Inferno - Max Hastings [263]
In January 1942 demonstrators thronged the streets of Cairo, crying out, “Forward Rommel! Long live Rommel!” British troops and armoured cars surrounded the royal palace until Farouk acceded to British demands. That summer, Egyptian army officers eagerly anticipated their liberation by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. They were thrilled by the arrival in Cairo of two German spies, Hans Eppler and another man known only as “Sandy.” Captain Sadat was crestfallen, however, to witness the frivolous behaviour of the two agents, whom he found living on the Nile houseboat of the famous belly dancer Hikmet Fahmy. He wrote: “The surprise must have shown on my face, because Eppler laughingly asked: ‘Where do you expect us to stay? In a British army camp?’ ” The German said Hikmet Fahmy was “perfectly reliable.” He and his colleague spent drunken evenings at the Kitkat nightclub, and changed large sums of forged British banknotes through a Jew who allegedly charged 30 percent commission. Sadat wrote long afterwards, with the unembarrassed anti-Semitism of his people: “I was not surprised at a Jew performing this service for the Nazis because I knew that a Jew would do anything if the price was right.” The British arrested the entire spy ring and suppressed internal dissent with little difficulty. But they could not credibly idealise Egypt’s role in the Allied camp.
Britain’s Asian empire manifested the most conspicuously divided allegiances. In 1939, nationalists in Malaya staged antiwar demonstrations, harshly suppressed by the local colonial authorities. An Indian member of the Malay civil service said that, “although his reason utterly rebelled against it, his sympathies instinctively ranged themselves with the Japanese in their fight against the Anglo-Saxons.” Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: “It [is] obvious that the average man in India is so full of bitterness against the British that he would welcome any attack on them.” Some of his compatriots rejoiced in the spectacle of fellow Asians routing white armies and navies. “We couldn’t help gloating at the beating the British were getting at the hands of the Germans,” said Dr. Kashmi Swaminadhan. “This, in spite of our being anti-Hitler.” Lady Diana Cooper wrote before the deluge in 1942: “I could see no particular reason why the 85 per cent Chinese and 15 per cent Indian and Malayan citizens of Singapore should fight, as Cockneys do, against people of their own shade, and for the dear good English.” Indeed, few did so.
In Malaya and Burma, the new rulers were able to enlist the services of many local people and some Indians who felt no loyalty to the expelled British. But against these should be cited the example of such a man as the Indian P. G. Mahindasa, teacher of the English school in Malacca settlement. He wrote before his execution by the Japanese for listening to the BBC on his radio: “I have always cherished British sportsmanship, justice and the civil service as the finest things in an imperfect world. I die gladly for freedom. My enemies fail to conquer my soul. I forgive them for what they did to my frail body. To my dear boys, tell them that their teacher died with a smile on his lips.” In Malaya, the Chinese communist Chin Peng, who later became leader of the violent anti-British independence movement, remarked on the irony that he received an OBE from a grateful British government for promoting terrorism and murdering Malays who collaborated with the Japanese.
Many people in Burma, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, together with more than a few in the Philippines, at first welcomed the invading Japanese as liberators. Even ardent foes of European imperialism were soon disillusioned, however, by the arrogance and institutionalised brutality of their new masters. Examples are legion: far more local people died as slaves on the notorious Burma Railway than did Allied prisoners. Of almost 80,000 Malays