Forgotten Wars (5 page)

The main points of arrival for most of these pioneers were the great port cities such as Rangoon and Singapore: dynamic and diverse, they were built for play as much as trade or government, and their citizens were obsessed by their own modernity. They were glittering outposts of the West, where the colonial elite enjoyed a lifestyle they could never aspire to at home. Yet the lives of the Europeans, contained by their gross obsessions with race and hierarchy, barely touched the complex Asian worlds around them. The cosmopolitanism of a place like Singapore, for example, was built by Chinese, Indian, Arab, Armenian and Jewish merchants and professionals, many of whose own businesses were now regional in scope. Not least among them, and concentrated in new ‘modern’ sectors, were the Japanese: as dentists, photographers, and shopkeepers. Like the British before them, they saw Southeast Asia first as a frontier for private commerce, and then as a field for empire. In 1942 they renamed it ‘Syonan-to’, or ‘light of the South’. Singapore was the Paris, or even the New York, of the East, and more of a global city than either. Its fall seemed to herald the collapse of an entire civilization and all its certainties. But the colonial city was enveloped by another, invisible city; an Asian
metropolis of artisans and labourers, prostitutes and players, itinerants and peddlers, teachers and preachers, artists and writers, spies and revolutionaries: people of all communities who began to interact and explore the commonality of their lives and ideas. In the years after 1942, the invisible city would come into its own.

There was a curious insubstantial quality to Britain’s Asian empire. Its political topography baffled the layman: as colonial power stretched to the south and east, the great traditions of the Raj gave way to complex arrangements of indirect rule. Even the 80 million people of Bengal, the oldest British possession in India, were governed at a distance. Assam to the northeast was an uncertain border region. Burma had been part of British India until 1936, and although the predominant Burmese population of the lowlands was governed on a Raj model, the ethnic minorities of its hill regions enjoyed a good deal of autonomy. British Malaya was a cluster of Islamic sultanates; there was no central government as such: British rule rested on the treaties of ‘protection’ that had been signed with Malay rulers from 1874 to 1914. The British governed, but they did not, strictly speaking, rule. The Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and Malacca were older outposts of the islands: models of Anglo-Saxon municipal management with oriental trappings. To all this the war gave a flaking veneer of coherence. If there was an ‘imperial system’ it really functioned only in wartime: men and materiel were mobilized across the crescent: Indian soldiers for the garrisons of Malaya, Chinese labourers for the Burma Road that supplied Chiang Kai Shek’s war effort. But in Malaya, the mobilization and the defeats of 1941 and 1942 exposed all the inadequacies of an administration that was ‘more suited to the days of Clive’.
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The final, squalid exodus from Singapore laid bare the complacency and racial arrogance of its colonial masters. When the city fell on 15 February 1942, General Yamashita Tomoyuki’s armies shattered the myth of white invulnerability, and broke the mandate of ‘protection’.

This loss was catastrophic to Britain’s global prestige and material strength. As India became a drain on the domestic balance of payments, Southeast Asia had emerged as one of the Empire’s prize assets. The region exported two-thirds of the world’s tin, and British Malaya alone provided half the world’s production of rubber. Most of it
passed through the port of Singapore. These industrial colonies were a major buttress of the sterling area: before the war, rubber exports to the USA were running at $118 million a year; tin, another $55 million.
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Even Burma, although something of backwater, had oil and rich reserves of timber, and its export economy was intimately tied to the rest of the crescent. The frontier economies of Southeast Asia were dependent on the food production of the basins of the great river systems of the mainland, particularly the 3.7 million tons of padi exported annually from the Irrawaddy delta: Burma was the rice bowl of Malaya.
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Japan’s blitzkrieg to the south in 1941 had as its principal target the oilfields of British Borneo and Sumatra, and the iron and bauxite mines of Malaya. The assault on Burma and India was dictated by the need to throttle the supply route over the ‘hump’ of northern Burma to Yunan in China. The economic resources of Southeast Asia were seen by Britain as so vital to its domestic recovery that it was willing to expend an unprecedented amount of blood and treasure in its reconquest.

