By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The Elimination Of Chiang Kai-shek?
According to General
Stillwell's diary, Roosevelt stated in regards to his policy towards Chiang
Kai-shek; ”we've been friends with China for a gr-e-e-at many years” but “a
fresh Japanese offensive might overturn Chiang.” And according to Jonathan Fenby Stilwell wrote; “Though neither knew it, this
was just what was happening. A group of young officers who wanted to keep
Chiang as a figurehead but get rid of the more corrupt and inefficient of his
associates had planned to kidnap him on his return from Cairo, and force him to
act as they wished. They hoped for US backing. But the secret police discovered
the plot, and sixteen of the plotters were executed.” The Chinese really liked
the Americans, but not the British, Roosevelt went on. “Now, we haven't the
same aims as the British out there. For instance, Hong Kong . Now, I have a
plan to make Hong Kong a free port: free to the commerce of all nations - of
the whole world! But let's raise the Chinese flag there first, and then Chiang
can the next day make a grand gesture and make it a free port. That's the way
to handle that! I'm sure that Chiang would be willing to make that a free port,
and goods could come through Siberia - in bond - without customs examinations.”
Hauling the conversation back to Burma, Stilwell observed that Chiang would
have trouble explaining to his people the failure of the Allies to do as Roosevelt
had promised. “We need guidance on political policy on China ,” he insisted.
“Yes, as I was saying, the Chinese will want a lot of help from us - a lot of
it,” Roosevelt responded, only to veer off into a lengthy tale about an
occasion on which the Prime Minister, H.H. Kung, had asked him for a
multi-million loan to develop China's transport system. Chiang took more than
two weeks to tell Roosevelt that the decision to renege on his pledge
(cancellation of the landing in Burma) had,“given
rise to serious misgivings on all sides”. As a result, would not go ahead
with a planned offensive into northern Burma from south-west China. Never known
for his consistency, the Generalissimo did, in fact, allow the attack to take
place, under Stilwell's command.1
The cure for China,
Stilwell decided, was the elimination of the Generalissimo. He recorded that,in Cairo, Roosevelt had been “fed up with Chiang and
his tantrums and said so. In fact he told me in that Olympian manner of his:
"If you can't get along with Chiang and can't replace him, get rid of him
once and for all. You know what I mean. Put in someone you can manage.” But no
such person was to be found, and the Nationalist leader hung on, waiting for
America to defeat Japan so that he could turn back to the elimination of the
Communist rivals he had been pursuing since 1927.
At Churchill's
behest, the President and Prime Minister went on a trip to the Pyramids and the
Sphinx. And the following several days three rounds of talks were held with the
Turkish President, Ismet Inonu, to try to bring Ankara into the war on the
Allied side. Inonu kissed Churchill on the cheek as he left, but there was no
commitment. After Anthony Eden remarked that a kiss on the cheek was not much
of a result for fifteen hours of discussions, the Prime Minister told his
daughter: “The truth is I'm irresistible. But don't tell Anthony, he's
jealous.” 2
Churchill and Stalin,
both sought to create a new world order. Both saw in Roosevelt the key to
success.3 Next and in fact intended as a message to Stalin by the new US Governement; the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki belong to some of the other, defining events of the twentieth
century.
