Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  Mountbatten was not happy, though. Always acutely aware of how events might be interpreted, he deprecated Gracey’s uncompromising tone. He must have worried not only about the radical British press but also about the distant fulminations in Tokyo of his alter ego, Douglas MacArthur, against the perfidious English and the brutal French. He chided Gracey: ‘I must say that it would be most indiscreet for a British Commander to put on record [as Gracey had done] that “tanks, ships, aircraft and guns” are massed against virtually unarmed people and that “useless misery” might ensue.’ He was also ‘distressed to see that you have been burning down houses, and in congested areas, too! Cannot you give such unsavoury jobs (if they really are military necessities) to the French in future?’ Gracey replied with characteristic bluntness that he had to maintain ‘a proper standard of British prestige’ and that force was necessary because the Viet Minh had not the slightest intention in practice to make any distinction between British and French troops. British and Indian lives were at stake, so the threat of overwhelming force was appropriate. As for burning down Vietnamese houses, ‘getting the French to help would result in the complete destruction of not 20 but 2,000 houses and probably without warning to the inhabitants’. Mountbatten’s objections became more muted after this exchange. It is clear, though, that he remained frustrated and continued to see himself as the friend of national liberation movements. On 4 October he wrote to Driberg: ‘I can assure you that if I was left as free a hand in French Indo-China as I was left in Burma, I could solve both problems by the same method’, that is bringing the Viet Minh into a national government. The problem, he believed, was that the French, like the Dutch in Indonesia, were intransigent and refused to give any ground whatever to the nationalists.32 Driberg used this letter along with his own observations on the ground when he attacked Paris and The Hague in Parliament later in the year. Mountbatten also benefited from the gamble of taking Driberg into his confidence. While he remained in Singapore or later as viceroy of India, he could always count on the arrival of detailed and gossipy letters from the roving correspondent about the state of parliamentary or popular opinion.

  The muted argument continued among the British in Saigon, Rangoon and Singapore. Slim told his superiors in London mildly but firmly that their orders were ‘somewhat contradictory’.33 Later, a report of the Saigon Control Commission up to 9 November went the rounds of the commanders for comment. One note, not in Gracey’s handwriting, recorded that the Saigon situation was ‘an almost exact parallel with Burma. If only the French would promise progressive sovereignty to be complete at a very much earlier date (say two or three years) AND the Annamites would be equally ready to meet them, the situation might clear up.’ One note said simply ‘Good’. Another hand, possibly Gracey’s, added, ‘Waffle’. Perhaps this was the British officer who had dismissed Mus’s reportage as ‘just ideas’. More perceptively, someone had responded to a comment that it was ‘inevitable that the French should re-establish control’ with the query: ‘Can they control any better than Annamites?’34

  Despite the parallels that some wished to draw, the Indian Army soldiers faced quite different problems in Saigon and the surrounding countryside from the ones they encountered in the newly reconquered cities of Burma and Malaya. The French settlers, the ‘colons’, were extremely ambivalent about them. As Mus pointed out, there had been little resistance to the Japanese and the population had embraced Vichy and ‘Pétainisme’ with complacency. Relatively speaking, the colons had suffered little from the war even during the scarcities of 1943 – 4. They wanted French troops back and, after the coup that Gracey sanctioned, they had arms themselves. The British were merely unwelcome birds of passage. Gracey had to fire off a letter to General Leclerc, the French officer commanding during the British occupation, insisting that he tell the settlers and French forces some home truths. The Indian Army had come to their rescue. As for arming the Japanese and putting them back on the streets, if the Japanese had not faithfully carried out Gracey’s orders, ‘there would have been a disaster of the first magnitude in Southern French Indo-China with a massacre of thousands of French people and the destruction of vast amounts of French property’. What irked Gracey particularly was the attitude of some of the French to the Indian troops. He insisted that Leclerc explain the ‘camaraderie’ that existed between the white officers and the Indian and Gurkha soldiers: ‘Our men of whatever colour are our friends and are not considered “black” men. They expect and deserve to be treated in every way as first-class soldiers, and their treatment should be, and is, exactly the same as that of white troops.’ In treating such men as ‘black’, the French had misunderstood ‘our Indian Army traditions’.35 This was an interesting reflection on differing racial attitudes in the two colonial systems. French settlers did not always subscribe to France’s racially blind ideal of a civilizing mission among the non-white races. The French in Indo-China had been humiliated by Asians twice over, once by the Japanese and then by the Vietnamese. Many were not prepared to concede equality of any sort to Indians. Yet British attitudes were only superficially liberal. However friendly working relations appeared to be within the Indian Army, eating and socializing away from the front were still racially segregated activities. Indian officers had had to struggle hard to achieve a degree of equality with their white counterparts. Gracey, though, was sincere. He personally was little concerned with race and it was this that made Chacha (‘Uncle’) Gracey an acceptable commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s army after independence.

