Forgotten Wars (25 page)

Tired veterans of the war in Europe headed east in cramped troopships: a new forgotten army. A young captain, Derek van den Boegarde, had witnessed the long push from Normandy into Germany, and as the war in Europe ended he had witnessed the horror of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On 1 July, he departed from Liverpool on the SS
Carthage
, a new passenger liner, for the build-up of the liberation of Southeast Asia. It was a grotesque parody of the stately voyages that had connected Britain’s Asian empire before the war. Later he would recall his arrival at the Gateway of India, where his ship was greeted by waving men being demobilized back to Britain. Bombay seemed squalid: ‘The stench was heavy: oil, bodies, dirt; somewhere, faintly, spices.’ Then, immediately, came the long rail journey to Bengal. ‘The India I saw, from that terrible train, was sere, desolate. It was a fearful let-down… I had expected story-book splendour. Instead we trailed for days across stony, beige desert.’ He detrained at Calcutta to see an Indian porter being beaten by ‘a fat, ginger-haired, moustached, red-faced stocky little major from Transport. Screaming. Thrashing at the cringing Indian with his swagger cane… My first sight and sound of the Raj at work.’ Fifty years on, he wrote that the memory of ‘the cowering humbled body’ in the crowded Seddah station repulsed his mind even more than the desolation of the bleak heaths and pines of Germany. In Calcutta van den Bogaerde was put to work memorizing maps and photographs of the beaches and mangroves of the Malay peninsula.
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In the event the only action that occurred in his time in India came after a screening of the film
Objective, Burma!
when the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers returning from the Arakan front took umbrage at the sight of Errol Flynn liberating Burma single-handedly, and set fire to the cinema.
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Years later, Dirk Bogarde, as he styled himself after the war, would come under attack for his own portrayal of one of his commanding officers, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, in the film
A Bridge too Far
.

After celebrating VJ Day in Calcutta, chaotic with deserters, he left for Southeast Asia. Five weeks after the Japanese surrender he arrived in Singapore. The harbourside was still in ruins, and the city had the odour of defeat, which ‘meandered through the paint-peeling streets
of Singapore like a slowly dispersing marsh gas, lying in pockets here and there, loitering in rooms and corridors, bitter, clinging, sickening’. Ex-prisoners of war still haunted the hotels and bars; internees told terrible stories of the chaos and incompetence of the fall. Yet colonial society was coming to life, with all its attendant snobberies. Van den Bogaerde noted that, as in 1941, the memsahibs of Singapore refused to speak to mere soldiers. The city was ‘a white-washed bastard Tunbridge Wells – with palm trees’. Inching across the sea in a landing ship, his detail passed south, across the equator and into the Java Sea towards Jakarta. It was a cramped, nauseating journey for the soldiers. Van den Bogaerde landed in Tanjong Priok harbour amid a bustling scene of Javanese dock labour, Japanese prisoners of war – ‘naked except for their boots, peaked caps and flapping loin cloths’ – and turbaned Indian soldiers. The air reeked of burnt rubber, from a smouldering store, after a bomb attack by armed revolutionaries. Three and a half months after the surrender of Japan, van den Bogaerde had arrived in the middle of a combat zone.
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This vast new deployment placed a colossal burden on South East Asia Command, which by the end of year had become, in the words of Mountbatten’s political adviser Esler Dening, ‘more and more a purely British Indian affair’.
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India had to find troops, not only for Burma, Malaya and Singapore, but also for Thailand and what had been French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia. The British were even readying to send detachments of the Indian Army to occupied Japan; this was the first and the last ‘British Commonwealth’ force of its kind. Some of the first forces to enter were the 536 British and Australian sailors and marines who landed in Tokyo Bay in MacArthur’s triumph. They were the advance guard of a Commonwealth contingent force that was to be 37,000 strong. These were war-weary men. The senior Indian officer, Brigadier Thimayya, had seen his brother – a staff officer in the INA – captured by his own brigade at Rangoon. For his Indian officers, the occupation was unlikely to lead to any career advancement. It was to be the last adventure of the Raj: the final Indian soldiers left Japan on 25 October 1947.

The Commonwealth troops were given an area that included Hiroshima. It was believed at the time that this was because the Americans did not want to be so closely associated with the devastation their
bomb had wrought: a headline in the
Australian Army Journal
read: ‘Australia takes the Ashes’. The Americans denied having any ulterior design; the area had been chosen on climatic grounds, that the north was too cold for the Indians and Australians. The effects of radiation were unknown at this time, but many of the men who served in Hiroshima would die at a comparatively early age. After the first sight-seeing they stayed away from the city: it brought doubt and depression. Some men spat at the wharfside on disembarking, but most were saddened by the poverty and wrack of war. As General ‘Punch’ Cowan, who had himself fought and lost a son in the Burma campaign, asked: ‘How can I blame these children and their families for what has happened?’
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Even before the British reoccupied the Malay peninsula they were planning a strike to the east against Japanese forces in French Indo-China, the territories that are today Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The main target was the headquarters in Saigon of the ageing and ailing Field Marshal Count Terauchi, who had suffered a stroke earlier in the year. The British intervention in Indo-China is almost forgotten now, but it was to have major repercussions for the whole of Southeast Asia during the period of the Cold War. Why did British politicians and commanders commit forces to what might have appeared to be the sideshow of a sideshow, when everyone was worried about ‘imperial overstretch’? Why not leave it to the Chinese nationalists with American assistance, as happened in Hanoi and the northern region?

War brutally exposed the limitations of empire, but to the imperially minded it also offered tantalizing glimpses of further expansion. Up in the heights of Simla in 1943, Dorman-Smith had been in correspondence with Leo Amery, secretary of state for India, and the foreign secretary Anthony Eden about not only the recapture of Burma but also the establishment of a new British protectorate in Thailand. In 1945 most British politicians saw no reason to doubt that Burma, Malaya and Hong Kong would remain theirs. For empire to be re-established,
however, it was imperative to set it amid friendly powers, and in Asia in the mid 1940s this meant imperial powers. Certainly, this was what Winston Churchill believed. Quite apart from this, the prime minister felt obligated to the Free French and Dutch regimes that had been his strong allies during the war and which showed no sign of wishing to give up their colonial territories in Indo-China and Indonesia. Churchill had several spats with Franklin D. Roosevelt about this in 1943 and 1944. The US president, brought up on British and Dutch history, heartily detested French imperialism and was keen to install a United Nations protectorate in Indo-China after the war. Then, at a stroke, the political scene was unexpectedly transformed. FDR died and his successor, Harry S. Truman, seemed prepared to give the British their head in southern Indo-China and Indonesia, provided that Chiang Kai Shek and the Chinese nationalists, now close allies of the USA, were allowed a controlling influence in the north. Shortly afterwards Labour came to power in Britain, ostensibly committed to policies of colonial independence. On the ground Mountbatten had established good relations with Indian and Burmese nationalists.

It could not be assumed, therefore, that the British would take the line that they did. This was effectively to restore the French and Dutch empires in Indo-China and Indonesia at the very time that they were coming to realize the limitations of their own tenure in India and Burma. In Indo-China in particular the consequences were momentous. In 1970, at the height of the American war in Vietnam, George Rosie, a radical journalist, wrote
The British in Vietnam:how the twenty-five year war began
. Rosie built up a formidable case against General Douglas Gracey, commander of the 20th Indian Division, which intervened in Indo-China in September 1945 on the orders of South East Asia Command. Gracey, the book argued, had greatly exceeded his orders. While claiming that he would not intervene in the politics of Indo-China, Gracey purposely allowed the French to rearm and stage a coup against the communist-led Viet Minh national front government in Saigon on 23 September 1945. He then used the Indian Army and surrendered Japanese forces to suppress a legitimate nationalist rebellion. Rosie concluded that the British ‘as a nation, bear some measure of responsibility for the tragedy of Vietnam’.
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Now that official and private papers are open, it is possible to consider
anew many of Rosie’s assumptions and also to show how the beginning of the brutal war in Indo-China impacted on Britain’s policies in Southeast Asia more broadly.

