This atmosphere of crisis spread across British Asia, in part because the nationalists were aware of each other’s actions. In Rangoon Aung San’s speeches became more inflammatory after the New Year. In India Nehru was threatening the British with mass civil disobedience, but in Burma it was the threat of military force that loomed. At the Shwedagon pagoda in early January 1946 Bogyoke, as Aung San was popularly known, denounced Dorman-Smith as a Tory imperialist who was misleading Labour and was in cahoots with British capitalists. There were calls for the resignation of the ‘fascist governor’ and cries of ‘Rise! Kill! Kill!’ On 19 January Aung San surpassed himself with a three-hour speech, during which even he had to sit down for a time as a result of exhaustion. In the course of this marathon he insisted that Britain was no longer great. It was indebted to the USA and even to its own colonies. The British were attempting to reintroduce their commercial interests into the country and ‘the Emergency Laws in Burma and [the] British Judicial system are similar to those of the Kempeitai’, the hated Japanese secret police.94 Amidst the ranting, however, he enunciated three demands that would resonate throughout the year. First, he insisted that the White Paper of May 1945 which seemed indefinitely to postpone Burma’s independence should be torn up: power should be transferred to a wholly Burmese ministry. Second, he called for full adult suffrage to be introduced and, third, he demanded an immediate passage to Britain to talk to Attlee’s government.
In January 1946 all this sounded like the wishful thinking of a firebrand. Dorman-Smith certainly maintained his haughty demeanour to the young fellow. Yet by the end of the year Aung San had achieved every one of these aims. This was testimony both to the rapid weakening of Britain’s international position and to the approach of a social crisis in Burma itself. In this same speech, Aung San went on to demand the immediate nationalization of business, the exclusion of British, Chinese and Indian firms and the seizure of their assets, and government control of padi exports. Again, every one of these aims was in the process of being achieved two years on when Burma became an independent country and left the Commonwealth.
To the British it might have seemed that these speeches were cynical attempts by Aung San to restore his credibility with his restive left wing. Yet there was no hiding the fact that the AFPFL spoke directly to the fears of many, if not a majority, of Burmese.95 British business was obviously re-establishing itself in the teak forests and oilfields. Indians were trickling back into the country and the governor, along with Indian business representatives, was putting strong pressure on his fairly tame executive council to allow the 1942 evacuees to return, promising only to retain some of the restrictions on immigration agreed in 1940. It was true that the Americans had withdrawn from the north of the country. But it was Indians and Chinese, not Burmese, who were making vast fortunes by buying up and selling off US war surplus. In the cities, the Anglo-Burmans and the Chinese were setting up lucrative and semi-criminal businesses. Even though the ‘Black Market Administration’ was more or less over, a few unscrupulous British officers were still on the make. Meanwhile, Karen and Kachin separatists and their missionary friends thought their day had come and were intent on biting off large chunks of the country.96 To ordinary Burmese people who had not known security since the Depression, impoverished and without savings, it seemed that the whole nightmare of occupation and dispossession was to be played out again. However foolish Ba Maw and his gaudy satin pants had been, there had at least been some hope of independence in 1943. Now his partial or ‘ten anna’ independence seemed to have been devalued to five annas. The Pegu Club had even reinstated its colour bar, as if it were still 1939, or perhaps even 1889. So Aung San sparked a bonfire of resentment when he spoke of the ‘fascist governor’ and his business cronies. He also expected his message to find some sympathetic British listeners. Mountbatten’s old aides were still on the ground in some places and the Army Education Corps had done a good job of converting a lot of men to Fabian socialism. Word filtered through to the governor of the existence of an East and West Association, a British officers’ club whose members courted Burmese nationalists and made anti-government pronouncements.97
