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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Yet events in India revealed the weakness of the nationalist movement and the resilience of the Raj. The Viceroy announced India’s entry into the war without a word of consultation with the leaders of Congress. The ‘Quit India’ Campaign launched in 1942 was snuffed out within six weeks by the simple expedients of arresting Gandhi and the campaign’s other leaders, censoring the press and reinforcing the police with troops. Congress split, with only a small minority egged on by Bose – a would-be Indian Mussolini – electing to side with the Japanese.
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And even his self-styled Indian National Army proved of little military value. It turned out that the only serious threat to the British in India were the Japanese divisions in Burma; and the Indian Army defeated them roundly at Imphal (March – June 1944). With hindsight, Sir Stafford Cripps’s offer of 1942 – full dominion status for India after the war or the option to quit the Empire – was superfluous. As dogmatic a Marxist as only a millionaire can be,
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Cripps declared: ‘You have only got to look at the pages of British Imperial history to hide your head in shame that you are British’. But Indians only had to look at the way the Japanese conducted themselves in China, Singapore and Thailand to see how much worse the alternative before them was. Gandhi might dismiss Cripps’s offer as ‘a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank’. But how could anyone seriously claim that driving out the British would improve life, if the effect would be to open the door to the Japanese? (As Fielding jeers in
A Passage to India
: ‘Who do you want instead of the English? The Japanese?’)
No one should ever underestimate the role played by the Empire – not just the familiar stalwart fellows from the dominions but the ordinary, loyal Indians, West Indians and Africans too – in defeating the Axis powers. Nearly a million Australians served in the forces; over two and a half million Indians (though only around a tenth of the latter served abroad). Without Canadian pilots, the Battle of Britain might well have been lost. Without Canadian sailors, the Battle of the Atlantic surely would have been. Despite Bose’s efforts, most Indian soldiers fought loyally, despite occasional grumbles about pay differentials (75 rupees a month for a British soldier, 18 for an Indian). Indeed, the mood of
Josh
(‘positive spirit’) tended to grow as stories about Japanese atrocities filtered down through the ranks. ‘I get inspired by a sense of duty’, wrote one sepoy to his family, ‘and get excited by the brutal atrocity of the uncivilized Japanese’. The men of the Royal West African Frontier Force had their moment of glory too when a group of Japanese soldiers did the unthinkable and surrendered – fearing, they said, that ‘African troops ate the killed in battle, but not prisoners ... if eaten by Africans, they would not be acceptable to their ancestors in the hereafter’. Even the Irish Free State, the only dominion to adopt the shameful policy of neutrality, produced 43,000 volunteers for the imperial forces. In all, more than five million fighting troops were raised by the Empire, almost as many as by the United Kingdom itself. Considering Britain’s desperate plight in 1940, it was an even more laudable show of imperial unity than in the First World War. The Empire Day slogan for 1941 was almost a parody of an earlier Nazi catchphrase: ‘One King, One Flag, One Fleet, One Empire’, but it had a certain truth to it.
Yet the Empire alone could not have won the Second World War. The key to victory – and the key to the future of the Empire itself – lay, ironically, with the country that had been the first colony to throw off British rule; with a people once dismissed by an earlier Prime Minister of New Zealand
111
as a ‘mongrel race’. And that turned out to mean – as one old Colonial Office hand already sensed – that ‘the prize of victory [would] not be the perpetuation, but the honourable interment of the old system’.
In the First World War, American economic and then military support had been important, though not decisive. In the Second World War it was crucial. From the very earliest days Churchill had pinned his hopes on the United States. ‘The voice and force of a United States may count for nothing if they are withheld for too long’, he told Roosevelt as early as 15 May 1940. In speeches and radio broadcasts he repeatedly hinted that salvation would come from across the Atlantic. On 27 April 1941, more than seven months before the US entered the war, he memorably quoted the poet Arthur Hugh Clough in a BBC broadcast aimed at American listeners:
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
 
With his own Anglo-American parentage,
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Churchill firmly believed that an alliance of the English-speaking peoples was the key to victory – avictory that would, of course, restore the British Empire to the
status quo ante
. When he heard on the evening of 7 December that the Japanese had attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor, he could scarcely conceal his excitement. Beforehand, over dinner with two American guests, he had been in deepest gloom, ‘with his head in his hands part of the time’. But on hearing the news on the radio, as the American ambassador John G. Winant recalled,
Churchill jumped to his feet and started for the door with the announcement, ‘We shall declare war on Japan.’
... ‘Good God,’ I said, ‘you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.’
He stopped and looked at me half-seriously, half-quizzically, and then said quietly, ‘What shall I do?’ The question was asked not because he needed me to tell him what to do, but as a courtesy to the representative of the country attacked.
I said, ‘I will call up the President by telephone and ask him what the facts are.’ And he added, ‘And I shall talk with him too.’
 
