The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (82 page)

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Steadfast Comrades: The Stresses of War

1942 was a bleak year for the British empire. On 15 February, the 130,000-strong garrison of Singapore yielded to a smaller Japanese army. Four days later, the war reached Australia; Darwin suffered a devastating air raid while a panic-stricken government in Canberra prepared for invasion. Burma was overrun, with Rangoon falling on 1 March and Mandalay on 1 May. The Andaman Islands were captured on 23 March, and during the first fortnight of April a Japanese armada cruised at will in the Bay of Bengal. Calcutta and Colombo suffered air attacks and two British cruisers were sunk. A weak Allied squadron was overwhelmed in the Battle of the Java Sea at the end of February, and within two months Japanese forces had conquered the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, much of New Guinea and a string of British island colonies in the south-western Pacific. In the meantime, Japanese strategists were planning the seizure of Fiji and long-range operations in the Indian Ocean.

Despite sybilline voices which had foretold disasters on this scale, these reverses stunned Britain and the rest of the empire. What was happening in the Far East and Pacific triggered a spasm of national introspection, accompanied by much hand-wringing, in which searching questions were asked about the nature of the empire and its future. There was also plenty of angry name-calling as everyone directly and indirectly responsible for the reverses excused themselves and incriminated others.

Australia saw itself as the chief victim. After the fall of Singapore (‘Australia’s Maginot Line’), the
Sydney Morning Herald
announced that, ‘The Empire is suffering from a series of disasters which are shaking it to its foundations,’ and concluded, ‘we do not seem to be muddling through as much as muddling along.’ Speaking as he usually did, from the shoulder, Curtin alternately blamed Britain for his country’s predicament and appealed to the United States to rescue it. His charges of betrayal incensed Churchill, who was also accused by H.V. Evatt, the Minister for External Affairs, of succumbing to partisan prejudice in his treatment of Australia. The Prime Minister, he claimed, ‘seems to have a deep hatred of Labour governments and a resentment of independent judgement which makes it impossible for us to work with him.’
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The mood of near hysteria which seemed to grip the Australian government so worried Major-General Lewis Brereton, USAAF commander in the Far East, that he suggested the imposition of ‘strong centralised control of Australian politics under American influence’.
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New Zealanders were prepared to take their blows on the chin. Reacting to the news of Singapore’s surrender, New Zealand’s prime minister, Peter Fraser, proclaimed, ‘We will not wince and will not indulge in unhelpful, carping criticism of those who have the higher direction of the war effort.’ In Britain many, including Churchill, contrasted Australia’s tantrums with the stoicism of the British people when they had been faced with danger. Oliver Harvey noted in his diary:

The Curtin government have screamed for help from the Americans, making it clear that they think us broken reeds. I’m afraid it is the ‘good life’ in Australia which has made them soft and narrow. Not so the New Zealanders, however, who have been models of restraint, dignity and helpfulness.
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Curtin responded to this criticism in a broadcast made to the British people in May 1944 in which he reminded his listeners that Australians were suffering as much as if not more than they were in terms of rationing and shortages.
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Australia’s strident appeals during the first three months of 1942 were cries of desperation rather than a declaration of independence. And yet it was plain to everyone that Britain was unable to defend the extremities of its empire unaided. Nor was any help available from other dominions. An attempt to by-pass Britain and appeal directly to Canada for armaments was snubbed. The Canadian minister of munitions bluntly informed the Australian government that, ‘If Britain tells us to send our supplies to the Middle East, we send them to the Middle East, if she tells us to send them to Australia, we send them to Australia.’
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America stepped in to become the arsenal for Australia and New Zealand: between January and June 1942 the RAAF and RNZAF received 54 aircraft from Britain and 230 from the United States, the bulk of Britain’s spare machines being rushed to India.
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At the same time, 50,000 GIs were drafted to defend Australia at Churchill’s request, although he believed, correctly as it turned out, that the Japanese invasion would never materialise.
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Relations between Britain and Australia took a severe battering at the beginning of 1942 and, although they improved once the threat of Japanese landings receded, sour memories lingered. They surfaced in 1991–2 when the republican Australian prime minister, Paul Keating, repeated allegations that Churchill had left Australia in the lurch so as to concentrate on the war in the Middle East. This charge, like those levelled in 1941–2, was a simplification which failed to take into account the precariousness of Britain’s position in Egypt and on the north-eastern frontier of India. It was, and clearly still is hard for Australians to stomach the fact that in its direst moment their country was low down the list of British strategic priorities.