The RAF seemed particularly radical in this respect. Dorman-Smith called it the ‘Red Air Force’. His judgement seemed to be borne out by an incident that took place in April. The previous December Aung San had told Reuters that he was planning an Asiatic ‘Potsdam Conference’ at which ‘Asiatic liberties’ would be discussed and guaranteed by a small group of senior nationalist leaders. He added that the plans for this would be discussed with Pandit Nehru during his ‘forthcoming visit’ to Burma. Dorman-Smith immediately dashed off a telegram to the external affairs department of the government of India, insisting that they should give no facilities for a visit to Burma by Nehru. There was too much loose tinder lying around, not least a thousand increasingly restive INA men still held in Rangoon. Yet Nehru did fly to Singapore at the end of March 1946 to meet Mountbatten. En route his RAF plane developed ‘engine trouble’ and had to land at Rangoon just at a time when the governor was absent in Mandalay. As Dorman-Smith later described it, Nehru was greeted ecstatically by 300 Indians at the Strand Hotel ‘who Jai-ed him Hind and anything else they could Jai’.98 (‘ Jai Hind!’ – ‘Victory to India!’ – was a standard nationalist slogan.) He also met Aung San for two and a half hours and planned with him an East Asian ‘subject nations’ conference. This was eventually to take place in March and April 1947. All this confirmed Dorman-Smith in the view that the ‘engine trouble’ had been a put-up job. The ‘good old RAF have rather too many red gentlemen within their ranks for my liking’, he asserted. What was more, why was Nehru ferried to Singapore in the first place and fêted by Mountbatten? ‘Yet, damme, Dickie put him up at Government House and drove with him plus Mrs Dickie to show him the Town, etc.’
In fact it was Wavell who told Mountbatten that Nehru was to be treated as a future prime minister of India. When the BMA could find no transport for him, Mountbatten lent his own, and travelled with him. The sight of Nehru by Mountbatten’s side was a political sensation. Nehru’s first engagement was a visit to a welfare centre for Indian troops in Singapore in the company of the Mountbattens. They were mobbed together with Nehru and had to escape. A vital political friendship was born. Nehru was fêted by representatives of all communities. A crowd of 100,000 people gathered outside the Adelphi Hotel where he was staying.99 Tan Kah Kee led a delegation of Chinese and they feasted him at their ‘millionaires’ club’, the Ee Hoe Hean Club. Wherever he stopped, the local MCP representatives came to see him. When confronted by MPAJA veterans, he retorted: ‘Army? You have not come here armed have you?’
Nehru had agreed not to intervene in local politics, but made twenty speeches in eight days to around 60,000 people. His themes were pacific and pan-Asian rather than the specifics of the struggle in Malaya.100 The police were worried that support for the INA would resurface. Guards of honour were provided, and it was agreed that they would not wear INA badges, although many wore their old uniforms: they had no other decent clothes. One of his first acts was to visit the Indian political detainees in jail, dispensing good advice on how to keep body and soul together in prison.101Congress sent a medical mission under an ex-INA officer that during a ten-week period treated over 17,000 labourers. But there were complaints that some of Nehru’s gifts of clothing did not reach the poor people, for whom they were intended.102 This was one of the last interventions of Congress nationalism in Malayan politics and many local Indians were disappointed by the statesmanlike moderation of the Pandit’s language. At a big rally at Jalan Besar Stadium in Singapore in front of around 10,000 people, including over 3,000 INA personnel, there was a cry of ‘Blood!’ Nehru rebuked the crowd: ‘He agreed that Netaji had done great work, but stated that the fighting spirit called for then was now out of date.’ The veterans in the crowd began to melt away.103 Behind the scenes, in Penang, Indian community leaders gathered to confront him about the fate of the gold that Bose had collected in Malaya. Nehru had been seen as slow in coming to the defence of the INA men on trial at the Red Fort. It was felt that in having cocktails with Mountbatten, Nehru had himself become a ‘sahib’.104
But none of this washed with Dorman-Smith, to whom Dickie – ‘rot him!’ – was the root of all the troubles in Burma because he flattered and built up Aung San. ‘Let’s face it, our Dickie may be a first-class military commander, but he is a damned poor politician. If he ever became Governor General of anywhere I would expect a spot of bother because he just cannot keep his hands off politics… Probably Dickie will get the order of the White Rabbit from the first Government of Free India.’ Dorman-Smith saw plots all around him, most of them originating with Attlee or Mountbatten. He had recently met Edward Gent and felt he was facing similar trouble. Gent told him that there was an agreement between the British government and Ceylon that the colony would have its freedom in five years’ time. ‘I only hope my people [the Burmese] do not get to know of this!’ Dorman-Smith commented. In London, the civil servant to whom this long lament was addressed, Sir David Monteath, minuted loftily that he had a lot of sympathy with Dorman-Smith, even if his letter was ‘phoney’ in parts.
For the time being, the governor thought he had a few cards left to play. He continued to tinker with building a coalition of the old pre-1941 politicians. The friendly rogue, U Saw, was on the way back with his Myochit party. Ba Maw was heading back too, having escaped prosecution in Tokyo,105 while poor old Sir Paw Tun hung on, gamely trying to put the clock back. From Dorman-Smith’s point of view, any of the flotsam and jetsam of the pre-war years was better than the BNA firebrands. Besides, like many other observers, he sensed that Aung San himself did not know what to do, caught as he was between the British and the old guard on the one side and Thakin Soe and the communists on the other. Military intelligence later reported that Aung San was ‘severely terrified of U Saw, who is really dangerous’ and whose return to power was propelled by ‘criminal gangsters’.106 Aung San lived in perpetual fear of assassination but, according to the assessment, ‘has much personal courage, unlike U Saw’. His courage was perhaps not always matched by his judgement; Aung San had poured out his woes to ‘a motherly type of woman’ who just happened to be a British informant: ‘He did not know what to do; all his life he had been without real friends and now everything he tries goes wrong.’ He was ‘beginning to doubt his ability to live up to the position which he has now acquired’, Dorman-Smith paraphrased with satisfaction.107All the same, the governor was sensible enough to realize that Burmese opinion was largely on Aung San’s side. Burma wanted to ‘gallop down the road without any help’.108 The ‘middle classes’, such as they were, seemed weak and their representatives were likely to be wiped out at the next election. Dorman-Smith had had a ‘heart-warming trip’ up to Myitkyina and the north, where the Kachins and other minority groups remained staunchly pro-British. Yet the minorities could not really provide a bulwark for continued British government in Burma. Though he was often accused of playing divide-and-rule politics, Dorman-Smith was suspicious of a strongly pro-minority stance. Perhaps his Irish background helped here: ‘resistance groups are awkward things to handle as they may go on looking for something to resist’, he wrote, adding that these ‘special arrangements for minority groups only lead to trouble in the long run’.109
Then, quite suddenly, Dorman-Smith began to overplay his hand. In October 1945 he had been prepared to give Aung San the benefit of the doubt and even at his bitterest he still had some time for the man. At the turn of the year, as Aung San’s rhetoric intensified, Dorman-Smith’s tone soured. In mid December Ralph Michaelis, a radical journalist who published an ‘independent newsletter’, reported that the governor was so obsessed by his trial of strength with Bogyoke that he was losing his grip on the fragile administration. Rather than answering Aung San’s charges of delaying Burma’s independence, the governor had chosen to reopen the old Rangoon Yacht Club, a ‘prewar stronghold of the futile snobbery of the British colony in Rangoon to which no Burman was admitted’. Yachts, Michaelis’s pamphlet noted, were once again being built at the club and were being guarded at the expense of the British taxpayer.110 Dorman-Smith’s political touch seems to have been deserting him. His dysentery, which flared up in the miserable conditions of post-war Rangoon, was getting worse. His view of Aung San became darker and darker. By April he was talking about ‘Aung San and his band of thugs’, by whom he meant the rapidly proliferating network of paramilitary People’s Volunteer Organizations. Loosely administered by the AFPFL, the PVOs now effectively controlled large parts of the countryside. Dorman-Smith could almost feel British power draining through his hands into the swamps of the Burmese delta.
