Historians organize decades of history, impressing their own periodization on them – the Age of Discovery; the European Civil War 1890–1945; the Cold War 1947–1989 and so forth – as they have done since the Renaissance implicitly defined a Dark Age following classical antiquity. But the lives of contemporaries rarely fit such divisions neatly, especially since until recently youth was not mandatory for high political office. Throughout I have sought to convey the generational experiences of the men who were at the centres of these events, although it is worth noting how, for example, fear of repeating 1930s appeasement still haunts leaders far too young to have lived it, as it did Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. That is why I have included biographical sketches of the main players: to emphasize the myriad experiences they brought to the decisions they made during these two decades. What did future nationalist leaders from Africa or Asia think when as young men they gawped at the ornate buildings in huge European capitals, and from within whose elegant façades the destinies of their countrymen were arranged according to abstract or inaccurate anthropological principles, or in line with considerations of international balances of power that had little or nothing to do with them? Speaking of these future leaders, it requires an act of imaginative recovery to grasp the sheer vitality of Marxist-Leninism or the ‘national socialisms’, which in ensuing decades have in turn been swept aside by Communo-capitalism or political Islamism. I hope I give the worm’s-eye view too, that is the perspective of the men and women amid whom cold and hot wars were waged as well as that of the intelligence officers who flit in and out of this story like shifting shadows. Many of the subjects dealt with here also have a remarkable pertinacity, for example Iranian belief in the almost occult role of the British in their national affairs, a form of paranoia they share with the Russians, as they uncover cameras placed by the Secret Intelligence Service (popularly known as MI6) in fake rocks in Moscow parks. One can hear this paranoia in the words of the Iranian nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadeq, although he had every justification for feeling very afraid. The most tense borders in the world – in Korea or Kashmir – derive from this period, as do the unresolved problems of Israel and its neighbours, one of over twenty or more extant problems in the post-colonial Middle East.
The following narrative unashamedly swerves, turns in on itself and revisits key events in different contexts, in an attempt to weave them together in something approximating to their multi-layered complexity. It would be impossible for my readers to follow a simultaneous account of events in very different cultures thousands of miles apart from one another, as we would have to jump back and forth from Algeria to Kenya via Malaya and Indochina. Beneath whatever modish stances states struck were also what amounted to cultural demiurges, evident in, for example, India’s far-from-smooth relations with China or the latter’s with the Vietnamese, which have to be considered too. Although the military mind is often amnesiac, there were clear examples of one campaign influencing another, or of mindsets formed in one context, such as French Indochina, pre-programming a determination to win in another, in this case Algeria, even if this meant mutinous paratroopers descending on central Paris. The connections can be surprising, and the morality involved was usually obscure, most obviously in the Anglo–French–Israeli plot to overthrow Nasser or in the Kennedy brothers conniving with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, himself no slouch at assassinating his enemies. ‘Good’ decisions, such as Lyndon Johnson’s not to use military force to stop China becoming a nuclear power, contributed to the ‘bad’ one of attempting to crush North Vietnam by conventional bombing to reassure Asia-Pacific allies made anxious by China’s first nuclear-bomb test in October 1964. I have tried throughout to indicate these connections and ironies.
All maps fundamentally distort the reality they depict, including those using words rather than lines and shading. Thus, for effect, I have tilted on its head the map familiar to many Europeans and North Americans by beginning in East Asia with a series of cascading responses to the effect of the Japanese lunge south in 1941–2, followed by the impact of global war on the greater Middle East. This is primarily designed to encourage readers to think on a commensurate scale about places that may not come readily to mind. After the only occasion, in Korea, where US and Soviet forces fought one another in the air, we turn to what in reality were simultaneous counter-insurgency wars, mainly in South and East Asia, with the coup in Iran against Mossadeq in 1953 and the Suez Crisis in 1956 marking the midway point of the book, and the moment when US power was most nakedly revealed to its own allies. This was when thoughtful British people realized they were no longer a great power, although many of their fellows have still not grasped that reality in the twenty-first century.
The extremely costly struggles between colonizers and nationalist insurgents in Algeria and Kenya follow, until we revert to the global superpower contest, and the competition for influence in Africa and South Asia, culminating in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the most ominous crisis of the entire conflict. In a way all the small wars were surrogates for the avoidance of such a moment when people might have awakened to the northern hemisphere destroyed by huge arsenals of nuclear bombs. Throughout I have intermittently referred to the parallel growth of those deadly stockpiles, to remind readers what was ultimately at stake whenever American or Russian agents clashed in some remote country according to their own ‘big boys’ rules’. The book ends with the US acting as a colonial power amid the debris of its nation-building efforts in South Vietnam, the event which fixed the widespread perception of the US as another, infinitely more successful, imperial power that persists to this day. And so it may seem, with the Pentagon’s thousand or more overseas military bases, ranging from the Green Zone in Baghdad to a drone hangar on the Seychelles, though even America’s critics relentlessly continue to admire and consume its high and low material and intellectual cultures.
