Between June 1940 and May 1945, more Frenchmen carried arms for Vichy or the German forces than ever fought for the Resistance or allied armies. The great majority of French troops evacuated from Dunkirk to Britain chose to be repatriated to their own country under German occupation, rather than serve with the ‘Free French’ of Gen.De Gaulle, as so too did most of those captured in Syria in 1941. It is easy to forget that in many nations around the world, many people rooted for the Axis, often because they hated the British Empire. Winston Churchill stretched a delicate point by telling the House of Commons on 8 December 1941: ‘We have at least four-fifths of the population of the globe on our side’. It would have been more accurate to say that the allies had four-fifths of the world’s inhabitants under their control, or recoiling from Axis occupation. Propaganda promoted an assumption of common purpose among ‘free’ nations- of which it was necessary to grant honorary membership to Stalin’s tyranny- in defeating the totalitarian powers. Yet in almost every country there were nuances of attitude, and in some places stark divisions.
The mercenaries of Britain’s Indian Army remained generally loyal, and some Indian civilians cherished a deep affection for Britain. I am moved by the story of one named P.G.Mahindasa who was teacher of the English school in Malacca settlement. He wrote after torture and before execution by the occupying Japanese for listening on his radio to the BBC: ‘I have always cherished British sportsmanship, justice and the civil service as the finest things in an imperfect world. I die gladly for freedom. My enemies fail to conquer my soul. I forgive them for what they did to my frail body. To my dear boys, tell them that their teacher died with a smile on his lips’. But we should acknowledge that many of India’s 400 million people saw scant advantage in allied victory, if they remained subject to British rule. For most of the war, the imperial power was obliged to use more troops to maintain its internal control of India in the face of militant nationalists than were deployed against the Japanese.
Jawaharal Nehru, later the first and greatest prime minister of an independent India, wrote from his British prison cell on the day after Pearl Harbor: ‘If I were asked with whom my sympathies lay in this war, I would unhesitatingly say with Russia, China, America and England’. But for the Congress president, there remained an unbreakable barrier to giving the allies his active support. Churchill refused to grant India independence. Thus, Nehru critically qualified the above, ‘there is no question of my giving help to Britain. How can I fight for a thing, freedom, which is denied to me ? British policy in India appears to be to terrify the people, so that in anxiety we may seek British protection’.
Meanwhile in Egypt, Britain exploited to the limits and beyond its treaty rights with a supposedly sovereign state. The country was governed as if it was a colony. Most Egyptians strongly supported the Axis, believing that its victory would free them from imperial subjection. During riots in 1942, crowds thronged Cairo streets shouting enthusiastically ‘Rommel ! Rommel !’. Anwar Sadat, an army officer who later became Egypt’s president, spent much of the war in a British jail for aiding German agents. He wrote later: ‘Our enemy was primarily, if not solely, Great Britain’.
None of this is intended to suggest that I doubt the virtue of the allied cause: rather, I want to show that at the time Churchill and Roosevelt did not have all the best tunes. It does us no harm, in justly congratulating our parents and grandparents on what they did, to be reminded of some blemishes on the allied escrutcheon, foremost among them the 1943 Bengal famine. At least a million people, and perhaps as many as three millions, perished under British rule. Thousands died on the streets of Calcutta while in the city’s clubs white sahibs enjoyed unlimited eggs and bacon.