Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  Figure 2.2 The prehistory of the Iraq War: British tanks and aircraft in Mesopotamia, 1922.

  Getty Images / Hulton Archive / Stringer / 2665034

  In India, the educated classes kept up the pressure for self-government through the Congress Party. In 1928, ten years after the offer of 1918, a commission was set up to explore possible revisions. Once again, though, the British refused the Indians any power in the central government. Gandhi described this as ‘an insult to the whole people’ and in 1930 led a satyagraha march to the Gujarat coast to boil sea water for salt, which was a government monopoly. His arrest in May 1930 triggered a national campaign of civil disobedience, boycotting elections to provincial legislatures, work in government offices and schools, together with a boycott of foreign cloth which undermined Indian industry. The government clamped down, throwing 29,000 Indians into jail. A truce was made with the government in 1931, but talks failed and civil disobedience began again in 1932. The main concern for the opposition was that the campaign was essentially Hindu, with very little Muslim participation. Hyderabad-born Sayyid Abdul Ala Mawdudi, aged 24, who had taken part in the Khilifat movement, published his Jihad in Islam in 1927. This argued that violence was necessary in ‘the Holy War for the Cause of God’ against the pillaging and killing of imperialists, but his ideas did not become current until after his death in 1979.35

  Meanwhile, in 1935, another Government of India Act was passed. This finally allowed for an all-Indian federal government in which Indian ministers would staff domestic ministries in Delhi and all ministries at the provincial level. There were, however, three main drawbacks. First, the viceroy retained a vast array of emergency powers to scrap the system if anything went wrong. Second, the princes were given inordinate influence, with the power to nominate a third of the lower chamber and two-fifths of the upper chamber. Half of them also had to agree to allow the federal government to come into being, which they did not. Third, Congress did extremely well in the 1937 provincial elections, making inroads even in Muslim provinces. Muhammed Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League decided that the best policy now was to play on the threat to Islam and to move towards a separate Muslim state. On the eve of the Second World War the divisions and frustrations in India were as bad as they had ever been.36

  In China, after the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916 China had become a prey to feuding warlords. These were challenged by both Nationalists and communists and then by an expansionist Japan, which regarded China as her India. Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen met a Comintern emissary in 1922 and agreed that the Soviets would support the Nationalists if they in turn worked with Chinese communists. Soviets trained Chinese revolutionaries at the Whampoa Military Academy and built up a National Revolutionary Army. Unfortunately, Sun died in 1925 and the army was entrusted to the more conservative Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang regained Shanghai in 1926 and then planned a Northern Expedition to bring the warlords under control. Before leaving on the campaign he turned on the Communist Party and trade unions in Shanghai and all but destroyed them. The Northern Expedition managed less to eliminate the warlords than to absorb them, and Chiang developed a form of nationalism that integrated Confucianism.37

  In Indo-China, long a tributary province of the Chinese Empire but now dominated by the French, the nationalist and communist revival challenged French rule. A National Party of Vietnam (VNQDD), inspired by Sun Yat-sen, organised a mutiny in a French garrison at Yen Bay, north of Hanoi, in 1930. The execution of its leaders provoked a wave of strikes and peasant disturbances. Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Ai Quoc), who had been active as a Comintern agent in Canton in 1924–5, returned to Indo-China in 1929 to set up an Indochinese Communist Party. This exploited peasant unrest to organise rural soviets in the Nghe Tinh region of Annam from where he came. However, the French unleashed a white terror in which 3,000 peasants were killed, the communist leadership was destroyed, and Ho was lucky to escape to Moscow.38

  Meanwhile disaster struck the Chinese Nationalists in September 1931. The Japanese Kwantung Army, anxious to cut off the nationalist threat, seized power in Manchuria, and tried to conceal their military might by setting up a puppet state of Manchuko, under the Puyi, the Chinese boy emperor who had abdicated in 1912. When the League of Nations protested, the Japanese claimed that they were exercising a mandate over a more backward nation that was not yet fit for self-government, and were behaving no differently from the British in India. In August 1936 the Japanese military published a plan for empire in East Asia – which they called a coexistence and co-prosperity sphere – with a five-year plan to develop Manchuria and Northern China as industrial bases. War with China broke out in July 1937, and by the end of the year the Japanese had captured Shanghai and the Nationalist capital of Nanking in December 1937. The death of 30,000 Chinese soldiers and 20,000 civilian men and the rape of 20,000 women in Nanking in December 1937 announced the brutal irruption of a new imperial power.39

  The Defeat of the French and British Empires

  Whereas the British and French Empires survived the First World War, in the Second World War they suffered significant defeats. Germany under Nazi rule strove to recreate on the Continent of Europe the colonial empire it had lost in 1918, while Japan drove forward as the dominant empire in East Asia. Each took revenge on the humiliation they had suffered at the Paris Peace Conference or in the League of Nations. Those defeats encouraged colonial subjects to assert their independence with greater force and authority against France and Britain, which frequently descended into fighting each other over their endangered possessions. Meanwhile a crisis of legitimacy was caused by the intervention of the United States in the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The United States denied that it was asserting imperial power and refused simply to rescue the embattled empires of France and Britain. It asserted the equal right to self-government of all peoples, whether they had been subjugated by Germany or Japan, France or Great Britain. The United Nations, founded in 1945, also upheld the principles of the equality of nations and self-government. The British and French Empires resisted these ideas all the way. They took advantage of an American change of attitude to the empires of Allies in the face of threats from the Soviet Union and in the short term at least managed to reassert a fragile control over their colonial possessions.

