Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  ANTHONY EDEN died of liver cancer on 14 January 1977, after retiring with his second wife to Rose Bower at Broad Chalke, Wiltshire. He was seventy-nine.

  DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER and MAMIE retired to their farm near Gettysburg. He died of congestive heart failure on 28 March 1969 and is buried near his memorial library in Abilene, Kansas. His reputation as president has markedly improved as time moves on.

  KING FARUQ I, weighing 300 pounds and described as ‘a stomach with a head’, died in exile after choking at Rome’s Île de France restaurant on 18 March 1965. He was forty-five. I have met young Egyptians who are nostalgic for his era, a vibrant time in Egypt’s cultural life.

  GENERAL CHARLES DE GAULLE died of a ruptured blood vessel at home in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises on 9 November 1970. He had installed an electricity meter and paid for his own stamps and haircuts. He was almost eighty. He has dwarfed all subsequent post-war French leaders.

  SAM GIANCANA was shot dead in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1975, while sawn-up pieces of Johnny Rosselli were found floating in a barrel off Florida a year later. Having escaped prosecution one last time in 1986, Santo Trafficante lived modestly in Miami Beach and Tampa, and died peacefully the following year.

  PRESIDENT HO CHI MINH died of heart failure aged seventy-nine on 2 September 1969. His body is displayed in a mausoleum on Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honour. United Vietnam would fight China and invade Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The People’s Republic of Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, and conducts naval exercises with the US so great are its anxieties about China, which has the autism of all great powers.

  LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON died of a heart attack on his ranch on 22 January 1973, aged sixty-four, after a lifetime of physical indulgence. It was the day before a ceasefire was declared in Vietnam.

  BOBBY KENNEDY was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan on 6 June 1968 during his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination. He is buried at Arlington Cemetery near JFK. His murderer remains in prison.

  JOMO KENYATTA ruled Kenya until his death from old age on 22 August 1978, when his deputy, Daniel arap Moi, replaced him. Moi ruled, dictatorially and corruptly, until 2002.

  NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV lived on a reduced pension of 400 roubles a month in Moscow until his death from a heart attack on 11 September 1971. He was not given a state funeral.

  KIM IL SUNG died of a heart attack aged eighty-two on 8 July 1994. Despite many North Koreans being dependent on US food aid to avoid starvation, Kim was embalmed and immortalized in the Kumusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang. Visitors enter this on travelators. The monument is estimated to have cost anything between $100 million and $900 million. His young grandson Kim Eun rules North Korea.

  MAJOR-GENERAL EDWARD LANSDALE died on 22 February 1987 at home in McLean, Virginia, where he lived with Pat Kelly, whom he took up with again after the death of his wife Helen. A memorial Mass was held in a university chapel in Manila.

  GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR died at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on 5 April 1964. He is buried within his own memorial museum in Norfolk, Virginia, where his hundred or more military decorations are displayed.

  IAIN MACLEOD died of a heart attack on 20 July 1970, a month after Prime Minister Edward Heath had appointed him chancellor of the exchequer.

  HAROLD MACMILLAN, FIRST EARL OF STOCKTON, died aged ninety-two on 29 December 1986 at home at Birch Grove. His last words were ‘I think I will go to sleep now.’ Some claim greatness because of the housing he built.

  MAO ZEDONG ruled China until his death aged eighty-two on 9 September 1976. He was succeeded by the reformer Deng Xiaoping. The ruling Communist Party still venerates Mao’s legacy, though not the 100 million deaths he caused, which are said to be the 30 per cent he ‘got wrong’.

  ROBERT McNAMARA served as president of the World Bank, 1968–81, and died aged ninety-three on 6 July 2009, having very publicly repented of his former ways.

  ROLANDO MASFERRER was killed by a car bomb in Miami in 1975.

  GENERAL JACQUES MASSU retired from the French army in 1969 and lived at Conflans-sur-Loing until his death on 26 October 2002.

