‘An essential and stimulating account of this crucial time’
Patrick French
‘A spellbinding account of Britain's Asian campaigns during World War II. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, archives and personal accounts, the authors successfully evoke the ambience and human tragedies of an empire at ebb tide… Forgotten Armies is much more than a narrative of military history; it excels at lampooning the pretensions of colonial society’
Jeff Kingston, Japan Times
‘A model of history… the book's scope is panoramic, its pace breathless… Forgotten Armies answers back for those whose silence was an essential part of their servitude’
Asad Latif, Sunday Times (Singapore)
‘Dazzling… a vivid picture of the complacency and folly of British rule’ Herald
‘An original and comprehensive account of one of the least understood aspects of the War with Japan. The book will be a worthy successor and complement to Christopher Thorne's classic Allies of a Kind’
Ronald Spector, author of Eagle Against the Sun: the American War with Japan
‘A must-read… The authors deserve our congratulations’
Asian Review of Books
‘A masterful account of the fate of British Asia during the Second World War. Far more than military or political history, the book presents a fascinating account of how individual lives and social relations changed from the heyday of the British Raj to the rise and fall of Japan's Asian empire’
Akira Iriye, Charles Warren Professor of American History, Harvard University
‘Forgotten Armies now takes its rightful place as the definitive history of the Second World War in Southeast Asia’
Roger Spiller, George C. Marshall Professor of Military History, US Army Command and General Staff College
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper are acknowledged as two of the world's leading historians of India and Southeast Asia, having written and researched widely in their respective fields.
Christopher Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge. His books include Imperial Meridian, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire and The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 – 1914.
In June 2005 Christopher Bayly won the Wolfson Prize for History for his contribution to historical writing.
Tim Harper is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is the author of the End of Empire and the Making of Malaya.
Britain's Asian Empire and the war with Japan
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Published by Allen Lane 2004
Published in Penguin Books 2005
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Copyright © Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, 2004
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192719-0
List of Illustrations
Maps
Some Key Characters
Preface: The Many ‘Forgotten Armies’
Prologue, Part I: Escaping Colonialism
Japan's Asian vision and the coming of war
Aung San's Far Eastern odyssey
‘Signor Mazzotta’ flees to Berlin
Mr Tan Kah Kee visits Mao
Prologue, Part II: Journeys through Empire
The great crescent
A Malayan pastorale
The ‘new world’ of Singapore
Malaise
1. 1941: Last of the Indian and Burmese Days
India on the brink
Indian politics as usual?
Burma unready
The world of the hills and the ‘tribes’
Dorman-Smith reaches his ‘backwater’
Burmese and others
Endgame: the governor and the politicians
2. 1942: A Very British Disaster
The fortress that never was
The arrow leaves the bow
The battle of Malaya
‘The modern Pompeiians’
Flotsam and jetsam
3. 1942: Debacle in Burma
The road to Rangoon
From scorched earth to green hell
Burma's false dawn
Death of the innocents
Would India hold?
Total defence in the hills: the Lushai levies
The Nagas, the Kachins and the anthropologists
The monsoon of 1942: an unnoticed turning point
4. 1942: The Abyss and the Way Back
The rape of Malaya
The ‘New Malai’
Desperate journeys: Burma in late 1942
India ablaze
The forgotten armies mobilize
5. 1943: Valleys of the Shadow of Death
Uneasy allies
Another fiasco in Arakan
India in the doldrums
The great starvation
The slow fight back begins
6. 1943: Personal Wars
Ba Maw's apotheosis
The ‘Spirit of Asia’ and the Malay nation
The second coming of the Indian National Army
Life in the time of tapioca
‘Life without salt’
War by proxy
High councils: Tokyo, Cairo and Tehran
7. 1944: The Pivot of the Fighting
Japan's final throw
India on the offensive
Battle commences: Imphal and Kohima
The politics of war
Japan's forgotten army
8. 1944: The Nemesis of Greater East Asia
Heroism and murder in the hills
The crumbling of ‘Free Burma’
Roads to the death railway
Silent armies
The peninsular war
New balls at Wimbledon
9. 1945: Freedoms Won and Lost
India mobilized
Ba Maw's last stand
Aung San's revolt
Rangoon falls again
The fading light of the new Asia
10. August 1945: An End and a Beginning
Final journeys down the crescent
Forgotten armies, forgotten wars
Notes
Bibliography
Index
1. ‘Great World’ amusement park, Singapore, 1930s (National Archives of Singapore)
2. Flower girls supporting the China Relief Fund, c. 1940 (National Archives of Singapore)
3. Reginald Dorman-Smith touring the Shan States, 1941 (Imperial War Museum)
4. U Saw and Leo Amery in London, 1941 (British Library)
5. Claire Chennault, Stilwell and the Flying Tigers (Corbis)
