All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [410]
For the most part, the conquerors and the conquered shared an overpowering relief that history’s greatest bloodletting was ended. Aboard the US carrier Princeton in the Pacific, chief ship’s clerk Cecil King exulted to have ‘seen it come out this way … just like Hollywood when the Marines come up over the horizon in the last reel’. The historian of a USAAF bomb group on Saipan wrote vividly, if ungrammatically: ‘The ending of the war was the greatest morale factor that has befell this group since its activation.’ But while there were displays of rejoicing in the Allied capitals, and in the homes of families promised the return of loved ones, many people found it impossible to shake off the melancholy induced by years of suffering, fear and bereavement. After the liberation of Bucharest, Mihail Sebastian wrote: ‘I am ashamed to be sad. After all, this is the year that gave me back my freedom.’
But what was ‘freedom’? A year before the Japanese surrender, the Australian minister to China warned the Advisory War Council in Canberra about widespread hostility to the restoration of white colonial rule in Asia – ‘It would be an error to suppose that we would be welcomed by the native populations when we return’ – and he was proved right. Malayan nationalist Mustapha Hussein said: ‘I cried when I heard that the Japanese had surrendered … simply because there were only forty-eight hours separating us from the declaration of independence for Malaya. This was indeed a tragic case of “So near yet so far.” I regretted the matter deeply as Malaya would once again be colonised and gripped by Western Power. Even tears of blood could not rectify the situation.’
Serious conflicts erupted in several countries where nationalists resisted the restoration of European hegemony, notably French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Lord Louis Mountbatten, Allied Supreme Commander in South-East Asia, urged returning colonial officials to concede sufficient local autonomy to avert conflict. Both the Dutch and the French declined to do this, however; instead, they plunged into long, doomed counter-insurgency campaigns. In Banya Bini 10 internment camp on Java, the Japanese did not inform the emaciated and diseased Dutch inmates of the war’s ending until 24 August. When prisoners ventured out, they found themselves threatened and sometimes fired upon by Indonesian nationalists, bent upon resisting the restoration of colonial rule. Only in September did Gurkha soldiers arrive, and another two months elapsed before the Dutch were able to leave their hated place of confinement for a voyage to Holland. A thousand Japanese soldiers on Java deserted to join local communities; many of them afterwards aided nationalist guerrillas. In China, American aircraft flew Nationalist troops and some US Marines into Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing in a successful bid to forestall a communist takeover, but civil war soon engulfed the country, from which Mao Zhedong eventually emerged victorious.
British officials returning to Burma were appalled to find destitution: public services and transport had collapsed, many people were starving and traumatised by their experiences. In Rangoon, civil servant T.L. Hughes found ‘old friends so changed as to be unrecognisable; many were emaciated and shrunken; many were white-haired prematurely and many continued to cast an anxious eye over their shoulder on the look-out for the Japanese Gestapo’. British onlookers at the Burmese capital’s victory parade watched uneasily as Aung San’s nationalist troops goosestepped down the central avenue in Japanese-style uniforms. It was plain to all but the most stubborn imperialists that the clock could not be set back to 1941, that the British must soon leave for good, just as they would also have to quit