  MOHAMMED MOSSADEQ died of cancer on 5 March 1967; Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, was deposed in 1979 and, after covert treatment for cancer in the US, died in Cairo in 1980, where he is buried in a mosque next to his brother-in-law King Faruq.

  PRESIDENT GAMAL ABDUL NASSER OF EGYPT died suddenly of a heart attack in Cairo on 28 September 1970. A lifelong heavy smoker, he was aged fifty-two. An estimated five million people attended his funeral, including a weeping Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who fainted twice.

  JAWAHARLAL NEHRU died of a ruptured aorta on 27 May 1964, after years of hypertension and chronic overwork. India remains the world’s largest democracy. He built it.

  KIM ‘KERMIT’ ROOSEVELT died on 8 June 2000 in a retirement home in Maryland. His memoirs were controversial within the CIA.

  MOBUTU SESE SEKO ruled Zaire as a brutal kleptocracy until 1997, when he was driven into exile. He died later that year in Rabat, Morocco, and is buried in a Christian cemetery called Pax. The full name he awarded himself translates as ‘The all-powerful warrior who because of his endurance and inflexible will to win goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’. ‘Thief’ would be shorter.

  LUIS TARUC, the Huk leader, was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, but was pardoned in 1968 by President Ferdinand Marcos, whom he thereafter supported. He died of a heart attack aged ninety-one in 2005 in Quezon City.

  FIELD MARSHAL SIR GERALD TEMPLER died of lung cancer and pneumonia in London on 25 October 1979 after a final pink gin had put him to sleep.

  MOSHE TSHOMBE, the Katangan separatist, was exiled to Spain after Congolese independence, while Mobutu’s courts tried and sentenced him to death in absentia. In June 1967 his plane was hijacked to Algeria, where he was kept under arrest until his death ‘from heart failure’ in 1969. Who was responsible for the hijacking has never been clarified.

  Acknowledgements

  Andrew Wylie and Scott Moyers of the Wylie Agency helped shape the initial proposal on which this book hangs like a fat man on a skeleton. I must thank Ron Suskind, whose blending of contemporary history and reportage I enormously admire, for a valuable discussion on how to interweave complex narrative plotlines while he was trying to drive a car in Washington traffic.

  I am very grateful to Hugh Bicheno for his expert advice on Cuba and Latin America, and for unravelling the more tortuous paragraphs and sentences with such good grace. Yang Lian explained much about Mao Zedong through the Chairman’s poetry, as has my great friend George Walden, who served as a British diplomat in Moscow during the Missile Crisis and in Beijing amid the Cultural Revolution. Professor Frank Dikötter in Hong Kong also recommended some very useful reading on the People’s Liberation Army, while Dr John Adamson reminded me of Nehru’s world history. Professor Jonathan Haslam set me to rights about Soviet foreign policy through his excellent monograph on that subject. At a very early juncture Professor William Hay made several helpful suggestions about the distinctive traditions within US foreign policy over a much longer period than is directly addressed in this book, notably as refracted through the works of Professor Walter McDougall of Penn State. My wife Linden has constantly reminded me of the needs of the general reader, even if I took a strategic decision to focus on Indian foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s rather than the last days of the Raj, which her family lived through. Both Wendy Wolf at Viking in New York and Georgina Morley at Macmillan in London have done sterling work on a manuscript whose possibilities they generously and jointly recognized early on. Working with them has been a pleasure, though I let them imagine they terrify me for form’s sake. In our sixth collaboration, Peter James has been a sensitive and painstaking editor.

  The London Library, the Liddell Hart Military Archiv
e at King’s College London and the Imperial War Museum have been hugely helpful with materials, though this is primarily a work of description and interpretation. Finally, I am grateful to the Nonino family for an amazing prize that enabled me to finish the book at my own pace. The book is dedicated to someone I admire, whose company I enjoy and through whose writing I was intrigued by this wider world as a young man – Sir Vidia Naipaul – and to his wife Nadira, who talks so intelligently about Pakistan. They are joined on the dedication page by two other dear friends, Nancy and Andrea, who have shown Lindy and me incredible hospitality in their beautiful home in Venice.

