How Japan Rolled Up Colonialism In Asia

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Forward march Malayan soldiers defend their peninsula on 10 February 1942 before the Japanese completed their occupation and pushed the British out. Photo: AP

It was Japan’s spectacular victories against two major European countries that sparked revolutionary movements across Asia. In particular, two epic events created a domino effect that ensured the collapse of colonialism.

The first was the sinking of the Russian fleet by the Japanese Navy at the Battle of Tsushima at the dawn of the 20th century. Following the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, the Japanese laid siege to Port Arthur, Russia’s only warm-water port in the Pacific. To relieve the siege, Tsar Nicolas II sent his Baltic Fleet comprising 27 warships.

Finding the Suez Canal blocked by Britain, the Russian fleet sailed 33,000 km around Africa to take on the Japanese fleet. On 26 May 1905, as the tired and inexperienced Russian fleet entered the narrow Tsushima Strait, between Japan and Korea, Admiral Togo Heihachiro launched a blistering attack on it with 37 torpedo boats and 21 destroyers. By the following morning, the Russians had lost 21 ships and 4,800 sailors; 5,917 surrendered to the Japanese.

The Japanese victory was seen as a turning point because, for the first time in modern history, an Asian nation had defeated a European power.

Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, said in 1924 in Kobe, Japan: “Since the day of Japan’s victory over Russia, the people of Asia have cherished the hope of shaking off the yoke of European oppression, a hope which has given rise to a series of independence movements — in Egypt, Persia, Turkey, Afghanistan and finally in India. Therefore, Japan’s defeat of Russia gave rise to a great hope for the independence of Asia.”

In Jawaharlal Nehru’s view, the Japanese victory lessened the feeling of inferiority besieging Asians. “A great European power had been defeated, thus Asia could still defeat Europe as it had done in the past,” he wrote in The Glimpses of World History(1934).

For a time when communications were slow and patchy, the news travelled like a tsunami to the Indian hinterlands. Decades before they would hear of Mohandas Gandhi, people in remote villages were excitedly talking about how Japan had humbled a ‘gora’ country.

Japan became a magnet for Indian freedom fighters. Large numbers of Indian students joined Japanese universities in order to be close to this new hub of Indian revolutionaries. Rashbehari Bose, who tried to incite a mutiny in the Indian Army during World War I, escaped to Japan after the attempt failed. Britain was Japan’s ally and the two countries had signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, but Tokyo refused to hand over Indian revolutionaries to the British colonialists.

Bose married a Japanese woman, took Japanese citizenship and founded the Indian Independence League. In June 1942, at the Bangkok conference, Subhas Chandra Bose was asked to join the League and become its president. Bose took charge of the Indian National Army in September 1942.

Battle of Singapore
If the Battle of Tsushima was the spark that lit the flame of hope in Asia, it was the Battle of Singapore in 1942 that dropped the “atomic bomb of nationalism” in Asia. Located at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore was considered an impregnable fortress designed to stop any attack on Britain’s Asian possessions. Garrisoned by 1 lakh British, Indian and Australian troops, it was Britain’s “Gibraltar in the Far East”.

After the Anglo-Japanese Alliance ended in 1923, the British War Office was confident it could deter the Japanese. Colin Smith writes in Singapore Burning (2006) that the Japanese were portrayed as “little yellow men”, comical figures who could not see well enough to shoot straight or fly modern aircraft with skill. In fact, some Australian officers expressed their disappointment they would not be meeting more worthy opponents.

On 8 December 1941, Japan called their bluff. Deploying the Asian equivalent of the blitzkrieg, Japan established overwhelming air and naval superiority over Malaya and Singapore within a week. As a battle-hardened force of 25,000 Japanese troops and 200 tanks scythed through the jungles of Malaya, down south, the Japanese Navy showed the British they could shoot — and shoot well. Two massive battleships — the Prince of Wales and Repulse — were sunk off the Malaya coast by precision air strikes with the loss of over 800 British sailors. (In fact, the funnels of the Prince of Wales still stand out of the waters at the mouth of Kuantan Bay.) Among the dead was Admiral Tom Phillips, their naval commander. Effectively, in one ruthless campaign, the Japanese ended British sea power in Asia.

The loss of these capital ships had a devastating impact on morale back home. The then British prime minister, Winston Churchill, wrote in his memoirs: “I put the telephone down. I was thankful to be alone. In all the war, I never received a more direct shock.”

Shock and awe were in store aplenty for the British. On 15 February 1942, Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita asked Lieutenant General Arthur Percival of the British Army in Singapore, “Do you wish to surrender unconditionally?” Without wasting a second, Percival blurted out: “Yes we do.”

