Inferno - Max Hastings [270]
Britain’s wartime treatment of its subject races remained humane by German or Japanese standards; there were no arbitrary executions or wholesale massacres. But India was not the only imperial possession in which the exigencies of emergency were used to justify neglect, cruelty and injustice. In 1943, famines afflicted Kenya, Tanganyika and British Somaliland; at various moments there were food riots in Tehran, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus. While these were caused by circumstances of war, the imperial power was parsimonious in apportioning resources to alleviate their consequences. While British rule reflected moderate rather than absolute authoritarianism, it scarcely sufficed to promote support—and especially Indian support—for retention of imperial hegemony. The only narrowly plausible defence of British wartime rule of India is that the country was so vast, with such potential for turbulence, that indulgence of domestic dissent would have threatened an irretrievable loss of control, to the advantage of the Axis. The common experience of battle forged some sense of battlefield comradeship between British and imperial soldiers, white, brown and black alike. But the stress of war, rather than strengthening the bonds of empire as Britain’s jingos liked to pretend, dramatically loosened them.
The leaders of the Grand Alliance depicted the war as a struggle for freedom against oppression, good against evil. In the twenty-first century, few informed people even in former colonial possessions doubt the merit of the Allied cause, the advantage that accrued to mankind from defeat of the Axis. But it seems essential to recognise that in many societies contemporary loyalties were confused and equivocal. Millions of people around the world who had no love for the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini or Hirohito felt little greater enthusiasm for Allied powers whose vision of liberty vanished, it seemed to their colonial subjects, at their own front doors.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ASIAN FRONTS
1. China
AS EARLY AS 1936, the American correspondent Edgar Snow, a passionate admirer and friend of Mao Tse-tung’s, wrote: “In her great effort to master the markets and inland wealth of China, Japan is destined to break her imperial neck. This catastrophe will occur not because of automatic economic collapse in Japan. It will come because the conditions of suzerainty which Japan must impose on China will prove humanly intolerable and will shortly provoke an effort of resistance that will astound the world.” Snow was right about the outcome of Japanese imperialism, though not about the military effectiveness of Chinese resistance. Wartime Allied strategy in the Far East was powerfully influenced by America’s desire to make China not only a major belligerent, but a great power. Enormous resources were lavished upon flying supplies from India to Americans, notably airmen, supporting the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek “over the Hump” of the Himalayas, after Japan’s conquest of Burma severed the land link in 1942, and the United States built airfields in China from which to deploy its bombers.
All these efforts proved vain. China remained a chaotic, impoverished, deeply divided society. Chiang boasted an enormous paper army, but his regime and commanders were too corrupt and incompetent, his soldiers too scantily equipped and motivated, to make significant headway against the Japanese. Logistical and operational difficulties crippled USAAF missions out of China. In the north, in Yennan Province, Mao’s