Phil Craig Discusses War, Empire, and Historical Memory

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Excerpts from the interview:

Q: Shall we start at the very beginning of this book?

A: It's taken 20 years for me to complete a trilogy of books about Britain and its empire in the Second World War. But I really wanted the final volume to appear for the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. And I wanted it to focus on India and what we call the Far East, what I should really call Southeast Asia. I was interested in the effect of the empire on policymaking in Britain and how the fact that there was a common consensus really emerging across India that independence was genuinely going to come. I think after 1942 it was inevitable. But a rising class of officers in the Indian army were torn. Should they stay loyal to Britain one last time and fight this war against Japan or should they perhaps follow Subhas Chandra Bose in the INA?

Q: How did you home in upon Subhash Chandra Bose and General Kodendera Subayya Thimayya to create your narrative?

A: I think Bose is such an interesting historical figure. His popularity in modern India, the way in which your PM often refers to him as one of the great heroes of Independence, that is something that many people in 1945 might have been surprised had they lived this long to discover. And Thimayya was a perfect character for me to find because he himself is a nationalist, he’s a friend of the Nehru family. He spends most of his career in the Indian Army being very sympathetic to the cause of Independence. When the war comes, I think he is genuinely torn. In Burma, there are very well-known stories of racial prejudice for the refugees, that the white refugees get preferential treatment. This creates massive amounts of anger in India amongst men like Thimayya. And of course, the feeling that here's Bose saying the quickest way to true independence is to side with the enemies of Britain. He's done it with the Nazis and now he's doing it with the Japanese. So Thimayya is torn and his own brother joins the INA. And the way that his life and Bose's life interweave and intersect was just completely fascinating.

Q: What is it about historical narratives that you find has changed over the years?

A: On the purely technical level, it's so much easier now to access archives because of the internet. I found amazing material on Thimayya sitting in my bedroom in Twickenham. But I think the really interesting thing, especially in terms of how historical memory works, is the impact of social media. You only have to mention the war and what happens in 1945 and you will attract the attention of many thousands of very passionate devotees of Bose. And they will tell you that he was the true hero. And I would say India perhaps should be more proud of the official Indian Army. Thimayya’s view is that for independence to happen, India needed a strong, politically independent and multi- denominational military force. And he dedicated his life to building that.

Q: You also spend quite a while not just researching but reinterpreting the story of Britain and the empire.

A: There is a wonderful quote from Salman Rushdie which I use in the book from ‘Midnight’s Children’ where he says something does not have to be true to be real. And I take that very seriously to heart when I think about the way people choose to remember the past. And don't forget, most people are not academically trained. They'll take what they receive from social media in a tweet or in a TikTok video. And some of those can be very short and emotionally manipulative. And I think it's quite easy, many years after the event, for someone like Bose to become a hero because it's very simple. He was uncompromising. He believed that India must be independent and he was prepared to do anything to make that happen. He was never going to compromise with the British men like Thimaiyya would. But I would say if you lived in the time of these men, you would understand why their passionate extremism was not perhaps what was necessary. There are numerous examples of the Japanese army killing Bose's own men. He actually lost all of the battles he ever fought. But he kind of won the bigger battle, the battle for control of the narrative.

Q: You show large parts of the world which are fighting, trying to create their own narratives.

A: The heart of a good documentary is intercutting — knowing when to cut, knowing how much the audience can take before they lose track, and running various plot lines in parallel and interweaving them. I hope I deployed that in the book. I think that the idea of a reckoning was important to me because in Britain, and I guess I am writing primarily as a British person, we have this idea of the Second World War, that we were the underdog. We love the story of 1940, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the rationing. We had Dunkirk, it's backs to the wall. But the thing is, the rest of the world never looked at Britain like that because Britain was never an underdog, it was an overdog, an overlord. It ran other countries, it was capable of being very ruthless. And actually, when you look at the empire in 1945, what really strikes you is it isn't ending. I mean, it is in India but elsewhere there's an awful lot of skulduggery to keep the empire going.
I was really amazed to discover how the British had fought with the French and the Dutch to try and keep colonial control in places like Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. And I was amazed to discover that Indian troops were sent under British command to Vietnam, to Indonesia to fight against people who had been our allies in order to put colonial masters back in their palaces. These British and French commanders and Dutch, they released Japanese prisoners of war, the very people they had been fighting against for four years... So, yeah, the empire doesn't end in 1945. In fact, there's quite a lot of kicking and screaming to keep the show on the road.

Q: Is that why you use a phrase like ‘imperial muscle memory’?

A: Yes, that's exactly why I used that phrase. Because I think we need to understand that the people making decisions had grown up in a world where imperialism was natural and also a sort of racial attitude. Even the left-wing Labour PM Clement Attlee says things about the empire which today we would find really shocking, the implication that white Europeans are somehow better suited to rule than the colonised people themselves. And I think also it's very hard for the British to understand that when the Japanese first sweep through the region, people are thrilled to see all empires driven out. British, French, Dutch, American. Somehow, for the first time ever, another Asian power is showing that it can govern, it can have a good military, it can have a good economy. You don't need white people telling you what to do. That was a seismic change and I think that once that genie was out of the bottle, it was never going to go back in.

Q: There was an urgency in your text to remember past events. As we're getting further away, historical memory is becoming weaker.

A: For this book I met only two people who are actually living witnesses to the times I'm writing about. So maybe as they fade into memory and the last of that generation dies off, there is an urgency to nail this down, to understand what it was they achieved. The reason Britain was so powerful and could stand up to Hitler in 1940 is that it had an empire, so it's hard to disentangle those two things, the good and the bad.