Forgotten Wars (91 page)

Lansdale’s journey to Saigon signalled the beginning of the era of deep US involvement in Vietnam. The looming conflict was also marked in fiction by Graham Greene’s novel
The Quiet American
, published in 1955.
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Greene, himself a former British agent, had been living in Saigon in 1952 when a series of bomb attacks rocked the French colonial city. The authorities blamed the communists, but Greene suspected a plot between right-wing Vietnamese militias and the CIA. He was probably right. A
New York Times
reporter just happened to be on the spot at the vital moment. Photographs of people maimed in the attack were speedily published under a headline blaming Ho Chi Minh for the violence. By 1955 Lansdale was certainly working hard to put in place a third force to take over from the French as a bulwark against the communists. In that year he helped organize a coup which placed the city of Saigon in the hands of the future dictator of South Vietnam, Ngo Din Diem. This final act of the unending war, the American struggle with North Vietnam, would run its bloody course to 1975. Meanwhile General Douglas Gracey, who had reinstalled the French in Saigon in 1945 and managed another post-colonial armed struggle between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, retired from his post as commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s army.

At the height of the crescent’s forgotten wars, few had the time or the inclination to ponder the tidal wave of war and change that had swept over them since 1941. By 1955, the tenth anniversary of the formal end of the Second World War, the mood was changing. This was a year when the rhetoric of the Bandung Conference – of development, non-alignment and peace – concealed both the onrush of aggressive nationalism and the slow expansion of the crescent’s new capitalism. Yet it was also the year of memory, when people began to take stock of events in that terrible year a decade before: the year of the atom bomb, the fierce campaign of the 14th Army, the death of Subhas Chandra Bose and Aung San’s revolt against the Japanese. A whole series of commemorative ceremonies were held. In Rangoon and Mandalay, people celebrated Independence Day, Aung San’s birthday and Union Day with particular fervour that year. Ominously, people noted that the highlight of that year’s Independence Day festivities was the ‘participation of a larger number of armed forces personnel in the march past before the President of the Union’.
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As yet ‘Army Day’, the celebration of that momentous event in April 1945 when Aung San had led his Burma Defence Army into the jungle to fight the Japanese, had not assumed the significance in the calendar of Independence Day. As the Burmese army became increasingly autonomous and powerful, the meaning of this festival became a source of debate and controversy. Ceremonies to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of the war were more muted in India. But Subhas Chandra Bose’s birthday saw celebrations across the subcontinent, particularly in Calcutta. The veterans of the Indian National Army, still uncertain of their status in independent India, drilled and marched with particular pride. The simplest ceremony of all was held on 6 August 1955 at 8 a.m. in the city of Hiroshima. At the exact moment the bomb had fallen ten years before, the mayor of the city, himself a survivor, released 500 doves into the air and inaugurated a new peace centre.
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The press across the world reflected on the folly of nuclear war while peace campaigners denounced the great powers in speeches and newspaper articles. Sir William Slim, now
Governor General of Australia, interpreted the world scene in another way. Ten years on from the end of the war, he observed, an authoritarian power once again overshadowed Asia. He was referring, of course, to China.

The most poignant acts of commemoration related to the physical remains of the fallen. Parties of former soldiers still moved across former battlefields seeking and memorializing their lost comrades. For the armies of Britain’s former empire, the task was organized by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Monuments were built at Imphal, Kohima and other major battle sites, but individual graves were also identified and tended in remote and isolated countryside. The task required tact and diplomacy. Disputes arose between the British, Australians, Canadians and Americans. Indian soldiers’ groups debated the appropriateness of forms of burial or cremation, depending on the assumed religion of the fallen. The Japanese, still regarded with cold indifference by their conquerors, had been allowed to build a monument to their dead at Rangoon racecourse only very late in 1947. But slowly thereafter, as the country was rehabilitated and the war crimes trials ceased, Japan began to press for the proper burial of its war dead. For many Japanese the recovery of a dead soldier’s remains for burial on home soil was crucial to the continuity of families and their chain of ancestry. On his visit to Tokyo in 1955 Nu offered Burmese co-operation in the recovery of the bodies of the more than 85,000 Japanese soldiers who had perished on Burmese soil.
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The government formed a survey mission to plan the recovery and repatriation of the dead. For years afterwards towns and cities in Japan were host to sad little ceremonies as urns and caskets were returned from Burma. More gruesome tales went the rounds. The activities of guerrilla levies and special forces in north Burma, the Philippines and Borneo had led to an upsurge of head-hunting among the tribal peoples. Quiet negotiations went on to have severed heads returned to the military authorities and properly disposed of. Soldiers’ groups were particularly active along the Burma–Siam railway, of course, and 1955 saw a series of memorial services hosted by the Thai and Burmese governments and the British Burma Star Association. The huge numbers of Thai, Burmese, Malayan and Burmese civilians who had perished on the railway were also commemorated, but most
remained without named graves. Their bodies had simply been thrown into huge lime pits.

