The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (86 page)

In December 1943 Roosevelt announced that he intended to have Indo-China administered by an international commission rather than let it remain in French hands. It was harder to extend such an arrangement to Britain’s former colonies, since Churchill was adamantine whenever the subject of the post-war empire was raised. With strong, all-party backing he and his successor, Attlee, stonewalled at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences when discussions moved towards some form of international control for Europe’s colonies. Americans were also disturbed by Britain’s policy in Greece where, during 1944–5, British troops supported the anti-Communist faction, in what resembled a Palmerstonian bid to secure total control over the eastern Mediterranean. As the tide of war turned during 1944, it seemed that Britain, so lately the champion of democracy and freedom, had metamorphosed into the hungry imperial lion of a past age, wanting the biggest share of whatever was available.

Shortages of the wherewithal to wage war slowed down the lion in the Far East. India had finally been made secure by the battles of Kohima and Imphal in March and June 1944. Eight months before, Churchill had pressed for Operation Culverin, a landing on Sumatra, which would provide a base for an attack on Singapore. It was abandoned because Churchill’s attention had been taken up by another chimerical scheme, the expulsion of the Germans from the Dodecanese Islands, which, he imagined, would propel Turkey into the war as an ally. This was overruled by the Americans, who rightly wanted all spare forces concentrated on the imminent invasion of France. European fronts continued to enjoy precedence over the Far East; in October 1944 Mountbatten was told that no forces could be spared for a seaborne assault on Rangoon.

It was only in February 1945 that permission was given for an advance on Rangoon. This was to be followed by large-scale seaborne landings on the Siamese and Malaya coasts between June 1945 and March 1946, code-named Roger, Zipper and Mailfist. (There is a peculiar poetry about the titles given to Second World War operations; their origins and originators deserve a close study.)

As it was, Zipper and Mailfist turned out to be bloodless enterprises. Overstretched everywhere since the middle of 1942, Japan had been fighting and losing a defensive war. The Imperial Japanese Navy had lost both its preponderance and initiative at Midway and, despite considerable effort, failed to recover either in the next two years. By the winter of 1944–5, American forces had secured the Ryukyu Islands, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and by the spring mass raids against Japanese cities by the USAAF’s B-29 bombers were underway. In June 1945, less than a month after Germany’s defeat, a detailed plan for invasion of Japan had been prepared. Thirteen or fourteen United States divisions were to attack Kyushu in November 1945, and a further twenty-five, with a Commonwealth contingent, would land on Honshu in March 1946, coinciding with the final push in Malaya. Hitherto, Britain had played virtually no part in the Pacific war, but once the defeat of Germany was imminent, Churchill fulfilled his pledge to Australia and began to move ships to join the USN. By the summer of 1945 nearly a hundred British and Commonwealth men-o’-war were operating in Japanese waters.

Neither the ships nor the elaborate plans for landings on the Japanese mainland and Malaya were needed. On 6 August an atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima, followed by another over Nagasaki three days later. These blows, combined with Russia’s declaration of war, forced the Japanese government to surrender unconditionally on 15 August. The way was now open for Britain to take back its colonies, and incidentally assist the French and the Dutch to regain theirs. Rangoon had fallen in the spring, and on 9 September British and Indian forces went ashore in Malaya. Three days later Singapore was recaptured without a fight. As the Japanese generals proffered their swords, they struck Mountbatten as resembling ‘a bunch of gorillas, with great baggy breeches and knuckles almost trailing to the ground’. Lee Kuan Yew, the future prime minister of Singapore, thought the ‘final humiliation of these little warriors’ was ‘one of the greatest moments of the history of South East Asia’.
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Was it one of the greatest moments in the empire’s history? Probably not, for the British had come back into Malaya on the coat tails of the Americans. Nonetheless, British rule was infinitely preferable to Japanese, and the army was warmly welcomed, although one journalist was dismayed to notice how a ‘blundering and stuffy’ administration encouraged the recrudescence of ‘all the petty snobbery of second-rate Singapore’.
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There was nothing stuffy about the soldiers of the liberating army; they dressed untidily and were slack in saluting superiors, much to Mountbatten’s annoyance.
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It was, perhaps, their way of saying goodbye to all that, for the war was over.

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The British empire had survived the war without loss of territory, although damage to prestige, sustained since Munich, was impossible to calculate. The human cost of victory had been far less than in 1918; casualties were:

Economic losses were far heavier than in 1918 for, as Chamberlain had foretold, the war effort ate up Britain’s reserves. Britain had been stripped of two-thirds of her pre-war export trade and a quarter of her stored wealth. In December 1945 she had to obtain a $375,000 million loan at 2 per cent from the United States in return for a pledge that a year after the sums had been transferred the pound would become freely convertible. This would hamper an economic recovery based on exports, but the American government cancelled $20,000 million of Lend Lease obligations.

So, in 1945, Britain had emerged from war a debtor nation with an empire, (still the largest in the world) and clinging to old pretensions of global power. But when Churchill had met Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta, one observer had likened the trio to the Roman triumvirs who held power after Julius Caesar’s death. Stalin and Churchill were the titans, Octavius and Mark Antony, while Churchill, for all his rhetoric, was the all-but-forgotten Lepidus. Russia and America had become, through their industrial and armed strength, ‘superpowers’, leaving Britain to occupy a humbler position. The United States was for the moment the mightier of the two superpowers; she held two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves, aerial and naval supremacy and, most importantly, the technology to produce atomic bombs. Her industrial and banking systems were undamaged by war, and she was to all intents and purposes enjoying the same international pre-eminence as Britain had in 1815.

