by Jan Morris
And if it was illusory, if the British victory was a defeat disguised, if the propagandists had given the people some false ideas about themselves and their prospects, if the Empire was not so united and powerful as Churchill suggested, if the grand euphoria of 1945 was all too soon to dissolve, still there was much to be proud of. They had stayed the terrible course, start to finish. They had lived up to the best in themselves and their civilization. For a few years the British Empire had achieved the condition, nothing to do with imperialism, which Burke had desired for England long before—not an England ‘amusing itself with the puppet-show of power’, but ‘sympathetic with the adversity or with the happiness of mankind, feeling that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her’.
1 At least in the early years: by the end Generals Alexander, Slim and Montgomery had all succeeded to a remarkable degree in enlisting the confidence of their troops, and Montgomery’s name even went into the Australian language—‘it’s a monty’ meant it was a certainty.
1 Though King George himself had decided to stay in England whatever happened.
1 Until February 1945. Two months later Egypt was able, as a belligerent Power on the right side, to become a founder member of the United Nations.
1 In fact the incident rankled ever after, and Anglo-Egyptian relations remained deplorable until the last claims to imperial privilege were abandoned. In the end it was the Egyptians themselves who forced the abdication of Farouk—in 1952, when they shipped him off to Italy in his own yacht (to be returned later, like an empty bottle). He died in 1965, a year after Lampson.
1 Though his army was a failure, as Hitler had foreseen—‘there are Indians’, said the Führer sagely, ‘who won’t kill a louse, so they won’t kill an Englishman either.’ Bose himself is thought to have died in Taiwan after his Japanese aircraft had crashed there in 1945. Aung San, reconciled with the British after the war, became the first Prime Minister of independent Burma, but three months later, only thirty-three years old, was assassinated in the council chamber at Rangoon. The imperturbable Mufti settled after the war in Egypt—where I met him, I cannot resist recording, at the wedding of the King of Libya—and died in 1974 in Beirut.
1 Though the islands are now officially simply the Republic of Malta, to this day they are still often called Malta GC, especially by the British.
1 And its Admiral commanded it from London.
2 The Repulse was twenty-five years old, the Prince of Wales, thanks to treaty commitments, was armed with 14-inch guns as against the 16-inch of Japanese battleships. Churchill reassured the New Zealanders, as he despatched the squadron, that ‘nothing is so good as having something that can catch and kill anything’, but only two months before he had privately deplored the inadequate armament of the Prince of Wales class—sorrow rose in the heart when one thought about it, ‘or ought to’.
1 And simultaneously upon the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii—thus ensuring a British victory in the end, for the Germans promptly declared war on the Americans too.
1 Singapore is transformed today as an independent City-State, but the Ford plant still stands and offers in its brown teak-furnished offices melancholy evocations of the surrender. I asked my hosts there in 1974 if many Britons came to see the place. Not many, they said, very few in fact: but seldom a day went by without a coachload of Japanese tourists stopping at the factory gate.
General Percival, remembered by Yamashita later as being ‘so pale and thin and ill’, spent the next three years as a prisoner in Manchuria, where the Japanese kept their most important captives, but was released in time to be present at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945, and lived until 1966. Yamashita, on the other hand, was hanged as a war criminal in 1946, the last victory being the one that counts.
1 For example, in vernacular leaflets dropped into New Guinea: ‘Japan bugger up finish. Altogether Japan man fraid too much, now all e like run away. By-n-by Govment makim good fashion along you fella, now you fella happy too much. Wait liklik time das all.’
1 Twelve of whom were executed by the Japanese, in 1944, for the possession of a radio. They were shot on a pleasant sandy beach outside the prison, and a memorial marks the spot.
1 I have adapted this episode from Spencer-Chapman’s bestselling war memoir The Jungle Is Neutral (London 1949). Its author never refound himself after the war, and ended up as warden of a residential hall at Reading University—where, on a summer day in 1971, he took a gun and shot himself.
2 The Kohima war memorial marks the site. The Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow has disappeared, but the white lines of his tennis court have been marked out in concrete at the foot of the monument.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Heirs Assemble
IT did not last long. The Churchills and the Macmillans might respond to glory still, the blood-bonds of Empire were momentarily strengthened by the experience of victory, British prestige in Europe stood higher than ever before, but still the mass of the British people were not interested in power or influence. A tremendous home-sickness seized the exhausted armies, and a sense of duty completed, chapters closed, lay upon the now shabby homeland. The people wanted only to live quietly and comfortably, and disillusioned as they had been by the torments of slump and unemployment in the 1930s, they saw in the aftermath of war the chance to make a fresh start—not in the distant fields of Empire, but in their own familiar island. They would not be gulled again by illusions of splendour. Churchill was dismissed from office at the first chance, and went smouldering off to write his war memoirs and to complete his History of the English-Speaking Peoples.1 The Labour Government which took office under Clement Attlee in 1945 dedicated itself to social reform at home, internationalism abroad. The British Empire was held momentarily in abeyance, so to speak, while the new rulers of Great Britain decided what best to do with it.