Many people’s memories were very personal, almost picaresque. When he was in northern Burma the writer Norman Lewis met a cheerful Burmese former soldier who had served in the forces fighting alongside the Japanese. He took Lewis to a tree where, he said, Chinese soldiers had tried to hang him as a traitor following his capture. Laughing heartily he explained how the Chinese were too ‘weak from semi-sickness and starvation’ to hoist him off the ground. His proposed execution, according to Lewis, degenerated into ‘a lurid Disney-like farce’ with the Chinese attempting to pinion him while hoisting him into the air. Eventually he escaped, but the memory was not so easily defeated. It is unlikely that Lewis was the only person he took back to his hanging tree to marvel at the wound on the branch where the rope had rubbed it raw.
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There were also grander, public memorials. In Mandalay, nursing nuns at a hospital had vowed to construct a miniature Lourdes if the building was spared during the wartime bombing. At the end of the war a Japanese POWcamp had been stationed near the hospital and the commanding officer had despatched some of the inmates to do the sisters’ bidding. The POWs set to work enthusiastically and on Mandalay Hill, traditional home of votive shrines, they created a miniature mountain landscape with a meandering stream and a delicate Oriental bridge – to Lewis’s eye it was Lourdes as it might have appeared on a willow-pattern plate. The Japanese captain himself carved the statue of the Virgin, which bore a striking resemblance to Kwannon, the Japanese goddess of mercy.
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Religion played an important part in people’s reconstruction of the past. The Burmese intellectual Khin Myo Chit had passed through an atheist and communist phase in her youth. She had been disgusted by the corruption and selfishness she discovered while hiding in a monastery during the Japanese invasion of 1942. In the straitened circumstances of newly independent Burma, however, she rediscovered a simpler and heartfelt Buddhism, as she recovered from a mental breakdown with the help of her meditation master. She became a ‘lay sister’ in a monastery, replicating in her own life the prime minister’s tilt towards Buddhism and illustrating how Nu’s revivalism
was more than a simple political tactic.
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Several Allied soldiers, too, recounted how they had to dig deep into their reserves of Christian faith to find forgiveness for the brutality of their Japanese captors. But as early as ten years after the war, soldiers on both sides were beginning tentative meetings for the purposes of reconciliation and creating a true record of the terrible events they had witnessed. For their part, the Japanese were also haunted by what they had seen in Southeast Asia. The author of the
Harp of Burma
, a bestselling novel in post-war Japan, was a former soldier who drew on his wartime experiences to tell of a disillusioned man whose battered faith in the search for enlightenment is reinvigorated by the earnest folk Buddhism of Burma. His hero becomes a wanderer, a kind of forest monk, typical of the region, moving from village to village playing his Burmese harp and telling fables.

Other vivid fictional recreations of the Second World War sparked controversy. In 1954 the first English translation appeared of Pierre Boulle’s novel
Le Pont de la Rivière
Kwaï. The French author, himself a former prisoner of the Japanese, depicted a group of British POWs being forced to build a bridge on the Burma–Siam railway. The fictional senior British officer, Colonel Nicholson, after a protracted and painful battle with his Japanese jailer about officers’ honour and dignity, becomes obsessed with the creation and perfection of the bridge, at the same time as British special forces are doing all they can to destroy it. At first sight it seemed an odd thing for a Frenchman to write a novel about the hidebound British military mentality, although his story undoubtedly served as a good illustration of the futility of war. But Boulle had worked on rubber plantations in Malaya before and after the war and had had ample opportunity to observe the waning British Empire at close hand. Or perhaps his novel represented a kind of transposition of his views on the glorious folly of de Lattre de Tassigny and the defenders of Dien Bien Phu to the British, whose decolonization in the region had been generally more circumspect and less bloody. In 1957, just after Britain and France’s occupation of the Suez Canal, the controversy about the book was revived by David Lean’s film version. The British public had long been sensitive about cinematographic portrayals of the Burma war and its aftermath. In 1945 a Warner Brothers’ film,
Objective Burma!
, which depicted
Errol Flynn as an American paratrooper recapturing Burma without the benefit of a single British ally, had caused such offence in the United Kingdom that it was withdrawn from release until 1952. Now, the American financiers of the Lean film insisted on inserting a brave American individualist into a story carefully crafted by Boulle to juxtapose the honourable but purblind orthodoxy of ‘Colonel Nicholson’ with the unorthodox but ultimately futile heroics of ‘Major Warden’, the ‘Force 316’ agent. This was only a few years after the American General Joseph Stilwell’s dismissive and foul-mouthed reflections on the British war effort were made public and Lean’s film was given a very mixed reception in Britain. In retrospect, though, it was simply another marker on the road that transformed Britain from an imperial nation at war into a consumer society increasingly suspicious of class, deference and moral homilies.