  On 28 March 1940 the French and British governments made an agreement that neither would conclude a separate peace. This was put dramatically to the test by the German offensive launched in the Ardennes on 10 May 1940. The British Expeditionary Force in France evacuated at Dunkirk between 27 May and 4 June. German armies occupied Paris on 14 June. On 16 June the British government proposed a Franco-British union with a single war cabinet and supreme command but a majority of the French government, which had fled to Bordeaux, argued that this would make France into another British dominion and the French into British subjects.40 Instead, a new French government was formed under Marshal Philippe Pétain which sued for an armistice with Germany. Charles de Gaulle, under-secretary of state for defence, flew to Britain on 17 June and in his famous appeal of 18 June urged the French not to accept the terms of the armistice but to continue the fight. This marked the inauguration of the Free French. On the same day Churchill told the House of Commons:

  I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin […] Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands […] Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’41

  Churchill’s words underline the fact that this war was a struggle for empire, and that not only Germany was looking to found a Thousand Year Reich. Colonial forces were mobilised to fight in France in May–June 1940, with 100,000 Senegalese Tirailleurs in regiments commanded by the likes of Major Raoul Salan, who described hi
mself as ‘a soldier of the Empire’.42 Algeria and the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia in French North Africa provided their own indigenous Tirailleurs for the Army of Africa.43

  The big issue around the armistice was whether France would continue to fight on from her empire. Charles de Gaulle was a relatively junior general and from London contacted his superior, General Noguès, commander-in-chief of all forces in North Africa and proconsul of Sultan Mohammed of Morocco. ‘General, the defence of North Africa is you or nothing’, he declared on 24 June. ‘Yes, it is you and it is the essential element and the centre of continued resistance.’44 However, far from using the Empire as a springboard for resistance, Noguès obeyed the dictates of hierarchy, fell into line behind Pétain and accepted the armistice that had been concluded on 22 June 1940. French North Africa was now a province of Vichy.

  This caused serious problems for the British. The French had not only violated the agreement of 28 March not to conclude a separate peace, but their military resources were at the mercy of Germany. The French naval base in North Africa was anchored at Mers el-Kébir, the port of Oran, and might fall into German hands. After the French commander refused an ultimatum to sail to waters under British control the British opened fire on the French fleet on 3 July 1940, killing 1,300 French sailors. This rekindled the enmity between France and Britain over their seapower and empires that went back to Fashoda, indeed to Trafalgar. De Gaulle, in London, was now seen by Vichy as a traitor and sentenced to death in absentia.

  A battle now took place between Vichy and the Free French for control of the French Empire in Africa. The British supported the Free French but there was always a suspicion on the French side that the British were seeking to exploit French weakness to extend their own colonial reach. In a first phase de Gaulle used the support of the British in Lagos for a mission by his chosen commander, General Leclerc, who flew to Africa on 6 August 1940 and in three glorious days on 26–28 August won over the French Congo, French Cameroon and Chad in French Equatorial Africa.45 This was the Free French’s baptism of fire as a serious force. However, the Free French failed to win over French West Africa, where governor-general Boisson declared for Vichy. On 23–25 September the British supported de Gaulle in a seaborne assault on Dakar, the gateway to French West Africa, but Boisson obeyed Vichy’s orders to repel the Free French attack. Shore batteries and the battleship Richelieu, which had escaped from the British attack on the French fleet at Dakar, prevented a landing. ‘I wanted to avoid a pitched battle between Frenchmen, so I pulled out my forces in time’, de Gaulle wrote to his wife in London, adding, ‘the ceiling is falling on my head’.46

  In the Far East the French Empire collapsed before another rampant empire. On 22 September 1940 Japan took advantage of the French defeat in Europe to invade Vietnam, occupying Haiphong and Hanoi. Vichy’s Governor-General, Admiral Decoux, agreed to an armistice on 25 September 1940, and Japanese troops entered Saigon. Although this was officially described as a ‘stationing’ of the Japanese Army, and Bao Dai remained nominal emperor of Vietnam, it was no less than an occupation of French Vietnam with Decoux as a Pétain of the Far East.47

