Wretchard: While you make very good points, I believe you are being a few shades too hard on the colonial authorities in Asia during and prior to WWII. I must state clearly that Singapore was very much the exception to the rule which sobered up enough after the initial defeats in the North to begin taking the IJA seriously- albiet not effectively enough to actually endure its assault-, and even prior to the war even in Singapore there were rather loud voices at the top (particularly the military command) shouting that Singapore’s defenses were not enough to withstand a serious attack by the Japanese. While they tragically were ignored, they did try.
And secondly, while hubris doubtless played a role in several fiascos in the Pacific during 1941 and ’42 (namely in Singapore and to a lesser extent the Philippines), I believe you severely overemphasize the confidence of the Western colonials in their security. Indeed, well before the Japanese had actually entered the war, most colonial authorities were PAINFULLY aware of their strategic vulnerability and spent much of their time petitioning London and Washington to ramp up troop levels and training. Hong Kong and Guam were perhaps the most overt cases of this (being as they had a front-row seat of the Japanese military buildup and were separated from other Western Allied colonies by dozens if not hundreds of miles of Japanese-dominated ocean), but the Dutch and the Raj were also rather prescient, with the Dutch in particular advocating a withdrawl from Boreo and Java to Sumatra and New Guinea while practically begging for all the supplies they could get. In addition, the main component of the Western defeats in the early phases of the Pacific war was not arrogance but lack of coordination and proper supplies. MacArthur was perhaps one of the few who took the Japanese seriously within the US military hierarchy but even he was woefully disorganized and understrength when the time came to actually fight. While the West did indeed overestimate itself, it did so more or less marginally (for instance, by discounting the importance of aircraft carriers because of their experiences in WWI and the naval war so far, which emphasized Battleships and anti-Sub warfare), and took it largely for granted that the issue was trying to delay the Japanese enough to free up troops from Europe to help the matter. Which they largely succeeded in doing, albiet far less skillfully than they had hoped.
And it is notable that they did not make the same mistakes again. Even in Malaysia and the Philippines, the Japanese army’s extremely light equipment and armarment was revealed to be a fatal flaw, and one which was taken full advantage of later in Burma and the Island hopping campaigns. And when storm clouds again surfaced over Indochina and Korea after the war, the Western powers did not hesitate to spit hundreds of thousands of well armed, well trained veteran troops into the firing line.
A more apt comparison in my opinion is that of Spain and its Morrocan protectorate from 1900-1936, which saw even greater Spanish hubris than Singapore even had on far thiner justification break down just as thoroughly after Annual only to lead to a savage melee for control, and the rising of Franco and the other coup leaders in that war is something I will leave you to read into as you choose, though with the note that it is quite possible that such a situation may happen here in a country of intense political polarization even regarding the military coupled with the arising of a few skilled, charismatic, and very, VERY embittered men. That such a thing did not happen after Vietnam is something I regard as a minor miracle. We may not be so lucky.