The Japanese had sought to impose their vision upon the crescent by incorporating it, with their other conquered territories, in a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was a dream of a new Asian cosmological order, with Japan at its political and economic core. This vision left a powerful legacy in the minds of all who were exposed to it. However, the Japanese conquest states were hamstrung by conflicts between officials, chiefly men of a civilian background who wanted to give substance to Japan’s dream of ‘Asia for the Asians’, and military commanders who saw only the imperatives of the war effort. Japan did not manage to make its colonies serve its economic needs. A brief phase of constructive imperialism in 1942 soon gave way to the politics of scarcity and plunder. Japan’s military ascendancy was short lived, and the resurgence of Allied naval power after the Battle of Midway in mid 1942 meant that strategic goods from Southeast Asia could not be shipped back to Japan in any meaningful quantity. The great rubber estates of Malaya became virtual wastelands in which the remaining labourers scraped a subsistence by growing food on roughly cleared ground. The campaigns in Burma left behind large regions of scorched earth. When rice exports from Burma and Thailand dried up in 1943 and 1944 the rest of the region faced
desperate food shortage and its attendant scourges of malnutrition and disease. The old trading links to South Asia and China were severed. After August 1945 the peoples of the region scrambled to reconnect their world.

The great crescent was to be forged anew. The instrument for this was South East Asia Command (SEAC), and the tribune of the new imperial vision was its supremo, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the British king-emperor, George VI. Created in 1943, Mountbatten’s new command was the first expression of ‘Southeast Asia’ as a distinct geopolitical entity. It was a partner to the Pacific vision behind General MacArthur’s South West Pacific Command, but there was little love lost between the two unequal allies. To Americans, Southeast Asia was an ‘unnecessary front’.
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To wits, SEAC stood for ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’. There was much truth in this: ‘Here,’ Winston Churchill thundered in September 1944, ‘is the Supreme British objective in the whole of the Indian Ocean and Far Eastern Theatre’. But the resources necessary to achieve it were a long time coming. In the interim Mountbatten, unable to wage war directly, encouraged others to do so on his behalf, using covert methods for which he exhibited a puckish enthusiasm. No fewer than twelve clandestine or semi-clandestine organizations operated in the theatre. Not for nothing was SEAC also known as ‘Supreme Example of Allied Confusion’.
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Only after the fall of Germany were the materials of conventional war released for Southeast Asia, and it was not until August 1945 that Mountbatten was in a position to take the war back to the Japanese through a series of massive amphibious landings on the coast of Malaya. However, the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki denied him the opportunity to restore Britain’s martial pride in the region. The main task of South East Asia Command was to begin only after the surrender of Japan. But there were new tasks at hand: at the final hour, in addition to the Asian mainland, Mount-batten was given responsibility for the vast Indonesian archipelago. This marked the beginning of a final era of British imperial conquest.