As the administration began to lose the propaganda war in Burma, Dorman-Smith searched for a way to stop what he viewed as the country’s slide towards ‘fascism’, a sorely overused term in Burma at the time. One issue on which Aung San seemed to be vulnerable was the persistent rumour that he had murdered a village headman with his own hands during the Burma Independence Army’s advance on Rangoon in early 1942.111 This rumour had been relayed to London in 1945, but had wisely been shelved by the Burma Office. When Dorman-Smith was scouting around for politicians to appoint to his newly constituted executive council in early 1946, he approached Tun Oke, an old rival of Aung San. Tun Oke then used the more public forum of the legislative council formally to accuse Aung San of murder. This was a proceeding of dubious merit, not only because it tied the attack on Aung San to Dorman-Smith’s political manoeuvring, but also because Tun Oke was himself wanted by the American military police for atrocities against Allied troops in 1942. According to one account he had had the heads of three British soldiers cut off and impaled on stakes outside a village, posting a notice beside them that read: ‘The dirty, cunning English people came to Burma and not only committed the crimes of thieving brigands but cut off the heads of so many of our Burmese people… What I have done is revenge for that.’112 By working with Tun Oke, Dorman-Smith therefore managed to offend not only Aung San’s followers but the British military too. One of Tom Driberg’s correspondents described the reaction: ‘There are several thousand British troops in Burma who are not at all keen on dying to defend a government which is close to such men as Thakin Oke.’ Why, asked Driberg in exasperation, ‘does Labour choose ex-ministers of the Chamberlain government as agents of its colonial policy?’113
Nevertheless, Tun Oke’s allegations against Aung San gained momentum. In March newspapers in Rangoon, India and Britain began to report on the case and the police apparently had some success in digging up pertinent evidence. Determined to rid himself of the troublesome young nationalist, Dorman-Smith wrote to London seeking permission to arrest him. At this stage the British government had not thought through the implications of trying Aung San. While attending a conference in Singapore Dorman-Smith received a note from Whitehall ordering him to proceed with the arrest. He rushed back to Rangoon. The CID was alerted but, at the last minute, a telegram arrived countermanding the order. India had reasserted its primacy again. On 27 March Mountbatten had written to the government of Burma that, although he no longer had any responsibility for Burma, he was deeply perturbed at the proposal to arrest Aung San. Aung San’s antics might have been disturbing but he had ‘played the game by me’ and, given his youth, he was bound to play a major part in Burmese politics for many years to come.114 Three weeks later, as Dorman-Smith was beginning to hope that Mountbatten’s intervention would be ignored, Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence telegraphed Burma urgently from Delhi, where they were on Cabinet Mission duty. They were trying to resolve the increasingly intractable stand-off between the Congress and Muslim League over the structure of a future government of independent India. The Indian issue thrust Burma to the margins. ‘Solely from the point of view of our mission here, we must repeat to you the great risks we see in the arrest of Aung San at this juncture.’115 It would be a ‘disastrous’ move and would derail the whole Indian constitutional process. To a long private letter to Attlee about the Indian deadlock, Pethick-Lawrence added a postscript on the possible arrest of Aung San: ‘My personal feeling is that if we start probing into what happened during the Japanese occupation, we shall stir up mud which may well give us a lot of trouble.’116
The arrest warrant was duly intercepted between the chief secretary and the CID. Another hour and Aung San would have been behind bars. This would almost certainly have been the signal for a mass Burmese uprising against the British which could well have brought about the sort of bloody denouement that the British faced in Indonesia that very year. In Surabaya, they tried to suppress a well-entrenched nationalist movement. Many British and Gurkha soldiers who had survived the campaign against Rommel and the bloody fighting at Imphal and Kohima died for no good reason. In his memoirs Dorman-Smith was unrepentant. This was a nettle that the British had refused to grasp, he insisted. It discouraged the loyal and encouraged illegality. Ultimately, he implied, it set Burma on the path towards authoritarian government.
