Inferno - Max Hastings [258]
It is unsurprising that only small minorities supported resistance, because the price was so high. Peter Kemp, an SOE officer in Albania, described a 1943 episode when he and his British party sought refuge in a village after ambushing a German staff car. Stiljan, their interpreter, conducted a long argument with an indignant figure at a half-open door, which was finally slammed in his face. “He will not have us,” explained Stiljan. “They have heard the shooting on the road and they are very much afraid, and very enraged with us for causing the trouble.” Who could blame such people? They knew they would face appalling reprisals, while the young foreign adventurers moved on to make mischief for the Axis elsewhere. Kemp acknowledged: “As time went on it became more and more obvious that we could offer the Albanians little inducement to take up arms compared with the advantages they could enjoy by remaining passive. I must confess that we British liaison officers were slow to understand their point of view; as a nation, we have always tended to assume that those who do not wholeheartedly support us in our wars have some sinister motive for not wishing to see the world a better place.”
THE EUROPEAN OVERSEAS EMPIRES were riven by divisions which became more acute where colonies were subject to occupation. In Indochina, through a variety of complex anomalies the French flag continued to fly until March 1945; a Vichy regime led by Adm. Jean Decoux administered the country in accordance with the orders of a Japanese military mission. In September 1940, Japanese troops emphasised their absolute dominance by attacking two Tonkinese towns and killing 800 French troops before withdrawing into southern China. The confusion of local loyalties intensified when Vichy warships fought a brisk series of actions against the neighbouring Siamese, who attempted to secure disputed border territory in Laos and Cambodia. The Japanese thereupon intervened to enforce a French retreat, to secure the interests of their Siamese clients. From July 1941 onwards, 35,000 Japanese troops acted as they chose in Indochina, which was incorporated in Japan’s so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Vichy colons preserved shreds of personal freedom as long as they, like European acolytes of the Nazis, implemented the policies of their Axis masters. In March 1945, on orders from liberated Paris, French troops launched a disastrous uprising, quickly and brutally suppressed by the Japanese, who then assumed full control of the country.
The Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians suffered appallingly from 1942 onwards, as the Japanese pillaged their countries: elderly Vietnamese later said that their experiences were worse than those of their later wars of independence. Rice, corn, coal and rubber were shipped to Japan; many rice fields were compulsorily planted with jute and cotton to meet the occupiers’ textile requirements. Denied their own produce, local people began to starve on a staggering scale. In Tonkin, by 1945 at least 1.5 million Vietnamese, and perhaps many more, had died of hunger in an area which before the war was the world’s third-largest grower of rice. The French colonial authorities suppressed local protests and insurrections with a brutality the Japanese could not have surpassed.
The communist Vietminh movement was the chief political beneficiary of Vietnamese misery, gaining substantial support in northern areas where Tokyo’s economic policies caused the most distress. There was no significant armed resistance to the Japanese until the summer of 1945, because the passionately anti-imperialist Americans refused to fly Free French officers into Vietnam from China. Only