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on the road and they are very much afraid, and very enraged with us for causing the trouble.’ Who could blame such people? They knew they would face appalling reprisals, while the young foreign adventurers moved on to make mischief for the Axis elsewhere. Kemp acknowledged: ‘As time went on it became more and more obvious that we could offer the Albanians little inducement to take up arms compared with the advantages they could enjoy by remaining passive. I must confess that we British liaison officers were slow to understand their point of view; as a nation, we have always tended to assume that those who do not wholeheartedly support us in our wars have some sinister motive for not wishing to see the world a better place.’

The European overseas empires were riven by divisions which became more acute where colonies were subject to occupation. In Indochina, through a variety of complex anomalies the French flag continued to fly until March 1945; a Vichy regime led by Admiral Jean Decoux administered the country in accordance with the orders of a Japanese military mission. In September 1940, Japanese troops emphasised their absolute dominance by attacking two Tonkinese towns and killing eight hundred French troops before withdrawing into southern China. The confusion of local loyalties intensified when Vichy warships fought a series of actions against the neighbouring Siamese, who attempted to secure disputed border territory in Laos and Cambodia. The Japanese intervened to enforce a French retreat, to secure the interests of their Siamese clients. From July 1941 onwards, 35,000 Japanese troops acted as they chose in Indochina, which was incorporated in Japan’s so-called Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Vichy colons preserved shreds of personal freedom as long as they, like European acolytes of the Nazis, implemented the policies of their Axis masters. In March 1945, on orders from liberated Paris, French troops launched a disastrous uprising, quickly and brutally suppressed by the Japanese, who then assumed full control of the country.

The Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians suffered appallingly from 1942 onwards, as the Japanese pillaged their countries: elderly Vietnamese later said that their experiences were worse than those of their later wars of independence. Rice, corn, coal and rubber were shipped to Japan; many rice fields were compulsorily planted with jute and cotton to meet the occupiers’ textile requirements. Denied their own produce, local people began to starve on a staggering scale: in Tonkin, by 1945 at least 1.5 million Vietnamese, and perhaps many more, had died of hunger in a country which before the war was the world’s third-largest grower of rice. The French colonial authorities suppressed local protests and insurrections with a brutality the Japanese could not have surpassed.

The communist Vietminh movement was the chief political beneficiary of Vietnamese misery, gaining substantial support in northern areas where Tokyo’s policies caused most distress. There was no significant armed resistance to the Japanese until the summer of 1945, because the passionately anti-imperialist Americans refused to fly Free French officers into Vietnam from China. Only in the summer of that year did the OSS ship arms to the Vietminh, in a belated attempt to foment anti-Japanese activity. The weapons were warmly welcomed by their leader Nguyên Ai Quôc, better known as Ho Chi Minh. OSS officers on the ground displayed unreserved enthusiasm for his guerrillas, epic naïveté about their politics, and bitter animosity towards local French colonialists.

The Vietminh – by that time numbering about 5,000 active supporters – were happy to fight the French, but showed no interest in engaging the Japanese. They either stored their weapons in readiness for the post-war independence struggle, or brandished them to impose their will on the rural population. Under pressure from Washington, the OSS persuaded the guerrillas to make some show of engaging the occupiers; one group staged a noisy demonstration against a small