One young female
wrote:
We arrived in the
early evening. The reddish setting sun hung in the sky. The ruins from an
ordinary fire are burned black, aren't they? But the ruins of Hiroshima were
brown, the colour of unfired pottery ... The city
didn't look as if it had been burned. Yet it was flattened. In the middle of
the ruins two buildings, a department store and the newspaper [office] stood
all alone. There my father met me ... I remember the tears in his eyes when I
met him ... I knew Mother had died.4
Everywhere such news
was received with deep ambivalence. The leaders of the USA and Britain had been
determined to save Allied lives by bringing the war to a rapid conclusion, but
now they were assailed by guilt and doubt. In London Sir Cuthbert Headlam, a Conservative politician and robust supporter of
Winston Churchill, rejoiced that the war was over, but he stood aghast at 'this
new and fearful form of bomb' and the wanton destruction it had caused. The
bomb would mean 'either the end of war or the end of civilisation'.5
The Japanese
themselves were torn by mixed emotions. In Hiroshima itself, some American
prisoners of war who had survived the explosion hidden in a cellar were found
and beaten to death. But the majority of Japanese viewed the disaster as they
would a great calamity of nature.6 Kimura Yasuko later recorded that the bomb
did not make her hate the Americans. In the two years before the bomb, life had
been horrible and heartbreaking as city after city across Japan had been
consumed by incendiary attacks.7 Some 3 million Japanese had been killed since
the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and millions more had been wounded, bereaved
or made homeless. The country was so utterly devastated that the incoming
victors were astonished that it had held out for so long. The bomb finally
ended that resistance. Some Japanese fainted when the high-pitched voice of
Emperor Hirohito was heard over the radio. A few militarists and patriots
committed suicide, while other Japanese were shamed. When the Japanese
guards came they announced that everyone in Hiroshima was dead.8
The bomb had killed a
microcosm of people caught up in the terrible conflict: prisoners of war,
Koreans and Chinese labourers, students from Malaya
on scholarships, and perhaps 3,200 Japanese American citizens who were stranded
in the city after Pearl Harbor.9 Later, American planes flew over again, but
this time they dropped food and medicines. Some of these supplies landed near Petrovsky's mine. Petrovsky and
his fellow prisoners of war passed their supplies to the Japanese, who suddenly
had nothing to eat. They realized that something quite extraordinary had
happened when they noticed that all the flies and the bed bugs had disappeared.
The prisoners were put to work digging a trench. They were told that it was an
air-raid shelter; only later did they realize it was to be their own grave: if
the Americans invaded, they were to be lined up beside it and shot.10 Across
their empire, the Japanese were still killing prisoners, and orders had been
given in Taiwan, Borneo and elsewhere to exterminate whole camps. But there
was, in the end, to be no mass slaughter.11
After the initial
confusion, a strange mood of equanimity and freedom prevailed. Allied prisoners
in Japan travelled without restraint, 'commandeering' cars and trucks,
disarming Japanese servicemen on trains, entering houses in search of food and
looking for women. Then, on 9 August, came the bomb at Nagasaki, and the whole
valley around it felt the fury of the impact; afterwards 'not a sound. No
birds, Not even a lizard. Just brown, treeless soil like cocoa, no grass, and
twisted girderwork ... ' 12
The day before the
first bomb was dropped, most military commanders in mainland Asia believed that
the war would go on for many months more. The British 14th Army had pushed down
into Burma since their defeats of the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima on the horders of Assam in June and July 1944. The British took
Rangoon, the country's capital, in May 1945.13
The Japanese
continued to occupy Thailand, Indo-China, Malaya and Indonesia. Despite the
island-hopping advance by General Douglas MacArthur's forces in the Pacific,
the Japanese had held on to the main islands of the Philippines, and pockets of
resistance remained in Borneo.14 In the camp for women internees in
Singapore, Sheila Allan, the Eurasian daughter of a British mining engineer,
kept a secret diary of a youth in captivity. On 10 August she marked her
twenty-first birthday by writing: 'Baby born to crippled Jewess - prophecy
concerning her - a Jewess Rabbi dreamt that when a crippled woman gave birth to
a boy we'll hear of Peace!' The next day she heard one of the paws bringing the
news by singing, 'The war is over.' 15
Then came other
portents: war businesses liquidated overnight; the gambling syndicates and
lotteries that had flourished in the occupied lands cashed in their assets.