Roosevelt’s first words to Churchill were: ‘We are all in the same boat now’.
Yet from its earliest days, the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States had its own special ambiguity, at the heart of which lay the Americans’ very different conception of empire. To the Americans, reared on the myth of their own fight for freedom from British oppression, formal rule over subject peoples was unpalatable. It also implied those foreign entanglements the Founding Fathers had warned them against. Sooner or later, everyone must learn to be, like the Americans, self-governing and democratic – at gunpoint if necessary. In 1913 there had been a military coup in Mexico, to the grave displeasure of Woodrow Wilson, who resolved ‘to teach the South American Republics to elect good men’. Walter Page, then Washington’s man in London, reported a conversation with the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who asked:
‘Suppose you have to intervene, what then?’
‘Make ’em vote and live by their decisions.’
‘But suppose they will not so live?’
‘We’ll go in and make ’em vote again.’
‘And keep this up 200 years?’ asked he.
‘Yes’, said I. ‘The United States will be here for two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves.’
 
Anything, in other words, but take over Mexico – which would have been the British solution.
What such attitudes implied for the future of the British Empire was made blatantly clear in an open letter by the editors of
Life
magazine ‘to the People of England’, published in October 1942: ‘One thing we are sure we are
not
fighting for is to hold the British Empire together. We don’t like to put the matter so bluntly, but we don’t want you to have any illusions. If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing all alone’.
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The American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, agreed. ‘The colonial system means war’, he told his son during the war. ‘Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back ... all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war’. A brief stopover in the Gambia on the way to the Casablanca conference confirmed these theoretical suspicions. It was, he declared, a ‘hell-hole ... the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life’:
Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate ... Those people are treated worse than live-stock. Their cattle live longer ... For every dollar that the British ... have put into the Gambia [he later asserted], they have taken out ten. It’s just plain exploitation.
 
Naively trusting of Stalin, positively sycophantic towards the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt was deeply suspicious of Churchill’s unreconstructed imperialism. As the President saw it: ‘The British would take land anywhere in the world, even if it were only a rock or a sand bar’. ‘You have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood’, he told Churchill in 1943, ‘and you just don’t understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere else if they can get it’. What Roosevelt wished to see instead of colonies was a new system of temporary ‘trusteeships’ for the colonies of all the European powers, paving the way to their independence; these would be subject to some over-arching international authority, which would be given rights of inspection. Such anti-imperialist views were far from being peculiar to the President. In 1942 Sumner Welles, the American Under-Secretary, proclaimed: ‘The age of imperialism is ended’. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, had used almost the same words.
This, then, was the spirit in which American war aims were formulated: they were in many ways more overtly hostile to the British Empire than anything Hitler had ever said. Article III of the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which acted as the basis for the Western Allies’ war aims, appeared to rule out a continuation of imperial forms after the war, in favour of ‘the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. In 1943 an American draft Declaration on National Independence went even further: as one British official lamented, ‘the whole tenor of it is to look forward to the ideal of the dissolution of the British Empire’. Nor did the Americans confine themselves to generalities. On one occasion, Roosevelt pressed Churchill to hand back Hong Kong to China as a gesture of ‘goodwill’. He even had the temerity to bring up the question of India, at which Churchill erupted, retorting that an international team of inspection should be sent to the American South. ‘We have made declarations on these matters’, Churchill assured the House of Commons: the British government was already committed to ‘the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the British colonies’. ‘Hands off the British Empire’ was his pithy slogan in a December 1944 minute: ‘It must not be weakened or smirched to please sob-stuff merchants at home or foreigners of any hue’. He had egged the Americans on to join the war. Now he bitterly resented the feeling that the Empire was being ‘jockeyed out or edged nearer the abyss’. He simply would not consent to
forty or fifty nations thrusting interfering fingers into the life’s existence of the British Empire ... After we have done our best to fight this war ... I will have no suggestion that the British Empire is to be put into the dock and examined by everybody to see whether it is up to standard.
 
To British eyes, the proposed ‘trusteeships’ would just be a façade behind which an informal American economic empire would be erected. As the Colonial Office put it, ‘the Americans [were] quite ready to make their dependencies politically “independent” while economically bound hand and foot to them’. Curiously, the trusteeship model did not appear to apply to Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, all
de facto
American colonies. Also exempt was the long shopping list of Atlantic and Pacific island bases for the US Navy drawn up for Roosevelt by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Alan Watt, a member of the Australian Legation in Washington, shrewdly observed in January 1944: ‘There are signs in this country of the development of a somewhat ruthless Imperialist attitude’. It was the great paradox of the war, as the exiled German-Jewish economist Moritz Bonn noted: ‘The United States have been the cradle of modern Anti-Imperialism, and at the same time the founding of a mighty Empire’.
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BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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