Abstract
The Potsdam Conference in July 1945 had not only placed southern Vietnam within the sphere of British military operations against the Japanese, but it had also included the tip of southern Laos and all of the Kingdom of Cambodia. Allied military planners logically expected the war in the Far East to continue well into 1946. Military preparations and expectation were thus developed with this in mind. At this stage, there was no hint of a possible Japanese surrender. Furthermore, few in the Allied military establishment knew of the existence of an atomic weapon of mass destruction. All military strategy within SEAC dramatically changed in August. The two atomic bombs dropped upon Japan relegated existing plans for the continuation of the war to the wards of history.
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Notes
M. Vickery, Kampuchea: Politics, Economics and Society, London, 1986, p. 8; Chandler, A History of Cambodia, p. 171.
V.M. Reddi, A History of the Cambodian Independence Movement 1863–1955, Triupati, 1973, p. 108.
D.P. Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign, London, 2003, p. 251; TNA, WO 172/7009, Allied Land Forces Phnom Penh, Instruction no. 1, 10 October 1945.
N. Tarling, ‘Some Rather Nebulous Capacity: Lord Killearn’s Appointment in Southeast Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 1986, pp. 559–560.
C.E. Goscha, Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 1885–1954, Richmond, 1999, pp. 201–203.
For a detailed discussion of British foreign policy towards French Indo-China during the formative years of the Vietminh’s guerrilla warfare offensive (1946–1950), see Smith, Britain and the Origins of the Vietnam War; and for a uselul volume of collected essays concerning the wider geo-historical interplay of decolonisation, the Cold War and the history of Southeast Asia, see C.E. Goscha and C.F. Ostermann (Eds.), Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–1962, Stanford, 2009.
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© 2014 T.O. Smith
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Smith, T.O. (2014). The Sideshow: Cambodia 1945. In: Vietnam and the Unravelling of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448712_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448712_4
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