It was not only the British who were stirred up by dramatic recreations of the Second World War. In 1955, the Hollywood film
The Purple Plain
reached Burma. It starred Gregory Peck and a young Burmese actress, Win Min Than, and told the story of a Canadian special operations executive soldier lost in the fastnesses of Burma during the latter stages of the war. Many Burmese were unimpressed. For one thing it had been shot in Ceylon (as had Lean’s film). But what they really objected to was its cultural crassness. One scene showed people wearing shoes in a pagoda; another showed a Burmese boy killing a lizard. This, it was said, was ‘a gross slander on the character of Burmese children’.
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Worst of all, the Peck character was seen sleeping beside the Burmese maiden, ‘without being married’. This ‘suggested that Burmese women were immoral’. Government censors debated whether to ban the film, but in the end it was released so that Burmese people could criticize it in full knowledge of its contents. The horrors and compromises of the Second World War were still fresh in the minds of both Asians and Europeans.

Memory changed over time; different themes would come to the fore at different periods, in ways that reflected how societies sought to fashion their public history. For Singapore, as its new prime minister Lee Kuan Yew argued in opening a memorial to civilians, in 1961, it was ‘through sharing such common experiences that the feeling of living and being one community is established’. In Malaysia, nationhood
perhaps demanded that much be forgotten. Memories would often speak to contemporary anxieties.
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They were reawakened by the reappearance of the Japanese. Their presence in the region – as long-term residents – predated the war and the logic of Japanese interests drew them at a very early stage after it, and in exactly the strategic areas – Malayan iron mining, for example – in which they had made such a pronounced investment before 1941. In 1951 the wartime administrator of Singapore, Mamoru Shinozaki, returned to the island, or at least to its harbour, where, unable to land, he received guests on board a freighter. Later Shinozaki was to lead the way in confronting the past with a memoir, published in English in Singapore, of his wartime experiences:
Syonan: My Story
. It acknowledged the atrocities of the
sook ching
massacres, but also highlighted his role and his contribution to the welfare of Singapore’s people. These returns generated considerable anger in the Chinese press. But, with the encouragement of key figures such as Malcolm MacDonald, they persisted. In April 1952 the first senior Japanese to visit MacDonald arrived at Bukit Serene with a letter from the Japanese prime minister. The visitor was nervous. The cook at Bukit Serene wept – his parents and sister had been murdered by the Japanese in China – but, it was observed, he did his duty.
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By 1954 the flagship Japanese departmental store, Echigoya, where a pre-war generation of Asian clerks had bought their cheap office ducks and toys for their children, reopened, as did the Singapore Japanese Association, which had been such a prominent feature of the island’s social scene before the war. The old Japanese expatriate community began to return as ‘advisers’, often exploiting their wartime connections. Some still saw Malaya as their home, and a sense of rootedness began to return with the refoundation of the Japanese School.
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The economic consequences of this were immense. By 1972 Southeast Asian countries purchased nearly 12 per cent of total Japanese exports and supplied 16 per cent of total imports. By 1979, 35.4 per cent of Japan’s total manufacturing investment and 43 per cent of investment in mining was in Southeast Asia.
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‘Even after the war’, one Japanese historian has observed, ‘many Japanese businessmen and entrepreneurs still thought of Indonesia as a sort of second Manchuria’.
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The old wartime battlefields and shrines in Singapore island – with the remains of both the Japanese war
criminals and war victims, Kempeitai and conscript labourers – began to be visited in large numbers by a new and ubiquitous presence: the Japanese tourist.