Asia Betrayed How Churchill Sacrificed the Far East to Save England

“Somebody knew. Who knew?“ Did Winston Churchill lure Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor as a cynical ruse to pull the United States into the war against the Nazis to save England? Did he deliberately weaken the defenses of Singapore and Hong Kong to convince the Japanese to jump? Did he even run a double spy to feed information to Tokyo? John Bell Smithback examines the evidence in a shocking new assessment of the origins and backstory of one of the turning points of the twentieth century—the Pacific War 1941 to 1945. He looks at Churchill's role in how Japan came to make one of the biggest strategic errors in history, and the horrific consequences for tens of millions of people across East Asia.

A newspaper columnist and a former teacher, John Bell Smithback has published more than fifty books defining English idioms and proverbs for an international audience, with his wife as illustrator and translator, as well as The Lonely Dark, a novel about America in the age of the atomic bomb, and Silent in the Dawn, a collection of poems. For more than thirty years, their educational column has appeared in a number of Asian newspapers, including Ming Pao in Hong Kong and the Star in Malaysia. John's feature column WRITE ON appears in Ming Pao, his fiction in the European journal Spotlight and the Canadian literary magazine Brick. Describing themselves as "literary gypsies" they have lived in various places including Hong Kong, Portugal, Singapore, and France, all the while producing their books and daily newspaper column. Until recently they resided in England where they lived close to Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon.