The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (87 page)

Much the same was true of the Pacific dominions. Australia had joined Britain at war without hesitation, but the Australian government pinned its hopes on an early peace.
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Thereafter, it waged an unrelenting campaign for influence in London – through representation in an ‘Imperial War Cabinet’ (promptly rejected in London), through a personal visit by the Prime Minister, Menzies, in the spring of 1941, and by urging a meeting of dominion prime ministers.
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Australian ministers were deeply uneasy over the concentration of British naval and military power in Europe, and the lack of any real deterrent to a Japanese attack. To make matters worse, the prompt offer by New Zealand to send a division to fight in Europe had forced them to make a matching offer.
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By 1941, three Australian divisions were fighting in the Middle East, and the small Australian navy had been placed at Britain's disposal. As alarm about Japanese intentions grew, the Australian and New Zealand governments were forced to accept Churchill's reassurances that Japan would do nothing until Britain was defeated, and that, if they were attacked, the British would abandon the Mediterranean struggle and send army and navy to protect kith and kin. The military debacle of mid-1941, when the disastrous invasion of Greece and Crete wrecked an Australian and a New Zealand division, intensified Canberra's mistrust of Churchill. But the new Labor Prime Minister, John Curtin (who had originally opposed sending Australian troops abroad), was very reluctant to ask for the return of Australian troops. He accepted the argument that Singapore was the key to Australia's defence.
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When Australian troops were sent back from the Middle East (at Churchill's suggestion) after Pearl Harbor, their destination was Java. It was only after the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 that Curtin insisted, after a furious exchange with Churchill, that the two divisions in transit – the dominion's sole trained fighting force – should be diverted not to Burma but home to Australia.

By that time, Curtin had already infuriated Churchill by his notorious New Year's message announcing that Australia ‘looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’. What has often been seen as a symbolic repudiation of the old tradition of imperial loyalty was much more ambivalent. It is better seen as an anxious attempt to claim a full Australian place in strategic planning as America's main partner in the Pacific War (a claim badly received in Washington). In this role, Curtin was saying, Australia would not be Britain's poodle. Both Curtin and Fraser, the New Zealand Prime Minister, recognised that their own defence, as well as ultimate victory in the Pacific conflict, largely rested in American hands. But neither wanted to abandon the British connection or would have been allowed to do so by their public opinion. As the overweening scale of American power became more and more evident, they searched for better ways to influence Anglo-American policy and the post-war settlement. Closer Commonwealth unity (to secure British backing), local solidarity (as in the Australia–New Zealand agreement of January 1944) and the long-standing claim that the Pacific dominions should represent all Britain's interests in the South Pacific (as the ‘trustees of British civilisation’) were their preferred (and perhaps only) means to this urgent end. But there was no brooking the fact that, with the fall of Singapore (taking with it all hope of a British fleet being sent to Southeast Asia – Churchill had planned to send a battle squadron east in May 1942), the Pacific dominions had passed from the strategic sphere of the British system into that of the United States.

In all three dominions where there was a Britannic majority, the sense of being ‘British’ countries remained strong and there was a continued and intense commitment to the survival of Britain as an independent great power. The armies despatched by dominion governments told only half the story. Among RAF aircrews, where losses were highest and life expectancy shortest, dominion volunteers were out of all proportion to their population size.
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‘England is the home of our race’, said an Australian Labor MP in June 1940. ‘We love England, and if England should go down, it would seem to me as if the sun went down.’
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But all three had been forced to find ways of compensating for the British weaknesses so starkly revealed between 1940 and 1942. All three had been forced to recognise that the old reciprocity of the British system could no longer be counted on. The unstinting commitment of the dominions’ manpower to an imperial war had been based on the assumption that British sea-power would keep their homelands safe. After 1940–2, that assumption could no longer be made: another great-power protector was needed whose claims might be greater. For the British system, the implications were profound. Since the late nineteenth century, the mutual and unconditional loyalty of the ‘British’ countries had lain at the core of British world power. Their relatively high levels of economic development (Canada's national income, calculated
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in 1941, was as large as Italy's
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), their shared political values, and their astonishing capacity to mobilise their manpower for faraway wars, made them valued allies out of all proportion to their population size. Their oft-declared loyalty to King and Empire was an important source of psychological reassurance to the British at home that their global burdens would be shared in a crisis. Though it took some time before the pattern was clear, 1942 saw the end of this old imperial nexus. As they took stock of their interests in the worldwide war, it was to a new international order that they began to look to supplement, replace or incorporate the British connection.

