In Burma, too, events on the ground were spinning out of control. Dorman-Smith’s departure and Knight’s interregnum had given the Burmese radicals the signal for revolt. Old friends returned to stir the political pot. Out in the districts there was an ominous tide of minor revolts and clashes between different ethnic and religious groups. Ba Maw, the former Japanese-sponsored Adipadi, returned from a brief imprisonment in Tokyo, announcing on the steps of the aircraft that his government had not been a ‘Jap regime’ but a ‘Burma regime’.34 Sarat Bose, Netaji’s brother, made a speech, closely monitored by the CID, in which he prophesied that the British would be driven out only by the shedding of blood and urged Burmese to live up to the ideals of Netaji. A thousand people heard him speak, including 300 ex-INA men in uniform.35 Burma’s Indian population remained uncertain. Most Hindu, Sikh and Christian Indians fully identified with the AFPFL, but feared that the anti-immigrant element in Burmese politics would rise to the surface in a time of crisis. By contrast, many Indian Muslims held themselves aloof from the AFPFL, which for them still had a whiff of communalism about it from the pre-war days. In Arakan, Muslims identified with Jinnah’s inchoate Pakistan, particularly after the communal riots in Calcutta in August and September. Industrial trouble spread. A few Indian radicals and workers on the partially restored oilfields heeded the call of P. C. Joshi, Secretary General of the Indian Communist Party, for a union between Burmese communists of all races and all factions in anticipation of a general Asian rising against ‘monopoly capitalism and imperialism’. Large numbers of Indian postal workers struck in sympathy with their counterparts in the subcontinent who were suffering as a result of high prices. Relations between Burmese and Chinese, usually less tense than those between Burmese and Indians, also deteriorated. The nationalist government in China pledged $5 million for the rebuilding of Chinese businesses shattered by the Japanese.36 Burmese politicians feared that this would tip the economic balance back towards the Chinese in areas where they had benefited during the war. Meanwhile, clandestine groupings such as the Black Star Society and paramilitary bodies such as the People’s Volunteer Organizations hoarded the vast numbers of Allied and Japanese weapons that had fallen into their hands over the past few years.
As India’s interim government took office in September, the fact that their big neighbour had already achieved a kind of independence goaded Burmese politicians to greater intransigence. Hubert Rance, the new governor, immediately noted that the Burmese were hostile and resentful because no grand British Cabinet Mission had bothered to visit Burma – ‘the most devastated country in the empire’.37 The Burmese had suddenly begun to appreciate the fragility of British power in Asia. Aung San’s hungry and frustrated supporters looked on impatiently as some aspects of the old regime seemed to totter on regardless. As soon as he arrived, Rance was therefore plunged into the worst Burmese political crisis since the reoccupation of Rangoon. September 1946 saw a mass movement on a scale that appalled the authorities. It only just failed to become another 1886 or 1930 rebellion, mainly as a result of the good judgement of Aung San. Large areas of the countryside were out of control of the central authorities, principally the ones that had caused trouble throughout British rule and before: the ‘badlands’ of Shwebo, north of Mandalay; the impoverished middle Irrawaddy basin with its difficult lines of communication; and the old haunts in the delta of the rebel monk of the 1930 uprising, Saya San. The anti-government forces had got their hands on automatic weapons and large reserves of ammunition that had presumably been buried since the Japanese withdrawal. Two thousand police were already on strike and the number of dacoities was soaring. In one incident in a town southwest of Rangoon 17,000 bags of rice were looted in a single raid.38 Elsewhere a Burmese district magistrate evacuated himself and his treasury from town on hearing that a small army of bandits was about to attack. Special Branch reported gloomily that ‘prolonged rebellion will probably reduce the civil population to starvation’.
