Forgotten Wars
BY THE SAME AUTHORS
Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian empire and the war with Japan
The End of Britain’s Asian Empire
ALLEN LANE
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First published 2007
1
Copyright © Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, 2007
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ISBN: 978-0-14-190980-6
List of Illustrations
Maps
Some Key Characters
Preface
Prologue: An Unending War
1. 1945: Interregnum
The New Asia
The last journey of Subhas Chandra Bose
Nations without states
Three weeks in Malaya
The fall of Syonan
2. 1945: The Pains of Victory
Burma intransigent
India: the key
Bengal on the brink
The reckoning
3. 1945: A Second Colonial Conquest
‘Black Market Administration’
A world upside down
Liberal imperialism and New Democracy
‘Malaya for the Malays, not the Malayans’
4. 1945: The First Wars of Peace
The crescent regained
Britain’s forgotten war in Vietnam
Britain and the birth of Indonesia
Freedom or death in Surabaya
5. 1946: Freedom without Borders
The passing of the Malayan Spring
Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat
British and Indian mutinies
Dorman-Smith’s Waterloo
A new world order?
6. 1946: One Empire Unravels, Another Is Born
The killing begins
Britain’s terminal crisis in Burma
The burial of the dead
Business as usual in Malaya
7. 1947: At Freedom’s Gate
The last days of the Raj
The crescent fragments: Bengal divided
Tragedy in Rangoon
Disaster approaches
8. 1947: Malaya on the Brink
The crescent fragments: orphans of empire
Malaya’s forgotten regiments
The strange disappearance of Mr Wright
‘Beware, the danger from the mountain’
A people’s constitution
9. 1948: A Bloody Dawn
Boys’ Day in Burma
The genesis of communist rebellion
A summer of anarchy
Karens and Britons
India recedes, India reborn
10. 1948: The Malayan Revolution
A third world war?
The frontier erupts
Calls to arms
Sten guns and stengahs
The road to Batang Kali
11. 1949: The Centre Barely Holds
Britain, India and the coming of the Cold War
The centre barely holds
The battle for the ulu
Freedom and revolution
The generation of 1950
Epilogue: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire
Freedom, slowly and gently
Freedom from fear?
Flawed memories
A flawed inheritance
Notes
Bibliography
Index
1. Surrendered Japanese troops in Burma, August 1945 (Imperial War Museum)
2. Japanese troops clearing the Singapore Padang before the surrender ceremony, 12 September 1945 (Imperial War Museum)
3. Lt General Seishiro Itagaki signing the surrender, Singapore, 12 September 1945 (Empics)
4. Mountbatten announces the surrender of the Japanese in Singapore, September, 1945 (Corbis)
5. A forgotten army: surrendered Japanese in north Malaya, November 1945 (Empics)
6. Seagrave’s return, 1945 (Getty)
7. Leclerc and Gracey with Japanese sword of surrender, Saigon, 1945 (Corbis)
8. Soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, Java, 1945 (Imperial War Museum)
9. Bengal sappers and miners watch the reprisal burning of the village of Bekassi, Java, 1945 (Imperial War Museum)
10. Imperialism’s return? Christison in Java, 1946 (Getty)
11. Sukarno addresses an ‘ocean’ rally, Java, 1946 (Getty)
12. Charisma and revolution: Sukarno, Java, 1946 (Getty)
13. Nehru’s arrival at Kalling Airport, Singapore, April 1946 (Imperial War Museum)
14. Macdonald inspects the Malay Regiment, Kuala Lumpur, 1946 (Imperial War Museum)
15. Dorman Smith leaves Burma, June 1946 (Imperial War Museum)
16. Muslim rioters and the corpse of a Hindu, Calcutta, August 1946 (Corbis)
17. India’s interim government at their swearing in, Delhi 1946 (Corbis)
18. Aung San and Attlee, London, January 1947 (Getty)
19. Aung San and family, 1947 (Popperfoto)
20. The Mountbattens in Delhi, eve of independence, August 1947 (Getty)
21. Celebrating independence in Calcutta, August 1947 (Getty)
22. Ending the Burmese days: Rance and Burma’s president, January 1948 (Corbis)
23. Communist suspect, Malaya c. 1949 (Imperial War Museum)
24. Bren gun and stengah: rubber planter in Malaya, 1949 (Getty)
25. Chinese peasants being arrested by Malay policemen, April 1949 (Getty)
26. Dyak trackers in Malaya, c. 1949 (Imperial War Museum)
27. The sultan expects: the ruler of Selangor inspects Malay special constables on rubber estate, 1949 (Imperial War Museum)
28. Hearts and minds: a propaganda leaflet drop, 1948 (Imperial War Musuem)
29. Imperial Twilight: Drinks party at Malcolm MacDonald’s residence, Bukit Serene, 1949 (Getty)
30. Fighting during the Karen insurgency, 1949 (Getty)
31. The quiet man: Ne Win in London for military training, 1949 (Corbis)
32. The man with the plan: Templer with the Home Guard, Kinta, 1942 (Getty)
33. Bandung spirits: Nasser, Nu and Nehru celebrating the Burmese Water Festival, 1955 (Corbis)
34. Chin Peng at Baling, December 1955, with his old Force 136 ally, John Davis (Corbis)
Abdul Razak bin Hussein (b. 1922). Malay politician. Served in the war as a district officer; studied law in London, where he became a close associate and political ally of Tunku Abdul Rahman. Succeeded him to become second prime minister of Malaysia, 1970–76.
