Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [87]
This vast new deployment placed a colossal burden on South East Asia Command, which by the end of year had become, in the words of Mountbatten’s political adviser Esler Dening, ‘more and more a purely British Indian affair’.5 India had to find troops, not only for Burma, Malaya and Singapore, but also for Thailand and what had been French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia. The British were even readying to send detachments of the Indian Army to occupied Japan; this was the first and the last ‘British Commonwealth’ force of its kind. Some of the first forces to enter were the 536 British and Australian sailors and marines who landed in Tokyo Bay in MacArthur’s triumph. They were the advance guard of a Commonwealth contingent force that was to be 37,000 strong. These were war-weary men. The senior Indian officer, Brigadier Thimayya, had seen his brother – a staff officer in the INA – captured by his own brigade at Rangoon. For his Indian officers, the occupation was unlikely to lead to any career advancement. It was to be the last adventure of the Raj: the final Indian soldiers left Japan on 25 October 1947.
The Commonwealth troops were given an area that included Hiroshima. It was believed at the time that this was because the Americans did not want to be so closely associated with the devastation their bomb had wrought: a headline in the Australian Army Journal read: ‘Australia takes the Ashes’. The Americans denied having any ulterior design; the area had been chosen on climatic grounds, that the north was too cold for the Indians and Australians. The effects of radiation were unknown at this time, but many of the men who served in Hiroshima would die at a comparatively early age. After the first sight-seeing they stayed away from the city: it brought doubt and depression. Some men spat at the wharfside on disembarking, but most were saddened by the poverty and wrack of war. As General ‘Punch’ Cowan, who had himself fought and lost a son in the Burma campaign, asked: ‘How can I blame these children and their families for what has happened?’6
BRITAIN’S FORGOTTEN WARIN VIETNAM
Even before the British reoccupied the Malay peninsula they were planning a strike to the east against Japanese forces in French Indo-China, the territories that are today Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The main target was the headquarters in Saigon of the ageing and ailing Field Marshal Count Terauchi, who had suffered a stroke earlier in the year. The British intervention in Indo-China is almost forgotten now, but it was to have major repercussions for the whole of Southeast Asia during the period of the Cold War. Why did British politicians and commanders commit forces to what might have appeared to be the sideshow of a sideshow, when everyone was worried about ‘imperial overstretch’? Why not leave it to the Chinese nationalists with American assistance, as happened in Hanoi and the northern region?
War brutally exposed the limitations of empire, but to the imperially minded it also offered tantalizing glimpses of further expansion. Up in the heights of Simla in 1943, Dorman-Smith had been in correspondence with Leo Amery, secretary of state for India, and the foreign secretary Anthony Eden about not only the recapture of Burma but also the establishment of a new British protectorate in Thailand. In 1945 most British politicians saw no reason to doubt that Burma, Malaya