On the face of it, the British still had considerable strength in Burma. There were more than 10,000 British soldiers in the country in mid 1946 and they showed few signs of demoralization, let alone mutiny, unlike some of the forces in Malaya. Yet the situation was much more fragile than it seemed. In 1945 the term of service for British soldiers had been reduced from four years to three years and eight months and this meant that repatriation to Britain was proceeding apace. Later, a full-scale demobilization began, a decision that effectively turned the ‘British’ garrison in Burma into an Indian and West African one. Therein lay the problem: even in 1946 there were still large numbers of Japanese POWs in the county, along with a few units of the INA who had not yet been returned to India. British authority began to look stretched when West African troops conducted flag marches through the villages of southern Burma or were seen supervising Japanese soldiers building roads. Burmese villagers were wary of both groups of troops, with some reason. Their memories of the Japanese were only too recent and many Burmese were overwhelmed by the size, colour and radically different demeanour of the Africans. Not that this stopped some Burmese from exploiting the newcomers’ naivety. The West African men, isolated in the countryside, began to find companions among the Burmese village girls. In some cases they proposed to them and used their meagre savings to give the girls’ families ‘bridewealth’ in the traditional African form. These payments – between 30 and 100 rupees – signalled that the soldiers intended to marry the girls and would take them back to Africa when the time came. On more than one occasion, though, the love-smitten Africans came back to the villages only to find that the girls and their families had disappeared – along with the hard-earned bridewealth. Serious trouble flared up between Burmese villagers and the British and West African regiments in what was already a political powder keg.39Still, the governor was grateful to have the West African troops. They were well disciplined and rarely inclined to pick a fight with the locals. And their striking physiques did lend a little glory to Britain’s shrinking power. Many of the Africans passed through a recreational camp near Rangoon. They visited the city frequently, impressing its fractious youth with the continuing reach of British rule.
The bushfire revolts and affrays in the countryside were matched in the towns by an extraordinary show of trade-union strength, all the more pointed because people were still poverty stricken from the war. The political heat was turned up as the AFPFL demanded a date for independence from the British government. Basically, this was a revolt for better conditions. British rule seemed no better than Japanese: annual inflation was soaring away and real incomes had reduced by 25 per cent. First of all the Rangoon police went on strike on 9 September, then the postal service union on 15 September. Finally, a general strike was called on 23 September. By the last week of this troubled month, nearly 100,000 key workers were on strike.40 They included government servants, port workers, police and post-and-telegraph employees. Supplies were not coming off the ships in Rangoon harbour.41 There was concern that the oil, which provided Burma’s main foreign exchange earnings, would dry up. Worse, women and children still suffering from the malnutrition and disease of the terrible war years were once again under threat. The already spartan ration shops were running out of essential commodities such as groundnut oil. Places far upcountry, especially in the hills, could only be supplied from Rangoon and they rapidly ran out of supplies. Memories of 1942 resurfaced and the authorities planned food drops to the Karenni states and other remote points. One sign that this generation of British officials was rattled was provided by their references to the British general strike of 1926. The government’s publicity offices tried to make much of the plight of children in their propaganda against the AFPFL: ‘If the trains from Rangoon to Mandalay do not run our kinsmen in Upper Burma and the Shan states will suffer,’ wrote Maung Tin and F. B. Arnold in a press release. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, officials tried to persuade the strikers to exempt vital provisions from their blockades.42
The sense of crisis radiated across the whole region. The authorities in Malaya were also facing strikes in hospitals and industrial units while the Malayan Communist Party staged a huge demonstration that drew more than 10,000 people into the streets. South East Asia Command made it clear to the cabinet that the whole of Britain’s Southeast Asian empire was spiralling down to disaster. Wavell, now at his gloomiest, continued to ponder ‘Operation Madhouse’ and drew up a plan to save the lives of British residents in India in case of a total breakdown of order. At last Clement Attlee was obliged to look up from Britain’s domestic troubles and contemplate the looming catastrophe in the East.