6. Special Branch portrait of Lai Teck (Imperial War Museum)
7. Chin Peng (Imperial War Museum)
8. Chiang Kai Shek, Madame Chiang and General Joseph Stilwell (Hulton)
9. Yamashita: ‘The Tiger of Malaya’ (National Archives of Singapore)
10. Percival in May 1941 (Imperial War Museum)
11. Straits Settlements Volunteers Force, c. May 1941 (Imperial War Museum)
12. The sinking of HMS Prince of Wales (Imperial War Museum)
13. Japanese war artist's painting of the Singapore surrender (Cheong Yew Kee, National Archives of Singapore)
14. Sketch of sook ching massacres by Liu Kang (Liu Kang)
15. Japanese troops marching into Rangoon (Popperfoto)
16. A bombed-out Buddhist temple in Rangoon, 1942 (Imperial War Museum)
17. Refugee map of the route from Burma to India, 1942 (courtesy of the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge)
18, 19. Indian refugees fleeing Rangoon, 1942 (Imperial War Museum)
20. Two pictures from the Statesman's coverage of the Bengal famine, 1943 (British Library, copyright © The Sunday Statesman Ltd)
21. Lord Wavell at a Rotary Club soup kitchen, Calcutta, 1943 (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
22. Subhas Bose taking the salute with Field Marshal Tojo, Municipal Building, Singapore, 6 July 1943 (Netherlands Institute for War Documentation)
23. Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army propaganda leaflet (National Archives of Singapore)
24. ‘Comfort women’ from Malaya liberated in the Andaman Islands (Imperial War Museum)
25. Subhas Chandra Bose with Ba Maw in Rangoon, 1943 (courtesy of Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta)
26. Louis Mountbatten with General Auchinleck, Air Chief Marshal Peirse and General Giffard (University of Southampton Library)
27. West African troops arriving in India for the Burma front, 1944 (Imperial War Museum)
28. General Slim addressing the troops (Imperial War Museum)
29, 30. Indian troops (Punjab Regiment) and British troops in Arakan, 1944 (Imperial War Museum)
31. A Sikh patrol charging a foxhole, 1945 (Imperial War Museum)
32. Surrendered Indian National Army troops at Mount Popa (Imperial War Museum)
33. Aung San delivering a speech in Rangoon, c. 1945 (International Institute of Social History, Amstersdam)
34. Chinese fighters of Force 136, 1945 (Chang Teh Cheok, National Archives of Singapore)
Abdul Razak bin Hussein (b. 1922). A student at the elite Raffles College in Singapore on eve of fall of Malaya; then worked as an official in his native Pahang, where he secretly aided resistance. Second Prime Minister of Malaysia, 1970 – 76.
Amery, Rt Hon., Leopold, MP (b. 1873). Conservative politician and Secretary of State for India and Burma, 1940 – 45.
Auchinleck, General Sir 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; Minister of Defence under Ba Maw, 1943 – 5. President of Anti-Fascist People's Front Freedom League. Assassinated 1947.
Ayer, S. A. Propaganda and Information Minister in Subhas Bose's Government of Free India; accompanied him on the 1945 campaigns in Burma and wrote Unto him a witness after the war.
Ba Maw (b. 1893). Lawyer, politician and Prime Minister of Burma, 1937 – 9. Emerged as main collaborator with Japanese 1942 and became ‘Adipadi’ (First Man) of independent Burma 1943. Fled to Tokyo, imprisoned by Allies 1945.
Bennett, Major-General Henry Gordon (b. 1887). Gallipoli veteran and successful businessman. Commander of Australian Imperial Force in Malaya, 1941 – 2. Escaped Singapore in controversial circumstances.
Bose, Rash Behari (b. 1880 or 1886). Indian radical anti-colonialist; escaped to Japan following 1905 – 10 radical movement in Bengal; leader of Indian Independence leagues, East and Southeast Asia. Died 1945.
Bose, Subhas Chandra, or ‘Netaji’ (‘leader’) (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 1944; presumed dead in plane crash September 1945.
Bower, Ursula Graham (b. 1914). British anthropologist working among the Naga hill people of eastern Assam; helped co-ordinate local resistance; known as ‘the Naga Queen’.
Brooke-Popham, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert (b. 1878). Brought from retirement after Governorship of Kenya, 1937 – 9, to become Commander in Chief, Far East, 1940 – 41. Replaced by Wavell in January 1942.
Chapman, F. Spencer (b. 1907). Well-known author; surveying and film-making in Arctic and Tibet. Appointed to 101 Special Training School in Singapore, and senior ‘stay-behind’ officer in Malaya until arrival of Force 136. After the war, worked for the Outward Bound Trust and as a schoolmaster. He shot himself in 1973.
Chennault, Claire (b. 1890). Commander of American Air Volunteer Group (the ‘Flying Tigers’) fighting with Chiang Kai Shek against Japanese; leader of the air defence of Burma, 1942.
Chin Peng (b. 1924). Nom de guerre of Ong Boon Hua. Communist liaison officer with Force 136 in Perak, Malaya. Secretary-general of the Malayan Communist Party, 1947–. Led rebellion against the colonial government in 1948 and became ‘the most wanted man in the British Empire’.
Chiang Kai Shek (b. 1887). Chinese nationalist leader and ‘Generalissimo’ of Chinese armies fighting Japan since 1936; drawn into fighting in Burma 1942 to keep Burma Road open. Pressed for Allied campaign against Burma 1943 – 4.
