I’m a former RAF pilot. I’ve written books and made films about Nelson, Churchill and the Battle of Britain. I’m reliably on the ‘Oh come off it!’ side when empire-bashing academics bang on about reparations for slavery or present my country as the great villain of global history. And yet my recently published book, ‘1945: The Reckoning’, has been described by one reviewer in Australia as ‘an unrelenting account of terror… decapitation, head-hunting and the Allies paying for it’, and by one in India as an expose of ‘the hypocrisy and brutality of imperial power in the wake of a war fought, ostensibly, for freedom and democracy.’
So – to paraphrase a famous Mitchell and Webb sketch – could it be that we were the baddies in 1945? Well, when you research the ‘wars after the war’ of 1945 – stories that will likely not figure in our VJ80 celebrations – sometimes, we sort of were.
Allied war aims, first articulated by Roosevelt and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, were boldly progressive: this was a crusade to replace a dark age of dictators with a future of freedom and self-determination. Such language dominated Allied propaganda, most famously in Eisenhower’s stirring words on the dawn of D-Day: ‘The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.’ And in a much-discussed pamphlet from the Army Education Corps called ‘The British Way and Purpose’, millions of men and women in uniform read that:
We no longer regard the Colonial Empire as a ‘possession’, but as a trust or responsibility. ‘Imperialism’ in the less reputable sense of that term is dead: there is obviously no room for it in the British Commonwealth of equal nations, and it has been superseded by the principle of trusteeship for Colonial peoples.
And yet in London – to use one of Churchill’s favourite words – there was ‘weaselling’ before the ink on the Charter was even dry. Britain’s Prime Minister cabled members of his War Cabinet to say that ‘We must regard this as an interim and partial statement of war aims designed to reassure all countries of our righteous purpose and not the complete structure which we should build after victory.’ When he later attempted to calm nervous Conservative MPs in the House of Commons, he was able to identify several areas of ‘wriggle room’. As he’d crafted the document with Roosevelt, he claimed, they primarily ‘had in mind… the States and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke’, which he determined ‘quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution’ of colonial subjects.
What ‘progressive evolution’ meant in practice could be seen in Borneo during the final weeks of the war. Here, a chance (small but real) to save prisoners of war caught in disease-ridden Japanese camps, and scheduled for hellish ‘death marches’, was set aside to prioritise taking back control of profitable oil fields, tin mines and rubber plantations. Britain had lost prestige and money in Borneo and badly wanted it back, as the paper trail for what was called ‘Operation Semut’ plainly reveals.
This shadowy operation (with undeclared colonial goals) soon turned into a bloody disaster. Australian Special Forces launched a hard-to-understand guerilla campaign, to prepare the local population for the return of the famous ‘White Rajas’. With strings clearly being pulled in London, they started paying their local allies for human heads, stirring up a savage and almost certainly unnecessary war that did little to advance the liberation of the island but brought death and destruction to the communities that had trusted them. The whole story – which I recount in detail in my book – has more than a little resemblance to Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Other colonial operations in 1945 had a bigger impact than Borneo and are very much remembered – and resented – in the region today, but almost forgotten in Britain. For example, how many British people today know that, in the final weeks of the war and in the months that followed, British generals recruited tens of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war, armed them and sent them into battle, sometimes against former allies of the USA?
They did this because Charles de Gaulle, just like Churchill, was keen to see the age of empires resume. As soon as he returned to France in 1944, he looked to reclaim his nation’s old colonies, publicly ruling out ‘any idea of autonomy, any possibility of evolution outside the French bloc of empire’. The two old warriors had clashed throughout the war but now discovered that they had this at least in common. Both understood that American plans for a new world order would not necessarily be to the economic advantage of Britain or France. And so, in Indochina, a British Indian army allied to French colonial forces (and thousands of released Japanese POWs), helped crush the independent state declared by Ho Chi Minh (with the encouragement of America’s OSS). In the words of the French commander in Saigon, General Leclerc, who had walked arm in arm with de Gaulle into Paris a year earlier, they did this ‘to preserve the future of the white race in Asia’. Liberation for France, but ‘évolution progressive’ for the colonials!
This bitter little war set the region up for two more massive conflicts to come, and millions of casualties, between 1945-75, and at the end of all that carnage, Ho Chi Minh emerged as the ruler of an independent Vietnam, which is exactly what the Roosevelt-era OSS had recommended 30 years earlier. It seems clear to me that the Vietnam wars were directly caused by this foolish example of ‘imperial muscle memory’ in Paris and London during 1945. Not something we’re going to read much about this week, I suspect.
In the Dutch East Indies, even larger battles were fought by British-led Indian troops in the final months of 1945. Tens of thousands of local people died, and cities were reduced to the state of, say, Aleppo or Gaza, by relentless air raids and naval bombardments. And here too, Japanese prisoners of war were released, pressed into service and sent into battle by British commanders – over 35,000 of them. When Lord Mountbatten flew into Jakarta to direct the operation, he was startled to see just how many of the men he’d spent over three years fighting were now serving under his command: ‘It was a great shock to me to find over a thousand Japanese troops guarding the nine miles of road from the airport to the town.’
A British aristocrat reinstalling a colonial regime guarded by saluting Japanese soldiers. This is not how the Second World War is generally remembered in the West. But it is how most Indonesians think of 1945, along with the ferocious urban battles that marked this ugly coda to allied victory. The city of Surabaya – a naval base second only to Singapore – was largely destroyed and somewhere between 10,000-15,000 Indonesian guerrillas and civilians died inside it, along with at least 300 British and Indian soldiers. It remains the bloodiest and most intense urban battle fought by a British-led army since the Second World War. And, although the casualty count was strikingly one sided, as historian Dan Todman put it, Indian troops ‘who had survived Kohima and Imphal lost their lives here in a struggle whose purpose they could not discern’.
Britain held a large stake in the Royal Dutch Shell Company, which had operated important refineries in both the East Indies and Borneo before the war and very much wanted them back. Once their own country was free from German control, Dutch politicians successfully lobbied the new British government of Clement Attlee, stressing the economic argument but also describing the nationalists of the East Indies as dangerous allies of the Japanese. This was a clever framing of the facts and partly true. Like many other independence-minded radicals of their time, the nationalists of Java and Sumatra had indeed looked to Japan for inspiration and had been pleased to witness the victories in 1942. But was that a good enough reason to send in British troops with the order to wind back the imperial clock?
The end of the war has attracted much myth making. Britain bankrupted itself to defeat Hitler, or so pub wisdom goes. It sacrificed its power and its empire to bring down the Nazis, just as some of the more ‘pragmatic’ voices of 1940 gloomily predicted that it would.
But Britain didn’t sacrifice its empire at all. In fact, it fought hard and sometimes dirty to regain control of those parts of it that were temporarily taken over by its enemies. And it didn’t bankrupt itself either. Balancing the books was painful and some forms of food rationing persisted until 1954, but the relative economic decline that took place after the war was largely due to home-grown choices and disputes, and because rival nations grew faster and created more wealth than Britain managed to do. It was in no way the inevitable consequence of the war. Indeed, income from the colonies recovered quickly as the great cities of imperial business – Hong Kong, Rangoon and Singapore – began to thrive once again.
The British government was particularly keen to rule Malaya again, whatever the Atlantic Charter might have promised, because it helped ease its perennial shortage of tradable foreign currency. Measured in US dollars, rubber exports from Malaya to the US soon exceeded all other exports from Britain to that critical market, while the Malayan tin mining industry became one of the largest and most profitable in the world. In 1947, Arthur Creech Jones, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, informed Attlee’s Cabinet that ‘Malaya is by far the most important source of dollars in the colonial empire, and it would gravely worsen the whole dollar balance of the Sterling Area if there were serious interference with Malayan exports.’
India was taking its independence. That had become inevitable in 1945 if not earlier. But Britain emerged from the war still an empire and rich and powerful by any standards, with world class businesses, a huge scientific and technological base, a people better educated than at any time in the country’s history and nowhere that looked anything like Berlin, Hamburg or Dresden.
Britain was an empire and acted like one, which should not really surprise any of us. In fact, without this global imperial power, the men and women of the 1940s could not have confronted great evil, especially in the dangerous early years of the war. Freeing the Indo-Pacific from Japanese imperial control was also hugely beneficial. But the reason why what happened in Indonesia, Vietnam or Borneo is so little-known today is that those stories do not sit comfortably with the nation’s favourite memories of the Second World War – of Britain as plucky underdog.
However much I may scowl when a statue gets pulled down, I do like my history to be ‘warts and all’. And if we want to arrive at a fair reckoning of what was undoubtedly a heroic and exceptional moment in Britain’s story, it can’t hurt to examine the warts of 1945 more closely.
Phil Craig’s latest book, ‘1945: The Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World’, is available now.
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