The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (85 page)

Hurley and other American anti-imperialists set the greatest store by the Atlantic Charter. It was an idealistic statement of Anglo-American war objectives, which had been agreed between Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941. For many, perhaps the majority, of those who read it, the Atlantic Charter was a blueprint for a new and just world order. Taken literally, it appeared to undermine the moral base for all empires. The President and the Prime Minister had pledged themselves to uphold ‘the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.’

Churchill disliked this phraseology which, taken at face value, challenged Britain’s right to rule her colonies. On reflection, he satisfied himself that in the case of those colonies in Japanese hands the ‘sovereign rights’ concerned were those of Britain and not the indigenous inhabitants. Churchill also conveniently assumed that the rest of the colonial empire was exempt from the Atlantic Charter. His deputy, the Labour leader Clement Attlee, thought otherwise and, like many within Britain and the empire, believed the Charter had universal application. The Colonial Office adopted a grudging, middle-of-the-road position, indicating that in the ‘far distant future’ some colonies might achieve dominion status. Others never would; strategic considerations demanded that Britain held on perpetually to Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and Aden, and for various other reasons could not relinquish control over the Gambia, Borneo, Malaya, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Fiji, the Falkland Islands and British Honduras (Belize).
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Those responsible for war propaganda in the colonies were instructed to stay as mute as possible about the Charter and its implications.
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One way to sidestep the moral dilemma created by the Atlantic Charter was to persuade the Americans that the empire’s subjects were not downtrodden and exploited. From 1941 onwards, the government went to considerable lengths to educate American politicians and opinion-makers, a process which continued for the next twenty years. The message was always the same: British colonial government was unselfish, humane, just and always conducted in the best interests of people who would be lost without it. The star wartime apologist was Lord Hailey, a former administrator in India with a deep understanding of African affairs, who embodied everything that was good and honourable in a colonial mandarin. After hearing this Olympian figure expound the virtues of British rule to a group of American intellectuals, a Colonial Office official sourly commented, ‘What a stupid tragedy it would be to take the management of great affairs from men like Hailey and give them to the boys with thick-lensed glasses, long hair, and longer words nasally intoned.’
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Behind these remarks lay a half-hidden welter of anti-American prejudices. Proud of their own rectitude, the British, then and later, were sensitive to moral criticism from Americans. Pre-war hostility towards America and its people had been restricted to the upper and upper-middle classes, according to George Orwell. These feelings were, he believed, based upon distrust of the United States’s expanding commercial power and its peoples’ egalitarian outlook. By contrast, the working class had been entranced by American films and popular music and impressed by American living standards.
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As the war proceeded British attitudes fell into line, as the presence of large numbers of American servicemen made itself felt. They were commonly seen as ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’, although Orwell oddly blamed the new, resentful anti-Americanism on the fact that all United States personnel were middle class, and therefore unlikely to get on well with the British working class.

It was upper-class Englishmen who dealt with Americans at the highest levels, an experience that many found trying. John Maynard Keynes, who negotiated wartime financial deals, found the American accent discordant and called it ‘Cherokee’ English.
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Harold Macmillan’s patrician sensibilities were bruised by American manners, speech and verbosity. How Americans may have felt about him and his kind can be guessed from his revealing observation that traditional British snobbery disappeared overseas, and was replaced ‘by the bond of contempt for and antipathy to foreigners’.
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One persistent source of resentment was American allegations about the mistreatment of colonial races. The British were quick to counter-attack, launching their offensive in an area where America was vulnerable, domestic racism. The socialite commentator Nancy Cunard, appealing in 1942 for legislation to outlaw the colour bar, claimed that whereas the British displayed ‘unthinking prejudice’ towards blacks, Americans showed ‘rabid hatred’.
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A visit to Monroe, Georgia, where four negroes had been lynched in 1946, provoked the left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg to boast that such barbarism would never have occurred within the colonies or in Britain, where there was ‘no racial discrimination or practically none’.
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This was not entirely true; but segregation and lynchings in the South and race riots everywhere made American sermons about colonial oppression sound like humbug. This point was made obliquely by Gandhi in a personal message to Roosevelt in 1942, and was not well received.
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The roots and history of Anglo-American bickering have been exhaustively studied, and sometimes the results give the impression that relations between the Allies were an unending and unedifying dog fight. This was not so, thanks in large part to the characters of Churchill and Roosevelt. Not always smooth, their association rested on a warm personal friendship, mutual admiration and a remarkable degree of candour on both sides. A further strong bond was the common determination to beat Hitler, even though, during 1942 and 1943, American commanders suspected Britain of having cold feet when it came to getting to grips with the German army in Western Europe.

When it came to prosecuting the war, more percipient Americans detected two Britains, strangely at odds with each other. In April 1942, the columnist Walter Lippmann told Keynes that there existed in America ‘a strong feeling that Britain east of Suez is quite different from Britain at home, that the war in Europe is a war of liberation and the war in Asia is the defence of archaic privilege.’
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Up to a point, Lippmann was right, although when he was writing the ‘archaic privilege’ of the old colonial order was withering. It had been physically overturned in shameful circumstances when Singapore fell, and its ethical foundations were being eroded by public criticism in Britain and the United States.

British public opinion, as much as American anti-imperialism, made it impossible for the British government to put the clock back. Henceforward, the empire’s rulers knew that for the colonies to survive in the post-war world they would have to jettison the maxim ‘Nanny knows best’, and instead listen and respond to the aspirations of their subjects. The point was made by Lord Hailey in the
Spectator
on 17 March 1942, in which he discussed the difficulties of restoring imperial government in the Far East. Early in 1945 Lord Lugard, then in his eighty-eighth year, looked benignly on the new spirit abroad in the world. A new age was imminent and it would be Britain’s duty to extend to the colonies those fundamental freedoms for which the war was being fought. It was now the moment for the colonies to begin their apprenticeship for home rule.
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It says much about the shift in attitudes during the war that a veteran of Queen Victoria’s imperial campaigns and the architect of indirect rule should embrace ideas whose practical application was bound to bring about the dissolution of the colonial empire. And yet Lugard’s conversion is not altogether surprising, given the nature of the empire. It had undergone many changes during his lifetime, and if an imperial philosophy existed, it was that the empire was an evolving organism. By 1945, there was a consensus as to the direction the empire should take: the colonies would slowly be transformed into self-governing dominions, wherever such a change was viable. The Labour party had already pledged itself to Indian home rule, and promised the same to the colonies, with the caveat that they needed to remain under British control ‘for a long time to come’.
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The Labour minister Herbert Morrison put it more bluntly; premature independence for the colonies would be a folly equivalent to delivering ‘a latch key, a bank account and a shot-gun’ to a ten-year-old child.
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Imperial propaganda was adjusted to the new mood in Britain, taking on a defensive, sometimes apologetic air. ‘To many people nowadays the word “Empire” has a nasty sound. It reminds them of Nazi ideas of a master-race ruling others,’ ran an advisory pamphlet issued by the Directorate of Army Education in April 1944.
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Teaching soldiers about the empire and the vital part it would play in the post-war world had been one of the tasks of army instructors since the end of 1941.
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Classes were to be reminded that to be a part of the empire was to be ‘a member of a great powerful world-wide family instead of the citizen of a small, weak country’. At the same time, lecturers were encouraged to demolish the myth that most natives were ineducable, and extol their talents such as craftsmanship and a sense of rhythm. Colonial peoples were now partners with Britain, which safeguarded them against exploitation by ‘ruthless private enterprise’, and helped them towards prosperity and independence. The way forward was explained in a simple sketch which showed a matchstick figure of a native with a huge bundle on his head walking towards a grass hut, which contained two women and no furniture. Opposite was a bungalow with a bed and a chest of drawers, and outside the same native was cycling with his bundle on the back of his bike.
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Benevolent imperialism had come of age. Like Britain, the empire was moving into a new and better era in which the well-being of its subjects was of paramount importance. The empire had become very worthy, and was stripped of its old glamour. Nevertheless, it was essential that Britain presented its empire in a way which showed that there was a place for humane imperialism in the millenniumal world which, it was hoped, would emerge after the war.

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Not only did Britain have to convince the United States that its empire was a force for good, it had to secure American assistance for the defence of India and the recovery of its colonies in the Far East. Both were secondary war aims and far beyond Britain’s capabilities. Allied resources and strategy in the region were in the hands of South-East Asia Command (SEAC), set up in the summer of 1943, and quickly nicknamed ‘Save England’s Asiatic Colonies’ by cynical Americans. SEAC also had the task of reviving Britain’s almost moribund prestige in the area, and Churchill was anxious that it should have a British commander-in-chief.

His choice was eccentric and controversial. Vice-Admiral Louis Mountbatten was forty-three in 1943, had a fine fighting record, and had been promoted at a pace which would have raised eyebrows in the eighteenth century. He was the younger son of a German princeling who was, like most of his kind, a member of Queen Victoria’s distended family, and had made himself an impressive career in the Royal Navy. The son was vain, ambitious, and hard-working, although his attention to his duties never quite wiped out his reputation as a playboy. For Churchill, Mountbatten was the ideal figurehead for what was essentially an imperial campaign. Years before, Churchill had developed a deep admiration for T.E. Lawrence, whom he and many others regarded as a true hero of empire, perhaps the last. His death in 1935 had dismayed Churchill, who deeply regretted the loss of a talent which would have been invaluable in another war. Churchill was, therefore, always on the look-out for another Lawrence. He was captivated, but not for long, by Orde Wingate, who commanded behind-the-lines units (Chindits) in Burma.
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His choice finally fell on Mountbatten who, if he did not possess Lawrence’s intellect and imagination, had his gallantry, good looks, assiduity and flair for showmanship.

The United States government approved Mountbatten’s appointment, for he appeared less starchy and more ‘democratic’ than the run-of-the-mill British general or admiral.
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Older, more experienced men, who had been by-passed, were disgruntled, even though Mountbatten faced an uphill struggle in Asia, against not only the Japanese but the Americans. All SEAC’s offensive operations required American sanction. The situation was candidly summed up by General Sir Henry Pownall, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, in April 1944: ‘The Americans have got us by the short hairs … We can’t do anything in this theatre, amphibious or otherwise, without material assistance from them … So if they don’t approve they don’t provide.’
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It was the same in the Mediterranean in 1943–4, when the American high command was extremely reluctant to send landing craft and warplanes to the Italian front, which was considered of secondary importance to the Pacific.

In SEAC’s area, the United States set its highest hopes on Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist army, followers of a loftier cause than the restoration of British, French and Dutch colonies. Moreover, American post-war plans envisaged China as the major regional power in the Far East, and assumed that it would take on major peacekeeping responsibilities. Until his replacement in October 1944, Chiang’s chief of staff was the anglophobe, anti-imperialist Stilwell, who, while civil in public, was contemptuous of the British in private. Mountbatten was at various times reviled as ‘the Glamour Boy’, ‘an amateur’, ‘a fatuous ass’, ‘childish Louis, publicity crazy’ and a ‘pisspot’. His countrymen were ‘bastardly hypocrites [who] do their best to cut our throats on all occasions. The pig fuckers.’
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Stilwell’s expletives were a vivid reminder of American misgivings about Britain’s wartime goals. In the Far East these were contrary to Allied ideals; by no stretch of the imagination, and in spite of the brutality of Japanese rule, could the retaking of Burma and Malaya be depicted as liberation. Both were repossessed by their former owner, Britain.