• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4329 0

disease. Some prisoners even went into business, one Australian opening a hotel in Kyoto, where he sold sake and Asahi beer. There was remarkably little violence. The Japanese had all along feared this vast captive army, but now it was too weak to take its revenge. Many Allied servicemen visited the ruins of Hiroshima. They understood little of what had happened there: some thought the city had been a huge ammunition dump. In the words of one Australian major, they ‘did tours with cut lunches and hot boxes etc. and on a picnic. All parties boiled the billy, had their lunches, picked up souvenirs and generally picked around the debris and the ruins.’ There was little feeling of elation. The Japanese had, in every sense, been humbled. As an Australian private in Kobe recalled: ‘our former enemies became polite, likeable, respectful people, only too pleased to help wherever possible’. But, equally, the men felt little guilt or even compassion: ‘they had seen the shelters dug into the hills by them to be [put] into and set alight’. Then, on 9 August, came the bomb at Nagasaki, and the whole valley around it felt the fury of the impact; afterwards ‘not a sound. No birds, Not even a lizard. Just brown, treeless soil like cocoa, no grass, and twisted girderwork…’9

The day before the first bomb was dropped, most military commanders in mainland Asia believed that the war would go on for many months more. The British 14th Army had pushed down into Burma since their defeats of the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima on the borders of Assam in June and July 1944. The British took Rangoon, the country’s capital, in May 1945.10 But Japanese troops were still numerous in Burma’s southern peninsula, Tenasserim, and in the recently liberated areas the mood was tense. Long-range B-17 bombers were pounding Singapore. The Japanese continued to occupy Thailand, Indo-China, Malaya and Indonesia. Despite the island-hopping advance by General Douglas MacArthur’s forces in the Pacific, the Japanese had held on to the main islands of the Philippines, and pockets of resistance remained in Borneo. The Japanese army was also engaged in a huge and bloody war of attrition with the forces of nationalist China to the north of the capital, of Chiang Kai Shek’s republican government at Chungking. Across this vast area, the pursuit and killing of Japanese troops came to a halt only slowly. The political outlook was uncertain, while food and clothing were alarmingly scarce.

Malaya and Burma had borne the brunt of the fighting in Southeast Asia. Here, as word of the bomb spread through the bazaars and villages, the mood was ambivalent and the air full of new menace. It first arrived as ‘black-market news’. The past three and a half years had been a time of virtual isolation and rumour ruled: now there was rumour of a secret weapon, of an American invasion, that the Chinese were coming.11 In Malaya, when parachutists from the British Special Operations Executive began to break cover, in all their garb of modern warfare they seemed like visitors from another world. This was the first of a series of strange new wonders, along with jeeps, penicillin, walkie-talkies and atomic power. The news of the surrender was confirmed by radio broadcasts from the Allied headquarters in Ceylon. Only a few days before, to be caught listening to Allied radio would have meant arrest, torture and possibly even death, but the Japanese no longer had the will to enforce their diktats. In the camp for women internees in Singapore, Sheila Allan, the Eurasian daughter of a British mining engineer, kept a secret diary of a youth in captivity. On 10 August she marked her twenty-first birthday by writing: ‘Baby born to crippled Jewess – prophecy concerning her – a Jewess Rabbi dreamt that when a crippled woman gave birth to a boy we’ll hear of Peace!’ The next day she heard one of the POWs bringing the news by singing, ‘The war is over’.12

Then came other portents: war businesses liquidated overnight; the gambling syndicates and lotteries that had flourished in the occupied lands cashed in their