Amery, Rt Hon. Leopold, MP (b. 1873). Conservative politician. Secretary of state for India and Burma, 1940–45.
Attlee, Rt Hon. Clement Richard (b. 1883). Labour politician. Deputy prime minister, 1942–5; prime minister, July 1945–1952; defence minister to 1946.
Auchinleck, General Claude (b. 1884). Commander North African Front, 1940–42, Commander-in-Chief, India, 1943–7; co-ordinated India base for the Burma campaign.
Aung San, Thakin or ‘Bogyoke’ (General) (b. 1916). Leading Burmese revolutionary. Commander of Burma Independence Army, 1942; defence minister under Ba Maw, 1943–5. President of Anti-Fascist People’s Front Freedom League; member of Governor’s Executive Council 1946–7. Assassinated July 1947.
Ba Maw (b. 1893). Lawyer, politician and prime minister of Burma, 1937–9. Emerged as main collaborator with Japanese in 1942 and became ‘Adipadi’ (first man) of independent Burma in 1943. Fled to Tokyo; imprisoned by Allies 1945; returned to Burma in 1946; interned following 1947 assassinations.
Boestamam, Ahmad (b. 1920). Born Abdullah Sani bin Raja Kechil. Malay novelist, journalist and politician. Founder and leader of Angkatan Pemuda Insaf, 1946–8. Detained 1948–55. Founder Partai Rakyat and leader of Socialist Front in parliament after 1959. Detained again during ‘Confrontation’ with Indonesia.
Bose, Subhas Chandra (b. 1897). Bengali politician and radical leader within Forward Bloc of Congress. Arrested by British 1940, fled to Berlin 1941. Took over leadership of Indian National Army and Free India government 1943. Retreated from Imphal with Japanese in 1944. Presumed dead in plane crash, August 1945.
Burhanuddin al-Helmy, Dr (b. 1911). Leader of Malay Nationalist Party, 1945–7. Detained after Nadrah riots and on release became leader of Parti Islam Se-Malaya. Detained again during ‘Confrontation’ with Indonesia.
Chiang Kai Shek (b. 1887). Chinese nationalist leader and ‘generalissimo’ of Chinese armies fighting Japan since 1936; drawn into fighting in Burma during 1942 to keep the ‘Burma Road’ open. Pressed for Allied campaign against Burma, 1943–4. Fought and lost civil war with Mao Zedong, 1946–9.
Chin Peng (b. 1924). Party name of Ong Boon Hua. Communist liaison officer with Force 136 in Perak, Malaya. Secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party from 1947 and led rebellion against the colonial government 1948–60. Resident in China from 1960. Signed a peace accord with the Malaysian government in 1989.
Christison, Lt General Sir Philip (b. 1893). Commanded 15 Indian Corps in Burma. Took surrender of Singapore and commanded in Indonesia. Later became ADC to King George VI.
Creech Jones, Arthur (b. 1891). Labour Colonial Secretary, 1946–50, having earlier headed the Fabian Colonial Bureau.
Cripps, Sir Richard Stafford (b. 1889). Labour politician. As Leader of the House of Commons in 1942, visited India to treat with Indian National Congress (the Cripps mission), and again with Labour government’s Cabinet Mission in 1946. Chancellor of the Exchequer from November 1947.
Davis, John. A policeman in Perak before the war; senior Force 136 officer in Malaya, 1943–5. Afterwards a district officer in Malaya; escorted old comrade Chin Peng to the abortive Baling peace talks in 1955.
Donnison, Colonel Frank S. V. (b. 1898). Civil servant. Secretary to Burmese government, 1939–41 and its representative in Delhi, 1942–3. Commissioned, joined Civil Administration Secretariat (Burma) during re-conquest, 1944–5; later wrote official history of the war and military administration in the Far East.
Dorman-Smith, Sir Reginald (b. 1899). Governor of Burma, 1941–6, escaped from Myitkyina 1942. Exiled in Simla. Returned as civil Governor of Burma autumn 1945. Replaced by Attlee government May 1946.
Eng Ming Chin (b. 1924). Joined the Malayan Communist Party in Perak in 1940 and played a leading role as a women’s activist in the ‘open’ organization of the party after 1945. Took to the jungle in 1948, and assigned to the Malay 10th Regiment. In 1955 married Abdullah C. D. and took the name Suraini Abdullah.
Furnivall, J. S., ICS (b. 1878). Retired Burma civil servant and Fabian socialist, well connected with radical Burmese Thakins. Advised on reconstruction of Burma in Simla, 1943–4; returned to Burma after independence as an economic adviser.