  Michael Burleigh

  Kennington, London

  May 2012

  Notes

  1: Japan Opens Pandora’s Box

  1. Peter Thompson, The Battle for Singapore. The True Story of the Greatest Catastrophe of World War II (London 2006), p. 39.

  2. Margaret Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun. The British in Malaya 1880 –1960 (London 2000), p. 237.

  3. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies. Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London 2004), p. 226.

  4. Masanobu Tsuji, Singapore. The Japanese Version (London 1962), p. 272.

  5. Liddell Hart Archive King’s College London (hereafter LHAKCL), Spooner Papers 1/38a, diary entry dated 7 February 1942.

  6. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 132.

  7. Max Hastings citing M. N. Roy in All Hell Let Loose. The World at War 1939–1945 (London 2011), p. 417.

  8. T. N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge 1999), p. 38.

  9. David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945–1967 (Oxford 2011), p. 162, and John Dower, War without Mercy. Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York 1986).

  10. Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters. The Chinese Civil War 1946–1950 (Stanford, Calif. 2003), p. 71.

  11. Chong-sik Lee, Counterinsurgency in Manchuria. The Japanese Experience 1931–1940, Rand Corporation Memo RM-5012-ARPA (1967), pp. 82ff. This is probably one of the most neglected documents in the history of counter-insurgency warfare.

  12. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 113–14.

  13. Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution. China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford 2004), p. 178, and pp. 140–1 for the hair and dress points.

  14. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao. The Unknown Story (London 2006), pp. 42–5.

  15. Ibid., pp. 16–17, is crucial on Mao’s worldview.

  16. David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, Mass. 1994), p. 259, is based on interviews with Yenan veterans.

  17. Jonathan Fenby, The Penguin History of Modern China. The Fall and Rise of a Great Power 1850–2008 (London 2008), pp. 299ff.

  18. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 250.

  19. Ibid., pp. 270–2.

  20. Jonathan Fenby, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost (London 2005), pp. 440–2.

  21. Richard Harris Smith, OSS. The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Guilford, Conn. 2005), pp. 241ff, and Maochun Yu, OSS in China. Prelude to Cold War (Annapolis, Md 1996).

  22. Bruce Cumings, The Korean War. A History (New York 2010), pp. 51–7.

  23. Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY 2003), pp. 27–32.

  24. Andrew Gordon, A History of Modern Japan. From Tokugawa Times to the Present (Oxford 2003), pp. 178ff and 191ff.

  25. Hastings, All Hell Let Loose, pp. 420–1.

  26. Judith Brown, ‘India’, in Judith Brown and Wm Roger Louis (eds), The Twentieth Century (Oxford 1999), vol. 4 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, p. 433.

  27. Ibid., p. 419.

  28. Stanley Wolpert, Shameful Flight. The Last Years of the British Empire in India (Oxford 2009), pp. 44–6 and 60–3.

  29. Hastings, All Hell Let Loose, pp. 422–4.

  30. Patrick French, India. An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People (London 2011), p. 25, for the holy monkey on the loose in Lucknow.

  31. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London 1985), pp. 200–1.

  32. Stanley Karnow, In our Own Image. America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York 1989).

  33. H. W. Brands, Bound to Empire. The United States and the Philippines (New York 1992), p. 199.

  34. Benedict Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion. A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley, Calif. 1977, reprinted Lanham, Md 2002), pp. 26ff.

  35. Nicholas Tarling, A Sudden Rampage. The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia 1941–1945 (London 2001), pp. 154–9.

  36. Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War. A Concise International History (Oxford 2008), p. 30.

  37. Ibid., p. 30.

  38. See the excellent essay by Paul Orders, ‘Adjusting to a New Period in World History: Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism’, in David Ryan and Victor Pungong (eds), The United States and Decolonisation. Power and Freedom (New York 2000), pp. 63–84.

  39. William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh. A Life (New York 2000) is the finest life in English.

  40. The best account of these years is Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh. The Missing Years 1919–1941 (London 2003), pp. 43ff.

