Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Read online

  Also by Michael Burleigh

  The Racial State: Germany 1933–45

  Death and Deliverance

  Germany Turns Eastward

  The Third Reich: A New History

  Earthly Powers

  Sacred Causes

  Blood and Rage

  Moral Combat

  VIKING

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  Copyright © Michael Burleigh, 2013

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  First published in Great Britain by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  Map illustrations by Hugo Bicheno

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burleigh, Michael, 1955–

  Small wars, faraway places : global insurrection and the making of the modern world, 1945–1965 / Michael Burleigh.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63803-3

  1. Low-intensity conflicts (Military science)—History—20th century. 2. Military history, Modern—20th century. 3. United States—Military policy—History—20th century. 4. World politics—20th century 5. Imperialism. 6. Cold War. I. Title. II. Title: Global insurrection and the making of the modern world, 1945–1965.

  D431.B87 2013

  909.82’5—dc23

  2013017207

  For Vidia and Nadira Naipaul,

  Nancy Sladek and Andrea Chiari-Gaggia

  CONTENTS

  Also by Michael Burleigh

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Introduction: From the Halls of Montezuma to the Green Zone of Baghdad

  1. Japan Opens Pandora’s Box

  2. Harry Truman’s World

  3. Arab Nationalism, Jewish Homeland

  4. Some More Victorious than Others

  5. ‘Police Action’: Korea

  6. ‘Emergency’: Malaya

  7. By Huk or by Crook: The Philippines

  8. Parachute the Escargot: Indochina

  9. Sometimes Special Relationship

  10. Hungary and Suez

  11. With Us or Against Us: The Sub-Continent

  12. Losing by Winning: Algeria

  13. Terror and Counter-Terror: Kenya

  14. The Cold War Comes to Africa

  15. Backyard Blues: Cuba

  16. To the Brink: The Missile Crisis

  17. Overreach: Vietnam

  18. Watershed of the American Century

  Epilogue: Legacies

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  From the Halls of Montezuma to the Green Zone of Baghdad

  At the height of President George W. Bush’s 2003 intervention in Iraq, bold spirits urged the United States to do as Rudyard Kipling once urged in 1899, following the lightning US conquest of the Spanish overseas empire:

  Take up the White Man’s burden –

  Send forth the best ye breed –

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need . . .

  Yet in mid-1945, when the US assumed leadership of the free world, half a century after Kipling wrote and another before President Bush acted, history and tradition rendered such a choice a more equivocal affair for Americans than it is often made to seem. The pitifully needy condition of Europe after 1945, resembling the continent’s million wandering orphans, sealed the fate of its distant colonies. In Asia these fell like ninepins to the marauding Japanese from early 1942 onwards. The example of Nazism more generally discredited the notion that race determined political destinies, as did Imperial Japan’s occupation of Asia, with which this book begins.

  It tells the story of the eclipse of those empires, of the birth of some of the nation states that replaced them, and of how the US (and the Soviet Union) reacted to these developments. These struggles for independence, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, coincided with the intense superpower competition called the Cold War. The Americans had to suppress a long-standing disinclination to meddle in other countries – a view caricatured as ‘isolationism’ – and an inherent dislike of colonial rule stemming from their own freedom fight against the British. That was notwithstanding an imperialist spasm of the Republic’s own just before and after the dawn of the twentieth century, or intensified interference in Mexico and the Caribbean. Colonies shocked Americans, from the Presidents downwards, and despite racial segregation in the Southern states. After a wartime visit to Gambia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to his son Elliott: ‘Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate. I asked. Life expectancy – you’d never guess what it is. Twenty-six years. These people are treated worse than livestock. Their cattle live longer!’ In the case of French Indochina, Roosevelt agreed with Stalin that French rule there was ‘rotten to the core’. As an article in Life magazine had it in October 1942: ‘One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together.’

  However, by the late 1940s, when the Cold War had begun in earnest, the United States calculated that propping up colonial empires was cheaper than deploying US troops, while accepting the argument that European metropolises economically weakened by decolonization would become as susceptible to Communist subversion as their colonies. Because the Soviet Union was the sole Communist state, it was assumed that its directing hand was responsible for subversion everywhere: it had after all established the Communist International, or Comintern, for that purpose in 1919. In fact, despite being Lenin’s former Commissar responsible for nationalities, Stalin was uninterested in the Third World. A red mist clouded the vision of America’s governing class, even when Yugoslavia and then China took another route. State Department experts also sometimes failed to detect reds under every bed and President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the dangers to democracy of a military–industrial complex. Of course, American inability to discriminate between Communist regimes was as nothing compared with the incapacity of successive Communist regimes to learn from the disasters of those who went before them, so that Mao repeated many of the same ‘errors’ – meaning murderous experiments in collectivization – as Stalin, whose own radicality was eclipsed by Cambodia’s Pol Pot.

  Not all Americans were enamoured of their new world role. US Congressmen routinely opposed any spending on new embassy buildings the State Department thought commensurate with post-war US power, because they and their constituents resented ‘striped pants’ elitists bent on squandering their hard-earned cash on glass ziggurats in faraway places. Actually, foreign service officers often worked in dangerous places, where the air they breathed or the water they dr
ank could kill them, not to speak of air travel, which was far more lethal than it is now. The resentments were reciprocal. US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, an East Coast elitist and Anglophile, once gave the game away by publicly remarking: ‘If you truly had a democracy and did what people wanted, you’d go wrong every time.’ That is more relevant than ever at a time when Western intervention in Afghanistan is massively unpopular in Europe and the US.

  This US accommodation with late European empire was eased by the fact that the colonial powers had themselves adopted the rhetoric of happy families progressing towards self-rule (notably the British Commonwealth but also the French Union) even as they fought vicious rearguard actions against nationalists in their colonies. What commenced as a response to Britain’s admission that it no longer had the means to support Greece and Turkey became the 1947 Truman Doctrine of potentially limitless global security undertakings. Republican Senator Robert Taft spoke up to oppose the conversion of the United States into ‘a meddlesome Mattie, interfering in every trouble throughout the world’. This linked him to a venerable tradition in US foreign policy going back to John Quincy Adams’s reluctance to support Greek nationalists in the early 1820s, no mean gesture in a land with a city called Philadelphia, and forward to the pre-9/11 foreign policy of George W. Bush, which defined itself in opposition to the fitful humanitarian interventions of William Jefferson Clinton. In the 1940s, the influential newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann was among the first to see that this newly achieved American ‘globalism’ also passed the initiative to the Soviets, who could defeat the US by ‘disorganizing states that are already disorganized, by disuniting peoples that are torn with civil strife, and by inciting their discontent which is already very great’. The US would become embroiled in ‘recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous army of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets’, a highly prescient description of the decades covered in this book, 1945–65. Mindful not to alienate large numbers of West European Communists attached to their respective empires, the Soviets also reluctantly adjusted their theoretical doctrines so as to accommodate ‘bourgeois’ nationalists – for there were not many industrial proletarians in the Third World, before Khrushchev decided to compete with the US for influence in the developing world. By the end of the 1960s, Mao’s China made a bid to lead all Third World revolutionary struggles. While relations with the Soviets cooled, Mao also grew impatient with India’s pretensions to being an equal partner in the affairs of Asia. This led to war between the two most populous Asian nations over disputed territories in the Himalayas. Nations seeking to free themselves from colonialism were sucked into this vast superpower conflict, often with devastating local effects, despite attempts begun by Yugoslavia and taken over by India to non-align the new Asian and African states in a distinctive Third World camp at the April 1955 Bandung Conference. The two major empires were those of Britain and France, though there is some attention paid to the Netherlands East Indies too.

  Books on empire seem to oblige the authors to give a verdict and/or statement or confession of views about the subject, although this is less contentious in the case of the Macedonian, Roman, Persian or Han empires of the ancient past where the ‘civilizing’ effects seem less controversial at such a great remove. Contemporary history is more sensitive, even though empires have been more normative than either democracies or nation states in the broad history of humankind. Just as many Americans disliked the US’s global role, so not all Europeans were eager for empire, and nor did they all live in castles and chateaux either. There were and are many critics of imperialism. Emotional investment in empire was limited, except in Scotland, to the prefect class from the private schools, inspired by the Christian warriors depicted in the stained glass of their chapels. Its ethos was anti-democratic. As one proconsul wrote from northern Nigeria, ‘the duty of colonial trusteeship lay . . . in protecting the virtues of northern [Nigerian] aristocratic life and its communal economy’ from the ‘barbarizing effects of European capitalism, democracy and individualism’. The British ruling classes enmeshed indigenous elites in all the fluff and flummery of chivalric orders and titles, for when all was said and done the British knew how to mount a damn good show. Though they may be suckers for ‘our’ royal weddings, most Americans can separate the fluff from statecraft. They are not Romans to British Greeks, a conceit with unfortunate contemporary undertones. This is not to deprecate or ignore such objective improvements as the eradication of tropical diseases or constructing telegraphs, railways and roads, not to speak of legal systems and (through schools) the Christian virtues, which nowadays are more pervasive in Africa than in the secular former imperial metropolises. Actual literacy rates often told another story. Long after it ceased to exist, empire also left a sense of mass national entitlement and elite Romantic ambition, which endures as Britain punching above its actual capacities and resources, or the assumption lower down the social scale that a defined pool of foreigners would always do the unpleasant jobs. While your author is not a crusader trying to right past injustices, he has a realistic view of empire and its unfortunate legacies to the former colonial powers, including the subconscious ways it affects so many international moralists, for that is part of punching above one’s weight too, however much human rights advocates would not appreciate me saying so.