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (b. 1869). Symbolic head of Indian National Congress. Apostle of non-violence. Headed the anti-British Quit India movement of 1942. Jailed by the British for much of the rest of the war, during which time he staged a hunger strike. Assassinated January 1948.
Gent, Sir Edward (b. 1895). Colonial civil servant. As head of Eastern Section, played a major role in devising Malayan Union Plan. Governor of Malayan Union, 1946–8. Killed in an air crash on recall to London after the outbreak of the Emergency in June 1948.
Gracey, General Douglas (b. 1894). Commanded 20th Indian Division, 14th Army at Imphal and Kohima 1944. Occupied Saigon, French Indo-China, August 1945 to February 1946. Effectively handed back southern Indo-China to French colonial government. Chief of Staff of Pakistan Army, February 1948 to January 1951.
Gurney, Sir Henry Lovell Goldsworthy (b. 1898). Career colonial servant; formerly Chief Secretary in Gold Coast and Palestine before replacing Sir Edward Gent as High Commissioner in Malaya, 1948. Oversaw the early stages of the Emergency until his assassination by the communists on the way to the hill station of Fraser’s Hill in October 1951.
Hirohito, Showa, Emperor of Japan (b. 1901). Implicated in aggressive Japanese policies in China and Southeast Asia. Remained on throne 1945, under American tutelage.
Hussein bin Onn (b. 1922). Malay politician. Son of Onn bin Jaafar. Served in Indian Army during war; then led UMNO Youth until 1951 when he left with his father to form the Independence for Malaya Party. Joined UMNO in 1968 to become third prime minister of Malaysia, 1976–81.
Ibrahim, Sultan of Johore (b. 1873). Independent-minded sultan of peninsular Malaya’s southernmost state; ruled from 1895 until 1959.
Ishak bin Haji Mohamed (b. 1910). One of the leading Malay novelists and journalists of his generation. Leader of the Malay Nationalist Party after Dr Burhanuddin and played leading role in PUTERA-AMCJA. Detained 1948–54.
Khatijah Sidek (b. 1918). Women’s activist and politician. Born in west Sumatra, where she led a women’s paramilitary organization during the Indonesian revolution. Took struggle to Malaya, but detained in 1948. Led UMNO’s women’s wing, but was expelled for radical views and later joined the Parti Islam Se-Malaya. Died in poverty in 1982.
Khin Myo Chit (b. 1915). Socialist radical, Buddhist and literary figure. Women’s official in Ba Maw’s government, 1943–5. Teacher in Rangoon University after the war.
Knight, Sir Henry (b. 1886). Joined Indian Civil Service in 1909. Acting Governor Bombay, 1945, Madras, 1946, and Burma, June–August 1946.
Lai Teck (b. 1900?). Best-known alias of the Vietnamese-born secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party. Exposed as a British and Japanese agent in 1947; fled to Bangkok, where he was assassinated later the same year.
Laithwaite, Sir Gilbert (b. 1894). Assistant undersecretary of state, India Office, 1943; undersecretary of state, War Cabinet, 1944–5; deputy undersecretary of state for Burma from 1945.
Lee, H. S. (Hau Shik) (b. 1901). Industrialist and leader of the Selangor Chinese. Active in the Kuomintang (he held the rank of colonel) and then the Malayan Chinese Association. Brokered the MCA’s first electoral alliance with UMNO in the Kuala Lumpur municipal elections of 1952. First finance minister of independent Malaya.
Lee Kong Chian (b. 1894). Rubber tycoon and philanthropist. Son-in-law to Tan Kah Kee and leading spokesman of the Chinese of Singapore.
Lee Kuan Yew (b. 1923). Singaporean politician. A student at the elite Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1942. Worked as a translator for the Japanese during the war, then studied in Cambridge and at the London Bar. Founded the People’s Action Party in 1954; prime minister of Singapore, 1959–90; after stepping down, continued to exercise a leading political role.
Leyden, John L. (b. 1904). Joined the Burma Frontier Service in 1927. Well connected with Kachins and Chins; involved in covert operations 1942–3. Returned to Frontier Areas Administration 1946.
Liew Yao (b. 1918). Leading military commander of the MPAJA. An early casualty in the Emergency when intercepted at Kajang, Selangor, June 1948.
Lim Chin Siong (b. 1933). Charismatic Singaporean left-wing trade unionist and politician. Detained 1955–7 and again 1963–9. After release went into exile in England; later returned to Singapore but never re-entered politics.
Listowel, 5th earl of (William Francis Hare) (b. 1906) Labour politician. Parliamentary undersecretary for India and Burma, 1944–5; secretary of state for India and Burma from April 1947 and for Burma only from August 1947. Visited Burma 1947.
MacDonald, Malcolm John (b. 1901). Governor general, 1946–8, and commissioner general, 1948–55, in Southeast Asia. Son of Ramsay MacDonald. Served as a reforming colonial secretary, 1935, 1938–40, and dominion secretary, 1935–8, 1938–9. Later high commissioner in India, governor of Kenya and special representative in East and Central Africa.
Mahathir Mohamad (b. 1923). Malay politician. A medical student in Singapore after the war, and author of occasional newspaper columns on Malay affairs. Later joined UMNO and became fourth prime minister of Malaysia, 1981–2003.
