In August 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sailed across the Atlantic on the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales for a secret rendezvous in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, with American warships carrying President Roosevelt. The United States had yet to enter the Second World War and it would have stuck in the throat of any properly conscientious American to form an alliance to protect the British Empire: the country owed its very existence to rejecting it.Yet Churchill and Roosevelt managed to agree a statement, an Atlantic Charter, which laid out eight war aims. The very first of these stated that neither country was seeking any territorial gain from the conflict. The veteran of the battle of Omdurman may not have had his fingers crossed when he agreed this. But he certainly had anxieties about the third principle to which the men signed up, which claimed that the two governments ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’. As various colonial officials around the world now quickly told him, you could hardly get a more unequivocal rejection of the principle of empire. Churchill later blithely told the House of Commons that what he’d had in mind was merely self-determination for the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe. ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister’, as he famously declared on a later occasion, ‘to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ Perhaps so. But the fact remained that one of the country’s greatest enthusiasts for empire had put his signature to a war aim which undercut its very existence.
Then came the greatest imperial calamity of the war. Until Stamford Raffles saw its potential in the early nineteenth century, Singapore had been just another pestilential Asian island, all swamp and discomfort. By banning slavery, promoting education, declaring equality before the law and asserting freedom of trade Raffles transformed the place.* Singapore flourished and the population boomed. A statue of a thoughtful-looking Raffles, arms folded, gazing down on the astonishing success of his creation, was standing outside the Victoria Memorial Hall in the heart of Singapore when, in February 1942, Japanese soldiers inflicted on the British Empire its greatest humiliation of the twentieth century. The hall itself was already serving as a temporary hospital to treat the casualties of Japanese bombing raids. Yet until the last possible moment the European community in Singapore had continued the routines of expat ease, in the misguided conviction that they were protected by the vast amounts of money Britain had invested turning the island into what was claimed to be ‘the Gibraltar of the East’. Twenty-one square miles of dockyards, barracks, warehouses and fuel stores were shielded from attack by an array of heavy guns. Manning this garrison, as The Times had described them, were ‘sturdy British infantrymen, Scottish Highlanders, bronzed young giants from Australia, tall, bearded Sikhs, Moslem riflemen fresh from service on the North-West Frontier, tough little Gurkhas, Malays from the Malay Regiment … the core of British strength in the Far East’.
But, as every student of military history knows, the crisis-planners had made the critical mistake of assuming that any attack on the island would come from the sea – the artillery had been equipped with armour-piercing shells and sited to fire at any approaching warship. In fact, the Japanese swept down the Malay peninsula from the north. It wasn’t as if the British had not been warned. A military assessment in October 1940 had concluded that if the Japanese were to invade Malaya, ‘the survival of Singapore for more than a short period is very improbable’. And now the speed and ferocity of the Japanese advance were astonishing. From their base in occupied Siam (Thailand) the Japanese raced down by any available means of transport, including great numbers of bicycles, stopping for almost nothing: enemy wounded were butchered, surrendering prisoners were shot.
How could the defensive planning have been so inept? Churchill claimed that ‘the possibility of Singapore having no landward defences no more entered my mind than that of a battleship being launched without a bottom’. Was there also some residue of a nineteenth-century belief in an innate racial superiority alive in the British high command, who seemed to consider that while the Japs might be able to defeat a Chinese army (as they had done in the invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s) they were no match for Europeans? ‘I trust you’ll chase the little men off,’ had been the response of the Governor of the island, Sir Shenton Thomas, when a general reported that the Japanese had landed in Malaya. But the Japanese were formidable soldiers, commanded by a bold and ruthless general, Tomoyuki Yamashita.* The British forces may have contained elements from all over the empire. But they were largely untested and they were not especially well led: General Percival’s military headquarters was known among the men as ‘Confusion Castle’. As the enemy forces neared, an order went out that all the alcohol on the island was to be poured away, to prevent it falling into enemy hands and triggering a drunken Japanese rampage. Some Australian soldiers were seen face down in the gutter, scooping up whatever whisky they could. Panicking civilians fought their way on to vessels leaving Singapore, sometimes pushing Asians aside as they did so.
Before the war, Churchill had acknowledged that the island was a ‘stepping stone’ to Australia and New Zealand and, at the last minute, dispatched the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle-cruiser HMS Repulse. They sailed for Singapore on a tide of sonorous phrases. ‘Thus’, Churchill proclaimed, ‘we stretch out the long arm of brotherhood and motherhood to the Australian and New Zealand peoples.’ Unfortunately, the two great ships also sailed as unprotected as they might have done before the development of air power. Both were sunk by Japanese bombers. This left the defence of the island in the hands of 90,000 or so empire troops, many of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger. In London, an impotent Prime Minister issued increasingly frantic orders – that the entire male population should be used to build earthwork defences, that ‘Commanders, Staffs and principal officers [were] expected to perish at their posts’, that ‘every inch of ground [was] to be defended’, that there was to be no question of surrender ‘until after protracted fighting among the ruins’. All in vain. Despite their advantage in numbers, the British were incapable of staunching the Japanese advance. Troops were rushed first to one sector, then to another, but always the wrong one. Japanese aircraft rained bombs down on the city. British generals accused Australian soldiers of running away. The Australian commander, General Gordon Bennett, levelled the familiar accusation that British commanders were stuffed shirts, while he himself scurried off to Australia, where, he claimed later, he was needed in order to brief people on how to fight the Japanese.
In his sweltering bunker Percival now had to make a decision. Perhaps the empire troops could hold the island, for the Japanese forces must almost be at their last gasp and their supply lines stretched close to breaking point. On the other hand, Percival’s forces were either untested or the survivors of the defeated army which had fallen back through Malaya: beaten men do not fight as well as those who have never tasted failure. Churchill had ordered them to fight to the end. But there were terrified civilians everywhere and the water was running out. Percival and his generals decided there would be fewer casualties if they threw in the towel. Had they had any idea of how grotesquely the Japanese would behave towards prisoners, they might have decided to fight on. But Percival did not know, as he also failed fully to grasp how vulnerable the exhausted and extended Japanese forces were. Yamashita understood that his troops’ fatigue demanded swift finality. It must be unconditional surrender by the British. The newsreel footage of the negotiations shows the bull-necked Japanese general leaning across the table towards a thin, distressed Percival, who asks for a day to consider his response. Knowing that with a day’s reflection the British might decide that they can, after all, fight on, the offer is refused: it must be all or nothing now. Percival looks around at his brigadiers and translator. His eyes blink furiously. And then he agrees to the biggest surrender of British troops in history. He and his general
s had funked, and at some deep, instinctive level the whole empire shuddered. There could be no way back to the pre-war assertion of a natural right to rule.
It is as well to remember that the Japanese invaded as part of a plan to establish an empire of their own, and the brutal occupation of Singapore illuminated how benign the pre-war rule of the British had been. Japanese soldiers murdered and raped at will. They killed doctors, nurses and patients in hospital. Singapore was renamed Syonan-to, adults were forced into labour camps, children indoctrinated. Prisoners of war were used as slaves and the civilian population went very hungry. The rules of the Geneva Convention were completely ignored and all civilians obliged to proclaim the supremacy of the new master race (they were, for example, made to bow to any Japanese soldier passing on the street). The experience was sufficiently traumatic that at war’s end Singaporean nationalists determined to ensure that they never again lived under foreign rule of any kind.
As the defeated British fell back to Singapore from the Malayan peninsula they had attempted to dynamite the causeway linking the island with the mainland. Like much of the rest of the defence of Singapore, it was a botched job. But the explosion made a massive noise, heard by the staff and pupils of a school on the island. When the headmaster asked what had caused the bang, an eighteen-year-old schoolboy, Lee Kuan Yew, told him that it was the sound of ‘the end of the British Empire’.* The fall of Singapore had shown the world that Britain no longer had the capacity to protect its territories abroad. It was conclusive evidence that there was nothing superior about the white man and nothing permanent about his presence in the colonies. If the country couldn’t hold an island which had been acquired as a protective outpost, what could it defend? ‘The British Empire in the Far East depended on prestige,’ wrote an Australian diplomat. ‘This prestige has been completely shattered.’
To his immense disappointment, the British people thanked Winston Churchill for his inspirational wartime leadership by voting him out of office in 1945. The priorities of the Labour government which replaced him were crystal-clear. ‘The nation wants food, work and homes,’ said its manifesto, and the problems of the rest of the world were distinctly secondary. The party believed, of course, in a United Nations, in peace and friendship and in ‘a common bond with the working peoples of all countries’. As for the empire, the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had made it absolutely clear he considered that the principles of the Atlantic Charter, about which Churchill had been so one-eyed, applied to everyone. (‘We have always demanded that the freedom which we claim for ourselves should be extended to all men,’ he had said in 1941. ‘I look for an ever increasing measure of self-government in Africa.’) The Labour manifesto promised ‘responsible self-government’ for India and ‘planned progress of our Colonial Dependencies’, whatever that was. The Conservative manifesto by contrast, repeated the term ‘Mother Country’, which even then must have been getting pretty threadbare.
The mood of the world had changed. Britain was exhausted and bankrupt, France in a similar state. The two new world powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, both professed themselves to be ‘anti-imperialists’, with varying degrees of plausibility. The United Nations, created in 1945 as the successor to the League of Nations, declared itself an institution committed to equal rights and self-determination. For years, the initiative had been shifting from the builders of empire to its dismantlers. Among those who, in Orwell’s delicious phrase, took ‘their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow’, (western) imperialism was An Inherently Bad Thing. But ideology was rather beside the point. The critical necessity was a sense of purpose. The objective of the breakers-up of empire was obvious enough. But what were the imperialists about? If the purpose of empire was really only to look after places until they could look after themselves – as had been maintained for years – then everything was reduced to a question not of principle but of timing. It is remarkable how hard it is to find evidence of really serious disagreement between the mainstream British political parties in the 1950s and 1960s about what ought to happen to the colonies: the claims for independence were undeniable. Both the left and right had decided that there was simply nothing to set against demands for self-determination – increasingly, those who did not feel a twinge of discomfort at the possession of an empire were simply ignorant. A Colonial Office survey in 1951 found that 59 per cent of those questioned were unable to name a single British colony, although one man did come up with ‘Lincolnshire’.
