Critics of Churchill’s attempts to promote secret resistance rarely think beyond Europe. Much has been written about SOE in France and the Low Countries, a great deal of it highly critical. But Churchill encouraged SOE to think of itself as a global organisation operating on every continent, resulting in success as far afield as Brazil, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea. Remarkably, almost nothing has been written about its biggest success, which lay in Burma. During the last year of the war, SOE in Burma carried out its most spectacularly successful campaign of the entire conflict. The main focus was a series of operations employing the fiercely loyal Burmese hill tribes, codenamed ‘Nation’ and ‘Character’. Churchill was instrumental in promoting a wide range of special forces activity in Burma, including the Chindits. This force was led by Orde Wingate, one of Britain’s most eccentric wartime leaders. He was so odd that Churchill had to compel his generals to give him a role, but thereafter he achieved remarkable things. Churchill collected eccentrics precisely because they shook things up, and he thought Wingate ‘a man of genius’. At one point the prime minister considered making Wingate overall commander in India, to the absolute horror of the chiefs of staff.47
From late 1944, the guerrilla levies recruited from the Burmese hill tribes scented victory. Guerrilla intelligence also multiplied the effect of Allied air attacks. Japanese casualties of ‘Operation Nation’ were estimated at between 3,582 and 4,650, with Allied casualties between sixty-three and eighty-eight.48 ‘Operation Character’, conducted in the Karen tribal area, met with even greater success. It consisted of three main groups under Lt. Colonel Tulloch, Lt. Colonel Peacock and Major Turral. By 13 April 1945, Tulloch’s Northern Group commanded a tribal force of 2,000. As the 50,000-strong Japanese 15th Division tried to move south through the Karen areas in a race with the British for the key town of Toungoo, which controlled the strategic road south to Rangoon, it was ambushed.49 Extended fighting developed, and continued into July. Remarkably, on 21 July, General Stopford, commander of the British 33rd Corps, conceded that SOE’s locally-raised Karen forces had inflicted more casualties in the previous month than the regular army.50 Churchill loved secret service, but even more than that he loved empire. Here, in the hills above the Irrawaddy River, they came together.
When Roosevelt and Churchill met off Newfoundland in 1941 they drew up an agreed statement of war aims called the Atlantic Charter. Few people realise that this charter was never signed. To Churchill’s horror it contained clauses offering self-determination to everyone – including Britain’s imperial subjects. He saw the war as a struggle to save the British Empire, and was already thinking about the impact of the post-war settlement on imperial territories. Fearing Roosevelt’s anti-imperialism, he turned the lens of British intelligence on the country’s closest ally, the United States.
Churchill was far from merely defensive when it came to imperial territory, believing that the empire needed to become larger if it was to become safer. After Britain’s ignominious defeat at Singapore in 1942, which he called ‘the greatest disaster in our history’, he was determined to restore British rule to Burma and Malaya, and if possible to expand their territory by annexing parts of Thailand. He told Eden that this could be presented to the world as ‘some sort of protectorate’.51 But the American Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, engaged in special operations behind enemy lines, thwarted the plan by taking the lead in working with the Thai resistance. In April 1945, it was reporting that Thailand should become an ‘incubator of Americanism’ in the Far East.52
Churchill envisaged the Far Eastern war as an exercise in imperial recovery. By contrast, Roosevelt believed that the European empires were a major contributing factor to the outbreak of war. The president was a devout anti-imperialist on ideological grounds, but he also saw the European empires as a barrier to post-war American trade. Some of his secret services were even backing Ho Chi Minh against the French – the future of French Indochina was an issue so divisive that by 1944 Churchill and Roosevelt had refused to discuss it. Instead, they simply spied on each other and sought to subvert each other’s projects.53
SOE was the most powerful British secret service in Asia. It was run by Colin Mackenzie, a friend of Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India, and a director of the textile company J&P Coats. In the early twentieth century, this was the world’s third largest company after US Steel and Standard Oil, and it had vast imperial interests. Its main business rivals were American. Similarly, John Keswick, the senior SOE officer in China, was with the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, while MI6’s Asian operation was run by Geoffrey Denham, a director of Anglo-Dutch Plantations. Like Churchill, they were determined to perpetuate the post-war empire.
The main focus of Churchill’s paranoia was the Indian independence movement. Churchill’s views on India can seem shocking. His private secretary recorded how ‘The P.M. said the Hindus were a foul race,’ and wished that Bomber Harris could ‘send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them’.54 British intelligence followed every move of Indian nationalists, and also discovered covert OSS activity in India. Anglo–American spy rivalry was rife in Delhi. From 1942 onwards, Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ movement had left the British in the awkward position of trying to fight a war in Asia from a base that was itself effectively occupied territory. India presented a major internal security problem, and the OSS was seen as siding with the subversives. The Americans were not unaware of the ironies. Donald Downes, an OSS officer watching events in Bombay, recalled: ‘I saw the great Gandhi himself come to visit his British dentist in a green Rolls-Royce on which was mounted a sign in five languages saying “boycott British goods”.’55
William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination continued its operations in New York, and busily spied on Indian nationalists in the United States. In return, Roosevelt deliberately provoked Churchill by appointing William Phillips, head of OSS London, as his personal representative in India. OSS officers arriving in Delhi were warned that ‘the British are past masters at intrigue and had planted spies in all American agencies to piece together information’.56 In fact, the British had gone even further, and from early 1943 were intercepting all mail addressed to American consulates in India.57 General Al Wedemeyer, the most senior American officer in India, was told by his staff that the British had tapped his telephone.58
Hong Kong lay firmly in the American sphere of military operations. Although occupied by Japan during the war, everyone expected it to be liberated by American and Chinese nationalist forces. Churchill feared that this prize piece of British real estate would be handed to Chiang Kai-shek. He therefore approved the insertion of a British SOE group under John Keswick conveniently close to Hong Kong to watch events there. In April 1942, the head of the Chinese secret service had them expelled. But SOE was greatly helped by the fact that the Chinese nationalists were fighting the Chinese communists, while the OSS were fighting a rival intelligence outfit run by the US Navy. By 1944, SOE had made its way back into China under the cover of a mission to recover and rescue escaping prisoners of war from Hong Kong. It developed a plan to arm and train 30,000 British-paid guerrillas to ensure that a British force played a part in liberating Hong Kong at the end of the war. Also assisting Britain’s return to Hong Kong was a massive SOE black-market currency-smuggling exercise so large that it paid for all of SOE’s operations in every theatre during the Second World War.
French Indochina had considerable symbolic value for Roosevelt. In conversations with Stalin he remarked that after a century of French rule, ‘the inhabitants are worse off than before’.59 As a result, he tried to