A World at Arms (175 page)

In the hope of restraining Arab hostility at a time of danger from Italy and Germany, the British government had dramatically restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine just before Germany’s initiation of its mass murder campaign made that British mandate almost the only possible refuge for the prospective victims. Earlier, the British had divided the Palestine mandate into two separate units at the Jordan river and had entirely excluded Jews from about three–fourths of the area; now the remaining portion was also about to be closed to further immigrants if they were Jewish (Arab immigration being permitted at all times). The war was to have a whole series of complicated and inter-acting effects on this situation.

The Arab nationalist movement grew in strength during the war everywhere, furthered by the obvious weakening of the British and French. The leader of the Arab nationalists in Palestine, however, had aligned himself with the Axis and had thereby discredited himself and left the local Arab population without a credible local spokesman. On the other hand, the full revelation of the extent of the slaughter of European Jews at the end of the war made at least some portions of world opinion more sympathetic to the plight of the survivors of the Holocaust, at the same time as those survivors were increasingly desperate to find a home in Palestine. Once the British government had decided to abandon its role in India, the whole rationale for maintaining British control of the northern approach to the Suez Canal lifeline to India–a key element in the original interest of London in the mandate for Palestine–had evaporated. Under these circumstances, the strife flaring up again inside the mandate looked to the British more trouble than holding the mandate was worth. They therefore left, and the United Nations decided to partition the area into two states, an Arab one and a Jewish one, with international status for Jerusalem.

While the representatives of the Jewish population were willing to accept this U.N. decision, the Arab countries were not and attacked both the newly proclaimed Jewish state and the international area of Jerusalem, anticipating a quick capture of both. That effort failed in the face of a successful Jewish defense which held the areas allotted to the new state by partition, portions of the land originally destined for the
Arab state, and a sliver of the Jerusalem area, most of the latter remaining under Arab control. A series of armistice agreements ended hostilities temporarily but did not lead to peace. The reason why these matters need to be recalled in connection with World War II is that the new Jewish state, called Israel, was so drastically affected by aspects of the war as were the surrounding newly independent Arab states.

The decision of many extreme Arab nationalists to side with Germany in the war undoubtedly influenced the U.N.’s approval of a Jewish state substantially larger than the minute one envisaged by the pre-war British Royal Commission, the Peel Commission. Some unit of that type was clearly going to emerge once the crisis which had led to its postponement had passed; in that sense the postponement has to be seen as similar to the delay in the independence of Iraq, Egypt, and Iran, but it would have been one far different from what actually came to develop.

The obvious desperation of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and the pogroms in Poland which made the return home of those from that country impossible, rendered some new solution essential, and brought a substantial influx of Jewish immigrants the moment independence facilitated their entry into a state one of whose declared objectives was to be a haven for any Jew who wished to enter. In the long run, on the other hand, the enormous scale of the slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe meant that the main reservoir from which prior Jewish immigrants had come was only a small fraction of what it had once been. Before long, Jewish refugees from the newly independent Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East would therefore come to outnumber those from Europe. These and related issues would trouble the area for years.

In India, also, the war had both a retarding and an accelerating effect on decolonization. Without the war, Churchill would certainly not have become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. His steadfast opposition to increased home rule for India in the 1930s had isolated him from all parties in England at the same time as it made Sir Samuel Hoare, who had pushed the Government of India Act of 1935 through the House of Commons over Churchill’s last ditch resistance, the obvious next Viceroy. Hoare would presumably have played in the early or mid-1940s the role that Lord Louis Mountbatten performed a few years later.

That the war simultaneously retarded and speeded up the process of India’s gaining independence can be seen when the retarding effect of Churchill’s imperial vision is contrasted with the collapse of British power and prestige as a result of the exertions of war and the defeat at the hands of Japan in the early stages of fighting in Southeast Asia. The association of Mountbatten with the recovery of British military prestige
in the region, because of his position as head of the South East Asia Command during the defeat of the Japanese invasion of India and the liberation of Burma, made him a logical choice for the post-war Labor government in London to charge him with the responsibility for arranging the independence of India.
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The new British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had been Labor’s representative on the British Statutory Commission, whose recommendations had once aroused Churchill’s wrath. There was no turning back to the vanished days at the turn of the century where Churchill’s imagination still lived.

The war had contributed to a horrendous famine in Bengal but had in general assisted the economic development of India. Vast numbers had served in the British Indian Army; many had acquired experience in new factories; the port facilities had been vastly improved. Tensions between the divergent religious communities in the sub-continent had, unfortunately, also risen and made the emergence of a single state impossible. Those opponents of Gandhi, like Subhas Chandra Bose, who had long argued that violence was an appropriate tool if used for the right ends by sincere people, merely contributed to the deadly rash of communal violence which accompanied the partition of India and would repeatedly stain the area’s history thereafter. This would be true for all four, eventually five, states which emerged out of the British empire in southern Asia: India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and eventually Bangladesh.

Similar processes applied to Southeast Asia. The Philippines were the most obvious example of the mixture of delay and speeding up in decolonization as a result of the war. The United States had decided to leave before the war; independence was to come in 1944 and the last American bases were to be given up in 1946. The Japanese invasion delayed the former and concern over Soviet power in the Pacific delayed the latter deadline. But there was never any doubt that the islands would be independent. The destruction of war, the fighting of so many Filipinos alongside American forces, and the new defense agreements meant that independence would be accompanied by vastly greater American financial aid to the new state than could otherwise have been anticipated.

