Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  Even more serious were the consequences of Japan’s advance for British India. For sixty-six years the British monarch had been empress or emperor of India and the Indian elites had been denied self-government. Military defeat changed all this. The Japanese captured Rangoon in British Burma on 7 March 1942. The Burma Road, along which the British were supplying the Nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese, was abandoned, and Indian, Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese populations of Burma were forced to flee to India. In April 1942 the Japanese bombed Calcutta and the British naval base at Colombo, Ceylon. Fearing a Japanese invasion of Bengal, the British ordered scorched-earth measures there as early as February 1942. Power stations and oil installations were demolished, rolling stock, boats and even elephants that might be used by the invaders were confiscated and rice stocks were requisitioned and stockpiled for the British Army. Together with a cyclone, tidal waves and floods in October 1942, these measures provoked a famine in Bengal in 1943 that caused over three million deaths and all but destroyed the reputation of the British as a colonial power.57

  The day after the fall of Singapore the Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo told the Japanese parliament, ‘It is a golden opportunity for India to rid herself of the ruthless despotism of Britain and participate in the construction of the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Japan expects that India will restore its proper status as India for the Indians.’58 Both the Japanese and the Germans supported the formation of an Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose, a nationalist who had broken with Gandhi in 1939, formed from Indian soldiers captured after the loss of Singapore. One of its officers, Captain Prem Kumar Sagel, reflected on the new balance of global power: ‘The fall of Singapore finally convinced me of the degeneration of the British people and I thought that the last days of the British Empire had come.’59

  The British government was desperate to hold on to the Indian Army, almost two million strong, to help drive back the Japanese but at the same time was forced to make concessions to the Indian Congress movement. Urgently, Churchill sent a Cabinet mission under Sir Stafford Cripps to India in March 1942 promising independence after the war and in the meantime a greater role for Indians in the government of India. This was not enough and Gandhi famously described the offer as ‘a post-dated cheque on a failing bank’.60 The Indian Congress rejected the deal on 10 April 1942 and in August launched the Quit India campaign. Gandhi, Nehru and their colleagues were thrown into prison and crowds took matters into their own hands.

  The British were now terrified that the Japanese would gain control of the Indian Ocean and snap the routes that kept the Empire together. The island of Madagascar, a French colony since 1896 and which had declared for Vichy, exposed East and Southern Africa and the route by the Cape. The British sent in a force largely of South African and East African troops and took Diego Suarez on 5 May 1942. A deal was then done with the Vichy governor, much to the fury of the Free French. The island was handed over with poor grace to the Free French when their high commissioner arrived in January 1943, but the British did not leave until 1946.61

  ‘The Age of Imperialism is Ended’

  Faith in the British Empire was shaken even among the British people. The BBC dropped a programme of Kipling readings for Empire Day, 24 May 1942. As Captain David Gammans MP said, ‘The old Kipling idea of Empire is dead.’62 Although they were now fighting alongside the British against the Axis powers, the Americans did not offer the British much hope for saving their Empire. In a Memorial Day address at the Arlington Memorial Amphitheatre, on 30 May 1942, Sumner Welles declared:

  If this war is in fact a war for the liberation of peoples, it must assure the sovereign equality of peoples throughout the world as well as in the world of the Americas. Our victory must bring in its wake the liberation of all peoples. Discrimination between peoples because of their race, creed or colour must be abolished. The age of imperialism is ended.63

  The American press was clear in its support for the Indian National Congress when it launched its Quit India campaign against the British. The editors of Life magazine published an open letter to the people of England on 12 October 1942. This was accompanied by pictures of huge crowds listening to the All-India Congress Committee meeting in Bombay, on 7 August 1942, calling for total disobedience to British rule, and recording the riots that broke out after the arrest of Gandhi. The letter was explicit:

  One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together. We don’t want to put the matter so bluntly, but we don’t want you to have any illusions. If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing alone […] Quit fighting the war to hold the Empire together […] if you cling to the Empire at the expense of the United Nations you will lose the war.64

  In the teeth of this challenge, the riposte of Churchill was equally explicit. At a press conference on Armistice Day, 11 November 1942, he asserted, ‘Let me make this clear, in case there should be any mistake about it in any quarter. We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’65

  Despite these tensions over empire, Britain and America agreed on the need to defeat the Axis. Operation Torch landed their forces in French North Africa, from Casablanca to Algiers, on 8 November 1942. This was intended as a bridgehead for the liberation of Europe from German power, but the Americans had no more thought of saving the French Empire than they had of saving the British. ‘What inherent right has France to territory which she has seized, sometimes by war, as recently as the 1880s’, Roosevelt had asked in August 1942, ‘any more than has Japan to seize by force certain territories of China which she has now occupied? The only difference is in point in time.’66 Equally, Roosevelt had no reason to prefer the Free French over Vichy. The Free French had antagonised the Americans by seizing from Vichy the island of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, off Nova Scotia and only 500 miles off US territory, on Christmas Eve 1941. The Americans did not feel let down by France’s armistice with Germany and Roosevelt’s ambassador at Vichy, Admiral Leahy, got on very well with Vichy’s First Minister, Admiral Darlan. De Gaulle was not told of Operation Torch and when he found out exclaimed, ‘Fine. I hope that Vichy throws them back into the sea. You don’t enter France like a burglar.’67

