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By Root 862 0

which afflicted policy in Europe. Americans, from their president to soldiers and airmen who served in the China-Burma-India theatre, were almost universally antipathetic to the British Empire, and resented committing their country’s resources to its resurrection. Where the British regarded Siam as an enemy, an ally of the Japanese, from 1942 the U.S. chose to see it merely as an occupied, victim country. This was partly because Washington harboured a conviction, which persisted through 1945, that London cherished imperialistic designs there. Americans shared with the British a commitment to undoing Japanese aggression, but would greatly have preferred not to restore the European powers’ lost possessions to their former owners. So strong was this sentiment that most Americans, including the nation’s leaders, would happily have forsworn British aid to defeat the Japanese, if they could thus have distanced themselves from the cause of imperialism. Only the most compelling global political imperatives persuaded the U.S. to cooperate with the British in the Japanese war. It is hard to overstate the mutual suspicion and indeed antagonism which prevailed between the Western Allies in Asia in 1944–45.

“I have noted a regrettable93 lack of any spirit of camaraderie between British and American sections,” wrote a U.S. diplomat in India, “or any evidence of mutual frankness and trust.” A British diplomat likewise reported: “The majority of American officers94 in this theatre…are pessimistic about the chance of any real Allied cooperation being achieved here, suspicious of British intentions, bitter over many real or fancied grievances, and convinced of the essential bad will and hopeless inefficiency of the Indian administration.” If the British government was less troubled than it should have been by the deaths of three million Indians in the 1943 Bengal famine, precipitated by the loss of Burma’s rice, those Americans aware of it were appalled. A growing proportion of British signal traffic on Asian matters was marked GUARD—not to be shown to allies.

“The Americans[in India]…have rather behaved95 as an Army of Occupation,” wrote a senior British officer in December 1943, “or if that is too strong, much as we comport ourselves in Egypt vis à vis the Egyptian Army and Government.” A British officer of the Indian Army wrote of the distaste for Roosevelt’s people which pervaded his mess: “Our anti-Americanism96 probably stemmed from their reluctance to enter the war against Germany until 1941, their scornful attitude to any other Allied nations’ efforts, and their ability to create huge material and massive air support for their war in the Pacific, while almost grudgingly offering us similar backing. Stories of men losing their wives and girlfriends to American forces in Britain, and films of gum-chewing, jiving, laconic groups of American soldiers and airmen, no doubt led us to the wrong message…We should have understood these things better, but we were young and often intolerant.”

Such feelings were reciprocated. A sheaf of contemporary97 War Office reports complained of the reluctance of British and U.S. personnel to salute each other. Pollsters put a proposition to Americans at home: “The English have often been called oppressors because of the unfair advantage some people think they have taken of their colonial possessions. Do you think there is any truth in this charge?” Fifty-six percent of respondents answered: “Yes.” The Office of Strategic Services, the American covert operations organisation whose missions operated out of India into South-East Asia, was rabidly anti-colonialist. OSS officers reported to Washington, entirely accurately, that many Indians thought well of Subhas Chandra Bose, the nationalist leader assisting the Japanese to raise an “Indian National Army” from the ranks of POWs to fight against the British. Even the governor of Bengal, Richard Casey, wrote in 1944 that he perceived no enthusiasm for the war among its people: “It would be a brave man98 who would say that the majority of Indians want to remain