There were celebrations that ranged from the quiet consumption of hidden
bottles of brandy and whisky in Malaya to outright rejoicing in Burma. In the
mountainous forest fringes of Malaya, the Chinese peasants who taken shelter
there slaughtered their pigs and fowl. In the towns, Chinese papermakers and
tailors prepared flags of the four victorious powers: Britain, the United
States, Russia, and Chiang Kai Shek's China. Then, in
a sudden rush of confidence, Malaya burst into light. The blackouts during the
Allied bombing had created 'cities of dreadful night'; but now light bulbs
appeared on verandas and the 'five-foot' walkways of shophouses.16 The great
'Worlds' - the amusement parks where the townsfolk came to play and to trade in
one of the great spectacles of local life - turned on their show-lights and
resumed their gyre. People went on a spending spree with freshly printed
Japanese notes bearing their distinctive 'banana' design. But the mood was soon
deflated.17
Many Japanese
officers - 300 in Singapore alone took their own lives: some in the lounge of
the luxury Raffles Hotel where they heard the news Japan had surrenderred.18
Others who submitted to surrender and the prospect of imprisonment were anxious
as to whether they would receive the protection of the Geneva Conventions,
which Japan itself had not observed. At Kranji (near
Singapore airport), where the Commonwealth war cemetery now stands, they first
met the Allied forces: Gurkha paratroops from Special Operations Executive.19
They became 'Japanese
surrendered personnel', a term of art introduced by the British in order to
avoid implementing the Geneva Conventions' protocols towards prisoners of war.
Although a few remained arrogant and uncooperative, the majority were compliant
and patient. But it was still unclear what was happening to the more remote
garrisons. Some of Itagaki's officers tried to flee
to Sumatra, where there was rumoured to be last-ditch
defiance. One Japanese officer of the Imperial Guard in northern Sumatra, who
had fought down the length of the Malay peninsula and into Singapore in late
1941, wrote that after the announcement the mood was so mutinous that it was
dangerous for officers to walk in the barracks.20
As the Allies brought
ahead plans to reoccupy the region, it was still unclear whether or not large
numbers of Japanese would fight to the death .These events can no longer be
viewed as a minor theatre of a global war centred
upon Europe. This now, was an 'Asian World War': a connected arc of conflict
that claimed around 24 million lives in lands occupied by Japan; the lives of 3
million Japanese, and 3.5 million more in Illdia
through war-related famine. It was the most general conflict in
Asia since the 'Mongol invasions' of the thirteenth century. Waves of Chinese
migrants, mostly from the hinterland of the southern seaboard, had come to the
Nanyang, or the 'South Seas', as traders and artisans. They pioneered the
plantations and mines of Malaya, and still provided the bulk of their labour force. South Asian communities were to be found in
an infinite variety of specialist trades: Muslim shopkeepers, Malayalee clerks,
Chettiyar money-lenders, Sikh policemen, Ceylonese
lawyers. The train service of Malaya was known as the 'Jaffna railway' because
of the monopoly by Tamils from Ceylon on the post of ticket-collector. The
large-scale European rubber enterprises in Malaya pulled in another
three-quarters of a million Tamils from the hinterland of Madras. Many more
Indians made the shorter journey from eastern Bengal and Orissa into the rural
economy of Burma. Migrations from Java and Sumatra kept alive a sense that the
Malay peninsula was the heart of the Islamic civilization of the islands, that
dated back to the fifteenth-century empire of Melaka. The traditional Malay rice,
fishing and trading economy survived in the midst of some of the most advanced
and regimented systems of wage labour on earth. The
main points of arrival for most of these pioneers were the great port cities
such as Rangoon and Singapore: dynamic and diverse, they were built for playas much as trade or government, and their citizens were
obsessed by their own modernity. They were glittering outposts of the West,
where the colonial elite enjoyed a lifestyle they could never aspire to at
home. Yet the lives of the Europeans, contained by their gross obsessions with
race and hierarchy, barely touched the complex Asian worlds around them. The
cosmopolitanism of a place like Singapore, for example, was built by Chinese,
Indian, Arab, Armenian and Jewish merchants and professionals, many of whose
own businesses were now regional in scope.21
