A War of Words ─ The Man Who Talked 4000 Japanese into Surrender

Raised Japanese in a European skin at the turn of the 20th century, fate and circumstance ensured that Charles Bavier spent his life caught between two cultures, yet claimed by neither. A War of Words traces the extraordinary life of Bavier based on his own diaries and three decades of research by journalist and author Hamish McDonald. It thoroughly captures turn-of-the-century Japan, the Chinese revolution, and both world wars. The illegitimate son of a Swiss businessman, Charles Bavier was brought up by his father’s Japanese mistress before setting off on an odyssey that took him into China’s republican revolution against the Manchus, the ANZAC assault on Gallipoli, and British counterintelligence in prewar Malaya. Bavier’s journey finally led him into a little-known Allied psych-war against Japan as part of the vicious Pacific War, where his unique knowledge of Japanese culture and language made him man of the hour. This is the story of a man regarded at times as a spy by both the Allies and the Japanese, but who remained true to the essential humanity of both sides of a dehumanized racial conflict. Though far from the glory he craved, Bavier saved thousands of lives in the Southwest Pacific: the Japanese soldiers who surrendered and the Americans and Australians they would have taken with them.

Hamish McDonald has been a foreign correspondent, specializing in Asia, for more than 40 years. He was foreign editor and Asia-Pacific editor at the Sydney Morning Herald and is the author of several books, including Mahabharata in Polyester and coauthor of Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra.