ABSTRACT
SEAC’s task was to liberate the pre-war colonies from Japanese control and restore them to their former masters, the Netherlands and France, who anticipated their immediate return. In the past the European powers had milked the colonies of their wealth and after the war were deluded into thinking they could return to those halcyon days. After the war the language officers worked all over South-East Asia as their work became more general and varied. Louis Allen in his book The End of the War in Asia describes how he was involved in negotiating surrender terms with envoys of the Japanese 18th Division at Abya near the Sittang River north-east of Rangoon. Throughout South-East Asia the British Army began exposing war crimes. At the end of the war Gardner, of Translators V, was working at the South-East Asia Translation and Interrogation Center in New Delhi translating documents which had been captured in Burma.
