Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [128]
In August 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sailed across the Atlantic on the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales for a secret rendezvous in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, with American warships carrying President Roosevelt. The United States had yet to enter the Second World War and it would have stuck in the throat of any properly conscientious American to form an alliance to protect the British Empire: the country owed its very existence to rejecting it.Yet Churchill and Roosevelt managed to agree a statement, an Atlantic Charter, which laid out eight war aims. The very first of these stated that neither country was seeking any territorial gain from the conflict. The veteran of the battle of Omdurman may not have had his fingers crossed when he agreed this. But he certainly had anxieties about the third principle to which the men signed up, which claimed that the two governments ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’. As various colonial officials around the world now quickly told him, you could hardly get a more unequivocal rejection of the principle of empire. Churchill later blithely told the House of Commons that what he’d had in mind was merely self-determination for the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe. ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister’, as he famously declared on a later occasion, ‘to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ Perhaps so. But the fact remained that one of the country’s greatest enthusiasts for empire had put his signature to a war aim which undercut its very existence.
Then came the greatest imperial calamity of the war. Until Stamford Raffles saw its potential in the early nineteenth century, Singapore had been just another pestilential Asian island, all swamp and discomfort. By banning slavery, promoting education, declaring equality before the law and asserting freedom of trade Raffles transformed the place.* Singapore flourished and the population boomed. A statue of a thoughtful-looking Raffles, arms folded, gazing down on the astonishing success of his creation, was standing outside the Victoria Memorial Hall in the heart of Singapore when, in February 1942, Japanese soldiers inflicted on the British Empire its greatest humiliation of the twentieth century. The hall itself was already serving as a temporary hospital to treat the casualties of Japanese bombing raids. Yet until the last possible moment the European community in Singapore had continued the routines of expat ease, in the misguided conviction that they were protected by the vast amounts of money Britain had invested turning the island into what was claimed to be ‘the Gibraltar of the East’. Twenty-one square miles of dockyards, barracks, warehouses and fuel stores were shielded from attack by an array of heavy guns. Manning this garrison, as The Times had described them, were ‘sturdy British infantrymen, Scottish Highlanders, bronzed young giants from Australia, tall, bearded Sikhs, Moslem riflemen fresh from service on the North-West Frontier, tough little Gurkhas, Malays from the Malay Regiment … the core of British strength in the Far East’.
But, as every student of military history knows, the crisis-planners had made the critical mistake of assuming that any attack on the island would come from the sea – the artillery had been equipped with armour-piercing shells and sited to fire at any approaching