Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (58 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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Europe had been lost. But the Empire remained. And this had been achieved without further parleying with ‘That Man’.
From Masters to Slaves
 
In December 1937 the Chinese city of Nanking fell to imperial forces. With explicit orders to ‘kill all captives’, the army ran amok. Between 260,000 and 300,000 non-combatants were killed, up to 80,000 Chinese women were raped and, in grotesque scenes of torture, prisoners were hung by their tongues from meat hooks and fed to ravenous dogs. Imperial troops competed in prisoner-killing competitions: one officer challenged another to see who would be first to dispatch a hundred Chinese PoWs. Some of the victims were stabbed, some bayoneted, some shot, some covered in petrol and burnt to death. The destruction left half the city in ruins. ‘Women suffered most’, recalled one veteran of the 114th Division. ‘No matter how young or old, they all could not escape the fate of being raped. We sent out coal trucks ... to the city streets and villages to seize a lot of women. And then each of them was allocated to 15 to 20 soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse’. ‘It would [have been] all right if we only raped them’, one of his comrades confessed. ‘I shouldn’t say all right. But we always stabbed them and killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk’. With good reason, they called it the Rape of Nanking.
This was imperialism at its very worst. But it was Japanese imperialism, not British. The Rape of Nanking reveals precisely what the leading alternative to British rule in Asia stood for. It is easy to portray the war between the British and Japanese Empires as a collision between an old, self-doubting Empire and a new and utterly ruthless Empire – between the setting and the rising sun. But it was also the collision between an Empire that had some conception of human rights and one that regarded alien races as no better than swine. In the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Ryukichi Tanaka, Director of the Japanese Secret Service in Shanghai: ‘We can do anything to such creatures’. By the 1930s many people in Britain had got into the habit of rubbishing the Empire. But the rise of the Japanese empire in Asia during that decade showed that the alternatives to British rule were not necessarily more benign. There were degrees of imperialism, and in its brutality towards conquered peoples Japan’s empire went beyond anything the British had ever done. And this time the British were among the conquered.
The naval base at Singapore had been built in the 1920s as the linchpin of Britain’s defences in the Far East. In the words of the Chiefs of Staff, ‘The security of the United Kingdom and the security of Singapore would be the keystones on which the survival of the British Commonwealth of Nations would depend’.
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Throughout the inter-war period, the declared strategy for defending Singapore in the event of an attack was to send the fleet. But by 1940 the service chiefs had realized that this was no longer an option; and by the end of 1941 even Churchill was attaching a lower priority to defending Singapore than to the triple needs of defending Britain, assisting the Soviet Union and holding on to the Middle East. Even so, not enough was done to protect the base from the threat posed by Japan. On the eve of the invasion there were just 158 first-line aircraft in Malaya where 1,000 were needed; and three and a half divisions of infantry where eight divisions plus two armoured regiments would barely have sufficed. Above all, there had been a woeful failure to build proper fixed defences (minefields, pillboxes and anti-tank obstacles) on the land approaches to Singapore. The result was that, when they attacked, the Japanese found the impregnable citadel was a sitting duck. As shells rained down on the city, the choice was between the horror of a Nanking-style Japanese assault and the humiliation of abject surrender. At 4 p.m. on 15 February 1942, despite Churchill’s desperate exhortation to fight ‘to the death’, the white flag was raised.
Altogether 130,000 imperial troops – British, Australians and Indians – gave themselves up to a force less than half that size. Never in the history of the British Empire had so many given up so much to so few. Only too late did it transpire how worn out the Japanese themselves had been after their gruelling jungle route march. Royal Artillery gunner Jack Chalker was among the prisoners. ‘It was hard to believe we were now in Japanese hands’, he later recalled. ‘That night, as we wondered what the future held for us, we couldn’t help but think of the Rape of Nanking ... Our prospects were not encouraging’. For Chalker and his comrades, what really rankled was the fact that this was humiliation at Asian hands. As it turned out, Japanese anti-Western rhetoric did not translate into better treatment for the nonwhite population of Singapore. The Japanese merely inserted themselves into the privileged position hitherto occupied by the British. If anything, their treatment of the other Asian inhabitants was worse: the Chinese community in particular was subjected to a devastating process of
sook ching
or ‘purification by elimination’. However, nothing more clearly expressed the character of the ‘new order’ in Asia than the way the Japanese treated their British prisoners.
The Japanese high command regarded surrender as dishonour and were contemptuous of enemy soldiers who did lay down their arms. Jack Chalker once asked one of his captors why he was so callous towards PoWs. ‘I am a soldier’, he replied simply. ‘To be a prisoner of war is unthinkable’. Yet there was more to the ill treatment of British prisoners than (as was sometimes claimed) a mere mistranslation of the Geneva Convention. By 1944 the British authorities had begun to suspect ‘an official policy of humiliating white prisoners of war in order to diminish their prestige in native eyes’. They were right. In 1942 Seishiro Itagaki, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Army in Korea, told the Prime Minister Hideki Tojo:
It is our purpose by interning American and British prisoners of war in Korea, to make the Koreans realize positively the true might of our Empire as well as to contribute to the psychological propaganda work for stamping out any ideas of worship of Europe and America which the greater part of Korea still retains at bottom.
 
