Forgotten Wars Read online

  3

  1945: A Second Colonial Conquest

  In 1945 imperialism was down but not out. Japan’s dream of a great East and Southeast Asian empire had been crushed flat in the ruins of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But the British seemed determined to retain a dominant influence in the region. As British armies fanned out across Burma, Malaya, French Indo-China and Indonesia, a more intrusive and authoritarian form of administration seemed to be taking shape in place of the distant paternalism of the old Raj. Yet not all the signs seemed to favour renewed imperialism. A new British Labour government had been voted into office by a landslide as the European war ended in mid 1945. Prime minister Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps, its dominant personalities, had always displayed an interest in India’s independence, or at least dominion status under the British crown. But both men were paternalists rather than liberators, and in the dangerous new world which followed the bomb many of their colleagues believed that a powerful military position in Asia was essential to guarantee Britain’s worldwide security. Clement Attlee personified his party’s awkwardness about imperial authority. In 1945 he made a speech to Americans insisting that British ‘socialists’ were not ‘against freedom’: ‘We in the Labour Party’, he said, ‘declare that we are in line with those who fought for Magna Carta and habeas corpus, with the Pilgrim Fathers and the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.’1 But this freedom was not to be of an untrammelled nature; elsewhere he lamented the fact that ‘man’s material discoveries have outpaced his moral progress’. By implication, most people would benefit from a strong and morally assured guiding hand. Such beliefs flowed from his sense of the injustice of poverty, which far more than any belief in the principles of scientific socialism had drawn him into the Labour Party.

  Attlee and his generation were really nineteenth-century Whigs and their colonial policy was conceived in this vein. By no means convinced of the inherent value of territorial empire, they were none the less sure of the doctrine of the white man’s burden. Pondering the possibility that Britain might be forced to take over some of Italy’s colonies after the war, Attlee wrote: ‘Why should it be assumed that only a few Great Powers can be entrusted with backward peoples? Why should not one or other of the Scandinavian countries have a try? They are quite as fitted to bear rule as ourselves. Why not the United States?’2 The even-handedness of this thinking towards Europeans is as striking as its insistence on the category ‘backward peoples’. In a similar exercise of doublethink, Herbert Morrison, the rumbustious foreign secretary, had declared: ‘we have ceased to be an imperialist race’, whilst adding in the same breath that Labour was a great friend to the ‘jolly old Empire’. Arthur Creech Jones at the Colonial Office reckoned that the continuation of British imperialism was not problematic because America effectively had an empire in the West Indies, Hawaii and the Philippines, ‘not to mention her internal race problem’.

  Labour’s paternalism was not undiscriminating. Government ministers took it for granted that Indians deserved more respect than other Asian peoples, especially Burmese and Malays, let alone Africans. They had mixed with the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru and Krishna Menon, the Indian National Congress’s roving ambassador, who were Fabian socialists like themselves. Stafford Cripps was committed to constitutional change in India, since this had been the message during his abortive mission in 1942 when he had sought to bring the Congress into the wartime government. Attlee’s connections went back even further. He had been a member of another ill-fated constitutional investigation, the Simon Commission of 1927–9, which had similarly ended in mass civil disobedience. Yet even in the case of India, the Labour ministers still seem to have expected that the country would remain a dominion of the crown, and one with which Britain had continuing military ties. As for other peoples – Burmese, Malays, Arabs and Africans – they might well require decades more imperial tutelage before they could emerge into the light of freedom and democracy.

  In the two years following the end of the Second World War socialist paternalism was in the ascendant in Britain. But other, more conservative shades of British opinion also helped maintain a fragile imperial consensus. This was the era of moral rearmament and Christian service was to be an ever-present if often unacknowledged motivator of the Empire’s war against communism and radical nationalism in several parts of the globe in the later 1940s and 1950s. The adjutant-general of the post-war Indian Army endorsed a paper on ‘Religion in the army’ by its chaplain-general. It was essential to teach religion to British personnel in India because, it stated, the ‘effect on the spirit of empire as a whole will be immense’. On Christianity would depend the ‘future of our race’.3 In the Colonial Office, civil servants contemplating the rebuilding of empire in Southeast Asia invoked ‘the Stewardship which God has entrusted to our Nation’. Was not the British Commonwealth an expression of the ‘Brotherhood of Man’?4 Secular reform was couched in terms of a ‘civilising mission’. But there were problems with this kind of language. In 1945 the British Empire governed more Muslims than any other power in history.

  The Conservative opposition to imperial retreat was even more adamant. Churchill, the valiant fighter for the free nations of Europe, had never believed that that freedom should extend to the coloured races. Privately he had specifically excluded them from the Atlantic Charter of 1941, that great Anglo-American clarion cry for freedom which had so raised expectations across the colonial world. Churchill had mused to Wavell about the possibility of dividing the Indian empire into ‘Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan’, the last an amalgam of India’s princely states. The first and the third of these entities would remain within the British Empire no matter what happened to the ‘Hindoo priesthood machine’ and its commercial backers.5 Churchill’s parting shot to Wavell, on the viceroy’s visit to London in August 1945, was ‘keep a bit of India!’6 Anthony Eden, a powerful Conservative foreign relations expert, feared that the loss of Malaya with its rich resources of tin and rubber and of Hong Kong with its strategic position would reduce Britain to the status of a ‘bagman’ east of Suez. Far from believing that British rule in India was inevitably coming towards its end, many Conservative politicians, quite apart from the obdurate Churchill, believed that the Raj should continue to function in one way or another. Harold Macmillan, a man later considered a moderate Tory, thought that national servicemen might be sent to hold India. He recorded in his diary his astonishment that the viceroy considered that British rule could be re-established in the subcontinent with a mere five divisions of troops and 1,000 extra administrators. This was nothing to what the British were doing in ‘Germany, Trieste, Greece and Palestine’, where large new administrations had been put in place.7

  With many Labour and Liberal MPs undecided and the Conservatives generally opposed, the political consensus in 1945 for Indian independence was fragile. Only with hindsight has it seemed a sure thing. This helps to explain why the Indian National Congress was so suspicious of British intentions, a suspicion that ultimately led them to accept the partition of India rather than trust British good offices. Even if successive British cabinets had made vague promises about freedom after the war, the senior leadership of the Congress, especially Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, were wholly unconvinced. They believed that the British were still playing a game of ‘divide and rule’ and that Wavell was privately building up Mahomed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League against them. The result would be a ‘Balkanization’ of India into a host of fragments that the British could easily manipulate: some kind of Muslim ‘Pakistan’, semi-independent princely states with treaties with the British crown and, possibly, an independent Bengal.

  If Britain’s grip on the subcontinent should weaken, the great arc of empire could still be anchored in Southeast Asia. On this, if nothing else, the consensus in Westminster was solid. The region was now crucial to Britain’s Great Power status. Malaya was the ‘dollar arsenal’ of the sterling area, and Singapore was destined to become more of a ‘
fortress’ than ever it was before the war. But reconstruction was not seen in solely material terms. Britain had to rebuild her moral authority: the humiliation of 1942 was to be redeemed by the creation of new model colonies. For over a decade Malaya and Singapore were to be subjected to some of the most ambitious projects of political development and social engineering in British imperial history. As a first step, reform-minded civil servants in Whitehall seized the opportunity to realize a long-cherished ambition: the ten different authorities which constituted British Malaya were to be ruled directly for the first time. A Malayan Union was to be created, under the British crown, and united by a common citizenship. At a stroke, this overturned the founding principles of British Malaya: that of the sovereign independence of the Malay rulers and the privileged position of the Malays. With the memory of the final squalid exodus from Singapore never far from the surface, the new watchword was ‘multi-racialism’.

  One of the few senior Malayan civil servants to be included in these discussions was Dr Victor Purcell. Aged forty-nine, he was an influential voice in the Malayan Planning Unit in London that developed the new policy from mid 1943, and adviser on Chinese Affairs to Mountbatten’s military administration. ‘The rigid pro-Malay attitude’, Purcell wrote, ‘was more often than not a paternalistic feeling towards the Malays (and occasionally it was homosexual)’, but it was not universally shared. The Malayan Civil Service was ‘virtually split… into two camps’.8 Purcell was a scholar-administrator of a special kind: as a cadet he was sent to Canton to learn Chinese dialects and put to work in Malaya as a ‘protector’ of Chinese. This was a personage unique in British colonial history; the protector acted as tai-jin, a great panjandrum to every level of Chinese society: banqueting with tycoons, suppressing secret societies and traffic in women, even mediating in marital rows. From Purcell’s perspective, the ‘fiction of a “Malay” Malaya had become a farce’. At the last census of the peninsula in 1931, of a population of 3.79 million, 49 per cent were classified as Malays, as against 34 per cent Chinese and 15 per cent Indians. If the overwhelmingly Chinese city of Singapore was included, the Malays were reduced to only 44 per cent of the population. They were, as Malay poets lamented, a minority in their own country. British patronage, Purcell argued, was a ‘gilded insult’ to the Malays and held them back. The system whereby the Malays were governed through sultans, and the Chinese and Indians hardly at all, merely encouraged their ‘separatist tendencies’. As one of the leading advocates of change put it: ‘We want to fully develop the plural society.’9 Assuming that Mountbatten would have to fight his way back into Malaya, the Colonial Office for the first time was making an active bid for the support of the non-Malays.

  The Malayan Union was seen as a first step to ‘self-government’, if not full independence. The time-scale of what Labour ministers called colonial ‘partnership’ was entirely open ended. It was axiomatic to the British that before the war there was no local patriotism in Malaya. Dressed in the borrowed robes of nationalism, the British would now create it. After 1945 the fashioning of a ‘Malayan’ national identity became the lodestar of imperial policy. Until this point the term ‘Malayan’ had no legal status; it was neither a census category nor a synonym for ‘Malay’. Yet the word had taken on a more fixed meaning in the inter-war years to refer to those people who were locally domiciled and who did not perhaps retain any overriding loyalty to their country of origin, and it was adopted in particular by English-educated Eurasians, Straits Chinese and some Indians.10 As the future of Malaya was debated in London, the European ex-residents of the Association of British Malaya also staked their claim: ‘For all intents and purposes we are Malaya.’11 What was now called ‘nation-building’ was taken up with an evangelical fervour by a post-war generation of British officials and educators.

  But it was unclear as to what a ‘Malayan’ nation might be founded upon. The idea seemed not to relate to any one ethnic group, but had to encompass all of them. The British tended to see it, as they preferred to see all colonial nationalism, in terms of the culture of a responsible middle class, united by English education and the values it carried. The language of Shakespeare, the King James Bible and the Atlantic Charter was the key to multiracial harmony and to colonial peoples’ continuing loyalty to the British Commonwealth. This vision was to collide violently with other nations of intent. But it was a bold experiment: Victor Purcell was adamant that the ‘utmost freedom’ be allowed so that political parties could emerge and ‘achieve a balance of power amongst themselves’. The draconian laws that controlled speech, publication, assembly, societies and trade unions, were all to be suspended. This was to herald Britain’s liberal intentions. But, as Purcell made clear, it was also to honour the bargain struck in the jungle between John Davis and ‘Chang Hong’. For the first time in its history the Malayan Communist Party was coming out into the open.

  ‘BLACK MARKET ADMINISTRATION’

  The British Military Administration (BMA) of Malaya was a khaki-clad revolution in government, the most direct form of rule that Malaya had experienced in its history. It united Malaya and Singapore as never before and took on functions that were entirely novel in a colonial context: refugee and relief work; food rationing and nutrition; social welfare and public relations. Yet for 208 days after 4 September 1945, the BMA operated in conditions where in many places the apparatus of state had all but broken down, or where people had opted out of it entirely. Ralph Hone, former head of the Malayan Planning Unit and now Chief Civil Affairs Officer, was to claim that ‘no single problem arose when Malaya was occupied which had not already been considered by the planning staff’.12 Yet he was desperately short of resources and expertise. Hone himself, although he had been legal adviser to a government of occupation in Italy’s African colonies, which he took as a model, had never visited Malaya, nor had much practical experience of administration. His team was reinforced by junior army officers, who were also new to empire and to Asia, and who had received only a crash course in local topography, the Malay language and the Indian penal code at a police college in Wimbledon.13 By this route, in the final years of British Asia, new kinds of men and women entered imperial service, who had a different class and educational outlook to the ‘high born’ civil servants of the pre-war days. But the local knowledge that was acquired in the first few weeks began to drain away once demobilization began in November; the new temporary drafts were often disinterested and disillusioned by their role. And by its very nature, military government proved to be a wholly inadequate agent of liberal, democratic reform.

  The charter of the BMA was to prevent the outbreak of ‘disease and disorder’. But it was overwhelmed by the magnitude of Malaya’s crisis. The devastation began at the dockside. The naval base at Sembawang in Singapore lay in ruins, incinerated in the Allies’ scorched-earth retreat of 1942. The 50,000-ton floating dock was lying on the bottom of the Straits of Johore with a tanker sunk inside it: it would take over five years to rebuild it.14 Inland the landscape was, at every turn, scarred by war. Fearing the escalation of air raids on Singapore, the Japanese had burrowed tunnels deep into ridges and hillsides. All available land – the public parks, playing fields and tennis courts – was given over to vegetables and rows of tapioca, the ubiquitous, despised staple food of the war years. Other open areas had become vast dumps for looted or destroyed equipment. There were hoards of incongruous commodities. As the civil engineer O. W. Gilmour made an inventory of the island, he discovered in a rubber plantation some sixteen brick warehouses, each 100 feet long, by 24 feet wide and 20 feet high. They were full of leather saddles, bridles, straps, holsters and harnesses, enough ‘to equip all the cavalrymen and cowboys left in the world, and that in a country where a horse is a curiosity’.15 As the Japanese struck camp, few buildings were left guarded, and looters moved into abandoned houses and offices. Upcountry, the pickings were richer: stockpiles of food, rubber and tin were collected by armed gangs.

  Peninsular Malaya had taken
a step backwards from the industrial age. None of the great tin dredges were working; Chinese mine-owners complained that their businesses were stripped of machinery and motors. Much of the rubber plantation land was overrun by either food production or weeds. At the liberation Guthrie, one of the largest rubber companies, had only six experienced planters to husband over 155,000 acres of rubber trees.16 Electricity supplies would not meet demand until 1949 and transportation had all but broken down. The east coast was cut off from the rest of the country because the railway line from Kuala Lumpur had been stripped of track to lay the Burma–Siam railway. This left Kelantan virtually isolated in the monsoon season. Outside the towns, the roads were pitted and unsafe. Cars and lorries were at a premium; the army was forced to issue orders that its men should not drive out alone, because so many of their vehicles were immediately stolen when left unattended. For most people cheap Japanese-made bicycles were now the only viable form of transport. The British estimate of war damage was a staggering £127 million, the total costs incalculable.17

  At every turn, the British were confronted by the human debris of war. Thousands of people were without shelter, or stranded far from home. Javanese romusha (forced labourers) haunted Singapore, they gathered around the railway station, in the eyes of one witness, ‘half dead like skeletons… like in Germany, half-starved like. And some of them, their legs dangling, sitting down, their legs hanging down the sides of the train, and load[ed] like sheep inside.’ By the end of 1945, there were still 18,000 of them in Malaya.18 Singapore was dangerously overcrowded, and life was a constant scramble for space. Even before the war its urban population density had been between 500 and 900 persons an acre; now it took ‘tea money’ of $100 to secure a lease for a room, $1,000 for a house. And still more people were arriving, as Chinese fled from ethnic fighting in Johore and Indonesia.19 Soon after his arrival in Singapore, the agent of the government of India, S. K. Chettur, made a ‘hurricane tour’ of the west coast of the peninsula, visiting rubber estates and interviewing Indian labourers by the wayside. After the general collapse of industrial exports Indians had been easy prey for Japanese forced-labour schemes. Of the estimated 72,204 labourers sent from Malaya to Burma and Thailand, 29,634 were reported to have died and 24,626 ‘deserted’; many of this number were lost in the jungle, or disguised in the statistics of fatalities in the camps. The impact on small estate communities was traumatic: over 40 per cent of the labour in rubber areas such as Selangor had vanished, and everywhere Chettur reported the absence of menfolk who either ‘never returned or returned broken men’.20 A ‘citizen’s advice bureau’ in Singapore, staffed by local community leaders, was inundated with thousands of appeals from desperate families; it despatched Chinese businessmen with experience of trading in Thailand to locate refugees. But by the end of 1945 there were still believed to be 6,500 Malayans in South Thailand and another 23,000 around Bangkok.21 Some took years to return.