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, victor at El Alamein and now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was also growing alarmed. He told the chiefs of staff committee on 23 September 1946 that Britain faced a critical problem if the internal situations in India, Malaya, Burma and Palestine continued to deteriorate in parallel.43 There were simply not enough troops left for the other colonies if substantial numbers were sent to Rangoon. Britain could not count on Australian help any longer and it would have difficulty in extracting its Commonwealth troops from the occupation forces in Japan. Nor, in view of the growing Soviet menace, could it switch troops from Greece or Germany to deal with a crisis in Southeast Asia. It also had to be remembered, Montgomery warned, that India was now a virtually independent country under its own interim government. If Nehru demanded the withdrawal of Indian troops or refused them for use in the case of serious internal trouble in the country, ‘we should not be able to handle the situation in Burma’.
Hubert Rance was unimaginative but hardworking. He did not have Dorman-Smith’s literary flair. But he was intensely practical and, as Mountbatten’s ADC in the British Military Administration, he knew a lot about Burma. Straightaway he understood that suppression of the radical nationalists was impossible. The appreciation of the situation that he wrote for the Burma Office on 15 September 1946 was clear-eyed and unsentimental. He did not like the AFPFL, distrusting its authoritarian tendencies much more than Mountbatten had done. He noted that between Dorman-Smith’s departure and his own arrival it had built up its power by ‘taking all the measures so profitably used by Hitler, Mussolini and Ghandi [sic]’.44 Like many other British officials, he thought Aung San, though young and apparently indecisive, was at least sincere. Rance believed the problem was that if the British were to hitch themselves irrevocably to the AFPFL, its leftward trend might sour relations with the potentially powerful Buddhist monks, whom, perhaps mistakenly, he did not see as a radical force. Yet the alternative – the suppression of the AFPFL – really was out of the question. There were not enough British troops to go round and the hybrid Burma Army – part BNA and part old-style colonial force – would fragment on political and ethnic lines if he tried. Worse, Wavell and Auchinleck continued to tell him that there was no way he could use Indian troops to suppress Burmese nationalists.
Rance had one other option. This was to try to build up a moderate party of the old order, perhaps including some of the more conciliatory nationalists. His assessments of the available politicians were not so different from Dorman-Smith’s. He quickly concluded that Sir Paw Tun was past it, but he took to the recently repatriated U Saw, as so many British did. ‘I was impressed by his virility and oratory’, he wrote, describing him later as ‘probably the most forceful character in Burma today’.45 In the course of conversation with Saw, Rance remarked that he was also quite impressed with Aung San, especially since he had just managed to give a speech lasting for five and a half hours. But ‘U Saw was not impressed, as his record is twelve hours’. Saw held out some bait to the governor. He tried to diminish Aung San, saying that he was sincere ‘but not a strong character’, controlled first by the communist Than Tun, and later by other major figures in the AFPFL. Even more to Rance’s taste, Saw positioned a future independent Burma – under his rule – within the British Commonwealth. He readily accepted that free Burma would need British help. The United Nations was ineffective, he said, while Russia was ideologically purblind and the USwas distant. Without British support the Burmese might wake up to find the Chinese in Mandalay one day, in Sagaing the next and Rangoon the day after: ‘A hundred million Chinese in Yunnan could not be ignored.’46 Saw tried to persuade Rance that the British overestimated the AFPFL. He said that they were powerful in Rangoon and parts of the delta but elsewhere people were thoroughly sick of them. Later, writing a memorandum for Rance, Saw took the gloves off and railed against Aung San. He had been tutored by the Japanese and hated democracy. Throughout Burma it was the ‘brute force and terrorism’ of the AFPFL which prevailed. Most of its members were unemployed. Hence they resorted to extorting goods and money from people by using Aung San’s alternative title Bogyoke, ‘a title which inspired the awe and abject submission of a great bulk of the unthinking masses’.47 The British, he concluded, had failed in their responsibilities since their return. They should have relied on the old ministers such as Saw himself. Instead, the ‘Burmese felt that the British Government have wittingly or unwittingly handed over the administration of the country to a band of traitorous fascists whose avowed policy is to gain power and ascendancy at all costs’.48
Though he sympathized with the spirit of such ranting, Rance was shrewd enough to see through U Saw. The AFPFL organization was much stronger than Saw’s and Saw was unlikely to be able to exploit any splits within it. Saw’s party, which was associated with pre-war sleaze, would certainly do poorly in an election. Rance quickly decided to back Aung San, recommend concessions to London and try to get the AFPFL to enter the Burmese cabinet. The alternative was a popular revolt, further damage to an already shattered economy and possibly even mass starvation.49 In the meantime, one event pregnant with the future took place. Returning from a visit to his party’s newspaper office, Saw was ambushed by gunmen dressed as AFPFL volunteers about half a mile from Government House on Prome Road. He narrowly escaped assassination and was badly cut around the eyes with broken glass. Next day in the bazaar, most fingers pointed to members of Aung San’s party who must have known about Saw’s parleys with the governor. But this was a gangsterish and prurient sort of Burma. Another strand of gossip indicted U Saw’s Burmese wife, ‘who was anxious to get rid of him on account of his so-called German wife from Uganda’.50 Saw kept his counsel, bided his time and began to stockpile weapons. The consequences for Burma’s future were to be no less critical than the telegrams flying between Rance and Attlee’s government.
Rance’s decision to work with Aung San to counter the gathering social crisis was easier said than done. The young nationalist leader had been languishing ill in bed for some time while the general strike gathered pace: ‘Here I am helpless in bed, and I must remain quiet, God alone knows how long.’51 The bruiser U Saw took this as weakness, but it seems as likely that Aung San was ‘doing a Gandhi’, using his apparent weakness to set the agenda. At any rate, Rance obligingly called on him at his home to discuss the political situation in secret. Rance painted a bleak scenario, not unlike the ones troubling Wavell and Gent: prolonged strikes would lead to communal and anti-British riots and the destruction of the economy. The peasant, already overburdened, would be the great loser.52 There were some favourable signs. Bogyoke had come to the parting of the ways with the communists over the strike. He had clearly decided that large-scale civil disobedience leading potentially to armed rebellion would not only undermine his own position but severely damage what remained of Burma’s economic base. This presaged the expulsion of the communists from the AFPFL on 2 November.53 The impending breach materially strengthened Aung San’s position in Rangoon and Mandalay, though it pointed to trouble in the delta districts where communist sympathizers were numerous. But Aung San needed more concessions from the British to see off the communist threat and damp down civil disruption. Comparisons with India remained irksome. Whatever its larger failures, the Cabinet Mission had at least established that India was heading for independence within two years. In contrast, Burma was still stuck with Churchill’s timescale, set out in the May 1945 White Paper, which put off independence indefinitely. Worse, the 1935 constitution, with its pitifully small franchise and bias towards Indians and Europeans, remained in force. The patience of the AFPFL could not be guaranteed to last for more than a few weeks and this would impede any attempts to call off the strikes. They could not afford to be always in danger of being outflanked on the left by communists who claimed that they had capitulated to imperialism. Rance realized that some type of dramatic gesture had to be made and it would have to be Attlee who made it.
In a sense, the British government in London made the key concession as early as 18 September when it authorized Rance to negotiate on government servants’ wages, to appoint a further Burmese to the governor’s council with the defence portfolio and to arrange a general election for the spring of 1947.54 The White Paper of 1945 was thus quietly shelved. But by now, having waited for so long, Burmese public opinion demanded a far more dramatic gesture. At least Rance could now make a few gestures himself. An offer of increased wages was conveyed to key groups of workers. The governor agreed to include additional AFPFL representatives and members of U Saw’s and even Ba Maw’s parties in his executive council. The changes tipped the balance in favour of Aung San’s supporters. Rance later judged that the AFPFL socialists had been in effective control of the government machine since October 1946.
