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In the last months of 1945 the troops of the British Empire reconstituted the great crescent of land that Britain had occupied before 1941, and then fanned out beyond it. As in the First World War, the scope of empire actually increased as the formal fighting ended. The British had finally come to dominate the entire great area that curved from Bengal through Burma and Thailand on to Singapore. Indeed, in 1945 and 1946 the British military empire in Asia stretched triumphant over an even wider territory, from the Persian railhead at Zahedan to New Guinea and the Australian seas. For a time, British armies and administrators occupied half of French Indo-China and large parts of Indonesia. The vision would have dizzied even Lord Curzon. Certainly, to India’s Congress, the British seemed alarmingly reluctant to surrender control over the Indian Army that had served them so well against the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. In 1945 South East Asia Command was apparently determined to deploy Indian troops not only in Burma, Malaya and Singapore, but also in Thailand and what had been French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia. If they got their way, Salisbury’s great barracks in an Oriental Sea would be spilling blood for the British Empire for years to come. Indian journalists scanned the speeches and press comments of British ministers for any signs of a change of heart. Why had the king’s broadcast to the nation, the first of Attlee’s administration, not mentioned Asia? One newspaper remarked: ‘Perhaps messages of freedom, democracy and lasting peace, liberal as they are, will have application to no wider an area than Europe.’1 Another gloomily and correctly concluded that ‘the war in the East will not come to an end with the defeat of Japan’.
Tired veterans of the war in Europe headed east in cramped troopships: a new forgotten army. A young captain, Derek van den Boegarde, had witnessed the long push from Normandy into Germany, and as the war in Europe ended he had witnessed the horror of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On 1 July, he departed from Liverpool on the SS Carthage, a new passenger liner, for the build-up of the liberation of Southeast Asia. It was a grotesque parody of the stately voyages that had connected Britain’s Asian empire before the war. Later he would recall his arrival at the Gateway of India, where his ship was greeted by waving men being demobilized back to Britain. Bombay seemed squalid: ‘The stench was heavy: oil, bodies, dirt; somewhere, faintly, spices.’ Then, immediately, came the long rail journey to Bengal. ‘The India I saw, from that terrible train, was sere, desolate. It was a fearful let-down… I had expected story-book splendour. Instead we trailed for days across stony, beige desert.’ He detrained at Calcutta to see an Indian porter being beaten by ‘a fat, ginger-haired, moustached, red-faced stocky little major from Transport. Screaming. Thrashing at the cringing Indian with his swagger cane… My first sight and sound of the Raj at work.’ Fifty years on, he wrote that the memory of ‘the cowering humbled body’ in the crowded Seddah station repulsed his mind even more than the desolation of the bleak heaths and pines of Germany. In Calcutta van den Bogaerde was put to work memorizing maps and photographs of the beaches and mangroves of the Malay peninsula.2 In the event the only action that occurred in his time in India came after a screening of the film Objective, Burma! when the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers returning from the Arakan front took umbrage at the sight of Errol Flynn liberating Burma single-handedly, and set fire to the cinema.3 Years later, Dirk Bogarde, as he styled himself after the war, would come under attack for his own portrayal of one of his commanding officers, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, in the film A Bridge too Far.
After celebrating VJ Day in Calcutta, chaotic with deserters, he left for Southeast Asia. Five weeks after the Japanese surrender he arrived in Singapore. The harbourside was still in ruins, and the city had the odour of defeat, which ‘meandered through the paint-peeling streets of Singapore like a slowly dispersing marsh gas, lying in pockets here and there, loitering in rooms and corridors, bitter, clinging, sickening’. Ex-prisoners of war still haunted the hotels and bars; internees told terrible stories of the chaos and incompetence of the fall. Yet colonial society was coming to life, with all its attendant snobberies. Van den Bogaerde noted that, as in 1941, the memsahibs of Singapore refused to speak to mere soldiers. The city was ‘a white-washed bastard Tunbridge Wells – with palm trees’. Inching across the sea in a landing ship, his detail passed south, across the equator and into the Java Sea towards Jakarta. It was a cramped, nauseating journey for the soldiers. Van den Bogaerde landed in Tanjong Priok harbour amid a bustling scene of Javanese dock labour, Japanese prisoners of war – ‘naked except for their boots, peaked caps and flapping loin cloths’ – and turbaned Indian soldiers. The air reeked of burnt rubber, from a smouldering store, after a bomb attack by armed revolutionaries. Three and a half months after the surrender of Japan, van den Bogaerde had arrived in the middle of a combat zone.4
This vast new deployment placed a colossal burden on South East Asia Command, which by the end of year had become, in the words of Mountbatten’s political adviser Esler Dening, ‘more and more a purely British Indian affair’.5 India had to find troops, not only for Burma, Malaya and Singapore, but also for Thailand and what had been French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia. The British were even readying to send detachments of the Indian Army to occupied Japan; this was the first and the last ‘British Commonwealth’ force of its kind. Some of the first forces to enter were the 536 British and Australian sailors and marines who landed in Tokyo Bay in MacArthur’s triumph. They were the advance guard of a Commonwealth contingent force that was to be 37,000 strong. These were war-weary men. The senior Indian officer, Brigadier Thimayya, had seen his brother – a staff officer in the INA – captured by his own brigade at Rangoon. For his Indian officers, the occupation was unlikely to lead to any career advancement. It was to be the last adventure of the Raj: the final Indian soldiers left Japan on 25 October 1947.
The Commonwealth troops were given an area that included Hiroshima. It was believed at the time that this was because the Americans did not want to be so closely associated with the devastation their bomb had wrought: a headline in the Australian Army Journal read: ‘Australia takes the Ashes’. The Americans denied having any ulterior design; the area had been chosen on climatic grounds, that the north was too cold for the Indians and Australians. The effects of radiation were unknown at this time, but many of the men who served in Hiroshima would die at a comparatively early age. After the first sight-seeing they stayed away from the city: it brought doubt and depression. Some men spat at the wharfside on disembarking, but most were saddened by the poverty and wrack of war. As General ‘Punch’ Cowan, who had himself fought and lost a son in the Burma campaign, asked: ‘How can I blame these children and their families for what has happened?’6