It was ironic that this trend was weakest in the least Britannic of the overseas dominions. In South Africa, Smuts had won the support of enough Afrikaners to back South African entry. The volunteer army despatched to fight in East and North Africa was composed of Afrikaners as much as English South Africans.
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Smuts waged a vigorous propaganda campaign to win over South African opinion and counter the calls for peace made by opposition politicians after the fall of France. But in South Africa's case there was no Singapore, although, with the crisis of the North African war in July 1942, Smuts was anxious enough to start thinking of how South African forces might be withdrawn to stage a fighting retreat up the Nile valley.
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In 1943, after Alamein, Smuts was strong enough to win a decisive victory in a general election (another ‘khaki electie’ as his opponents complained). The pragmatic basis of Anglo-South African relations, helped by the specially favourable treatment in imports and shipping by which Churchill aimed to bolster Smuts’ popularity,
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was undisturbed by the presence of an alternative great-power patron in the Southern African sub-continent. But there were warning signs that the greater warmth that Smuts had brought to the imperial link would only be temporary. Afrikaner nationalism, frustrated in parliament, mobilised furiously among teachers and journalists and denounced Smuts’ government as a British lackey. The 1943 election was a formal triumph, but a closer analysis was less reassuring. The percentage of Afrikaners who voted for the United party fell from 40 per cent in 1938 to 32 per cent,
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while the nationalist opposition was united firmly behind D. F. Malan and an independent republic outside the Empire.
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The dream of fusion and Afrikaner reconciliation to the British system was fading away.

The second pillar of British world power was the Indian Raj. India had been the captive market for Britain's largest export, an important field for British investment and a vital contributor to Britain's balance of payments – though all three had suffered badly in the 1930s. But its greatest value after 1900 had been as the indispensable auxiliary to Britain's military power. The Indian budget had paid for two-thirds of the Empire's standing army. Its vast rural manpower formed an inexhaustible reserve against an imperial emergency. At the outbreak of war, however, India's military strength was in decline. The Indian army was unmechanised. Funds were short. The modernisation programme, for which London was paying, had hardly begun. Nor was it expected that Indian troops would play an important part in the European war. The main objective of the Army in India (a term used for the combined British garrison and the Indian army proper) was to defend the Northwest Frontier against Afghanistan. The Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 made it seem all the more important to keep watch on the Central Asian front against the ‘old enemy’.

As a result, although the Viceroy would have liked to enlist Congress support and keep their ministries in office, there was no sense of urgency on the British side. After May 1940, the picture changed dramatically. Over the next six months, the Indian army was almost doubled in size. In the following two years, the total strength of its combat arms rose to over two million.
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Recruitment, supply and the promotion of war industries became the central preoccupation of the Indian government. The cooperation of Indians (especially the educated) became more and more vital, and the wooing of opinion all the more necessary. Not surprisingly, then, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, made another attempt to draw representatives of the Congress into the government. The ‘August Offer’ promised dominion status at the end of the war (no deadline had been offered previously), Congress seats in the Viceroy's ‘cabinet’, and an advisory council to bring a larger Indian voice into the war effort.
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The Congress refused. Dominion status, said Jawaharlal Nehru, was ‘as dead as a doornail’. India must be free to leave the Empire–Commonwealth.

