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detainees for all they were worth. Ironically, Britain’s real saviour in these dark days of the eastern empire was the Japanese army. ‘They have been carrying out their “defeat drill”’, Esler Dening told Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, ‘with the discipline and determination which characterised their aggression.’141 Deprived of British and Indian troops, the British authorities used Japanese POWs to put down Indonesian and Vietnamese insurgents, police a restive Burma and build a real Fortress Singapore.

Though Attlee was beginning to tire of Wavell’s pessimism, it was to be several months before he confirmed the rumours of Mountbatten’s ‘monumental appointment in the East’.142 Mountbatten and Malcolm MacDonald had similar views about the future of empire, although they approached the issue from a different social perspective. Mount-batten was a high aristocrat with a popular touch, a military man who could deal with nationalists, who saw himself as a kind of latter-day Lord Durham, turning the old empire into a commonwealth of free nations. MacDonald, a member of the Scottish socialist elite who tended towards liberal Toryism, had a similar vision, but none of the military or royal charisma of Mountbatten. While Mountbatten delighted in state pageantry, MacDonald opted for the more intellectually respectable ceremonial of university degree days. He much preferred attending meetings in an open-necked shirt and was famously denounced by the colonial press in Singapore for not possessing a tailcoat or dinner jacket. Mountbatten seems to have got on with Indian leaders precisely because he was a royal, but formed few intimacies. MacDonald reportedly had a string of Chinese and Eurasian girlfriends and adopted a Dayak family in Borneo. When the Sultan of Johore loaned him what his frequent guest, the Eurasian writer Han Suyin, called the ‘Walt Disney fantasy castle’ at Bukit Serene, MacDonald had some Dyak friends to stay. The sultan was incensed: ‘Why’, he expostulated, ‘should I have his damned Dyaks with their backsides in my chairs and in my bed?’ He cut off the water supply to the swimming pool.143 Yet MacDonald did not find India’s intense and intellectual politicians entirely to his taste. Like Mountbatten, who had accompanied the Prince of Wales on his unhappy tour of India in 1921–2, MacDonald had had an earlier introduction to Indian politics. He had acted as a go-between for his father with Gandhi when the latter had visited London for the second Round Table Conference in 1931. MacDonald found the Mahatma to be both charming and perplexing but remembered particularly his strangely shaped set of false teeth.144 MacDonald’s own rather prominent teeth left much to be desired, but, like the handsome Mountbatten, he nevertheless delighted in the company of stage and screen celebrities. He was to remain in the region in high office for eight years. He oversaw, though never directly managed, the exit of Burma from the Commonwealth and the Malayan Emergency. He underestimated the strength of communism in Indo-China, but helped to lay the foundations of the economic rise of Singapore and Malaya. The British Empire had entered a new and final phase.

6

1946: One Empire Unravels, Another Is Born

For one last time events in India changed the situation in Burma and sent shock waves speeding towards Malaya. Following the Congress’s great victories in the March 1946 elections, it had become obvious to Wavell and Auchinleck that the Indian Army could not be used to put down a revolt in Burma. This conclusion had already been forcibly impressed on Dorman-Smith. Now, as the impasse in Indian politics deepened, it also became clear that the British withdrawal from the country would be faster than anyone could possibly have predicted. The political outcome of the elections in the Punjab in the spring had left the Muslim League deeply embittered, although it had done rather well in several other provinces, notably through its proxies in Bengal. Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade, A. V. Alexander, First