  Saigon and Cholon were elegant and prosperous cities fallen on hard times. Even after the French estaminets and cinemas reopened, there was little entertainment for the troops. Narain Das, a local Indian merchant, opened an Indian Other Ranks Club at the Cercle Hippique. A Canadian social worker from northern India, Mr Love, set up two YMCA clubs, one each for British and for Indian personnel. The more friendly of the French residents allowed British officers into the Cercle Sportif Saigonnais. But time hung heavily on their hands in the tense atmosphere of the city. The men began to amuse themselves in other ways. The French army and civilians had never had much of a problem with prostitution. There were no anti-vice leagues or distant fulminations by the Archbishop of Canterbury to close down brothels as there had been in India. The French organized them for easy access and checked the women’s health regularly. But during the Japanese occupation the medical inspections had stopped. Indian and Gurkha troops began to contract VD in significant numbers. British medical officers tried to trace the source of disease. The men were deliberately vague about where they had picked it up, mumbling disclaimers such as ‘in the Punjab four years ago’. The French were unhelpful, except ‘in one way’, as a medical officer put it sardonically: ‘their troops so often filled the brothels that ours could not get in’.36

  Infection of a political sort threatened the Indians and Gurkhas. During October and November Viet Minh and communist cadres tried to win over Indian Army men to their side. English and Vietnamese leaflets appeared denouncing the British: ‘Indian Soldiers, You are our friends because your country is under British imperialism. You and your countrymen are struggling for independence as we are doing. Why are we struggling against each other?’37 Indian and Vietnamese nationalism were the same emotion, one broadsheet explained lyrically: ‘Viet-nam has once been brilliant and sparkling beneath the Asia-sky with its heroic and everlasting history.’ Vietnamese would soon throw off the French yoke. Why were Indian soldiers spending their blood for ‘evil capitalists’? Another, more politically astute message told the Indians that the San Francisco Broadcasting Station had reported that one ‘Mr Nonon’ had wired Prime Minister Attlee objecting to the use of Indian soldiers in the suppression of the Vietnamese people.38 The ‘Nonon’ in question seems to have been a composite of Nehru and Menon. Both were indeed trying to rouse international public opinion against British and French actions in Vietnam and Indonesia. American opinion was receptive. General Douglas MacArthur called B
ritish and French action in Indo-China a betrayal of trust. Gracey was not too worried. He believed that the propaganda had little effect on his men, many of whom expressed their disgust at the communists’ brutal attacks on the French and on Vietnamese women associated with them. But Gracey may have been over-confident. Tom Driberg recorded that some Indian soldiers were indeed worried at having to put down resistance among another Asian people, and particularly resented the use of Japanese troops to restore order.39

  One side effect of the appearance of Indian soldiers in Saigon was the deterioration of relations between local Indian civilians and the Vietnamese. These had previously been quite good, though Indian moneylenders had come under attack in the 1930s. Whereas in Malaya, and particularly Burma, large and growing Indian populations had sparked resentment among local people who felt they were losing their jobs and livelihoods to them, this had not happened in French Indo-China. The 2,000-odd Indian residents here were grouped in the major cities, especially Saigon–Cholon, where they formed a quiet and prosperous merchant community. On the whole, they did not bring their families with them, unlike their contemporaries in the British territories and Thailand.40 They stood out less as a community, partly because they were fragmented into local religious groupings. This absence of a single community identity had frustrated the Japanese during the occupation, when they had tried to foster branches of Bose’s Indian Independence League in Saigon and Hanoi. When one finally did appear, it seems to have functioned chiefly as a protection racket, siphoning off funds from the big merchants, Chettiyars from southern India, into the pockets of the League’s officers. But the local Indians’ relative anonymity evaporated when Gracey arrived with the 20th Indian Division. Vietnamese resentments bubbled up when Indian soldiers appeared to be helping the British and, through them, the French to regain power. Half a dozen local Indians were murdered during the September outbreak and nearly seventy were kidnapped by militants. Indians presented huge compensation claims to the British authorities against the Vietnamese rioters, to add to their numerous headaches.41

