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MACARTHUR, in his new role as supreme commander Allied powers, ordered all subordinate commanders to postpone reoccupation of Japanese-held territory until after the formal surrender was signed. Seven million Japanese troops remained under arms, in the home islands and across Hirohito’s empire. A British official wrote: “They do not consider that they have been defeated and say so quite openly. They have simply laid down arms on the Emperor’s orders. We are thus in a position that, in a few days’ time, we shall be setting out to disarm an undefeated army.” It was also plainly a matter of urgency to prevent a vacuum of authority across a huge area where local nationalists were poised to challenge the Allies for control. At SEAC, Mountbatten told his staff he was “at a loss to understand why General MacArthur should wish to impose such a dangerous delay.” MacArthur said loftily to his British liaison officer: “Tell Lord Louis to keep his pants on or he will get us all into trouble.” Mountbatten responded: “Tell him I will keep my pants on if he will take Hirohito’s off.” SEAC’s commander defied MacArthur’s orders and rushed help to Allied prisoners in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Without prompt succour, these men would have continued to die, as the U.S. general might have paused to consider. It was widely believed that MacArthur’s policy was promoted by vanity, a determination to tolerate no distractions from his own great final performance.

The Japanese surrender brought the beginnings of a new round of misery to Indochina. The vanquished occupiers exerted themselves to aid Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist Vietminh and inflict further humiliations on the French. In Hanoi, 5,000 French prisoners remained confined for weeks in the citadel, even as the Vietminh hastened to occupy the city. While the Hôtel Metropole continued to serve six-course meals, and shops were stocked with silks, the bodies of Vietnamese who had died of starvation lay in the streets. Even after the surrender, the Japanese dealt brutally with French officers whom they captured. While awaiting Chinese and British occupation forces, they transferred large quantities of money and arms to the Vietminh. Some Japanese deserters joined Ho Chi Minh’s ranks. The first British troops found themselves obliged to participate in a bitter struggle for power, indeed an open war, until French units arrived to relieve them. In Saigon, the Americans abruptly withdrew from participation in the Vietnam Control Commission, removing the designated U.S. Army signals team from the Allied occupying force. Brig.-Gen. Timberman, commanding U.S. troops in South-East Asia, asserted that reoccupation of Indochina “had nothing to do with the French.”

In the Dutch East Indies, local nationalists swiftly seized control from the Japanese. A bitter and bloody struggle began, which cost thousands of lives in the months that followed, to resist the restoration of Dutch hegemony. “The Japanese,” concluded963 a French observer who had been in Batavia since 1941, “though defeated in a general sense, have ‘won the war’ in this corner of Asia.” They had rendered it impossible for the former European colonial powers convincingly to reassert their authority where they had left off more than three years earlier.

THOUSANDS OF British and Indian Soldiers had been preparing for the amphibious assault on Malaya, Operation Zipper. For them, as for American soldiers slated to land in Japan, it was an overwhelming relief that they could now land unopposed. Cecil Daniels’s battalion of the Buffs had lost ten officers and 205 men in Burma. Looking back on his personal contribution to the war, the infantryman wrote with touching gaucheness: “I felt I had acquitted myself964 reasonably well, but…could and would have done more (in other words, stuck my head out more) if my parents had not already lost one son in the war. I wanted to spare them the grief of the possibility of losing another son if possible.”

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