By Ronald H. Spector
Random House, 2007
Reviewed by Dan Pinck

This book is difficult for me to assess and I don’t mind saying this. Mr. Spector is a historian with a commendable reputation. He has written six or seven books that skillfully illuminate past wars, including World War II and Vietnam. Given the wide-angle scope and boldness of the thesis in his new book, I’m puzzled by its execution and the style or manner in which picks at some important facts. In some respects, his history is excitingly sound and in other respects, it’s somewhat scattered. I add that it’s possible that his book demolishes some of my thoughts about war and peace in Asia, and it dumps some of assumptions in a waste paper basket. But never mind. This goes with the territory of anyone who tries to capture China during the Second World War, as well as before and after it. When you add French Indochina, Great Britain, and the Netherlands to the mix, and Japan after their surrender, you’ve got an imposing swath of history. How to pick and choose? In this review, I propose to suggest what the context is, not to cover the entire, postwar geopolitical and military history of Asia. That’s a complex task for me. I expect I will concentrate on mainland China, with a few excursions to other nations. Along the way, I will undoubtedly reveal some of my eccentricities and biases.

Read More...

The story is at once confusing and fascinating. The  Vichy regime tracked down left wing resistants  and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces. It deported slave works and Jews to Germany. Yet concurrently, it tracked down and arrested hundreds of German agents who sought to further undermine France militarily. More than one hundred of them were sentenced to death, and Kitson  writes that he found “formal proof” that eight were actually executed.  A ranking French counterintelligence officer, Paul Paillole, puts the number of 42, which to Kitson “seems credible.”  Other efforts were directed against British officers seeking to organize resistance groups preparing for the inevitable invasion. As the papers make plain, the French military harbored a keen sense that it was “betrayed” by England in the opening months of the war.

To understate, French internal politics of the era were devilishly confused. Curiosity directed me to a book remainder house, where I found a 2005 biography of Petain by Charles Williams, a former Labour member of the British House of Lords. As I frequently discover as I age, the “full story” is often more complex than we were taught in school. So be it with Petain’s Vichy government.

Kitson is a highly-recommended  read for anyone interested in the intricacies of counterintelligence.