His authority strengthened, Aung San moved to limit the industrial and political unrest. Strikes in the public sector gradually petered out. The government simultaneously moved against the continuing strikes in private companies. These were targeting the Burmah Oil Company, road transporters and saw mills. The authorities brought in military drivers and Japanese POWs to break the strikes.55Then the AFPFL began to exert pressure on its own affiliated unions. On 26 October ‘workers demonstrated around the secretariat shouting slogans in support of the Government’. With Rance’s help, Aung San had scored a significant if only temporary victory over the communists. The governor and his officials also began to bargain with the authorities in neighbouring countries to improve Burma’s import position. They approached India about iron and steel supplies, Thailand about oil and, ironically, the American occupation authorities in Japan about supplies of cloth.56 In one sense, Aung San already had the initiative. At the height of the trouble, on 8 October, Nehru sent a telegram to him saying that the interim Indian government was anxious to bring Indian troops home from Burma. But he was keen that the withdrawal should not ‘upset conditions in Burma and be embarrassing to your government’. He also invited Aung San to Delhi in April 1947 to discuss military and other matters of common interest. Wavell was in no doubt about the telegram’s significance. ‘This was sent without consulting me’, he noted.57 Britain’s erstwhile subjects in Asia were now making their political dispositions without consulting British authority. A convention established in about 1800 by Richard Wellesley, Governor General of India, was thus quietly torn up a century and a half later.
Aung San then went on to try to dissolve what remained of British control over Burma’s internal affairs. On 11 November, heavily tutored by the former ICSofficer U Tin Tut, he made what was, in effect, his final set of demands. He denounced the governor’s remaining discretionary power over certain ‘imperial’ subjects as incompatible with democracy.58 The frontier areas would now have to be brought within the remit of a Burmese cabinet. So, too, would control over affairs concerning British and Indian imports. All expenditure would have to be made subject to a vote of the lower house. The British could no longer hope to ‘reserve’ subjects that bore on their own interests, as they had been doing for years. As for the future shape of a popular assembly in Burma, the AFPFL made it perfectly clear that the franchise would have to be universal in the general election that was scheduled for March 1947. There was no going back to the 1935 Government of India Act and its constitution for Burma. All the old subterfuges that had guaranteed the continuation of colonial interests and their hangers-on would have to go. No longer would the Burmese be outvoted by a combination of representatives of the European and Indian chambers of commerce; those great Indian moneylenders, the Nattukottai Chettiyars; and a plethora of Shans, Karens, Kachins, and so on.59
In all this Tin Tut, ‘highly trained, intelligent and very ambitious’, made it clear that his lodestar was India.60 Burmese would never again play poor relations to the Indians. The Indians were now sending ambassadors to other countries, and in a world where nations measured each other according to international clout, that was independence. Tin Tut, who offered constitutional and financial advice to all the Burmese political parties, threatened boycotts and strikes if an agreement on independence was not reached before 31 January 1947. Rance, however, knew that boycotts and strikes would almost certainly be the precursors of armed insurrection. Aung San had only just managed to stave off that threat in October and the social situation in the country was still deteriorating. Rance bowed to force majeure, noting that 12,000 Indian troops were scheduled to leave Burma in February 1947 and there would be no replacements.61 In the interim, these troops could not be used to put down openly nationalist risings. Timetables were now quite irrelevant. ‘It cannot be argued’, he wrote to the Labour government, that ‘a people by assumption fit to govern themselves in 1948–49, are still unfit to begin the process in 1947–48’.62 He urged the immediate passage of a House of Commons amending bill to expand the powers of the present government to include those formerly retained by the governor.63 In addition, the Burmese leaders should be rapidly invited to London to discuss outstanding issues, above all financial matters and the future position of the minorities.
