troops prisoner. The whole of south-east Asia had
fallen under Japanese domination.
British rule seemed to be threatened now at
the very heart of the empire, British India. The
position was regarded as sufficiently desperate for
the British Cabinet to send out Sir Stafford Cripps
with a promise to the leaders of the Indian
Congress Party that India would be granted inde-
pendence after the war. A constituent assembly
would be called to decide whether it would
remain within or outside the Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, during the war, the Congress Party
would be granted some participation in, but not
control of, government. Congress rejected the
proposals, partly because Cripps also offered to
the Muslim League the possibility of secession for
the predominantly Muslim parts of India (later
Pakistan). Gandhi, India’s greatest voice of non-
violent opposition, now called on Britain simply
to ‘quit India’. He expected non-violence to
defeat Britain and Japan and to win India for the
385 million Indians. The viceroy of India reacted
with repression and arrested the Congress leaders
and Gandhi. India did not rise against the British,
and the Indian army fought under British
command against the Japanese. The Japanese also
created an Indian ‘liberation’ army from prison-
ers of war mainly taken at Singapore and founded
the Indian Independence League. In 1943 an
Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose, ex-
president of the Indian Congress, took over the
Indian ‘government’ operating with the Japanese.
Though Bose had a good deal of success among
Indians beyond British control, his impact within
India was limited and never threatened British
rule. The problem of Indian independence was
now shelved until the war was won.
Militarily the Japanese expansion in the Pacific
and south-east Asia was checked by the summer
of 1942. In the naval battle of the Coral Sea in
May 1942 Japan’s thrust towards Australia was
blunted when the Japanese attack on Port
Moresby in New Guinea was called off as a result
of the naval engagement. Far more serious for the
Japanese was the failure of their attack in June on
the American-held Midway Island. Admiral
Yamamoto was in overall command of the most
powerful fleet of battleships, aircraft carriers,
cruisers, destroyers and submarines the Japanese
had ever assembled. Its task was not only to cover
the Japanese landing force, but to destroy the
remaining US Pacific fleet. Yamamoto had separ-
ated his fleet. It was a naval battle dominated by
the aircraft carriers on both sides. The Japanese
lost four of their eight carriers, the Americans
only one, before Yamamoto’s main fleet could
join the engagement. Yamamoto decided to break
off the battle and from then on had lost the ini-
tiative in the Pacific. It was now certain that the
American war effort, once fully developed, would
overwhelm Japan eventually. Just as in Europe,
where Hitler’s Blitzkrieg had failed finally in
1942, so did Japan’s oriental Blitzkriegnow fail
in its purpose of forcing its principal enemies to
accept Japan’s claim to predominance in eastern
and southern Asia.
The American counter-offensive in the Pacific
began in August 1942 with the American attack
on the tiny Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal,
one of the Solomon group of islands. The fight-
ing between the American marines and the
defending Japanese was ferocious and casualties
on both sides were heavy, until the Americans
overwhelmed the fanatical defenders. This was to
become the pattern of the remorseless Pacific war
until Japan’s surrender.
The Japanese war with Britain, the Dominions
and the US brought relief to the Chinese, who
had been at war with the Japanese alone since- Chiang Kai-shek now avoided active battles
with the Japanese as far as possible. His eyes were
firmly set on the future when, with the Anglo-
American defeat of the Japanese, he would gain
mastery over all China, including the commu-
nists, his theoretical allies against Japan. Despite
the growing corruption of the Kuomintang and
the inefficiency of Chiang Kai-shek’s armies, the
US based its hopes for the future peace and
progress of eastern Asia on the emergence of a
strong and democratic Chinese Republic linked
in friendship to the US. Roosevelt did not wish
to see the restoration of the pre-war special rights
of Europe in China or the re-establishment of the
European empires in eastern Asia. In January
1945 he expressed his hopes to his secretary of
state that US policy: