Eighty Years Ago This Week

  Prime Minister Attlee made a statement to Parliament of the mission of the ministerial delegation that was to go to India. He announced the end of the Raj and was emphatic that they should use their, "utmost endeavours to help her to attain [...] freedom as speedily and fully as possible. What form of government is to replace the present regime is for India to decide.....India herself must choose what shall be her future Constitution, and what will be her position in the world." The statement was widely welcomed in India although it left open the mechanism for independence. Insidiously it seemed to place the onus for solving the question of communal relations on the Indians themselves. The government of Iran lodged a formal protest at the  the continuing, illicit presence of Soviet forces in the country with the UN Security Council.  It was based on the tripartite treaty of 1942 which featured a withdrawal by the occupying forces at the end of the war. The Sovi...

   The Aga Khan, leader of the world's Ismaili Shia muslim community, was ceremonially weighed on the sixtieth anniversary of his accession in front of 70,000 Indian Ismailis gathered in Bombay's Brabourne Stadium. He was presented with his weight in diamonds, 243lb (107kg) worth  £640,000 at the time. The diamonds had been bought by his followers but he returned the gift for the betterment of the community. He had played a part in the ultimately unsuccessful "round table" conferences on reforming the Raj in the early 1930s but he played no serious part in discussions with the British Cabinet Mission then in India to create a framework for independence. General Mihailovic, the former leader of the mainly Serbian Cetnik movement in Yugoslvia was captured  after two years in hiding. Mihailovic had gone from being the acknowledged Royalist leader of resistance to Axis occupation to the head of one faction in a virtual civil war. In 1943 he had lost British backing which...

  Churchill delivered a speech at Fulton, Missouri in the presence of President Truman under the title "The Sinews of Peace." It contained the sentence  “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent". The phrase "iron curtain" entered the language as a shorthand for the division of the world into the communist controlled area and democracies which lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Once again Churchill's gift for language had caught a fundamental development in politics. The Potsdam conference had decided that the occupation of Iran by the Allies undertaken in late 1941 should be terminated at the end of the war in line with the initial Tripartite Alliance. The US and UK complied but the Soviet Union did not. Indeed it began to increase its military presence in the Azerbaijan region to sustain a puppet communist government. The US delivered a strongly worded note o...

  A major mutiny broke out in the Royal Indian Navy involving 10,000 men (perhaps over  half of the total) on  56 vessels and shore establishments. The RIN had expanded hugely during the war but did not have the same close relationship with the British Royal Navy that its (much larger) army counterpart had. The mutineers were motivated by a mixture of classic grievances at serving conditions, terms of demobilisation, racist language by British officers and active political goals. Neither Congress nor the Moslem League gave their support and the mutiny folded in the face of the threat of overwhelming force. Whilst the mutiny was not part of the campaign for independence, it was a clear sympton of widespread discontent at the Raj. A US diplomat in Moscow, George Kennan, responded to an enquiry from Washington as to the implications of a speech by Stalin with an 5,000 word analysis dubbed the "long telegram." He derided Soviet fears of an attack by the US and UK as absurb, b...

  The evacuation of 1.5m Germans from Poland began under an agreement between Britain and Poland which implemented one of the decisions at the Potsdam conference. These first people were to be settled in the British zone of Germany. Many Germans had already fled the advancing Soviets and many more were to  follow. Practically the entire enclave of East Prussia was to become a purely Polish zone. The partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth were unwound. As had happened to the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia a root cause of Nazi German expansion was being extirpated.  The Soviet Union delivered the first veto on a UN Security Council decision. It prevented the Council recording a formal decison on the Soviet attempt to force withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon of French and  British forces which were blocking nationalist movements. In practice this was mere diplomatic manoeuvering; neither power was commited to long term occupation. A three man delegation of ...

  The British government presented a stark picture of the future for the public in a debate on food supply. They would have to make further sacrifices on top of accepting the savage food rationing to which they were still subject. Wheat was in particularly short supply. The scale of sacrifice rather depended on the massive loan from the US which was still being arranged. Inevitably the problem was exaggerated for US consumption. The despatch of a whaling fleet to the Antarctic held some prospect of increasing the edible oil supply.  Rationing remained strict for several years; indeed it was tightened; bread, which had been freely available  during the war,  was put on ration.  Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, the "white rajah" abdicated as the third rajah of Sarawak which had been in his family's hands since 1841, a relic of the free-booting days of the British empire. As a young man he had fought in two military campaigns; in one of these, one fifth of the Dyaks under...