Cocteau, Jean (b. 1889). French writer and playwright. Visited Malaya and Singapore in 1937. Representative of the many literary travellers who passed through Southeast Asia in the 1930s.
Cooper, Alfred Duff (b. 1890). Conservative politician. Secretary of State for War (1935 – 7) and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1938, when he resigned in protest against the Munich Pact. Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and ‘Resident Minister’ in Singapore, December 1941 – January 1942. Married to socialite Diana Manners (b. 1892).
Cripps, Sir Richard Stafford (b. 1889). Labour politician, Leader of House of Commons 1942; visited India to treat with Indian National Congress (the Cripps’ mission) 1942; visited India with Labour Government's Cabinet Mission 1946.
Davis, John (b. 1910). 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). Burmese civil servant, Secretary to Government, 1939 – 41. Burma Government representative in Delhi, 1942 – 3. Commissioned, joined Civil Administration Secretariat (Burma) during reconquest, 1944 – 5, later wrote official history of the war and military administration.
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.
Fujiwara, Iwaichi (b. 1908). Japanese intelligence officer; instrumental in formation of the Indian National Army and in liaison with Malay nationalists.
Furnivall, J. S. (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.
Haq, Fazlul (b. 1873). Bengali Muslim political leader. Chief minister Bengal, 1937 – 43. Blamed by many for inaction as Bengal famine began.
Hirohito, Showa Emperor of Japan (b. 1901). Implicated in aggressive Japanese policies in China and Southeast Asia. Remained on throne in 1945, under American tutelage.
Ho Thean Fook (b. 1921?). A schoolteacher in Papan, Perak. Recruited to communist underground and the jungle army. After the war he abandoned politics and worked as a bank clerk.
Ibrahim, Sultan of Johore (b. 1873). Independently minded sultan of southernmost state of peninsular Malaya; ruled from 1895 until 1959. Friendly to Japan before the war, but stayed aloof from politics during the occupation.
Ibrahim Yaacob (b. 1911). Leader of pre-war Kesatuan Melayu Muda who worked with Japanese regime to further Malay independence. Fled to Indonesia in August 1945 and died in Jakarta 1979.
Iida, Lieutenant-General Shojiro (b. 1888). Commander of Japanese armies in Burma 1941 – 3.
Khin Myo Chit. Socialist radical, Buddhist and literary figure. Women's official in Ba Maw's government 1943 – 5; teacher in Rangoon University after war.
Konoe, Prince Fumimaro (b. 1891). Right-wing Japanese politician and foreign minister 1940 – 41, replaced by Tojo. Came to doubt wisdom of assault on Britain and USA. Died 1945.
Lai Teck (b. 1900?). The 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.
Lakshmi Swaminathan (b. 1914). Madras-born doctor. Settled in Singapore. Led the women's regiment of the Indian National Army, the ‘Rani of Jhansi Regiment’.
Lee Kuan Yew (b. 1923). A student at Raffles College in Singapore in 1942. Worked as a translator for the Japanese during the war. Prime Minister (1959 – 90) and later Senior Minister (1990–) of Singapore.
Lim Bo Seng (b. 1909). Singapore Kuomintang leader. Recruited agents for SOE in Nationalist China, after the fall of Singapore, and returns undercover with Force 136 to Malaya in late 1943. Died in a Japanese prison in 1944. Canonized as a national martyr in Singapore.
Lim Boon Keng (b. 1869). Straits Chinese leader, educator and social reformer. Forced by the Japanese to head an ‘Overseas Chinese Association’. Returned to China where he died in 1957.
Lim Kean Siew (b. 1922). Son of leading Penang Straits Chinese Lim Chean Ean. A student at Raffles College in Singapore on the eve of the war. Memoirist of the Japanese occupation of Penang. A prominent socialist politician in the 1960s.
Leyden, John L. (b. 1904). Burma Frontier Service from 1927. Well connected with Kachins and Chins; involved in covert operations 1942 – 3. Returned to Frontier Areas Administration 1946.
Linlithgow, Lord Victor Alexander John Hope (b. 1887). Viceroy of India, 1936 – 43, declared war on behalf of India 1939, directed suppression of 1942 Quit India movement.
Maung Maung, Bo (b. 1920). Young recruit to Aung San's Burma Independence Army who takes part in the anti-Japanese revolt in 1945 and later career in Burmese military.
McCall, A. G. British civil officer working among the Lushai of the eastern Bengal hills; organized the Lushai Total Defence scheme, 1942 – 3.
Mountbatten, Admiral Lord Louis (b. 1900). Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, 1943 – 6; rebuilt army morale 1943; assumed overall direction Imphal-Kohima campaign 1944; cultivated relations with Aung San's Burma Defence Army, 1945 and aided its rebellion against the Japanese March 1945. Viceroy of India 1947.
Mustapha Hussain (b. 1910). A schoolteacher on the eve of occupation and vice-president of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda; accompanied the Japanese advance to Singapore, but rapidly became disillusioned with them. Wrote a vivid memoir in defence of his reputation.
