Map of the partition of India in 1947 for Wikipedia “Partition of India” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

(17) INDIA & PAKISTAN – INPEPENDENCE & PARTITION

(1942-1947)

Moving closer to the focus of my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars fought in Asia after the Second World War but which took definitive shape during that war – in this case, in south Asia or the Indian subcontinent.

India may have been fortunate in it did not have to fight a war of independence and Britain effectively ceded independence to it in 1947, but that independence was on the basis of partition into two independent states along religious lines – Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan (the latter as west and east Pakistan, with the latter subsequently seceding as Bangladesh).

Independence may have been relatively bloodless but partition brought with it displacement and violence on a large scale – with the former estimated as 12-20 million people displaced or as refugees, and the latter estimated as anywhere between 200,000 and two million people killed by sectarian violence, with the most common estimate as a million.

Both independence and the idea of Hindu-Muslim partition originated well before the Second World War. Indian independence movements arguably originated from resistance or revolts at the very outset of British imperialism in India by the British East India Company. However, the First World War “would prove to be the watershed of the imperial relationship between Britain and India” – as Indian independence movements hoped India’s contribution to that war would be repaid by British political concessions. Indian independence movements took even more definitive shape in the Second World War and India’s contribution to it – particularly with the Quit India Movement in 1942, hence my choice of 1942 as the starting date for this special mention.

My choice of 1947 as the end date for this special mention of course derives from the year of independence for the two new nations of India and Pakistan – with all the displacement and sectarian violence that this partition involved. The former persisted until at least 1951 and while the latter may have largely subsided by 1948, it laid the foundations for hostility and subsequent wars between Indian and Pakistan as well as the 1971 secession of the former east Pakistan as Bangladesh.

While the independence and partition of British India were probably inevitable, at least from the First World War onwards, it became inevitable on an almost immediate basis from the end of the Second World War due to Britain’s inability and unwillingness to maintain its former imperial or global commitments.

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

UN General Assembly Resolution 181 – UN Special Committee on Palestine (3 September 1947) and UN Ad Hoc Committee (25 November 1947) partition plans. The UN Ad Hoc Committee proposal was voted on in the resolution and adopted 29 November 1947 (map – public domain image)

(16) PALESTINE – INSURGENCY, CIVIL WAR & ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

(1939 / 1944-1948)

And now we come to my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars fought after the Second World War, but which took definitive shape during that war – above all in Asia.

Historian Ronald Spector, author of The Eagle Against the Sun, encapsulated this in the titles of his books, The Ruins of Empire and A Continent Erupts, reflecting their subject. In western Europe, the end of the war may have “marked the beginning of decades of unprecedented cooperation and prosperity…labelled the long peace”, but “east and southeast Asia quickly became the most turbulent regions of the globe”.

However, one region of western Asia soon vied as contender for the most turbulent region of the globe – the British mandate of Palestine or Mandatory Palestine, which Britain had administered since the end of the First World War as territory taken from the former Ottoman Empire.

The nascent conflict in Palestine, between Arabs and Jews, originated in the First World War – arguably in 1916-1917, with the Arab Revolt, Sykes-Picot Agreement, and Balfour Agreement in those years, although Palestine as the focus of Zionism or Jewish settlement and a Jewish “national home” originated earlier than that.

During the Mandate, there was further Jewish immigration and the rise of nationalist movements in both Jewish and Arab communities, culminating in the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine. Britain ultimately suppressed the Arab Revolt, but in part by means of the 1939 White Paper, severely restricting Jewish immigration and land purchases – hence my choice of 1939 as starting date for this special mention.

The combination of Arab Revolt and White Paper led to the formation of Jewish underground militias, primarily the Haganah which was to become the core of the Israeli Defence Force – as well as increasing Jewish sentiment that they could not achieve their aims in cooperation with the British, particularly after the war. It also contributed to the idea of partition as solution, as it became clear that Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine could not be resolved.

The Second World War saw some suspension of this conflict, as Palestine even came under Axis air attack and within potential reach of Axis armed forces with Rommel’s victories in 1942. That saw British training of forces within the Haganah, as well as the subsequent creation of the Jewish Brigade within British armed forces.

However, the Second World War had not even ended when the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine began in 1944 and persisted through to 1948, albeit in fairness the tide of war had passed well away from Palestine when it began. The primary insurgents were the more radical Jewish militias or underground groups – Lehi (or the Stern Gang) and Irgun. Even the Haganah sought to suppress them in cooperation with Britain or at least avoiding direct confrontation with British armed forces, instead mainly supporting immigration spurred by Jewish refugees from or after the Second World War.

From there, the conflict spiralled out of British control or even its ability to do so, and like many or most of Britain’s commitments elsewhere, Britain could not (or did not want to) maintain it and instead handed it over to someone else – in this case, the newly founded United Nations, which formulated a partition plan.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan – proposing the division of Palestine between Arab and Jewish states – prompted the 1947-1948 civil war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In turn, the conflict escalated into the 1948 Arab-Israeli War as five Arab states – Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq – declared war (and lost) against the new state of Israel that Jewish leadership declared when Britain ended the Mandate and withdrew its forces.

Arab-Israeli wars, and even more so Palestinian-Israeli wars have defined the region ever since. While Jewish immigration to and settlement in Palestine predated the Second World War, it gained new impetus from the war – albeit more before and after the war than during the war itself – and it is difficult to see that the formation of the state of Israel would have had the same force or support without the events of the war, one event in particular above all, perhaps to the extent that it may not have been formed at all in Palestine.

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

US propaganda poster 1942-1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum / US National Archives & Records Administration – public domain image

(15) PHILIPPINES – WAR OF OCCUPATION & RESISTANCE

(1941-1945)

The fighting Filipinos!

