Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

This month marks the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, when fighting between Japanese and Allied forces in the Second World War came to an end.

Yet, as broadcaster Kavita Puri argues in her new BBC sound series, The History Podcasts the Second Map,

this was a messy, complicated conflict that remains largely forgotten.

Matt Elton caught up with Kavita to find out more.

Your new series, The Second Map, explores what you describe as the other story of the Second World War,

which is the war against Japan on the Asian Front. Before we go any further, why is the series called the second map? And why is that a helpful

way into some of the things it covers? It's called the second map because I met a man who

is now 98, Peter Knight, and he told me that after Pearl Harbor happened, he put up a map. Now, if I could just set the scene, he was

a young boy. He was 14 in early December, 1941. He was living in Bromley in Kent, which is a kind of

suburb of London. He lived in a terrorist house, and he had been following the war in Europe on a map on one side of

his dresser in his living room. But when Pearl Harbor happened, he put up another map on the

other side of the dresser and this map was of Asia and the Pacific. And so he would sit down every

evening with his mum and his grandparents and he'd listen to the BBC

bulletin and he'd hear places that he'd never heard of in this other war on the Asian front

that was dealing with British colonies and he would trace what was happening on that second map. So there were two maps in tandem.

There was, let's say, the War of Europe, which was against the Nazis, of course, there were

other fronts there. But there was this other map, and that was our war against the Japanese.

And that idea of there being almost two conflicts happening in parallel is one

that will return to later in the conversation. Before we do, I wanted to talk a little bit

about the ways in which the other war, the war against Nazi Germany, has come to sort of

dominate how we view this conflict. Why do you think that is? And do you think that we need to understand more

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