The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (92 page)

The loss of India was felt most keenly by the men and women who had served there and devoted their lives to its people’s welfare. Many old servants of the raj were bitterly dismayed by the unseemly haste of the transfer of power and its baleful consequences. But those who had connections with the raj represented a narrow section of British society. In June 1946 there had been 44,537 civilians and 10,837 service wives and children in India, together with the garrison and Indian army officers. They were the last representatives of a British population which, since the days of Clive, had been transient. Men and women came to India, performed the duties they had been sent to undertake, and then returned home. Even so, the rearguard of 1947 and previous exiles found it extremely hard to accept the emotional break with a country and a people which they had come to love and to which they had given so much of their lives. Forty-five years later, newspaper announcements of various Indian reunion dinners, usually regimental, in London clubs are a testament to their sense of comradeship and nostalgia for the raj.

The strategic and psychological consequences of the loss of India were enormous but their effect was, at first, limited. Mountbatten had not clinched a military alliance with either India or Pakistan, although both elected to enter the Commonwealth. Ceylon was more accommodating and agreed to allow Britain use of its bases, so Britain could maintain its old, dominant position in the Indian Ocean. This was small consolation for control over India. A pantheon of statesmen from Disraeli to Bevin had convinced themselves and the country that ownership of India was the key to Britain’s greatness. Take away India, Curzon had warned, and Britain would become a second-rate power.

Strategists from Wellington to Attlee’s chiefs-of-staff agreed, and the latter feared that Britain’s future as a world power would be in jeopardy without India’s reserve of manpower, which had proved so vital in two world wars and sundry smaller imperial campaigns throughout the Middle East, East Africa and the Far East. Within a year of Indian independence, a senior officer was calling for the creation of an Anglo-African army on the lines of the Indian:

If British units were mingled with East African units on a similar but miniature model of the recent Army in India, their standard of efficiency and pleasure in soldiering could rise to unprecedented heights. The British ranks of the African units could be filled by the cream of those attracted by the life and people.
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As has been seen, Attlee was eventually attracted by this idea, But mass standing armies were expensive to maintain in peacetime. Since mid-1946, British strategic planners had been concentrating on a cheaper source of strength that was more relevant to Cold War needs; long-range bombers and atomic bombs. As a source of power and prestige, the Indian army had become an anachronism, although its loss would be felt in the so-called ‘bush-fire’ campaigns of the Far and Middle East during the 1950s and early 1960s.

These were the years during which the British public found itself slowly coming to terms with the delayed trauma of imperial decline. The slowness of the reaction owed much to the fact that the Commonwealth had served as an invaluable shock-absorber in the years immediately after 1947. It had helped salve pride hurt by the loss of territory and prestige, and appeared to offer compensation for both. It gave Britain a special moral status at a time when France was fighting two bloody colonial wars. For those whose political opinions were primarily determined by ethical considerations, it embodied all the old idealism of benevolent imperialism without any of the guilt associated with alien rule. Reporting with approval the 1956 Young Commonwealth conference, the
Observer
referred to the ‘moral benefits’ which delegates felt they had acquired during discussions on such matters as literacy campaigns.
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It was all very earnest, and heartwarming for those of the left and centre who had never quite lost their pre-war faith in international cooperation.

After 1950, the virtues and value of the Commonwealth became part of that centrist British political consensus which accepted unquestioningly the virtues of the mixed economy and the welfare state. Senior Labour and Conservative politicians were committed to perpetuation of the Commonwealth, and publicly proclaimed it as a manifestation of Britain’s residual influence in the world. It was, according to one defender, ‘a logical outcome of our own development’, the heir-general, as it were, of the empire and, in moral terms, infinitely preferable.
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The conventional, bipartisan wisdom was expressed by Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to one of its newest members, Ghana, in November 1961. She defined the body of which she was head as: ‘A group of equals, a family of like-minded peoples whatever their differences of religion, political systems, circumstances and races, all eager to work together for the peace, freedom and prosperity of mankind.’
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What was needed for the Commonwealth to flourish was an act of ‘faith’ by all its members. This must have been an extremely difficult speech to deliver, and harder still to believe in, for her host, Dr Nkrumah, was currently arresting and locking up opposition politicians.