This attitude was to prove his undoing. The British position was now too weak. As one official put it, it might have been possible to arrest and shoot Aung San a year earlier, but it was too late now. Quite apart from the demands of the Cabinet Mission, the Indian situation frustrated Dorman-Smith at another level. The Indian Army was no longer available to suppress any popular movement that might have developed in response to the detention of Aung San. The Indian authorities had already made it clear that Indian troops could not now be used to put down Burmese nationalists. Congress would not wear it and the Indian Army would anyway probably have mutinied. Watching bitterly from the fringes, Dorman-Smith noted that a meeting of ‘Dickie, Archie [Wavell] and the Auk [Auchinleck]’ in Delhi had decided that the governor of Burma would have to govern in such a way as to avoid a popular uprising. ‘Struth! Old Archie does not seem to be able to manage his show so as to avoid the use of British troops and Indian troops, while friend Dickie seems to be using troops of all sorts in Malaya.’117 This refusal to deploy the Indian Army in Burma was, as he later put it, ‘a bit of a facer’, an insoluble problem, especially as he felt sure that Indians would be among the first to suffer in any AFPFL uprising.118 But he was not ready to give up yet; he still hoped that he could persuade London to go ahead with the arrest and trial of Aung San.
What were the facts about the murder of the headman? Given the years of mayhem in Burma and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, why did it matter so much? The key point was that the man killed by Aung San was a Muslim of Indian descent, one Abdul Rashid, who had been loyal to the British and opposed the nationalists.119 He was headman of a village near Moulmein on the southern coast where tension between Muslims, who were mostly of Indian origin, and Burmese Buddhists had been very high since the Depression. In 1942 the incoming BIA had been immediately drawn into settling local scores as the British fled to the north. In her petition for the trial of Aung San, Abdul Rashid’s widow gave a vivid account of his brutal last days. Denounced by the villagers, he had been thrown into a locked cart with a pig and starved for eight days. Though there is no independent evidence of this, the story’s very existence, with its emphasis on an insult carefully tailored for a Muslim, illustrates the depths of the hatreds involved. Then, the widow continued, Aung San ‘took him to the Thaton football ground and in the presence of thousands of people, speared him to death with his bayonet after crucifying him to the goal post’.120 Aung San did not deny the killing, though he later told Dorman-Smith that he had been incapable of the degree of resolution alleged by the widow. He had certainly intended to kill the man himself, because it was his order that had condemned him, but he had bungled it ‘and almost collapsed after the first stroke’. His subordinates had to finish off the headman.121
In early April, Aung San gave a lengthy response to these accusations in the legislative council.122 The context, he said, was the mass looting and murder which accompanied the BIA’s entry into southern Burma in 1942. He had tried to stop the score settling, but neither he nor Suzuki, the senior Japanese liaison officer with the BIA, had been able to do so effectively. Aung San said that it was important to try to restore order by punishing those who really had been guilty of abuses under the old regime. He claimed that British administration had failed and therefore it was incumbent on the nationalists to form an administration. Besides, ‘in such slave countries as Burma, it cannot be said that conformity with the law is justice’. Abdul Rashid was one who had abused the slave people. He was a ‘wicked man who had ill treated the villagers’ and had indulged in despicable looting ‘for his own stomach’.123 Aung San declared that his conscience was clear, but as he made his statement, he appeared to lose his way, muttering, ‘I forget, I forget…’ He also added: ‘To confess the truth, however, though this measure is not at all regular, yet it was rough and ready justice to suit the time and the conditions prevailing in the country.’ This statement earned him some respect from the more open-minded of the British officials.124
Despite the governor’s desire to act decisively, other British authorities in Burma were in two minds about prosecuting the case. For a start, there were procedural problems. Only six people of the 500 or so present at Abdul Rashid’s killing had come forward to give evidence, and they were all Indians. Also the government doubted its ability to shield Indians from the inevitable reprisal attacks should the case come to trial. Even the archdeacon of Rangoon, George Appleton, who doubled up as the government of Burma’s director of public relations, could partially excuse Aung San. He should perhaps have been ‘arrested and executed’ a year ago, but once Mountbatten had treated him ‘respectfully’, the British had effectively condoned his crimes. His arrest now would have ‘repercussions comparable to those of the INA trials in India’. Besides, added Appleton, there were racial factors involved: ‘In Burma people do not generally think in terms of justice and reason, but in terms of personalities and relationships.’ Aung San’s crime, and certainly his version of it, was ‘understandable’ and less heinous than many committed during the war, especially given that he was ‘an emotional and in some ways fanatical man’.125
