All Hell Let Loose (69 page)

Britain’s Asian empire manifested the most conspicuously divided allegiances. In 1939, nationalists in Malaya staged anti-war demonstrations, harshly suppressed by the local colonial authorities. An Indian member of the Malay civil service said that, ‘Although his reason utterly rebelled against it, his sympathies instinctively ranged themselves with the Japanese in their fight against the Anglo-Saxons.’ Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: ‘It [is] obvious that the average man in India is so full of bitterness against the British that he would welcome any attack on them.’ Some of his compatriots rejoiced in the spectacle of fellow Asians routing white armies and navies. ‘We couldn’t helping gloating at the beating the British were getting at the hands of the Germans,’ said Dr Kashmi Swaminadhan. ‘This, in spite of our being anti-Hitler.’ Lady Diana Cooper wrote before the deluge in 1942: ‘I could see no particular reason why the 85 per cent Chinese and 15 per cent Indian and Malayan citizens of Singapore should fight, as Cockneys do,
against
people of their own shade, and
for
the dear good English.’ Indeed, few did so.

In Malaya and Burma, the new rulers were able to enlist the services of many local people and some Indians who felt no loyalty to the expelled British. But against these should be cited the example of such a man as Indian schoolteacher P.G. Mahindasa, teacher of the English school in Malacca settlement. He wrote before his execution by the Japanese for listening on his radio to the BBC: ‘I have always cherished British sportsmanship, justice and the civil service as the finest things in an imperfect world. I die gladly for freedom. My enemies fail to conquer my soul. I forgive them for what they did to my frail body. To my dear boys, tell them that their teacher died with a smile on his lips.’ In Malaya, Chinese communist Chin Peng, who later became leader of the violent anti-British independence movement, remarked the irony that he received an OBE from a grateful British government for promoting terrorism and murdering Malays who collaborated with the Japanese.

Many people in Burma, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, together with more than a few in the Philippines, at first welcomed the invading Japanese as liberators. Even ardent foes of European imperialism were soon disillusioned, however, by the arrogance and institutionalised brutality of their new masters. Examples are legion: far more local people died as slaves on the notorious Burma Railway than did Allied prisoners. Of almost 80,000 Malays sent to work there, nearly 30,000 perished, alongside 14,000 whites; the rail link also cost the lives of 100,000 Burmese, Indians and Chinese. When cholera broke out at Nieke on the Burma–Thailand border, infecting large numbers of Tamils performing forced labour on the railway, the Japanese set fire to a barracks housing 150 stricken patients. Elsewhere, any man or woman who displeased the occupiers was treated with systemic sadistic cruelty. Sybil Kathigasu, Catholic wife of a Perak planter, was tortured in Taiping jail, while her daughter was hung from a tree over a fire. She shamed them into freeing the child, but herself emerged from the ordeal crippled for life.

A minimum of five million people in South-East Asia died in the course of the war, many of them in the Dutch East Indies, either at Japanese hands or as a result of starvation imposed by Tokyo’s diversion of food and crops to feed its own people. The price of rice soared, while harvests fell by one-third; tapioca was exploited as a substitute. Writer Samad Ismail wrote wearily in 1944: ‘Everyone feels affection for tapioca; embraces, exalts and extols tapioca; there is nothing else they discuss other than tapioca, in the kitchen, on the tram, in a wedding gathering – always tapioca, tapioca and tapioca.’ But while a tapioca diet provided some bulk, it did nothing to reverse the chronic vitamin deficiency that became endemic in Japanese-occupied societies. Hunger did more than anything else to alienate the subject peoples of Tokyo’s Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, however strong their dislike of their former European overlords.

2
THE RAJ: UNFINEST HOUR

British-occupied India, as nationalists regarded the subcontinent, experienced bitter wartime upheavals and distress. The jewel in the crown of Britain’s empire, second only to China as the largest and most populous land mass in Asia, became a huge supplier of textiles and equipment to the Allies. It manufactured a million blankets for the British Army – the wool clip of sixty million sheep – together with forty-one million items of military uniform, two million parachutes and sixteen million pairs of boots. It was a source of fury to Churchill that India’s sterling balances – the debt owed by Britain to the subcontinent in payment for goods supplied – soared on the strength of this output. ‘Winston burbled away endlessly,’ wrote India secretary Leo Amery on 16 September 1942, ‘that it was monstrous to expect that we should not only defend India and then have to clear out, but be left to pay hundreds of millions for the privilege.’

But could Indians refuse to be defended? Before the conflict began, nationalist demands for self-government and independence had become clamorous, enjoying overwhelming enthusiasm from the Hindu majority except in the so-called princely states. The maharajahs’ territories survived as feudal fiefdoms, whose rulers knew that once Indians ruled their own country, their privileges would be swept away. They provided islands of support for British hegemony, because they thus preserved their own. Elsewhere, however, almost every educated Hindu wanted the British to go. The question was when: the onset of war caused some influential figures to argue that the independence struggle should be postponed until the greater evil of fascism was defeated. Veer Damodar Savarkar, though a nationalist, suggested pragmatically that his people should exploit the opportunity to acquire military and industrial skills which would be priceless to a free India.

The League of Radical Congressmen urged that active participation in the war would ‘not be thereby helping British imperialism, but on the contrary weakening it, by developing and strengthening the anti-fascist forces in England and Europe’. Likewise M.N. Roy: ‘The present is not England’s war. It is a war for the future of the world. If the British government happens to be a party to the war, why should the fighters for human liberty be ashamed of congratulating it for this meritorious deed? The old saying that adversity brings strange bedfellows is not altogether meaningless. If it was justifiable for the Soviet government to make the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, why should it not be equally permissible for the fighters for Indian freedom to support the British government so long as it is engaged in war against fascism?’ Some of his compatriots adopted the view of Lt. A.M. Bose, nephew of India’s most famous scientist and himself a cosmopolitan who had travelled widely in Europe. Bose wrote to a British friend: ‘I am now in the army since three years as I wanted to do my bit to fight the Nazis.’

Several hundred Indians, boasting such exotic names as ‘Tiger’ Jaswal Singh, Piloo Reporter, ‘Jumbo’ Majundan and Miroo Engineer, flew for the Indian Air Force; Engineer, one of four flying brothers, once took a girlfriend into the air in his Hurricane. But though Indian fliers wore the same uniforms and adopted the same slang as their RAF brethren, they sometimes suffered the casual racism of British officers, who called them ‘blackies’. Fighter pilot Mahender Singh Pujji was dismayed when his ship stopped in South Africa en route to Britain: ‘I was shocked to see the treatment of Indians and Africans there. I and my colleagues were very angry.’ In England and later the Western Desert, he never adapted to British food, and subsisted largely on eggs, biscuits and chocolate. Indian fliers knew that they remained second-class airmen in their commanders’ eyes, denied the best aircraft and glamorous assignments; but they made a significant contribution to the 1944–45 Burma campaign, flying thousands of reconnaissance and ground-attack sorties in support of Fourteenth Army.

Other Indians, however, adopted a more nuanced and cautious attitude to the conflict. Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, a Congress leader and Premier of the Madras presidency, said in June 1940 that it might seem small-minded to raise domestic issues when Britain was in the midst of a life-and-death struggle against a merciless enemy. ‘Yet every nation has its own life to look after … We do not serve civilisation by forgetting our rights. We cannot help the Allies by agreeing to be a subject people. On the contrary, such surrender would help the Germans.’

Nehru, in a letter from the prison cell he frequently occupied, pointed out to the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, that his supporters had often held back from injuring the Raj: ‘In the summer of 1940, when France fell and England was facing dire peril, Congress … deliberately avoided [direct action], in spite of a strong demand for it … because it did not want to take advantage of a critical international situation or to encourage Nazi aggression in any way.’ He wrote likewise on the day after Pearl Harbor: ‘If I were asked with whom my sympathies lay in this war, I would unhesitatingly say with Russia, China, America and England.’ But for Nehru, there remained an essential qualification. Churchill refused to grant independence to India; in consequence, Nehru asserted, ‘there is no question of my giving help to Britain. How can I fight for a thing, freedom, which is denied to me? British policy in India appears to be to terrify the people, so that in anxiety we may seek British protection.’

