Focusing on the period between 1932 and 1968, this comprehensive study bridges the gap between recent political studies and available historiography, which generally conclude with the 1932 revolution. Dr. Brailey discusses the 1942 Japanese capture of Singapore that dragged a reluctant Thailand into World War II—a war Thai leaders believed was irrelevant to their national interests. He argues that this country, which had launched one of the East's earliest nationalist revolutions, had its political development reversed for a quarter century by the arrival of Japanese troops. Ironically, the Japanese presence in the region enabled most of Thailand's neighbors to promote their own development through decolonization. Dr. Brailey demonstrates that Thailand, once freed from post-war trauma, achieved a level of political freedom unsurpassed in Asia without seriously compromising its stability.

This volume of the navy's history covers the period from 1976 to 1990. It examines the navy's success in keeping abreast of advances in technology in step with progressive self-reliance. In a decade and a half of innovation, the navy equipped its indigenously built frigates, corvettes, and other vessels with combinations of the latest available weapons and equipment from the Soviet Union, from Europe, and from indigenous sources. A tiny "ship design cell," which in 1965 was designing yard craft, was by 1990 designing an aircraft carrier, submarines, and missile destroyers. The new acquisitions from the Soviet Union ranged from missile destroyers, conventional submarines, and long-range reconnaissance aircraft, to minesweepers. All these high-tech inductions needed to be operated and manned by better-educated and better-trained personnel. New maintenance, repair, and refit facilities had to be created. The increase in the volume of spares and the diversity of sources compelled modernization of the logistics system. This volume analyzes how these problems were tackled.