Not quite a new book (this was released in 2005, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II), Romen Bose’s The End of the War: Singapore’s Liberation and the Aftermath of the Second World War is nonetheless a welcomed resource for secondary school history teachers and National Education coordinators. Unlike other recent publications about Singapore’s WWII experience (eg. Did Singapore Have To Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress by Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn), it covers the period when British forces were making its plans to retake Malaya and Singapore and the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender for these two territories.
The book’s strength is that it compiles information and quote extensively from all the major popular works of this topic: Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral (1949), Chin Kee Onn’s Malaya Upside Down (1946), Cheah Boon Kheng’s Red Star Over Malaya (1983), and recent additions like Chin Peng’s My Side of History (2003) and Tan Chong Tee’s Force 136: The Story of a WWII Resistance Fighter (1995). To Bose’s credit, he consulted quite a number of primary sources from the Public Records Office of London. For example, he checked Tan’s (a surviving member of the famed Force 136) accounts of the events with the original records he submitted to the British in 1945 after the war. This chapter (‘Clandestine Forces’), which covers the activities and eventual betrayal of war hero, Lim Bo Seng, is one of the more exciting retellings in the book. It covers new ground on the war compensation that was due to Lim’s family and the disputes surrounding that.
Of interest to NE Coordinators planning for the annual Total Defense Day on 15 February are the Appendices which reprinted original documents such as “Orders of the Commander Occupying Force to the Japanese Commander of Singapore” and “Instrument of Surrender of Japanese Forces in Southeast Asia”. These would be useful to NE Coordinators planning activities for Total Defense Day or history teachers wanting to use primary sources to teach about the Japanese Occupation of Singapore.
If one is to offer a criticism of Bose’s book, it is his lack of consultation of recent literature on the role played by the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). Cross-referencing with the recent memoirs of MPAJA members such as Shan Ru-hong’s The War in South: The Story of Negri Sembilan’s Guerillas (2003) would have added more rigour to Bose’s study.
If you like this book, you should also get Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper’s Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (2007).
Lim Cheng Tju