Ne Win (b. 1911). One of ‘Thirty Comrades’ of Burma Independence Army; military commander of Burmese Defence Forces 1943– 5; AFPFL. Later dictator of Burma.
Nehru, Jawaharlal (b. 1889). Congress Socialist leader, he favoured the Allies over the Axis, but went to jail following the Quit India movement, 1942; later first Prime Minister of independent India.
Ng Yeh Lu (b. 1913). Leading public face of the Malayan Communist Party in 1937 – 41. Arrested by Japanese 1942 – 5. Turned away from left-wing politics after 1945.
Nu, Thakin (b. 1907). Burmese student activist and devout Buddhist. Minister in Ba Maw's government 1943 – 5; AFPFL, 1945 – 6. Became Prime Minister to lead Burmese independence on assassination of Aung San, 1947.
Onn bin Jaafar, Dato (b. 1895). Leading Malay of Johore. Worked as a food controller and district officer during the war. In 1946, headed the United Malays National Organization: the first national leader of Malay opinion. Knighted 1953.
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 from 1945.
Pearce, Major-General Sir Charles Frederick (b. 1892). Governor's Secretary, Burma, 1939. Commissioned into army, became a key figure in Civil Administration Secretariat (Burma) during reconquest, 1943 – 5. Counsellor to Governor 1946.
Percival, Lieutenant-General Arthur Ernest (b. 1897). GOC Malaya Command, 1941. Interned as a prisoner of war and later active in ex-POW associations.
Purcell, Victor (b. 1896). Malayan civil servant, and a key figure in planning for post-war Malaya. Returned as adviser on Chinese affairs in 1945. Later critic of post-war policy; historian of the Chinese in Southeast Asia.
Rudra, Ajit ‘Jick’. Leading soldier in the British Indian army, one of few who held a King's Commission, a key staff officer of Auchinleck, he helped sustain Indian army morale.
Saw, U (b. 1900). Minister of Forests, later prime minister of Burma; flew to London 1941 on goodwill mission; imprisoned in Uganda during war for contacting Japanese. Returned Burma 1946; implicated in assassination of Aung San 1947; hanged 1948.
Shahnawaz Khan. Punjabi Muslim soldier, from an old military family. Stayed aloof from Mohan Singh's INA, but joined when Subhas Bose took the helm. Fought in Burma. A defendant at the Red Fort Trials; later Congress MP for Meerut.
Shinozaki, Mamoru (b. 1910). Pre-war Japanese press attaché in Singapore, convicted of espionage; a leading Japanese civil affairs officer in Singapore, 1942–5. Emerged as a ‘protector’ of the Chinese and Eurasian communities.
Singh, Mohan (b. 1909). Sikh soldier. Recruited by the Fujiwara Kikan to lead the first Indian National Army, but his independent stance led to his removal by the Japanese in December 1942. Detained for the duration of the war. He surrendered to the British in Java in 1945. He joined Congress and was elected to the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Indian parliament).
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.
Smith Dun (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, 1946.
Suhrawardy, H. S. (b. 1892). Bengali Muslim politician. Minister of Labour 1937. Minister of Supplies in Bengal Government during 1943 famine.
Suzuki, Keiji, Colonel (Burmese name Bo Mogyo). Founding member of Minami Kikan organization planning Burmese rising against the British. A leader of the Burma Independence Army, 1942.
Tan Cheng Lock (b. 1883). Straits Chinese leader, businessman and legislator. Fled to India on Japanese invasion of Malaya. Figure-head leader of left-wing united front in 1947; founding president of the Malayan Chinese Association in 1949. Knighted 1952.
Tan Kah Kee (b. 1874). Leader of the Overseas Chinese; headed the China Relief Fund (1937 – 41). As Japanese invaded Malaya, British turned to him to organize last-ditch Chinese resistance. Before capitulation, fled to Java, where he spent the rest of the war.
Tan Malaka (b. 1897). Sumatra-born Comintern leader. Hiding in Singapore on outbreak of war, and later escaped to Indonesia. Died during the Indonesian revolution in 1949.
Thein Pe, Myint (b. 1914). Burmese Communist who escaped to India in 1942; wrote What Happened in Burma, an attack on Japanese occupation. Sent to Chungking, China, but maintained links with Burmese resistance to Japanese. Secretary, Burma Communist Party 1945.
Thomas, Sir T. Shenton (b. 1879). Governor of Singapore and High Commissioner of the Malay States 1934 – 42. Detained in Singapore and interned in Taiwan.
Tin Tut (b. 1905). Barrister and Burmese member of Indian Civil Service, accompanied U Saw to London, 1941; joined Dorman-Smith in Simla 1942; left ICS and became financial spokesman for AFPFL government. Assassinated 1948.
Tojo, Hideki (b. 1884). Japanese military commander and Prime Minister and Minister of War from 1941 – 4. Masterminded Greater East Asia plan. Hanged for war crimes 1947.
Tokugawa, Marquis (b. 1886). Last of Tokugawa dynasty. Political advisor to Japanese occupying forces in Malaya.
Tsuji, Masanobu (b. 1902). Influential Japanese strategist of invasion of Malaya. Leading force behind sook ching massacres. Went to ground in Bangkok in August 1945. Escaped war-crimes trials to forge career in politics.
