Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  Up to the very last minute Subhas Bose had hoped that Japan would resist the Allies’ resurgence long enough for his Azad Hind government to secure something from the expected peace conference. If that did not succeed, he would approach the Soviet Union, which appeared increasingly antagonistic to Britain as the war ended. As their own nemesis approached in August 1945, the Japanese commanders finally agreed to help him make contact with the advancing Soviet armies in Manchuria. The dropping of the atom bombs and the Japanese surrender forced him to move fast. He was touring Malaya, after laying the foundation of the INA Martyrs’ Memorial at Connaught Drive on Singapore’s seafront. On 17 August he issued a final order of the day, dissolving the INA with the words: ‘The roads to Delhi are many and Delhi still remains our goal.’13 He then flew out of Singapore on his way to China via French Indo-China. If all else failed he wanted to become a prisoner of the Soviets: ‘They are the only ones who will resist the British. My fate is with them.’14 But as the Japanese plane took off from Taipei airport its engines faltered and then failed. Bose was badly burned in the crash. According to several witnesses, he died on 18 August in a Japanese military hospital, talking to the very last of India’s freedom.

  British and Indian commissions later established convincingly that Bose had died in Taiwan. These were legendary and apocalyptic times, however. Having witnessed the first Indian leader to fight against the British since the great mutiny of 1857, many in both Southeast Asia and India refused to accept the loss of their hero. Rumours that Bose had survived and was waiting to come out of hiding and begin the final struggle for independence were rampant by the end of 1945. A later British interrogation of a Japanese civilian associated with their Southeast Asian secret-service organization, the Hikari Kikan, hints at the rumours’ source. This operative recorded that when news of Bose’s death was reported in Rangoon on 19 August 1945, several Japanese officers went to offer their condolences to one of Bose’s senior officers, Bhonsle. He had not been altogether in Subhas Bose’s confidence and told General Isoda that ‘he had a feeling that Bose was not dead, but that his disappearance had been covered up’.15 Despite denials from the Japanese, who had received more details on the fatal crash, INA personnel remained unconvinced and passed on this feeling to Indian civilians. When the news of Bose’s death reached India, about a week later, many did not believe it and dismissed the report as British propaganda. In Tokyo young INA leaders studying at the Japanese Military Academy were also unconvinced by the account of his death and disturbed by the hasty cremation. They guarded Bose’s ashes around the clock.16 There are still some in India today who believe that Bose remained alive and in Soviet custody, a once and future king of Indian independence. The legend of ‘Netaji’ Bose’s survival helped bind together the defeated INA. In Bengal it became an assurance of the province’s supreme importance in the liberation of the motherland. It sustained the morale of many across India and Southeast Asia who deplored the return of British power or felt alienated from the political settlement finally achieved by Gandhi and Nehru.

  Of those Indians who did accept that Bose had perished, most eulogized him as a great patriot and military leader, even when they took the official Congress line that he was mistaken in allying with Japanese ‘fascism’. Even Gandhi thought kindly of him. To Amrit Kaur he wrote: ‘Subhas Bose has died well. He was undoubtedly a patriot, though misguided.’ Typically, however, the Mahatma immediately changed the subject and reverted to avuncular advice, adding: ‘Your gum has caused me much trouble. I blame the dentist.’17 Bose’s martyrdom most directly traumatized the many young men and women from the Indian civilian communities of Malaya and Singapore who had rushed to enlist. Fearing British reprisals, the INA officers in Tokyo sought sanctuary in the USA from the new military ruler, General MacArthur.18 Bose’s exit further dramatized the issue of the legitimacy of the INA and the problems that the British would face in dealing with it. They had already decided to try as many as 300 of its officers, but their gradual retreat from this position over the next two years was a further demonstration that the Raj was moving inexorably towards its end.