The widening rift between the British and Congress was not just the result of nationalist mistrust of British intentions, or the pacifist inclinations of the large Gandhian wing. The real reason was the tacit but deepening commitment of the British to the claims advanced by the Muslim League. Since the Lahore resolution of March 1940, its leader Jinnah had insisted on a Muslim veto – in effect a League veto – on any constitutional settlement hammered out for India. An independent India must acknowledge ‘Pakistan’ – the whole community of Indian Muslims – as an equal partner in a confederal India.
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The League would negotiate an equal footing with the Congress. Of course, successive Viceroys had long recognised the Muslim claim to separate representation, to protection against a ‘Hindu Raj’, and to the right to govern the Muslim majority provinces. The grand federal scheme of 1935 had been designed to prevent the concentration of power in Congress hands by devolving heavily to semi-autonomous provinces. But, from 1940 onwards, the politics of war gave a fierce twist to this established policy. The most vital zones of the Indian war effort were Muslim majority provinces: Bengal, which contained more than half of India's industrial capacity; and the Punjab, the main recruiting ground of the Indian army. In both, Muslim-dominated governments had co-operated willingly.
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But their goodwill and stability could not be taken for granted – especially if talk of constitutional change raised the temperature of Hindu–Muslim rivalry. Nor would recruitment continue if communal tensions discouraged would-be sepoys from leaving their homes.
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The result politically was that, at the very moment when it was more important than ever to gain the cooperation of Congress, the British had less than ever (of what really mattered) to give away in return. The stalemate persisted until the end of 1941 and the early phase of the Pacific War. Then the rapid advance of the Japanese armies showed that India would soon be in the war's front-line and that its war effort would need to be cranked up to even higher levels. This was not the only worry. The dismal failure of Malaya's defence raised a disturbing question. What would happen if India were attacked or invaded? Would the internal administration fall apart as Indians refused to take orders or abandoned their posts? Would the Indian masses simply disown a colonial regime in which the largest party had no share of power? The prospect unnerved the government in London. The case for a new approach was strengthened by signs that the Congress ‘moderates’ might be more amenable, and even more perhaps by Churchill's grudging acceptance that some new initiative was needed to disarm American complaints against colonial rule.
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Congress endorsement of the British war effort (then at its nadir) would be helpful evidence of the continued vitality of the British system. What was needed, urged Clement Attlee, in a burst of hyperbole, was someone who would save the British Empire in the East as Lord Durham had once saved Canada.
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Singapore fell thirteen days later.

The fruit of this rethink at the war's worst moment was to be a new constitutional offer. As soon as the war ended, India's political future would be handed over to a ‘constitution-making body’, free to withdraw India from Empire membership and the British system. Meanwhile, Indian participation in the Viceroy's government would be increased significantly. It would even include a defence minister with control over almost everything except operational matters. At the Viceroy's insistence (he threatened to resign), the offer was not published. Instead, it was taken to India (and published there) by Sir Stafford Cripps, widely considered Churchill's likeliest successor. Cripps began with high hopes that his old friendships in Congress would win him a deal. But two insoluble differences wrecked his prospects. The first (and less serious) was the Congress insistence on a direct say in defence operations – a demand to which London, the Viceroy and Cripps himself were unanimously opposed. The second (and more fundamental) was the British insistence that, whatever the model of independence proposed after the war, the Muslim provinces and the princely states would be free to opt out and make their own arrangements in negotiation with Britain. It would be up to the Congress to find an acceptable formula. This was the recipe for ‘Pakistan’ or – worse still ‘balkanisation’ – that the Congress feared most and rejected completely. With an imperial war effort ever more deeply dependent upon Muslim goodwill, it was also the recipe that London could not surrender. By early April, all negotiation was over (Congress gave its final rejection on 10 April), and Cripps was on his way home.
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Two months later, as the Japanese armies drove closer towards the Indian frontier, the Congress passed its ‘Quit India’ resolution, and set in motion a mass campaign to bring British rule to an immediate end.