There was also a hunt for Blimps in the Commons. The government was savaged over the blunderer who had permitted Penang to be abandoned without a fight, making a gift to the Japanese of its stocks of rubber.13 Here was a Blimp to be punctured along with many others, who were imagined enjoying a privileged life in other corners of the empire. ‘The majority of British officials live in a by-gone world,’ alleged Major James Milner, a Labour MP. ‘At this very moment they will be dining in short coats and all the rest of the palaver, in Calcutta, only a few miles away from the front line.’14 He was very close to the mark. In Burma, the acerbic American General ‘Vinegar’ Joe Stilwell was peeved by his meetings with the ‘bored and supercilious limies’ who ran the empire and commanded its troops. One easily recognisable specimen tried his patience, and he noted in his diary: ‘Monocled ass at lunch: “One does enjoy a cawktail doesn’t one? It’s so seldom one gets a chawnce. In my case I hardly have time for a glahss of bee-ah.”’15 The condescending, off-hand manner of men of this stamp, and there were plenty of them, galled Americans, who were now beginning to encounter them elsewhere in the empire, and in the higher ranks of the armed services and the government. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then in charge of strategic planning in the Far East, was irritated by the ‘stiff-necked’ response of Wavell after he had been offered Chinese troops to help shore up the crumbling front in Burma.16 All too often, Americans were left with the impression that Britain’s ruling class lacked the inner drive and energy to wage, let alone win, a modern war.
There were some in America and Britain who were wondering whether the class which still largely had the governance of the empire deserved to retain its power. ‘There must be no place after the world for special privileges, either for individuals or nations,’ Roosevelt had proclaimed in November 1941. His countrymen tended to agree, as did a substantial body of opinion in Britain, mostly on the left and centre. So too, but to a lesser degree, did the government, whose propaganda continually exhorted everyone to work together and share the burdens of war equally. An egalitarian and democratic spirit was abroad, and was often forcefully expressed in servicemen’s letters, which contained plenty of grumbling about ‘stand-offish’ officers and the amorphous, but all-too-recognisable, ‘they’ and ‘them’ who exercised authority.
Within the empire the social hierarchy was unshaken by the war. Servicemen attached to the units which reoccupied Malaya in the summer of 1945 were hurt by the snobbery of those they had liberated, the planters and their wives, who, like the Bourbons, appeared to have remembered everything and learnt nothing.17 This was not surprising; throughout most of the empire’s existence the élite which managed the colonies had been drawn almost exclusively from the upper and upper-middle classes. Men in senior positions during the war had been recruited from public school alumni, who had passed through Oxford or Cambridge and shown themselves more adept on the playing field than in the examination hall. Character counted for much; when interviewing potential district officers, Sir Ralph Furse made a point of looking for such telltale signs of an interior weakness as ‘a languid handshake’.18 Before 1914, and probably after, a ‘social test’ was applied, and the candidate who offered his interrogator a Virginia rather than a Turkish cigarette was automatically scratched for what was then a social solecism.19
The tone of the empire was therefore aristocratic and conservative. It may be judged by the reactions of the group of Indian officials and their wives to the news of Labour’s general election victory at the end of July 1945, which they heard while homeward-bound in a liner passing through the Mediterranean. There were anxious remarks about whether pensions, public schools and coal royalties were in jeopardy, and then a discussion as to who would replace Leo Amery as Secretary of State for India:
Amery is out, but who is in? This is a favourite point of speculation. The Colonel – I think he’s a boxwallah but that’s what everyone calls him – has got hold of a rumour that it’s this Palme Dutt [a Communist MP of Indian and Swedish descent] fellow. Good God, they might at least choose Britishers to run the blasted country, not niggers.20