Mahomed Ali Jinnah (b. 1876). President of the All-India Muslim League, 1916, 1920 and from 1934. First Governor General of Pakistan from August 1947. Died 1948.
Marshall, David (b. 1908). First chief minister of Singapore, 1955–6, on a Labour Party platform. Of Baghdadi Jewish background, he was a noted trial lawyer and human rights campaigner.
Maung Maung, Bo (b. 1920). Young recruit to Aung San’s BIA who took part in the anti-Japanese revolt in 1945 and went on to a career in the Burmese military after 1948.
Mountbatten, Admiral Lord Louis (b. 1900). Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, 1943–6. Rebuilt army morale 1943. Overall director of Imphal–Kohima campaign, 1944. Cultivated relations with Aung San’s Burma Defence Army in 1945 and aided its rebellion against the Japanese that March. Viceroy of India 1947, then governor general of independent India.
Mustapha Hussain (b. 1910). Malay nationalist. Vice-president of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda. Accompanied the Japanese advance to Singapore, but soon became disillusioned with them. Detained briefly after the war, and narrowly defeated by Tunku Abdul Rahman in UMNO’s presidential election of 1951.
Ne Win (b. 1911). One of ‘Thirty Comrades’ of the Burma Independence Army. Military commander of Burmese Defence Forces, 1943–5. Commander of Burmese armed forces in 1948. Later dictator of Burma.
Nehru, Jawaharlal (b. 1889). Indian Congress Socialist leader. Favoured the Allies over the Axis, but went to jail following the Quit India movement in 1942. First prime minister of independent India, 1947. Architect of Bandung Conference and Non-Aligned Movement.
Nu, Thakin (later U Nu) (b. 1907). Burmese student activist and devout Buddhist. Minister in Ba Maw’s government 1943–5; AFPFL, 1945–6. Became head of government for independent Burma following the assassination of Aung San in 1947, and its first prime minister in 1948. Architect of Bandung Conference, 1955.
Onn bin Jaafar, Dato (b. 1895). Leading Malay of Johore. In 1946, headed the United Malays National Organization. Left UMNO to form multi-racial Independence for Malaya Party, 1951–4, known from 1954 as Party Negara. Failed to win seat in 1955 election, but elected MP in 1959.
Paw Tun, Sir (b. 1883). Conservative Arakanese politician. Prime minister of Burma 1942. Exiled to Simla in India with Dorman-Smith. Member of Governor’s Executive Council 1945–6.
Pearce, Major General Sir Charles Frederick (b. 1892). Governor’s secretary, Burma, 1939. Commissioned into the army, he became a key figure in Civil Administration Secretariat (Burma) during reconquest, 1943–5. Counsellor to Governor, 1946.
Pethick-Lawrence, 1st Baron (Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence) (b. 1871). Secretary of state for India and Burma, 1945 to April 1947. Member of Cabinet Mission to India, 1946.
Purcell, Victor (b. 1896). Civil servant in Malaya and a key figure in its post-war planning. Returned there as adviser on Chinese affairs in 1945. Later critic of Templer regime; historian of the Chinese in Southeast Asia and Cambridge University lecturer.
Rance, Major General Sir Hubert (b. 1898). Served on Western Front, 1939–43. Director of civil affairs in Burma, 1945–6. Governor of Burma, August 1946 to January 1948.
Saw, U (b. 1900). Minister of forests for Burma 1939; prime minister, 1940–42. Flew to London in 1941 on goodwill mission. Imprisoned in Uganda during war for contacting Japanese. Returned to Burma 1946. Convicted of assassination of Aung San 1947. Hanged 1948.
Shamsiah Fakeh (b. 1924). Malay radical and leader of AWAS women’s movement. Took to jungle in 1948 and active in the 10th Regiment of the MNLA. Married briefly to Ahmad Boestamam.
Sjahrir, Sutan (b. 1909). Indonesian socialist born in West Sumatra and educated in the Netherlands. Experienced imprisonment and internal exile by Dutch, 1934–41. First prime minister of Indonesia, 1945–7, he led negotiations with British and Dutch.
Slim, General (later Field Marshal), Sir William (b. 1891). Commander 1st Burma Corps, 1942, during retreat with Gen. Harold Alexander. Main figure in rebuilding 14th Army and success of its Burma campaigns 1944–5. Commander Allied Land Forces South East Asia, 1945. Later governor general of Australia.
Smith Dun, Colonel (b. 1906). Karen military officer who fought with 14th Army in Burma campaign, became commander-in-chief of Burma’s armed forces 1948, but was speedily dismissed.
Soe, Thakin (b. 1905). Communist leader. Set up ‘base area’ in Burma delta, 1942–5. Broke with Anti-Fascist People’s Front government and led Red Flag communists in rebellion against British and independent government of Burma, 1946–55.
Stevenson, Henry Noel Cochrane (b. 1903). Joined Burma Frontier Service in 1926. Organized Chin levies, 1942–3. Served in Civil Affairs Secretariat Burma, 1944–5. Director Frontier Areas Administration, 1946 to February 1947, when he was replaced for being too close to minorities leaders.
