Less than three months later, the teenage Lee watched British army soldiers—“an endless stream of bewildered men”—escorted by their Japanese captors to prison camps. Recalling the blunders that led to the island’s defeat in early 1942, he wrote, “In 70 days of surprises, upsets and stupidities, British colonial society was shattered, and with it all the assumptions of the Englishman’s superiority.”