  As the imperial powers crumbled so colonial peoples saw a chance for liberation. On 1 April 1941 nationalist army officers under Rashid-Ali seized power in the former British mandate of Iraq and appealed to the Germans for support. The Germans looked at the French mandates of Syria and Lebanon and considered them an excellent bridgehead from which to attack the British Empire. The Vichy regime was happy to go along with this. First Minister Admiral Darlan flew to Berchtesgaden to meet Hitler on 11 May, announcing that ‘Today is the festival of Joan of Arc, who got rid of the English.’48 He signed the Protocols of Paris of 27 June 1941 which offered the Luftwaffe the right to use airbases in Syria, use of the port of Bizerta in its protectorate of Tunisia to supply the Afrikakorps against the British in Egypt, and the right to use Dakar as a naval and submarine base. German planes began to arrive at Aleppo and Damascus and General Wavell scraped together a force of British soldiers together with Australians and Indians, under the command of Maitland ‘Jumbo’ Wilson. This defeated Vichy’s Levant Army, who sued for an armistice at Acre on 12 July 1941.49 The Free French under de Gaulle were furious at being cast aside in their own mandates and tried to regain the initiative by a ceremony of independence for Syria and Lebanon on 27 September 1941 but this was only for show. In reality the British took overall control of foreign affairs while de Gaulle appointed a high commissioner responsible for internal order.50 Tightening their grip on the region, the British orchestrated a coup in Egypt in February 1942 to force out King Farouk’s anti-British ministers – an event which had a formative impact on young officer Gamal Abdul Nasser.51 Taking their cue, the French arrested the Lebanese president in November 1943 to prevent him from unilaterally abrogating the French mandate.

  It was not that the British themselves were not in imperial crisis: they were. The Battle of Britain, fought against the Luftwaffe between 10 July and 31 October 1940, was held up as the victory of ‘the few’, but it was unable to prevent the Blitz against British cities between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, which killed 40,000 civilians. A photograph of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rising above the smoke, published in The Daily Mail on 31 October 1940, came to symbolise Britain ‘standing alone’ against Nazi Germany, but if it had stood alone, it would have crumbled.

  Britain relied for its survival on soldiers and supplies from its Dominions, notably Canada and Australia, and for military hardware and economic support from the United States under the Lend-Lease agreement signed by President Roosevelt on 11 March 1941. This dependency on the Dominions and the United States dramatically tipped the balance of power away from Great Britain. Australia felt increasingly isolated from Britain as Japanese forces advanced in East Asia and in his 1942 New Year message, premier John Curtin told Roosevelt, ‘Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’52 Churchill was desperate to bring the United States into the war but had to accept that it would be on American terms, not just to shore up the British Empire. On 9–12 August 1941 Churchill met Roosevelt on the USS Augusta in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, and signed the Atlantic Charter. Drafted by Under-Secretary of State Sumner Wells and published on 14 August it committed them to common principles including the freedom of the seas, equal access to trade and raw materials and the ‘abandonment of the use of force’. Most controversially, it announced that ‘they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’.53 For Churchill, this applied to the peoples subjugated by Germany and Japan, but not to those peoples of the Empire that Britain would in its own time nurture towards independence. How to reconcile the equal rights of nations to self-government and the historic claims of colonial powers became one of the most intractable questions of the war.

  The inexorable advance of Japanese forces posed this question in momentous terms for the future of the British Dominions and British India. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and overran the Philippines, which the United States had conquered from the Spanish in 1898. The United States declared war on Japan, then on Germany and Italy. On 10 December British seapower in the region was crippled by the sinking of The Prince of Wales and Repulse by Japanese aircraft off the Malay coast. Churchill rushed to Washington and spent Christmas with Roosevelt, planning what to do next. Next came the Japanese attack on Singapore on 8 February 1942. Two days later Churchill sent a message to General Wavell, now commander-in-chief in India and supreme commander in the Far East. ‘There must be at this stage no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population’, he instructed. ‘The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs […] Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and the British Army
is at stake.’54 All this was to no avail. Wavell was forced to retreat to Java in the Dutch East Indies. General Arthur Percivall was left to surrender the Singapore garrison of 85,000 men to 30,000 Japanese troops on 15 February 1942 (Figure 2.3). In all, over 130,000 men were taken prisoner by the Japanese, more than half of them Indian. Churchill was devastated. He described the fall of Singapore as ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.55

  Figure 2.3 The British Empire humiliated: the surrender of British forces to the Japanese, 15 February 1942.

  Getty Images / Modadori Portfolio / 141556273

  The fall of Singapore weakened relations between Britain and the Dominions, which lost faith in the mother country’s ability to defend them and sought greater autonomy or a rapprochement with the United States. On 19 February 1942 the Japanese bombed the North Australian port of Darwin. Australian Premier John Curtin was quick to welcome General Douglas MacArthur, newly appointed Supreme Commander of the South Pacific Area, in March 1942. Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, told members of the Empire Parliamentary Association at Westminster in November 1943 that Britain had ‘nothing left in the till’ as a result of the war and retreat. It should concede a more decentralised model of the British Empire, in which the Dominions become ‘sharers and partners’. Concerned too that the Japanese tornado and the faltering myth of white supremacy might encourage black Africans to demand liberation, he proposed that Dominions like South Africa should extend that dominion over the British colonies around them in order to deal with ‘the problem of race and colour’.56 Here was a sign that greater autonomy for South Africa might lead to greater racial oppression.