The role of the Philippines in the Pacific War has always struck me as similar to that of Poland in Europe. While not playing the same role as casus belli – which is more properly assigned to Pearl Harbor – it was effectively the front line or ground zero for commencement of the war, and then a center of resistance behind the lines of occupation in that war.

Indeed, the parallel with Poland continues in that, similar to the Anglo-French planning that effectively foresaw writing off Poland to liberate it after German defeat, so too did American planning effectively to write off the Philippines.

As I understand it, particularly from my reading of Ronald Spector’s The Eagle Against the Sun, while War Plan Orange – the original American plan for war against Japan which was largely followed in the actual war – did not explicitly plan to abandon American and Filipino forces in the Philippines, its hope for those forces to hold out on their own until relieved by the American naval counter-offensive was unrealistic.

As it turned out, whatever hope there was of the forces in the Philippines holding out on their own, it was dashed first by the naval losses at Pearl Harbor and then, through bad luck and timing, the loss of US aircraft at Clark Field from Japanese attack in the Philippines itself. The loss of air cover forced the retreat of the American Asiatic Fleet from the Philippines, so that American forces were effectively left stranded without air or naval support except for the limited use of American submarines.

The doomed American campaign from 8 December 1941 to 8 May 1942 to defend the Philippines from the Japanese invasion, with its famous landmarks of Bataan (with the infamous Bataan Death March of American prisoners by Japan that followed) and Corregidor, may be the stuff of heroism but is more properly considered as part of the Pacific War.

Equally, the victorious American campaign from 20 October 1944 to 15 August 1945 to return to and liberate the Philippines is also more properly considered part of the Pacific War.

However, in the two and a half years between those two campaigns was the war of resistance in the Philippines. Indeed, the war of resistance in the Philippines overlapped with both. Significant parts of the resistance came from American or Filipino forces that escaped or did not surrender in the 1941-1942 campaign and instead led or fought as guerillas against Japanese occupation.

Among other American commanders, General MacArthur, who had been ordered to leave his command in the Philippines by submarine, maintained a keen interest in the maintaining or supplying the resistance there, consistent with his declaration that he would return – and indeed, the resistance would also play its part in preparing the ground by sabotage and other means for the 1944-1945 campaign.

The resistance in the Philippines was of no more small scale or effect. “Postwar studies estimate that around 260,000 people were organized under guerilla groups, and that members of anti-Japanese underground organizations were more numerous”. Also, such was their effectiveness that Japan only controlled the key or major islands in their occupation, with their control of the countryside or smaller towns often tenuous at best – “of the 48 provinces, only 12 were in firm control of the Japanese”.

Ironically, some Japanese soldiers took a leaf from the Filipino resistance, with the notorious Japanese holdouts on more remote islands throughout former occupied territory after the Japanese surrender. Many of them, as individuals or in groups, were in the Philippines. Only in Indonesia did one confirmed Japanese soldier endure longer – holding out to 1974! – but unconfirmed reports persisted after that in the Philippines, with  the last report taken seriously by Japanese officials in 2005.

As for the Philippines, while their resistance received mixed or belated recognition from the US government, it at least bore fruit with the US honoring its commitment from 1935 for the independence of the Philippines in 1946.

RATINGS: 4 STARS****

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Map legend shows origins and direction of Russian and British attacks as the two nations invade Iran to protect oil fields from sabotage by German agents who they claim have infiltrated there – Iowa City Press Citizen Newspaper Archives August 26, 1941 Page 1 (public domain image)

(14) ANGLO-SOVIET INVASION OF IRAN & IRAN CRISIS

(1941-1946)

Another part of the Middle Eastern theater that everyone forgets about when it comes to the Second World War. Following on the heels of Britain’s successful campaigns in Iraq and Syria, as well as the new Anglo-Soviet alliance in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invaded and occupied the neutral state of Iran in the six days from 25 August 1941 to 31 August 1941.

Britain invaded from Iraq to the west while the Soviet Union invaded from its border to the north. Hopelessly outmatched, Iran largely did not oppose the Anglo-Soviet invasion and surrendered on 31 August 1941.

Its primary purpose was to secure Allied supply lines to the Soviet Union – and indeed the so-called Persian Corridor turned out to be the most reliable route for Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets.

Other purposes included securing the Iranian oilfields – although the Middle East in general had a lot less prominence for oil during the war than it was to have later – as well as blocking German influence in Iran (understandably enough from the Iranian perspective of a history of being stood over by Britain and Russia) or pre-empting an Axis through Turkey (and later the Caucasus), albeit unlikely.

Not pictured among those purposes – concern for what was, after all, a neutral nation, or for the effects of the occupation on Iran, which manifested primarily in that recurring handmaiden of both British and Soviet empires, famine, with the disruption of food supplies and transport.

For their part, the Soviet Union and Britain signed a treaty with Iran ruling that Iran was not to be considered occupied by the Allies, but in alliance with them. They also declared that they would remain in Iran until six months after the end of the war. Once in the war, the Americans were also drawn into Iran, helping to man the Persian Corridor (and providing Lend-Lease to Iran itself) while effectively guaranteeing the Anglo-Soviet withdrawal from Iran after the war.

That led to the Iran Crisis in 1946 – the first crisis of the Cold War and one in which the Americans succeeded in forcing the Soviets to back down. While the British withdrew according to schedule after the war, the Soviets did not – refusing to relinquish their occupied territory, and worse, supporting pro-Soviet separatist states of the Azerbaijan’s People’s Government and the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad.

Those states actually fought against Iran, but ultimately intense pressure from the United States forced Soviet withdrawal and the dissolution of the Azerbaijani and Kurdish separatist states.

RATINGS: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)