For example
Singapore's political topography baffled the layman: as colonial power
stretched to the south and east, the great traditions of the Raj gave way to
complex arrangements of indirect rule. Even the 80 million people of Bengal,
the oldest British possession in India, were governed at a distance. Assam to
the northeast was an uncertain border region. BlIrll1a had been part of British
India until 1936, and although the prcdominant
Burmese population of the lowlands was governed on a Raj model, the ethnic
minorities of its hill regions enjoyed a good deal of autonomy. British Malaya
was a cluster of Islamic sultanates; there was no central government as such:
British rule rested on the treaties of 'protection' that had been signed with
Malay rulers from 1874 to 1914. The British governed, but they did not,
strictly speaking, rule. The Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and
Malacca were older outposts of the islands: models of Anglo-Saxon municipal
management with oriental trappings. To all this the war gave a flaking veneer
of coherence. If there was an 'imperial system' it really functioned only in
Wartime: men and materiel were mobilized across the crescent: Indian soldiers
for the garrisons of Malaya, Chinese labourers for
the Burma Road that supplied Chiang Kai Shek's war
effort. But in Malaya, the mobilization and the defeats of 1941 and 1942
exposed the inadequacies of a now, outdated administration.22
The final, squalid
exodus from Singapore laid bare the complacency and racial arrogance of its
colonial masters. When the city fell on 15 February 1942, General Yamashita
Tomoyuki's armies shattered the myth of white invulnerability, and broke the
mandate of 'protection'. This loss was catastrophic to Britain's global
prestige and material strength. As India became a drain on the domestic balance
of payments, Southeast Asia had emerged as one of the Empire's prize assets.
The region exported two-thirds of the world's tin, and British Malaya alone
provided half the world's production of rubber.23 The Japanese in turn had
sought to impose their vision upon the Asian crescent by incorporating it, with
their other conquered territories, a dream of a new Asian order, with
Japan at its political and economic core.24
Thus the old
trading links to South Asia and China were severed. After August 1945 the
peoples of the region scrambled to reconnect their world. The great crescent
was to be forged anew. The instrument for this was South East Asia Command
(SEAC), and the tribune of the new imperial vision was its supremo, Admiral
Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the British king-emperor, George VI.
Created in 1943, Mountbatten's new command was the first expression of
'Southeast Asia' as a distinct geopolitical entity. It was a partner to the
Pacific vision behind General MacArthur's South West Pacific Command, but there
was little love lost between the two unequal allies. To Americans, Southeast
Asia was an 'unnecessary front.' 25
To wits, SEAC stood
for 'Save England's Asian Colonies'. There was much truth in this: 'Here,'
Winston Churchill thundered in September 1944, 'is the Supreme British
objective in the whole of the Indian Ocean and Far Eastern Theatre'. But the
resources necessary to achieve it were a long time coming. In the interim
Mountbatten, unable to wage war didctly, encouraged
others to do so on his behalf, using covert methods for which he exhibited a
puckish enthusiasm. No fewer than twelve clandestine or semi-clandestine
organizations operated in the theatre. Not for nothing was SEAC also known as
'Supreme Example of Allied Confusion.' 26
Only after the fall
of Germany were the materials of conventional war released for Southeast Asia,
and it was not until August 1945 that Mountbatten was in a position to take the
war back to the Japanese through a series of massive amphibious landings on the
coast of Malaya. However, the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki denied him the
opportunity to restore Britain's martial pride in the region. The main task of
South East Asia Command was to begin only after the surrender of Japan. But
there were new tasks at hand: at the final hour, in addition to the Asian
mainland, Mountbatten was given responsibility for the vast Indonesian
archipelago. This marked the beginning of a final era of British imperial
conquest. The pre-Hiroshima war plan had required a massive build-up of men and
materiel in India at Bombay, Cochin, Vizagapatnam and
Madras. And even after VE Day, the reconquest been delayed owing to a shortage
of shipping, repatriation of personnel and uncertainty of conditions of the
ground.
