NEW YORK -- World War II did not end neatly upon Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945. Aside from scatterings of Japanese soldiers who joined local independence movements in Southeast Asia after the surrender, at least one sizable Japanese army unit fought on in China's northeastern province of Shanxi, with solid local support, until April 1949, when Mao Zedong's forces finally prevailed.

Japanese military forces played a different role, at least in Indonesia. Britain, which led the occupation of the former Dutch colony, found itself "in the paradoxical position of having to order the Japanese to redeploy . . . the forces which [the Japanese themselves had] so obligingly concentrated for incarceration," as Col. Laurens van der Post wrote in his report for Britain's minister for foreign affairs at the end of 1946 ("The Admiral's Baby," Morrow, 1996). This came about because, in a land quickly turning into chaos, "law and order" became the occupation's primary concern.

The greatest cause of this chaos was, as van der Post saw it, the "pathological" Dutch refusal to recognize that their role in Indonesia was over when their colonial government fled the archipelago in March 1942. The Dutch fervidly continued to reject any suggestion that Indonesian nationalism, which had flared up while they were in retreat, was "not a shallow, effeminate, intellectual cult but a people-wide, tough and urgent affair." They utterly ignored, of course, Indonesia's declaration of independence on Aug. 17, 1945.