The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  As a group of British colonies and protectorates federated in 1948 in preparation for independence, Malaya was ethnically diverse, with large Chinese, Malay, Indian, and aboriginal populations. The Communist Party drew its strength chiefly from the Chinese population, and its military wing, the Malayan Races Liberation Army (MRLA), retained a great many weapons from the war against the Japanese and was extremely violent. The ethnic Malays generally opposed communism, and Graham Greene’s sympathies were with them. About four-fifths of the country was ancient rainforest and mangrove swamps;2 the insurgents struck out from such terrain in a campaign of terror that especially targeted British rubber planters and those who worked for them.

  The response to the insurgents, however, was heavy-handed: hundreds of thousands of Chinese were resettled from their smallholdings to new fenced-in villages so that they could not supply the communists, an approach anticipating the ‘strategic hamlets’ used in Vietnam. There is evidence that in December 1948 Scots Guards shot twenty-four unarmed rubber workers in cold blood at Batang Kali,3 an event which, as late as 2015, was the subject of unsuccessful court proceedings in Britain aimed at forcing an inquiry.4

  Having worked for most of the Second World War with the BBC, Hugh Greene was a good choice to oversee psychological warfare in Malaya. Arriving in mid-September 1950, he had two main tasks: to alienate soldiers from their officers and civilians from the cause. Following BBC practice, he maintained that, to be effective, propaganda must be truthful and positive. He knew that they needed to make a sound case to intelligent people fighting for, or supporting, the MRLA. One of the practical difficulties he faced was that in a very rainy country leaflets would turn to pulp as soon as they were scattered, so he ordered them to be waterproofed and vastly increased their effect. Most importantly, he sought out able Chinese assistants who took over the campaign when he left a year later.5

  Graham arrived in Singapore on 27 November 1950 and when he saw Hugh was ‘over-joyed’6 – a term he almost never uses to describe his own feelings. Presumably at the request of Alex Korda, he met right away with the film-producer brothers Run Run and Run Me Shaw,7 who controlled a chain of cinemas. Run Run Shaw, who was to live to 106, was later known for developing the kung fu genre, and when asked what were his favourite films famously responded, ‘I particularly like films that make money’.8

  Greene soon found a new friend in Kuala Lumpur, Noël Ross, the ‘Resident’ or chief British adviser to the Sultan. Ross had been a Dominican novice and was sensitive to Greene’s struggles – the two attended Mass together. In Malacca, Greene prayed at the original burial site of St Francis Xavier. Visiting a dance hall, he met a young blue-eyed Englishman named Jolly who was enraptured by one of the taxi dancers, saw her home in the evenings, claimed she was a virgin, and hoped to marry her. When Greene returned to the hall on a later occasion, he saw the girl taxi dancing again and was told that Jolly had been shot to death in his car; he found the story pitiable and agonizing.9

  The thrill of seeing a new place subsided, and his own prayers reverted to the request for Catherine or death. On a train, he saw that officers travelled with their revolvers unholstered in case of attack, and he wished that one might happen. While much of his time was spent visiting besieged planters, the centrepiece of his visit was a trek with Gurkhas through the jungle in search of MRLA fighters. Equipped with anti-leech boots, a heavy pack, and a revolver – a rifle being too much for him to carry – Greene joined a fourteen-man patrol that moved not by path but by compass line, so as to cross many tracks looking for evidence of guerrillas. This meant facing the full density of the vegetation, getting slashed by branches, and sliding down steep hills slick with mud from the almost daily rainstorms.

  A march of nine miles took two and a half days. There was a stench of decay and the ceaseless buzz of insects. By the end of the first day, Greene was barely upright. Afraid of slowing the patrol, he hoped to be hit by a bullet.10 Sleeping on a bed of logs and leaves, Greene woke cramped, and on the second night dreamt that he was at the Ritz with Catherine, only to find that his rough bed was shared by Major Joey MacGregor-Cheers, a man who lived up to his benign name by listening for bird-calls at dawn and dusk. On the third morning Greene was retching as he marched. He had had leeches removed from a buttock and from his neck11 and was almost at the end of endurance when the Gurkhas spotted a squatter’s shack, and they emerged from the jungle at last. All they had found were two abandoned camps. It was a ‘routine’ patrol.12

