Imperial 'muscle memory' set the tone for what came next

And it doesn't always make for pleasant reading, admits historian PHIL CRAIG, whose new book examines the end of the Second World War and how decisions made to rebuild colonial empires gave rise to later conflicts

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WHEN you set aside decades of myth-making about the Second World War you discover that some of the things the British state did in its final months were far from lovely. That includes little known actions in the Far East that do not sit at all easily with the publicly expressed war aims of both Winston Churchill and his successor Clement Attlee.

Those aims, first expressed in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, were bold and progressive: to banish dictatorships and give freedom and self-determination to the peoples of the world. But time and again, they ran into the realities of power politics and what I like to call “imperial muscle memory”.

In 1945, as the war in the Pacific was drawing to a close, Lord Louis Mountbatten ran the South East Asia Command (SEAC) on behalf of both Britain and the US. But in Washington they joked that a better title would be “Save England’s Asian Colonies”.

One such colony was Sarawak in northern Borneo and, in my latest book, 1945:The Reckoning, I tell the story of what happened there. In short, opportunities to save prisoners of war caught in disease-ridden Japanese camps, and scheduled for hellish “death marches”, were spurned in order to prioritise taking back control of profitable oil fields, tin mines and rubber plantations.

Now that’s a contentious statement and not every historian would agree with me. But if you look at the evidence it is hard not to see what happened here as a prime example of “muscle memory”.

Britain had lost prestige and money in Borneo and badly wanted it back, as the paper trail reveals. And so normal military priorities — and the chance to save thousands of British and Australian lives — were set aside in favour of shadowy missions with undeclared colonial goals, an operation that turned into a bloody disaster.