![]() Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has characterized that threat as “acute.” In public, the Pentagon now says only that it does not expect an invasion in the next two years. This isn’t some well-kept secret: National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently told Bloomberg News that there is a “distinct threat” of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The crisis that erupted in August, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan and Beijing responded with its largest show of force in the Western Pacific in a quarter-century, made many US officials fear that the countdown to conflict had started. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February drove home the threat of autocratic aggression across the democratic world. Historians may one day look back on 2022 as the moment when the free world truly realized that “great-power competition” entails an inherent risk of great-power conflict. If America wants to win a potential great-power war with China a few years from now, it had better start rearming far more seriously before the shooting starts. Today, the US needs to take a vital lesson from the war in Ukraine - as well as from its own experience, generations ago, in World War II. “Wise men learn from other people’s experience.” It is always better to glean hard lessons from someone else’s war than from one’s own. The legacy of VJ Day continues to this day as so many of Britain’s diverse communities, whether of South Asian or African origin, are descendants of the men and women who sacrificed so much alongside British forces in the war against Japan.“Fools learn by experience,” the very quotable German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once remarked. For millions of service personnel from Britain and the Commonwealth, it would take months and years to be reunited with loved ones, some whom they hadn’t seen for more than five years. Many hoped the end of the war would mean they would be able to finally return home after years fighting abroad, but unfortunately, the end of the war did not lead to the immediate reunification of families and friends. Over 2.6 million Japanese people lost their lives including a million civilians killed as a result of military action, disease or starvation. Estimates put Chinese losses both civilian and military, at approximately 20 million, others suggest the figure could be as high as 50 million. suffered the greatest losses, with more than 100,000 killed in action. While millions celebrated with parades and street parties, many others had already felt the war had ended with victory over Germany and the war in the Far East seemed distant and unrelatable to their daily lives.ĭespite the relief that war was over, there was also great sadness, the human cost of the Pacific War was enormous and many eagerly awaited the safe return of loved ones.ĩ0,332 British troops were casualties in the war against Japan, of which 29,968 died and 12,433 were held as prisoners of war. The British, pre-partition Indian, Burmese, Nepali and African forces led the fighting in South East Asia, while the Australian, New Zealanders, Pacific Islanders and Canadians under the direction of the US fought their way across the South West and Central Pacific. The British and the Commonwealth’s principal fighting force in the region - the Fourteenth Army – was one of the most diverse army’s in history, where it is estimated at least 40 languages were spoken. The men and women who fought came from all corners of the world, from Ghana to Bangladesh and from Fiji to Zambia. Fighting took place from Hawaii to the North East borders of India and from Papua New Guinea in the south to Manchuria in northern China on the border of the Soviet Union.īy 1945 across Asia and the Pacific there were 365,000 British and 1.5 million Commonwealth troops were deployed, including the largest volunteer army in history, the pre-partition Indian army of 2.5 million soldiers. The scope of the war was vast and encompassed a huge area – an area far larger and more diverse, than those of Europe, North Africa, and the Atlantic theatres of war combined.
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