million Hindus to 35 million Moslems, was almost impossible to partition, and 8 million people moved. However, ‘East Pakistan’ without Calcutta was ‘an economic disaster area’, with the jute production separated from the mills, and it was itself separated from the rest of Pakistan by a thousand miles. The division of the Punjab in spring and summer 1947 turned out to be savage, whole train-loads arriving with corpses that were burned or disembowelled, as the Punjab was mixed, with a large Sikh population that was to be split between India and Pakistan. By the summer of 1947 the British had neither the money nor the will for a fight, and the army did not carry out proper policing; besides, the timetable was absurdly short, and maddened people grabbed what they could when they could. On independence, in mid-August, New Delhi itself was seething, while in Calcutta 7,000 tons of rubbish built up, even at the gates of the stock exchange, the leading financial institution in Asia. It was a dismal end to the British
Of all oddities, the British had been at work in 1945 even trying to extend their empire. British troops were present in Vietnam and Indonesia, where they were dragged into support for the existing French and Dutch rulers. In order to do so (and in Burma as well) they were driven to use the hundreds of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war to put down risings by the local nationalists. The French and the Dutch somehow understood even less than did the British that the European position was hopelessly lost: the Foreign Office adviser on Mountbatten’s staff told him that the Dutch were ‘mentally sick’ and ‘not in a fit state to resume control in this vast area’; it was not until 1948 that the Dutch abandoned Indonesia. But the British were also fantasizing, though less bizarrely. In the second half of the 1940s they were trying to create a new form of empire, in this case one based on Malaya. Here, they had a certain amount of justification, in that Malayan rubber earned a surplus of ?170m for the sterling area — more than a third of its income (the Gold Coast supplied another quarter). Malaya was put together in a novel way, together with Singapore, but this did not solve the three-cornered problem of Indian, Chinese and Malay cohabitation. A civil war soon developed, with a Communist insurgency that was largely Chinese, and Malaya was not stabilized until 1960. The Americans faced problems of the same sort in the Philippines, to which they gave an independence with certain limits.
The nightmare of nightmares was Palestine. Whatever the British did would be wrong. As with India, it is obvious that a few more years of Empire would have been desirable for an orderly transfer of power to occur. But to whom? Here again, as with other parts of the British Empire, there was much strength in the argument that the Empire kept order, tried to assure legal rights, and sent out honest people. But there was an original sin at the centre of the Palestinian question, and it lay in the context of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which had offered the Jews a national home in what was then Arab (or Ottoman) territory: the aim being essentially to keep the French away from the Suez Canal. The British then found themselves responsible for keeping order in a small area claimed by both sides, and there was a further problem, in so far as the native Palestinians were themselves very divided. Partition was an obvious solution, and even then the transfer of Palestine to Jordan would have made sense, but there were vast problems as regards Jerusalem. The British muddled, swung to one side and the other with pressures of terrorism, and thus encouraged the terrorists to do their worst. There were some particularly horrible episodes, such as the blowing up, in an operation of sinister brilliance, of the King David Hotel, British headquarters in Jerusalem (March 1946), or the hanging of two sergeants, whose bodies were then booby-trapped, and the British were much criticized for stopping the emigration of Jews from the concentration camps to Palestine. The Americans were loud in their criticism, and in February 1947 the British threw the affair at them and the United Nations. The Mandate was abandoned; an unworkable plan for partition came up; ethnic cleansing occurred, and 700,000 Palestinians fled from their homes. On 14 May 1948 Israel was proclaimed as a state, and a war then followed, until 1949, when an unsatisfactory boundary was set up through an armistice. This period is full of questions: was there ever any possibility that proper partition, or even a single-state solution, might have been established? At any rate, here was another problem, involving Moslems, that the British simply could not manage. They ‘scuttled’, as in India or Greece.
Those dreadful winter months of 1947 were decisive and the issue which caused the decision was the least of the problems: Greece. She had a very important place in British imperial strategy. Control of the eastern Mediterranean was essential for any power concerned with the Suez Canal and the shortest routes to Asia, and there had long been a British interest in the whole area — it had led to the Crimean War, and in 1878 to the taking over of Cyprus. The British were preponderant in Athens and in 1944 Churchill had struck a bargain with Stalin to keep it that way. The Red Army was conquering eastern and much of central Europe, and the resistance movements were heavily influenced by Communism — in Yugoslavia especially, but also in Greece.
Greece was indeed almost a textbook case of the sort of country most open to Communist takeover. She was backward and largely agrarian; the Orthodox Church, unlike the Catholic Church, was not solid as regards resistance to Communism (it had not been much of a focus of reaction against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War); the non- Communists were badly divided between monarchists and republicans, and, besides, they were dominant in different parts of the country. There were also minorities, whether Albanian, Bulgarian (or Macedonian) or Vlach (or Romanian), and, decisively, a quarter of the entire population consisted of refugees — people, destitute, who had fled from the collapse of the Greek invasion of western Turkey after 1922. Salonica and its hinterland had been populated by them, as the local Moslems also emigrated to Turkey and that city, very heavily Jewish, was the capital of Greek Communism. Its leader, Nikos Zachariadis, had even once been a dock-worker at Galata, the port of Istanbul. The Communists had been a political presence in the 1930s and kept an organization even under the military dictatorship that ruled Greece. When the German army invaded in 1941 and occupied the country, Greek Communists eventually became foremost in the resistance movement and when the Germans withdrew, late in 1944, they nearly took over Athens. British troops prevented this, but there was a more important factor: Stalin instructed the Greek Communists not to take power but to make an agreement with the British and with the monarchists whom they supported. This was Stalin’s part of a bargain that otherwise provided for the British not to resist Communist takeovers elsewhere (Romania and Bulgaria, expressly, though the implications as regards the other parts of Soviet-dominated eastern Europe were menacing enough). In 1946 the Greek Civil War flared up again, and this time the Communists had help from Yugoslavia (there was a substantial Macedonian Slav minority in northern Greece) and bases in Albania.
Here was the first of a set of Cold War crises in which the Great Powers fought each other by proxy in some place, extremely complicated on the ground, with a colonial past, a divided native middle class, no tradition of stable government, a strong Communist Party and a foreign intervention that had happened more by incident than design. There was a very ugly encounter (each side hijacked the other’s children with a view to re-education). The British were divided as to what they should do. One thing was plain: they could not afford another imperial war, and they shrank from the unpopularity that was accruing. The Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, disliked the Greek policy and warned that there was in any event no money for it: ‘we are… drifting… towards the rapids’. On 21 February 1947, in the middle of that terrible winter, the British ambassador in Washington announced to President Harry S. Truman that the British would terminate their involvement in the Greek Civil War. The United States would have to sort things out. It was at this point that the War of the British Succession broke out, with Americans and Soviets the chief contenders for the succession.
2. Cold War
The British collapse in that terrible winter of 1946-7 coincided with a worsening of the domestic problems of western Europe, but it also coincided with the start of the Cold War, an expression that now entered the world’s vocabulary. The tensions grew in central Europe, and especially Germany. Here was the greatest economic power in Europe, but in 1945 Germany was prostrate. The smashing of Germany’s cities was a very cruel business, and was carried on almost to the very end of the war, quite without necessity. In July 1944 the British and Americans fielded their maximum bomber strength — 5,250 — with a capacity to drop 20,000 tons of bombs over any target in a day, and overall, from D-Day to the end of the war, a million tons were dropped on German cities and towns, even smaller ones. The last RAF raid took place, appropriately enough, on Potsdam, the heart of ‘German militarism’, where 500 aircraft went in on 14-15 April and killed 3,500 people. Even places far from the front line, which were
