The Western perspective on World War II overlooks pivotal episodes in China, India and elsewhere that shaped the present.
Sept. 11, 2026
What was World War II about? It sounds like a trick question with an obvious answer: It was waged to defeat the forces of fascism.
And what followed the Allied victory? Almost as obvious: The war’s end led to a rebuilding of battered nations and an era of unparalleled prosperity.
To all of which the historian Hans van de Ven might say: Yes, but you are missing a few things.
For much of Asia, it was more than a war against Japan; it was an unparalleled chance to throw off the yoke of colonial rule. As for the postwar era, while Europe celebrated, in Asia World War II had fanned the flames of rebellion and sparked new struggles for power. In many parts of the continent, war’s end brought no peace at all.
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Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia
In history, as in life, what you believe depends on where you sit. That principle undergirds Mr. Van de Ven’s sweeping “Blood Dawn,” a view of World War II—its causes, battles and consequences—as seen from Asia. His thesis is that all too often, World War II narratives have followed a Eurocentric arc: Hitler’s rise to power; the Anschluss in Austria and the invasion of Poland; the air war over Britain and the D-Day landings; the conferences at Yalta and Potsdam about a postwar order.
What about Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in the leadup to the war? What about operations Ichi-Go, in China, and U-Go, in British India, against U.S. and Allied forces? Or the battles for Changsha and Hengyang, in China, which would ultimately involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Japanese troops? Away from the front lines, how about the 1943 Cairo Declaration—which the author calls a “foundational document” for postwar Asia—or the 1955 Bandung conference that served as a “coming-out party” for new Asian nation-states?
These and other events have been “insufficiently examined, inadequately narrated, and rarely remembered,” says Mr. Van de Ven, a professor of modern Chinese history at Cambridge University. Turn the historical lens toward Asia, the author tells us, and even the war’s best-known episodes look different.
Case in point: Pearl Harbor. In the traditional telling, it’s the story of an unexpected and unprovoked attack that drew America into the war. From the Asian perspective, Pearl Harbor was all that, but more. It was the opening salvo in Operation Strike South, Japan’s campaign to capture vital resources in the Dutch East Indies—salt and rubber, tin and bauxite, and especially the refineries that produced kerosene, critical for Japanese warplanes. Disabling the U.S. Pacific Fleet was a necessary first step.
More broadly, Mr. Van de Ven argues, from an Asian perspective the war’s main consequence “was not the defeat of the Axis powers, but the transformation of a region of the world long dominated by European empires into one made up of nation-states.”
When the 20th century dawned, nearly all of Asia was under the colonial boot. Britain, France and the Netherlands had been there for centuries; the U.S. and Japan came in the late 1800s. By the early 1900s, Mr. Van de Ven notes, Japan had become “the Britain of the East”—an island off the coast of a large land mass, with a powerful navy and a set of colonial outposts.
After World War I and its remaking of the global order, including the end of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, anticolonial movements stirred across Asia. From India to Indonesia, Mr. Van de Ven writes, “previously polite, elite nationalist murmurings soon gained large, passionate, and occasionally explosive followings.” Thus when World War II began, European nations took up arms against Nazi Germany for a straightforward reason—their lands and ways of life were under threat—while the calculus was more complicated in many Asian capitals. “Their North Star,” Mr. Van de Ven notes, “was the end of imperialism.”
That helps explain why so many Asian leaders sympathized—at least initially—with the Axis powers. In Burma, the revered revolutionary figure Aung San warmed to Imperial Japan because it had helped create the Burma Independence Army. The Indian National Congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose was convinced that allying with Japan offered India its best chance at ending British rule. And Indonesia’s independence leader, Sukarno, welcomed the Japanese as they drove out or jailed Dutch colonial officials. “In each of these cases,” Mr. Van de Ven writes, “the point of the fight was not to take the side of a respectable or noble ally or to tip the scales in a global conflict; it was to achieve independence and transform their societies into modern nation-states.”
The old empires didn’t help themselves by responding brutally to the independence movements. This was particularly true in India, where Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent Quit India campaign was met in 1942 by a violent British crackdown. That left even fewer Indians interested in preserving the British empire; if their soldiers were expected to fight, they wanted pledges of self-rule in return.
In Indonesia, the Dutch moved to cripple industry ahead of the Japanese advance, targeting oil wells on Sumatra and Borneo, road and rail networks on Java, and infrastructure on rubber plantations. These actions compelled Sukarno and others to make common cause with Japan. The Japanese were occupiers, but they made concessions unlike anything the Dutch had offered—opening government positions to Indonesians and ultimately allowing displays of the Indonesian flag and performances of its national anthem.
By late 1945, while the U.S. and others were cheering the defeat of Japan, something bigger was brewing in Asia. Sukarno had declared Indonesia’s independence even before Japan’s surrender, and Ho Chi Minh had done the same in Vietnam. New geopolitical realities seemed possible—the demise of the European colonial order, the rise of the U.S. as a superpower and the transformation of Asia into a region of nation-states.
That transformation would prove violent. “When the Allies declared World War II over after Japan’s surrender,” Mr. Van de Ven notes, “they did not describe a reality but expressed a hope.” Britain’s viceroy of India, Archibald Wavell, wrote in his diary after Japan’s surrender: “So now for the horrors of peace.”
The horrors came from all corners of the continent. Indonesia was first to descend into chaos, as Sukarno and other parties fought over what sort of nation the huge archipelago would become. By 1946, the young republic had almost disintegrated.
Things were worse in India, where Gandhi’s prewar push for nonviolent resistance gave way to deadly clashes between Hindus and Muslims—a spasm of violence that led ultimately to partition in 1947.
In China, war with Japan had given Mao Zedong and his Communist forces an opportunity to regroup and rebuild, enough so that by 1945 they had undergone a “phoenix-like re-emergence,” as Mr. Van de Ven puts it, and wrested the upper hand from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist fighters.
President Harry Truman made a bid to unify the warring forces, dispatching George Marshall to China in December 1945. Mr. Van de Ven’s Asia-centric history reminds us that while Marshall is best known for spearheading the European aid plan that bears his name, he also spent months brokering a ceasefire and broader accord in China, and returned to Washington pushing a $500 million American loan to what he believed would be a newly peaceful nation. As Mr. Van de Ven drily notes, “this would mark the high point of Marshall’s peacemaking in Asia.” Full-scale civil war soon followed.
For all the horrors of peace, a new and largely postcolonial Asia emerged soon after the war. On Oct. 1, 1949, Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China; on Nov. 26, India adopted a constitution as a newly independent and democratic republic; on Dec. 27 in Amsterdam, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands formally transferred sovereignty of its East Indies territories to the new republic of Indonesia.
World War II had utterly changed the Asian continent. That end-of-era feeling underpinned the Bandung conference, held on the Indonesian island of Java in the spring of 1955. Leaders of a dozen newly minted Asian nations gathered there, in a powerful assertion of a new path, absent the heavy hand of the West.
Ultimately, World War II in Asia was about the dismantling of three empires—British, Dutch and French—and the birthing of new nations. In what had been French Indochina there arose Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam; from the ashes of Britain’s Asian empire came Burma, Ceylon, India, Malaysia and Pakistan; and where the Dutch had ruled there was the new republic of Indonesia. In China, World War II had meant liberation for Manchuria—but it also cleared the way for Mao’s rise to power.
None of it had come easily. Millions were killed in the various Asian conflicts that directly followed World War II. Blood dawn, indeed.
Mr. Nagorski is a senior editor at the Cipher Brief and author of “Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack.”
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Appeared in the September 12, 2026, print edition as 'Asia’s World War'.