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By Root 4424 0

railhead at Zahedan to New Guinea and the Australian seas. For a time, British armies and administrators occupied half of French Indo-China and large parts of Indonesia. The vision would have dizzied even Lord Curzon. Certainly, to India’s Congress, the British seemed alarmingly reluctant to surrender control over the Indian Army that had served them so well against the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. In 1945 South East Asia Command was apparently determined to deploy Indian troops not only in Burma, Malaya and Singapore, but also in Thailand and what had been French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia. If they got their way, Salisbury’s great barracks in an Oriental Sea would be spilling blood for the British Empire for years to come. Indian journalists scanned the speeches and press comments of British ministers for any signs of a change of heart. Why had the king’s broadcast to the nation, the first of Attlee’s administration, not mentioned Asia? One newspaper remarked: ‘Perhaps messages of freedom, democracy and lasting peace, liberal as they are, will have application to no wider an area than Europe.’1 Another gloomily and correctly concluded that ‘the war in the East will not come to an end with the defeat of Japan’.

Tired veterans of the war in Europe headed east in cramped troopships: a new forgotten army. A young captain, Derek van den Boegarde, had witnessed the long push from Normandy into Germany, and as the war in Europe ended he had witnessed the horror of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On 1 July, he departed from Liverpool on the SS Carthage, a new passenger liner, for the build-up of the liberation of Southeast Asia. It was a grotesque parody of the stately voyages that had connected Britain’s Asian empire before the war. Later he would recall his arrival at the Gateway of India, where his ship was greeted by waving men being demobilized back to Britain. Bombay seemed squalid: ‘The stench was heavy: oil, bodies, dirt; somewhere, faintly, spices.’ Then, immediately, came the long rail journey to Bengal. ‘The India I saw, from that terrible train, was sere, desolate. It was a fearful let-down… I had expected story-book splendour. Instead we trailed for days across stony, beige desert.’ He detrained at Calcutta to see an Indian porter being beaten by ‘a fat, ginger-haired, moustached, red-faced stocky little major from Transport. Screaming. Thrashing at the cringing Indian with his swagger cane… My first sight and sound of the Raj at work.’ Fifty years on, he wrote that the memory of ‘the cowering humbled body’ in the crowded Seddah station repulsed his mind even more than the desolation of the bleak heaths and pines of Germany. In Calcutta van den Bogaerde was put to work memorizing maps and photographs of the beaches and mangroves of the Malay peninsula.2 In the event the only action that occurred in his time in India came after a screening of the film Objective, Burma! when the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers returning from the Arakan front took umbrage at the sight of Errol Flynn liberating Burma single-handedly, and set fire to the cinema.3 Years later, Dirk Bogarde, as he styled himself after the war, would come under attack for his own portrayal of one of his commanding officers, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, in the film A Bridge too Far.

After celebrating VJ Day in Calcutta, chaotic with deserters, he left for Southeast Asia. Five weeks after the Japanese surrender he arrived in Singapore. The harbourside was still in ruins, and the city had the odour of defeat, which ‘meandered through the paint-peeling streets of Singapore like a slowly dispersing marsh gas, lying in pockets here and there, loitering in rooms and corridors, bitter, clinging, sickening’. Ex-prisoners of war still haunted the hotels and bars; internees told terrible stories of the chaos and incompetence of the fall. Yet colonial society was coming to life, with all its attendant snobberies. Van den Bogaerde noted that, as in 1941, the memsahibs of Singapore refused to speak to mere soldiers. The city