In the British and Dutch possessions of Southeast Asia the tides of nationalism had been accentuated by the war at the same time as the prestige of the colonial powers Britain and the Netherlands had been shattered. It took several years for the various areas on the continent and in the islands to secure their independence, but the process was irreversible, and in the case of the former Netherlands East Indies vigorously pushed by the United States. That country, with President Roosevelt’s personally urging such a policy, had originally objected to a return of
the French to their former control of French Indo-China. The American secret service in the field, the OSS, had worked with and assisted the Vietnamese nationalists under Ho Chi-minh as these fought the Japanese. The planning for the final operation of the Pacific War, the invasion of the Japanese home island of Honshu in the spring of 1946, was accordingly deliberately designed to include those two French divisions which de Gaulle’s government had originally hoped to send to Indo-China. But in the face of its assessment of the situation in post-war Europe, the United States changed its policy from opposition to support of the reestablishment of the French colonial position; a reversal that was to have immense consequences.

The most dramatic decolonization took place in the colonial empire Japan had accumulated. The attempt to expand that empire by new seizures beginning in 1931 had failed. Not only were the remaining conquests of the 1930s and 1940s (including Thailand) freed of the Japanese presence, but the portions of the empire acquired earlier were now stripped from Japan as the Allies had promised at the Cairo Conference. Formosa was to be returned to China, and Korea was to regain its independence though after an intermediate period of American and Russian military occupation. When that occupation ended, two states emerged but certainly neither of them would again be ruled from Tokyo. Japan also lost the islands in the Pacific acquired from Germany after World War I, with these passing through American trusteeship into independence or commonwealth status, and the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, which had been taken from Russia at the end of the Russo-Japanese War. When they occupied the Kuriles, the Soviets also seized some small islands off the shore of Hokkaido which had been Japanese for centuries; whatever might have been the military advantages derived from this step, the political repercussions were to plague Russo-Japanese relations for decades.

Under the terms of a preliminary agreement reached at Yalta and a subsequent treaty between the Chinese Nationalist government and Moscow, the special facilities Japan had held at and near Port Arthur in Manchuria went to the Soviet Union, not China; but after some years were retroceded to China anyway. The area which had been the focus of international dispute in East Asia since the end of the nineteenth century, Manchuria, was returned to Chinese control where it was to remain. Ironically, the decade and a half of Japanese occupation had brought a demographic revolution in this huge territory: for the first time the massive influx of Chinese workers into the factories and farms of the region had made it predominantly Chinese rather than Manchu in population. The industrial facilities in Manchuria were stripped and
carried off by the Russians, who claimed them as Japanese property; the population, except for the Japanese immigrants, remained.
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The surrender of the Japanese at a time when their troops were still in occupation of vast stretches of China, including many of its most important cities, led to a race between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists to claim both the territory and the surrendered Japanese weapons. Although very greatly assisted by the United States in this process, the Nationalists proceeded very quickly to throw away their advantage. Their confiscation of economic assets in the liberated areas and establishment of an exchange rate from the occupation to their own currency which wiped out savings turned the business interests in these areas against them.
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The failure in the latter years of the war to engage in serious fighting against the Japanese left the Nationalist armies demoralized when now–after the war was supposed to be over–they were required to fight once again. Within a short time, mainland China came under the control of the Communists who would rule it for decades in, first, uneasy alliance with the Soviet Union, and then in equally uneasy enmity to that power. Chiang was left with Formosa (Taiwan), the area restored to China fifty years after its loss to Japan. One of the more preposterous excuses advanced by Japanese expansionists for their course of action had been that of extirpating the danger of Communism from East Asia; they had instead played a major role in destroying the Chinese Nationalists and turning the world’s most populous country to Communist rule.

Japan itself, stripped of its colonial empire and with its major cities largely destroyed, was in a desperate condition. The whole country was occupied by Allied troops, most of it by American soldiers, the western portion of Honshu and the island of Shikoku by the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. There were, however, mitigating factors which contributed to the country’s recovery. Unlike Germany and Italy, the home islands of Japan had not been fought over mile by mile; the surrender induced by the atomic bombs and Soviet entrance into the war meant that the process of destruction had not included ground fighting with its attendant destruction of small towns and facilities, to say nothing of the accompanying casualties. Similarly, the surrender at a time when the military still had over seven million men in uniform meant that these men would almost all return home rather than fight to the death, either in the far-flung territories where they had been holding out or in the home islands as had been their practice in the preceding years. The country to which they were repatriated was in dire straits, and many of them were now happy to secure menial jobs with the occupation forces in order to make a living– I recall sharing my lunch with some of them.
But they had survived along with the energies and skills they brought back with them.

Of additional significance was the fact that Japan, unlike Germany, was not divided into occupation zones which were sealed off from each other. The central administration continued to operate under supposedly Allied but in reality American supervision; and a restructuring of the society by extensive land reform, the development of free labor unions, the extension of political rights to women, and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy far more broadly based than the one Japan had tried in the 1920s, provided the basis for a relatively quick and massive recovery. That recovery was undoubtedly aided by the economic stimulus provided by the Korean War from 1950–53, but it had already started well before then. Japan was on the political and economic road to recovery; only the unwillingness to deal honestly with the darker elements in its own past continued–and continues–to hold it back.