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.
Wang Ching Wei (b. 1883). Japanese puppet ruler in China.
Wavell, General Sir Archibald (b. 1883). Supreme Allied Commander South West Pacific. Viceroy of India (1943 – 6).
Yamashita, Tomoyuki (b. 1885). Commander Japanese 25th Army; the ‘Tiger of Malaya’. Later served in China and the Philippines. Hanged for war crimes in 1946.
‘It seemed like the end of everything.’ So thought many of the British administrators and civilians who fled precipitately in the face of the stunning Japanese thrust into Malaya and Burma during the ‘cold weather’ of 1941 and 1942. To the people of Asia the world had been turned upside down. There were few parallels in history to this sudden and dramatic humiliation of an old and complacent supremacy – the British Empire in Asia – by an underrated and even despised enemy. One might have to look as far back as Alexander the Great's lightning destruction of the Persian Empire of Darius to find anything like it. The memory of what Asians saw as abandonment and betrayal by their fleeing white masters in those terrible days of 1942 still lingers amongst the old generation of the former Indian, Malayan and Burmese servants of the British Raj. The ultimate victors forged heroic legends around the later successes of British arms in the Eastern War: Wingate's Chindits, Force 136 in Malaya, Sir William Slim's great victories over the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima in 1944. Yet these events never quite eradicated the bitter sense of humiliation felt by those who witnessed the surrender of the Singapore garrison and the flight of the ‘heaven born’ civil servants from Malaya and Burma in 1942.
The revolution which took place in the minds of Asians and some, though not all, Europeans was greater even than the political and economic revolutions on the ground. For in reality the British in Asia struggled back from the abyss after that year dependent on the temporary sufferance of Asians. Above all, it was Indian soldiers, civilian labourers and businessmen who made possible the victory of 1945. Their price was the rapid independence of India. Equally, an independent Burmese army controlled much of the countryside into which the British 14th Army stormed in 1944 and ’45 after the dramatic rebirth of its military prowess. Its prize, too, was a rapid transition to Burmese self-rule. Even in Malaya where British rule struggled on after 1945 for twelve years, it did so to a significant extent because conservative Chinese and Malays wished to use the British connection as a shield against communist insurgency.
These events are now passing from the memory of the living, and need reassessment for a new generation. This book tells the stories of many soldiers and recounts the great battles and guerrilla campaigns in which they took part. Yet it is not a conventional military history. Innumerable fine histories have been written of the fall of Singapore and the Burma campaign of 1942 – 5. Dozens of memoirs and web sites tell poignant tales of the sufferings of Allied troops on the Burma–Thailand railway and of conditions inside Changi prison on Singapore island. Instead of retelling these stories, this book is intended to create a panoramic picture of one of the world's most important and populous regions as it was ravaged by the consequences of warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease and famine. The ‘forgotten armies’ of the title certainly include Britain's 14th, which finally triumphed over neglect in London and Washington, and malaria, monsoon rain and poor morale in the field. They also include the Indian National Army which fought alongside the Japanese to liberate India, but found itself to be the ghost at the feast in Prime Minister Nehru's independent and non-aligned India. The book's forgotten armies also include the Burma Independence Army of Aung San, father of today's Burmese democracy activist, Aung San Suu Kyi, Chin Peng's communist guerrilla army in Malaya and even the huge forces thrown by the Japanese against India in 1942. All deserve this title, though the opening of archives and people's desire to memorialize the history of their nations have begun to renew the historical record.
This book also considers the vast ‘armies’ of Asian workers who laboured and died in the terrible wartime conditions prevailing in the ‘great crescent’ of former British territory. For these armies are still forgotten even today. Huge bodies of Indian refugees poured out of Burma into India in 1942. Thousands died in the mud and ‘green hell’ of the high, forested passes of Manipur and Assam. The Asian labourers who worked and died on the Burma–Thailand railway – men, women and children – perhaps outnumbered the Allied prisoners by more than ten to one. They, too, are largely forgotten. Hundreds of thousands of Indian coolies, tea estate workers and tribal people were thrust by want or the hope of reward into supporting and supplying the Japanese and British armies and associated bodies of guerrilla fighters. These men, women and children also laboured and perished along the high passes of Assam to the north and in the dense jungles of central Malaya to the south. Armies of nurses and doctors – Indian, Chinese, Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese – provided aid and compassion in the midst of fighting which brought the brutalities of the Middle Ages face-to-face with modern mechanized killing. Across the whole region as many as 100,000 women and girls were pressed into service as sex slaves, some by direct compulsion, as with Japan's ‘comfort women’, and many more by the insidious operation of famine and the ‘free market’ in the British territories.
This book spans a huge territory from India to Malaya: the heart of the British empire in the East. Of course, ‘British Asia’ was larger than this. It encompassed Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports of China; there were possessions east of Singapore: the territories of the ‘White Rajah’ of Sarawak and the British North Borneo Company. The experiences of Hong Kong and Shanghai are central episodes of the war in China; and the fate of British Borneo became interwoven with that of the Netherlands East Indies. But these campaigns lie somewhat outside our story. We focus instead on the connected crescent of land between Calcutta and Singapore: the pivot of the fighting of the Far Eastern war. We do so because this was the territory spanned by the people of these forgotten armies themselves, whose experiences give a unity to our story. Since the immediate post-war years, the historical study of South and Southeast Asia has collapsed into a series of academic specialities and public memory has also fragmented. Burmese history, in particular, has been almost forgotten following the country's retreat into virtual isolation after 1960. The story of India at war from 1939 to 1945 has been pushed to the margins by the telling and retelling of the story of independence and the partition of British India into the republics of India and Pakistan. The memory of war in Malaysia and Singapore is troubled by many events that later national histories have tried to forget, and the full story of the resistance to the Japanese has been obscured by the shadow of the communist insurgency of 1948 – 60. Above all, it has been forgotten that the histories of these different regions were firmly intertwined, and above all during the Second World War. Japanese commercial communities across the whole region provided an unofficial fifth column for their army's invasion of 1942, for instance. Indian lawyers, businessmen and plantation workers scattered throughout Southeast Asia by decades of migration became recruits to the Japanese sponsored Indian Independence League and the pro-Japanese Indian National Army. Punjabis and Baluchis from the far northwest of Britain's Indian Empire fought in Burma and Malaya under the British flag. The Overseas Chinese too fought Japan in Malaya and, with their financial muscle, in China itself. Japanese armies and their camp followers thrust together into one unit the British, French and Dutch colonies in 1941 and 1942. For some months in 1945, the whole area from the borders of Bengal and Assam almost as far as the Australian Sea was united by the Allies for the first and only time in a single, interconnected administration. The very term ‘Southeast Asia’ was coined to describe this huge crescent of land. The aim of this book, therefore, is to reassemble and reunite the different, often unfamiliar but connected narratives of these epic events and to put the stories of the great men and the great battles of the period into the context of the histories of ordinary Asian men and women.
In doing so we are conscious of our debt to the many hundreds of powerful memoirs and histories that have been written of the war years in the East. We also recognize the debt we owe to the many people who have carefully written and preserved their memories or have given their papers and their oral testimony to the great public collections in Britain and Asia. These include those in London (the British Library and National Archives; Liddell Hart Centre for War Studies at King's College London; the Imperial War Museum); Cambridge (the Centre of South Asian Studies, Royal Commonwealth Society Collection); Oxford (Rhodes House Library); Southampton University; Singapore (the Singapore National Archives and National Library of Singapore); Malaysia (the Arkib Negara Malaysia and Perpustakaan Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur); and the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta. We are particularly grateful to Dr Kevin Greenbank, Ms Rachel Rowe, Professor Sugata Bose, Dr Susan Bayly, Dr Thant Myint-U, Ms Chua Ai Lin, Dr Katherine Prior, Dr Paul Kratoska, Professor Jomo K. S., Dr Ronald Hyam, Dr Lizzie Colling-ham, Ms Yeo Seok Lian and to Norman and Collette Harper. Many people in Britain, India, Myanmar, Malaysia and Singapore have helped us elucidate points of detail and while we cannot name them all we are grateful to all of them. This book has its origins in a document-based ‘special subject’ we taught in the Cambridge History Faculty between 1997 and 2002. We are grateful to the several generations of students who made this an enlightening and enlivening experience.
JAPAN’S ASIAN VISION AND THE COMING OF WAR
Two events in Japan towards the close of 1940 signalled the gathering of the typhoon across Asia. On 4 October the Japanese government announced a three-way military alliance with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy as Hitler's and Mussolini's armies rampaged across Europe and North Africa. Then November witnessed a climax of Japanese nationalistic fervour as the people celebrated what the authorities claimed was the 2,600th anniversary of the foundation of the Japanese Empire. The country was festooned with flags and pictures of Emperor Hirohito. Millions feasted in the streets. Some 50,000 representatives from Japan and all over the world, including members of the Hitler Youth, shouted in unison ‘Banzai!’, ‘a thousand years!’ or ‘long life!’, while ‘warships anchored in Tokyo Bay fired salutes; and radio coverage of the joyous event continued throughout the day’.1 The festivities were repeated across Asia. The 3,000-strong Japanese community in Singapore celebrated with a sports festival, sumo wrestling and an archery tournament. The local Japanese Boy Scout troop turned out on parade.2 One of the messages promoted in these celebrations was that Japan was leader of the ‘Asiatic peoples’. Many Vietnamese, Burmese and Indians resident in Tokyo eagerly participated. Indian organizations, founded to press for India's immediate freedom from British rule, congratulated the emperor. Almost unnoticed, Aung San, a young, taciturn Burmese radical, slipped into Tokyo airport from China the day the festivities drew to a close. The shape of the future great Southeast Asian war was already outlined.
Since their country's spectacular leap forward during the Victorian age, the Japanese devoutly believed that being modern meant being imperialist and Japan's zone of conquest would be the former Chinese Empire. The Japanese regarded China in rather the same way that the previous generation of Britons had regarded France, as a cultural reference point, but a contemptible nation-state. One young nationalist explained it like this: ‘America and Britain had been colonizing China for many years. China was a backward nation… we felt Japan should go there and use Japanese technology and leadership to make China a better country.’3 The Great Depression of the 1930s added further economic justifications for aggressive nationalism. Japan needed an easily plundered store of raw materials and already had a client kingdom in Manchukuo, the former Chinese province of Manchuria.4 But now nationalist China itself was stirring under the leadership of the mercurial Chiang Kai Shek and began to reassert its sovereignty in the north.
In 1937 skirmishes between China and Japan had turned to bloody, all-out war. Japan conquered most of the eastern seaboard of China and brutally suppressed its civilian population. The Japanese military, with Emperor Hirohito firmly at its head, regarded international law as a Western fabrication. Thousands of prisoners of war were summarily executed. The Japanese armies experimented with chemical and biological weapons and carried out what they routinely called ‘annihilation campaigns’.5 The nature of the coming war in Southeast Asia was now clearly signalled, too. Yet the imperial army somehow could not seem to finish the fight. The Chinese forces fell back on the city of Chungking, far inland up the Yangtze river. Chungking sustained continuous aerial bombardment. The British and Americans, who opposed Japanese policies in China, kept the embattled nationalists going with financial support and provisions. Americans saw China as a great future trade partner and President Franklin Roosevelt himself had family business connections in China. Americans applauded the advances that American Christian missions seemed to be making in the country. China would one day be the United States of Asia: prosperous, Christian and free.
Relations between Japan and the USA soon soured further.6 The USA began to re-equip Chiang's armies. The German invasion of France in 1940 worsened the outlook further for the Chinese, with Japan seizing French Indo-China and cutting off one major route to Chungking. Yet the British and Americans still managed to supply Chiang along a road which snaked up from Rangoon through the hills into southern China.7 Day and night, huge quantities of goods and war supplies poured northward as lorries, tail to bumper, strained up through the boom town of Lashio to the Chinese border. This was the famous Burma Road.8 It remained a lifeline for the Chinese, except for a few months in 1940, when the British authorities panicked and closed it, afraid to antagonize the Japanese while an invasion of mainland Britain seemed imminent. Then came the announcement of the Japanese military pact with Germany and Italy, provoking the British into opening the Burma Road again, to the ill-concealed rage of the Japanese.9 The British Empire was now firmly in Japanese sights and the Japanese military and foreign office began to cultivate Britain's enemies in Asia with a new vigour.
In the eyes of the outside world Japan seemed secure and powerful. It was allied with the victorious Nazis. Its most dangerous enemy, Soviet Russia, seemed to be reconciled with Germany. Yet Japan's rulers were plagued by anxiety. They believed that their nation had always suffered from diplomatic and political isolation. With American embargoes now being applied to oil and other essential war materials, and with 70 per cent of its budget going on the China war, Japan ‘would have to do something or collapse’.10 By the summer of 1941, when both Britain and Russia were distracted by the war against Germany, Japan's course of action seemed inevitable: the Japanese would have to break out of what they called the ‘ABCD encirclement’.11 The initials referred to America, Britain, China and the Dutch East Indies. By building up a yet bigger empire in Asia, Japan hoped to reinforce its own security. It would finish off the Nationalist Chinese and seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies, the mineral resources and rubber of French Indo-China and British Malaya. It would create a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in which grateful Asian nations would live under the tutelage of Japan and contribute in turn to its material needs. The bluntly named Total War Research Institute in Tokyo buzzed with grandiose plans for conquest.
Japan was not really particularly well placed to fight a war in Southeast Asia. The army was preoccupied with China and Russia and paid little attention to the region. The powerful Pacific fleet which was soon to strike such a devastating blow against the Americans saw Pearl Harbor as its primary target. But the Foreign Office and some major Japanese firms with overseas interests had been keeping an eye on Southeast Asia for a long time, if only because Chiang and the Chinese nationalists had many wealthy backers in the region. By the mid 1930s there were scores of ‘language’ and ‘foreign affairs’ schools throughout Japan specializing in Malay, Burmese, Thai and Indian languages. These schools were really mini military academies. They maintained punishing regimes of sumo wrestling and martial arts along with language instruction.12 Their ideal was a kind of muscular Buddhism mixed with emperor worship. Right-wing politicians with contacts in the imperial cabinet loved to tour them and make speeches about Japan's manifest destiny as the dominant state in Asia.
One further advantage lay in Japan's pan-Asian diplomacy. Since the 18 70s when it began to catch up with the West, other Asian nations had regarded Japan with admiration. In 1904 – 5, Japan destroyed attacking Russian armies and sunk the Russian imperial navy. It became the first Asian country to defeat a European power for more than a century. Newly born babies in India and Burma were named after the Japanese admirals. Asians ‘looked to the east’. In Thailand, which was never a colony of the West, the Japanese imperial revival of the Meiji era had captivated the reforming kings of the Chakri dynasty. King Vajiravudh had expatiated on its example in the Thai press under a pseudonym. Warming to the contemporary racist language, he also denounced the Chinese as ‘the Jews of the Orient’. By the 1930s, a significant element within the Thai military elite had embraced the pan-Asian dream. They saw in alliance with Japan the prospect of realizing the goal of a greater Thailand, particularly the recapture of territories which had been lost to the French in Indo-China and to the British in Malaya. Even to Muslims in Britain's Southeast Asian colonies, understanding the Japanese achievement was seen as essential to being modern. One of the earliest Malay descriptions of a ‘nation’ came from a translation of the Egyptian reformer Mustafa Kamil's travels in Meiji Japan. In 1906, the Singapore journal Al-Imam – ‘The Preacher’ – praised Sultan Abu Bakar of Johore for visiting Japan: ‘his heart was filled with the intention to work and to uplift the Malay People to the highest standard possible as… the Japanese had done for their people’.13 His successors kept the connection alive: his son, Sultan Ibrahim, visited Tokyo in 1934, where he was feted by the aristocracy, and given imperial honours for his protection of Japanese interests in his state.
As anti-colonial movements burgeoned in India and Southeast Asia, radical nationalists flocked to Tokyo. Students from Asian countries eagerly attended courses in the new Japanese universities. They joined anti-colonial debating societies and kept in touch with businessmen from their homelands. Japanese travellers, meanwhile, visited the Buddhist holy places in India, Nepal and Southeast Asia. On the side, some of them were working for Japanese intelligence agencies, relying on contacts made for them by radical young Burmese, Indians or Vietnamese. In the 1930s, as secret societies and paramilitary organizations pushed Japanese politics to the right, they too turned their gaze southwards. The leader of the extreme nationalist Black Dragon Society lent protection to the Indian revolutionary-in-exile Rash Behari Bose, who took a wife with family connections to the Society. The British, French and Dutch colonial intelligence services were aware that something was going on, but by the time they found out what, it was too late.
There was underway no less than a creeping Japanese colonization of Southeast Asia. It is striking in the years before 1941 how much of the region's trade had fallen, almost by stealth, to the Japanese. After the First World War, business strategists toured the region in ‘sight-seeing’ parties. Spurred on by communities of long-term migrants, enflamed with patriotic purpose, the Japanese colonial government of Taiwan sought to extend its development schemes southwards. Japanese trade and investment in this period is a crucial link in the history of the modern economic dynamism of Southeast Asia. Japanese goods were at the heart of the consumer boom in Malaya in the later 1930s. The closure of American markets in the Depression led Japanese manufacturers to focus their attention on the emerging markets to the south. In 1941, Japanese investments in British Malaya totalled 85 million yen. Japanese firms attempted to corner the market in goods from matchboxes to condensed milk; they imported over half of Malaya’s everyday goods. The people of Singapore marvelled at the new technology in a ‘Japanese Commercial Museum’. Children in Malaya grew up with toys from the ‘ten-cent’ stalls on Middle Road in Singapore and elsewhere; the small army of Asian clerks depended on Japanese stores such as Echigoya for the cheap white shirts and ties they were required to wear in European offices.14 The Japanese were responsible for what was perhaps the most revolutionary innovation within the rural economy of Southeast Asia at this time: the bicycles with which country people could get their own goods to market. In the Blitzkrieg in Malaya in 1941, this technology would be used to devastating effect by General Yamashita's shock troops in a highly mobile form of warfare.
The Japanese had been a prominent feature of the urban landscape of Southeast Asia for many decades. Japanese ships routinely visited the ports; Japanese sailors drank in the bars and cafés, many of which catered especially to their needs. In the early period of Japanese southward enterprise, some of the earliest economic pioneers were the karayuki-san, the Japanese prostitutes. The rationale for this was, in the words of one pimp: ‘Put a whorehouse anywhere in the wilds of the South Pacific and pretty soon you’ve a general store to go there with it.’15 In the face of the 1915 boycott of Japanese businesses by the Chinese in Southeast Asia, it was largely the karayuki-san that kept Japanese commerce afloat. After the First World War, Japanese expatriate communities became respectable. But the linkage between sexual servitude and imperial expansion was revived in the 1930s and 1940s. In every small town on the Malay peninsula there were Japanese photographic studios, chemists and taxidermists. Japanese hotels serviced the growing tourist trade. In Singapore, a fleet of 100-odd motorized fishing boats and 1,500 fishermen supplied the larger proportion of the colony's needs. Up until December 1941 Japanese barbers – such as Yamashita Hairdressing, Bishop Street, Penang – were cutting the hair of British and Australian troops. The community had its own schools and newspapers, and its own golf club in Singapore. It came together to fete the Japanese royals who regularly passed through on their way to Europe; it also celebrated British royal coronations and jubilees. Some Japanese men and women married locals, such as Indians resident in Malaya. They also felt the full force of European racism and the social exclusion of colonial societies.16 Redress became a key war aim. The strategist Masanobu Tsuji produced a pamphlet to be distributed to the troops on the eve of the greater East Asian war. It was called Read This Alone – and the War Can Be Won: ‘These white people may expect, from the moment they issue from their mothers’ wombs, to be allotted a score or so of natives as their personal slaves. Is this really God's will?’17
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