Got it again, here's a broader outline of the suppression of the anti-fascist resistance under the cover of 'reconstruction', etc.
For studies of the post-World War II U.S. campaign to destroy anti-fascist elements internationally and to return traditional ruling groups to power; Gabriel Kolko,
The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990); Gabriel Kolko and Joyce Kolko,
The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954, New York: Harper & Row, 1972. These books were the first major scholarly efforts to document this history, and remain extremely valuable and unique in their scope and depth despite the flood of new scholarship since -- although, because they do not adhere to approved orthodoxies, it is considered a violation of scholarly ethics in the American academic community to refer to them.
Also; David F. Schmitz,
Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, especially ch. 4.
On operations in Japan; Joe Moore,
Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power, 1945-1947, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, especially ch. 7, (pp. 188-189, 191):
S.C.A.P. [the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers, i.e. the post-war U.S. administration in Japan,] had become convinced of the necessity of putting limitations on the workers' freedom of action after coming face to face with the power and radicalism of the working-class movement in spring 1946 and having to make the decision that even the maintenance of an unpopular conservative government was greatly preferable to allowing the left-wing opposition to come to power. . . . S.C.A.P. henceforth put its emphasis upon the building of a healthy labor movement that would avoid politics and radical actions such as production control, while encouraging business and government leaders to resist such worker excesses. . . . The Yoshida cabinet was only too happy to return to the anti-labor policies of the past, and encourage union-busting tactics including use of the police to suppress disputes to a degree that would have been unimaginable even a few months before. As if to underscore S.C.A.P.'s approval, on several notable occasions even U.S. military police participated. The new policy was called, in a cynical phrase current among S.C.A.P. officials, "housebreaking" the labor movement. . . .
[The Civil Information and Education Sector of S.C.A.P.] suppressed whole issues of left-wing publications, and the censors riddled many others with their blue pencils. Henceforth, left-wing writers could no longer count upon freedom of the press to ensure that unpopular opinions got into print. On 18 May, [U.S. General Kermit] Dyke had already seen General MacArthur [the U.S commander] and secured his consent to clamp down on the press unions. Two days after that, [the chief of the C.I.E., Major Daniel] Imboden issued a strong warning to the press, threatening to close down "irresponsible" papers as General Hodge had done in Korea. He stated that "labor unions had no right and could not dictate the editorial policy of a newspaper" for "that was the right of the owners and men who are nominated by the owners."
Michael Schaller,
The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, especially pp. 44-51; Howard B. Schonberger,
Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945-1952, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989, especially ch. 4 and pp. 62-64; Gabriel Kolko,
The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990), ch. 21. Another political bomber is Bruce Cumings'
The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II ("The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950"), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Quotation (pp. 56-57):
Only Japan held [U.S. State Department planner George] Kennan's attentions in East Asia, and his new notoriety and strategic placement in 1947 made it possible for him to author the "reverse course," or what we may call the Kennan Restoration. . . . The operative document for the reverse course, developed in draft form under Kennan's aegis in September 1947 . . . envisioned a Japan that would be "friendly to the United States," amenable to American leadership in foreign affairs, "industrially revived as a producer primarily of consumer's goods and secondarily of capital goods," and active in foreign trade; militarily it would be "reliant upon the U.S. for its security from external attack." The paper reserved to the United States "a moral right to intervene" in Japan should "stooge groups" like the Japanese Communist Party threaten stability. Leaving little to the imagination, it went on: "Recognizing that the former industrial and commercial leaders of Japan are the ablest leaders in the country, that they are the most stable element, that they have the strongest natural ties with the U.S., it should be U.S. policy to remove obstacles to their finding their natural level in Japanese leadership." Thus Kennan called for an end to the purge of war criminals and business groups who supported them.
On operations in Thailand; Frank C. Darling [former C.I.A. analyst and Thailand specialist],
Thailand and the United States,
Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1965, chs. II and III, especially pp. 65, 69 (the dictator of Thailand under the Japanese, Phibun Songkhram, who had in fact declared war against the United States, was reinstalled in an American-supported military coup in 1948 and thereby became "the first pro-Axis dictator to regain power after the war").
On operations in Indochina; Archimedes L.A. Patti,
Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America's Albatross, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
On operations in French North Africa, the first area liberated by U.S. forces in World War II; Stephen E. Ambrose,
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, Baltimore: Penguin, 1971, ch. 2, especially pp. 54-66. Quotation (pp. 55-59):
The United States took the view that one could do business with Vichy [the pro-Nazi government in southern France during World War II]. Much in Pétain's [the Vichy chief of state] program appeared to Roosevelt and Hull [the British Prime Minister] to represent the best hope for France, especially those parts that stood for work, patriotism, and stability. . . . The President did everything in his power to stop de Gaulle's rise, primarily because of his fear that the French people upon liberation would, as they had in the past, run to an extreme. . . . What made [de Gaulle] even more dangerous was the way that he flirted with the forces of the left, especially the communists in the Resistance. "France faces a revolution when the Germans have been driven out," the President once said, and he feared that the man most likely to profit from it would be de Gaulle.
Roosevelt spent much time searching for an alternative to de Gaulle. He might have wanted to turn to Vichy, but Pétain was too thoroughly brushed with the tar of the collaborationist. Roosevelt's best hope was the French Army, which represented the forces of stability and conservatism without appearing to be pro-Nazi. . . . By accident, Admiral Jean Darlan was in Algiers when the [Allied] invasion hit. Darlan was bitterly anti-British, author of Vichy's anti-semitic laws, and a willing collaborationist, but he was also the Commander-in-Chief of Vichy's armed forces and he was ready to double-cross Pétain. He agreed to a deal proposed by Clark and Murphy, which required him to order the French to lay down their arms, in return for which the Allies made him the Governor General of all French North Africa. Within a few days the French officers obeyed Darlan's order to cease fire, and a week after the invasion Eisenhower flew to Algiers and approved the deal. . . . The result was that in its first major foreign-policy venture in World War II, the United States gave its support to a man who stood for everything Roosevelt and Churchill had spoken out against in the Atlantic Charter. As much as Goering or Goebbels, Darlan was the antithesis of the principles the Allies said they were struggling to establish.
"Why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?"
Lord Varys,
Game of Thrones.