The tough lessons of the past fourteen years had dented this rosy and optimistic view of the Commonwealth. There were a handful of dissidents unprepared to make the leap of faith necessary for belief in the Commonwealth. In 1956, the year when Britain’s global pretensions were tested to breaking point, a few isolated voices were prepared to ask searching questions about the practical value of the Commonwealth in an increasingly unfriendly world. In a mordant analysis, written shortly after the June 1956 Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference, the veteran diplomat Lord Vansittart argued that apart from the old white dominions the Commonwealth gave no advantage to Britain.
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South African apartheid made a mockery of claims that the Commonwealth stood for racial equality; Pakistan was a republic, but at least lined up with the West against Communism, while India and Ceylon, who had just evicted Britain from her bases, were obstructive Cold War waverers. The conference’s communiqué was full of ‘colourless platitude’ and the Commonwealth was, in Menzies’s words, ‘just a scattered group of nations, unattached but friendly’.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the
New Statesman
was equally dismissive. The Commonwealth was ‘entirely formless’ for it lacked ‘any basis of unity’, being without even rudimentary machinery for political, economic or military cooperation.
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Britain might congratulate itself on the largely peaceful metamorphosis of empire into Commonwealth, and draw some moral satisfaction from it as a glowing example of goodwill between nations, but it was not a makeweight for the power and prestige of empire. Nevertheless, it helped protect the British people from suddenly coming face to face with the fact that after 1947 their country’s power was dwindling. With hindsight, it is possible to see that the Commonwealth enabled Britain to accept the loss of India without too much heartache. Strange to say, the Labour government which had engineered the liquidation of the Indian empire continued to act as if Britain was still a formidable global power. It was left to the Conservatives, inheritors of this hubris, to come to terms with reality.

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The World as It Is: Middle Eastern Misadventures, 1945–56

‘We have to make a policy on the assumption that there is not an Indian army to send to Basra,’ argued Labour MP Richard Crossman. He was defending his party from charges of irresolution during a debate on the Middle East in July 1951. According to the Conservatives, the past six years had witnessed the sacrifice of British interests in an area where previously they had been upheld with the utmost vigour. And yet, during the same period, Attlee’s government had been channelling large sums into the development of a British atomic bomb, possession of which would uphold Britain’s claim that it still was a world power.

It was easier for Labour to acquire the sinews of power than it was to exercise it. In 1945, Attlee inherited all the pre-war problems of the Middle East: the worsening Arab-Jewish conflict; the simmering resentment of the Egyptians against alien domination; and the widespread feeling that Britain was the greatest hindrance to Arab national aspirations and unity. Labour was instinctively sympathetic to liberation movements; it was an internationalist, progressive party which thought itself in harmony with the trends of the modern world. The Conservatives were locked into the past and hosts to atavistic concepts of racial superiority and thinly disguised xenophobia. During a debate in which the subject of the Burmese came up, the volatile George Wigg shouted at the Tory benches, ‘The Honourable Gentleman and his friends think they are all “wogs”. Indeed, the Right Honourable Member for Woodford [Churchill] thinks that the “wogs” begin at Calais.’

High principles and ideals of international brotherhood were not always compatible with the pursuit of British interests, particularly in the Middle East and under the conditions imposed by the Cold War. The government had constantly to heed the demands made by its partner, the United States. During 1946, Pentagon and Whitehall strategists began to plot the course of a hypothetical war against Russia and both concluded that control of the Middle East was vital for victory. If the Soviet Union was to be beaten, a substantial part of its war machine would have to be destroyed by atomic bombs. Nuclear attacks on Russia’s industrial heartlands required bases relatively close to its borders. So, in the summer of 1946, Britain secretly agreed to allow B-29 bombers to fly nuclear sorties from airfields in East Anglia and Egypt.
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The latter were crucial, for they made possible a concentrated nuclear assault on the oilfields, refineries and industrial centres of the Caucasus and Don basin. With these levelled, Russia’s capacity to wage a war in western Europe would be severely curtailed. Atomic weapons alone would redress the imbalance between Russia’s massive ground forces and the West’s.

