Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [14]
The great crescent was to be forged anew. The instrument for this was South East Asia Command (SEAC), and the tribune of the new imperial vision was its supremo, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the British king-emperor, George VI. Created in 1943, Mountbatten’s new command was the first expression of ‘Southeast Asia’ as a distinct geopolitical entity. It was a partner to the Pacific vision behind General MacArthur’s South West Pacific Command, but there was little love lost between the two unequal allies. To Americans, Southeast Asia was an ‘unnecessary front’.23 To wits, SEAC stood for ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’. There was much truth in this: ‘Here,’ Winston Churchill thundered in September 1944, ‘is the Supreme British objective in the whole of the Indian Ocean and Far Eastern Theatre’. But the resources necessary to achieve it were a long time coming. In the interim Mountbatten, unable to wage war directly, encouraged others to do so on his behalf, using covert methods for which he exhibited a puckish enthusiasm. No fewer than twelve clandestine or semi-clandestine organizations operated in the theatre. Not for nothing was SEAC also known as ‘Supreme Example of Allied Confusion’.24 Only after the fall of Germany were the materials of conventional war released for Southeast Asia, and it was not until August 1945 that Mountbatten was in a position to take the war back to the Japanese through a series of massive amphibious landings on the coast of Malaya. However, the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki denied him the opportunity to restore Britain’s martial pride in the region. The main task of South East Asia Command was to begin only after the surrender of Japan. But there were new tasks at hand: at the final hour, in addition to the Asian mainland, Mount-batten was given responsibility for the vast Indonesian archipelago. This marked the beginning of a final era of British imperial conquest.
The pre-Hiroshima war plan had required a massive build-up of men and materiel in India at Bombay, Cochin, Vizagapatnam and Madras. Mountbatten’s personal staff at Kandy in Ceylon numbered over 7,000. The war plan – Operation Zipper – demanded the landing in Malaya of 182,000 men, 17,750 vehicles, 2,250 animals and 225,000 tons of stores, and half the men had to be disembarked in the first eight days. It was 1,050 miles from Rangoon to the nearest airbase in Malaya. Even after VE Day, the reconquest been delayed owing to a shortage of shipping, repatriation of personnel and uncertainty of conditions of the ground. This had allowed the Japanese, who were well apprised of Allied intentions, to pour more troops into Malaya. The received wisdom of amphibious warfare was that, for landings to be successful, a superiority in numbers of three to one was needed; in August 1945 Mountbatten had an advantage of only eight to five, and a high proportion of his men had yet to experience combat. Mountbatten returned from a visit to London on 14 August to learn that, following Emperor Hirohito’s formal capitulation, the operation was to be launched immediately. And it was still not clear whether or not the Japanese would obey their emperor’s order to surrender.25
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1945: Interregnum
THE NEW ASIA
The great force that now embarked on reconquering British Asia saw itself as the new ‘forgotten army’. British India provided the bulk of its manpower. The subcontinent was seething with discontent, directed and channelled by the Indian National Congress whose leaders the British had reluctantly released from jail as the war drew to its close. Official monitors reported that local people were relieved that the fighting had ended but were too exhausted and apprehensive about the future to indulge in anything more than perfunctory celebration. Indians,