It was a brief exchange, but the surrender would prove to be a turning point in the history of the world. The myth of the invincibility of the West was punctured. For the British, the French and the Dutch, the fall of Singapore and the advance of the Japanese across the region destroyed the myth of imperial supremacy. The capitulation of so many British empire troops before a Japanese Army a fourth of that, showed doubting Asians that the British could be beaten.

Look who’s yellow
Chinese, Indians, Malays and Burmese had front seats to this British tragicomedy. They were witness to the cowardice and racism of British and Australian troops; and they were shocked by the uninspiring leadership of British officers who were more interested in manicuring their golf courses and munching on cucumber sandwiches than digging in for a fight. Coming less than two years after the Germans defeated the 3.38 lakh strong British Expeditionary Force in Boulogne and Calais in 1940, the rout in Singapore exposed the fragile foundations of the British empire.

NS Rajaram, a NASA mathematician and Indologist, remembers talking to Indian soldiers of the British imperial army. In an article for Folks magazine, he quotes one of them, now settled in Penang, Malaysia: “When the Japanese attacked, the British ran away. They were very clever. They had a wonderful life with bungalows and butlers and cooks and all that, but as soon as the Japanese came, they ran away. And once they got back to India, they sent Gurkhas, Sikhs, Marathas and other Indians to fight the Japanese. They knew it was too dangerous for them. That is how we got independence in Malaya.” Rajaram says not one of these World War II veterans remembers the British fighting the Japanese — only running away.

Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, corroborates that statement. In his memoirs, The Singapore Story (1998), Lee describes the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore, which he had experienced as a youngster. “In 70 days of surprises, upsets and stupidities, British colonial society was shattered, and with it all the assumptions of the Englishman’s superiority,” he writes.

“The Asiatics were supposed to panic when the firing started, yet they were the stoical ones who took the casualties and died without hysteria. It was the British civilian bosses who ducked under tables when the bombs and shells fell. It was the British civilians and bureaucrats in Penang who, on 16 December 1941, in the quiet of the night, fled the island for the ‘safety’ of Singapore, abandoning the Asiatics to their fate. The British had proved as frightened and at a loss as to what to do as the Asiatics, if not more so.”

According to War Office records released on the 50th anniversary of the fall of the fortress, members of Australia’s 8th Division were guilty of looting, rape, drunkenness, insubordination and even murder. One document says an entire battalion of Australian troops assigned to guard the coast had simply fled, allowing the Japanese to walk through the gap. “The Australians are known as daffodils: beautiful to look at, but yellow all through,” it says.

Road to perdition
Britain’s Asian nightmare was a long time coming. Declassified files from Britain’s Colonial Office show British administration of Asia in an unflattering light. One of the files contains the war diary of Vice-Admiral Geoffrey Layton, acting Commander-in-Chief of Britain’s Eastern Fleet. He wrote: “Man for man, our men were inferior to the Japanese in training and in the moral qualities of audacity, tenacity, discipline and devotion.”

In fact, the German blitzkrieg in France had revealed the sloth and corruption that flourished in the British Army. Theft of stores, fuel and even trucks by soldiers was common, writes military historian Max Hastings in Winston’s War (2010).

Churchill pressed his generals to overcome their fears of the enemy, but Hastings says, “A perception was growing that Britain was too yellow to fight.”

Things didn’t get any better when, in August 1941, Churchill sent his man, Alfred Duff Cooper, to Singapore to report on the preparations for the Japanese attack. In a letter to Churchill, he complained that the governor of the region, Shenton Thomas, had cancelled Cooper’s order that European women and children should be evacuated first from the area. Here is Thomas’ version of the row: “I stood for no racial discrimination. He (Cooper) said in council that he considered a European ought to get preference over an Asiatic.”

The scenes of exodus from Malaya were nothing less than disgraceful. While British families were evacuated, Asian families were left behind. No arrangements were made for their exit.

Surrender spectacle
Author James Leasor says in Singapore: The Battle that Changed the World (2001) that the British treated Asians to an “unprecedented exhibition of their own humiliation and ineptitude”.

“Never in all imperial history had such a spectacle been staged before nor watched by so vast and attentive an audience. Subject peoples had watched the British destroy their own myth. Now nationalism, which had been either nascent or non-existent, surged to maturity.

“If one Asiatic power could so humble the greatest imperial power in the world, then other countries suffering under imperial jackboots could rise and fight.”

The Japanese treated the surrender as a major spectacle. As the British and Australian pows were marched off, the Japanese guards told the locals: “Look at your proud masters now.”

The Australians, who had indulged in rioting and rape of Singapore civilians (the people they were supposed to protect), were treated most harshly.