  Routine soon brought Graham Greene face to face with a private enemy. On 23 December 1950, while buying drinks at a cold-storage depot he was approached by a man who introduced himself as Wheeler, and spoke of how at Berkhamsted School Greene had helped him with his Latin. This was his sometime friend and Carter’s sidekick, Augustus Henry Wheeler, who recalled their companionship wistfully, ‘What inseparables we were – you and me and old Carter.’13

  Graham wrote to Catherine: ‘What a lot began with Wheeler & Carter – suspicion, mental pain, loneliness, this damned desire to be successful that comes from a sense of inferiority, & here he was back again, after thirty-five years, in a shop in Kuala Lumpur, rather flash, an ardent polo player. And instead of saying “What hell you made my life 30 years ago,” one arranged to meet for drinks!’14 Always raw, those school memories had recently been dredged up in sessions with Strauss, so this sudden appearance of Wheeler must have been unspeakably strange. Greene says he forgot about the appointment for drinks, as if forgetting was a kind of revenge15 – more likely he chose to avoid the company of Wheeler, as one might forgo a night on the town with Judas Iscariot.

  Greene often fell in love with the troubled countries he visited, but not Malaya. The British soldiers seemed grim and graceless, and it was impossible to romanticize the rebels – especially, for example, when he had to photograph the naked body of a Malay constable bayoneted through the heart.16 He also learned that some of their victims, including children, had been trussed up and disembowelled.17 He spent a melancholy Christmas in Malacca, where at least he had the company of Hugh, who then went on to Singapore.

  In Kelantan, on the north-east side of the Malay Peninsula, Greene caught up with Noël Ross. In a celebration of the visit, he witnessed Thai boxing and was, after many drinks, induced to join in the Joget and Ronggeng traditional dances.18 While there he also had a long drinking session with a couple of British priests, one of whom denounced the church’s position on birth control; the three of them ended up in agreement that mortal sin was practically impossible as no one could really reject God with full understanding apart from a saint, who would cling to God in any event.19 Afterwards, he spent several more days with the Gurkhas in the dangerous region of Bentong, north-east of Kuala Lumpur, and travelled through the state of Negeri Sembilan, north of Malacca, using a train system notorious for derailments.20 He came safely through it all.

  29

  SHOULDER FLASH

  Greene’s hankering for risk ought to have been satisfied by the Malayan Emergency, but his eye was now on a different war. Since the late nineteenth century, the French had ruled what we now call Vietnam as three territories: Tonkin in the north, Annam in the centre, and Cochinchina in the south. During the Second World War, the Axis-aligned Vichy government administered policies determined by the Japanese, who took direct control in the last months of the war. The actions of Vichy France and the Japanese led to a famine killing not less than a million people in 1944–5.1 The strongest of a number of nationalist groups, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh, fought against the Japanese, with the ultimate goals of independence and socialist revolution. On 30 August 1945, the Annamite emperor Bao Dai, who served as an equal-opportunity puppet for the French and Japanese, abdicated, and Ho declared the independence of a unified Vietnam.

  However, colonialism dies hard. The British promptly transported a contingent of Frenchmen re-armed after their release from Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and some Gurkhas to Saigon and reclaimed Vi
etnam on behalf of France. After some arm-twisting from the French, the United States, notionally opposed to colonialism, not only acquiesced in the French claim to Vietnam but transported thousands of French soldiers there by sea.

  In the north, there was an army of 180,000 Nationalist Chinese, the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. An agreement in March 1946 got the Chinese out and provided for the independence of Vietnam within the French Union, but this arrangement did not last. In November, a dispute over customs led to the French shelling the port city of Haiphong, near Hanoi, with many civilian casualties. Throughout the following year, the better trained and equipped French army sought to defeat the Viet Minh in a single decisive battle, but they chose not to engage on such terms. A guerrilla army skilled at ambush, its numbers increased rapidly, and despite the best efforts of the French, Ho and the other leaders eluded capture.