  So, this book is about a crucial transitional era in which power tangibly passed from European capitals to the ‘World Capital on the Potomac’. Beneath that secular process, dozens of new nations struggled into independent existence, many successfully, some disastrously. Since a book which discussed every struggle for independence would be impossibly long, I have selected those which most interest me, favouring depth of field rather than a wide-angled focus. As it is, I reluctantly decided to cut lengthy sections on Angola, Mozambique and South Africa, despite months spent researching them. In all cases the presence or absence of a charismatic leader such as Chiang Kai-shek, Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba or Jomo Kenyatta was determinative. Who remembers the Malayan Communist leader Chin Peng, one of the few among my cast of characters who, aged ninety at the time of writing, still lurks somewhere over the Thai border? Much blood was shed in what was not a sociological process, though it is worth recalling that in Africa – often regarded as uniquely savage – the initial wave of statehood cost less life than the number of Americans killed each year on the roads. That was certainly not true of Algeria or Indochina, where millions died, nor of Korea, where the death toll was similarly colossal as the superpowers fought a proxy war and the Americans came up against Mao’s armies.

  This period of small wars in faraway places is highly topical, not least in contemporary military circles, which study them obsessively. This book explores a number of those fought by the British and French, or the Japanese before them, questioning some of the received wisdom whereby bludgeoning incompetents were supplanted by quasi-heroic sophisticates practising ‘population-centric’ hearts-and-minds warfare. Generals and military experts have ransacked this period for ‘how to do it’ lessons for contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, often by ignoring what tactics actually won atypical campaigns in favour of what best resembles what they want to do in the present.

  I branch out into the parallel experiences of the US in the Philippines and Vietnam, where in the first case the Americans directed a highly successful counter-insurgency campaign, and in the second inherited and compounded the disaster left by the French. In reality, hearts-and-minds campaigns only worked once kinetic force – a euphemism for killing people – had achieved population and spatial control, as such contemporary adepts as General David Petraeus do not readily acknowledge in their apparent unawareness that the Japanese also pioneered this style of warfare long before the British in Malaya. The British triumphed in Malaya, which they were leaving anyway, against an enemy limited to part of an ethnic minority, just as in Kenya their Mau Mau opponents consisted of marginalized elements of the Kikuyu
tribe. In Algeria and Indochina the French had the majority populations against them and lost against guerrillas who could weave in and out of neighbouring states. China and the Soviet Union also poured men and weapons into Indochina. Able to dissociate leftist Algerian nationalists from Communists, the Americans proved unable to do the same in the case of the Vietnamese and ended up fighting a disastrous war that became uniquely their own. Obviously the ability to discriminate between Communist states was hampered by their generic internal similarities, with secret policemen consigning broadly defined opponents to concentration camps, whether in Albania, Bulgaria, China or Vietnam.

  Using counter-insurgency campaigns as paradigms for contemporary practice also involves ignoring their less savoury aspects. These were deliberately concealed by the destruction of incriminating written materials relating to brutality, murder and torture. Even the ashes of burned papers were pulverized by the British, while crates crammed with papers were dropped into deep sea, where there were no currents to wash them up again. The so-called legacy files handed on to the post-colonial successor governments were systematically weeded too. When a file flagged as a watch file (stamped W) was surreptitiously removed from an archive, a dummy twin was created to fill its place, with suitably anodyne content. This ever so deliberate work was to be done only by white colonial police officers. The archive policy was decreed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod so that materials that ‘might embarrass Her Majesty’s governments’ or ‘members of the police, military forces, public servants or others e.g. police informers’ or that might be ‘used unethically by ministers in the successor government’ would never see the light of day. The surviving files were secreted in a Foreign Office communications centre in Buckinghamshire until lawyers acting for Kenyan victims of British maltreatment forced their selective release into the public domain in 2011.

  The period I have chosen to write about is one in which many contemporary developments can be discerned, like ships appearing on the horizon, from Cuba to China and Palestine to Pakistan, though I happen to believe that contemporaries also make their own destinies in a past that was no more determined than the present. For many contemporaries, some of the major transformations described here were inconceivable at the time, whether the coming to power of Mao’s Communists in China or the swift demise of what seemed to be unassailable global empires. People probably once felt the same way about the impossibility of democracy or racial integration. Then there are the certainties which have been overturned in subsequent decades. How many Americans can recall that Pakistan was among the US’s most solidly reliable allies, whereas India was regarded as suspiciously pink? Who would have imagined, given the US’s tragic invovements in Indochina, that nowadays it would be conducting joint naval exercises with Communist Vietnam designed to contain Chinese claims to a few submerged rocks in the northern Pacific as it asserts its own Monroe Doctrine?