Japan’s ‘atomic bomb’
On 9 February 1947, The New York Times published an editorial that said Japan had dropped an “atomic bomb of nationalism” in Asia. “When the Japanese came, they made three important changes. First, they exploded the myth of military and social invulnerability of the ‘pukkah sahibs’. They overwhelmed their military forces in short order and then subjected white prisoners to every form of indignity and encouraged former servants of the white man to do likewise.

“Second, they inaugurated a propaganda campaign that has been eagerly continued by nationalist leaders. Knowing the people could not read, the Japanese set up radio stations and established outdoor radio receiving units in practically every village. Thus millions who could not be reached through the eye were reached through the ear.

“That the colonial peoples of the Far East intend to have their freedom, and that they eventually will win it, there is little doubt. Their numbers are many times those of the white man. And for the first time in their history — thanks largely to the Japanese — they have modern arms with which to fight.

“Whatever the outcome of these present days of turmoil and transition, the Far East in all probability will never again be the happy hunting ground of European imperialists and the predatory white businessman.”

(This is the first article in the two-part series)

 

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Strategic offensive Japan attacked British India in 1944 with the limited objective of securing strategic areas in the Northeast for the defence of Burma. Photo: AP

On 15 November 1941, less than a month before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese leadership approved a “Plan for Acceleration of the End of the War with America and Britain”. Among other things, the plan called for the “separation of Australia and India from Britain” and “stimulation of the Indian independence movement”.

Prime Minister Hideki Tojo mentioned India in a string of speeches in the Diet, the Japanese parliament, calling Indians to take advantage of World War II to rise against British power and establish an India for Indians. Shortly after the capitulation of British forces in the Battle of Singapore in February 1942, Tojo said, “Without the liberation of India, there can be no real mutual prosperity in Greater East Asia.” On 4 April, he said, “It has been decided to strike a decisive blow against British power and military establishment in India.”

Japan’s problem was that Mohandas Gandhi’s Indian National Congress was not favourably disposed towards it. Indian leaders feared Tokyo would make India a vassal State. They were mistaken. “Japan at no time planned a major invasion of India or actual incorporation of India into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, contrary to the suspicions of many Indians in the independence movement,” writes Joyce C Lebra, American historian of Japan and India, in The Indian National Army and Japan (June 2008).

The Congress leaders had made a strategic miscalculation, for it prevented Tokyo from planning a major invasion of India — despite declarations by Tojo. If over 300 million Indians were under the spell of a hostile Congress, then Tokyo reckoned it would have a major problem on its hands.

It was in this backdrop that the Japanese applied a unique policy towards India. The Indian National Army (INA), comprising Indian pows captured by the Japanese military, was the spearhead of Tokyo’s thrust into the subcontinent. In February 1942, Japan had captured 50,000 Indian pows after routing the British forces in Singapore, and these soldiers were asked to join the INA.

Japan was primarily interested in using the INA for propaganda purposes. The Army HQ in Tokyo fussed a lot about how far Japan should go in support of Indian independence. Japanese military officers assigned to train and equip the INA, such as Major Iwaichi Fujiwara, wanted Japan to offer total support in preparation for a quick and blistering attack on British India, but Tokyo had reservations. For the Japanese brass, India remained on the periphery as Russia and the US were their biggest concerns.

The best time to attack British India was shortly after the initial Japanese victories in Asia. “At several points it was conceivable a Japanese invasion of India might have succeeded had it been planned,” writes Lebra. “The optimum time was in the spring and summer of 1942, following Japanese successes in Malaya and Burma, when Japanese air, sea and land power could not have been checked by the British. But Japan passed up the opportunity.”

Bose arrives, finally
During the months when Japanese forces were toppling European bastions in Asia, Subhas Chandra Bose — who had quit the Congress because of Gandhi’s reluctance to push for freedom — was camped in Berlin. He was trying to get the German Army to allow the Indian Legion — that he had established in Germany with Indian POWs — to fight the British alongside Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Bose’s plan was brilliant: when the soldiers of the British Indian Army would see their former comrades in the German lines, it would create confusion and possibly mass desertions.

However, Bose’s maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” didn’t apply to Rommel and Adolf Hitler. The Indian Legion found little support with the Nazis. “The vulgar racism and Eurocentricism there, particularly Hitler’s brand, prevent the Axis powers from fully believing in the Indian independence movement,” writes Anton Pelinka in Democracy Indian Style: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Creation of India’s Political Culture (2003). “Hitler holds fast to the myth of the superiority of the white man and shies away from allying himself with the non-whites against the white Albion.”

At the same time, the German Foreign Ministry was reluctant to release a potentially valuable bargaining instrument in dealing with the British.

When Bose finally arrived in Tokyo by the end of May 1943, the impact was electric. Of the more than 50,000 Indian POWs, only half had volunteered to fight under the INA, but once Bose showed up, nearly all of them were ready to fight the British.