Foreigners had firmer ideas, and the general opinion was, in the years after the Second World War, that it should now be abolished. Hitler indeed, before his death in 1945, had announced it to be doomed already, and called Churchill its grave-digger. ‘It is at an end’, he wrote venomously in the last weeks of his life. ‘It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island.’
2
The Americans viewed the British Empire confusedly. There was still a powerful class of Anglophiles in the United States, especially in the Protestant Establishment of the east, and there was an inherited respect for the presence and the experience of the English, and for the common origins of the two nations—the imperial troops under his command, said a victory message from the American General Douglas MacArthur to Mr Attlee, had proved themselves ‘fully worthy of the immortal tradition of our race’. British influence was still strong in Washington, for all the new disparities of power: through personal friendships and family connections, through the Common Law and analogous institutions, through the presence, always around the seats of power, of American Rhodes Scholars from Oxford. The Special Relationship, the Anglo-American axis forged during the war, survived into the peace, and made Britain, even in her straitened circumstances, more than a client State, but rather like a family adviser past the peak of his career.
This esteem and understanding did not generally extend to the British Empire. Nearly all Americans had been brought up to distrust the very notion of imperialism, whether they were descendants of American revolutionaries or refugees from the old tyrannies of the European continent. The Americans had experienced an imperialist spasm themselves, in the 1890s, when Kipling was moved to urge them to ‘take up the White Man’s burden’ by occupying the Philippines. They had soon grown out of it, though, and indeed considered themselves the divinely appointed executors of universal self-determination, rather as the British had considered themselves entitled to interfere with slavery anywhere in the previous century. They had neglected the sacred task between the wars, by abandoning the League of Nations an
d withdrawing into isolationism, but the end of imperialism in the abstract, which meant British imperialism in the palpable, was certainly among their aims in the Second World War. They were astonishingly ignorant about the nature of the British Empire—it was commonly supposed even in Detroit and Chicago that Canada was ruled from London:1 but they were generally convinced that whatever its nature was, it was reprehensible.
In July 1941 Churchill went to Newfoundland to draw up with President Roosevelt the Atlantic Charter, a pietistic declaration of war aims. Churchill was determined to do it in the imperial style. He sailed on board the battleship Prince of Wales, fresh from the battle in which the greatest of German warships, Bismarck, had been sunk in the north Atlantic, six months from her own end in the China Sea: and it was beneath her 14-inch gun turrets, as the ship lay in Placentia Bay, off the southern coast of the island, that the two leaders were photographed at the end of their talks, surrounded by all the ancient circumstance of the Royal Navy. The Charter, however, which the Prime Minister found himself obliged to sign was anything but an imperial document, for it referred specifically to ‘the right of all people to choose the form of Government under which they live’. Churchill tried vainly to write in a clause excluding the British Empire from this awkward philosophy, and lamely explained, when he returned to London, that it was ‘primarily intended to apply to Europe’. It was not, though. It was intended to apply to Empires everywhere, not least Churchill’s own.
The Americans certainly did not propose to support the British Empire after the war, however special the Special Relationship. Roosevelt himself was a vehement critic of the Empire—‘the British would take land anywhere in the world,’ he once remarked, ‘even if it were only a rock or a sandbar.’ ‘Quit fighting a war to hold the Empire together’, Life magazine demanded in 1942, and wherever in the course of the fighting the Americans came into contact with the imperial presence, they nibbled away at its authority, by diplomacy, by economic strategy, by example. As early as 1942 Roosevelt was suggesting to Churchill that India should be given immediate Dominion status, with freedom to secede from the Empire altogether—but of course, he disingenuously added, ‘all you good people know far more about it than I do.’ In the following year Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, had to ask the India Office to stop the flow of ‘well-meaning sentimentalists from the United States to India, so that we may mind here what is still, I suppose, our own business’. In the last years of the war Colonel Louis Johnson, Roosevelt’s personal representative in New Delhi, frequently maddened the British with his interfering ways, though Churchill, recognizing the priorities of the day, always restrained his resentments—‘Anything like a serious difference between you and me’, he wrote to Roosevelt after one particularly irritating intervention, ‘would break my heart.’
In the Far East the Americans were especially determined that Hong Kong, when it was liberated from the Japanese, should be handed over to their Chinese ally Chiang Kai-shek. They considered themselves to have special interests in China, and the end of the British Empire on the Chinese coast became almost an idée fixe of the State Department. In 1941 it was suggested that Britain should sell the colony to the Chinese, the cost being met by the U.S. Treasury. In 1943 Roosevelt urged that Britain should give it up ‘as a gesture of good will’. At Yalta he suggested privately to Stalin that it might be internationalized as a free port. When Hong Kong was liberated in 1945 it was only the immediate action of one Briton, the former Colonial Secretary Franklin Gimson, that kept it British—the moment he emerged from Stanley Prison, after three years of imprisonment, he ran up the Union Jack over Government House and resumed the colonial administration on his own initiative.
