The British and the AFPFL continued to confront a situation of extreme delicacy. Communist insurgency and a fresh wave of strikes might result from the slightest hint that there were any conditions attached to the January agreement or that British business was manoeuvring behind the scenes. The country was armed to the teeth and very jumpy. Rance moved from town to town, trying to calm the situation. He had spoken at the largely Burmese Orient Club in December 1946, claiming that the country was returning to normal. In February he made an upbeat speech at the Rangoon Chamber of Commerce. The January agreement, he said, ‘brings to an end the struggle of the Burmese people in their passionate and natural desire for freedom’.75 He made an appearance at the convention of the Burmese Union of Stage and Screen and the Burmese arts and crafts exhibition, where he praised the emerging local film companies and the revival of handicrafts such as lacquer ware and basket weaving. He gave Burmese national feeling another fillip when he attended a ceremony marking the affiliation of the Burmese Olympic Committee to the international body on 8 July.
Yet, under the surface, deadly hatreds were feeding on the corruption that had spread with the military administration and the return of the old politicians. Guns were everywhere and a lot of them were not in British hands. British troops continued to return home. So did the Indians. As late as September 1947 there were still 10,000 Indian troops in Burma, but the agreement on the partition of India in April had made their withdrawal inevitable and underlined the fact that those who stayed on could not really be used in any offensive action. There were only a few thousand British troops left. Even the Japanese who had been uncomplaining cannon fodder were on the move. In February 1947 the final 35,000 POWs began to return to Japan, though it took four months to despatch them all. The British and Burmese fought one final campaign together in March. This was Operation Flush, which was designed to dislodge the ‘dacoit dictatorship’ in Toungoo and Yamethin districts in the heart of Burma. Gangs of bandits had been attacking trains and there was some suspicion that renegade Japanese soldiers or radical red-flag communists were training them. Led by Brigadier Charles Jerrard and Colonel Ne Win, the nationalist and future dictator, a mixed force of British, Gurkha and Burmese troops attacked the bandit strongholds.76 This campaign was successful, but it also underlined the fragility of the post-war situation. In a very real sense order had never been re-established over much of the country: barely a year later a virtual civil war would be unrolling across these very districts. Shortly after the end of Operation Flush, the British handed over effective control of the Burma Army to the Burmese command.
Equally difficult was the situation on the frontiers. Many Burmese were convinced that British interests were playing dirty tricks among the Shan and Kachin by trying to undermine the accord which Aung San had brokered between the minorities and the future Union of Burma. While this was not official policy, the evidence suggests that some British personnel were continuing to meddle in the politics of the minorities. Meanwhile, in Arakan a communist separatist movement, led by U Seinda, was spreading vigorously.77 A further cause for concern on Burma’s borders was the continuing influx of ‘unauthorized’ persons into the country. These were former Indian residents who had fled in 1942 or after and were now returning to claim their property. In June the interim Burmese government rushed through an emergency immigration bill to stop the influx, claiming that it was only a temporary measure while Burma was rebuilding its shattered infrastructure. Opinion in India was not impressed and a government spokesman said that the act would fall hard on the 300,000 refugees from Burma still resident in India. Nehru had always accepted that the Burmese did not want the return of powerful Indian capitalists to their country, but ordinary refugees were a different matter. A rather tetchy relationship developed between the two countries as India edged towards independence and partition.
Aung San regularly addressed mass rallies in central Rangoon. His speeches, punctuated by wild cheering, rambled on genially about the need for national unity, the value of statistics, the wisdom of Lenin and various thinly disguised Buddhist themes concerning the baseness of luxury, and so on. On 11 June the new constituent assembly elected that spring was inaugurated. The AFPFL delegates marched down the aisle followed by colourfully dressed tribal representatives from the frontier areas.78 Gandhi sent a message promising friendship with Burma and reminding the Burmese that the Buddha was an Indian. The city’s populace was entertained with Hollywood films, now much more popular than those contemporary British productions in which moustachioed men in trilby hats addressed each other in clipped tones. Rangoon’s city hall hosted an All-Burma beauty contest presided over by Aung San’s wife.79 The competition was intended to demonstrate the fitness of the body politic. The finalists were ‘young, but they possess firm, neat little figures’, drooled the New Times of Burma correspondent. Despite all this, politics in Rangoon and Mandalay was turning more vicious. In May Tin Tut sued the Burmese daily Bamakhit for defaming him.80 The newspaper accused the former ICS man of getting his brother appointed as an additional judge of the High Court and using his patronage as chancellor of Rangoon University to distribute jobs to his relatives: ‘one rotten fish’ could undo all the good work of Aung San’s government, the newspaper wrote. It was perhaps no coincidence that within a month the editor of Bamakhit had been called on to furnish security to the police that he would not print articles subversive of public order. To compound its offence against Tin Tut, the newspaper had printed stories such as ‘A true red flag sheds his blood freely for the country’. A communist patriot, the paper averred, would proclaim, ‘Kill me boldly in the presence of the dumb masses.’81
Ironically, the event that began the unravelling of Burma’s politics came from within the old establishment and not from the myriad of dacoits, communists or separatists in the countryside. On 16 July 1947, three days before the most fateful date in Burma’s modern history, Rance was picking up some alarming signals. The governor telegraphed London that a false demand note had led to the issue of 200 Bren guns to ‘persons unknown’ from the Base Ordnance Depot of Burma Command three weeks before.82 At about the same time 100,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition and 25,000 rounds of Sten-gun ammunition had ‘gone missing’. This had altered the balance of power in the capital and Aung San was so worried that he had called a tribunal to investigate the continuing leaks. Nu said that some young hotheads had concluded that the British were conniving in this leakage to strengthen the power of the opposition and put in power people who would accept dominion status.83 The newspapers were full of rumours of nocturnal meetings and bodies of men moving around the city and surrounding villages.
