The Beginning of the End of the British Empire

Análisis
Stratfor Global Intelligence, 14.02.2016

 

Analysis

On Jan. 31, 1942, Allied engineers blew a hole in the causeway linking the island city of Singapore to the Malay Peninsula, hoping to slow the advancement of the Japanese Imperial troops down the coastline. The blast resounded throughout the city. As the story goes, 19-year-old university student and future prime minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew was walking across campus at that moment. When his British headmaster, passing by, asked what the sound was, Lee responded, "That is the end of the British Empire."

Japanese troops landed on the beaches eight days later, and Singapore was hopelessly surrounded. On Feb. 15, British forces were forced to surrender. Before the astonishing defeat, the loss of Singapore was unthinkable for Britain. Winston Churchill had called Singapore the "Gibraltar of the East," an impregnable fortress at the heart of the empire. Japan's surprise victory shook that empire and marked the start of an epochal shift — one in which the United States became the top Pacific power. It also marked the start of a period of near-apocalyptic violence in Southeast Asia and resulted in multiple intractable smaller conflicts that continue today.

 

The Light of Asia

The success of Japan's 1941 Pacific campaign was unprecedented, but the capabilities needed to wage the campaign had taken decades to develop. In 1868, Europe was ascendant in Asia, and Japan was isolated and divided. China, long the center of regional power, was in disarray and its imperial system was imploding. Between 1839 and 1860, the British took advantage of the chaos by waging the First and Second Opium Wars, forcing open some of China's ports to foreign trade. Japan took notice. The arrival of U.S. warships to China in 1854 galvanized Japan to reform, a process that culminated in the 1868 Meiji Restoration. This ended feudal rule, centralized the political system and readied the country for industrialization.

In 1895, Japan scored a decisive victory against China in the First Sino-Japanese War, overcoming China's larger fleet. In 1905, Japan went a step further and achieved the unthinkable, routing the Russian imperial navy at the Battle of Tsushima and forcing it out of the Pacific. It moved on to defeat Russia's Baltic fleet as well. With the defeat of a recognized European great power, Japan began to insert itself into the colonial order that the Europeans had created, slowly chipping away at it and putting its pieces back into the hands of an Asian power.

Japan was a devoted adherent of the British naval model and imperial strategy. Beginning with the Meiji Restoration, Tokyo began to establish its own Pacific empire, which secured the home islands and fed its burgeoning industrial sector. In the 1870s, Japan took a smattering of holdings in the South Pacific. In 1895, Tokyo took formal control of the island of Formosa (Taiwan) and in 1910, the Korean Peninsula. In 1931, it pushed overland toward the center of China, taking the peripheral, resource-rich and industrialized region of Manchuria and establishing the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo in modern Northeast China and Inner Mongolia. By 1937, skirmishes between Japan and the Chinese Nationalist government morphed into all-out war.

Across Asia, other nationalist movements in the European colonies were rising. Japan became the guiding light for these would-be insurgents and downtrodden future leaders. Many studied at Japanese universities or were trained by Japan's increasingly powerful military. Tokyo made subtle preparations to take on its European rivals. Between 1930 and 1941, Japan established a shadow empire in Southeast Asia, forging deep economic ties and creating a broad intelligence network. These connections were the foundation for Tokyo's next move: establishing its continental empire, the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

By 1940, Japan was pouring massive resources into conquering China. Tokyo controlled the coast, but the Nationalists held out in the interior, bolstered by Allied support based in mainland Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Japan was dependent on imports from the United States, especially oil and rubber. In September 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, putting it on course to challenge the West in the Pacific. For Japan, relying on the United States became increasingly intolerable. In July 1941, Japan took control of French Indochina, ostensibly with the permission of the Nazi-controlled Vichy government. It was the final straw for the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and all reacted by seizing Japanese assets and cutting off trade with the country. About 75 percent of Japan's oversees trade was halted, along with nearly 90 percent of its oil imports.

 

Paper Fortress

Japan was left economically devastated, so it looked to the European holdings of Southeast Asia to escape from the bind: Rubber, oil, minerals and foodstuffs could be had in abundance from Burma, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and Malaya. The only thing standing in the way, with France and Holland under German control, was the United Kingdom and its domination of the Indian Ocean.

Singapore was key to British Asia — 23 percent of the empire's trade and 60 percent of Australia's passed through the Malacca Straits. Singapore's massive and expensive Sembawang naval base had been completed in 1939. It was meant to serve as the staging ground for a hypothetical defense of Malacca in the event of Japanese aggression, guarding the approach to British India. The plan was simple: Troops in Singapore would hold off the aggressor while British vessels sped to their defense. After relieving the troops in Singapore, the British navy would stage a counterattack and regain British Hong Kong before blockading the Japanese home islands.

