Mark Collins – Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) After WW II: The Indian Army and the Raj

India since the Second World War has done much to overlook the very serious role of the British Indian Army, and the other Indian services, during that great conflict before independence:

India’s Forgotten Good War

That post was based on a NY Times article by Raghu Karnad, author of Farthest Field: A Story Of India’s Second World War: a realistic, impressionist and most moral book very much worth the read (the family involved were Parsis):

[Identify the aircraft.]

Here then from that book is an example of how the British employed their Indian Army immediately after the war was won and before independence in 1947 (pp. 227-228):

…[In 1945 after the August 15 surrender of Japan] A Dutch colonial administration waited to be restored to power in the East Indies…The vanquished Japanese Army had accepted the terms of surrender: including the bitter condition that they would now help restore Asian colonies to their old European masters. But some Japanese commanders were more inclined to surrender their arms to natives than to Allied victors…

…So began the inevitable final act of the 5th [Indian] Division’s five years of war: Indonesians, armed by the Japanese, would fight Indians, commanded by the British, on behalf of the Dutch [more on the division here and here]…

Funny old word, what? Also and importantly on the immediate aftermath of the war in Asia:

After the “Good War”: Die schreckliche Stunde null

…the defeat of Japan and the collapse of its short-lived empire accelerated and broadened the civil war in China and set in motion revolts against the colonial masters by native populations across the hemisphere. These consequences of the fall of the Japanese empire are still inadequately known [look at this must-read: In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia by Ronald Spector–a great number of people in Vietnam, China and Korea were starving well before the Japanese surrender]…

And many of those live were saved after the Japanese surrender, a surrender mainly caused by the use of two atomic bombs. Along with almost certainly many American lives saved:

SIGINT and Another Reason Why the Atomic Bomb Was Needed Against Japan (reprise)

A nasty old world too. And not seeming to get much better.

Mark Collins, a prolific Ottawa blogger, is a Fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute; he tweets @Mark3Ds