Social and racial arrogance went hand in hand, and both were capable of injuring the empire. So thought Margery Perham, an exceptionally well-informed and percipient commentator on colonial affairs who, until the events of February 1942, had unreservedly endorsed current paternalist imperial ideals. In two articles which appeared in The Times in March, she asked and answered the uncomfortable question as to how the Kenyans would behave if a Japanese task force hove to off Mombasa. They might, she feared, act like the Malays, for British rule in Kenya had failed to kindle any deep sense of loyalty or common purpose among its different races. The root of the trouble was that the diligent and hard-working British officials who governed the colony, once their daily tasks had been completed, would withdraw to their houses and clubs and each other’s company. This voluntary detachment did not win men’s hearts, and left the rulers ‘insulated’ from that growing minority of educated blacks who would, in time, succeed them.21
Miss Perham had struck a raw nerve. The war in the Far East, which in the spring of 1942 showed every sign that it would soon extend to the Indian Ocean, was a racial conflict. Japanese propaganda hailed the fall of Singapore, Hong Kong and Manila as triumphs for the peoples of Asia and milestones on the road to their liberation from white rule. Australian POWs were forced to sweep the streets of Singapore as a token that the old racial order had been overturned; white civilian and military prisoners were systematically humiliated and maltreated in what the victims interpreted as a form of racial revenge; and some were wantonly murdered, like the twenty-two administrators, missionaries and wireless operators killed in the Gilbert Islands in October 1942.22
Japan’s call for a race war reached many ears. ‘I have heard Natives saying, “Why fight against Japan? We are oppressed by the whites and we shall not fare worse under the Japanese,”’ Smuts wrote after inspecting a newly raised contingent of black troops. ‘But’, he consoled himself, ‘I am sure the great majority are still loyal in their conservative way.’23 Many Indians, Malays and Burmese were not. In what still remains a shadowy episode in the war (thanks to the furtiveness of Britain’s official secrecy regulations) large bodies of Indian, Ghurka and Tamil troops defected to the Japanese and formed the Indian National Army (INA), a nationalist force dedicated to the overthrow of the raj. The full numbers are not known; in 1944, military intelligence believed the INA contained 35,000, and a year after it was estimated that 20,000 Indian troops had gone over to the Japanese, two out of every seven captured.24
In the summer of 1945, when the Indian army had the wretched task of sifting through the survivors of the INA, its intelligence staff identified a hard core of 7,600 who had actively assisted the Japanese, and in some cases committed horrendous war crimes which deserved punishment.25 The rest were for the main part decent soldiers disorientated by the chaotic retreats in Malaya and Burma during the winter and spring of 1941–2, or prisoners who collaborated to get better rations and treatment. In this category were many who had been genuinely shocked by the defeats inflicted on Britain and had lost confidence in their old rulers.
Among the convinced nationalists who saw themselves as India’s future liberators was Captain Garbaksh Singh Dhillon whom British intelligence believed had tortured and murdered Indian and Chinese prisoners in Changi gaol, Singapore.26 There were other fanatics, like those members of the Rani of Jhansi’s women’s regiment who were defiant under interrogation and devoted to Chandra Subhas Bose, the former Congress politician who had fled to Germany in 1941.27 After broadcasting propaganda from Berlin, in which he denounced democracy and pilloried Britain as ‘the impeccable foe to progress and evolution’, Bose travelled by submarine to Tokyo, where he arrived in June 1943.28 Assuming the title ‘Netaji’ (leader) of the INA, Bose threw himself into its reorganisation. He was a mesmeric speaker, and the Indian government recognised him as a formidable adversary.29
&n
bsp; The INA was part of a wider, Japanese-supervised organisation for nationalist subversion in India and anti-European propaganda throughout Asia. It included the Swaraj Young Men’s Training School in Rangoon, which specialised in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and an academy in Penang which trained Malay, Chinese and Siamese propagandists.30 INA soldiers were told that once they and the Japanese penetrated Bengal, there would be a mass anti-British uprising.31 In the meantime, trained saboteurs and partisans were landed from submarines, but nearly all were intercepted. By the end of October, forty-two Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnists (JIFs) had been rounded up by intelligence.32 On the battlefield, the INA proved a disappointment to its masters and desertions back to the British were frequent.