Suhrawardy, H. S. (b. 1892). Bengali Muslim politician. Minister of labour, Bengal, 1937. Minister of supplies in Bengal government during 1943 famine. Chief minister, Bengal, after 1946 elections. Implicated in Great Calcutta Killing, 1946. Founded East Pakistan Awami League.
Sukarno (b. 1901). First president of Indonesia, 1945–66. Presided at Bandung Conference, 1955. Declared martial law and ‘guided democracy’ in 1957. Removed by Suharto after failed military coup in 1965.
Tan Cheng Lock (b. 1883). Straits Chinese leader, businessman and legislator. Fled to India on Japanese invasion of Malaya. Figurehead leader of left-wing United Front in 1947; founding president of the Malayan Chinese Association in 1949. Knighted 1952. His son, Tan Siew Sin (b. 1916) succeeded him and was a minister in independent Malaya.
Tan Kah Kee (b. 1874). Leader of the Overseas Chinese; headed the China Relief Fund, 1937–41. Spent the war hiding in Java, returning to Singapore to head China Democratic League. Returned to China in 1949.
Tan Malaka (b. 1897). Sumatra-born leader of Partai Kommunis Indonesia and Comintern. In hiding in Singapore on outbreak of war, and later escaped incognito to Indonesia. Revealed himself in 1946 to lead calls for social revolution. Died at hands of republican soldiers in 1948.
Templer, Sir Gerald Walter Robert (b. 1898). High Commissioner of Malaya, 1952–4. Earlier served in military government of occupied Germany and as director of military intelligence. After Malaya became Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 1955–8, and retired a field marshal.
Than Tun (b. 1911). Student leader. Minister of agriculture under Ba Maw, 1943. Joined anti-Japanese resistance. Led Burma Communist Party in 1945. Broke with AFPFL in 1946
Thein Pe Myint (b. 1914). Burmese communist who escaped to India in 1942. Author of What happened in Burma, an attack on the Japanese occupation. Sent to Chungking, China, but maintained links with Burmese resistance to Japanese. Secretary of the Burma Communist Party, 1945–55. Broke with AFPFL in 1946.
Tin Tut (b. 1895). Barrister and Burmese member of Indian Civil Service. Accompanied U Saw to London in 1941. Joined Dorman-Smith in Simla, 1942. Left ICS and became financial adviser to AFPFL government. Accompanied Aung San to London, January 1947. Assassinated 1948.
Tunku Abdul Rahman (b. 1903). Malay prince of Kedah. Served as a district officer during war. As head of the United Malays National Organization led Malaya to independence in 1957; prime minister until 1970.
Wavell, Field Marshal Sir Archibald (b. 1883). Commander-in-chief, India, 1941–3. Viceroy and Governor General of India, 1943–7.
Yeung Kuo (b. 1917). Malayan Communist Party leader. In Penang in 1946, aided Chin Peng in exposure of Lai Teck and was viewed as Chin’s deputy. Killed in the jungle shortly before the 1955 Baling peace talks.
In August 1945 the US dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so bringing to an end the Second World War. Yet in Asia the Second World War was only one intense and awful phase of a much longer conflict: ‘the defeat of Japan would not end war in Asia’, as one Indian newspaper mused when news of the Japanese surrender leaked out. This long and savage war had begun in 1937 with a full-scale attack on China by the Japanese imperialists. It continued after 1945 in a range of intense and bloody wars, both civil and against a revived European colonialism. These conflicts, variously called the Indonesian revolution, the First Indo-China War, the Partition of India, the Burmese civil war, the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War, surged on into the 1970s and beyond. It was not really until the 1980s, with the economic renaissance of Japan, the rise of Singapore and Malaysia and the beginning of the transformation of Asian communist regimes towards free-market capitalism, that Asia began to claim its place in the sun as the dominant continent of the twenty-first century.
This book is the story of the first and most intense period of the birth pangs of this new Asian world. It concentrates particularly on the great crescent of territory between eastern India and Singapore which had once been the commercial heart of Britain’s Asian empire and which a revived and self-consciously ‘constructive’ British Empire now wished to reclaim as its own. The book focuses on the years between 1945 and 1949 and is a sequel to our earlier work, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (Allen Lane, 2004). British troops, including a large contingent of Indian and African soldiers, poured into Burma from northeastern India, reversing the humiliating defeat which they had suffered at Japanese hands three years earlier. The British went on to occupy Thailand, much of the former French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia, ostensibly in order to disarm the Japanese. But this revivified British Empire attempted to recreate itself in conditions vastly different from those that had prevailed a few years earlier. The British now faced a variety of powerful, armed and embittered nationalist leaderships determined to claim immediate independence.