But this "Singapore Strategy," and the much-touted invincibility of the island city itself, was a mirage. By sea, the city was impregnable. It was vulnerable, however, to the north across the two-kilometer-wide Straits of Johor. The city's massive shore batteries were meant to defend against attacking naval vessels. They could be turned landward but were not equipped with the proper ordnance to take out infantry or tanks. If the Malay Peninsula fell, Singapore fell. And Malaya lacked natural barriers — besides jungle — to stop advancing troops. By 1940, even the naval aspect of Singapore's defenses was diminished. With the fall of France in June, Churchill decided that the new priority for the British navy was the Middle East, leaving the U.S. fleet as the only nearby assistance to defend Singapore.

But on Dec. 7, 1941, the surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor left the U.S. fleet in disarray. On Dec. 8, Japanese forces landed at Kota Bharu in northern Malaya. The British dispatched battle cruiser HMS Repulse and battleship HMS Prince of Wales; the Japanese sunk them both on Dec. 10. That same day they began to bomb Singapore. Over the course of the next 55 days, Japanese troops advanced an average of 20 kilometers (12 miles) per day, assisted by the use of 6,000 bicycles. During this "Bicycle Blitzkrieg," they repaired 250 bridges and fought 95 engagements, killing 13,000 Commonwealth troops. As they approached Penang, under imperial control since 1786, its British administrators fled the city. The only one left to surrender was an Indian newspaper editor.

Churchill told the British military commanders to fight to the death, advising that the honor of the British Empire was at stake. But with Japan advancing and no Allied relief in sight, army leaders made the unanimous decision Feb. 15 to capitulate and spare the civilian population of the city. The ceremony lasted five minutes and took place in a car factory. Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival unconditionally surrendered his 85,000 troops to Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita. Japan took 130,000 civilian and military prisoners, to be interned at the notorious Changi Prison among other places. Many of them would serve as the slave labor to build the Burma-Siam Railway, memorialized in Pierre Boulle's iconic novel, The Bridge over the River Kwai. About 13,000 prisoners and perhaps 10 times as many local Asian laborers died building the railway.

 

Asia for the Asians

For much of the remainder of the war, there were large swaths of Southeast Asia where Allied regular forces could not operate. British troops, including the special forces, operated behind Japanese lines in Burma to reopen the overland route to supply China. In many places, however, Asian guerrilla forces filled the vacuum. Many worked in partnership with Western intelligence operatives — the ethnic Karen and Kachin of Burma, the communist-led Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army, the Vietminh in Indochina and numerous other resistance groups. In Burma, the nationalist Burma Independence Army allied itself with the Japanese, only to turn on them at the last moment and assist the return of the British. However, the Southeast Asia the British returned to in 1944 was changed. The war had fostered numerous anticolonial forces that, when the Japanese left, turned on the British and on the post-independence governments.

The fall of Singapore marked the end of the British Empire. The Japanese offensive decimated the British naval and ground presence in Asia, and when Imperial Japan fell, the United States was the last Pacific power left standing. London was beleaguered by the accumulated debts of World War I and World War II, which prevented it from reasserting itself. The "jewel in the crown of the British Empire," India, gained independence in 1947. British holdings in Southeast Asia followed slowly: Burma in 1948, Malaya in 1957 and Singapore soon after. However, despite the expectations of Southeast Asian nationalist leaders, independence did not usher in an era of peace and prosperity. As the imperial order fell, a new Cold War order rose to take its place. With the exception of Singapore and Thailand, this new order brought conflict, poverty and disarray.

Globally, the United States was gradually assuming the mantle of the British Empire, taking control of the seas and operating in Asia through a network of allies — chief among them a rehabilitated Japan. Western Europe had the stabilizing presence of U.S. troops and, by 1949, the economic lifeblood of the Marshall Plan. Eastern Europe was drawn into the stable, if stifling, Soviet sphere. In Asia, the regional leviathans, China and India, were both focused inward, dealing with their own unresolved political and economic problems. Neither had the capacity — or will — to successfully stabilize Southeast Asia, which was awash in small arms and seething with ideological and ethnic conflict.

Southeast Asia was the forgotten basket case, worrisome mainly for its potential as a site for communist infiltration. The Malay Emergency lasted until 1957, the Indochina Wars raged from 1946 to 1989 (drawing in the United States) and Myanmar's ethnic conflicts continue to today. Ironically, Singapore was an exception to this pattern of disarray. It possessed an unparalleled position on the Malacca Strait and continued to be a willing host for Western naval forces. It also managed to remain distinct from Malaysia — avoiding the drag of that country's turmoil — and was free to build a strong economy on the basis of its Western business ties. Today, the Pacific regional order is once again shifting, as the United States and China compete for influence in the South China Sea. Singapore still functions as a reliably corruption-free base for Western commercial interests looking to gain a foothold in Asia and is still an unparalleled node in the U.S.-designed global trade system. One thing has remained the same, though: Singapore is once again at the pivot point of global change.