Working from this premise, Pentagon experts revised and amended their plans during the next few years. The 1947 and 1948 versions, with the innocuous codenames ‘Broiler’ and ‘Speedway’, gave the USAAF fifteen days in which to deploy their bombers and their atomic payloads on the runways of the Canal Zone airfields.
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Local defence, indeed that of the entire Middle East, was entrusted to British and Commonwealth forces.
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The scale of the offensive against Russia’s ‘soft underbelly’ increased as America’s stock of atomic bombs rose from fifty in 1948 to three hundred in 1950. In 1949, plan ‘Dropshot’, outlining a war scenario for 1957, proposed an attack on southern Russia by ninety-five bombers flying from Egypt.
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Like its predecessors, this warplan took for granted that Britain would still be in control of the Canal Zone.

Egyptian airfields were also an essential part of the RAF’s nuclear programme. This had its genesis in 1946, when the chiefs-of-staff, particularly Air-Marshal Lord Tedder and Field-Marshal Montgomery, persuaded an initially lukewarm Attlee that it was imperative for Britain to maintain its old predominance in the Mediterranean and Middle East.
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Their argument was simple: Britain would remain a first-rate, global power and enjoy a measure of independence from the United States if it acquired atomic bombs and the means to deliver them against the Soviet Union. In the event of war, a substantial part of Britain’s nuclear strike force would fly from the Canal Zone towards southern Russia. During the next six years, Britain implemented an ambitious nuclear programme. Work went ahead on the development of the long-range, jet-powered V-bombers and the first, the Valiant, was operational by 1955. Three years before, Britain’s first atomic bomb was tested off Monte Bello island on the north-west coast of Australia.

According to Britain’s warplan ‘Trojan’ of 1952 (codenames became more belligerent as the Cold War intensified), the Monte Bello bomb’s successors would be dropped on Russia and, if the sums had been added up correctly, could reduce Russia’s industrial capacity by 30-40 per cent.
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By the beginning of 1956, major changes had been made to targeting policy. A large-scale Russian land and air offensive was expected in the Middle East against eastern Turkey and the Iraqi and Persian oilfields. Given a three-week warning before the outbreak of hostilities, Britain would be in a position to mount a counter-attack which would include nuclear sorties against concentrations of Soviet forces, their airfields and lines of communication.
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None of these prognoses assumed that a nuclear exchange would bring outright victory to either side. Although crippled, the antagonists would, it was believed, still retain the will and some of the wherewithal to fight on with conventional weaponry. In this situation, Britain would have to defend the world’s sealanes which provided it with access to food and oil. Data gathered from the Monte Bello test was used to discover the possible effects of a nuclear attack on a large port, Liverpool, and this study was extended to the Suez Canal. The boffins were remarkably confident that both Liverpool and Port Said could be restored to a semblance of working order within four months. The problems of contamination could be overcome and, if a Russian atomic bomb exploded over the Suez Canal, it was estimated that earth-moving equipment operated by a ‘rotation of men’ could open a navigable passage within several months.
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This astonishing information, presented in a report of July 1956, assumed that sufficient men and machinery would be on hand for what would have proved an extremely hazardous enterprise for those whose job it was to shovel sand.

The Canal Zone became a vital integer in the sombre arithmetic of nuclear war. If such a conflict was winnable, and the strategists who drew up the various warplans believed it was, then Anglo-American control of the Middle East had to be maintained. Even without schemes for launching potentially war-winning nuclear attacks against southern Russia, the region would have had to be kept within the western camp and defended for the sake of its oil. The Second World War had seen the transformation of the world pattern of oil consumption. By 1951, the Middle East was providing 70 per cent of the West’s oil, and all its reserves for the future were thought to be concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.