The beginning of the end of Empires: the Franco-Thai war of 1940-41. And its modern echoes.

 

Towering over one of Bangkok’s busiest roundabouts where key road arteries intersect and hub for travel to Myanmar and across Bangkok is the Victory Monument.

The roads Phahonyothin (Route 1 to Burma via the old capital at Ayutthaya), Phaya Thai (Chula university), and Ratchawithi (Dusit palaces), plus key BTS Skytrain stations, highlight the central importance of the Victory Monument.

Unveiled in June 1941 the 50 metre tall monument (designed by Italian Corrado Feroci, some say the father of modern Thai art) depicts an obelisk of 5 bayonet-shaped panels of heroic figures of soldiers, civilians, air force, police and sailors. With some 656 Thai killed with c.500 French casualties in the war, the memento is one of the few lasting mementos of the Franco-Thai War of 1940-41.

Forgotten as the Thai intervention in WW1? Or even the Kwai bridge salvaged from history by the book and movie?

While Feroci clearly doing something right as far as PM Phibun was concerned, also created the 1939 Democracy Monument to the 1932 revolution from absolute to constitutional monarchy.

Certainly, though the 1940-41 war between France and Thailand, it can be argued, and not Pearl Harbo(u)r, flags up the first shots that ended Europe’s Empires in Asia and beyond.

Within just 6 months of the Victory Monument being unveiled, Japan began its occupation of Vietnam and Cambodia, invaded, or gained transit if you prefer, through Thailand and Malaysia to then seize Singapore and eventually most of Burma.

Japan also seizing Hong Kong to continue its China War and attacking Pearl Harbo(u)r that brought USA into the World War along with Germany and Italy. Philippines and Dutch East Indies rapidly fell under Japan’s Occupation, and only a close-run thing with Papua New Guinea and Australia prevented complete Japanese control of the Pacific in its Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The latter scheme less an Asia for Asians but rather, an Asia for Japan. Again, those seeds first planted in the Japanese mediation of the Franco-Thai War between sovereign nations rather than merely the annexation of Manchukuo or China and Korea.

Japan creating something of another Manchukuo in its rule via Vichy France of an Indochina puppet state until even that pretence swept away in early 1945. The odd quirk of Asia’s Vichy outlasting France’s Vichy by some 6 months.

Again, as with much of the Franco-Thai War, details of Vichy Asia, Thai wartime politics, or Japan Occupations are lost in history or at least neglected by Western historians.

But from the Kwai Bridge supply route, Japan seized British Burma before only just being halted at the gates of India in Kohima in July 1944, at the infamous Tennis Court Battle. That battle aptly flagged, after the disastrous Singapore 1942 curtain-raiser of Asian defeats, as the UK’s greatest battle by the National Army Museum - and marking a brief resurgence of UK Imperial power in Asia with only Hong Kong reclaimed and lasting until the end of 20C.

(to be continued)