The pre-Hiroshima war plan had required a massive build-up of men and materiel in India at Bombay, Cochin, Vizagapatnam and Madras. Mountbatten’s personal staff at Kandy in Ceylon numbered over 7,000. The war plan – Operation Zipper – demanded the landing
in Malaya of 182,000 men, 17,750 vehicles, 2,250 animals and 225,000 tons of stores, and half the men had to be disembarked in the first eight days. It was 1,050 miles from Rangoon to the nearest airbase in Malaya. Even after VE Day, the reconquest been delayed owing to a shortage of shipping, repatriation of personnel and uncertainty of conditions of the ground. This had allowed the Japanese, who were well apprised of Allied intentions, to pour more troops into Malaya. The received wisdom of amphibious warfare was that, for landings to be successful, a superiority in numbers of three to one was needed; in August 1945 Mountbatten had an advantage of only eight to five, and a high proportion of his men had yet to experience combat. Mountbatten returned from a visit to London on 14 August to learn that, following Emperor Hirohito’s formal capitulation, the operation was to be launched immediately. And it was still not clear whether or not the Japanese would obey their emperor’s order to surrender.
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The great force that now embarked on reconquering British Asia saw itself as the new ‘forgotten army’. British India provided the bulk of its manpower. The subcontinent was seething with discontent, directed and channelled by the Indian National Congress whose leaders the British had reluctantly released from jail as the war drew to its close. Official monitors reported that local people were relieved that the fighting had ended but were too exhausted and apprehensive about the future to indulge in anything more than perfunctory celebration. Indians, Burmese and Malayans were also horrified by the barbarity they had witnessed during the war’s ending and the future dangers it portended. The Bengal press adviser reported to the governor that people believed ‘the situation did not call for such indiscriminate havoc; and that the readiness to use such means has lowered the moral prestige of the United Nations’.
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The fiery nationalist apparatchik Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, general secretary of the Indian National Congress, commented that: ‘Entire cities, children, the old, animals and all have been wiped out. What a demonstration of the limitless cruelty of Western civilisation.’ Ominously, he went on to link Western barbarism with what he saw as the British attempt to perpetuate differences between Hindus and Muslims in India.
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Lord Wavell, viceroy of India and Patel’s main sparring partner, agreed about the atomic bomb: ‘It is not a weapon that any thinking man would willingly have put into the hands of the present-day world.’
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Indians asked themselves what was the point in condemning German and Japanese atrocities if the Allies themselves were prepared to
massacre civilians on such a massive scale. Others were as concerned with the political as with the moral implications of the atom bomb. Would its existence so hugely increase the imbalance of power between the West and Asian peoples that the mirage of independence would once again vanish? A Bengali newspaper wondered if ‘the Asiatic people would not pass from the hands of one group of pirates to another’.
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Aung San, leader of Burmese resistance against first the British and then the Japanese, vowed that ‘no atom bomb can stop our march toward freedom’.
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What the British did not immediately appreciate was the extent to which Asian nationalism had been transformed by the war. Before it there had been movements of civil disobedience across India and Burma: peasant farmers had been goaded into revolt by the sufferings of the Depression of the 1930s; terrorist movements had flickered in Bengal and pan-Islamic ideologues had stirred the passions of the faithful throughout Asia; the Comintern had sponsored fledging communist parties in Burma and Malaya, where trade unions had flexed their muscles in its industrial areas. The Japanese war, however, had given nationalism a new face – a youthful, militaristic one. Before the Second World War Burma had been granted a form of semi-independence by the British. It had its own flag and its own prime minister, but it had no proper army. What passed for Burma’s defence forces comprised recruits almost exclusively from minority peoples, the Karen, Kachin, Shan and Chin, along with resident Anglo-Burmese, Gurkhas and Indians. Burmese Buddhists had effectively been excluded from the army since the final British conquest of the country in 1886. The reason given was that Buddhists were too pacific, a fiction contradicted by Burma’s impressive military traditions; the real reason was that soldiers from the minorities were cheaper and friendlier to the British Raj.

During the war all this had changed. With Japanese support, Burma had created its own army, the Burma Independence Army, renamed first the Burma Defence Army (BDA) after the Japanese invasion, and then the Burma National Army (BNA) after Japan’s installation of a nominally independent Burmese government in August 1943. One day in March 1945, the BNA had revolted against the embattled Japanese forces, hoping finally to secure real independence before the
British reoccupied the country. By now the Burmese had military heroes as well. The young and intense former student leader, Aung San, had become ‘Bogyoke’, the general.
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He was the first Burmese commander since General Mahabandula in 1826 to embody the military spirit of the Burmese people and to be known and admired across the country. Aung San and his ‘Thirty Comrades’ had marched into Rangoon with the Japanese in early 1942. The contrast between these young men in uniform and the civilian politicians of the British era, Ba Maw and U Saw, was obvious to all Burmese youth. Volunteers signed up in healthy numbers. Moreover, the war forged new links between the cities and the countryside as the army was billeted on the villages. When the British moved back into north Burma in 1945 they were faced with a militarized countryside populated by volunteer levies, many of whom identified with the socialist or communist thinking of the metropolitan radicals.
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