Nor were the American anti-imperialists much appeased by the disappearance of the die-hard Churchill and the advent of a pacific and reformist Socialist Government in Britain. On the contrary, now they feared the development of a socialist Empire—tea, rubber, tin and cocoa, reported the New York Times gloomily in August 1945, would probably all be nationalized. For economically the Americans were determined that in the reformed post-war world they would be dominant. They had always resented the imperial tariff systems, and they saw in the melee of the war their chance to break into vast new imperial markets. By 1946 their commerce was irresistible. The dollar had succeeded the pound as the chief world currency, and the American industrial machine, far from being debilitated by the war, like the British, was buoyant and productive as never before. Britain had lost enormous overseas assets, a loss calculated by John Maynard Keynes as thirty-five times that of the United States, while Lend-Lease, the American programme of war aid for Britain, had ensured that the entire British industrial machine was devoted to war production, so that when peace came again British technology could not compete with American. By 1946 Great Britain, for so long the greatest exporter in the world, was outclassed by the United States: American products of every kind, backed often by American loans, flooded the markets of the world, satisfying demands frustrated by four years of war, and elbowing out of the way many an old British trader, trying to recover customers and profits after the catastrophe.
By their example too, their style and their irresistible panache, the Americans irrevocably damaged the Empire. Their fleets and armies, pouring into the imperial territories, were like Hollywood come to life, offering dazzling new substitutes for the imperial way. Wherever they went the Americans presented an overwhelming image of opulence, vigour and generosity, more compelling by far than the dry modes of Empire. They cheerfully disregarded the old imperial taboos and superstitions, like the vital necessity of wearing topees in the tropic sun.1 They lacked the proper sahibs’ aloofness, they laughed at the carefully devised orthodoxies of the imperial system, passed so reverently from generation to generation of imperialist. And they had quite patently inherited from the British the magnetism of power. It was the Pax Americana now. ‘Australia looks to America,’ declared the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, ‘free of any pangs as to our traditional link or kinship with the United Kingdom,’ and young men throughout the Empire, of all races, turned to the American example as successor to, or relief from, the British manner of things.
All this was not immediately plain. It was like a shifting of transparent screens, the one set subtly, almost imperceptibly, replacing another. The existence of the Empire made the two Powers feel more like equals, and few Englishmen realized that the population of Great Britain was now no more than a third that of the United States (in 1897, Diamond Jubilee year, it had been almost a half). On most conscious levels Britons and Americans remained friends and allies. The Pilgrim Society still avidly toasted Anglo-American amity,1 the Rhodes Foundation still welcomed its scholars from Yale or Idaho, American servicemen paid sentimental visits to their wartime airfields in East Anglia, the Daughters of the American Revolution devotedly recalled the unvarying dukedoms of their English pedigree. Churchill was far more devoutly honoured in America than he was in England.
But it was happening all the same, and as the British presence began to fade beneath palm and pine, so the Americans stepped in with a jazzier hymn and a bourbon on the rocks—making a welcome change, so even some Englishmen thought, from the eternal gin and tonic.
3
A more baleful view of the Empire prevailed in Moscow. This was only to be expected. Even in Tsarist days, as we have seen, Russia was considered the most insidious of the Empire’s enemies, and the Bolshevik Revolution had done nothing to ease the mutual suspicion. Just the opposite, for while the Tsarist threat had been purely strategic, the massive pressure of one expanding empire upon another, the Communist threat was profoundly ideological. Lenin had defined imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, and Ireland had always been the Marxist archetype of oppression: now the anathema was extended to the whole colonial empire. Over the Himalaya in Tsarist times there had been an enemy indeed, but an enemy not so different in kind from the British themselves, whose Mongolian agents and Cossacks i
n disguise talked much the same language as the spies and adventurers sent from British India. Now there brooded beyond the steppes a different kind of enemy altogether, altogether alien and virtually beyond communication.
Now there was no frontier with Russia—or rather, the frontier was everywhere, and the Great Game was played in every continent. The very name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics indeed, containing as it did no territorial reference at all, implied that frontiers were artificial anyway, and eventually disposable. Churchill’s alliance with Soviet Russia, concluded in the desperation of war, was purely opportunist. He detested Communism, and had consistently and frankly opposed it since he had first sent troops to fight the Bolshevik armies in the winter of 1918. All his fine words about Russian heroism and brotherhood, the propaganda adulation of the Red Army, the jewelled Sword of Stalingrad sent to Russia in tribute by the British people, the perilous convoys taking supplies to Murmansk, the Hurricane fighters sent to fly with the Red Air Force—all this meant nothing, beyond the immediate necessities of war. There was hardly a true point of sympathy between the two Powers. They were altogether antipathetic, and au fond they wanted nothing better than the extinction of the other.