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By Root 4550 0

blaming Ho Chi Minh for the violence. By 1955 Lansdale was certainly working hard to put in place a third force to take over from the French as a bulwark against the communists. In that year he helped organize a coup which placed the city of Saigon in the hands of the future dictator of South Vietnam, Ngo Din Diem. This final act of the unending war, the American struggle with North Vietnam, would run its bloody course to 1975. Meanwhile General Douglas Gracey, who had reinstalled the French in Saigon in 1945 and managed another post-colonial armed struggle between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, retired from his post as commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s army.

FLAWED MEMORIES

At the height of the crescent’s forgotten wars, few had the time or the inclination to ponder the tidal wave of war and change that had swept over them since 1941. By 1955, the tenth anniversary of the formal end of the Second World War, the mood was changing. This was a year when the rhetoric of the Bandung Conference – of development, non-alignment and peace – concealed both the onrush of aggressive nationalism and the slow expansion of the crescent’s new capitalism. Yet it was also the year of memory, when people began to take stock of events in that terrible year a decade before: the year of the atom bomb, the fierce campaign of the 14th Army, the death of Subhas Chandra Bose and Aung San’s revolt against the Japanese. A whole series of commemorative ceremonies were held. In Rangoon and Mandalay, people celebrated Independence Day, Aung San’s birthday and Union Day with particular fervour that year. Ominously, people noted that the highlight of that year’s Independence Day festivities was the ‘participation of a larger number of armed forces personnel in the march past before the President of the Union’.56 As yet ‘Army Day’, the celebration of that momentous event in April 1945 when Aung San had led his Burma Defence Army into the jungle to fight the Japanese, had not assumed the significance in the calendar of Independence Day. As the Burmese army became increasingly autonomous and powerful, the meaning of this festival became a source of debate and controversy. Ceremonies to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of the war were more muted in India. But Subhas Chandra Bose’s birthday saw celebrations across the subcontinent, particularly in Calcutta. The veterans of the Indian National Army, still uncertain of their status in independent India, drilled and marched with particular pride. The simplest ceremony of all was held on 6 August 1955 at 8 a.m. in the city of Hiroshima. At the exact moment the bomb had fallen ten years before, the mayor of the city, himself a survivor, released 500 doves into the air and inaugurated a new peace centre.57 The press across the world reflected on the folly of nuclear war while peace campaigners denounced the great powers in speeches and newspaper articles. Sir William Slim, now Governor General of Australia, interpreted the world scene in another way. Ten years on from the end of the war, he observed, an authoritarian power once again overshadowed Asia. He was referring, of course, to China.

The most poignant acts of commemoration related to the physical remains of the fallen. Parties of former soldiers still moved across former battlefields seeking and memorializing their lost comrades. For the armies of Britain’s former empire, the task was organized by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Monuments were built at Imphal, Kohima and other major battle sites, but individual graves were also identified and tended in remote and isolated countryside. The task required tact and diplomacy. Disputes arose between the British, Australians, Canadians and Americans. Indian soldiers’ groups debated the appropriateness of forms of burial or cremation, depending on the assumed religion of the fallen. The Japanese, still regarded with cold indifference by their conquerors, had been allowed to build a monument to their dead at Rangoon racecourse only very late in 1947. But slowly thereafter, as the country was rehabilitated