  Vichy French forces indeed put up stubborn resistance. The Americans wanted to conclude a ceasefire as soon as possible and did this with Admiral Darlan, who was then in Algiers. The so-called ‘Darlan deal’ seemed to betray the much-trumpeted idealism of the United States, and Labour MP Aneurin Bevan asked, ‘What kind of Europe are we thinking of? A Europe built by rats for rats?’68 Roosevelt brushed off the pact with Vichy as a ‘temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle’.69 In the event, Admiral Darlan was assassinated on Christmas Eve 1942 but Roosevelt did not then turn to de Gaulle. Rather he endorsed de Gaulle’s arch-rival, General Giraud, who had sworn an oath of loyalty to Marshal Pétain. When Roosevelt met Churchill at Casablanca in January, de Gaulle was persuaded to meet Giraud and work with him. The Americans joked about the ‘shotgun marriage’ between Giraud the groom and de Gaulle the bride.70 At this stage the marriage did not work out and de Gaulle flew back to London, leaving Giraud in charge in North Africa.71

  The presence of the Americans and the discomfiture of the French Empire provided much encouragement to Algerian nationalists. Ferhat Abbas, a nationalist campaigner and local councillor in Algeria, who had fought with the French in 1940 and then returned to Sétif where he owned a pharmacy, observed that France’s defeat by Germany and bail-out by the Americans had altered the balance of power between colonisers and colonised. Broadcasts from London, Washington and Moscow, he noticed, were educating Africans and Asians in the principle of the liberty and equality of all nations. In February 1943 he therefore drafted a Manifesto of the Algerian People that was endorsed by a group of fifty-si
x Muslim leaders. It appealed to ‘those nations fighting both against Germany and for the liberation of peoples’, denouncing the French colonial regime in Algeria as ‘imperialistic and anachronistic […] a modern form of slavery’. A second draft demanded an Algerian state with a constitution drafted by an Algerian assembly elected by all its inhabitants.72 The Manifesto was submitted first to Giraud in March and then to de Gaulle who returned to Algiers on 30 May 1943 to set up the French Committee of National Liberation – in effect the French provisional government – jointly with Giraud. This was badly timed. Both the French and the Algerians were pursuing liberation, but for the French this meant restoring the unity of the French Empire, a unity that was being challenged by Algerian nationalists. Ferhat Abbas was placed under house arrest.

  Liberation or the Restoration of Empire?

  In North Africa, where the provisional government of the French Republic was now based, a new French army was built up under Giraud as commander-in-chief that amalgamated de Gaulle’s Free French and Vichy’s Army of Africa and was essentially funded and equipped by the Americans. From it was drawn an Expeditionary Force that took part in the Allied landings in Italy in the autumn of 1943, provoking the overthrow of Mussolini, armistice with the Italians and a long battle against the Germans who now defended the peninsula. This French force was also heavily reliant on African forces: it included 100,000 men from West Africa and 176,000 from North Africa.73 One of the soldiers fighting in Italy was 24-year-old Ahmed Ben Bella, an Algerian of peasant origin who had fought as a sergeant with the French in 1940, returned to the farm and was called up to rejoin the Algerian, then Moroccan Tirailleurs in 1943–4. He fought at Monte Cassino and was decorated by de Gaulle when they got to Rome, but was already thinking about how Algerian independence might have to be gained by armed struggle.74

  The great offensive against Japan in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, commanded by General McArthur and Lord Mountbatten, got under way. The manpower of the British Empire was fully mobilised but proved increasingly reluctant simply to serve and obey. The British focus was the Burma campaign led by General Slim to defeat the Japanese and secure the British Raj. About 70,000 Indian and 120,000 African troops took part in the Burma offensive.75 Soldiers were recruited from West and East Africa to join the fight. One of these was 17-year-old Isaac Fadoyebo, a Hausa from Nigeria educated in an Anglican missionary school, who had wished to train as a teacher. He was drafted into the Royal West African Frontier Force, swore an oath to King and Empire, and was shipped via Cape Town to Bombay, by rail to Calcutta and across the Bay of Bengal to Chittagong, arriving in August 1943.76 However, the recruitment of colonial soldiers became increasingly problematic, as the British Empire seemed to totter and rhetoric of national liberation gained force. Soldiers of the King’s African Rifles who had defeated the Italians in Ethiopia refused to board ships for the East at Massawa in February 1942, saying that they had won their war and did not want to fight ‘Bwana’s war’, the boss’s war.77 Similarly, a battalion of black Mauritian troops who had been sent to occupy Madagascar mutinied in December 1943 rather than go to fight the Japanese in Burma.78