Rance’s position was now unequivocal. The policies of Dorman-Smith were thrust aside. As 1946 drew to an end, Attlee and his colleagues realized that further equivocation was impossible in Burma, just at the moment the Indian situation was about to spin out of their control. They had to decide on quick independence for both countries and the form it would take. The AFPFL leadership was abruptly invited to London after New Year. The goal was to keep Burma within the Commonwealth and out of Soviet clutches. If possible, new agreements would safeguard British commercial interests in the country. The background to the talks in that cold, depressing London winter was an imminent conflagration in Burma. The general strike and accompanying disturbances had simmered down. Yet only Aung San’s authority now stood between the British and a widespread armed uprising. Aung San himself could not afford to compromise again. As it was, he was angry with both the British and the communists because he had been forced to take strong action against the strikers. He feared that this would stand him in bad stead in any future election. Even some of the moderate AFPFL leaders who had accepted ministerial office agreed with the communists that another strike would paralyse the government and force the British to grant immediate independence. If they were to go to London, Aung San and his supporters had to be assured of total success. Any temporizing by the British would compromise them completely. It would mean handing the leadership of Burmese nationalism to one or other of the communist factions. British power was already declining rapidly, but this was a decisive moment in the history of Burma and, arguably, in that of South and Southeast Asia as a whole. If Burma had become a communist state on independence, as later happened in Vietnam, the Cold War in Asia might have taken a very different course. Certainly, with the ‘cold weather’ of 1946 – 7 approaching, the communists were in a restive mood. Their aim, like their confrères in Vietnam, was to take over and dominate a coalition of nationalist forces. If they could not do this, they would adopt the tactics of the communists in China; they would go underground and fight the nationalists, denouncing them as stooges of imperialism. Fortunately for the AFPFL, the Burmese communists split into ideological and personal factions, with neither the Vietnamese nor the Chinese model triumphing. In the longer term it was to be military nationalists who would win out.
As relations between the moderates and the communists worsened with the collapse of the strikes during October, the executive committee of the AFPFL voted to expel the communists.64 At a critical meeting of the AFPFL supreme council on 2 November the communists accused Aung San and the moderates of becoming a ‘dominion status AFPFL’. For the British, dominion status, meaning self-government within the Commonwealth and defence treaties with the UK, was a political panacea for the dissolution of empire. Burmese would join Australians and Canadians in royal processions along the Mall in London. To the Burmese, dominion status was already a swear word easily paired with ‘fascism’, as was everything else in the limited lexicon of Burmese nationalism. Thein Pe, the communist who had spent much of the war in India and China, launched into a laboured historical analogy. He compared Aung San with a medieval king of the Burmese city of Pagan who did not know his true friends and was eventually murdered by the national enemy, the Mons. Than Tun, the most outspoken of the communist leaders, eventually announced that the parting of the ways had come. ‘Yes, all Communists must put party first and AFPFL second. Party to them meant the true welfare of the peasants, the workers and their sympathisers, who constituted the country.’65 Justifying their own position, the AFPFL leadership accused the communists of starting a ‘whispering campaign’ against Aung San and, less believably, of ganging up with the British military and civil administration against the ‘socialists’, that is, the moderates. The only reason that the AFPFL leaders were prepared to allow the split was that most now really believed that Attlee’s government would concede independence early in the new year. Moreover, they could see that the communists were splitting into personal and ideological cliques. Thakin Soe, who had done much to build up communist cells in the north of the country, had begun to accuse Than Tun and Thein Pe of collaboration with the British and of ‘right-wing deviationism’. He had been suspicious of much of the leadership since they had gone along with the deal that Aung San had worked out in Kandy back in September 1945 for the absorption of the BNA into a reorganized British force. He had formed his own ‘red flag’, supposedly Trotskyite, communist faction that went underground and started committing acts of revolutionary terrorism. Meanwhile, Than Tun and his clique had hit back at Soe with a pamphlet which again accused him of seducing a succession of female party workers and of quoting Engels on free love in his defence. Soe certainly seems to have believed that part of his revolutionary duty was to strike heavy blows against the ‘bourgeois family’. Thein Pe accused him of being ‘an anarchist and opportunist in matters of morality. He had a weakness for women and no qualms about alcohol.’66
All the same, the AFPFL moderates were taking a chance in booting out the communists. Broad agreement with the British government there was, but ways and means were still murky. Throughout November and early December the situation remained tense. The Attlee government was disinclined to give all its bargaining chips away before the London meeting. But for his domestic audience, Aung San had to make it appear that the delegation was only going to London for a kind of lap of honour, with the AFPFL having already won every point. Disagreements surfaced over the exact form of the ‘democratic’ constitution Burma was to receive, Burmese control over the armed forces, the status of the frontier areas and the future of British firms in the country. The issue of whether or not Burma would remain in the Commonwealth hovered in the middle distance. Worryingly, too, representatives of business and the minority peoples were lobbying Attlee’s government independently. The Burmese and their supporters in London were put on their guard in October when a Karen ‘goodwill mission’ arrived in town and was entertained at the exclusive Claridge’s Hotel by no less a luminary than Pethick-Lawrence.67 Against this background Rance continued to push Pethick-Lawrence and Attlee to invite representatives of the Burmese leadership to London as soon as possible, even though the composition of the delegation remained a matter of doubt.
