The African record was particularly impressive. At the beginning of 1943, Nyasaland had contributed 20,000 men to the King’s African Rifles, and a further 103,000 were undertaking war work, most in the Northern Rhodesian copper mines. This represented over a third of the adult male population.50 By this date, the colonial authorities were running into difficulties finding men, especially labourers for work on the airfields and bases in Egypt and North Africa. As in the last war, there was pressure from the high command for black men to release white for the fighting line, and it intensified during 1943 and early 1944 as forces were being concentrated for the D-Day landings in France.51
In July 1943, the Kenyan government reported that it had reached the limit, and, with 67,000 men already in the army, could find no more.52 In general, ‘portering’ was unpopular throughout East Africa despite the government’s ‘careful propaganda’, which proved ineffective in the face of folk memory. ‘Hardships and losses of the last campaign are vividly recalled and the feeling we broke faith still lingers,’ the governor of Uganda informed Whitehall.53 Both he and his counterpart in Tanganyika were dismayed by the lack of volunteers of suitable physique and stamina, and the latter feared that he might be driven to compel men to come forward.54 Somehow, the quotas were met by the colonial governments but, as they pointed out, at the cost of taking men away from the production of war matériel.55
A balance between men and women in uniform and those in overalls producing food and munitions was vital. ‘This is not a war of men but a war of highly specialised machines,’ Churchill told Mackenzie King in August 1941.56 Outside Canada, the empire’s potential for the manufacture of sophisticated weaponry was small, leaving dominions and colonies in the southern hemisphere almost entirely dependent on Britain and the United States. There was, however, an attempt in July 1940, to rationalise the production and distribution of war materials in this region after a conference of the governments concerned in Delhi.
As a result, there was a degree of specialisation and cooperation. Australia, which possessed an advanced machine-tool industry, began producing light machine-guns, twenty-four pounders and anti-aircraft guns in August 1941, some of which were shipped to Britain until early 1942. South Africa’s metallurgical industries were responsible for aircraft hangars and collapsible bridges, but was initially hampered by a lack of technicians for more complex work.57 New Zealand manufactured wireless sets, and the tropical colonies contributed raw materials with Ceylon swiftly raising its rubber output after the loss of Malaya.
This crash programme filled some gaps, but the final statistics for the imperial industrial effort reflect the concentration of manufacturing capacity within the empire:
These figures do not include the armoured cars and mortars made in South Africa and rifles and ammunition manufactured in India.
A substantial part of the final bill for equipment, commodities and services provided by the empire was footed by Britain. At the outbreak of war, all Indian and colonial sterling reserves held in London were effectively frozen by being declared non-convertible. They were subsequently commandeered for the British war effort, and thereafter colonial imports were paid for by credit, treasury bills. The result was that Britain’s debt to its colonies rose from £150 million in 1939 to £454 million in 1945. India benefited from this arrangement for, under the 1940 Defence Expenditure Agreement, Britain promised to meet all the expenses of Indian troops deployed outside the subcontinent. India, which had owed Britain £350 million in 1939, was itself owed £1,200 million when the war ended.
* * *
Britain faced other, less tangible reckonings in 1945. During the war, Churchill had banned a poster which showed a child with rickets playing in a dank and gloomy yard, with walls inscribed ‘Disease’ and ‘Neglect’, and the caption, ‘Your Britain For It Was’.58 Other approved and less trenchant propaganda conveyed the same message; the people’s war would be the prelude to an era of national regeneration in which ignorance, poverty, shoddy housing, unemployment and sickness would be eliminated by a benevolent state. How this would come about had been the subject of countless lectures, discussions and debates organised by the services’ educational staff which, in five years, had produced fighting men less deferential, more politically radical and aware of the world than their predecessors in 1918. They contributed, though not decisively as is commonly believed, to Labour’s victory in July 1945, and were by and large excited by the prospects it brought. Among troops stationed in India and the Far East, the army censors discovered ‘a widespread feeling that they [Labour] would produce some new and magic methods of solving the problems of reconstruction’.59
Coloured soldiers also expected a brighter future. According to Arthur Creech Jones, Labour’s expert on colonial matters, black servicemen shared the aspirations of their British comrades.60 In October 1945, a survey of Indian soldiers revealed that after the war they wanted, in order of preference: a comfortable home, a pension, a loving wife, children, an understanding of how to take precautions against malaria, one or two cows, schools, a maternity and general hospital, a gun for shooting game and a horse.61
For many Indian soldiers the experience of service on the Italian front in 1944–5 had been a revelation of the extent of their country’s backwardness, and had left them with a strong urge to return home and put matters right. Knowledge appeared to be the key to national salvation, and some sepoys demanded a national education system that promoted the teaching of technical subjects. One observed: ‘People of the West are far advanced in Art, Culture and Social Reform. In every respect India stands last. The main cause is too many castes, and our people will never unite together to do anything.’62
The war had also encouraged African soldiers to examine themselves and the world outside their villages. ‘The African is feeling his feet and is looking round with different eyes,’ wrote the novelist Gerald Hanley, who commanded East African askaris in Burma. After witnessing the poverty of India, the soldiers’ respect for the Indians had dissolved. Most significantly, the African was acquiring new tastes: ‘If a man learns to smoke, eat tinned food and to read newspapers, he will generally wish to continue satisfying these appetites and he will need to earn money to do so.’ One casualty of this revolution was the old African culture. Asked why the men did not sing traditional songs, a Rhodesian askari replied, ‘Why should we sing such stuff any longer? We have newspapers and ideas like Europeans. This music belongs to the old men and times that are gone.’63 But old loyalty remained strong; Hanley’s soldiers were untouched by the political radicalism of Africa’s small educated élite. ‘The feeling for “Kingi Georgi” among the askaris’, Hanley asserted, ‘is not just a “bwana’s” sundowner story, but a real thing … they regard him as the King of all the British and treat him accordingly.’64
12
The Defence of Archaic Privilege: The Empire Restored, 1942–5
Just over a year after the end of the war, Willie Gallacher, the Communist MP for West Fife, declared to the Commons that, ‘The British Empire [is] handed over to the American pawnbroker – our only hope.’ To prove his point and taunt the Conservatives, he then quoted a remark Churchill had made to Roosevelt in August 1941, ‘Without America, the Empire cannot stand.’1 Like all maverick MPs, Gallacher had a knack of bluntly expressing home truths which other politicians preferred to ignore or evade.