The government in India took the INA very seriously, fearing that its propaganda might entice front-line troops to surrender, and that its agents might foment sedition in areas already convulsed by Congress agitation. There was, therefore, close intelligence surveillance of Indian units and the inspection of troops’ mail for signs of discontent.33 Counter-propaganda programmes were concocted, although their authors were warned to proceed gingerly when presenting such controversial issues as post-war ‘social development’ in Britain, which might provoke Indian soldiers to ask why such measures were not introduced in their country.34 Post-war Asian politics were a minefield which British propagandists did all they could to avoid beyond pointing out that a Japanese victory would dash all hopes of Indian self-government. American propaganda was not so inhibited; in 1944 its message to the Burmese was that an Allied victory would ‘bring Burma peace and freedom’. The Colonial Office protested at this promise of independence, but was overruled by the Foreign Office, which wanted to keep on the best of terms with the United States.35
British propagandists were on safer ground with the Josh (literally ‘zeal’) programme for the Indian army, which was designed to encourage a cheerful, positive spirit among the troops. A dose of Josh may have inspired a Punjabi soldier serving on the frontier with Burma, who, on hearing a Japanese wireless announcement that Bose and the INA would be in Delhi within ten days, remarked, ‘Not if they go by train they won’t.’ In the end, neither Bose nor the INA made much impact on the outcome of the Far Eastern war, although both were seen as having an unlimited potential to create trouble inside India. Bose died in an air crash at the end of the war, much to the relief of the Indian government, which feared that his former followers might be a source of violent upheavals when they returned home.36
Among the troops fighting in Burma during 1944 were 30,000 askaris from East and West Africa, and, like their Indian comrades, they had their correspondence and conversations monitored for signs of political restlessness.37 Although the War Office had allowed the issuing of commissions to men of mixed race in October 1939, black troops continued to be commanded by white officers.38 In the case of the Gold Coast askaris, white officers were imported from the settlers of Southern Rhodesia.39
While the war loosened the social hierarchy in Britain, its racial counterpart in Africa and the West Indies remained as rigid as ever. The Colonial Office went to considerable lengths to ensure that its black subjects were cocooned from any outside influences that might upset them or make them unhappy with their lot. Contact between British blacks and negro American servicemen was officially seen as a potent source of discontent and disruption. Well-dressed and well-paid black American GIs turned the heads of poorer Bermudan blacks and so, under Colonial Office pressure, the former were withdrawn. Black servicemen stationed in Liberia were banned from taking leave in nearby British African colonies, again for fear that their self-confidence and prosperity might cause unrest.40
The 2,000 black soldiers, all relegated to labour duties under the United States army segregation rules, who arrived in Trinidad in 1941, caused a great stir. They had money to spend on drink and women, causing an anonymous calypso writer to lament: ‘I was living with a decent and contented wife/Until the soldiers came and broke up my life.’41 The governor of Trinidad was also disturbed by this irruption into his colony, but for different reasons. He saw the American negroes as envoys of the black militant and Back-to-Africa movements which were gaining ground in their homeland. Neither was welcome in Trinidad, with its recent history of strikes by black workers, and in 1943 the American government obligingly replaced the negroes with Puerto Ricans.
