Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin

Indeed, to oppress the populations they’d been occupying. It is so outrageous and it should be better known.

11/11 …Enemy: Britain, Japanese Troops and the Netherlands East Indies, 1945–1946’ History, Vol. 87, No. 286 (April 2002).

There is also a book (I haven’t read) by Stephen B Connor, Mountbatten's Samurai: Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Forces under British Control in Southeast Asia, 1945-1948

10/11 …another 30 went missing while the equivalent losses amongst Indian units were 550 and 300 respectively. It is less clear how many nationalists or socialists, fighting for freedom were killed by Japanese, British or Indian troops.

All quotes from Andrew Roadnight, ‘Sleeping with the…

9/11 …activities in the areas they still occupied and to maintain the status quo and civil administration.” Records show that in the year that this alliance lasted “the Japanese armed forces lost 717 men dead, 387 wounded and a further 205 went missing. By contrast 77 British troops were killed and…

8/11 …responsible up to the termination of hostilities”. Read that again - yes he used the Japanese troops who had recently been brutally occupying Indonesia, to stop any nationalist rebellions and allow the Dutch empire to return. “The Japanese were ordered, therefore, to halt all political…

7/11 …to be demobbed, but there was no enthusiasm in India to send troops to prop up colonial empires, when the promise of independence had just been won.

So Mountbatten decided “he had no alternative but to instruct the Japanese ... to maintain order in the areas for which they had been…

6/11 …and Siam, and only when these tasks had been completed were the principal islands of the NEI, Java and Sumatra, to be liberated.” The lack of military manpower to achieve various imperial ends led to the use of JSPs. At first he had tried to rely on Indian troops to allow British personnel…

5/11 …after the war”.

Mountbatten had received orders from the new Labour government: “On 13 August 1945, he was told that his primary objectives were the reoccupation of Burma, Singapore and key areas of Malaya. When this had been done, Mountbatten was to send troops to Hong Kong, Indochina…

4/11 …to cover up what they were doing. The new category also usefully removed them from POW statistics (and almost all were reclassified before they were recorded as POWs). One Japanese soldier on such duties was recommended for the “Distinguished Service Order in November 1945, only three months…

3/11 …the rules of the Geneva conventions and used as auxiliary soldiers - armed and under their own officers - attached to Lord Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command. Of course, part of the reason no one talks about this period is that the British authorities did everything in their power…

2/11 …to reestablish imperial control, particularly in Indonesia - then the Dutch or Netherlands East Indies (NEI). And because the Japanese were there and used to an imperial role some 35,000 Japanese Prisoners of War (POWs) were reclassified as ‘Japanese Surrendered Persons’ (JSPs), removed from…

3/3 …multiracial capitalism running and make plantation workers stay on their plantations. Incidentally the cover painting by Francois Cauvin of Toussaint with a guinea fowl on his head is symbolic. He identified with the bird, originally African, notoriously crafty & hard to catch & domesticate.

2/3 …understand the rebellion you need this too. Apart from anything else it is a reminder that Toussaint was a bourgeois revolutionary (& could hardly be anything else). As well as his military inventiveness fighting French, Spanish, British & Napoleon’s army, it details his attempts to get a…