Since 1941, Britain had been mortgaged to the United States. As the war had progressed, it became clear that the loss of financial independence had reduced the government’s freedom of choice when it came to making decisions about the empire’s future. American opinion could not be disregarded because American fighting men were bearing the brunt of the war against Japan. Victories in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945 were making it possible for Britain to regain its Far Eastern colonies. For large numbers of Americans this was not a worthy cause; many asked why American manhood should be sacrificed in order that Britain could continue to lord it over Malays and Burme
se.
Emotional anti-imperialism was endemic in America. The general line was that all empires, including the British, were parasitic tyrannies which were fast becoming obsolete. ‘The age of empires is dead,’ proclaimed the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles. For him and millions of Americans the war was a crusade for democracy and human rights throughout the world. Dynamic historical forces were gathering momentum which would create a new world order in which no country could expect the right to rule others without their consent. The man on the sidewalk concurred; opinion polls taken in 1942 and 1945 suggested that 56 per cent of Americans believed that the British empire was in some way ‘oppressive’.2
This response was predictable given the American press’s treatment of Britain’s empire. ‘The British game never varies,’ alleged the Chicago Tribune in April 1945 in a typical attack. ‘What Britain has she will hold. What other nations obtain Britain will share.’ Evidence of this rapacity, and the chicanery that invariably accompanied it, was the speed with which British officials took up the reins of power after American troops had liberated the Solomon Islands. America was in the throes of building a new, fairer world in which there was no place for district officers laying down the law, and the Tribune demanded an international debate on the future of all territories ‘where native populations have been long oppressed’.3 Ironically, and unknown to the Tribune’s high-minded editor, the newly-returned British administrators had been protesting at the recent use of USAAF aircraft in bombing raids on the villages of pro-Japanese Solomon Islanders.4
Behind visceral anti-imperialism lay that schoolroom version of the American War of Independence in which liberty-loving colonists rose up against the arrogant and despotic George III and his brutal redcoats. It was no accident that British apologists for the empire were often branded as ‘Tories’, the term of abuse which had been applied to loyalists in 1776. At a more sophisticated political level, there was a strong feeling that the protectionist empire and the sterling block were major barriers to the creation of open free markets throughout the world, to which the United States government was committed.
The British were also devious and, whatever might be said in public, their principal war aim was always the preservation of their empire and world power. Major-General Patrick Hurley, a former Oklahoma cowboy proud of his quickness on the draw, made it his business to sniff out British perfidy and alert the State Department. In 1942 he was in Persia where, he claimed, the British were siphoning off Lend Lease materials to further their imperial ambitions, which also involved a hugger-mugger deal with the Russians. Two years later, when he was serving in the Far East, Hurley accused Britain, France and the Netherlands of making secret preparations to repossess their old colonies despite the promises made by the Allies in the Atlantic Charter.5 Hurley’s was an extreme case of anti-British paranoia, but his sentiments were not exceptional; there were occasions when Roosevelt inveighed against British duplicity and greed.
Hurley and other American anti-imperialists set the greatest store by the Atlantic Charter. It was an idealistic statement of Anglo-American war objectives, which had been agreed between Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941. For many, perhaps the majority, of those who read it, the Atlantic Charter was a blueprint for a new and just world order. Taken literally, it appeared to undermine the moral base for all empires. The President and the Prime Minister had pledged themselves to uphold ‘the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.’