  41. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam. A History (London 1983, revised edn 1994), p. 135.

  42. Peter Macdonald, Giap. The Victor in Vietnam (London 1993).

  43. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, pp. 255–6.

  44. Archimedes Patti, Why Vietnam? Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley, Calif. 1980), pp. 83–8.

  45. David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945. The Quest for Power (Berkeley, Calif. 1995), p. 289.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, p. 323.

  48. Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘Vietnam and Laos: The Impasse of War Communism’, in Stephane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass. 1999), pp. 566–7.

  49. Smith, OSS, p. 318.

  50. Ibid., p. 330.

  51. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, p. 361.

  52. Martin Thomas, ‘French Imperial Reconstruction and the Development of the Indochina War 1950-1954’, in Mark Atwood Lawrence and Frederik Logevall (eds), The First Vietnam War. Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, Mass. 2008), pp. 131–5.

  53. Frank Giles, The Locust Years. The Story of the French Fourth Republic 1946–1958 (London 1991), p. 58.

  54. Macdonald, Giap, pp. 78–85.

  55. Patti, Why Vietnam?, p. 380.

  56. Charles Cruickshank, Special Operations Executive in the Far East (Oxford 1983), pp. 191ff.

  57. Robert McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War. The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence 1945–49 (Ithaca, NY 1981), p. 35.

  58. Ibid., p. 36.

  59. See especially John D. Legge, Sukarno. A Political Biography (London 1972), pp. 149ff.

  60. McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War, p. 95.

  61. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars. The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London 2007) p. 173.

  62. Patrick Heren, ‘The Death Knell of the British Empire’, Standpoint (November 2010), pp. 38–41. The title is misleading since the piece concerns the fate of the Dutch East Indies.

  63. Audrey Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy. The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (Seattle 1995), pp. 31–3.

  2: Harry Truman’s World

  1. See Wilson D. Miscamble, ‘Roosevelt, Truman and the Development of Postwar Grand Strategy’, Orbis (2009) 53, pp. 556–8.

  2. Joseph G. Goulden, The Best Years 1945–1950 (New York 1976), pp. 91–2.

  3. Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy. Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New York 198
3), p. 172.

  4. Alonzo Hamby, ‘The Mind and Character of Harry S. Truman’, in Michael Lacey (ed.), The Truman Presidency (Cambridge 1991), p. 37.

  5. David McCullough, Truman (New York 1992), pp. 340–2.

  6. Robert Dallek, The Lost Peace. Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope 1945–1953 (New York 2010), pp. 154–7.

  7. Ibid., p. 101.

  8. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower. US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford 2008), p. 603, for Truman’s words.

  9. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan. An American Life (London 2012), p. 268.

  10. For an excellent discussion of the evolution of containment, see Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York 1994), pp. 447–55.

  11. Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London, 2001), pp. 810–13.

  12. Goulden, The Best Years, p. 259.

  13. Miscamble, ‘Roosevelt, Truman’, p. 569.

  14. Stephen Ambrose, Rise to Globalism. American Foreign Policy 1938–1970 (Baltimore 1971), p. 297.

  15. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston 1980), p. 445.

  16. McCullough, Truman, p. 753.

  17. Dallek, The Lost Peace, pp. 221–4, is excellent on this shift.

  18. See the fascinating history of US embassy architecture by Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy. Building America’s Embassies (New York 1998, revised edn Princeton 2011), pp. 126–31.

  19. Robert Beisner, Dean Acheson. A Life in the Cold War (Oxford 2006), p. 174.

  20. McCullough, Truman, pp. 754–5.

  21. Andrew Alexander, America and the Imperialism of Ignorance. US Foreign Policy since 1945 (London 2012), pp. 132–7, has a good discussion of McCarthyism.

  22. For an interesting discussion of foreign policy decision-making see Joseph Marion Jones, The Fifteen Weeks. An Inside Account of the Genesis of the Marshall Plan (San Diego 1955), pp. 109ff.