  Despite all this, the 20th Indian Division did not waver when, in late December and January, the Viet Minh tried one last push from Bien Hoa down towards Saigon. The poorly armed Vietnamese were mowed down by machine-gun fire as they encountered disciplined Gurkha and Indian soldiers. As the occupation came to an end, Gracey issued a ‘Divisional commander sahib ki paigam’. This was an eloquent Urdu address in which he praised his soldiers for their steadfastness and bravery, saying that the name of the 20th Indian Division ‘would shine throughout the world’ (20 Hindustani Division ka nam tamam duniya men roshan hai). But the end was near for the Indian Army as an instrument of British world power. In October 1945 Lord Wavell, viceroy of India, had urged that Indian soldiers should be withdrawn from Indo-China as quickly as possible as Nehru and Patel inveighed against their use abroad. As 1946 wore on it became apparent that the leadership of the Indian National Congress was emerging as a regional and even international power. Further British action against national liberation movements with Indian soldiers would be impossible. This began to limit severely British options in both Burma and Malaya.42

  The year 1945 drew to an end amid antiquated but highly symbolic ceremonial. On 30 November Mountbatten, inspecting Allied forces in Saigon, accepted Count Terauchi’s sword as a formal signal of surrender. Earlier Gracey had worried that in the disturbed conditions of Indo-China this might seem to indicate that all authority had been abrogated. He urged instead that the ceremony take place in Singapore, where British power was fully re-established. Mountbatten also had had qualms: ‘I do not wish to drag an invalid man of sixty-seven through a humiliating ceremony.’ The Japanese field marshal was still suffering the after-effects of his stroke. Mountbatten concluded that the scale of Terauchi’s humiliation should be limited by inviting few guests and reporters. Yet the surrender must be completed. Mountbatten required one sword for himself and one for his king-emperor. Terauchi duly sent an aide to retrieve his finest swords from his home in Japan and transport them to Saigon. At the ceremony, a Times of Saigon reporter noted, they were ‘encased in draped boxes which according to Japanese tradition enhanced the act of presentation’.43 Terauchi died shortly afterwards in Singapore, where his ashes were interred in the Japanese cemetery.

  The Times of Saigon was a cyclostyled broadsheet with an issue of 500 daily. On 15 January 1946 it published its last issue. This recorded one final, slightly bizarre ceremony that had taken place the previous day. General Gracey and General Leclerc took the salute in the shadow of Saigon’s French cathedral. The march-past took place to the music of the Dogra Pipe and Drum Band, a curious amalgam of Scottish bagpipes and the music of the Kashmir hills. The band’s favourite tunes included ‘Killiecrankie’ and ‘Scotland the Brave’.44 It was accompanied by a French military band playing the battle music of the French Republic. Then the two generals went off to Government House, where the British handed over two further surrendered Japanese swords to the French. These weapons had previously belonged to the deputy Japanese commanders in the area. One sword was accompanied by a scroll that proclaimed that it was 650 years old. It is clear from other correspondence that Gracey regarded the swords as the symbol of Japanese sovereignty over Indo-China by right of conquest. He was now symbolically handing back that sovereignty to France, which he believed held it according to international law.

  Standing alongside Leclerc during these hybrid colonial ceremonies was Admiral Thierry D’Argenlieu, France’s new high commissioner for Indo-China. D’Argenlieu was a former monk. He followed General de Gaulle’s orders to the letter, believing that it was his mission to bring back Indo-China, with its substantial population of French, Eurasian and Indo-Chinese Catholics, into the fold of Christian civilization. One of his staff observed privately that he possessed ‘the most brilliant mind of the Twelfth Century’. Within a short time D’Argenlieu began an attack on the base of Viet Minh power in Hanoi and Haiphong to the north. This was to set the scene for thirty years of savage fighting which ended only with the fall of the American-backed government in Saigon in 1975. Douglas Gracey saw clearly what would happen. He had written to Slim on 5 November 1945 that the French troops moving out from Saigon had left a trail of atrocious destruction behind them. This would ‘lead to such resentment that it will be progressively difficult for them to implement their new policy, and, I am convinced, will result in guerrilla war, increased sabotage and arson, as soon as we leave the country.’45 Yet Gracey also believed that the restoration of French power was ‘inevitable’ and, no less important, necessary to protect the retreat of his own soldiers. He stuck to a politically barren doctrine of sovereignty and seemed unable to understand the post-war power of national liberation movements. Mountbatten and Slim were too distant to moderate his position. As Germaine Krull had observed back in September 1945: ‘The Annamites will win their independence because they are ready to die for it. We must recognise this inevitable fact.’46

