All Hell Let Loose (70 page)

Americans, from their president downwards, never entirely forgave Churchill and his nation for the manner in which the peoples of the subcontinent were excluded from the ringing promises of freedom enshrined in the Atlantic Charter. Americans serving in India – performing liaison and logistical tasks, training Chinese soldiers and flying bomber operations against the Japanese – recoiled from British treatment of its inhabitants, and believed their own behaviour more sympathetic. Indians were less convinced: a letter-writer to the
Statesman
newspaper denounced the conduct of the Americans as vigorously as that of the British, describing them uncharitably as ‘venereal disease-ridden and seducers of young women’. The British saw hypocrisy as well as moral conceit in criticism of their imperial governance by an ally which sustained racial segregation at home.

Most of Churchill’s political colleagues recognised the inevitability of granting early independence to India, and hesitated only about the timing. But the old Victorian imperialist remained implacable: he clung to a delusion that British greatness derived in substantial measure from the Raj, and was disgusted by the perceived treachery of Indian politicians who sought to exploit Britain’s vulnerability and sometimes rejoiced in its misfortunes. Throughout the war, the prime minister spoke and wrote about Indians with a contempt that reflected his only acquaintance with them, as a nineteenth-century cavalry subaltern; his policies lacked the compassion which generally characterised his leadership.

By the autumn of 1942 more than 30,000 Congressmen were imprisoned, including Gandhi and Nehru. But British treatment of dissenters throughout their empire was incomparably more humane than that accorded by the Axis to domestic foes and occupied nations. For instance, Anwar Sadat was jailed after being implicated in his conspiracy with the German spies in Cairo, but so casually guarded that he was able to make two easy escapes; after the second, in 1944, he remained free, though in hiding, for the rest of the war. In India, Nehru could write letters freely, enjoy such favourite books as Plato’s
Republic
and play badminton during a relatively privileged fortress incarceration. But his weight fell dramatically, and confinement bore down as heavily upon the fifty-two-year-old Indian leader as on any other prisoner. In one letter, he told his wife Betty to abandon the notion of sending him Bradley’s
Shakespearean Tragedy
‘when there is tragedy enough at present’.

Some nationalists believed that drastic methods should be employed to get the British out. In 1940 Subhas Chandra Bose, Congress president, demanded a campaign of civil disobedience. When Gandhi rejected this, Bose resigned his post and made his way to Berlin via Kabul. Once in Germany, he recruited a small ‘Indian Legion’ from prisoners captured in the Western Desert, which served the Third Reich without notable distinction. In the summer of 1943 Bose returned to South-East Asia. The Japanese granted his ‘provisional Indian government’ a nominal seat in the occupied Andaman and Nicobar islands, and he was soon attracting big crowds for public meetings under Japanese auspices. Wearing uniform and top boots, he spoke in terms that mirrored Churchill’s call for blood, toil, tears and sweat. Indian National Army recruits, he told his audiences, must face ‘hunger, thirst, privation, forced marches and death. Only when you pass this test will freedom be yours.’ INA soldiers called Bose
Netaji
– ‘Esteemed Leader’. One of them, Lt. Shiv Singh, said: ‘After being captured in Hong Kong, Gen. Mohan Singh and Bose said … “You are fighting for a very small sum of money indeed, now come and fight for your country.” We volunteered without any force being used … I thought
Netaji
… was number-one leader, above Gandhi.’

Bose formed a women’s brigade named the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, in honour of a heroine of the 1857 rising against the British, and marched with it from Rangoon to Bangkok. One recruit asserted in a radio broadcast: ‘I am not a doll soldier, or a soldier in mere words, but a real soldier in the true sense of the word.’ A contingent of five hundred reached Burma from Malaya late in 1943, but the women were disappointed to find themselves relegated to nursing duties. Men’s units were deployed against Slim’s army in Assam and Burma. One soldier, P.K. Basu, said later: ‘I did not believe that the INA would actually succeed, but I believed in the INA’; two INA regiments were named for Gandhi and Nehru. There was a yawning gulf between Bose’s rhetoric and the INA’s contribution to the Axis war effort. When its poorly armed units were deployed in battle, their Japanese sponsors treated them with disdain, and few showed stomach for serious fighting. Some imperial Indian troops shot INA prisoners out of hand, but the British were embarrassed by the renegade force’s very existence, and dismayed to find that a substantial number of Indians regarded Bose as a hero – as they do today.

The most serious blot upon the wartime Raj, and arguably upon Britain’s entire war effort, was the 1943–44 Bengal famine. The loss of Burma deprived India of 15 per cent of its food supplies. When a series of floods and cyclones – natural catastrophes to which low-lying East Bengal is chronically vulnerable – struck the region, wrecking its 1942 harvest, the population fell prey to desperate hunger. Much transport was destroyed, further impeding movement of food supplies. A Bengali fisherman named Abani was among millions who lost their livelihoods. ‘We could not afford to buy a net … The moneylender would not give me a loan. The moneylender himself had no money. Our family possessions had been destroyed in the flood: of eight cows we only saved one.’ By December, people were dying. In the following year, their plight became catastrophic. In October 1943 a relief worker named Arangamohan Das reported from Terapekhia bazaar on the Haldi river. ‘There I saw nearly 500 destitutes of both sexes, almost naked and reduced to bare skeletons. Some of them were begging for food … from the passers by, some longing for food with piteous look, some lying by the wayside approaching death hardly with any more energy to breathe and actually I had the misfortune of seeing eight peoples breathe their last before my eyes.’

Censors intercepted a letter from an Indian soldier embittered by his experience during leave: ‘We come home to our own villages to find the food is scarce and high-priced. Our wives have been led astray and our land has been misappropriated. Why does the Sarkar [government] not do something about it
now
rather than talking about post-war reconstruction?’ Why not, indeed? The British government refused to divert scarce shipping to famine relief; India secretary Leo Amery at first adopted a cavalier attitude. Even when he began to exert his influence in favour of intervention, the prime minister and cabinet remained unsympathetic. In 1943, sailings to Indian Ocean destinations were cut by 60 per cent, as shipping was diverted to sustain Allied amphibious operations, aid to Russia and Atlantic convoys; the British cabinet met only 25 per cent of Delhi’s requested food deliveries. Churchill wrote in March 1943, applauding the minister of war transport’s refusal to release ships to move relief supplies: ‘A concession to one country … encourages demands from all the others. [The Indians] must learn to look after themselves as we have done … We cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of goodwill.’ A few months later, he said: ‘There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done.’

But the British diet remained incomparably more lavish than that of the Indian people. Bengalis use the phrase
payter jala
– burning of the belly – to describe hunger, and many bellies burned in 1943 and 1944. Gourhori Majhi of Kalikakundu said long afterwards: ‘Everyone was crazed with hunger. Whatever you found, you’d tear it off and eat it right there. My family had ten people; my own stomach was wailing. Who is your brother, who is your sister – no one thought of such things then. Everyone is wondering, how will I live? … There was not a blade of grass in the fields.’ Many women resorted to prostitution, and some families sold their daughters to pimps.

Even at this extremity there were no reports of cannibalism such as took place in Russia, but there were many child murders. The newspaper
Biplabi
reported on 5 August 1943: ‘In Sapurapota village … a Muslim weaver was unable to support his family and, crazed with hunger, wandered away. His wife believed that he had drowned himself … Being unable to feed her two young sons for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering. On [23 July] she dropped the smaller boy torn from her womb, the sparkle of her eye, into the Kasai’s frothing waters. She tried in the same way to send her elder son to his father, but he screamed and grabbed onto her … She discovered a new way to silence her child’s searing hunger. With feeble arms she dug a small grave and threw her son into it. As she was trying to cover him with earth a passer-by heard his screams and snatched the spade from his mother’s hand. A [low-caste Hindu] promised to bring up the boy and the mother then went away, who knows where. Probably she found peace by joining her husband in the Kasai’s cold torrent.’