Britain’s lost colonies, if not its prestige, were eventually restored through the efforts of the United States which, at the beginning of 1942, had taken over the main burden of imperial defence. It was American warships which defeated the Japanese navy in engagements at the Coral Sea and Midway in May and June. The latter victory swung the balance of seapower in the Pacific in the Allies’ favour and halted Japanese expansion. By August, American and Australian forces had counter-attacked and begun the long, grinding process of ejecting the Japanese from the southwestern Pacific. The defence of India and the reconquest of Burma in 1942–5 was conducted by imperial forces, but here, as on all other fronts, American-made aircraft and armaments were vital.

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The baleful events in the Far East caused consternation in Britain. The country was already in the middle of a period of intensely critical self-examination as plans were being framed for post-war reconstruction. There was an overwhelming sense that whatever else happened there could never be a return to the pre-war world with its inefficiencies, social inequality and economic drifting. The new Britain would be a nation which cultivated social harmony and devoted a substantial portion of its wealth and energies to the regeneration of industry, full employment and providing a fair and generous system of education and welfare for all. How this last might be achieved was set out in the famous Beveridge report, which was issued in December 1942, and widely welcomed as a goal worth fighting for. The country was going to change for the better; but what of its empire?

The empire’s past, present and future came suddenly under public scrutiny during the weeks after the fall of Singapore. The shock of a capitulation which effectively shattered Britain’s admittedly fragile pretensions as a global, imperial power was followed by a series of disconcerting revelations about the character of the empire. A frank and devastating analysis of the background to the surrender written by
The Times’s
Far Eastern correspondent was published on 18 February. It argued that the ‘easy-going routine of colonial administration’ had sapped the will of officials who had shown themselves devoid of the ‘dynamism’ and ‘aggression’ now evident in other areas of public life. ‘The government had no roots in the life of the people,’ the writer concluded, and his point was expanded in an editorial which condemned the Malayan administration for the ‘lack of touch between the local Government and the vast Asiatic population, whose attitude, with the honourable exception of the Chinese, was passive, timorous and apathetic.’

Official censorship prevented the publication of details of defections to the Japanese by Malays, disheartened Indian troops and Burmese. Nonetheless, parliamentary critics of the government contrasted the indifference of the natives of Malaya with the fierceness with which the Filipinos were fighting for their American masters, who had promised the Philippines self-government after the war.
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According to the
Economist,
Britain’s subjects in the Far East had lost faith in the empire and the Allied cause.
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Defending his former colleagues, Captain Leonard Gammans, a Unionist MP and sometime district officer in Malaya, detected a collapse in national self-confidence. ‘We cannot expect Asiatics and Africans to believe in us as a colonial Power unless we believe in ourselves,’ he argued. What was needed was new life to be injected into the old imperial ideals of ‘common citizenship and trusteeship and vision’.
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In broad terms, the débâcle in Malaya was yet another example of the failure of the old order and its servants. The figure of Colonel Blimp soon entered the debate. He had come to symbolise the ossified thinking, complacency and obscurantism which were now seen as the outstanding features of the ‘Old Gang’, that band of men who, according to left-wing mytholoy, had guided the country so maladroitly between the wars. The routine analysis of servicemen’s mail undertaken to measure morale revealed that in the wake of the disasters in the Far East there had been an increase in complaints about Blimps in high places.
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A.L. Rowse, a distinguished Oxford historian, used the columns of
The Times
to speculate on how far the empire’s recent misfortunes stemmed from that dogma fostered in public schools, which elevated character over cleverness. It was the latter quality which had marked the men who had built the empire in the time of Elizabeth I, Anne and the two Pitts.
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On the same day, the government announced rigorous testing of all army lieutenant-colonels over the age of forty-five, presumably to weed out Blimps.

