Focusing on the Pacific War, this work explains how intelligence played a vital role in shaping Britain's conduct of its campaigns against the Japanese in Southeast Asia. It compares the effectiveness of British and Japanese intelligence and illustrates how cultural factors made a crucial difference in the outcome.

Drawing on documents in US and British archives, Douglas Ford explores why the belligerents in the Pacific war fought the way that they did. The book focuses not only on the battlefield level, but also provides a perspective from the military high command, government, and non-combatant citizens. How did Japan emerge as a Great Power following the breakdown of the Washington Treaty system of 1921-22? What factors propelled Japan's aggressive expansion on the Asian continent during the 1930s? After Pearl Harbor, Japan rapidly conquered Southeast Asia and the western Pacific but the tide of the...