Not every distinguished historian announces his arrival by the roar of a V8 engine, but Robin Prior is no ordinary historian and – for me at least – this was to be no ordinary lunch. I was planning a new book, the final volume in my Finest Hour trilogy about Britain and its empire in WW2. I wanted it to celebrate an astonishing achievement and the people who made it possible. But there were things I needed to discuss. If 1940 was about fear, and conquering fear, and 1942 was the pivot point where things could still have gone badly wrong for Britain and her Allies, what was 1945 about? The outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, only its timing, and all the really big questions concerned the future. Would promises be kept? Would a better, safer world emerge, or a new kind of great power confrontation? Would the age of empires end, or at least begin to end?
I would have to address some thorny questions, and in doing so, I was keen to view Britain not only through the eyes of her people but also through those of her Allies, her dominions such as Australia and, most importantly, her subjects. From the perspective of Singaporeans, Malays or Burmese, the imperial motherland may have been a ‘plucky underdog’ in 1940, but for many decades beforehand, she had been anything but. She’d been the greatest of the great powers, more overdog than under and at times a bully to be feared. This explains why Britain’s initial humiliation at the hands of Japan was greeted with joy in much of Malaya and Burma, and greeted with hope by those in India no longer wanting to be subjects anymore.
I wanted to dig into the complicated psychological and political struggles that took place between Indians who remained loyal to a King-Emperor in faraway London, and those who did not. And especially, the painful conflict between Indian nationalists, who identified a rapid route to independence through a deal with Japan, and those, every bit as committed to freedom, who concluded that fighting under British command one last time made more sense, both militarily and morally. I was planning to do this through the interconnected lives of INA leader Subhas Chandra Bose and Indian Army officer Kodandera Subayya Thimayya (aka Colonel Timmy). Timmy felt the pressures of these days intensely, especially when his own much-loved brother decided to follow Bose, and he faced the prospect of meeting him on the battlefields of Burma.
Finally, I felt it was important to ask whether the values and principles that the Churchill and Attlee governments claimed to underpin Britain’s war effort were truly upheld, particularly in relation to the optimistic and progressive vision of the future first articulated in the Atlantic Charter. All of this would take me into some of the darker corners of the story and – inevitably – highly politicised and voluble 21st Century debates about colonialism and race.
Such thoughts had drawn me to Jolleys Boathouse restaurant on the banks of the River Torrens. As I heard the thunderous sound of the Ford Mustang approach, I was re-reading its driver’s introduction to his superb account of British strategy across the two great wars of the 20th Century, called Conquer We Must. It begins with words I already knew well and would return to time and time again.
‘In the Twentieth Century it fell to Britain to confront a number of regimes which represented a threat to the civilised world…Taking the two world wars together, Britain was the only power on the Allied side to fight these regimes from beginning to end. And, given the nature of the powers it was fighting, it was essential that any chance of a liberal world order (however imperfect) emerging with peace, depended on Britain being on the winning side.’
This fundamentally positive view of the role played by Britain, her dominions and her colonies in the great struggle against German fascism and Japanese imperialism in the Second World War is one I shared then and share now. I like to think that it is encoded in the two earlier volumes of this trilogy. Yet, how to square it with some of the less pleasant, and certainly less liberal, things that Britain actually did as the war came to an end?
Amongst many other things, Robin and I discussed J.C.D. Clark, the historian who created the famous phrase ‘long 18th Century’ for the period between 1660 and 1832. As a conservative-minded critic of what was once called the ‘Whig’ or ‘Marxist’ interpretation of history, Clark was controversial when I studied the subject and remains so today. But he provides some useful lessons for anyone – academic or otherwise – trying to comprehend the past as it really was. His central insight is that historical characters were much more likely to be influenced by the forces of tradition – patriotic, conservative, and religious – than by a vision of a more liberal or progressive world to come. He believes that historians all too often let their own knowledge of that ‘world to come’ influence their judgments, thus creating a barrier to understanding what really mattered in the times they study. Where others stress change, Clark stresses continuity. Instead of writing with an unspoken assumption that, for example, the decline of organised religion or the extension of the voting franchise were inevitable, he believes that studying the resistance to such changes – a reluctance to reform, the clinging to ancient ways and patterns of thought – better helps us grasp what the past and its people were truly like.
How does a debate about the 18th Century apply to the end of the Second World War, or indeed to a lunch in Adelaide? Well, many years studying how the most important politicians and generals of the 1940s communicated and acted have led Robin to believe that J.C.D. Clark’s insight can be applied here, too. We know today that the age of empires was coming to an end, so we assume powerful people at the time did so too and acted accordingly. Some did, but many didn’t. We know today of the pride postwar Britain took in its new welfare state and assume this was the cause that inspired its fighting forces by the end, rather than the old slogans of ‘God, King and Empire’. Some people in uniform certainly believed that victory would bring a new and better Britain, but a desire to remain a global ‘overdog’ and the satisfaction of crushing the King’s enemies remained powerful motivators too. We know today that Australia was set to chart a proudly independent course in the postwar era, looking increasingly to Washington for trade and security rather than to London. We can assume that a suspicion of British command was an important factor in its wartime decision-making. Sometimes it was, but often it was not.