The most pressing question after the war had been what to do about India. This, the grandest imperial possession, also had one of the strongest claims to self-government, the most charismatic leaders and some of the most colourful and effective anti-imperialist campaigns, with a real capacity to cause international embarrassment. Nationalists had been committed to complete independence since the 1920s and nothing the British had tried, neither plans for some sort of federation nor mass arrests, had done anything to weaken their resolve. The Second World War did nothing to improve the popularity of the imperial British with nationalists, but then neither the ‘Indian National Army’ which fought alongside the Japanese nor Gandhi’s peaceful ‘Quit India’ movement had seriously imperilled British rule. Churchill, who had been passionately opposed to independence, had hoped that victory would make Indians feel more fondly towards Britain. It did not. His own indifference to a terrible famine which struck Bengal in 1942 and 1943 – he refused all entreaties to divert food supplies – had done nothing to help. And had they known how he spoke in private, nationalists would have felt even angrier. ‘I hate Indians,’ he exclaimed once. ‘They are beastly people with a beastly religion’ – ‘the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans’. As so often, he exaggerated: the people he really hated were not Indians in general, but what he called the ‘Hindu priesthood’ in the Congress movement campaigning for their country to be freed from the empire. Churchill’s almost religious devotion to empire meshed with a conviction that India was simply too diverse a country to function as an independent state. Minorities, such as the Muslims, would be oppressed, and in particular he worried about the effects of the country’s poisonous caste system, in which tens of millions of Dalits, or ‘Untouchables’, were condemned from birth to a life of discrimination and abuse. In a speech in 1931 he wondered whether ‘if Christ came again into this world, it would not be to the Untouchables of India that he would first go, to give them the tidings that not only are all men equal in the sight of God, but that for the weak and poor and downtrodden a double blessing is reserved’.
Churchill’s conviction that so-called Untouchables would be appallingly treated in an independent India has been horribly borne out since the British quit the subcontinent: even in the twenty-first century, Dalits suffer grotesque human rights abuses every day. The apparently paradoxical claim that only foreign occupation could protect indigenous people had taken root soon after Churchill first arrived in India as a cavalry subaltern in October 1896. Sharing a comfortable bungalow with two other young officers, he spent the long, hot hours between morning exercises and evening polo in a frantic course of self-improvement in which, first of all, he tackled Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its warning of how empires die. By the following summer he had worked out his convictions about the future of the British Empire: white colonies like Canada and Australia might be treated as near-equals, India never. Although he left the subcontinent that year, never to return, his views hardly altered for most of his life. In 1922 he was dismissing ‘the chatterboxes who are supposed to speak for India today’, contrasting them with the hundreds of millions of other people in the subcontinent for whom the empire was supposed to care. He told readers of the Daily Mail in 1929 that Britain had rescued India from barbarism and tyranny and that, thanks to the British, ‘War has been banished from India; her frontiers have been defended against invasion from the north; famine has been gripped and controlled … Justice has been given
– equal between race and race, impartial between man and man. Science, healing or creative, has been harnessed to the service of this immense and, by themselves, helpless population.’ His devotion to empire found expression as paternalism – he described the people of India as ‘children’. Self-government was simply inconceivable to him.
When, in January 1935, the National Government in Britain produced the enormous Government of India Act, envisaging a federation not very different to the solution he claimed to favour, Churchill objected passionately, describing it as ‘a monstrous monument of sham built by pygmies’. Throughout the Second World War (to which – to the immense fury of many nationalists – the people of India were immediately committed in September 1939, on the signature of the Viceroy), Churchill retained his adamant objection to home rule. The Viceroy attempted to dampen Indian anger by promising that, when the war was over, the whole question of Indian government would be revisited. But in reality Churchill had no desire to reassess anything. (In 1944 he even sent the Viceroy a peevish telegram asking him why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.) Leo Amery, Churchill’s India Secretary, was so struck by the passion of his leader’s hostility that he wondered whether ‘on the subject of India, he is really quite sane’.
But India was a lower priority than fighting Nazi Germany and, under pressure from Labour members of the wartime coalition, a promise was made that, once the war was over, India would be free to decide its own future. This, he was told, was the price of Indian support against the Japanese. To meet Churchill’s concern about the rights of minorities, the British promised that whatever entity emerged it could not be a state whose authority was denied by substantial elements in Indian political life – a pledge taken by India’s many millions of Muslims as a promise that they would not be forced into a ‘Hindu Raj’, which in turn paved the way for the world’s first invented Islamic state, Pakistan.
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