From jacket flap:
The official history of the War against Japan is being written as an inter-Service history from the point of view of the British commanders in the Far East, and is being published in five volumes.
One the fly-leaf of this first volume is the quotation from the great naval historian Admiral Mahan: ‘Defeat cries aloud for explanation; whereas success, like charity, cover a multitude of sins.’ The authors, in the spirit of this quotation, have attempted to find the reasons for the defeat of the Allied forces in the Far East in 1942. In doing so, they have found it necessary to cover briefly in the opening chapters of this volume the political and military aspects of the years 1921-1941 and believe that these show plainly that the seeds of disaster were sown well before the first shot was fired.
They then recount the dramatic and disastrous opening months of the war, covering the loss of the isolated outpost of Hong Kong and the Japanese conquest of the Netherlands East Indies, ending with the loss of Java. The greater part of the volume is devoted to a description of the retreat down the Malay peninsula and the withdrawal to Singapore Island, culminating in the surrender of an army of some 130,000 British, Australian and Indian troops, and the loss of the great Naval Base, the keystone of British strategy in the Far East.