  Despite these challenges, the ambition of the British and French was simply this: to restore their empires. For the Free French, France was being liberated from the springboard of the African Empire. After that the rest of the empire in the Middle East and Far East would be recovered, and with it all, the French greatness so cruelly shattered in 1940. In January 1944 de Gaulle called a conference to Brazzaville in the French Congo, effectively the capital of its empire. It brought together representatives of a Provisional Consultative Assembly that had been convened in Algiers the previous November and colonial governors in Africa. There were no representatives from Indo-China, which was under Japanese control, and only one black man, namely Félix Eboué, the governor of Chad who had come over to de Gaulle in 1940. De Gaulle told the delegates that France, ‘plunged into crisis by a temporary defeat, found help and a point of departure for its liberation in its overseas territories, so that there is now a definitive link between the metropolis and the Empire’. The outcome of the conference spoke of widening citizenship but was clear about business as usual: ‘the goals of the work of civilisation undertaken by France eliminate any idea of autonomy, any possibility of development outside the French imperial bloc; there can be no question even of a distant self-government in the colonies’.79

  The restoration of grandeur was still a long way off. The goal of the Allied Supreme Command was to drive German forces back into Germany with a minimum of political complications and no political disorder in France. The US government had not excluded establishing an Allied Military Government in Occupied Territory (AMGOT), as they had in Italy. On the eve of D-Day Churchill summoned de Gaulle and told him that the French would not be taking part in the Normandy landings. When the general protested, Churchill said that these were Roosevelt’s orders. He added that if he had to choose between Roosevelt and de Gaulle he would always choose Roosevelt, and if he had to choose between Europe and the wider world he would always choose the wider world.80 These words would come back to haunt the British government fewer than twenty years later.

  General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division did not land on the Normandy coast until 1 August, while the French B Army, amalgamating the Free French and Vichy’s Army of Africa, landed in Provence as part of Operation Dragoon on 15 August. African colonial troops were so prominent that Churchill quipped that the divisions involved were ‘three American and four Frog blackamoors’.81 Whether these colonial forces could be deployed in Europe was a matter for deep discussion. General Leclerc had asked de Gaulle in August 1943 for ‘white reinforcements to replace the blacks who are unsuitable for war in Europe’.82 After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, and as the French Army pressed towards the German frontier, most colonial troops were disbanded by a process of so-called blanchiment or ‘whitening’. The excuse given was that they would not survive the winter on the Franco-German border and that there was not enough equipment to go round; the reality was that they challenged racial hierarchies in Europe itself. Black troops were replaced by fresh troops drawn from resistance fighters of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieure (FFIs) and corralled in camps in the south of France or Brittany, awaiting repatriation to West Africa. They were deprived of uniforms, blankets and pay and generally treated as inferiors restored to the bottom of the colonial hierarchy. Mutinies broke out, most famously at Thiaroye near Dakar, where loyal Senegalese troops on French orders opened fire on the mutineers, killing thirty-five.83 This massacre has often been seen as a founding moment of African nationalism. ‘You did not die in vain’, wrote Léopold Sédar Senghor, who had fought with the Tirailleurs and been a POW in 1940, ‘You are the witnesses of immortal Africa, you are the witnesses of tomorrow’s new world.’84

  Dilemma in the United Nations

  As the Allied forces drove into Germany in the spring of 1945, the debate about the relative merits of the equal rights of all nations and the historic claims of colonial powers was moved to an entirely different setting, the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. Between April and June 1945, 282 delegates met and heard the voices of many subject peoples demanding equality and self-determination. W. E. B. Du Bois, veteran leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), had warned that the ‘tentative plan for world government designed especially to curb aggression’ might also ‘preserve imperial power, and even extend and fortify it’.85 In San Francisco he denounced ‘the colonial system of government’ as ‘undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars’ and rallied support from countries such as Haiti, Liberia, Ethiopia and Egypt.86 The Philippines delegation demanded a voice for the thousands of the colonised who did not have a voice and independence for colonised countries.

  The colonial powers, however, had absolutely no will to open the door to worldwide self-government. The British delegate, Ro
bert Gascoyne-Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, nicknamed ‘Bobetty’, saw no reason to depart from the time-honoured script. He argued that the world was divided into ‘peoples of different races, peoples of different religions and peoples of different stages of civilization’. Colonial powers had ‘a duty to train and educate the indigenous peoples to govern themselves’, but as yet they were ‘non self-governing peoples’ with a long way to go.87 League of Nations mandates were renamed trusteeships, but this category was designed for the colonies of the defeated Axis powers; in those areas, Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, together with South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, were to act as trustees. The French delegate, resistance leader and Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, firmly rejected the idea that Vietnam might become a trusteeship.

  The death of Roosevelt on 12 April 1945 and the succession of Harry Truman brought about a change of opinion in Washington. Truman was concerned mainly about the growth of Soviet power and saw the British and French Empires as important counterweights. This change of opinion fed through to the United Nations Charter, published on 26 June 1945. Its Chapter 11 established the principle of non-self-governing territories, but spoke of ‘their progressive development towards self-government or independence as may be appropriate to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples’ (article 76). This permitted the postponement of independence until that ‘development’ was assured. Meanwhile, article 80 endorsed the established claims of colonial powers: ‘nothing in this Chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties’. Self-government in the colonies was for another day.