A year on from the end of the European war and the death of Hitler, the world seemed no closer to reaching lasting peace. In Britain prosperity remained elusive. As a winter of bitter cold and gnawing food shortages drew to a close, labour disputes reached a crescendo. To no avail: the socialist millennium was indefinitely postponed. Abroad, British troops were spread thinly in Germany, as relations between the Allies and the Soviet Union deteriorated. They were also spread desperately thinly across Southeast Asia. Acute shortages of manpower eventually resulted in the British garrisons pulling out of Indonesia and Indo-China. This brought relief to the British alone, for as soon as they withdrew bloody fighting erupted between the nationalists and the Dutch in Indonesia and the Viet Minh and the French in Indo-China. Moreover, the British troops released from Indonesia and Indo-China faced likely redeployment in the region. Burma and Malaya were seething with ethnic and industrial conflict. In the one, Dorman-Smith’s unceremonious exit had left a dangerous vacuum that the perennial administrative ‘Mr Fixit’, Governor Knight, was scarcely able to fill. In the other, Sir Edward Gent’s plan for a Malayan Union ran into ferocious constitutional opposition from Malays at the very time that Chinese and Indian labour unions were flexing their muscles.
It was by only a small margin that the communists in Burma and Malaya failed to take to arms in early 1946. A fair wind seemed to be blowing for revolution as Mao Zedong and his red cadres declared all-out war against Chiang Kai Shek and capitalized on their gains during the war. If Southeast Asian communists had followed the Chinese, the British would have been in an impossible position. British troops had to be demobilized to kick start the home economy in a period of desperate financial crisis. That old standby, the Indian Army, could no longer fill the gap as Nehru and Patel were demanding that Indian troops be brought home. In India itself, the results of the March provincial elections led to an impasse between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs worse than anything the gloomy and mordant Wavell had predicted. Calcutta daily inched closer to riotous violence and mass murder. Meanwhile, Sarat Bose and other Indian radical politicians played up the issue of the INA detainees for all they were worth. Ironically, Britain’s real saviour in these dark days of the eastern empire was the Japanese army. ‘They have been carrying out their “defeat drill”’, Esler Dening told Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, ‘with the discipline and determination which characterised their aggression.’141 Deprived of British and Indian troops, the British authorities used Japanese POWs to put down Indonesian and Vietnamese insurgents, police a restive Burma and build a real Fortress Singapore.
Though Attlee was beginning to tire of Wavell’s pessimism, it was to be several months before he confirmed the rumours of Mountbatten’s ‘monumental appointment in the East’.142 Mountbatten and Malcolm MacDonald had similar views about the future of empire, although they approached the issue from a different social perspective. Mount-batten was a high aristocrat with a popular touch, a military man who could deal with nationalists, who saw himself as a kind of latter-day Lord Durham, turning the old empire into a commonwealth of free nations. MacDonald, a member of the Scottish socialist elite who tended towards liberal Toryism, had a similar vision, but none of the military or royal charisma of Mountbatten. While Mountbatten delighted in state pageantry, MacDonald opted for the more intellectually respectable ceremonial of university degree days. He much preferred attending meetings in an open-necked shirt and was famously denounced by the colonial press in Singapore for not possessing a tailcoat or dinner jacket. Mountbatten seems to have got on with Indian leaders precisely because he was a royal, but formed few intimacies. MacDonald reportedly had a string of Chinese and Eurasian girlfriends and adopted a Dayak family in Borneo. When the Sultan of Johore loaned him what his frequent guest, the Eurasian writer Han Suyin, called the ‘Walt Disney fantasy castle’ at Bukit Serene, MacDonald had some Dyak friends to stay. The sultan was incensed: ‘Why’, he expostulated, ‘should I have his damned Dyaks with their backsides in my chairs and in my bed?’ He cut off the water supply to the swimming pool.143 Yet MacDonald did not find India’s intense and intellectual politicians entirely to his taste. Like Mountbatten, who had accompanied the Prince of Wales on his unhappy tour of India in 1921–2, MacDonald had had an earlier introduction to Indian politics. He had acted as a go-between for his father with Gandhi when the latter had visited London for the second Round Table Conference in 1931. MacDonald found the Mahatma to be both charming and perplexing but remembered particularly his strangely shaped set of false teeth.144 MacDonald’s own rather prominent teeth left much to be desired, but, like the handsome Mountbatten, he nevertheless delighted in the company of stage and screen celebrities. He was to remain in the region in high office for eight years. He oversaw, though never directly managed, the exit of Burma from the Commonwealth and the Malayan Emergency. He underestimated the strength of communism in Indo-China, but helped to lay the foundations of the economic rise of Singapore and Malaya. The British Empire had entered a new and final phase.