All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [261]
Britain’s Asian empire manifested the most conspicuously divided allegiances. In 1939, nationalists in Malaya staged anti-war demonstrations, harshly suppressed by the local colonial authorities. An Indian member of the Malay civil service said that, ‘Although his reason utterly rebelled against it, his sympathies instinctively ranged themselves with the Japanese in their fight against the Anglo-Saxons.’ Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: ‘It [is] obvious that the average man in India is so full of bitterness against the British that he would welcome any attack on them.’ Some of his compatriots rejoiced in the spectacle of fellow Asians routing white armies and navies. ‘We couldn’t helping gloating at the beating the British were getting at the hands of the Germans,’ said Dr Kashmi Swaminadhan. ‘This, in spite of our being anti-Hitler.’ Lady Diana Cooper wrote before the deluge in 1942: ‘I could see no particular reason why the 85 per cent Chinese and 15 per cent Indian and Malayan citizens of Singapore should fight, as Cockneys do, against people of their own shade, and for the dear good English.’ Indeed, few did so.
In Malaya and Burma, the new rulers were able to enlist the services of many local people and some Indians who felt no loyalty to the expelled British. But against these should be cited the example of such a man as Indian schoolteacher P.G. Mahindasa, teacher of the English school in Malacca settlement. He wrote before his execution by the Japanese for listening on his radio to the BBC: ‘I have always cherished British sportsmanship, justice and the civil service as the finest things in an imperfect world. I die gladly for freedom. My enemies fail to conquer my soul. I forgive them for what they did to my frail body. To my dear boys, tell them that their teacher died with a smile on his lips.’ In Malaya, Chinese communist Chin Peng, who later became leader of the violent anti-British independence movement, remarked the irony that he received an OBE from a grateful British government for promoting terrorism and murdering Malays who collaborated with the Japanese.
Many people in Burma, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, together with more than a few in the Philippines, at first welcomed the invading Japanese as liberators. Even ardent foes of European imperialism were soon disillusioned, however, by the arrogance and institutionalised brutality of their new masters. Examples are legion: far more local people died as slaves on the notorious Burma Railway than did Allied prisoners. Of almost 80,000 Malays sent to work there, nearly 30,000 perished, alongside 14,000 whites; the rail link also cost the lives of 100,000 Burmese, Indians and Chinese. When cholera broke out at Nieke on the Burma–Thailand border, infecting large numbers of Tamils performing forced labour on the railway, the Japanese set fire to a barracks housing 150 stricken patients. Elsewhere, any man or woman who displeased the occupiers was treated with systemic sadistic cruelty. Sybil Kathigasu, Catholic wife of a Perak planter, was tortured in Taiping jail, while her daughter was hung from a tree over a fire. She shamed them into freeing the child, but herself emerged from the ordeal crippled for life.
A minimum of five million people in South-East Asia died in the course of the war, many of them in the Dutch East Indies, either at Japanese hands or as a result of starvation imposed by Tokyo’s diversion of food and crops to feed its own people. The price of rice soared, while harvests fell by one-third; tapioca was exploited as a substitute.