As the AFPFL leadership considered the constitutional endgame, British intelligence warned that the situation was even worse than it had been in early October. Dacoity was rising to a new peak as the harvest operations drew to a close. The local volunteer groups, the PVOs, now numbered 15,000 units, having swelled since the Tantabin incident of the previous May. They were a handy guerrilla force in themselves and in any outbreak would certainly be joined by a good number of the 100,000 armed police who were on the point of mutiny for better pay and conditions. This was quite apart from the non-Karen elements of the BNA who would rally to their former leader Aung San if he took up arms. The local Indians and the Chinese might stay out of a rebellion, but much of the rural population would rise, especially in the Pegu region. As ever, the example of the 1930 rebellion was brought up by the intelligence chiefs: ‘It took two years to put down the 1930 – 2 rebellion when most of the rebels were badly armed… and the police were co-operating with the army’, a report noted.68 In the Tathon area, communists seemed to have infiltrated the ranks of the local dacoits and were organizing them for major attacks. The Meiktila railway link was believed to be under particular threat. Internal unrest in Burma combined with a dangerous external situation. By now, a full-scale civil war had broken out between the Chinese communists and Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalists. Though this had no immediate impact on Burmese politics, the rise of communism throughout Asia weighed heavily on the minds of the British and the AFPFL leadership. Equally alarming was Hindu–Muslim and Muslim–Sikh conflict in India. Burma had seen comparable ‘communal’ outbreaks between Buddhists and Muslims in the 1930s. In a lengthy interview with Reuters, Aung San deplored China’s civil war and India’s communalism. Events in China might lead to a Third World War, he said, while both conflicts would ‘retard Asiatic unity and security’.69
On 13 December General Harold Briggs, the army commander in Burma, sent a particularly gloomy assessment of the situation to his superiors. For political reasons, Indian troops could not now be used, he said. Burmese troops were of ‘doubtful reliability’. And the British forces were ‘weak’ and could not hold the situation. The evidence suggests that Briggs painted the situation to be as dire as he could because he agreed with Rance and, more distantly, Mountbatten on the need for an immediate statement about the date of independence.70 The only alternative was the kind of warfare that was happening in French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. Commanders who had seen their men survive a brutal world war were extremely reluctant to throw more lives away in minor police actions designed to hold colonial territories of dubious economic value. Finally, the government decided to do what it had really known it was going to do two months or more before. On 20 December, Attlee made a speech in Parliament in which he at last disavowed the maligned White Paper and acknowledged that the government ‘would hasten forward the time when Burma shall realise her independence’.71
Events were now moving very fast. One of the old Burma hands in Whitehall, Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, was sent to Burma to discuss the AFPFL leaders’ visit to London in the new year to approve the final settlement. Laithwaite had intensive discussions with Aung San and Tin Tut and left a vivid account of them. Aung San was ‘about an ordinary Burmese height, largish head, very close shaved, a straight forehead receding with a covering lock. Good small hands; a white silk Burmese coat and longyi; sandals.’72 Though short and frail, he was ‘a personality, clear headed with good controls [sic], and much in charge’. Tin Tut, the old ICSman, was much closer to and more comprehensible to the British. Educated at Dulwich College and Queens’ College Cambridge, he was an ideal negotiator, a quiet rugby-loving nationalist who could still speak to the British as an establishment insider. Mrs Tin Tut and Mrs Aung San were friends of Lady Rance and all the women were afraid of further strikes and disturbances. Tin Tut’s own relationship to Aung San was ‘a little like that of a family solicitor when the son of the house is up before the magistrate, he intervened from time to time to make a point or direct