There was also a hunt for Blimps in the Commons. The government was savaged over the blunderer who had permitted Penang to be abandoned without a fight, making a gift to the Japanese of its stocks of rubber.
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Here was a Blimp to be punctured along with many others, who were imagined enjoying a privileged life in other corners of the empire. ‘The majority of British officials live in a by-gone world,’ alleged Major James Milner, a Labour MP. ‘At this very moment they will be dining in short coats and all the rest of the palaver, in Calcutta, only a few miles away from the front line.’
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He was very close to the mark. In Burma, the acerbic American General ‘Vinegar’ Joe Stilwell was peeved by his meetings with the ‘bored and supercilious limies’ who ran the empire and commanded its troops. One easily recognisable specimen tried his patience, and he noted in his diary: ‘Monocled ass at lunch: “One does enjoy a cawktail doesn’t one? It’s so seldom one gets a chawnce. In my case I hardly have time for a glahss of bee-ah.”’
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The condescending, off-hand manner of men of this stamp, and there were plenty of them, galled Americans, who were now beginning to encounter them elsewhere in the empire, and in the higher ranks of the armed services and the government. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then in charge of strategic planning in the Far East, was irritated by the ‘stiff-necked’ response of Wavell after he had been offered Chinese troops to help shore up the crumbling front in Burma.
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All too often, Americans were left with the impression that Britain’s ruling class lacked the inner drive and energy to wage, let alone win, a modern war.

There were some in America and Britain who were wondering whether the class which still largely had the governance of the empire deserved to retain its power. ‘There must be no place after the world for special privileges, either for individuals or nations,’ Roosevelt had proclaimed in November 1941. His countrymen tended to agree, as did a substantial body of opinion in Britain, mostly on the left and centre. So too, but to a lesser degree, did the government, whose propaganda continually exhorted everyone to work together and share the burdens of war equally. An egalitarian and democratic spirit was abroad, and was often forcefully expressed in servicemen’s letters, which contained plenty of grumbling about ‘stand-offish’ officers and the amorphous, but all-too-recognisable, ‘they’ and ‘them’ who exercised authority.

Within the empire the social hierarchy was unshaken by the war. Servicemen attached to the units which reoccupied Malaya in the summer of 1945 were hurt by the snobbery of those they had liberated, the planters and their wives, who, like the Bourbons, appeared to have remembered everything and learnt nothing.
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This was not surprising; throughout most of the empire’s existence the élite which managed the colonies had been drawn almost exclusively from the upper and upper-middle classes. Men in senior positions during the war had been recruited from public school alumni, who had passed through Oxford or Cambridge and shown themselves more adept on the playing field than in the examination hall. Character counted for much; when interviewing potential district officers, Sir Ralph Furse made a point of looking for such telltale signs of an interior weakness as ‘a languid handshake’.
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Before 1914, and probably after, a ‘social test’ was applied, and the candidate who offered his interrogator a Virginia rather than a Turkish cigarette was automatically scratched for what was then a social solecism.
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The tone of the empire was therefore aristocratic and conservative. It may be judged by the reactions of the group of Indian officials and their wives to the news of Labour’s general election victory at the end of July 1945, which they heard while homeward-bound in a liner passing through the Mediterranean. There were anxious remarks about whether pensions, public schools and coal royalties were in jeopardy, and then a discussion as to who would replace Leo Amery as Secretary of State for India: