There was much discontent among black Africans serving overseas about their rates of pay and conditions, much inferior to those of white soldiers. The South African forces set the pay of their ‘coloured’ – mixed-race – recruits at half the white rate, and that of black soldiers at two-thirds of the coloured rate, on the grounds that the latter could more cheaply support their families in the style to which they were accustomed. Like the US until 1944, South Africa refused to deploy black soldiers in combat roles, though it recruited them for labour service; it was thus disingenuous that early recruiting posters depicted black soldiers in uniform carrying knobkerries and assegais. Volunteers were slow to come forward, knowing that the country’s institutionalised racial discrimination would persist in the armed forces: even in besieged Tobruk, white South African army canteens would not serve black soldiers.
In India, segregated brothels were established for the British Army’s black Africans, though one Catholic commanding officer’s scruples caused him to insist that his unit’s establishment should be closed down. In 1942, there was a mutiny in 25 East African Brigade in East Africa: Gen. Sir William Platt reported ‘numerous incidents in almost all Somali units … refusals to obey orders, sit-down strikes, desertion with weapons, untrustworthiness as guards, collusive thefts, occasional stone-throwing and drawing of knives’. In India during 1944 there were clashes between black soldiers and civilians near the Ranchi rest camp in which six Indians were killed and several women raped.
The British drew comfort from the fact that these disturbances were less serious than a major mutiny by black French tirailleurs which took place at Thiaroye near Dakar that year, and uprisings by battalions of the Belgian Force Publique in the Congo. Commanders were dismayed, however, by the conduct of some colonial units on the battlefield, such as the King’s African Rifles battalion which broke and ran when first exposed to fire in Burma, and two battalions of 11th East African Division which refused to cross the Chindwin river into Burma, saying, ‘We will do whatever we’re told to do, but we are not going any further.’ Brigadier G.H. Cree reported that, given the widespread grievances of the African formations, ‘We were lucky to have escaped with a few flare-ups instead of a more general revolt.’
It is important to view such remarks and incidents in the wider context: hundreds of thousands of African troops performed their duty as labourers or riflemen under fire with considerable courage and some effectiveness. But it seems foolish to romanticise their contribution. They had no stake in Allied victory, and most served as mercenaries, drawn from societies schooled to obey white masters. A Rhodesian officer recorded the burial of African battlefield dead in the unyielding stony soil of Somaliland:
Poor Corporal Atang, self-abnegation and retiring modesty were part of you in life … How it would distress you to know that your grave is giving such trouble and keeping weary men from rest … They lower him gently. The bloodstained blanket is thrust aside … Lastly there is Amadu, the Musselman [sic] who died clutching his beloved Bren gun. The sergeant major of D company and a group of co-religionists are there. Two descend into the grave, the body being passed to them from the stretcher, they lower it slowly to the bottom … In a high, resonant voice the chief mourner intones an old Arabic phrase, a prayer for the dead.
Here was a sentimental view of the contribution of colonial subjects, to be contrasted with that of black South African Frank Sexwale, who called the conflict ‘a white man’s war, a British war. South Africa belonged to Britain; everything that the Afrikaner did, he got the notion from the master, Britain.’ Sexwale’s perception accurately reflected the indifference of almost all his black and coloured compatriots to the struggle, but he overlooked the complexities of white South African sentiment. Among Afrikaners there was a long-standing pro-German tradition. Field Marshal Smuts, South Africa’s prime minister and a close friend of Churchill, only narrowly defeated a 1939 parliamentary motion demanding his country’s neutrality. Having dragged South Africa into the war, Smuts ensured that it made a substantial contribution to the Allied cause. From beginning to end, however, he faced domestic opposition, and never dared to introduce conscription. White volunteers remained in limited supply, and towards the end of 1940, anti-war demonstrations took place in Johannesburg. Some avowed pro-Nazis were interned for the duration, including future Nationalist prime minister John Vorster.
In Australia, support for Britain was much stronger. In 1939, tens of thousands of volunteers responded like Rod Wells, who thought, ‘There’s a war going on! The Old Country needs help … Let’s go and show them what we can do.’ Three divisions of such men fought with distinction in the Mediterranean, and a further two later joined them in New Guinea and other Pacific campaigns. But the war also revealed political stresses and divisions ‘down under’. Most of the half-million Americans who passed through Australia between 1942 and 1945 warmed to the country socially, but their commanders deplored Australian parochialism, vicious trades union practices especially in the docks, and supposed lack of energy in pursuing the war. MacArthur suggested sourly that the Australian spirit had been corroded by twenty years of socialist government. On 26 October 1942, the New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin published a lacerating critique of the Australian war effort:
The normal difficulties of waging a coalition war have been increased in Australia by one factor about which Australians themselves complain – the labor problem. There is no question in the opinion of many Australians that Australian labor’s insistence upon its ‘rights’, its determination to work no longer than a stated number of hours and to knock off Saturday afternoons and holidays, and its general attitude toward and approach to the war, have hampered the full development of the United Nations’ war effort in Australia. The labor attitude in the ‘land down under’ can perhaps best be described as ‘complacency’; many of the workers seem primarily interested in retaining peacetime privileges.
Baldwin observed that the consequence of Australian labour unions’ obstructionism was that many logistical tasks had to be performed by American soldiers. He concluded: ‘Many of us in the democracies of all countries, loving personal liberty and our casual, easy, carefree ways of life of peacetime, have forgotten that war is a hard taskmaster and that the ways of peace are not the ways of war.’ Baldwin’s remarks caused a storm in Australia, where they were deeply resented, but they were founded in harsh reality, and the British government shared the correspondent’s sentiments. Many Australians earned admiration as warriors, but a substantial number exercised their democratic privileges to stay away from the battlefield.
In Canada likewise, overseas military service remained voluntary, causing the army to suffer a chronic shortage of infantrymen. Though Canadians played important roles in the north-west Europe and Italian campaigns, the Battle of the Atlantic and the bomber offensive, most of French Canada wanted no part in the struggle. ‘A nasty evening in Montreal, where the French Canadians booed and spat at us and several of us were thrown out of bars,’ recorded an RAF flight trainee among a party in transit through the region. In August 1942, a sullen 59 per cent of French Canadians told pollsters they did not believe they would have had to participate in the war but for Canada’s membership of the British Empire.
In the Middle East and Asia, some subject peoples displayed fiercer opposition to the conflict. They paid little heed to the nature of the German, Italian and Japanese regimes, merely choosing to view their colonial oppressors’ enemies as their own prospective allies. The British exercised de facto rule over Egypt not as an acknowledged colonial possession, but through a draconian interpretation of the bilateral defence treaty. Many, indeed most Egyptians, gave passive support to the Axis; King Farouk took impending British defeat for granted. One of his army officers, Captain Anwar Sadat, the twenty-two-year-old son of a government clerk who later became Egypt’s president, wrote: ‘Our enemy was primarily, if not solely, Great Britain.’ In 1940, Sadat approached General Aziz el-Masri, the
inspector-general of the army who was a well-known Axis sympathiser, and said, ‘We are a group of officers working to set up an organisation for the purpose of driving the British out of Egypt.’
In January 1942 demonstrators thronged the streets of Cairo, crying out, ‘Forward Rommel! Long live Rommel!’ British troops and armoured cars surrounded the royal palace until Farouk acceded to British demands. That summer, Egyptian army officers eagerly anticipated their liberation by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. They were thrilled by the arrival in Cairo of two German spies, Hans Eppler and another man known only as ‘Sandy’. Captain Sadat was crestfallen, however, to witness the frivolous behaviour of the two agents, whom he found living on the Nile houseboat of the famous belly-dancer Hikmet Fahmy. He wrote: ‘The surprise must have shown on my face, because Eppler laughingly asked: “Where do you expect us to stay? In a British army camp?”’ The German said Hikmet Fahmy was ‘perfectly reliable’. He and his colleague spent drunken evenings at the Kitkat nightclub, and changed large sums of forged British banknotes through a Jew who allegedly charged 30 per cent commission. Sadat wrote long afterwards, with the unembarrassed anti-Semitism of his people: ‘I was not surprised at a Jew performing this service for the Nazis because I knew that a Jew would do anything if the price was right.’ The British arrested the entire spy ring, and suppressed internal dissent with little difficulty. But they could not credibly idealise Egypt’s role in the Allied camp.
Britain’s Asian empire manifested the most conspicuously divided allegiances. In 1939, nationalists in Malaya staged anti-war demonstrations, harshly suppressed by the local colonial authorities. An Indian member of the Malay civil service said that, ‘Although his reason utterly rebelled against it, his sympathies instinctively ranged themselves with the Japanese in their fight against the Anglo-Saxons.’ Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: ‘It [is] obvious that the average man in India is so full of bitterness against the British that he would welcome any attack on them.’ Some of his compatriots rejoiced in the spectacle of fellow Asians routing white armies and navies. ‘We couldn’t helping gloating at the beating the British were getting at the hands of the Germans,’ said Dr Kashmi Swaminadhan. ‘This, in spite of our being anti-Hitler.’ Lady Diana Cooper wrote before the deluge in 1942: ‘I could see no particular reason why the 85 per cent Chinese and 15 per cent Indian and Malayan citizens of Singapore should fight, as Cockneys do, against people of their own shade, and for the dear good English.’ Indeed, few did so.
In Malaya and Burma, the new rulers were able to enlist the services of many local people and some Indians who felt no loyalty to the expelled British. But against these should be cited the example of such a man as Indian schoolteacher P.G. Mahindasa, teacher of the English school in Malacca settlement. He wrote before his execution by the Japanese for listening on his radio to the BBC: ‘I have always cherished British sportsmanship, justice and the civil service as the finest things in an imperfect world. I die gladly for freedom. My enemies fail to conquer my soul. I forgive them for what they did to my frail body. To my dear boys, tell them that their teacher died with a smile on his lips.’ In Malaya, Chinese communist Chin Peng, who later became leader of the violent anti-British independence movement, remarked the irony that he received an OBE from a grateful British government for promoting terrorism and murdering Malays who collaborated with the Japanese.
Many people in Burma, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, together with more than a few in the Philippines, at first welcomed the invading Japanese as liberators. Even ardent foes of European imperialism were soon disillusioned, however, by the arrogance and institutionalised brutality of their new masters. Examples are legion: far more local people died as slaves on the notorious Burma Railway than did Allied prisoners. Of almost 80,000 Malays sent to work there, nearly 30,000 perished, alongside 14,000 whites; the rail link also cost the lives of 100,000 Burmese, Indians and Chinese. When cholera broke out at Nieke on the Burma–Thailand border, infecting large numbers of Tamils performing forced labour on the railway, the Japanese set fire to a barracks housing 150 stricken patients. Elsewhere, any man or woman who displeased the occupiers was treated with systemic sadistic cruelty. Sybil Kathigasu, Catholic wife of a Perak planter, was tortured in Taiping jail, while her daughter was hung from a tree over a fire. She shamed them into freeing the child, but herself emerged from the ordeal crippled for life.
A minimum of five million people in South-East Asia died in the course of the war, many of them in the Dutch East Indies, either at Japanese hands or as a result of starvation imposed by Tokyo’s diversion of food and crops to feed its own people. The price of rice soared, while harvests fell by one-third; tapioca was exploited as a substitute. Writer Samad Ismail wrote wearily in 1944: ‘Everyone feels affection for tapioca; embraces, exalts and extols tapioca; there is nothing else they discuss other than tapioca, in the kitchen, on the tram, in a wedding gathering – always tapioca, tapioca and tapioca.’ But while a tapioca diet provided some bulk, it did nothing to reverse the chronic vitamin deficiency that became endemic in Japanese-occupied societies. Hunger did more than anything else to alienate the subject peoples of Tokyo’s Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, however strong their dislike of their former European overlords.