Dorman-Smith, however, refused to relent. This was a struggle of wills between his authority, the AFPFL and London. Once the petition of Abdul Rashid’s widow was in the public domain, he decided on a struggle to the death, effectively handing victory to Aung San. Why was he so inflexible? It was this phase in Dorman-Smith’s career that was to tar him as a Tory reactionary, the character he plays in Aung San Suu Kyi’s memoir of her father and also in Fergal Keane’s 1990s television documentary on Aung San’s assassination. Certainly the Dorman-Smith of 1946 was not the genial Irish observer of nationalist movements who had soothed Tin Tut’s ruffled feathers in Simla three years before. His health was rapidly deteriorating. He was in the grip of his fourth attack of amoebic dysentery since his return to Burma. The season was terrible and conditions were poor even for a governor. He had difficulty in understanding the massive changes that had overtaken Burmese politics since 1942, used as he was to the likes of Paw Tun and U Saw. He was also truly horrified by what was now coming out about Axis atrocities. He was haunted by images of the sook ching massacres of the Chinese in Malaya by the Japanese in 1942, their torture of Major Seagrim and the Karen special forces in 1944, the Burma–Siam railway and, more distantly, the Holocaust. He was horrified by the brutal treatment of the Burmese and Anglo-Indian Christians of Rangoon, among whom he had once felt at home. Aung San and his colleagues were indelibly painted in his mind as JIFS, Japanese-influenced forces, as ‘quislings’ and ‘fascists’. He was also deeply at odds with the Labour ministers in London, pining for his old expansive relationship with his ‘wonderful boss’,126 Leo Amery, rather than the stiff and self-righteous left-wingers who now held power. Attlee’s government seemed to embody dither and interference in about the same degree. Dorman-Smith once drafted a telegram to Attlee: ‘I had a dose of Eno’s [liver salts] last night. May I please be allowed to go to the lavatory tomorrow?’127
Some weeks after the plans to arrest Aung San were shelved, the security of the country deteriorated markedly. Aung San was building up his strength in the villages and small towns, aware that he might still need to stage a show of force against either the British or his communist ‘allies’. The drilling, marching and counter-marching of more than 80,000 volunteers became feverish in the weeks after the first anniversary of the BNA’s revolt against the Japanese. Then came the crisis. On 18 May a fatal shooting took place at Tantabin in Insein district, a small town with a mixed Burman/Karen population. A band of local volunteers was moving through the town protesting against the Defence of Burma rules. These prohibited quasi-military marching and arms drill, even when carried out with dummy weapons. The exact sequence of events is unclear, as defence and prosecution witnesses flatly contradicted each other,128 but there had evidently been ill feeling for some time between local leaders of the PVO and the police sub-inspector, Maung Gale. The authorities believed that the nationalists were collecting arms. Some people deposed that leaders of the crowd were carrying dummy weapons. The yebaws, or volunteers, allegedly told people to resist the police if they attempted arrests during the demonstrations: ‘Let the masses surround the authorities and forcibly take back the persons arrested.’129 On the day of the shooting, things had got out of hand as people converged on one of the main teashops in the town. The police started to beat members of the crowd with their rifle butts. The crowd attacked the police with bamboo poles. The police then discharged at least sixty live rounds, killing five people and wounding many others before the crowd retreated. Three hundred yebaws were arrested, but it was never clear if the order to disperse was actually given to or understood by the crowd before the firing began.130 As in so many incidents in British imperial history, from Ireland through Egypt to India and beyond, a relatively minor but bloody police action galvanized people’s perception of British rule as irredeemably repressive. An ominous feature of the situation in Tantabin was that the crowd was composed of villagers, not students or ‘agitators’. They were protesting because of demands for the repayment of agricultural loans in a terrible season of shortage and hardship. Tantabin was an indication of the strength of the bonds that had been forged between the yebaws, the volunteer corps of the old BIA, and the villages in 1942. It was a portent of a major revolt.