There were widespread cholera outbreaks, with people dying in the streets and parks of major cities: by mid-October 1943, the death rate in Calcutta alone had risen from its usual six hundred a month to 2,000. Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister-in-law wrote from a relief centre describing ‘rickety babies with arms and legs like sticks; nursing mothers with wrinkled faces; children with swollen faces and hollow-eyed through lack of food and sleep; men exhausted and weary, walking skeletons all of them’. She was appalled by ‘the look of weary resignation in their eyes. It wounded my spirit in a manner that the sight of their suffering bodies had not done.’ In October Wavell, by now India’s Viceroy, belatedly deployed troops to move relief supplies. Thereafter, government efforts to assist the population steadily increased, but at least one million and perhaps as many as three million people were dead, and immense political damage had been done. There was no doubt of the logistical difficulties the British faced in assuaging the consequences of natural disaster while fighting a great war. But Churchill responded to Wavell’s increasingly urgent and forceful pleas for aid with a brutal insensitivity which left an irreparable scar on Anglo– Indian relations.

Nehru wrote from prison on 18 September 1943: ‘Reports from Bengal are staggering. We grow accustomed to anything, any depth of human misery and sorrow … More and more I feel that behind all the terrible mismanagement and bungling there is something deeper … the collapse of the economic structure of Bengal.’ He added on 11 November: ‘The Bengal famine has been the final epitaph of British rule and achievement in India.’ Churchill stubbornly refused concessions to nationalist sentiment, dismissing objections from the Americans and their Chinese clients. Leo Amery recoiled in dismay from Churchill’s ravings: ‘Cabinet … [Winston] talked unmitigated nonsense, first of all treating Wavell as a contemptible self-seeking advertiser, and then talking about the handicap India is to defence, and how glad he would be to hand it over to President Roosevelt.’

Yet few British people, fighting for their lives, were much troubled by displays of Indian alienation or imperial repression. They cheered themselves with knowledge that the vast Indian Army, four million strong, remained loyal to the Raj. Indian divisions made a notable contribution to the East Africa, Iraq, North Africa and Italian campaigns, and played the principal role in the 1944–45 struggles for Assam and Burma. British wartime policy could be deemed a success, in that by 1944–45 disorder was almost entirely suppressed; strikes and acts of sabotage dwindled. But posterity can see the irony that while Britain fought the Axis in the name of freedom, to retain control of India it practised ruthless governance without popular consent, and adopted some of the methods of totalitarianism.

Britain’s wartime treatment of its subject races remained humane by German or Japanese standards; there were no arbitrary executions or wholesale massacres. But India was not the only imperial possession in which the exigencies of emergency were used to justify neglect, cruelty and injustice. In 1943, famines afflicted Kenya, Tanganyika and British Somaliland; at various moments there were food riots in Tehran, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus. If these were caused by circumstances of war, the imperial power was parsimonious in apportioning resources to alleviate their consequences. While British rule reflected moderate rather than absolute authoritarianism, it scarcely sufficed to promote support – and especially Indian support – for retention of imperial hegemony. The only narrowly plausible defence of British wartime rule of India is that the country was so vast, with such potential for turbulence, that indulgence of domestic dissent would have threatened an irretrievable loss of control, to the advantage of the Axis. The common experience of battle forged some sense of battlefield comradeship between British and imperial soldiers white, brown and black alike. But the stress of war, rather than strengthening the bonds of empire as Britain’s jingoes liked to pretend, dramatically loosened them.

The leaders of the Grand Alliance depicted the war as a struggle for freedom against oppression, good against evil. In the twenty-first century, few informed people even in former colonial possessions doubt the merit of the Allied cause, the advantage that accrued to mankind from defeat of the Axis. But it seems essential to recognise that in many societies contemporary loyalties were confused and equivocal. Millions of people around the world who had no love for the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini or Hirohito felt little more enthusiasm for Allied powers whose vision of liberty vanished, it seemed to their colonial subjects, at their own front doors.

1
CHINA

As early as 1936, American correspondent Edgar Snow, a passionate admirer and friend of Mao Zhedong, wrote: ‘In her great effort to master the markets and inland wealth of China, Japan is destined to break her imperial neck. This catastrophe will occur not because of automatic economic collapse in Japan. It will come because the conditions of suzerainty which Japan must impose on China will prove humanly intolerable and will shortly provoke an effort of resistance that will astound the world.’ Snow was right about the outcome of Japanese imperialism, though not about the military effectiveness of Chinese resistance. Wartime Allied strategy in the Far East was powerfully influenced by America’s desire to make China not only a major belligerent, but a great power. Enormous resources were lavished upon flying supplies from India to Americans, notably airmen, supporting the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek ‘over the Hump’ of the Himalayas, after Japan’s conquest of Burma severed the land link in 1942, and the US built airfields in China from which to deploy its bombers.