2 THE RAJ: UNFINEST HOUR
British-occupied India, as nationalists regarded the subcontinent, experienced bitter wartime upheavals and distress. The jewel in the crown of Britain’s empire, second only to China as the largest and most populous land mass in Asia, became a huge supplier of textiles and equipment to the Allies. It manufactured a million blankets for the British Army – the wool clip of sixty million sheep – together with forty-one million items of military uniform, two million parachutes and sixteen million pairs of boots. It was a source of fury to Churchill that India’s sterling balances – the debt owed by Britain to the subcontinent in payment for goods supplied – soared on the strength of this output. ‘Winston burbled away endlessly,’ wrote India secretary Leo Amery on 16 September 1942, ‘that it was monstrous to expect that we should not only defend India and then have to clear out, but be left to pay hundreds of millions for the privilege.’
But could Indians refuse to be defended? Before the conflict began, nationalist demands for self-government and independence had become clamorous, enjoying overwhelming enthusiasm from the Hindu majority except in the so-called princely states. The maharajahs’ territories survived as feudal fiefdoms, whose rulers knew that once Indians ruled their own country, their privileges would be swept away. They provided islands of support for British hegemony, because they thus preserved their own. Elsewhere, however, almost every educated Hindu wanted the British to go. The question was when: the onset of war caused some influential figures to argue that the independence struggle should be postponed until the greater evil of fascism was defeated. Veer Damodar Savarkar, though a nationalist, suggested pragmatically that his people should exploit the opportunity to acquire military and industrial skills which would be priceless to a free India.
The League of Radical Congressmen urged that active participation in the war would ‘not be thereby helping British imperialism, but on the contrary weakening it, by developing and strengthening the anti-fascist forces in England and Europe’. Likewise M.N. Roy: ‘The present is not England’s war. It is a war for the future of the world. If the British government happens to be a party to the war, why should the fighters for human liberty be ashamed of congratulating it for this meritorious deed? The old saying that adversity brings strange bedfellows is not altogether meaningless. If it was justifiable for the Soviet government to make the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, why should it not be equally permissible for the fighters for Indian freedom to support the British government so long as it is engaged in war against fascism?’ Some of his compatriots adopted the view of Lt. A.M. Bose, nephew of India’s most famous scientist and himself a cosmopolitan who had travelled widely in Europe. Bose wrote to a British friend: ‘
I am now in the army since three years as I wanted to do my bit to fight the Nazis.’
Several hundred Indians, boasting such exotic names as ‘Tiger’ Jaswal Singh, Piloo Reporter, ‘Jumbo’ Majundan and Miroo Engineer, flew for the Indian Air Force; Engineer, one of four flying brothers, once took a girlfriend into the air in his Hurricane. But though Indian fliers wore the same uniforms and adopted the same slang as their RAF brethren, they sometimes suffered the casual racism of British officers, who called them ‘blackies’. Fighter pilot Mahender Singh Pujji was dismayed when his ship stopped in South Africa en route to Britain: ‘I was shocked to see the treatment of Indians and Africans there. I and my colleagues were very angry.’ In England and later the Western Desert, he never adapted to British food, and subsisted largely on eggs, biscuits and chocolate. Indian fliers knew that they remained second-class airmen in their commanders’ eyes, denied the best aircraft and glamorous assignments; but they made a significant contribution to the 1944–45 Burma campaign, flying thousands of reconnaissance and ground-attack sorties in support of Fourteenth Army.
Other Indians, however, adopted a more nuanced and cautious attitude to the conflict. Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, a Congress leader and Premier of the Madras presidency, said in June 1940 that it might seem small-minded to raise domestic issues when Britain was in the midst of a life-and-death struggle against a merciless enemy. ‘Yet every nation has its own life to look after … We do not serve civilisation by forgetting our rights. We cannot help the Allies by agreeing to be a subject people. On the contrary, such surrender would help the Germans.’
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