Bose’s charisma also appealed to the Japanese. Army Chief of General Staff Sugiyama Gen and Tojo developed a special sympathy for him.

Rebel army Subhas Chandra Bose with officers of the INA

Varying war aims
However, the INA-Japan relationship was never a smooth affair. Tokyo was completely unequivocal about the fact that the INA was a black project — a secret war involving the weapons of espionage, infiltration, psychological warfare and guerrilla attacks.

Bose, on the other hand, insisted the INA be used as a single army that would lead the offensive into India. “For Bose, the first drop of blood shed on Indian soil had to be Indian,” writes Lebra.

A compromise was reached, with the INA remaining under Japanese command throughout the offensive but fighting in Indian units directly under Indian officers. But like all compromises, it didn’t work very well.

“For Bose, there was the single goal of liberation of India throughout the combined action of the INA and Japanese forces, while for Japan, Imphal was a limited holding operation subordinate to the high-priority campaigns in the Pacific,” writes Lebra. “Bose requested increasing support in military supplies, while Japanese capacity to support her campaigns steadily diminished. The two positions could never basically be reconciled, and the differences caused constant daily friction during this military phase of the cooperation.”

War in India
In January 1944, when the momentum of victory had considerably diminished, Japan finally mounted a military offensive on British India. Still, the instructions from Army HQ in Tokyo signalled the limited objective of “securing strategic areas near Imphal and in Northeast India for the defence of Burma”.

In June, when the Japanese forces crashed into the British Indian Army at Imphal and Kohima, only 15,000 INA soldiers took part in the fighting. The rest were assigned tasks of intelligence gathering and guerrilla attacks.

Recalling his warfront experiences as a havildar of an engineering company of the INA, V Vaidhyalingam, secretary and treasurer, Tamil Nadu Indian National Army League, told The Hindu (2 August 2004): “The battle of Imphal turned out to be a long-fought one — for which the INA’s timing was too late in summer. Soon monsoon, not the British army, became our biggest adversary.”

Had Bose been able to attack British India, and in full strength, two years earlier, the outcome may well have been different. Indeed, between 1940 and 1942, Japan had defeated three western nations — France, Holland and Britain — and humiliated a fourth, the US. Perhaps there would have been no Gandhi or Nehru. No Partition. It will forever remain one of history’s biggest ‘what ifs’.

The weather and the tide of war were turning against the INA. Japan’s game was up after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Russia occupied its northern territories. With its primary backer gone, the INA was effectively disarmed.

INA’s lasting impact
What the Japanese managed to do with the INA was exactly what they had planned all along. The INA was truly a secret weapon that fired up Indian revolutionary activity and drove a stake of fear through British hearts. For over two centuries, Indian soldiers had ensured the security of the British in India. The loyalty of the military was the ultimate sanction for British rule in India. With that assurance gone, the British knew their time was up.

As Russian writer Leo Tolstoy had written in a letter to Indian revolutionary Tarak Nath Das in December 1908: “When the Indians complain the English have enslaved them, it is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers who have settled among them have enslaved them… What does it mean that 30,000 people, not athletes, but rather weak and ordinary people, have enslaved 200 million vigorous, clever, capable, freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that not the English, but the Indians, have enslaved themselves?”

Like Tolstoy’s drunkards, the INA soldiers initially baulked when confronted with the prospect of fighting Britain for independence, in cooperation with the Japanese. It was a volunteer army comprising professional soldiers and many belonged to families that had long served the British.

This loyalty held true despite the British policies that discriminated against Indian officers and soldiers. For instance, Indian Navy officers of all ranks were barred from using the common swimming pools that were for exclusive use of the ‘gora’.

In ideal — for the British — conditions, the colonial government would have hanged most of the tens of thousands of INA returnees. After the Indian defeat in the First War of Independence of 1857, the British slaughtered 100,000 Indian soldiers in savage reprisals. But then followed an “untold holocaust”, which caused the deaths of almost 10 million Indians over 10 years, writes Mumbai-based historian Amaresh Misra in War of Civilisations: India AD 1857.

But post-World War II, India was an incendiary place. Serving Indian military officers and men keenly watched the INA trials in Delhi. So did more than two million soldiers who had returned from Europe after World War II, having experienced first-hand poor British soldiering. Most of these battle-hardened Indian soldiers were ripe for revolutionary activities. The British quietly released all INA soldiers.

“Despite the military defeat of Japan, and with it the INA, popular support for the INA finally precipitated British withdrawal from India,” writes Kalyan Kumar Ghosh in History of the Indian National Army (1966).

Japan’s role in India’s independence was catalytic. “In all, Japan trained 353,000 soldiers in Southeast Asia,” writes Hilary Conroy in Japan Examined (1983). It was these soldiers who prevented Europe from recolonising Asia