Forgotten Wars tells the story of how Burmese resistance and the collapse of the British Raj in India brought Burma to independence in 1948, but how that independence was corroded by inter-ethnic conflict and the irresistible rise of the Burmese army which remains dominant in the country today. It shows how Britain was able to maintain its grip in Malaya and Singapore only because it garnered and received the support of conservative Malay and Chinese leaderships which feared the powerful Malayan Communist Party whose cadres Britain itself had helped to arm during the conflict with Japan. It charts the beginning of the long Indo-China war which culminated in the American defeat in southern Vietnam in 1975 and the bloody and little-understood lurch towards Indonesian independence after the fall of Japan. In the process, the book analyses the emergence of the Cold War in Asia. To the north of the region, China became a communist monolith. To the east, North Vietnam seized independence from the French. But to the south, Britain’s rigorous campaign of counter-insurgency against the Malayan communists determined that the future states of Singapore and Malaysia would remain pro-Western and capitalist. These events sowed some of the seeds of East Asia’s great economic miracle which was to blossom in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Burma took a unique road to isolation and stagnation as its leaders battled both communist insurgency and the demands of minority peoples for autonomy.
This book describes the struggles of proconsuls, colonial military commanders and nationalist leaders. But, like Forgotten Armies, it also tells the story of many ordinary people, both Asian and British, who were swept up in the violence of insurgency and counter-insurgency, communal rioting and renewed economic privation. The four years after the fall of Japan were Asia’s time of revolution. Amid the turmoil, people still looked forward to an age of plenty when they would ‘dance among showers of gold and silver’, according to a Burmese verse. This bright future was still long decades away in the year 1949. Many people are still waiting.
In writing this book we have accumulated many more debts than we can possibly recount here: research has been undertaken in many places and over a long period of time. Historical research depends on dedication and specialist expertise, and the staffs of archives and libraries in Asia and Britain have consistently provided both. We would like to mention Kevin Greenbank of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, and Rachel Rowe of the Centre and the Royal Commonwealth Society Collections in the Cambridge University Library. Our thanks to the librarians and archivists in the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum, the Liddell Hart Centre in King’s College, London, and the library, archives and Burma Star Collection in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta. In Southeast Asia, the Perpustakaan Universiti Malaya, the Arkib Negara Malaysia, the National Archives of Singapore, the National Library of Singapore and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore have been particularly helpful.
We owe a special debt of thanks to Simon Winder, who has not only been a patient and indulgent editor but has also plied us with historiographical queries like the most genial of research supervisors. Katherine Prior once again contributed the index and helped us to clarify important questions. Thanks are due also to Chloe Campbell, Michal Shavit and Trevor Horwood for their editorial help over the two volumes and to Sophie Brockley, Bruce Hunter, Dr Romain Bertrand and Stuart Martin for their support and encouragement. Many other debts have been incurred. Sunil Amrith, Chua Ai Lin, Neil Khor, Gerard McCann, Emma Reisz, Felicia Yap, Lim Cheng Tju, C. C. Chin, Ronald Hyam, Christopher Goscha, Dr Syed Husin Ali and Professor Jomo K. S. all provided us with new material or insights. We owe special thanks to Professor Robert Taylor and Professor Robert Anderson for their helpful comments on portions of the manuscript. Any errors that remain are, of course, ours. Magdalene College and St Catharine’s College in Cambridge; Ms Véronique Bolhuis and the Centre Asie, Institut d’Etudes Politique, Paris; Oommen George, Yeo Seok Lian and many others in Kuala Lumpur all provided wonderful conditions in which to write. Our most unfailing supporters have been Susan Bayly and Norman and Collette Harper. We are very grateful to everyone who has helped us.
As a little girl, Kimura Yasuko was evacuated from the city of Hiroshima to the countryside. When the war ended on 15 August 1945, group evacuations were abruptly ended and children began to return to their homes. The children of Hiroshima really had nowhere to return to. All the same, the authorities decided to send them back to where their homes had once been, if they thought a single relative had survived the atomic bomb. Kimura heard that her father was still alive and so she went back to the city in a truck with thirty or forty other children. She remembered:
We arrived in the early evening. The reddish setting sun hung in the sky. The ruins from an ordinary fire are burned black, aren’t they? But the ruins of Hiroshima were brown, the colour of unfired pottery… The city didn’t look as if it had been burned. Yet it was flattened. In the middle of the ruins two buildings, a department store and the newspaper [office] stood all alone. There my father met me… I remember the tears in his eyes when I met him… I knew Mother had died.1
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the defining event of the twentieth century. Everywhere the news was received with deep ambivalence. The leaders of the USA and Britain had been determined to save Allied lives by bringing the war to a rapid conclusion, but now they were assailed by guilt and doubt. In London Sir Cuthbert Headlam, a Conservative politician and robust supporter of Winston Churchill, rejoiced that the war was over, but he stood aghast at ‘this new and fearful form of bomb’ and the wanton destruction it had caused. The bomb would mean ‘either the end of war or the end of civilisation’.2
The Japanese themselves were torn by mixed emotions. In Hiroshima itself, some American prisoners of war who had survived the explosion hidden in a cellar were found and beaten to death. But the majority of Japanese viewed the disaster as they would a great calamity of nature.3 Kimura Yasuko later recorded that the bomb did not make her hate the Americans. In the two years before the bomb, life had been horrible and heartbreaking as city after city across Japan had been consumed by incendiary attacks.4 Some 3 million Japanese had been killed since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and millions more had been wounded, bereaved or made homeless. The country was so utterly devastated that the incoming victors were astonished that it had held out for so long. The bomb finally ended that resistance. Some Japanese fainted when the high-pitched voice of Emperor Hirohito was heard over the radio, conceding defeat in stilted, formal Japanese. A few militarists and patriots committed suicide, while many other Japanese were shamed to the bottom of their hearts by their country’s defeat and awaited the coming of the Americans with trepidation. Others quietly rejoiced in the knowledge that the imperial house and the nation had at least survived. Hundreds of thousands of their young men would now escape almost certain death on the battlefields of East and Southeast Asia.