  In the Chinese Civil War, the Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949 and became, along with the Soviets, a steady supplier of materiel to the Viet Minh. Meanwhile, the Americans, who provided the French with money and weaponry, were hardening into a Cold War frame of mind: they saw the Viet Minh as just another kind of communist and failed to understand the degree to which they were inspired by nationalism and open to friendship with them. The French controlled the cities and were strong in the south, while the Viet Minh were powerful in the countryside and in the north. The ineffectual Bao Dai was brought back from exile as a non-communist leader for Vietnam. In October 1950, at the Battle of Route Coloniale 4, in the northern part of Tonkin, near the Chinese border, the French were humiliated and it became evident that they might lose this war.

  While still in Kelantan, Greene had spent about two days with Sir William Jenkin, the Director of Intelligence Services in Malaya.2 Presumably, he also met James Fulton, who ran SIS operations in the Far East, or his deputy Maurice Oldfield, who later became head of the service – Fulton and Oldfield were stationed in Singapore.3 Their discussions almost certainly dealt with the situation in Vietnam. It is worth noting that, like Graham and Elisabeth, Hugh Greene was also recruited by MI6 and, even late in his life, continued to be debriefed about his journeys, especially to Greece and Germany.4 He may have been part of the consultations in Singapore.

  After these meetings, Graham arranged a visit to his friend Trevor Wilson in Vietnam. Also a Catholic and something of a womanizer, he had worked with Greene in Section V of MI6, handling Morocco and Tangier, and was described by Tim Milne as ‘admirably unorthodox’. He had a contrary streak and would deliberately wear incorrect or mixed uniforms to annoy the authorities and the police.5 He went on to work in Paris with Malcolm Muggeridge and then in the Pacific under Mountbatten. Now British Consul in Hanoi, he was in the middle of the crisis. While Greene maintained somewhat evasively that he first went to Vietnam just to visit Wilson, it was hardly a social call: he was headed to one of the most dangerous places in the world.

  While Greene was in Malaya, the French government appointed Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the charismatic sixty-one-year-old Commander-in-Chief of Western Union ground forces in Europe, to take over supreme military and civilian authority in Indochina. His immediate task was to protect Tonkin’s Red River Delta, which included Hanoi, Haiphong, and important rice-growing areas, from imminent encirclement and a possible seaborne invasion by Chinese and Viet Minh forces. At the time of his appointment, French women and children were about to be evacuated.6

  General de Lattre had star power. Whereas most French generals observed strict practice about uniforms and kepis and wound up looking like lesser versions of Charles de Gaulle, de Lattre had recently met with correspondents in white trousers and an open-necked shirt, projecting himself, especially to Americans, as a man of energy.7 He was photogenic, with a gaze that could be construed as either kind-hearted or calculating.

  In his first month of command he held the Red River Delta in a series of bloody engagements that lifted the morale of his forces – happily for the French, the feared invasion by the Chinese did not materialize. Two days before Greene’s arrival, de Lattre thanked the United States for providing nearly all the shells, artillery, and aeroplanes used by the French forces in recent fighting.8 He and his aides recognized that, as a representative of Life magazine, Graham Greene could have wide influence over American opinion. Moreover, as a Catholic with connections to France he might see things the French way.

  Greene was ready to be impressed. He wrote to Hugh, ‘This is the country, not Malaya.’9 He was dazzled by the sophistication of the women, and the air of ‘Gaiety in spite of grenades’10 – indeed, the restaurants were protected against grenades by wire mesh since, by Greene’s estimate, about a quarter of the city turned Viet Minh at night. The French army had a swagger that Greene liked, taking ‘war so much less seriously than the British – ‘ “La vie sportive.” ’11

  He had no sooner arrived in Saigon on 25 January 1951 than a car was put at his disposal and he was invited to an ‘informal’ dinner with de Lattre the following evening – it was as informal as a dinner in a palace where two hundred men are engaged in a musical changing of the guard can be. In any event, Greene did not have to wear black tie. Presumably from prior intelligence briefings, he took an immediate interest in areas controlled by Catholic bishops and by new religious sects. He visited a territory in the south controlled by the Cao Dai; a group founded in the 1920s, they mingled spiritualist, Catholic, Confucian, and Buddhist beliefs, and had their own pope and female cardinals, while venerating among their saints Sun Yat Sen and Victor Hugo. Their membership was estimated at two million and they had an army of twenty-five thousand supporting the French. Another group that Greene visited was the Hoa Hao, a recent Buddhist offshoot, numbering about eight hundred thousand, with a tougher fighting force than the Cao Dai. At this time, the Hoa Hao, too, were allied with the French.

