1945: The final reckoning

It is convenient to forget that some men and women greatly enjoy war, even (or especially) when they themselves are in mortal danger.

Australian troops fighting in the jungles of New Guinea. Credit: Image courtesy of the National Army Museum, London.

I’d like to take 1945: The Reckoning author Phil Craig out for a drink. We would only have a couple of pints (nothing over the top) while we spoke in a sensible and measured fashion about issues important to both of us, such as the search for truth in military history.

Although we might find areas of argument, we would quickly (but not hurriedly) establish points where we could compromise and accept that differing explanations might be equally valid in the face of insufficient evidence one way or the other. We would probably then share an Uber home.

1945: The Reckoning by Phil Craig.

I say this because Craig has produced a book that is solid, good-natured, engrossing, and perceptive. It is focused on World War II as it affected Britain’s colonial interests in Asia, paving the way for some of the post-war independence struggles in the region.

Craig, a former head of factual at ABC TV, devotes the strongest section of the book to an examination of the sad Operation Semut, during which Australian Services Reconnaissance Department special forces in Borneo encouraged Dayak tribesmen to return to traditional headhunting practices and decapitate their Japanese invaders, with scant thought given to how the people of the longhouses might be protected from Japanese ­retaliation.

As well as the SRD commanders and a Dayak chief, Craig tells his stories through the lives of a carefully curated cast of characters, including an Indian officer in the British Indian Army, and another officer in the parallel, Japanese-allied Indian National Army; a British nurse serving in India; a prisoner of war of the Japanese who is taken from Changi to work in the mines of Taiwan; and a doctor who attends the liberation of Belsen. That’s two men of colour, a woman, a slave, and a Jew-adjacent medical practitioner whose story is personally significant to the author. And the Dayaks, of course, are Indigenous.

Bhandari Ram, of the 6th Battalion, 10th Baluch Regiment, received the Victoria Cross in Burma in 1945. Credit: Image courtesy of the National Army Museum, London

But Craig’s fashionably inclusive approach does not exclude conservative, collaborationist voices. Instead, the author seeks to understand them within their particular social and historical context. At the same time, he dismembers anti-colonial mythologies which have, for example, the British officers on a sinking ship separating their crew into groups of white and black sailors, and consigning the latter to lightweight, second-rate rafts while the white officers took the lifeboats for themselves.

His style is conversational, like a popular podcaster, but never glib or shrill. His judgments are often understated but shrewd. For example: “The ancient colleges of Oxbridge, at the heart of the power structure of imperial Britain, contributed more to the decolonisations of the 20th century than did the revolutionary agenda of the Communist International”. Or “Semut was the kind of operation that the officers who ran SRD actually wanted to do … a private little war in the jungle, far away from the brass hats and tick-box-wallahs, running with the headhunters of Borneo, swooping in and out by flying boat, gliding down tropical rivers on moonlit nights – it was all intensely exciting. It was Bulldog Drummond and Errol Flynn. It’s what they’d trained for, what some of them lived for.”

It is convenient to forget that some men and women greatly enjoy war, even (or especially) when they themselves are in mortal danger.

The eventual abandonment of the Dayaks was horrifyingly cold-hearted. When anxieties became apparent that the Dayaks would be deserted by the Allies, a commander suggested “shooting a few of the more importunate to clear the air”.

Equally morally indefensible was the Allies’ betrayal of the Vietnamese people, who were ruled during the war by pro-Axis Vichy elements and brought back under colonial control by forces partly composed of rearmed Japanese POWs under British command – who only months before had murdered, raped and looted the local population in a final orgy of violence before their surrender. Indonesia was “returned” to the Dutch under similar circumstances.

These are important facts to remember in the context of Australia’s subsequent involvement in the Vietnam War and the Konfrontasi with Indonesia.

Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the Indian National Army, announces that his troops will march alongside the Japanese to ‘liberate’ India, early 1944.

Like the TV guy he is, Craig can tell a much bigger story through a single, poignant image. For example, when a doctor writes about supplies delivered to the starving, dying wretches of post-liberation Belsen: “A very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it; it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance.

“I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering around about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post-mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again.”

Craig leans heavily on the autobiographical writing of his sources and I’m not sure he always makes quite the right calls: I suspect he gives insufficient weight to warranted fears of post-war Soviet expansion, and a bit too much credit to the benefits of imperial rule for the subjects of the British Empire (and the rest of the world).

If I ever met Craig, I might take these questions up with him. If I did, I know we would probably agree to disagree, shake hands firmly, smile tightly and part as friends.

- Mark Dapin is an historian and writer

About the author

Phil Craig is a best-selling author and filmmaker. He studied history at Cambridge University; he was a BBC graduate trainee and he worked for Panorama.

Phil Craig.

He has held senior positions at the Brook Lapping production company; at Channel Four; at the Discovery Channel, and at ABC Television in Australia where he was head of factual when the national broadcaster produced its high-profile Anzac centenary project. Throughout his TV and writing career, he has sought to research and reinterpret the story of Britain and its Empire during World War II.