Following Japan’s entry into the war, Mahatma Gandhi demanded that the British should leave forthwith, to make India a less desirable invasion objective. In 1942, the nationalists’ ‘Quit India’ movement gained widespread support, and stirred rising popular unrest. Congress moved from a policy of non-cooperation towards one of outright rejection of British rule. On 21 January Lord Linlithgow reported to London: ‘There is a large and dangerous potential fifth column in Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Orissa, and … indeed, potentiality of pro-enemy sympathy and activity in eastern India is enormous.’ To the nationalists’ surprise, even in this darkest hour of Britain’s eastern fortunes, the imperial power declined to negotiate. Most of Congress’s leaders were imprisoned, some for long periods; Gandhi himself was released only in 1944, on grounds of ill-health. Widespread violence erupted, most seriously in Bombay, the Eastern United Provinces and Bihar, with attacks on symbols of the Raj – government buildings, railways, post offices – and some sabotage.

In August 1942 spontaneous riots broke out, following the failure of Sir Stafford Cripps’s mission to persuade Congress to shelve its political demands until peace came. The British restored order with considerable ruthlessness: the Viceroy came close to authorising aerial strafing of the dissidents, an option he described only half-ironically as ‘an exhilarating departure from precedent’. There were mass punitive whippings of convicted rioters, and tens of thousands of troops and
lathi
-wielding police were deployed against demonstrators. There are credible reports of policemen in disaffected areas engaging in rapes and indeed gang-rapes of arrested women; several hundred demonstrators were shot down, many homes were burned.

In parts of north-west India, for some months a reign of terror prevailed. On 29 September in Midnapore, for instance, a procession led by a seventy-three-year-old woman named Matongini Hazra converged on Tamluk’s courthouse. An ardent follower of Gandhi, she had already served six months’ imprisonment for demonstrating in front of the Viceroy. Now, accompanied by several women blowing conches, she advanced on the police and army cordon securing the courthouse, carrying a flag. When the security forces opened fire, a bullet struck her left hand, causing her to transfer the flag to the right. She was hit again before a third bullet struck her full in the temple. Three teenage boys were among others killed before the demonstrators fled.

In the short term, repression was successful in restoring order. The Indian Army remained almost entirely staunch. But all save the most myopic British imperialists recognised that their rule had lost the consent of the governed. It was a source of embarrassment to thoughtful politicians that in 1942, in the midst of a war against tyranny, some fifty battalions of troops – more than were then committed against the Japanese – had to be deployed to maintain internal control of India. It may be argued that there were overwhelming practical objections against surrendering power to Congress when the Japanese army stood at the gates. But it was among the ugliest aspects of British conduct of the war that in order to hold India, it was necessary not merely to repulse external invaders, but also to administer the country under emergency powers, as an occupied nation rather than a willing co-belligerent. Some of the repressive measures adopted in India were similar in kind, if not in scale, to those used by the Axis in occupied countries. Reports of excesses by the security forces were suppressed by military censorship.

The British in India displayed a casual racism, and sometimes brutality, which caused sensitive witnesses to recoil. Troop-Sergeant Clive Branson was a peacetime artist born in the subcontinent, a former member of the communist International Brigade in Spain. He wrote of his compatriots’ behaviour: ‘Those bloody idiots in the regular army … treat the Indians in such a way which not only makes one tremble for the future, but which makes one ashamed of being one of them … Never will any of us … forget the unbelievable, indescribable poverty in which we have found people living wherever we went.’ If those at home knew the truth, said Branson, ‘there would be a hell of a row – because these conditions are maintained in the name of the British’.

There were grievances in the ranks of the Indian Army, mostly about soldiers’ inferior conditions of service compared to those of their British counterparts. One group of men wrote jointly to their commanding officer: ‘In the eyes of Mahatma Gandhi all are equal but you pay a British soldier Rs75/-and to an Indian soldier you pay Rs18/-only.’ Another man complained: ‘An Indian subadar salutes a British soldier, but the British soldier does not salute an Indian subadar. Why is this so?’ Nor were Indians the only victims of the Raj’s harsh governance: in December 1942, 2,115 Japanese civilian internees were held by the British at Purama Quila camp outside Delhi in scandalous conditions of squalor and privation; by the year’s end 106 of them had died, some of beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese empire presided over many worse things, on a vastly greater scale; but the deaths at Purama Quila reflected deplorably on British competence as well as humanity.