  NATIONS WITHOUT STATES

  Alongside these big nationalisms – Indian, Malay and Burmese – the war had mobilized and militarized a host of minority peoples across the vast swathe of South and Southeast Asia. It was not only the leaderships of easily recognizable minority groups, such as the Karen of Burma, who were asserting their claims to autonomy in the autumn of 1945. Other older and more shadowy entities seemed to be rising from the grave of history to plague both the would-be new imperialists and the new nationalists who were on the point of grasping independence. Strange as it may seem today, in 1945 many Bengali leaders, Hindu and Muslim alike, were contemplating a separate ‘Banglistan’, a Bengal outside of or only loosely affiliated to any future Indian federation. Some Hindus, for instance, were unhappy with any political settlement that might put the rural Muslim majority of the province into a position of unassailable power. Some Muslims in the province would have preferred partial separation from India to subordination to all-India politicians such as Mahomed Ali Jinnah.19 Across the border in Arakan, the northwestern coastal strip of Burma which had been the scene of heavy fighting during the war, similar ideas of separation were in the air. The Muslims of the region had been violently at odds with their Buddhist neighbours since the 1930s. They had already signed up for a vague idea of a Pakistan embracing the Muslims of eastern Bengal and those of Arakan. Even the Buddhists here harboured dreams of autonomy. Arakan had only been annexed to Burma in the 1780s. Arakanese Buddhists always thought of themselves as a different sort of Burmese. Some of them had leaned more to the British than had the Burmese of the Irrawaddy valley and the south. Others again had fantasies of re-founding the ancient state of Arakan which had been a major force in the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the autumn of 1945 public meetings in Akyab, the seaport capital, and other Arakanese towns pressed the case for their homeland.20 Even in Rangoon a meeting of Arakanese immigrants demanded local autonomy for Arakan within Burma. As for India: ‘the Government of Burma would have to ensure that the annexed portions of Arakan are returned or the rights of Arakanese within India are safeguarded’. Symbolically, the meeting also insisted on the return to the homeland of the ancient gilded image of Buddha Mahamuni that was housed in a pagoda in Mandalay. The image had been seized in the eighteenth century by the empire-building Burmese king Bodawpaya when he first conquered the region for the Ava monarchy.

  Then there were national visions that transcended territory. Just as the INA had placed a new responsibility for the freedom of India upon the Indian communities of Southeast Asia, so too, after 1937, did the National Salvation movement bring together the Overseas Chinese, as never before and as never since. Led by the ‘Henry Ford of Malaya’, Tan Kah Kee, a self-made millionaire philanthropist, it drew on the wealth of the Nanyang capitalists to provide as much as one third of the war expenditure of Chiang Kai Shek’s government. But it was also unprecedented in the way it mobilized labourers, food hawkers, rickshaw men, school students and prostitutes into Anti-Enemy Backing-Up Societies to collect subscriptions and boycott Japanese goods and shops. It united for a time the Kuomintang in Southeast Asia with the Malayan Communist Party, whose support was overwhelmingly Chinese, and allowed them to extend their organizations in a way that had not been possible before. Of all the communities of the crescent, it was perhaps the Chinese who paid the highest price for their resistance to Japan. Yamashita’s soldiers saw the Malayan campaign as a theatre of the China war, and after the fall of Singapore began the systematic screening and execution of Malayan Chinese. The sook ching, or ‘purification by elimination’, claimed perhaps 50,000 lives. It was the biggest single atrocity of the war in Southeast Asia: in the words of the Japanese administrator in Singapore, Mamoru Shinozaki, who had tried and failed to stop it, it was ‘a crime that sullied the honour of the Japanese army’.21