I hope that potential readers of 1945: The Reckoning will be pleased to learn that it is not primarily a work of historiography. Applying some of the ideas that Robin and I discussed to the people and the stories that figure in this book helped me understand them better. The power of older ways of thinking and the allure of tradition are particularly relevant to the story of the Indian independence movement, which a substantial part of the book explores. Without them, how could we explain the reserves of trust that remained in India despite the many disasters of the early years of the war and the horrors of the Bengal famine? They also, I believe, help us understand why officials in London sometimes displayed an aggressively colonial mindset, whatever the Atlantic Charter said, a kind of ‘imperial muscle memory’. The principles that Britain was publicly fighting for – self-determination, a new world of independent nations – were often set aside when it mattered, as older views of the national interest reasserted themselves. Some who had trusted and fought for Britain – and in some cases Australia – found themselves let down and perhaps even betrayed.
For example, a rapid retreat from brave liberal promises in what we now call Vietnam stored up many new problems for the future. Few in Britain today know anything about the actions of UK-led forces in Indo-China during 1945, nor how they battled against the very people who had helped drive the Japanese Empire out of power to put the French one back in. This campaign, directed from London and Paris, was all about re-imposing a colonial settlement (although now rebranded as ‘anti-communism’), and it set the scene for two more ghastly wars to come.
The British Empire is the subject of many duelling books and documentaries, while social media is full of ‘Empire good, no Empire evil, you’re blocked’. As I researched and wrote about it for this book, I found another quote from another historian, David Olusoga, most helpful: ‘History is not there to make us feel good, proud or comforted. It’s simply there to be fully understood, in all its wonder, pain and yes its cruelties and injustices.’
And one such injustice, in this writer’s opinion, is the way the war is remembered in the India of today. Subhas Chandra Bose, the warrior-prophet, the widely acclaimed Netaji or ‘most respected leader’, is now studied, revered and, truth be told, near-worshipped as much if not more than the original heroes of independence, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. His choice of anthem, Jana Gana Mana (‘Thou art the ruler of the minds of all people’), is now India’s national song, and his rousing cry of Jai Hind is ubiquitous across national life, particularly amongst the soldiers of the army that once fought him. Indian politicians raise statues of Bose, open schools named for Bose, and regularly invoke Bose’s long struggle for freedom. Any mention of India and the Second World War in an online forum rapidly evolves into a debate about his importance then and now, with Bose’s many young fans prominent, adulatory and loud.
One person who would definitely not be surprised at his modern-day prominence is Bose himself, since he was never one to underestimate his own historical significance. But even he might be shocked to see how quickly his invasion of his own country – an invasion that quickly turned into a military disaster by any standards – transformed him into a mainstream folk hero.
Bose could not have anticipated political and cultural change in Britain, or even the Atlantic Charter, when he decided to throw in his lot with Hitler and the Japanese Empire. The example of heroic sacrifice that he provided throughout his life did, indeed, move Indian opinion. To that extent, he is more than entitled to the posthumous adulation he receives, and doubtless expected, but it’s a shame that those who did not make the compromises with evil that he felt necessary, the Timmys of India, are not granted such a place in its history.
We may look back and think 1945 was Timmy’s victory more than it was ever Bose’s, and every military historian would agree. But, as J.C.D. Clark might say, the further we move away from 1945, the easier it is to forget about the traditional and conservative forces that shaped the players. This is why a reckoning now can never be the same as a reckoning then. A residual loyalty to Britain, even in a nationalist like Timmy, was understandable in the 1930s and 40s in a way it simply isn’t today. Conversely, as we leave the age of European empires behind, and focus our attention on their brutal and rapacious aspects, we’re naturally more inclined to favour those like Bose who were implacably opposed to them from the start, whatever deals they did with whatever devils.
There’s no expensive, heartstring-tugging drama series being made about Timmy’s Hyderabadis fighting alongside British commandos to keep the Japanese out of India. However, there is a lavish, cloyingly sentimental 10-part epic about the Indian National Army on Amazon Prime, and many millions have watched it. The all-female unit that Bose created features prominently, with numerous implausible battlefield triumphs. But there’s little or no reference to the cruelty of Bose’s Japanese allies or his genocidal Kameraden in the SS. One reason why I found myself on the banks of the River Torrens admiring a large red sports car.
Phil Craig is a bestselling historian and the author of 1945: The Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World.