The monsoon of 1947 had been particularly heavy in Rangoon. Pools of filthy water filled the streets of the dilapidated city. The third week of July was particularly unpleasant. Khin Myo Chit, the intellectual who wrote a vivid memoir of the Japanese occupation, remembered that
rain slashed mercilessly as the winds groaned and roared, and for a full week we scarcely saw the sun. The thick shroud of rain and clouds lay on us as if never to be lifted. The 19 July 1947 was a day we shall not easily forget. The rainstorm raged more fiercely on this day and the skies were darker. The terrible aspect of all nature seemed to be in keeping with the calamity which shook the whole nation.84
That wet morning Rance was working in Government House, expecting a report later in the day on the executive council debate that was going on some miles away in the Secretariat building. An ADC suddenly burst in to say that there had been an armed attack on Aung San and the council. Within a few minutes it was confirmed that Aung San and five members of the council had been killed. It seemed that independent Burma might die in the womb. Soon the stunning news burst on a bright summer morning at the Burma Office in Whitehall. In London it was only 8.40 a.m. when a top-secret telegraph message from Rangoon arrived: ‘Attack on Executive Council in session 10.30 by three Burmans armed with Sten guns; 5 killed; Aung San wounded through chest.’85 This was rapidly followed by another: ‘A jeep with 12 Army markings – 5 men armed with Sten guns and rifles. PVO tried to stop them and was shot–he says they were men 4 Burma Rifles–sprayed Council with bullets.’86 Aung San had actually died almost immediately after the attack. Ironically, one reason the assassins had been so effective was Burmese pride in their new army. British NCOs seconded to the Burma Army had been on guard until a couple of days earlier. But they had been replaced by PVO personnel recently recruited into the force. The assassins simply pushed past these inexperienced guards and crashed into the council chamber.
By now all Burma knew that Aung San, their hero and liberator, was dead. The city was paralysed with grief. Khin Myo Chit wrote: ‘Everywhere in the city, on buses, trains and in the market places I saw men’s eyes wet and women sobbing as if their hearts would break. I saw young soldiers in bedraggled uniforms standing at the foot of Bogyoke Aung San’s bier, tears streaming down their faces, which they wiped with their torn, dirty caps.’87 As the day wore on and new messages arrived in Government House and in London, the immediate sense of panic receded a little. Soon, ‘the assassinated bodies, embalmed, lay in glass cases in Jubilee Hall’, the meeting place where Tommy Trinder, the British comic singer, had sung to the troops, the Rangoon Theatre Club had played and British generals had addressed their officers.88
The British saw only confusion ahead. An official wrote to Sir Gilbert Laithwaite at the Burma Office: ‘Where we go from here I don’t know, or who is going to come out on top – Thakin Nu, U Saw or the Communists.’89 Rance understood that he had to move quickly to fill the gap left by Aung San, difficult as that was. Luckily, one plausible candidate, Thakin Nu, had not been in the council chamber. The governor persuaded Nu to take on the job and he was rapidly sworn in as acting prime minister. Nu was about the only person acceptable to both the British and most of the nationalist parties. As a kind of Buddhist socialist he seemed moderate to the British compared with most AFPFL leaders and the communists. Yet the latter knew that his instinct was for fairly radical land reform and the nationalization of ‘vested interests’.
