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By Root 1189 0

and Damascus. If these were caused by circumstances of war, the imperial power was parsimonious in apportioning resources to alleviate their consequences. While British rule reflected moderate rather than absolute authoritarianism, it scarcely sufficed to promote support – and especially Indian support – for retention of imperial hegemony. The only narrowly plausible defence of British wartime rule of India is that the country was so vast, with such potential for turbulence, that indulgence of domestic dissent would have threatened an irretrievable loss of control, to the advantage of the Axis. The common experience of battle forged some sense of battlefield comradeship between British and imperial soldiers white, brown and black alike. But the stress of war, rather than strengthening the bonds of empire as Britain’s jingoes liked to pretend, dramatically loosened them.

The leaders of the Grand Alliance depicted the war as a struggle for freedom against oppression, good against evil. In the twenty-first century, few informed people even in former colonial possessions doubt the merit of the Allied cause, the advantage that accrued to mankind from defeat of the Axis. But it seems essential to recognise that in many societies contemporary loyalties were confused and equivocal. Millions of people around the world who had no love for the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini or Hirohito felt little more enthusiasm for Allied powers whose vision of liberty vanished, it seemed to their colonial subjects, at their own front doors.

Asian Fronts

1 CHINA

As early as 1936, American correspondent Edgar Snow, a passionate admirer and friend of Mao Zhedong, wrote: ‘In her great effort to master the markets and inland wealth of China, Japan is destined to break her imperial neck. This catastrophe will occur not because of automatic economic collapse in Japan. It will come because the conditions of suzerainty which Japan must impose on China will prove humanly intolerable and will shortly provoke an effort of resistance that will astound the world.’ Snow was right about the outcome of Japanese imperialism, though not about the military effectiveness of Chinese resistance. Wartime Allied strategy in the Far East was powerfully influenced by America’s desire to make China not only a major belligerent, but a great power. Enormous resources were lavished upon flying supplies from India to Americans, notably airmen, supporting the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek ‘over the Hump’ of the Himalayas, after Japan’s conquest of Burma severed the land link in 1942, and the US built airfields in China from which to deploy its bombers.

All these efforts proved vain. China remained a chaotic, impoverished, deeply divided society. Chiang boasted an enormous paper army, but his regime and commanders were too corrupt and incompetent, his soldiers too scantily equipped and motivated, to make significant headway against the Japanese. Logistical and operational difficulties crippled USAAF missions out of China. In the north, in Yennan province, Mao Zhedong’s communists held sway, and professed antagonism to the Japanese. But Mao’s strategy was dominated by the desire to build his strength for a post-war showdown with Chiang. Between 1937 and 1942, both Nationalists and communists inflicted substantial casualties on the invaders – 181,647 dead. But thereafter they acknowledged their inability to challenge them in headlong confrontations which drained their thread-bare resources to little purpose. Chinese historian Zhijia Shen has written in a study of Shandong province: ‘Local people were much more influenced by pragmatic calculation than by the idea of nationalism … When national and local interests clashed, they did not hesitate to compromise national interests.’

Though Mao deluded some Americans into supposing that his guerrillas were making war effectively, for much of the conflict he maintained a tacit truce with the Japanese, and indeed became secret partners with them in the opium trade. While the Nationalists recorded 3.2 million military