All these efforts proved vain. China remained a chaotic, impoverished, deeply divided society. Chiang boasted an enormous paper army, but his regime and commanders were too corrupt and incompetent, his soldiers too scantily equipped and motivated, to make significant headway against the Japanese. Logistical and operational difficulties crippled USAAF missions out of China. In the north, in Yennan province, Mao Zhedong’s communists held sway, and professed antagonism to the Japanese. But Mao’s strategy was dominated by the desire to build his strength for a post-war showdown with Chiang. Between 1937 and 1942, both Nationalists and communists inflicted substantial casualties on the invaders – 181,647 dead. But thereafter they acknowledged their inability to challenge them in headlong confrontations which drained their thread-bare resources to little purpose. Chinese historian Zhijia Shen has written in a study of Shandong province: ‘Local people were much more influenced by pragmatic calculation than by the idea of nationalism … When national and local interests clashed, they did not hesitate to compromise national interests.’

Though Mao deluded some Americans into supposing that his guerrillas were making war effectively, for much of the conflict he maintained a tacit truce with the Japanese, and indeed became secret partners with them in the opium trade. While the Nationalists recorded 3.2 million military casualties during the Japanese occupation, the communists acknowledged only 580,000. Latterly, Chiang devoted as much military energy to holding his ground against Mao as to fighting the Japanese. He was unembarrassed by his own equivocations, saying: ‘The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the communists are a disease of the heart.’

Nonetheless, the occupation of half of China constituted a massive drain upon Tokyo’s resources, and cost Japan 202,958 dead between 1941 and 1945, compared with 208,000 men killed fighting the British, and 485,717 army and 414,879 naval personnel lost in combat with the United States. The country was vast: even if organised opposition was weak, large forces were indispensable to make good Tokyo’s claims on territory, and to control a hostile and often starving population. In the north, Japan’s Kwantung Army held Manchuria, the puppet state of Manchukuo; its North China Area Army was based in Beijing; the headquarters of the Central China Expeditionary Forces was in Shanghai. All estimates are unreliable, but it seems reasonable to accept the figure of fifteen million Chinese wartime dead as a direct consequence of Japanese military action, starvation or plagues, some of these deliberately fostered by biological warfare specialists of the Japanese army’s Unit 731.

The Japanese were the only large-scale wartime users of biological weapons. Unit 731 in Manchuria operated under the supremely cynical cover name of the Kwantung Army Epidemic Protection and Water Supply Unit. Thousands of captive Chinese were murdered in the course of tests at 731’s base near Harbin, many being subjected to vivisection without benefit of anaesthetics. Some victims were tied to stakes before anthrax bombs were detonated around them. Women were laboratory-infected with syphilis; local civilians were abducted and injected with fatal viruses. In the course of Japan’s war in China, cholera, dysentery, plague and typhus germs were broadcast, most often from the air, sometimes with porcelain bombs used to deliver plague fleas. An unsuccessful attempt was made to employ such means against American forces on Saipan, but the ship carrying the putative insect warriors was sunk en route.

That the Japanese attempted to kill millions of people with biological weapons is undisputed; it is less certain, however, how successful were their efforts. Vast numbers of Chinese died in epidemics between 1936 and 1945, and modern China attributes most of these losses to Japanese action. In a broad sense this is just, since privation and starvation were consequences of Japanese aggression. But it remains unproven that Unit 731’s operations were directly responsible. For instance, over 200,000 people died during the 1942 cholera epidemic in Yunnan. The Japanese released cholera bacteria in the province, but many such epidemics took place even where they did not do so. It was difficult, with available technology, to spread disease on demand with air-dropped biological weapons. Yet even if Japan’s genocidal accomplishments fell short of their sponsors’ hopes, the nation’s moral responsibility is manifest.

Between 1942 and 1944 big battlefield encounters in China were rare, but Japanese forces conducted frequent punitive expeditions to suppress dissent or gather food. One of the most ferocious of these took place in May 1942, designated by the Japanese high command as an act of vengeance for the USAAF Doolittle raid on Tokyo. More than 100,000 troops were dispatched into Chekiang and Kiangsi provinces, with support from the biological warfare unit. By September, when their mission was deemed fulfilled and the columns withdrew, a quarter of a million people had been killed. Throughout the war, Chiang’s capital of Chonqing was routinely bombed by Japanese aircraft, and raids inflicted heavy civilian casualties in several other cities.