The same principle was applied throughout Japanese-occupied Asia.
The British had built railways across their Empire with the labour of Asian ‘coolies’. Now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of world history, the Japanese forced 60,000 British and Australian PoWs – as well as Dutch prisoners and conscripted Indian labour – to construct 250 miles of railway through the mountainous jungle on the Thai-Burmese border. Since the mideighteenth century, it had been one of the Empire’s proudest boasts that ‘Britons never, never shall be slaves’. But that is exactly what the PoWs on the railway were. As one British prisoner bitterly observed: ‘It must be rather amusing for a Japanese to see the “white lords” trudging the road with basket and pole while they roll by on their lorries!’
Secretly, and at the risk of his own life, Jack Chalker, who had been an art student before the war, drew vivid sketches of the way he and his comrades were treated. Exhausted and on the brink of starvation, they were forced to work even when suffering from malaria, dysentery and, worst of all, the tropical ulcers that could gnaw a man’s flesh away to the bone:
Sleep was a shallow, tense business. We could be turned out of our huts at any hour to be paraded for a roll-call, assembled for a working party or to be beaten up; even the desperately ill had to attend regardless of their condition. Such assemblies could last for hours and even a whole day or night ... on some occasions sick patients died.
 
Pierre Boulle and David Lean’s film made the bridge on the River Kwai famous. But conditions were far worse than the film suggests. And they were worst of all further up the ‘Death Railway’, near the Burmese border.
The relentless and often sadistic abuse of the prisoners at the Hintok camp was recorded in the meticulous journal kept throughout his captivity by the Australian surgeon and PoW commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Dunlop, nicknamed ‘Weary’ partly as a pun (Dunlop – Tyre – Tired – Weary) but also because, as a tall man, he had to stoop when speaking to his much shorter captors to save their faces and avoid arousing their usually violent ire:
19th March 1943 ... tomorrow 600 men are required for the railway ... light duty and no duty men and all men without boots to go just the same. This is the next thing to murder. Obviously the Ns [Nips] have a great reserve of manpower here and at Singapore and they are showing every intention of just breaking men on this job, with not the faintest consideration for either life or health. This can only be regarded as a cold-blooded, merciless crime against mankind, obviously premeditated ...
22nd March 1943 I was furious ... and angrily told Hiroda [the Japanese officer in charge] that I objected strongly to his sending sick men to work ... I invited him to make good his threat to shoot me (rifles were trained on me). ‘You can shoot me, but then my 2 i/c [second-in-command] is as tough a man as me, and after him you will have to shoot them all. Then you will have no workmen. In any case, I have taken steps to one day have you hanged, for you are such a black-hearted bastard!’
 
In Dunlop’s eyes, the railway the Japanese – or rather their captives – were building was ‘an astonishing affair’ which seemed ‘to run without ... regard for the landscape as though someone had drawn a line on the map ...’ At Konyu the line went directly through a massive rock face 73 metres long and 25 metres high. Working in shifts around the clock, Dunlop’s men had to blast, drill and claw their way through. Despite the onset of the monsoon season and a horrific cholera epidemic, they managed to finish the job in just twelve weeks. During the night shift, the light shed by the flickering carbide lamps on the haggard faces of the PoWs earned this cutting the nickname Hellfire Pass. Dunlop’s diary makes it clear who the devils in this hell were:
17th May 1943 ... These days, in which I see men being progressively broken into emaciated, pitiful wrecks, bloated with beriberi, terribly reduced with pellagra, dysentery and malaria, and covered with disgusting sores, a searing hate arises in me whenever I see a Nip. Disgusting, deplorable, hateful troop of men – apes. It is a bitter lesson to all of us not to surrender to these beasts while there is still life in one’s body.
 
Twice he was viciously beaten and tied to a tree to await execution by bayonet, on suspicion of concealing a radio transmitter. Only with seconds to spare was he reprieved. But it was the treatment of one of his men – Sergeant S. R. ‘Mickey’ Hallam – that seemed to Dunlop to exemplify the gratuitous cruelty of the Japanese:
22nd June 1943 ... Sgt Hallam (malaria) had checked in with the Nipponese in this camp and had been admitted to hospital ... [He] was dragged from the hospital very ill with malaria (he had actually fainted on the way to work), then given an indescribable beating by the engineer sergeant and the other Nipponese. This included the following: blows with a fist, hammering over the face and head with wooden clogs, repeatedly throwing over the shoulder heavily on to the ground with a sort of fireman’s lift action, then kicking in the stomach and scrotum and ribs etc., thrashing with bamboos frequently over the head, and other routine measures ... This disgusting and brutal affair continued for some hours altogether ... Sgt Hallam was quite collapsed with a temperature of 103.4, face grossly contused – contusions to the neck and chest, multiple abrasions and contusions of limbs ...
 
Hallam died of his wounds four days later. As Dunlop noted: ‘He was slain by those Nipponese sadists more certainly than if they had shot him’.
When Dunlop added up the number of Allied prisoners who had died in the Hintok camp between April 1943 and January 1944 the total came to 676 – one in ten of the Australians, and two out of every three British prisoners. In all around 9,000 British did not survive their time in Japanese hands, roughly a quarter of all those captured. Never had British forces suffered such appalling treatment.
This was the Empire’s Passion; its time on the cross. After this, could it ever be resurrected?
With the Empire thus reduced – with its soldiers enslaved by Asian masters – the moment had surely arrived for India’s nationalists to rise up and throw off the British yoke. As Subhas Chandra Bose declared, the fall of Singapore seemed to herald ‘the end of the British Empire ... and the dawn of a new era in Indian history’.

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