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also haunted by what they had seen in Southeast Asia. The author of the Harp of Burma, a bestselling novel in post-war Japan, was a former soldier who drew on his wartime experiences to tell of a disillusioned man whose battered faith in the search for enlightenment is reinvigorated by the earnest folk Buddhism of Burma. His hero becomes a wanderer, a kind of forest monk, typical of the region, moving from village to village playing his Burmese harp and telling fables.

Other vivid fictional recreations of the Second World War sparked controversy. In 1954 the first English translation appeared of Pierre Boulle’s novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï. The French author, himself a former prisoner of the Japanese, depicted a group of British POWs being forced to build a bridge on the Burma–Siam railway. The fictional senior British officer, Colonel Nicholson, after a protracted and painful battle with his Japanese jailer about officers’ honour and dignity, becomes obsessed with the creation and perfection of the bridge, at the same time as British special forces are doing all they can to destroy it. At first sight it seemed an odd thing for a Frenchman to write a novel about the hidebound British military mentality, although his story undoubtedly served as a good illustration of the futility of war. But Boulle had worked on rubber plantations in Malaya before and after the war and had had ample opportunity to observe the waning British Empire at close hand. Or perhaps his novel represented a kind of transposition of his views on the glorious folly of de Lattre de Tassigny and the defenders of Dien Bien Phu to the British, whose decolonization in the region had been generally more circumspect and less bloody. In 1957, just after Britain and France’s occupation of the Suez Canal, the controversy about the book was revived by David Lean’s film version. The British public had long been sensitive about cinematographic portrayals of the Burma war and its aftermath. In 1945 a Warner Brothers’ film, Objective Burma!, which depicted Errol Flynn as an American paratrooper recapturing Burma without the benefit of a single British ally, had caused such offence in the United Kingdom that it was withdrawn from release until 1952. Now, the American financiers of the Lean film insisted on inserting a brave American individualist into a story carefully crafted by Boulle to juxtapose the honourable but purblind orthodoxy of ‘Colonel Nicholson’ with the unorthodox but ultimately futile heroics of ‘Major Warden’, the ‘Force 316’ agent. This was only a few years after the American General Joseph Stilwell’s dismissive and foul-mouthed reflections on the British war effort were made public and Lean’s film was given a very mixed reception in Britain. In retrospect, though, it was simply another marker on the road that transformed Britain from an imperial nation at war into a consumer society increasingly suspicious of class, deference and moral homilies.

It was not only the British who were stirred up by dramatic recreations of the Second World War. In 1955, the Hollywood film The Purple Plain reached Burma. It starred Gregory Peck and a young Burmese actress, Win Min Than, and told the story of a Canadian special operations executive soldier lost in the fastnesses of Burma during the latter stages of the war. Many Burmese were unimpressed. For one thing it had been shot in Ceylon (as had Lean’s film). But what they really objected to was its cultural crassness. One scene showed people wearing shoes in a pagoda; another showed a Burmese boy killing a lizard. This, it was said, was ‘a gross slander on the character of Burmese children’.62 Worst of all, the Peck character was seen sleeping beside the Burmese maiden, ‘without being married’. This ‘suggested that Burmese women were immoral’. Government censors debated whether to ban the film, but in the end it was released so that Burmese people could criticize it in full knowledge of its contents. The horrors and compromises of the Second World War were still fresh in the minds of both Asians and Europeans.