Indo-China had been conquered piecemeal by the French after 1850. In the deltas of the Mekong to the south and the Red River to the north, their rule was direct and intrusive, even though they maintained the fiction of Vietnamese sovereignty in the form of a client emperor, based at the old royal city of Hue. By the 1930s French land companies owned much of Cochin China (southern Vietnam) and Vietnamese labour was exploited on rubber and coffee estates across the country. In the hills and forests away from the river valleys, in Laos and Cambodia, the French allowed more authority to native rulers. The Depression had a devastating effect on the Indo-Chinese countryside. Hardship fuelled peasant risings. The French had suppressed mainstream Vietnamese nationalism. Inevitably, clandestine communist movements filled the vacuum. French forces carried out savage punitive campaigns during the 1930s. But the shadowy communist leadership, headed by Nguyen Ai Quoc, ‘Nguyen the patriot’, alias Ho Chi Minh, slipped to and fro across the Chinese border and infiltrated the homelands of the Moi, the tribal peoples of the northern hills.

When the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia in 1941–2, they preserved the rule of their French Vichy ally while clamping down hard on any sign of restiveness among the large French expatriate populations of Hanoi and Saigon, which numbered nearly 100,000. But the French settlers offered relatively little resistance; it was the Vietnamese who really suffered. There was the usual face-slapping and brutality on the part of the Japanese. As the Japanese lost control of the air, Allied bombing made impassable the difficult roads which brought rice from the south through the central hills to the food-deficient tracts of the north. In 1943 and 1944 scarcity degenerated into full-scale famine. Tens of thousands died of starvation; today older people still remember pushing the dead bodies of victims away from their doors each morning. The Vichy regime nevertheless gave the Indo-Chinese peoples a new sense of identity as they attempted to counter Allied propaganda, while the Japanese stimulated national feeling across Vietnam in the same way they had done in Burma and Malaya. The
French language was discouraged while Buddhist and Confucian rites flourished. Vietnamese youth was mobilized through the Buddhist Vanguard movement and martial arts associations.
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As long as pro-Axis Vichy rule lasted in France the French in Saigon and Hanoi had offered little opposition to the Japanese. Even after the fall of Paris to the Allies in 1944, local French administrators collaborated fully with the Japanese, helping to put down local Chinese and communist revolts and tracking Allied special forces. Paul Mus, a French special forces operative and sociologist who had been brought up in Indo-China, prepared a report for the Free French authorities in Calcutta in March 1945. In it he deplored the lack of effective ‘resistance’ among the French expatriate community. But as Burma fell to the 14th Army, the settlers and the local French forces began finally to refuse Japanese orders and make secret contacts with the special forces. At this stage, the Japanese were still expecting to hold their perimeter in southern Indo-China, Tenasserim and Malaya. They were in no mood to compromise and on 9 March 1945 they reacted with ruthless efficiency, ousting and imprisoning the former Vichy regime overnight and clamping much tighter controls on the hitherto largely untouched French settler lifestyle.

There were 60–70,000 Japanese soldiers in southern Vietnam and another 30,000-odd north of the 16th parallel. It was impossible for them to control this large and complex domain without Vietnamese help. Very late in the day, therefore, they instituted the sort of local government that had existed in Burma since 1943, installing in Hanoi a regime of moderates under Tran Trong Kim, some of whom were secretly sympathetic to the Viet Minh. Indo-Chinese members of the former French armed forces signed up with the new state. In Saigon, capital of the southern province, huge parades were held at which the motley collection of local political parties and religious groups handed out leaflets asking civilians to show their gratitude to the Japanese. A large placard proclaiming ‘Vietnam’ was erected outside the city’s cathedral. At first the new regime, though nationalist, was technically responsible to the Bao Dai emperor in Hue, the old client ruler of the French. But its writ did not run very far. In the countryside, armed bands of communists and followers of local religious sects ruled the roost along with bandit gangs.

Before the Japanese surrendered in August, their last political act was to recognize a more radical government in Hanoi led by Ho Chi Minh. The incoming Chinese forces of Chiang Kai Shek also preferred a friendly independent Vietnamese government to the re-establishment of colonial rule. From the balcony of Hanoi’s baroque opera house, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of the Viet Minh nationalist coalition. He mixed the language of the American Declaration of Independence with violent invective against the French: ‘They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood… To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.’
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For nearly nine months the new regime was to act as a sovereign power, organizing elections, redistributing land to peasants and trying to combat the dreadful poverty that followed the famines. The ruling groups that emerged in distant Saigon were formally subordinate to the new regime in Hanoi. The two major leaders in the south were the communists Tran Van Giau and Dr Pham Ngoc Thach, the heads of the shaky local Viet Minh coalition which jostled for power with other armed popular groupings.