As Sir Vidia Naipaul has reminded me, historians of ancient Rome from Appian of Alexandria to Edward Gibbon were still striving to understand the long-term significance of major events that had taken place centuries earlier. That is a respectable justification for the endless rehashing of the history of the Second World War in Europe, and of more or less exiguous episodes within it. Here I want readers to focus on the two seminal decades of the Cold War, which for the older among them is the world they came from, or in my case the one in which I grew up. I wanted a depth of field that would be lost if the global story were dragged out through the 1970s and 1980s. This period really did result in the wider world as we have come to know it – obliged, as every sentient citizen is, to think much more globally than paradoxically was often the case in the first age of globalization.
Imperialism is a touchy subject, although I have tried to avoid a bland ‘on the one hand, on the other’ median tone. What follows is not a work of advocacy history, for I have little ideological and even less nostalgic investment in the events described, and your historian is not an ancillary to activist lawyers campaigning for empire’s victims. But such questions as how to wage war on irregular opponents hidden among entire populations have a contemporary relevance, as do how societies claiming to represent civilization disguise torture with euphemisms. The book will not please those who wish for a reaffirmation of their simple dogmas, but then they seldom read anything outside their own approved canon. Fortunately, most readers do not fall into that narrow category, and people of many ages and national backgrounds will read this book. They include those living in societies still marked by empire’s long recessional – such as my own – as well as those who have as yet to find ways of demythologizing the founding myths of their national liberation. The liberation-era pieties of Algeria’s ruling FLN seem pretty hollow to many unemployed Algerians under twenty-five, particularly if they see the children of the governing elite driving around in Porsches. I hope the book has the same effect on the open-minded as the surprise of looking at a painting under X-ray to find a messy multi-layere
d affair of false starts and second thoughts beneath the smooth surface, in this case consisting of choices and decisions by people much as ourselves.
1. JAPAN OPENS PANDORA’S BOX
A War for the Future of the World
The end of the Second World War was like a starting pistol for what the uninvolved often dismiss as ‘little’ colonial wars. From December 1941 Japanese forces had swept all before them, defying the huge latent industrial capacities of their enemies. These were experienced warriors who had been at war in northern China since 1937. A series of powerful thrusts took the invaders into South-east Asia, the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines, as well as across a vast oceanic Pacific theatre. Their intelligence officers prepared the ground well for a rampage that took imperial forces to the northern shores of Australia. Japanese fishermen mapped the coastlines, while barbers and brothel madams recorded their clients’ careless gossip. Even the official photographer inside Singapore Naval Base was a covert Japanese intelligence officer.1
The Japanese advances caused panic among European colonists, among whom it was a case of sauve qui peut. Pet dogs and horses were put down, captive birds set free as their owners fled pell-mell from the Japanese. There were also personal betrayals. Leslie Froggatt in Singapore confessed:
I betrayed my Malay gardener. He cut my hedges, watered my flowers, cut and rolled my tennis lawn, and brushed up the leaves that blew down from the trees. I betrayed my round fat amah, who liked me, and amused me with her funny ways. I betrayed my Hokkien cook, who had a wife and four lovely children, whom he kept beautifully dressed at all times on the money he earned from me. I betrayed ‘Old Faithful’, our Nr. 2 Boy, who knew no word of English or Malay and padded round the house silently in bare feet . . . I betrayed the caddie who carried my bag, searched for my ball, and always backed my game with a sporting bet.2
When Japanese troops entered Singapore in early 1942, the clocks moved forward two hours to Tokyo time, and the year became 2602, in conformity with the Japanese calendar. Other changes deranged the cosmos of many Asians in more fundamental ways. Unless interned, the European masters and mistresses had to carry cash and stand in line in stores, rather than signing a chit or sending a ‘boy’ (the general term for servants, even when they were greyheads) to shop in their stead. For the first time in their lives, Asian subjects of European colonial rule witnessed the white man abase himself in the dirt, hands raised in the air, or sullenly sweeping the streets. If disobedient, these white men were slapped, or had their heads chopped off with a samurai sword, wielded by conquerors who regarded themselves as liberating lords of Asia.3
The Japanese were given to massed cries of ‘Banzai!’ when they paraded or assembled. Lopping prisoners’ heads off was a competitive sport for their officers, whose brisk manners owed something to classical operas familiar to other Asians. European and Dominion soldiers (half of the defenders of Singapore were Indians, while many of the whites were Australians) seemed slovenly and wilted, even before their morale collapsed amid defeat and heat.4
The surrender of 85,000 British and Dominion troops to 36,000 Japanese under General Yamashita Tomoyuki at Singapore in February 1942 was a comprehensive humiliation. As the opera-singer wife of the British Admiral superintending the docks wrote in her diary while Japanese shells whizzed overhead: ‘One can have so little confidence in the powers that be here. It’s a tragedy.’5 Gross negligence before the war had been crowned by dithering incompetence during the campaign. ‘Never have so many been fucked about by so few / And neither the few nor the many / Have fuck all idea what to do,’ observed a British wit.6
The war with Japan pitted Washington’s vision of a democratic United Nations against Tokyo’s paternalist Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Scheme. The Indian Communist and nationalist Manabendra Nath Roy accurately described the conflict – in which he supported the democracies – as ‘a war for the future of the world’.7 When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Christian Methodist Chinese Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek responded by playing ‘Ave Maria’ on his gramophone. He hoped, and the US hoped too, that a reunited and revivified China would emerge as the world’s fourth major power, occupying the vacuum that would one day be left by the defeated Japanese. It was not to be under his leadership, and by the time the People’s Republic of China finally replaced the rump Republic of China in Taiwan as a permanent member of the UN Security Council in 1971 the old ‘progressive’ concept of the great powers presiding over a world of self-determined and democratic peoples seemed like a distant hallucination.
