the British — the colonial masters — even while fleeing, thought first (and sometimes only) about the British themselves, not about all those supposedly “subjects” of the British Empire. That worked strongly against them both in the occupied territories (where the Japanese often promised the locals independence) and in other colonies that saw what the mighty empire’s “protection” was really worth.
Winston Churchill is now commonly praised as the genius who led Britain to victory in World War II, but the book also shows his snobbery and the mistakes that followed from it.
I would say that beyond the historical context, Igor Mozheiko’s work is compelling because it lays bare the weaknesses of an imperial order — weaknesses that ultimately contributed to the collapse of the empires themselves. Japan exploited those weaknesses first, but it acted in a similar imperial fashion, and so it, too, failed to gain genuine support from its newly acquired subjects. Many of these mistakes came back to haunt the British later and played a major role in the loss of a great number of their remaining colonies, already during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
Beyond that, understanding the events of the war in the Pacific makes it possible to see how the world arrived at its current shape of independent states — how the war helped some countries gain independence, and how it affected their economies for decades.
The book is interesting because the events it describes were rarely mentioned in our history textbooks, and also because it lays out many unflattering facts about the actions of all sides in the conflict. At the same time, the narration is fairly dry; I never had the feeling that I couldn’t put it down. Kir Bulychev the storyteller and Igor Mozheiko in this book feel like two very different people. The historical study lacks lightness. And yet, if you treat the book as a work of history, it is more than worth reading.
My rating: 3.5/5