Churchill disliked this phraseology which, taken at face value, challenged Britain’s right to rule her colonies. On reflection, he satisfied himself that in the case of those colonies in Japanese hands the ‘sovereign rights’ concerned were those of Britain and not the indigenous inhabitants. Churchill also conveniently assumed that the rest of the colonial empire was exempt from the Atlantic Charter. His deputy, the Labour leader Clement Attlee, thought otherwise and, like many within Britain and the empire, believed the Charter had universal application. The Colonial Office adopted a grudging, middle-of-the-road position, indicating that in the ‘far distant future’ some colonies might achieve dominion status. Others never would; strategic considerations demanded that Britain held on perpetually to Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and Aden, and for various other reasons could not relinquish control over the Gambia, Borneo, Malaya, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Fiji, the Falkland Islands and British Honduras (Belize).6 Those responsible for war propaganda in the colonies were instructed to stay as mute as possible about the Charter and its implications.7
One way to sidestep the moral dilemma created by the Atlantic Charter was to persuade the Americans that the empire’s subjects were not downtrodden and exploited. From 1941 onwards, the government went to considerable lengths to educate American politicians and opinion-makers, a process which continued for the next twenty years. The message was always the same: British colonial government was unselfish, humane, just and always conducted in the best interests of people who would be lost without it. The star wartime apologist was Lord Hailey, a former administrator in India with a deep understanding of African affairs, who embodied everything that was good and honourable in a colonial mandarin. After hearing this Olympian figure expound the virtues of British rule to a group of American intellectuals, a Colonial Office official sourly commented, ‘What a stupid tragedy it would be to take the management of great affairs from men like Hailey and give them to the boys with thick-lensed glasses, long hair, and longer words nasally intoned.’8
Behind these remarks lay a half-hidden welter of anti-American prejudices. Proud of their own rectitude, the British, then and later, were sensitive to moral criticism from Americans. Pre-war hostility towards America and its people had been restricted to the upper and upper-middle classes, according to George Orwell. These feelings were, he believed, based upon distrust of the United States’s expanding commercial power and its peoples’ egalitarian outlook. By contrast, the working class had been entranced by American films and popular music and impressed by American living standards.9 As the war proceeded British attitudes fell into line, as the presence of large numbers of American servicemen made itself felt. They were commonly seen as ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’, although Orwell oddly blamed the new, resentful anti-Americanism on the fact that all United States personnel were middle class, and therefore unlikely to get on well with the British working class.
It was upper-class Englishmen who dealt with Americans at the highest levels, an experience that many found trying. John Maynard Keynes, who negotiated wartime financial deals, found the American accent discordant and called it ‘Cherokee’ English.10 Harold Macmillan’s patrician sensibilities were bruised by American manners, speech and verbosity. How Americans may have felt about him and his kind can be guessed from his revealing observation that traditional British snobbery disappeared overseas, and was replaced ‘by the bond of contempt for and antipathy to foreigners’.11
One persistent source of resentment was American allegations about the mistreatment of colonial races. The British were quick to counter-attack, launching their offensive in an area where America was vulnerable, domestic racism. The socialite commentator Nancy Cunard, appealing in 1942 for legislation to outlaw the colour bar, claimed that whereas the British displayed ‘unthinking prejudice’ towards blacks, Americans showed ‘rabid hatred’.12 A visit to Monroe, Georgia, where four negroes had been lynched in 1946, provoked the left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg to boast that such barbarism would never have occurred within the colonies or in Britain, where there was ‘no racial discrimination or practically none’.13 This was not entirely true; but segregation and lynchings in the South and race riots everywhere made American sermons about colonial oppression sound like humbug. This point was made obliquely by Gandhi in a personal message to Roosevelt in 1942, and was not well received.14
The roots and histor
y of Anglo-American bickering have been exhaustively studied, and sometimes the results give the impression that relations between the Allies were an unending and unedifying dog fight. This was not so, thanks in large part to the characters of Churchill and Roosevelt. Not always smooth, their association rested on a warm personal friendship, mutual admiration and a remarkable degree of candour on both sides. A further strong bond was the common determination to beat Hitler, even though, during 1942 and 1943, American commanders suspected Britain of having cold feet when it came to getting to grips with the German army in Western Europe.
When it came to prosecuting the war, more percipient Americans detected two Britains, strangely at odds with each other. In April 1942, the columnist Walter Lippmann told Keynes that there existed in America ‘a strong feeling that Britain east of Suez is quite different from Britain at home, that the war in Europe is a war of liberation and the war in Asia is the defence of archaic privilege.’15 Up to a point, Lippmann was right, although when he was writing the ‘archaic privilege’ of the old colonial order was withering. It had been physically overturned in shameful circumstances when Singapore fell, and its ethical foundations were being eroded by public criticism in Britain and the United States.
British public opinion, as much as American anti-imperialism, made it impossible for the British government to put the clock back. Henceforward, the empire’s rulers knew that for the colonies to survive in the post-war world they would have to jettison the maxim ‘Nanny knows best’, and instead listen and respond to the aspirations of their subjects. The point was made by Lord Hailey in the Spectator on 17 March 1942, in which he discussed the difficulties of restoring imperial government in the Far East. Early in 1945 Lord Lugard, then in his eighty-eighth year, looked benignly on the new spirit abroad in the world. A new age was imminent and it would be Britain’s duty to extend to the colonies those fundamental freedoms for which the war was being fought. It was now the moment for the colonies to begin their apprenticeship for home rule.16
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 63