This had allowed the
Japanese, who were well apprised of Allied intentions, to pour more troops into
Malaya. The received wisdom of amphibious warfare was that, for landings to be
successful, a superiority in numbers of three to one was needed; in August 1945
Mountbatten had an advantage of only eight to five, and a high proportion of
his men had yet to experience combat. Mountbatten returned from a visit to
London on 14 August to learn that, following Emperor Hirohito's formal
capitulation, the operation was to be launched immediately. And it was still
not clear whether or not the Japanese would obey their emperor's order to
surrender.27
1. Fenby, Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He
Lost, London, 2003, p. 416.
2. Harold Macmillan,
War Dairies, London, 1984, p. 294.
3. See Oleg Rzheshevsky, Stalin and Churchill, 2007.
4. Haruko Taya Cook and
Theodore F. Cook, Japan at war: an oral history (New York, 1992), p. 306.
5. Stuart Ball (ed.),
Parliament and politics in the age of Churchill: the Headlam
Diaries, I935-SI (Cambridge, 1999), p. 473.
6. John W. Dower,
'The bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis
in Japanese memory', in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), Hiroshima in history and memory
(Cambridge, 1996), pp. II6-42.
7. John W. Dower,
Embracing defeat: Japan in the wake of World War II (London, 1999), p. 45.
8. Dr
Constantine Constantinovich Petrovsky
interview, OHD, SNA.
9. The Committee for
the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the physical, medical and social effects
of atomic bombings (New York, 1981), p. 478; Rinifo Sodei, Were we the enemy? American survivors of Hiroshima
(Boulder, 1998).
10. Petrovsky interview.
11. Brian MacArthur,
Surviving the sword: prisoners of the Japanese, I942-45 (London, 2005), pp.
420-1.
12. Hugh V. Clarke,
Twilight liberation: Australian PO Ws between
Hiroshima and home (Sydney, 1985), pp. 63-95, 121.
13. The best account
of the campaign remains Louis Allen, Burma: the longest war I94I-45 (London,
1984).
14. Datuk Mohd Yusoff Hj.
Ahmad, Decades of change (Malaysia - I9IOSI97os) (Kuala Lumpur, 1983), pp.
283-4.
15. Sheila Allan,
Diary of a girl in Changi, I94I-45 (2nd edn,
Roseville, NSW, 1999), p. 137.
16. The title of a
vivid early memoir by N. 1. Low & H. M. Cheng is This Singapore (our city
of dreadful night) (Singapore, 1946).
17. See Chin Kee ann, Malaya upside down (Singapore, 1946), pp. 199-202.
18. Romen Bose, The end of the war: Singapore's liberation and
the aftermath of the Second World War (Singapore, 2005), p. 101. He quotes a
figure of 300 suicides.
19. Carl Francis de
Souza interview, OHD, SNA.
20. Takao Fusayama, Memoir of Takao Fusayama:
a Japanese soldier in Malaya and Sumatera (Kuala Lumpur, 1997), pp. 147-50.
21. Nicholas Tarling,
Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1950 (Cambridge,
1998), p. 26.
22. Mountbatten to H.
R. Hone, I February 1944, in A. ]. Stockwell (ed.),
British documents on the end of empire: Malaya, part I (London, 1995),
P·73.
23. Nicholas]. White,
Business, government and the end of empire: Malaya, 1945-1957 (Kuala Lumpur,
1996), pp. 64-5.
24. Paul H. Kratoska, The Japanese occupation of Malaya, 1941-45
(London, 1998), p. 32.
25. M. E. Dening, 'Review of events in South-East Asia, 1945 to March
1946', 25 March 1946, in Stockwell, British
documents: Malaya, part I, p. 211.
26. Richard]. Aldrich,
Intelligence and the war against Japan: Britain, America and the politics of
secret service (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 172, 186-7, 33°·
27. S. Woodburn Kirby,
The war against Japan, vol. V, The surrender of Japan (London, 1969), pp.
77-82.
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