Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [294]
THE DUTCH, French and British owners of the old Eastern empires were increasingly preoccupied with regaining their lost territories—and conscious that they could expect scant help from the Americans to achieve this. “We must naturally be prepared810 for criticism from some quarters whatever we do,” the British embassy in Washington observed to the Foreign Office on 13 May. “If we prosecute Eastern War with might and main, we shall be told by some people that we are really fighting for our colonial possessions the better to exploit them and that American blood is being shed to no better purpose than to help ourselves and Dutch and French to perpetuate our degenerate colonial Empires; while if we are judged not to have gone all out, that is because we are letting America fight her own war with little aid, after having let her pull our chestnuts out of the European fire.” The U.S. Navy, said the embassy with a sigh, was prone to think both these things simultaneously.
Not only Japan’s Asian possessions, but those of the European powers, were perceived to be “in play.” Tensions between Britain and the U.S. grew, rather than diminished, as the war entered its final stage. MacArthur made plain that he had no desire for British participation in Olympic. A Foreign Office official minuted bitterly: “The Americans are virtually conducting811 political warfare against us in the Far East and are seeking not only to belittle the efforts which we have hitherto made in that theatre of war, but also to keep us in a humiliating and subsidiary role in the future.” Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s most intimate counsellor in Washington, did not dissent from such a view: “To hear some people talk812…you would think the British were our potential enemies.”
If the Americans were unenthusiastic about the resumption of British hegemony over Burma and Malaya, they were implacably hostile to French retention of Indochina. In 1945 the Japanese achieved a victory there which did nothing to improve their own strategic fortunes, but significantly influenced the future of South-East Asia. They had entered northern Indochina in 1940, to halt the flow of supplies to Nationalist China from the Vietnamese port of Haiphong. In 1941 they introduced 35,000 troops to secure for themselves the colony’s rich resources of rice, rubber and tin. The Vichy French administration was permitted to continue in office; the French garrison kept its arms under Tokyo’s orders; the hapless Vietnamese people were allowed to starve so that Japanese people might eat.
Early in 1945, however, de Gaulle’s government in Paris demanded that the governor, Vice-Admiral Jean Catoux, should adopt a far more aggressive policy. As the local nationalist Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh spread their influence ever more widely, de Gaulle decided that France would only regain possession of Indochina by being seen to contribute to its liberation. The outcome was a disaster. On 9 March the Japanese staged a pre-emptive coup against the Saigon administration, seizing or massacring ill-equipped French troops who sought to resist. By 13 March, the Japanese claimed to have captured 8,500 POWs and killed a further thousand Frenchmen. Saigon Opera House became the Japanese interrogation and torture centre. With wildly confused loyalties, some French colonials found themselves held captive in prisons manned by French guards. Straggling columns of French fugitive soldiers sought to cut a path across country from Tonkin to the