Inferno - Max Hastings [413]
But what was “freedom”? A year before the Japanese surrender, the Australian minister to China warned the Advisory War Council in Canberra about widespread hostility to the restoration of white colonial rule in Asia—“It would be an error to suppose that we would be welcomed by the native populations when we return”—and he was proved right. The Malayan nationalist Mustapha Hussein said: “I cried when I heard that the Japanese had surrendered … simply because there were only forty-eight hours separating us from the declaration of independence for Malaya. This was indeed a tragic case of ‘So near yet so far.’ I regretted the matter deeply as Malaya would once again be colonised and gripped by Western Power. Even tears of blood could not rectify the situation.”
Serious conflicts erupted in several countries where nationalists resisted the restoration of European hegemony, notably French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Allied supreme commander in Southeast Asia, urged returning colonial officials to concede sufficient local autonomy to avert conflict. Both the Dutch and the French declined to do this, however; instead, they plunged into long, doomed counterinsurgency campaigns. In the Banya Bini 10 internment camp on Java, the Japanese did not inform the emaciated and diseased Dutch inmates of the war’s ending until 24 August. When prisoners ventured out, they found themselves threatened and sometimes fired upon by Indonesian nationalists bent upon resisting the restoration of colonial rule. Only in September did Gurkha soldiers arrive, and another two months elapsed before the Dutch were able to leave their hated place of confinement for a voyage to Holland. A thousand Japanese soldiers on Java deserted to join local communities; many of them afterwards aided nationalist guerrillas. In China, American aircraft flew Nationalist troops and some U.S. Marines into Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing in a successful bid to forestall a communist takeover, but civil war soon engulfed the country, from which Mao Tse-tung eventually emerged victorious.
British officials returning to Burma were appalled to find destitution: public services and transport had collapsed, many people were starving and traumatised by their experiences. In Rangoon, a civil servant, T. L. Hughes, found “old friends so changed as to be unrecognisable; many were emaciated and shrunken; many were white-haired prematurely and many continued to cast an anxious eye over their shoulder on the look-out for the Japanese Gestapo.” British onlookers at the Burmese capital’s victory parade watched uneasily as Aung San’s nationalist troops goose-stepped down the central avenue in Japanese-style uniforms. It was plain to all but the most stubborn imperialists that the clock could not be set back to 1941, that the British must soon leave for good, just as they would also have to quit India. In the Philippines, too, radicalism had taken hold. A communist Huk guerrilla said of the period following the Japanese surrender: “I knew we’d have to have our peasant groups because landlords would be coming back. Life was still difficult and … there had been so much destruction. But I think people were hopeful. I know I was. And we little people had become stronger; we were more organised.”
Each of the three principal victorious nations emerged from the Second World War confident in the belief that its own role had been decisive in procuring victory. Not for many years did a more nuanced perspective emerge, in Western societies at least. Hitler was correct in anticipating that his enemies’ “unnatural coalition” must collapse and give way to mutual antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West, although this occurred too late to save the Third Reich. The Grand Alliance, the phrase with which Churchill ennobled the wartime relationship of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, was always a grand charade; it