This episode revealed the peculiar ambiguity of Anglo-American thinking about race. While the United States authorities were more than willing to cooperate with the Colonial Office in providing a quarantine for the empire’s blacks, many American politicians and pressmen continually sounded off about these same people being oppressed and exploited by their rulers. But the moral force of these attacks was blunted by America’s shocking racial record. Racial inequality was a way of life in the United States; throughout the war there were many, frequently bloody, race riots involving opposing bodies of white and black servicemen, including one on a USAAF base in Britain.42 Echoing the emotions which might have agitated members of the INA, an American negro soldier destined for the Pacific front was alleged to have asked for the following epitaph: ‘Here lies a black man, killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man.’43
British wartime propaganda found no difficulty in combating such cynicism, at least when it came to explaining why Germany had to be beaten. A particularly venomous passage from Mein Kampf was widely circulated among the African colonies to remind black men what Hitler thought of their kind: ‘It is an act of criminal insanity to train a being who is semi-ape till you pretend he has turned into a lawyer.’ Since 1939, the colonial section of the Ministry of Information had been busy outlining Britain’s war aims throughout the empire through films, lectures, exhibitions, leaflets and street theatre. A Nazi victory would destroy the empire, which was its subjects’ only hope of justice and advancement. As in India, official propagandists had to be careful that their material did not boomerang; excessive vilification of the Germans was avoided for fear of a backlash against the white race in general, and references to a war being waged for freedom and democracy were deliberately circumspect.44 On the other hand, the colonial empire’s subjects were reminded that after the war they would be treated as partners rather than dependencies.
Hitler provided an excellent bogey-man. In this form, he appeared in a splendid Hausa song, ‘Hitler bata kasa’, which loses none of its vigour in translation:
The English have a remedy for hopeless mischievousness;
Hitler brings treachery and mischief to everyone.
The English have a remedy for Hitler of Germany,
Hitler has no Father and is a dog (bastard)
He has no money and no home and is a thief
The English have a remedy for Hitler of Germany.45
A Gold Coast lyricist invoked the theme of imperial unity in a traditional-style battle song, written for women and chanted to the accompaniment of war drums:
Let the women of Britain’s Empire
Sing praises and their warriors inspire
Steadfast comrades who stand ready to die for liberty.
Sons of the Dominions and India
And far-flung islands of the seven seas,
Sons of the Motherland,
England the Motherland,
Sing out, women of the Empire.46
Modern persuasive techniques were employed in North Borneo during 1941. A touring exhibition showed enlarged and, given the Japanese threat, reassuring photographs of British battleships and aircraft carriers. Reports of the war’s progress were circulated in English and Malay with a note to householders: ‘Please give the Malay news sheet to your orderly or boy.’ There were public lectures on such topics as ‘Flying in Borneo’ and ‘Lend for Victory’, and a screening of the inspirational film Nurse Cavell, in which the heroine defies the Germans in 1914 and is executed for her courage.47
In contrast with the Japanese, the Germans and Italians made no attempt to enli
st the support of the empire’s subjects: understandably, since Naziism and fascism were both racist creeds. There was, however, a concerted effort to win over Arab opinion by exploiting the recent upheavals in Palestine. Britain and America were portrayed as the accomplices of the Jews and, ipso facto, the enemies of Arabs everywhere. After Allied victories in Egypt and North Africa, Radio Tunis claimed in December 1942 that, ‘Les Anglo-Américains champions rétribués des Juifs, veuillent faire du Maroc et de l’Algérie une seconde Palestine.’48
Britain’s programme of propaganda not only extolled the justice of the Allies’ cause, it exhorted men and women at every level and in every part of the empire to do their ‘bit’ for the war effort. As in the First World War, all the resources of the dominions and colonies were mobilised for war. Raising and training fighting men and women was still immensely important, and the full totals for the entire war were:
Great Britain:
4,650,000
Australia:
570,000
Canada:
770,000
India:
1,789,000
New Zealand:
97,000
East African colonies:
225,000
(plus 30,000 pioneers)
West African colonies:
150,000
(plus 16,000 pioneers)49
These figures represent the sum of all men and women in the services and ignore the fact that, at various stages of the war, there were partial demobilisations. The South African 1st Division returned home after the liberation of Abyssinia, and, the Japanese having been evicted from New Guinea, Australian and New Zealand servicemen were released for industry during 1943 and 1944. Nonetheless, Australia had 365,000 men and women under arms in 1945, four-fifths of them volunteers. Canada faced the same manpower problems it had in the First World War; by 1943 the number of volunteers for overseas service was dwindling and conscription was introduced the following year, although the pressed men were sent for garrison duties in the West Indies rather than to the fronts in France and Italy.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 62