The war in Asia: history that dare not speak its name
The end of the war in Asia 80 years ago is currently being commemorated with suitable reverence on the BBC, including a long Thought for the Day sermon by the King. But the coverage omits any mention of the 2.5 million soldiers in the British Army from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Bangladesh — all nation states that did not exist in 1945. Their officers may have been white men sent out to defend the empire, but the bulk of the fighting and dying was done by brown men.
They were fighting across Asia not just to defeat Japan, but to win freedom for their own peoples and nations. Japan, in the same grip of nationalism as Germany in the 1930s, had already invaded and occupied Korea, Taiwan and much of mainland China. But there they met the determined opposition of the communist People’s Liberation Army, led by Mao Zedong from 1935, as well as the nationalist Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek.
It was a taboo subject in English wartime literature, but Japan’s walkover conquest of European imperial colonies in Asia – Malaya, Burma, Singapore, the Dutch and Portuguese East Indies (now Indonesia), Vietnam – ended European imperialism almost overnight.
The dominant white European powers who founded the United Nations, along with the United States (who fought the second world war with its race-based segregated army), had succeeded in defeating Nazi Germany. Hitler’s nationalist colonial projects were based on creating a German network of settlements in Eastern Europe, until they met effective resistance from Stalin and the Red Army .
But Paris, London, the Hague, or Lisbon were not interested in giving their own non-white colonial subjects freedom or democracy. Russia of course decided to become a new form of an imperial colonial power in Central and East Europe, the Caucasus and the Balkans.
London was in a tricky position, as Indian soldiers had fought in the desert and on into Italy to defeat German and Italian extreme right nationalism. Moreover the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, had supported Indian demands for self-government, in opposition to Winston Churchill in the inter-war years. The defeated wartime leader devoted all his political energy and skills to insisting that Britain should remain an imperial, colonial power, especially denying self-government to brown-skinned Asians on the Indian sub-continent.
Thankfully Attlee’s vision of a post-war India won out. Though in handing over the task of making it work to a dilettante royalist, Louis Mountbatten, Britain allowed India to occupy Kashmir, which is as much India as Scotland is English. In an early act the UN mandated a referendum for the people, almost all Muslims, who lived in Kashmir to decide if they would belong to Muslim Pakistan or Hindu dominated India.
The new Indian prime minister Nehru, who enjoyed spending the sweltering summer in the cool hills and lakes of Kashmir, rejected the UN’s decision. He kept Indian Hindu occupation of and control over Kashmir, creating a dispute that has led to endless deaths and political violence ever since.
Labour Britain after 1945 at least did the decent thing after the Japanese army exposed the weak paper tiger nature of white European imperial rule in Asia. There was no return to the Churchill pre-1939 policy of maintaining British rule in India. But at the same time Labour, followed by the Tories after 1951, were shipping out white settlers to Malaya and then soldiers to kill the Malayans fighting for independence which was not finally granted until 1957, a decade after the Indian sub-continent nations became self-governing.
France came back to take possession of its colony Vietnam and used Japanese occupation troops to attack the Vietnamese calling for freedom from rule by les hommes blancsof France. France suffered as big a defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 as they had at the hands of the German nationalist army in 1940. But then the United States decided that Vietnamese independence might be a win for the leftists there and a war continued until 1975.
The white Dutch colonialist tried to stop the inevitable by fighting against Indonesian nationalists until 1949. Then Dutch common sense kicked in and The Hague accepted that the de-colonial revolution initiated by the Japanese military in 1941 was unstoppable.
The Japanese under US military occupation from 1945 pulled out of Korea, Taiwan and China and devoted their genius to turning their nation into a global economic anti-war superpower, a lesson that Vladimir Putin might learn from.
Today’s commemoration has understandably focused on the sacrifice of British soldiers as the last survivors of the war to reach the end of the road. Perhaps soon we can have an honest history of white imperial rule of Asia before we are made to learn it from the rising super-power of China? Sam Dalrymple has made a start with his new book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (reviewed hereby Sang-Hwa Lee).
Denis MacShane was Foreign Office Minister for East Asia and Australia in the government of Tony Blair.
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