  These
sufferings, and the sense of place fostered by these new sites of memory and mourning, contributed to a stronger Southeast Asian identity for those of Indian or Chinese origin. This had begun long before the war. In Malaya and Singapore, locally born Chinese had taken on a distinctive Peranakan (Straits) identity, and adopted the Malay language whilst also taking advantage of English mission schools. Their graduates formed the core of the growing professional classes of the towns. The response by more recent settlers to cultural and intellectual change in China had, by the late 1920s, brought with it a growing awareness that there was a distinctive ‘Nanyang’ style of politics.22 Many writers and artists who fled China in 1937 came to Malaya; a community that had been built by traders and labourers now possessed a growing intelligentsia. They saw the region as an artistic utopia and argued that their work needed to take in ‘local colour’ and adopt a proletarian bias. After 1945 the old links to distant homelands were difficult to re-establish. The urgency of the local political situation in Burma, Malaya and elsewhere, catalysed far-reaching debates: where did the Overseas Chinese or Indians call ‘home’? What stake might they be allowed in their places of abode? Was Burma to be for the Burmans, Malaya for the Malays? And who precisely were the ‘Burmese’ or the ‘Malays’? The British had tended to see the ethnic divisions of these ‘segmented societies’ in stark terms, and see racial groups in eternal conflict with each other: never more so than in what British writers termed the ‘plural society’ of Malaya. But this was not a true reflection of the ethnic diversity that existed within ‘Malay’, ‘Chinese’ or ‘Indian’ communities. Nor did it recognize their increasingly complex interconnections, or address the new solidarities of class that were being preached by the communists. This raised further questions: to what extent was a composite, multiracial ‘Malayan’ identity emerging? And what was to be its foundation? In the years to come these debates would engage the minds of nationalists, communists and colonialists alike.

  So the British faced newly energized nationalist movements, both great and small, which limited their room for manoeuvre in the longer term. But it was not only Asian thinking about empire that had changed. Many young Britons, though not yet the Tory and Labour leadership, had come to see empire as an anachronism during the war. Not only did it divert valuable manpower and resources from where they were needed at home, it also threatened domestic liberties and seemed likely to blow Britain’s new socialist government off course. At an almost unconscious level, the complaints of the ‘forgotten army’ in the East and its even more radical RAF comrade, the ‘forgotten air force’, represented a deep desire for change in the British social order as a whole. Before the election Churchill had been disgusted to hear from Sir William Slim that 90 per cent of the troops in the East were going to vote Labour and the other 10 per cent would not vote at all. Now those Labour supporters, heartily tired of dysentery, malaria, ENSA humour and poor pay, wanted to see the brave new world that their left-leaning tutors in the army education corps had promised them. Morale slumped and would soon lead to small-scale mutinies among British forces from Karachi to Singapore. Months after the surrender of Japan, British troops were incensed to find themselves fighting and suffering casualties in what seemed like completely unnecessary wars against nationalists in Indonesia and French Indo-China.

  This mood was picked up and articulated by radical newspapers in Britain and political discussion groups at army and air-force bases. A newspaper such as the old Labour broadsheet, Reynolds News, was typical. It was written for working people, but most of its correspondents and columnists were British middle- or upper-class communists and socialists, free to inveigh against the country’s archaic society and the dominance of ‘monopoly capital’ now that wartime censorship had been lifted. Major Woodrow Wyatt, a socialist with an interest in the ‘Indian problem’, demanded a pro-Congress policy and the abolition of the India Office in London.23 Harold Laski, Labour’s most prominent left-wing intellectual, urged that the viceroy’s executive council be turned into a ‘national government’.24 These radicals made common cause with Asian nationalists. Indonesian nationalists argued in Reynolds against any attempt by the British government to reinstate the Dutch capitalists who were accused of exploiting and impoverishing the Indonesian peasantry.25 All the while, the paper’s editorials demanded the swift demobilization of the eastern army and justice for Britain’s miners, steelworkers and textile workers, many of whom were now on strike. The Labour government and the political establishment at home found itself fighting on three fronts, in Asia and the new United Nations and among its own supporters at home. The news was full of reports of the trial and execution of French collaborators, concentration-camp guards and Japanese militarists. Repression was harder and harder to justify.

  One of Reynolds columnists was Tom Driberg MP, a colourful and maverick British politician who came to play a small but representative role in the history of the crescent. His Times obituary thirty years later stated with surprising candour that he was ‘a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist and a homosexual’,26 while many at the time also hinted that he had worked for the KGB. Before the war Driberg gloried in the sort of circles portrayed in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, but at the same time he rejected the British establishment represented by his late father, a former Indian civil servant in Assam. Frank Owen, the journalist who ran Lord Louis Mountbatten’s propaganda sheets for South East Asia Command, told Driberg that the men in the East thought of themselves as the ‘forgotten army’ and thirsted for coverage of their exploits and demands to be demobilized. Driberg wrote to Mountbatten at the end of July 1945 asking to visit South East Asia Command. At first, suspicious of his position as an MP, Mountbatten hesitated. Then, under the influence of Owen, Mountbatten changed his mind and agreed to meet him. Driberg’s biographer Francis Wheen writes: ‘he and Tom hit it off at once and discovered they had much in common, including a sexual preference for men’, although it has to be admitted that the jury is still out on this last point. Mountbatten, Wheen goes on, was ‘a royalist and a snob who nevertheless held left-wing views; Tom was a left-winger, who nevertheless loved the monarchy.’27 By early September Driberg was embarked upon a grand tour of South East Asia Command which would take him to Kandy, Singapore, Rangoon and Saigon. In all these locations he wrote despatches to Reynolds News which subtly influenced Labour opinion in favour of the conciliatory policy towards the Asian nationalists preferred by Mountbatten. He met many of the region’s nationalist leaders, notably Aung San, and reckoned later that he played a minor role in the early independence of Burma.

  So the leaders of nations and would-be nations continued their pirouettes of bargains, threats and violence. Meanwhile, across the whole vast crescent that stretched from the plains of India to Singapore and beyond, to Sumatra and the northern shores of Australia, millions of people dislocated by war, famine and disease tried to rebuild their lives. There were many tragic stories of loss, brutality and dispossession and these grew in strength as the interrogation of Japanese personnel for war crimes uncovered more horrors. Sometimes, however, fate was charitable. Take the case of the appropriately named Sweeper Pissoo, a low-caste Indian sanitation orderly, once attached to the British forces in Burma. As a non-combatant enrolled in the Indian Army, he had been left behind during the scuttle from Rangoon in 1942. He had gone to ground and survived the war as a humble sweeper. After the war he began to parade his military credentials again and turned up at a number of British military camps in Burma. Burma Command eventually signalled GHQ (India) and it was discovered that he had been formally reported missing. Burma Command began to make arrangements for his repatriation to Aurangabad, India. ‘This,’ said a British officer, ‘we did with a happy smile, wondering just how much pay Sweeper Pissoo would get before his demobilization.’28 With four years’ back wages due, he would be wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.

  THREE WEEKS IN MALAYA

  For so many people,
the fortunes of war would be decided in the interregnum that followed the Japanese surrender. Many of the definitive political events of the war occurred in the power vacuum between two empires. In these few short weeks bids for freedom were made in Burma, Malaya, Vietnam and Indonesia. This was also a time of some of the most horrific internal violence within these societies, the memory of which continues to scar the collective consciousness of the nation-states that emerged. Nowhere, perhaps, was the political future so open as in Malaya. It was here that the Japanese had devolved the least power to their Asian subjects. It was here too that imperial power was about to be reasserted with the greatest resolve. But on 15 August 1945 Mountbatten’s army of re-occupation was still in India. Its vanguard reached Malaya only three weeks later. In this hiatus of anxiety and anticipation, most of the people there did not know who or what to expect. In the towns of the Malay peninsula the flags that flew most prominently were those of China, bearing the name of the communist-led Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army as they fluttered from triumphal arches erected across the streets. As its fighters came down from the mountains, a struggle began for control of Malaya.