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House, where the British handed over two further surrendered Japanese swords to the French. These weapons had previously belonged to the deputy Japanese commanders in the area. One sword was accompanied by a scroll that proclaimed that it was 650 years old. It is clear from other correspondence that Gracey regarded the swords as the symbol of Japanese sovereignty over Indo-China by right of conquest. He was now symbolically handing back that sovereignty to France, which he believed held it according to international law.

Standing alongside Leclerc during these hybrid colonial ceremonies was Admiral Thierry D’Argenlieu, France’s new high commissioner for Indo-China. D’Argenlieu was a former monk. He followed General de Gaulle’s orders to the letter, believing that it was his mission to bring back Indo-China, with its substantial population of French, Eurasian and Indo-Chinese Catholics, into the fold of Christian civilization. One of his staff observed privately that he possessed ‘the most brilliant mind of the Twelfth Century’. Within a short time D’Argenlieu began an attack on the base of Viet Minh power in Hanoi and Haiphong to the north. This was to set the scene for thirty years of savage fighting which ended only with the fall of the American-backed government in Saigon in 1975. Douglas Gracey saw clearly what would happen. He had written to Slim on 5 November 1945 that the French troops moving out from Saigon had left a trail of atrocious destruction behind them. This would ‘lead to such resentment that it will be progressively difficult for them to implement their new policy, and, I am convinced, will result in guerrilla war, increased sabotage and arson, as soon as we leave the country.’45 Yet Gracey also believed that the restoration of French power was ‘inevitable’ and, no less important, necessary to protect the retreat of his own soldiers. He stuck to a politically barren doctrine of sovereignty and seemed unable to understand the post-war power of national liberation movements. Mountbatten and Slim were too distant to moderate his position. As Germaine Krull had observed back in September 1945: ‘The Annamites will win their independence because they are ready to die for it. We must recognise this inevitable fact.’46

BRITAIN AND THE BIRTH OF INDONESIA

This lesson was forced home in the Dutch East Indies, and at a bloody cost in Indonesian, Indian and British lives. The Allied reoccupation was a strung-out affair. British troops landed in force only towards the end of October 1945. General MacArthur, in whose command the region originally fell, had not felt the need for an immediate intervention in the former Dutch colony. He feared resistance from the 250,000-odd Japanese who remained in the theatre, and demanded that action wait upon the formal surrender of the Japanese in Tokyo Bay. The transfer of responsibility for Indonesia to Mountbatten’s command came on 15 August, with MacArthur’s warning: ‘Tell Lord Louis to keep his pants on or he will get us all into trouble.’ At a stroke of the pen, the area under South East Asia Command was increased by half a million square miles, and another 80 million people were added to its responsibilities. Mountbatten’s already strained communications were strung out another 2,000 miles across a vast archipelago. South East Asia Command had become the largest single administrative apparatus on earth.

Indonesia lay at the final stretch of the great strategic arc of control from Suez to Sydney harbour: it was the ‘Malay barrier’ that had broken with such dire consequences in early 1942. By 1945, British interests in the region were chiefly economic: pre-war British investments in the Dutch colony totalled £100 million, and this included a 40 per cent stake in Royal Dutch Shell with its large refineries in Sumatra and Borneo.47 In August 1945 a highly secret agreement had been signed by the Dutch granting the British and Americans access to thorium deposits – vital for nuclear processes – on Singkep island, south of Singapore.48 But by the end of 1945 Britain had been