The government of Burma set up a commission to investigate the incident while Dorman-Smith urged London to take a hard line against nationalist leaders whose speeches stirred up popular demonstrations of the sort that ended with the Tantabin firing. Once again he seems to have had Aung San in mind. When news of the incident had broken, Aung San put all the blame on the British government. According to Aung San’s agreement with Mountbatten at Kandy some eight months previously, members of the BNA were to be absorbed into the British Burma Army and more men would be recruited to turn it into a truly national force. But the British had not even begun to honour this pledge. Many former BNA personnel were unemployed and resentful, while village youths were pressing to enlist. Aung San was uncomfortably aware that people of this sort could easily shift allegiance to clandestine communist cadres unless the nationalist elements of the AFPFL moved fast. Besides, he asked, why was drilling by the volunteers illegal in the first place? Who had deemed it so?131
As it turned out, Aung San had already won the game. Attlee had finally begun to take a closer interest in Burma, aware that a flare-up there would do enormous damage if it came at the same time as mass demonstrations in India and Malaya. He had decided that Dorman-Smith was becoming erratic. This was not without reason. In early May, shortly after resuming his demands for the arrest of Aung San, the governor made an apparent volte-face by holding out the possibility of recruiting some new blood into his old-fashioned executive council, perhaps even Aung San himself. He also finally conceded the need to review the White Paper. By 7 May Attlee had concluded that the governor ‘changes his policy from day to day’ and was ‘losing his grip’.132 He would have to be relieved on the grounds of ill health. Attlee’s conclusion was only confirmed by Dorman-Smith’s vacillation and indecision after the Tantabin shootings. Blowing hot and cold, he first called for strong action against those who had fomented the agitation, only to reverse his policy in favour of a general amnesty for these and other political prisoners, a recommendation that infuriated senior police officers and civil servants.
On 14 June Dorman-Smith’s recall was made public and Sir Henry Knight became acting governor pending the arrival of Sir Hubert Rance, who would take over in August. Knight was an impeccable old India hand who had previously been acting governor in both Madras and Bombay. This change in personnel reflected a much deeper policy switch, for Rance had been Mountbatten’s right-hand man. The conservatives in the Burmese civil service were appalled. As Dorman-Smith left, Frederick Pearce, counseller to the governor, sent him a note of commiseration. He had been right all along, Pearce said. He had been unfairly made to carry the can in 1942 because military morale was too fragile to be told the truth. He had tried to defend the Burmese civil administration against the false accusations of the war correspondents. Finally, his policy had been undermined ‘by the wilfully blind conceptions and pre-emptive conclusions of that Heaven-inspired politician Dicky M.’133 For Pearce himself, the bitterest blows were to find himself accused of mismanaging the military administration and having his old boss replaced by Rance. Pearce hinted and Dorman-Smith believed that Mountbatten was covertly responsible for the governor’s sacking. They were probably right. True, Mount-batten had not been Dorman-Smith’s only handicap – a Chamberlain appointee was never likely to reach a meeting of minds with Labour ministers who disliked his politics and personal style, and Attlee quickly lost patience with him – but it does seem likely that Mount-batten played a key role in ejecting Dorman-Smith and choosing his successor. Certainly Tom Driberg, thought so. He believed that Mountbatten had privately briefed against Dorman-Smith and had impressed Attlee with the idea that only a rapid move towards independence could avoid the sort of situation that had arisen in Indo-China, where the French were desperately fighting to suppress the Vietnamese resistance.134 For his part, Driberg kept up the pressure on Mountbatten, relaying to him the fears of Aung San and other local politicians who valued him as one of their few direct links to domestic British opinion. On 12 June Aung San wrote to Driberg of ‘the blind prejudice and stark policy of bureaucratic intransigence he had encountered’.135 He alone, he claimed, was trying to restrain his infuriated followers from attacking British interests. Driberg duly passed this on to Mountbatten.