  BRITAIN AND THE BIRTH OF INDONESIA

  This lesson was forced home in the Dutch East Indies, and at a bloody cost in Indonesian, Indian and British lives. The Allied reoccupation was a strung-out affair. British troops landed in force only towards the end of October 1945. General MacArthur, in whose command the region originally fell, had not felt the need for an immediate intervention in the former Dutch colony. He feared resistance from the 250,000-odd Japanese who remained in the theatre, and demanded that action wait upon the formal surrender of the Japanese in Tokyo Bay. The transfer of responsibility for Indonesia to Mountbatten’s command came on 15 August, with MacArthur’s warning: ‘Tell Lord Louis to keep his pants on or he will get us all into trouble.’ At a stroke of the pen, the area under South East Asia Command was increased by half a million square miles, and another 80 million people were added to its responsibilities. Mountbatten’s already strained communications were strung out another 2,000 miles across a vast archipelago. South East Asia Command h
ad become the largest single administrative apparatus on earth.

  Indonesia lay at the final stretch of the great strategic arc of control from Suez to Sydney harbour: it was the ‘Malay barrier’ that had broken with such dire consequences in early 1942. By 1945, British interests in the region were chiefly economic: pre-war British investments in the Dutch colony totalled £100 million, and this included a 40 per cent stake in Royal Dutch Shell with its large refineries in Sumatra and Borneo.47 In August 1945 a highly secret agreement had been signed by the Dutch granting the British and Americans access to thorium deposits – vital for nuclear processes – on Singkep island, south of Singapore.48 But by the end of 1945 Britain had been drawn into the fire of a national revolution that threatened to overwhelm its own possessions in Southeast Asia.

  The British were once again the proxy for a defeated power of Europe. To the Dutch, the reconquest of Indonesia was vital to their credibility as a nation. In the words of the wartime Dutch prime minister, Pieter Gerbrandy: ‘The Netherlands nation is far more than a small part of the European continent. We have a stake in four continents. Our overseas interests condition our very existence.’49 The will to empire was intensified by an emotive nostalgia: the Netherlands East Indies was ‘Holland’s Atlantis’.50 Pre-war Dutch administration was admired by British colonial officials for its technocratic achievements, but known also by its unflinching authoritarianism: the Rust en Orde – tranquillity and order – that it took as its motto. But the Dutch had never fully controlled the archipelago. Their power was felt in ever-decreasing circles around core areas of control: the world’s most densely populous island, Java, the plantation belt around Medan in northern Sumatra, and the Christianized island trading posts of Maluku in the east. Most of the archipelago was governed only lightly through local authority, such as the Islamic sultanates of east Sumatra, southern Borneo and Sulawesi and other tiers of subordinate native officials or tribal chiefs. Even at the epicentre of empire on Java, the royal courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta still possessed aura and authority, and the proud priyayi aristocracy had carved out a role for themselves as a native administrative elite. It was a kaleidoscopic society, shaped by influential minorities such as the wealthy communities of Chinese and Arab traders and governed by an elaborate and legally entrenched racial hierarchy. At the apex of this world stood a large community of Dutch settlers and officials. In the villaed suburbia of cities such as Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya they had enjoyed a privileged lifestyle that made the social excesses of pre-war Malaya and Indo-China seem modest by comparison. At its margins was the Indo-European community. For many generations it had been the custom of the Indies Dutch to take ‘temporary wives’ locally and create families that remained behind in Indonesia when a father was repatriated to the Netherlands. In 1945 the Dutch settlers and Eurasians who emerged from the Japanese internment camps were to face the most uncertain of futures.