The files of the medical branch of the Tokyo War Ministry show that in September 1942, enslaved ‘comfort women’ were servicing Japanese soldiers at a hundred stations in north China, 140 in central China, forty in the south, a hundred in South-East Asia, ten in the south-west Pacific and ten on south Sakhalin. Women were deployed in proportions of one to every forty soldiers. Around 100,000 were centrally conscripted, in addition to many others recruited locally; Hirohito’s warriors were issued with condoms branded ‘Assault No. 1’, though many disdained to use them. Chinese peasants called their Japanese occupiers ‘the
YaKe
’, meaning dumb, because few Japanese condescended to learn or speak Chinese. ‘The
YaKe
treatment’ described the piercing of a man’s or woman’s legs with a sharpened bamboo, the customary punishment for supposed Chinese disobedience.

One of its victims was a nineteen-year-old girl Lin Yajin, who like many of her contemporaries bore
YaKe
scars for the rest of her life. She was a peasant’s daughter in Hainan province, one of six children, when she was seized by Japanese soldiers in October 1943. They took her to their base camp and questioned her perfunctorily about local guerrilla activity. She sobbed in terror through her first night of captivity; during the second, four men filed into the hut where she was held.

Deng Yumin, from Xiangshui in Baoting county, suffered a similar fate. Like many of her people, members of the Miao ethnic minority, she was conscripted for forced labour in 1940, living in a work camp first planting tobacco, then road-building. One day, the overseer told her she had been chosen for special work. She was taken to meet a Japanese officer, who she thought was about forty years old. Through an interpreter,

If Japanese conduct in victory had been barbaric, amid defeats it became progressively more murderous. The principal victims of their Asian rampages were not the British, Australians or Americans, whose pride and prestige were more vulnerable than their citizens, but the native inhabitants of the societies over which Tokyo assumed hegemony, China foremost among them. ‘Terrible things were done by Japan in China,’ says modern Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, but many of his compatriots still decline to acknowledge this.

Not only Japanese nationalists, but also some modern Western historians, argue that the United States provoked Japan into war in 1941. They suggest that conflict between the two nations was avoidable, and propound a theory of moral equivalence, whereby Japanese wartime conduct was no worse than that of the Allies. But the Japanese waged an expansionist war in China, massacring countless civilians, for years before President Roosevelt imposed economic sanctions. A contemporary Japanese nationalist later sought to justify his nation’s policies by asserting: ‘America and Britain had been colonising China for many years. China was a backward nation … we felt Japan should go there and use Japanese technology and leadership to make China a better country.’ The record shows that Japanese conduct in China was both wholly self-interested and shamelessly barbaric. But sufficient Japanese remained convinced of their nation’s ‘civilising mission’ and of the legitimacy of their claims upon an overseas empire to render their government implacably opposed to withdrawal from China, even when Japan began to lose the war and to ponder negotiating positions. If European imperialism was indisputably exploitative, the Japanese claimed rights to pillage Asian societies on a scale and in a fashion no colonial regime had matched.

American enthusiasm for the Nationalist regime, and for China’s potential as an ally, persisted until 1944, when the Japanese launched their last major conventional offensive of the war, Operation
Ichigo
. This was designed to eliminate American bomber airfields in China, and open an overland route to Indochina. It conclusively exposed the impotence of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, whose formations melted away in its path. Vast new areas of central and southern China were overrun – almost bloodlessly for the Japanese, though emphatically not for the Chinese. Once more, they died in their thousands and hundreds of thousands, as the warring armies swept over them. It is remarkable that Japan embarked on
Ichigo
at a moment in the war when such an ambitious operation had become strategically futile; its only significant achievement, beyond slaughter, was to disabuse Washington of its illusions about China. By 1945 the US chiefs of staff had abandoned notions of seizing Taiwan and using it as a stepping-stone to create a perimeter on the mainland. They recognised that the country was incapable of participating effectively in the war. China was merely a great victim, second only to Russia in the scale of its sufferings and losses, while denied the consolation of any redemptive military achievement.