It is unsurprising that Dorman-Smith, Pearce and the hardliners of the military administration loathed Dickie and his men. But their poisonous hatred of Aung San, whom they regarded as a creature of Dickie’s, was dangerously infectious. It entered the bloodstream of Burmese politics and fed the festering resentment of U Saw and his followers towards Aung San. Naively, Dorman-Smith disassociated his own actions from U Saw’s machinations. Till the end he retained some regard for Aung San as a strong man and military hero. Did he see in him an Asian Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator of Burma, perhaps? At any rate, having tried for three months to have the man hanged, he left a surprisingly emollient assessment of him for Sir Henry Knight. Aung San was ‘Burma’s popular hero and… I look upon him as a sincere man… He has enough sense to realise that an uprising can only mean added misery.’136 Dorman-Smith did not extend this benediction to Mountbatten, however. Back in England, he poured out his bile. He railed against the impression that Dickie’s ‘sea-green incorruptibles’ had replaced ‘our old corruptibles’, adding in a deplorable piece of word-play that one of his own senior officials had been pushed out ‘unhonoured and Aung San’.137 He always knew he was persona ‘not very grata’ to Attlee, he said, but he really felt it when he arrived back in London. Unlike the old days when Leo Amery used to meet him at the railway station, there was no one waiting at Euston this time. He duly turned up at Whitehall. ‘Then I saw the Pathetic One [Pethick-Lawrence] – “Out you go”… So that was it. Exit Smith.’ Pethick-Lawrence had consulted him on nothing, had not enquired after his health – the alleged reason for his recall – and had not even bothered to get up from his chair to shake hands when he entered the room. Now he was sure that Mountbatten had plotted against him. He got wind of rumours that Mountbatten was destined for ‘some monumental appointment in the East’. Surely not the viceroyalty of India? But that would explain a lot. As viceroy Mountbatten would want to have his own man in Burma: ‘I HATE Dickie having a finger in the Burma pie because I think he is so unsound.’138 None of this would have mattered very much except that it encouraged the former governor to stick his own fingers in the pie. Over the next two years he remained dangerously close to Saw, the rogue element in Burmese politics, and he cultivated the radical Karen separatists, irreconcilables who were almost to blow apart the future Union of Burma.
Almost all the pieces were now in place for the endgame of British Burma and the emergence of the new republic. But one other tangled set of events in the early part of 1946 set the scene for the country’s future and arguably for much of the rest of Southeast Asia. This was the implosion of the Burmese Communist Party, an event that ensured, in the long term, the relative isolation of Burma from the Cold War. Like the creaking British administration, the communist split was very much a matter of personalities. Since the beginning of the war, the communist hard man Thakin Soe had been quietly building up his cadres in the countryside. Soe took a dim view of erstwhile comrades such as Thakin Than Tun who had spent the war in ministerial office under Ba Maw, or skulking in Simla or Chungking. In the quaint lexicography of contemporary leftist abuse, Soe accused Than Tun and others of ‘Browderism’ or compromising communist purity by making deals with ‘imperialists’. Browder was an American communist leader who had preached a gospel of accommodation with capitalism.139 Worse, Soe accused Than Tun of corruption, in particular the misappropriation of a large quantity of gold that had been accumulated by the left for the purpose of anti-Japanese resistance during the war. An open split occurred at a conference in March 1946 when Than Tun and other communists who did not favour immediate armed struggle hit back with a lurid assault on Soe’s personal integrity. They accused him of extending his disdain for private property to other men’s wives and daughters and produced a lengthy charge sheet, detailing ‘how Thakin Soe had forcibly taken to himself the sister of his first wife; how he had deserted both the sisters and married a third wife; how he again left her and appropriated to himself a young woman recruit to the Party from the hands of one of his lieutenants’.140 After this conference, the main aim of Soe’s ‘red flag’ or Trotskyite communists became the extermination of the ‘white flag’ or Stalinist communists led by Than Tun. Soe went underground and continued to build up a following of Karen and Burmese communists in the Irrawaddy delta districts, occasionally engaging in dacoit-like attacks on the police and their rivals. This disunity among its future enemies was one important reason for the survival of the AFPFL government in the dangerous years immediately after independence.