Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ lives to seize this British possession in 1942, but a further 48,662 dead to stay there until 1945. The largest country on the South-East Asian mainland, rich in oil, teak and rubber, Burma had been ruled by a British governor, with only token democratic institutions. Its population of eighteen million included a million Indians, who played a prominent part in commerce and administration. A host of Indian fugitives died in ghastly circumstances during the 1942 British retreat. Burmans had always been hostile to colonial rule. Many acquiesced willingly in occupation by fellow Asians, until they discovered that their new masters were far more brutal than their former ones. By 1944, they had learned to hate the Japanese. They craved independence and, ironically, now looked to the British to secure it for them. Yet Winston Churchill’s government, and its servants in Asia, were confused about political purposes as well as military means. The poems of Kipling, the glories of the Indian Raj, the wealth and prestige which her eastern possessions had brought to Britain, imbued old imperialists, the prime minister notable among them, with passionate sentiment. They yearned to restore the old dispensation. Some younger men recognised that the changes wrought by the war, and especially by Japanese triumphs in 1941-42, were irreversible. They perceived that most Indians were indifferent, or worse, to Britain’s war. The enlightened, however, were not in charge.

      The situation was rendered more complex by the involvement of the US. The war with Japan exposed differences between London and Washington more profound than any which afflicted policy in Europe. Americans, from their president to soldiers and airmen who served in the China-Burma-India theatre, were almost universally antipathetic to the British Empire, and resented committing their country’s resources to its resurrection. Where the British regarded Siam as an enemy, ally of the Japanese, from 1942 the US chose to see it merely as an occupied, victim country. This was partly because Washington harboured a conviction, which persisted through 1945, that London cherished imperialistic designs there. Americans shared with the British a commitment to undoing Japanese aggression, but would greatly have preferred not to restore the European powers’ lost possessions to their former owners. So strong was this sentiment that most Americans, including the nation’s leaders, would happily have forsworn British aid to defeat the Japanese, if they could thus have distanced themselves from the cause of imperialism. Only the most compelling global political imperatives persuaded the US to cooperate with the British in the Japanese war. It is hard to overstate the mutual suspicion and indeed antagonism which prevailed between the Western Allies in Asia in 1944-45.

      ‘I have noted a regrettable lack of any spirit of camaraderie between British and American sections,’ wrote a US diplomat in India, ‘or any evidence of mutual frankness and trust.’ A British diplomat likewise reported: ‘The majority of American officers in this theatre…are pessimistic about the chance of any real Allied cooperation being achieved here, suspicious of British intentions, bitter over many real or fancied grievances, and convinced of the essential bad will and hopeless inefficiency of the Indian administration.’ If the British government was less troubled than it should have been by the deaths of three million Indians in the 1943 Bengal famine, precipitated by the loss of Burma’s rice, those Americans aware of it were appalled. A growing proportion of British signal traffic on Asian matters was marked ‘GUARD’—not to be shown to allies.

      ‘The Americans [in India]…have rather behaved as an Army of Occupation,’ wrote a senior British officer in December 1943, ‘or if that is too strong, much as we comport ourselves in Egypt vis à vis the Egyptian Army and Government.’ A young British officer of the Indian Army wrote of the distaste for Roosevelt’s people which pervaded his mess: ‘Our anti-Americanism probably stemmed from their reluctance to enter the war against Germany until 1941, their scornful attitude to any other Allied nations’ efforts, and their ability to create huge material and massive air support for their war in the Pacific, while almost grudgingly offering us similar backing. Stories of men losing their wives and girlfriends to American forces in Britain, and films of gum-chewing, jiving, laconic groups of American soldiers and airmen, no doubt led us to the wrong message…We should have understood these things better, but we were young and often intolerant.’

      Such feelings were reciprocated. A sheaf of contemporary War Office reports complained of the reluctance of British and US personnel to salute each other. Pollsters put a proposition to Americans at home: ‘The English have often been called oppressors because of the unfair advantage some people think they have taken of their colonial possessions. Do you think there is any truth in this charge?’ Fifty-six per cent of respondents answered: ‘Yes.’ The Office of Strategic Services, the American covert operations organisation whose missions operated out of India into South-East Asia, was rabidly anti-colonialist. OSS officers reported to Washington, entirely accurately, that many Indians thought well of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Nationalist leader assisting the Japanese to raise an ‘Indian National Army’ from the ranks of PoWs to fight against the British. Even the governor of Bengal, Richard Casey, wrote in 1944 that he perceived no enthusiasm for the war among its people: ‘It would be a brave man who would say that the majority of Indians want to remain within the British Commonwealth.’

      Some 23,000 young Chinese Nationalists were ‘back-hauled’ by air to India over the Himalayas for American training. They too were bemused and dismayed by their encounters with imperialism. Wen Shan, for instance, walked into Annie’s Bar in Calcutta with a group of comrades, looking for a drink. British soldiers shouted: ‘Out! Out!’ Wen remembered later: ‘We tried to say, “We’re just soldiers like you,” but they would not listen. Once, I saw a British soldier on a Hooghly bridge beating an Indian. This was the way I had seen Japanese soldiers treat Chinese people.’

      Wu Guoqing, a twenty-one-year-old interpreter from Chongqing, was thrilled to find that in India he had enough to eat, as he had never done in China. Indeed, he was translated overnight from a poor student into a privileged person with Indian ‘bearers’ to clean his shoes and make his bed, like all Americans in the theatre. Wu recoiled from the poverty, however, which seemed to him worse than that of China, and from British behaviour towards Indians: ‘Some British people even hit them,’ he said wonderingly. ‘They treated them like animals.’ A British tank crewman from London’s east end, John Leyin, was disgusted by the spectacle of two tommies dangling strips of bacon fat from a train window, to taunt starving Indian passers-by. If such behaviour did not represent the entire reality of the Raj, it reflected the impression which it made upon many outsiders, especially American and Chinese, who saw India for the first time in those days.

      For months following the expulsion of British forces from Burma in May 1942, they were merely deployed in north-east India to meet the threat of a Japanese invasion. As this peril receded, however, it was replaced by a dilemma about future strategy. Winston Churchill admitted to the British cabinet in April 1943: ‘It could not be said that the [re]conquest of Burma [is] an essential step in the defeat of Japan.’ Yet if this was acknowledged, what were British and Indian forces to do for the rest of the war? After the humiliations inflicted on them in 1941-42, the London government was stubbornly determined to restore by force of arms the prestige of white men in general, and of themselves in particular. If the Asian empire was not to be restored to its former glory, why should British soldiers sacrifice their lives to regain it? Herein lay uncertainties which afflicted strategy throughout the second half of the war, once the initial Japanese tide began to recede. What was Britain’s Far East campaign for? And what would follow victory? No more convincingly than the French or Dutch—the other major colonial powers in Asia, though they contributed nothing significant to the war effort—did the British answer these questions.

      In the latter part of 1942 and throughout 1943, Britain’s operations against the Japanese were desultory, even pathetic. Led by feeble commanders against an unflaggingly effective enemy, and with scant support from the government at home, troops failed in a thrust into the Burman coastal region of the Arakan, and were obliged merely to hold their ground in north-east India. Embarrassingly, in the winter of 1943 the operations of six and a half British and Indian divisions were frustrated by just one Japanese formation. Americans like Lt-Gen. Joseph Stilwell, senior US officer in China, became persuaded that the British were no more willing energetically СКАЧАТЬ