There is no shortage of books about 1945. Most understandably concentrate upon the destruction of Nazi Germany, the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the atomic bombs, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and the eventual Japanese surrender. Phil Craig takes a rather different approach in 1945: The Reckoning. His concern is less with how the Second World War ended than with what that ending actually meant. Victory settled one enormous conflict, but it simultaneously exposed political, racial and imperial contradictions that had been temporarily obscured by the need to defeat Germany and Japan. The result is a book that is simultaneously military history, imperial history and an examination of the uncomfortable transition between the world of European colonial empires and the political order that followed them.

Craig ranges widely, moving through India, Burma, Borneo, Formosa, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies and Europe. His geographical reach is important because it prevents 1945 from becoming merely the final chapter of a predominantly European war. Instead, the year emerges as a moment when several different historical processes collided. Japan was collapsing, European colonial governments expected to recover territories lost in 1941 and 1942, nationalist movements had acquired new confidence, and populations that had endured occupation were discovering that liberation did not necessarily mean independence. Craig is particularly interested in the British Empire, although the Dutch and French imperial systems are also important to his wider argument.

One of the strongest aspects of the book is Craig’s decision to tell this enormous story through individuals. This reflects his considerable experience as a documentary filmmaker, and it gives 1945: The Reckoning an immediacy sometimes missing from broad geopolitical histories. Political decisions made in London, Washington, Delhi or military headquarters are repeatedly brought back to the people who had to live with their consequences. Indian soldiers, nationalists, prisoners, civilians, intelligence personnel and servicemen consequently become more than illustrations attached to a larger argument. Their experiences are part of the argument itself. Robert Lyman has similarly identified this combination of the collapse and emergence of empires with individual experience as central to Craig’s method.

India provides one of the clearest examples. The war had placed Indian soldiers in British uniform across numerous theatres while Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army attempted to achieve independence through cooperation with Japan. Craig does not reduce this situation to a comfortable choice between loyalists and collaborators. Families and communities could contain profoundly different responses to British rule, while individuals were required to make decisions within circumstances that were rarely of their own making. The importance of the Indian National Army therefore extended beyond its limited military achievements because its existence demonstrated that British authority over India could no longer be regarded as politically secure merely because Britain had emerged victorious from the war.

For an Australian reader, however, some of the most interesting material concerns Borneo. Craig examines Australian special operations there and raises difficult questions concerning the relationship between military necessity, intelligence operations and the restoration of imperial authority. This is particularly valuable because Australian accounts of the Pacific War can easily become dominated by Kokoda, Milne Bay, Buna, the campaigns in New Guinea and the controversial final operations of 1945. Craig places Australian activities within a wider imperial structure and asks whether some operations conventionally understood as contributions towards defeating Japan also served political purposes associated with the restoration of British influence.

This is precisely where 1945: The Reckoning is at its most provocative. The Allied powers had fought regimes whose aggression and brutality made their defeat necessary, yet Allied victory did not automatically transform Allied policy into an uncomplicated programme of liberation. Britain, France and the Netherlands still possessed imperial interests, and the defeat of Japan created opportunities to restore colonial governments as well as to liberate occupied populations. In Indochina and the East Indies the resulting contradictions became particularly stark when Japanese personnel who had recently been enemies could become useful in maintaining order or assisting attempts to reassert European control. Victory and liberation were therefore related concepts, but they were not synonymous.

Craig deserves considerable credit for confronting this without simply reversing the moral framework of the war. There is a temptation in revisionist accounts to expose the shortcomings of the victorious Allies and then allow those shortcomings to obscure the nature of the regimes they defeated. Craig generally avoids that trap. Japanese imperialism had brought conquest, exploitation, mass death and enormous suffering across Asia. Recognising the contradictions within Allied imperial policy does not make Japanese expansion a war of Asian liberation. Equally, acknowledging Japanese brutality cannot make the attempted restoration of European colonial rule politically unproblematic. The value of Craig’s approach lies in allowing both propositions to coexist.

There are nevertheless weaknesses in the method. The constant movement between individuals, countries and political problems creates energy, but occasionally sacrifices analytical depth. Readers accustomed to conventional military histories may also find the structure somewhat restless. Campaigns are not necessarily followed from beginning to end because Craig is interested in what particular events reveal rather than in reconstructing every operation. The documentary style that makes the book accessible can therefore become a limitation when an especially complicated political or military problem deserves sustained treatment.

The reliance upon individual experience creates another difficulty. Personal stories are exceptionally effective at demonstrating how historical processes affected human beings, but particularly memorable experiences can acquire a representative significance that they may not entirely deserve. An individual can illuminate an empire without necessarily explaining it. Craig is usually careful about this distinction, although there are occasions when the transition from personal experience to broader interpretation occurs more smoothly in narrative terms than it does analytically. This is perhaps an unavoidable consequence of attempting to combine popular narrative history with a subject of enormous geographical and political complexity.

There is also an inherent danger in judging 1945 too heavily through knowledge of what followed. We know that British India would disappear, that Indonesia would fight the Dutch for independence, that French attempts to recover Indochina would ultimately fail and that European colonial power across Asia was approaching its end. The people making decisions during 1945 did not possess this knowledge. Colonial officials who attempted to restore prewar authority were certainly defending imperial interests, but many genuinely believed that the imperial system could survive. Nationalist movements were gaining strength, but their eventual victories were not inevitable. At its best Craig preserves this uncertainty, although the book’s overarching theme of imperial reckoning occasionally makes the collapse of empire appear more predetermined than it would have seemed to contemporaries.

Yet this criticism also points towards the book’s greatest achievement. Craig makes 1945 feel uncertain again. The familiar historical sequence in which Germany surrendered in May, Japan surrendered in August and peace followed conceals an extraordinary period of political instability. Armies had won a world war while governments were already confronting another struggle over who would control the territories supposedly liberated by that victory. Former enemies became temporary instruments of policy, former colonial subjects demanded political rights with increasing confidence, and victorious European empires discovered that military success had not restored the world of 1939.

The title The Reckoning is therefore particularly appropriate. The reckoning was not simply Japan’s defeat or Germany’s destruction. It was also a confrontation between the ideals used to justify the Allied war and the political realities of empire. Ideas concerning freedom, national sovereignty and resistance to foreign aggression were difficult to restrict to Europeans once they had been invoked during a global conflict. Colonial peoples had fought, suffered, organised and observed the vulnerability of their rulers. European prestige, once damaged, could not simply be reconstructed by raising the old flags again.

For Australian readers this wider perspective is especially useful. Australian military history has understandably concentrated upon what Australian forces did, where they fought and whether particular operations were strategically justified. Craig encourages another question: what political order were those operations helping to create or restore? That does not invalidate the courage or sacrifice of Australian servicemen, nor does it mean that individual soldiers were conscious instruments of imperial policy. It simply places their service within the larger strategic and political structures in which Australia operated.

Ultimately, 1945: The Reckoning succeeds because it makes a familiar year unfamiliar. Craig has not written a comprehensive military history of 1945, and readers seeking detailed operational accounts will need to look elsewhere. What he provides instead is an ambitious interpretation of a world caught between war, empire and decolonisation. Its broad geographical canvas occasionally comes at the expense of depth, while its personal narrative method can sometimes carry more analytical weight than individual experience can comfortably support. These are significant reservations, but they do not undermine the central achievement.

The Second World War ended in Allied victory, but the world that produced that victory was already disappearing. Britain, France and the Netherlands could defeat their wartime enemies without recovering unquestioned authority over their former possessions, while Asian nationalist movements could emerge strengthened from a conflict in which their countries had frequently been treated as battlefields, colonies or strategic resources. Craig’s achievement is to show that August 1945 was simultaneously an ending and a beginning. The shooting stopped in some places while new conflicts were already forming in others.

For anyone interested in the Pacific War, Australian military history, the British Empire or the origins of postwar Southeast Asia, 1945: The Reckoning is consequently well worth reading. I did not agree equally with every implication of Craig’s interpretation, and at times I wanted him to remain with a particular campaign or political question longer than his narrative structure permits. That is not necessarily a weakness in a work of this kind. A good history should do more than confirm what we already believe. Craig succeeds in making the reader reconsider what Allied victory in 1945 actually represented, and why for millions of people throughout Asia the end of the Second World War did not necessarily mean that their struggle was over.