The first Allied witnesses to this recessional were some of the Allied prisoners of war who had been sent to toil in the mines and heavy industries of Japan. Constantine Constantinovich Petrovsky was a White Russian doctor who had escaped the revolution to Singapore via China, and, like so many ambitious and talented people in Asia, found a home in its cosmopolitan world. In 1939 he had volunteered to fight for the British Empire. His war took him to Europe, then back to Singapore, where he experienced the trauma of its fall in February 1942. With the rest of the garrison he was herded into the prison camp at Changi, then sent to work on the Burma–Siam railway; he survived its horrors only to be embarked on one of the ‘death ships’ to mine coal fifty or so kilometres away from Hiroshima: of the 50,000 who began this journey, 11,000 perished. On the morning of 6 August 1945 there was an air-raid warning, as there had been most days that summer, ‘and suddenly phew! Like earthquake. And black smoke… a column of this coming up like mushroom, spreading out, black and so on. I said “My God! They shot one plane, one bomb, they got oil tanks”… They were all shuddering.’ The next day the Japanese guards came and announced that everyone in Hiroshima was dead.5 The bomb had killed a microcosm of people caught up in the terrible conflict: prisoners of war, Koreans and Chinese labourers, students from Malaya on scholarships, and perhaps 3,200 Japanese American citizens who were stranded in the city after Pearl Harbor.6 Later, American planes flew over again, but this time they dropped food and medicines. Some of these supplies landed near Petrovsky’s mine. Petrovsky and his fellow prisoners of war passed their supplies to the Japanese, who suddenly had nothing to eat. They realized that something quite extraordinary had happened when they noticed that all the flies and the bed bugs had disappeared. The prisoners were put to work digging a trench. They were told that it was an air-raid shelter; only later did they realize it was to be their own grave: if the Americans invaded, they were to be lined up beside it and shot.7
Across their empire, the Japanese were still killing prisoners, and orders had been given in Taiwan, Borneo and elsewhere to exterminate whole camps. But there was, in the end, to be no mass slaughter.8 After the initial confusion, a strange mood of equanimity and freedom prevailed. Allied prisoners in Japan travelled without restraint, ‘commandeering’ cars and trucks, disarming Japanese servicemen on trains, entering houses in search of food and looking for women. There was an epidemic of venereal disease. Some prisoners even went into business, one Australian opening a hotel in Kyoto, where he sold sake and Asahi beer. There was remarkably little violence. The Japanese had all along feared this vast captive army, but now it was too weak to take its revenge. Many Allied servicemen visited the ruins of Hiroshima. They understood little of what had happened there: some thought the city had been a huge ammunition dump. In the words of one Australian major, they ‘did tours with cut lunches and hot boxes etc. and on a picnic. All parties boiled the billy, had their lunches, picked up souvenirs and generally picked around the debris and the ruins.’ There was little feeling of elation. The Japanese had, in every sense, been humbled. As an Australian private in Kobe recalled: ‘our former enemies became polite, likeable, respectful people, only too pleased to help wherever possible’. But, equally, the men felt little guilt or even compassion: ‘they had seen the shelters dug into the hills by them to be [put] into and set alight’. Then, on 9 August, came the bomb at Nagasaki, and the whole valley around it felt the fury of the impact; afterwards ‘not a sound. No birds, Not even a lizard. Just brown, treeless soil like cocoa, no grass, and twisted girderwork…’9
The day before the first bomb was dropped, most military commanders in mainland Asia believed that the war would go on for many months more. The British 14th Army had pushed down into Burma since their defeats of the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima on the borders of Assam in June and July 1944. The British took Rangoon, the country’s capital, in May 1945.10 But Japanese troops were still numerous in Burma’s southern peninsula, Tenasserim, and in the recently liberated areas the mood was tense. Long-range B-17 bombers were pounding Singapore. The Japanese continued to occupy Thailand, Indo-China, Malaya and Indonesia. Despite the island-hopping advance by General Douglas MacArthur’s forces in the Pacific, the Japanese had held on to the main islands of the Philippines, and pockets of resistance remained in Borneo. The Japanese army was also engaged in a huge and bloody war of attrition with the forces of nationalist China to the north of the capital, of Chiang Kai Shek’s republican government at Chungking. Across this vast area, the pursuit and killing of Japanese troops came to a halt only slowly. The political outlook was uncertain, while food and clothing were alarmingly scarce.