Broader geostrategic calculations forced actions blatantly at variance with the rhetoric of the August 1941 Anglo-American Atlantic Charter, which affirmed ‘the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they shall live’. The Japanese responded by claiming that each people within its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would ‘have its proper place and demonstrate its real character, thereby securing an order of coexistence and co-prosperity based on ethical principles with Japan serving as its nucleus’. The Japanese granted Burma qualified independence in 1943, offered it to the Philippines a year later and pursued a fairly successful hearts-and-minds campaign in Malaya, an approach they had essayed fighting Kim Il Sung in Manchuria in the 1930s.8 They also had some success in recruiting captured Indian Army troops to a new Indian National Army under their puppet Chandra Subhas Bose. Bose overstated the size of the INA for propaganda purposes, but at one point British intelligence estimated that it contained about 35,000 trained troops.
Some Asians regarded the Japanese as liberators, on the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, or believed the Japanese embodied an Asian form of modernity. They did, but it was racially supremacist and bound up with mystical nationalism, rather in the way of Nazi Germany. The benign view had gathered momentum ever since the crushing defeat Japan inflicted on Russia in 1904–5, proof indeed of the Meiji modernization of the previously backward island empire. That was why so many Asian nationalists sought to instrumentalize the Japanese against colonialism. This may seem remarkable in the light of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against civilians and prisoners of war, but from the point of view of Asian nationalists these were not greatly different to the methods employed on occasions by the Western powers, both before and after the war.9
The Japanese distinguished between what they called ‘the rule of branches and leaves’, meaning the day-to-day emergencies of fighting insurgents, and ‘the rule of the roots’, a metaphor for the fundamental social and political issues which needed to be tackled. Japanese policy in China included minshin haaku – winning the people’s hearts – which went beyond mere propaganda to include reducing feudal dues, providing farmers with tools and seeds and above all ensuring competent government, in a land where officials were chosen and promoted on the basis of their calligraphy. The more intelligent Japanese officials were well aware that effective administration was the ‘secret weapon’ of the British Empire, and sought to emulate it. They also built on the foundations laid by Europeans to encourage opium addiction as a means of corrupting and pacifying the general population.
For all their belief in ancient paternalistic values, the Japanese employed modern techniques of mobilizing populations they claimed had been metaphorically emasculated by Western colonialism. Japanese propaganda films showed each martial triumph, from the blazing hulks of Pearl Harbor to victorious troops entering Rangoon or Singapore. When Chiang found himself ruling most of China after the Japanese capitulation, he popularized the rule of the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) with the aid of printing presses the Japanese had established in major Chinese cities.10
To the regret of some Japanese commanders, who appreciated the importance of winning popular support in a counter-insurgency campaign, the predominance of a purely military ethos ensured that these civilian-run programmes were never terribly effective and the bayonet w
as more conspicuous than the hand of friendship. Starting in 1934 the Japanese sought to isolate the guerrillas from the local population by corralling peasants in collective hamlets or shudan buraku, after burning their villages. The loss, disruption and increased costs caused by such programmes won the Japanese few friends, to the detriment of their simultaneous programme of intelligence gathering and the deployment of local collaborators to track down and kill insurgents.11
Perhaps the principal reason why Bose, Aung San of Burma and Sukarno of the Dutch East Indies took a broad view of Japanese atrocities was that they were mainly perpetrated in China, or against overseas Chinese in other conquered lands, where they were universally resented. Minshin haaku stood little chance against the particular racist loathing felt by the Japanese for the Chinese, and by the end of the war they had killed fifteen million of a people they regarded as uncultured vermin. Ominously, General Yamashita Tomoyuki’s men fought boredom on troopships steaming to Malaya by reading a booklet in which the ‘extortionist’ overseas Chinese were excluded from any notions of ‘Asia for the Asians’ or ‘Asian brotherhood’. This was heady stuff amid the diesel fumes and stale air.12
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 2