The empire alone qualified Britain to project itself as a global power. Its future in a world dominated by two states which, for various economic and political reasons, were inimical to territorial as opposed to ideological or economic empires, was far from certain. Furthermore the new Labour government had, since 1938, promised to give India self-government, and was determined to honour this pledge. Independence was also the destination of the larger colonies, although no one was prepared to say how long the journey would take. In terms of political logic, if such an abstraction exists, Britain had now committed itself to the eventual dissolution of its overseas empire and therefore its world power. Of course, the new pattern of thinking about the empire was not seen as a suicide note; it was assumed that old colonies would become new dominions whose association with Britain would somehow preserve her as a force to be reckoned with in the world.

PART FIVE

T
HE
S
ETTING
S
UN
1945–93

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The Colonialists are on the Rampage: The Empire in the Post-war World

The history of what turned out to be the final decades of the British empire was largely determined by the course of the Cold War. It began in the winter of 1944–5, when British and American strategists began to get the jitters about the extent and purpose of the formidable build-up of Soviet military strength in eastern and central Europe. It ended in December 1988, when Mikhail Gorbachev announced the imminent dismantling of Russia’s European war machine. In some respects the Cold War was like its predecessor, known less menacingly as the Great Game, which had been played between Britain and Russia in central Asia throughout the nineteenth century. It was a contest of nerve, diplomatic manoeuvre, arms races, intelligence gathering and subversion in which each side was continually nervous about the other’s intentions and capability for making mischief. Here the similarities end, for more was at stake in the Cold War. Antagonists in both camps regularly predicted that their goal was a world dominated by either Communism or capitalism. Furthermore, after August 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb there was always a chance that a severe crisis might lead to a nuclear war.

The Cold War was not started deliberately nor, in its early stages, was anyone clear as to how long it might last or what course it would take. What was clear to those in Washington and London with responsibility for forward planning was that by the end of the war Russia would possess a vast unofficial empire in eastern Europe. Fears that it might extend it by proxy, using the expanding European Communist parties, were confirmed with the outbreak of the Greek Civil War in December 1944. Four months after, Macmillan described Stalin as ‘a sort of Napoleon’, a conclusion already reached by American strategists who, from May 1944, felt that Britain could not resist post-war Russian encroachments in western Europe without the United States’s assistance.
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British apprehension about Russia’s future behaviour was focussed on threats to the empire, and they assumed a disturbing substance during the first half of 1946, when Russia demanded bases in Libya and the Dardanelles, and refused to evacuate northern Persia. Soviet attacks on British policy in the Mediterranean, India, Persia and the Dutch East Indies during the first United Nations meeting in February 1946 convinced the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, that Russia ‘is intent on the destruction of the British Empire’. The same view was taken by American military planners, who were now regarding the empire as a valuable asset in what might develop into a protracted global confrontation.
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Anglo-American solidarity was now as vital as ever it had been during the war. The point was vividly emphasised by Churchill in his celebrated ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, delivered with President Harry Truman’s warm endorsement at Fulton, Missouri, in February 1946. America’s need of Britain as an ally against a malevolent Russia helped soften Washington’s attitude towards the empire. There had been signs of a change of heart during the winter of 1944-5, after Roosevelt had relaxed his objections towards France’s repossession of Indo-China. There were substantial Communist, anti-Japanese resistance movements there (Ho Chi-Minh’s Viet Minh) and in Malaya. Both had a vast potential for subversion, and it was, therefore, politically prudent to allow the re-occupation of both colonies by their former rulers. Decolonisation would follow, but the process was best left to Britain and France, who would deal with the local Communists before handing over power to more tractable groups. The first skirmishes of the Cold War were fought around Saigon during the winter and spring of 1945-6, when Anglo-Indian forces secured the city in readiness for the disembarkation of an army from France. Japanese POWs were re-armed and took part enthusiastically in the operations against the Viet Minh partisans.
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General Douglas MacArthur was incensed by the cynical employment of old enemies against old friends; obviously he had still to grasp the new pattern of loyalties and alignments which was emerging throughout the world.

The Cold War was an unwelcome distraction for the Labour government, not least because it acted as a brake on national recovery since sparse resources had to be channelled into rearmament. Labour had won the 1945 election with a visionary programme; its manifesto,
Let us Face the Future,
was a masterplan for a social and economic revolution designed to create a new Jerusalem. A bountiful state took responsibility for welfare and education, and the economy was to be revitalised through a mixture of public ownership, regulation by Whitehall and private enterprise. The philosophy which underlay this policy dominated British politics until the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher started a new and as yet unfinished revolution based upon the values of an unrestricted free market. Her adherents, like Labour’s supporters in 1945, were Utopians, believing that they had discovered a perfect system which would bring universal content and prosperity.

The empire had been a peripheral issue during the 1945 general election. Labour did affirm that it would give self-government to India, but when George Orwell raised the issue at the hustings, he and it were politely ignored.
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Used to hearing sympathetic noises from Labour politicians, mostly on the left of the party, West African students in Britain threw themselves into the campaign in the hope that a Labour victory would bring nearer their countries’ independence. They were disappointed, and within a few years were finding it impossible to tell the difference between Labour and Conservative colonial policies.
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