an argument’. Dorman-Smith’s answers, said Aung San pointedly, had always been ‘evasive’. The only terms on which constitutional discussions could go ahead were clear and unequivocal commitments. Laithwaite noticed that the point of reference for these Burmese leaders was always India: ‘At every point there was the check back to what had happened in the case of India.’73 Why, asked Tin Tut, had Burma occasioned fewer recent ministerial statements than India? Why had India already despatched its own diplomats to foreign countries? The Burmese were sorely aware that by October 1946 the British had effectively handed power to India. That in itself raised serious questions about future relations between India and Burma. Aung San returned to the old sore point of the position of Indians in Burma and intimated vaguely that the Burmese could not have Indians and other ‘foreigners’ voting on their constitution. Laithwaite’s reports revealed that all participants in the forthcoming negotiations were extremely jittery. The British were worried that they faced ‘another Indonesia’. Some members of the AFPFL were still quite unclear about what freedom entailed and worried about the good faith of the British. They remained afraid that any delegation to London might be arrested and incarcerated as U Saw and Tin Tut had been five years earlier.
The British saw turmoil all around them. India was convulsed by the INA trials and communal violence. Malaya was fighting off a British constitutional settlement and gripped by communist-inspired labour strife. British troops had barely extricated themselves from the unrolling civil war in the Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China. The army was ‘gloomy’. The British civilian services were on the whole in favour of independence, but were now concerned about the welfare of their wives and children and their own future employment. In Burma Laithwaite said that he thought racial animosity was not too bad, but noted that there was still a diehard element in the Pegu Club which wanted to exclude the Burmese.74 Basically, ‘there is no alternative to the AFPFL’. Of Aung San he concluded: ‘I think business could be done.’ Besides, the momentum towards independence was now unstoppable. Churchill had already picked up the signals. On 20 December, after Attlee had made his statement, he rose to remind the House of Commons that in the days of Lord Chatham’s administration in the mid eighteenth century ‘you had to get up very early to keep up with the accession of territory’ to Britain. The opposite was now true: ‘The British Empire seems to be running off almost as fast as the American loan.’75 Privately, Churchill was furious that a British government was even considering parleying with someone whom he regarded as a ‘quisling’ and a ‘fascist’ such as Aung San.
For his part, Aung San knew that he had one last chance to get a complete independence package from the British. He could barely control his own supporters who were gearing up for civil disobedience, while he knew that the communists were regrouping in the delta and the Irrawaddy valley. Devastated Burma could afford no more war. But the spectre of Asian civil war in Indo-China, Indonesia, China and India hovered gruesomely before his eyes as he set off on his journey to London on a British Overseas Airways Corporation flight on the second day of 1947 .
The Burma that Aung San left behind could afford no more killing. The thought appalled even the hardest of fighters in 1946. The partial peace brought by the atom bomb had allowed time for reflection. There were plenty of reminders. For one thing large numbers of Japanese POWs continued to work on the roads and act as skivvies around the countryside. In June 1945 more than 35,000 of these had been repatriated to Japan through Moulmein and Rangoon. The same number, however, remained behind and they were increasingly used as strike breakers and guards as the internal situation deteriorated. By the autumn their morale began to sag seriously; it was now fourteen months since Japan’s surrender. In a token concession to their individuality, the British allowed them to make curios and art objects for sale to Allied and Burmese troops. But it was not forgotten who they were. On one occasion a fracas broke out when they tried to sell their trinkets to the civilian population and their goods were seized.76 Several Japanese were shot dead. Sympathy for them was limited.