Slowly but surely, I've been writing a book that I think actually has a chance of being published--On foreign fighters after WW2. A lot of them in the first decade after were stay-behinds from Axis Powers, and so I've been starting on Japanese soldiers in Indonesia. - ThreadSky

About ThreadSky

mister96.bsky.social • 10 days ago

Slowly but surely, I've been writing a book that I think actually has a chance of being published--On foreign fighters after WW2. A lot of them in the first decade after were stay-behinds from Axis Powers, and so I've been starting on Japanese soldiers in Indonesia.

Comments

mister96.bsky.social•10 days ago

I think it's pretty fair to say that because the British didn't have the capacity to repatriate the Japanese en-masse until the US loaned ships in May 1946, a lot of Japanese soldiers were able to hand off weapons to various Indonesian groups.

mister96.bsky.social•10 days ago

But the official number from a Japanese-Indonesian cultural org puts the stay-behind soldiers at 903. Japan also had a sort of romanticized renaissance with documentaries, academic papers and autobiographies of the stay-behinds in the 1980s and 1990s.

mister96.bsky.social•10 days ago

I will add--I really don't think it's the British fault for the stay-behinds that were influenced with the lack of timely repatriation. For all the shit Louis Mountbatten gets over India/Pakistan partitioning, the Atlee government was so vague to the SEAC in Indonesia that they wanted

mister96.bsky.social•10 days ago

him to just obey the Dutch. And the Dutch were so virulent, they just wanted him to violently shut down Indonesian Republicans, rather than negotiate like he was trying. There's a pretty crazy story where when British ships arrived with the Dutch 2-14 RI,

mister96.bsky.social•10 days ago

they didn't immediately land on Java. And so the Dutch soldiers started singing Nazi hymns about fighting England.
The month they did land in March 1946, a bunch of pemuda militias organized in Bandung, where a Korean who was formerly with the Japanese Army would join up.

Posting Rules

Be respectful to others
No spam or self-promotion
Stay on topic
Follow Bluesky's terms of service

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply