Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [95]
The muted argument continued among the British in Saigon, Rangoon and Singapore. Slim told his superiors in London mildly but firmly that their orders were ‘somewhat contradictory’.33 Later, a report of the Saigon Control Commission up to 9 November went the rounds of the commanders for comment. One note, not in Gracey’s handwriting, recorded that the Saigon situation was ‘an almost exact parallel with Burma. If only the French would promise progressive sovereignty to be complete at a very much earlier date (say two or three years) AND the Annamites would be equally ready to meet them, the situation might clear up.’ One note said simply ‘Good’. Another hand, possibly Gracey’s, added, ‘Waffle’. Perhaps this was the British officer who had dismissed Mus’s reportage as ‘just ideas’. More perceptively, someone had responded to a comment that it was ‘inevitable that the French should re-establish control’ with the query: ‘Can they control any better than Annamites?’34
Despite the parallels that some wished to draw, the Indian Army soldiers faced quite different problems in Saigon and the surrounding countryside from the ones they encountered in the newly reconquered cities of Burma and Malaya. The French settlers, the ‘colons’, were extremely ambivalent about them. As Mus pointed out, there had been little resistance to the Japanese and the population had embraced Vichy and ‘Pétainisme’ with complacency. Relatively speaking, the colons had suffered little from the war even during the scarcities of 1943 – 4. They wanted French troops back and, after the coup that Gracey sanctioned, they had arms themselves. The British were merely unwelcome birds of passage. Gracey had to fire off a letter to General Leclerc, the French officer commanding during the British occupation, insisting that he tell the settlers and French forces some home truths. The Indian Army had come to their rescue. As for arming the Japanese and putting them back on the streets, if the Japanese had not faithfully carried out Gracey’s orders, ‘there would have been a disaster of the first magnitude in Southern French Indo-China with a massacre of thousands of French people and the destruction of vast amounts of French property’. What irked Gracey particularly was the attitude of some of the French to the Indian troops. He insisted that Leclerc explain the ‘camaraderie’ that existed between the white officers and the Indian and Gurkha soldiers: ‘Our men of whatever colour are our friends and are not considered “black” men. They expect and deserve to be treated in every way as first-class soldiers, and their treatment should be, and is, exactly the same as that of white troops.’ In treating such men as ‘black’, the French had misunderstood ‘our Indian Army traditions’.35 This was an interesting reflection on differing racial attitudes in the two colonial systems. French settlers did not always subscribe to France’s racially blind ideal of a civilizing mission among the non-white races. The French in Indo-China had been humiliated by Asians twice over, once by the Japanese and then by the Vietnamese. Many were not prepared to concede equality of any sort to Indians. Yet British attitudes were only superficially liberal. However friendly working relations appeared to be within the Indian Army, eating and socializing away from the front were still racially segregated activities. Indian officers had had to struggle hard to achieve a degree of equality with their white counterparts. Gracey, though, was sincere. He personally was little concerned with race and it was this that made Chacha (‘Uncle’) Gracey an acceptable commander-in-chief of