Malaya and Burma had borne the brunt of the fighting in Southeast Asia. Here, as word of the bomb spread through the bazaars and villages, the mood was ambivalent and the air full of new menace. It first arrived as ‘black-market news’. The past three and a half years had been a time of virtual isolation and rumour ruled: now there was rumour of a secret weapon, of an American invasion, that the Chinese were coming.11 In Malaya, when parachutists from the British Special Operations Executive began to break cover, in all their garb of modern warfare they seemed like visitors from another world. This was the first of a series of strange new wonders, along with jeeps, penicillin, walkie-talkies and atomic power. The news of the surrender was confirmed by radio broadcasts from the Allied headquarters in Ceylon. Only a few days before, to be caught listening to Allied radio would have meant arrest, torture and possibly even death, but the Japanese no longer had the will to enforce their diktats. In the camp for women internees in Singapore, Sheila Allan, the Eurasian daughter of a British mining engineer, kept a secret diary of a youth in captivity. On 10 August she marked her twenty-first birthday by writing: ‘Baby born to crippled Jewess – prophecy concerning her – a Jewess Rabbi dreamt that when a crippled woman gave birth to a boy we’ll hear of Peace!’ The next day she heard one of the POWs bringing the news by singing, ‘The war is over’.12
Then came other portents: war businesses liquidated overnight; the gambling syndicates and lotteries that had flourished in the occupied lands cashed in their assets. There were celebrations that ranged from the quiet consumption of hidden bottles of brandy and whisky in Malaya to outright rejoicing in Burma. In the mountainous forest fringes of Malaya, the Chinese peasants who taken shelter there slaughtered their pigs and fowl. In the towns, Chinese papermakers and tailors prepared flags of the four victorious powers: Britain, the United States, Russia, and Chiang Kai Shek’s China. Then, in a sudden rush of confidence, Malaya burst into light. The blackouts during the Allied bombing had created ‘cities of dreadful night’; but now light bulbs appeared on verandas and the ‘five-foot’ walkways of shophouses.13 The great ‘Worlds’ – the amusement parks where the townsfolk came to play and to trade in one of the great spectacles of local life – turned on their show-lights and resumed their gyre. People went on a spending spree with freshly printed Japanese notes bearing their distinctive ‘banana’ design. But the mood was soon deflated. Inflation spread like a virus. Famine loomed. Everywhere people were anxiously on the move, to reach their families, or to get to the port cities where a sudden bounty of food and clothing was expected. And there were others – Taiwanese auxiliaries, mistresses of Japanese officers, informers, police and profiteers – who took to the shadows, fearing the reckoning that was to come.14
Only slowly were these rumours and portents confirmed by the behaviour of the Japanese themselves. In August 1945 there were around 630,000 armed Japanese across the whole region. Much of the rank and file was too young to have been complicit in Japan’s lurch towards militarism in the 1930s. Many of the over 100,000 Japanese civilians had lived in Southeast Asia before the outbreak of the war, and called it home. They were all victims in a sense. Their conditions varied. Many of the soldiers who had been involved in the fighting in Burma were diseased and malnourished. Those surrendered in Malaya, Indo-China and Indonesia were likely to be relatively healthy and better fed. There were emotional announcements in camps and work places. Many felt humiliated by the terms of Japan’s surrender. In Singapore the regional commander, Lieutenant General Seishiro Itagaki, announced that he would resist the Allies. He had laid plans for guerrilla warfare. His supreme commander, Field Marshal Count Terauchi, stated that he would submit only to a personal order from the emperor. A prince of the ruling house, Haruhito Kanin, flew with it to Terauchi’s headquarters in Saigon on 19 August, and Itagaki was summoned to receive it. Only then was the Imperial Rescript published in the Singapore press, together with Itagaki’s emotional appeal to his men that the imperial command was now ‘absolute and irrevocable’.15
Many Japanese officers – 300 in Singapore alone in one account – saw the surrender as a racial apocalypse, and took their own lives: some in the lounge of the luxury Raffles Hotel where they heard the news from Itagaki.16 Others who submitted to surrender and the prospect of imprisonment were anxious as to whether they would receive the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which Japan itself had not observed. Books on military law were at a sudden premium. The officers disposed of their plundered goods, burnt archives and, in some cases, killed witnesses to their atrocities. In the end the bulk of the Japanese garrison at Singapore marched itself into internment at Jurong, in the west of the island. British and Allied prisoners of war remained concentrated in the east, at Changi. But after the surrender Japanese units were ordered off the island and across the short causeway to the Malay peninsula. At Kranji, where the Commonwealth war cemetery now stands, they first met the Allied forces: Gurkha paratroops from Special Operations Executive. As one local POW observed: ‘It went full circle – we saw the whole lot, thousands and thousands, marching their way to Woodlands, past our camp.’17 These were the beachheads the Japanese had stormed in February 1942. They headed into the desolate, deserted rubber estates of the interior, As the Allies brought ahead plans to reoccupy the region, it was still unclear whether or not large numbers of Japanese would fight to the death.