  Greene went to Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta, south-west of Saigon, and met there with Colonel Jean Leroy, a fiercely anti-communist former paratrooper of mixed Vietnamese and French ancestry; he had put together the Unités Mobiles de Défense de la Chrétienté (UMDC), nominally Catholic paramilitary units, numbering about two thousand all told. Greene toured Leroy’s marshy fiefdom in an armoured boat with machine guns at the ready, and retained a good impression of the man who, though lapsed himself, seemed to inspire Catholics to fight in a way that no else could. Years later Greene contributed a foreword to Leroy’s memoirs. In his travels out from Saigon, Greene saw guard towers erected about every kilometre, reminding him of the structures erected along the Welsh border in the Middle Ages.

  He flew to Hanoi with de Lattre on 30 January 1951, and the general gave him the use of a small plane, a Morane-Saulnier, assuming he would use it to view the defence perimeter his forces had established in the Red River Delta. At this point, Greene did something the general did not expect. He and Trevor Wilson flew 120 kilometres south to Phat Diem, near the coast, where Bishop Le Huu Tu maintained a private army of two thousand to guard his Catholic diocese. Although Greene did not meet him yet, the bishop of the adjoining see of Bui-Chu, Pham Ngoc Chi, was also something of a prince-bishop. Both prelates regarded themselves as independent of, but allied to, the French.

  The historian Kevin Ruane has researched Foreign Office documents to find out what Wilson and Greene were doing.12 Although de Lattre and other French officials spoke of Vietnam eventually achieving full independence, Bao Dai was not a plausible leader – he would always appear a mere figurehead for a government still dominated by the old colonial master – so the French promises were suspect. It is well known that the Americans were searching, however ham-fistedly, for a ‘third way’ between colonialism and communism. The British too were looking for a non-communist path for Vietnam, giving special attention to the Catholic leadership of the country. This included not just the bishops, but local strongmen like Colonel Leroy. Wilson was extremely enthusiastic about this project, but it had the potential to outrage the French, as it meant underminin
g a policy for which their soldiers were dying.

  When they flew back to Hanoi, Greene and Wilson were shot at from within the defence perimeter. Unwisely, at dinner Greene joked about this to de Lattre, who was somewhat put out, since it suggested that Viet Minh fighters could easily cross through and conduct operations in a supposedly secure zone. De Lattre continued to treat Greene well, and gave him a shoulder flash of the First French Army, which, under his command, had liberated Strasbourg in November 1944. He took the novelist to a reunion of old comrades, where he said that while he must himself return to Saigon his wife would remain in Hanoi as a sign of French commitment never to abandon the city.13 It was a typically grand gesture, but even at his most inspiring de Lattre did not erase doubts as to the ultimate success of French arms in Indochina. Assured of his good will, Greene left on 5 February 1951.

  Back in Paris, where Catherine met him with warm clothes for a European winter,14 he received a telegram from Life asking whether he would be interested in writing not just on Malaya, but on Indochina as well, and he said that he would be glad to go back and do more research, especially if the fighting intensified.15 By the early summer, the magazine was pressing to make firm plans, and he finally went back in October. While sailing with Korda in mid-June, Greene wrote to Catherine from Epidaurus, en route to Athens, that while listening to the Jupiter Symphony at a night-time open-air concert, he had had an idea for a novel set in Indochina.16

  30

  THE CARDS IN HIS WALLET

  For the moment, Greene was the darling of Life magazine. His article on Malaya came out at the end of July. He wrote another, appearing in September, on Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), who would one day be described by John Cornwell as ‘Hitler’s pope’ – unfairly, according to Sir Martin Gilbert who maintains that the pope did in fact stand up against German persecution of Jews and saved a great many lives.1 The matter continues to be debated, albeit with caution as documents released from the Vatican archives are examined and assessed. Greene would have been surprised by the controversy: he had no doubt about the pope’s attitude. He recounted a story told by his friend the Marchese Bernardo Patrizi, whose father approached the then Cardinal Pacelli at a party and said that it was good for Germany to have a strong leader to deal with the communists. Having served in Germany as papal nuncio, Pacelli replied: ‘For goodness sake, Joseph, don’t talk nonsense. The Nazis are infinitely worse.’2