"The Fall of Singapore, Dien Bien Phu...
and the Battle for Kharg Island?"
by Ron Unz
Excerpt: "The World War II chapters of my introductory history textbooks always devoted a great deal of space to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought our country into the conflict. But they only spent a couple of paragraphs on the major military victories of Japan that had soon followed. Perhaps a single sentence was devoted to the fall of Singapore to a Japanese army, yet that event actually had major world importance.
For many years, the British had relied upon Singapore as the central military pillar of their East Asian holdings, a fortress-city that they often called “the Gibraltar of the East.” Garrisoned by a large British army of 85,000, it was regarded as totally impregnable. Yet just a few weeks after the destruction of most of the American fleet in distant Hawaii, a Japanese general attacked it from the landward side, marching his men through what the British had regarded as totally impassable Malayan jungle. With “the guns of Singapore” all famously pointing in the wrong direction, the British garrison was caught completely flat-footed when he invested the city and began his attack. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered his troops to fight to the last man, but instead they all surrendered after just a single week of combat, taken into captivity by a Japanese force little more than one-third their own size. This represented a total national humiliation for the mighty British Empire.
When Churchill later wrote his six volume history of the war, he described the fall of Singapore as “the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history,” and the aftermath had major geopolitical significance. Asians across the entire region were stunned by such a massive British defeat at the hands of a much smaller Asian force. Everyone saw the photographs of huge numbers of British troops being marched into POW camps with the top British generals at the head of those endless columns.
Whereas the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor could be ascribed to a treacherous surprise attack, no such excuse existed for the crushing British defeat at Singapore, so the long-standing bubble of perceived European military invincibility had been permanently punctured. Many have argued that the dramatic resulting changes in local Asian psychology played a major role in the postwar collapse of all the European colonial empires in that part of the world. Yet despite those resounding geopolitical consequences of the Fall of Singapore, I doubt whether even two Americans in one hundred are currently familiar with that important history.
Probably far more present-day Americans are at least somewhat familiar with the name “Dien Bien Phu,” at least if we include those who vaguely assume that it is some sort of tasty Chinese culinary dish, perhaps related to “Egg Foo Young.” But that 1954 French military defeat in Vietnam also had major world importance.
Less than a year after the outbreak of World War II, France had unexpectedly suffered a stunning total military defeat at the hands of Germany and as a result, Germany’s Japanese allies soon seized control of Vietnam, France’s major colonial possession in Asia. The Allied victory in 1945 ultimately left France in the winner’s circle, so after the Japanese surrendered, the new French government reestablished its former rule over Vietnam, but was faced with strong Vietnamese nationalistic resistance led by Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh forces.
The resulting colonial war dragged on for nearly a decade, with the French gradually being worn down until they finally decided upon a bold military strategy intended to turn the tide and defeat the Vietnamese independence movement that they faced. They placed a large French army in the valley of Dien Bien Phu inviting a Vietnamese attack. Given the strong defensive positions they established, they felt confident they would be able to inflict very heavy losses upon Vietminh troops, perhaps winning the war as a result.
But contrary to all those French expectations, the Vietnamese managed to drag their artillery into the hills surrounding that valley, and the resulting bombardment they unleashed allowed them to defeat the entrenched defenders. In desperation at the looming disaster, the French even asked their American allies to launch tactical nuclear strikes to destroy the besieging Vietnamese, but President Dwight Eisenhower rejected that option and the result was a humiliating French surrender.
Once again, many thousands of white Europeans were marched into bitter captivity by their Asian opponents, and this further debacle marked the end of most of the outright colonial control of the region. The Vietnamese forced the French to pay large financial reparations in order to get their POWs back, which further added to France’s national ignominy.
Few Americans today remember these historical incidents from three generations ago, and even those who do probably regard them as elements of the dead past. But they both came to my mind when the media began reporting that President Donald Trump had decided to dispatch ground forces to the Middle East, planning to deploy them against Iran."
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