Nu was a complex character. Before the war he had found it difficult to reconcile his easy, outgoing personality and sociability with the dictates of the stern Buddhism that he followed. Experience of the Japanese invasion and the fighting had heightened his religious beliefs. Although he played a part in the early organization of the AFPFL, he had soon retired to a country town to write. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Aung San had persuaded him to stand for election to the constituent assembly in the spring. Now Rance had to twist his arm even more vigorously to get him to take on the role of prime minister. He agreed to serve until independence, scheduled for January 1948, though most people clearly expected him to carry on longer. Nu quickly began to show his best asset: his capacity for conciliation. He broadcast to the nation: ‘My best friend and comrade has fallen. His mantle has fallen on my shoulders.’90 Nu gathered what remained of the nationalist leadership around him. He also recruited a young journalist and nationalist, U Thant, to act as his press adviser and personal confidant. More practical than Nu, Thant became a power behind the scenes in AFPFL politics over the next few years. Later he became a diplomat and ended his career as UN secretary general.91
Nu tried to coax the communists, especially his old comrade Than Tun, back into the nationalist coalition government. But this was not to be. The communists were too sure events were moving in their direction, while the AFPFL demanded that the Communist Party of Burma was dissolved before any such merger could take place. Five months before the Burmese regained their independence the troubles that would nearly destroy the young republic were clearly visible on the horizon. The minority issue and the tussle with communism were both put on hold rather than solved.
In the meantime it was essential that the British and the nationalists discover the assassins of Aung San and his colleagues. Though there was evidence that the red-flag communists had some inkling that a plot was in the air, the attack did not seem to be the signal for a leftist insurrection. By the late afternoon of the fateful day Government House in Rangoon was fairly sure that Than Tun’s communists were not involved. Nu was certain that Soe’s communists were also innocent. Suspicion turned quickly from the left to the right wing of Burmese politics, in particular to the former prime minister and wartime detainee, U Saw. Intelligence reports at the end of June had uncovered a good deal of night-time comings and goings around his house by ‘men in singlets’.92 On the afternoon of the assassination, British Special Branch raided his house and detained him and ten others. The police quickly discovered eighteen rifles and a Sten gun concealed in the house. Suspicion also fell on a jeep in the compound which carried no number plate. Later, when they drained an ornamental lake on the property, the police found thirty-seven complete Bren guns, fifty-nine spare barrels and eight revolvers. In another house connected with Saw’s party members a further forty-four hand grenades and forty-nine detonators came to light.93 The British had been spying on Saw for some time. One night they had seen a party in a boat on the lake. But nothing was done on this occasion because Saw had been well dressed and it was assumed that this was simply one of his evening assignations with young women. Saw and illicit arms had a long history. His Galon private army had been suspected of stockpiling arms even before the war. There was also much evidence of a growing vendetta between him and Aung San as Saw tried to re-establish himself in Burmese politics. Saw blamed Aung San for the near-fatal attack on his car he had suffered the previous September.
As suspicions about Saw grew, Rance and Whitehall had to contemplate an embarrassing possibility. A British army major commanding the ammunition depot had been observed making visits to Saw’s residence over the previous month.94 The officer commanding informed the governor that the ‘previous history of this officer is unsatisfactory both as a non-commissioned officer in Burma before the war and in India during the war’. Once the possibility of any form of British involvement in the assassinations emerged, the Rangoon rumour mill went into overdrive. Spread by word of mouth to every village in the country, the accusation that the British had armed the opposition parties against the AFPFL became an article of faith. There was even a rumour that the governor had interviewed Saw and Ba Maw in an attempt to form a new government that would keep Burma in the Empire. Even today many elderly nationalists and their supporters believe that the British government connived in the murder of Aung San. Kyaw Nyein, the veteran independence fighter who had joined the delegation to London in January, was quite certain about this when he was interviewed by the historian Robert Taylor in the 1970s. Attlee, he said, had personally known about and approved of the plot against Aung San. It was an act of personal vengeance, Kyaw Nyein insisted. At the conference in London, Aung San had given Attlee his word that, in return for an immediate commitment to independence, Aung San would keep Burma in the Commonwealth. Aung San had broken his word and had thus called into question Attlee’s ‘personal role in history’. He had to die. But, he added, the nationalists had decided not to reveal their evidence because they feared it would delay independence.95 While even Nu was hard pressed to believe this convoluted story, there is much circumstantial evidence to tie corrupt or rogue elements in the British armed forces and Force 136 to the plot. Privately, several British observers were unsurprised at the alleged involvement of their countrymen in graft and murder: ‘After what some of our own people did during the war in the way of lining their own pockets at the expense of the lives and safety of their own kith and kin, I am prepared to believe almost anything of our race,’ said one.96 The accusation that Dorman-Smith in London knew of the plot seems implausible, but it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility.
Over the next week the situation remained desperately tense. Rance got little sleep. The Communist Party of Burma (the ‘white flag’ group) had picked up an off-the-cuff remark by Tom Driberg that the Conservatives in Britain were backing U Saw and made it an issue. Almost as vexing to the governor was the problem of what to feed that austere vegetarian Stafford Cripps during his projected visit to Burma: ‘Please don’t forget to let me know what can and cannot be eaten,’ he pleaded with the Burma Office.97 Laithwaite replied promptly with a list of suggestions. ‘I hope this gives enough low-down on this vital subject,’ he wrote, although ‘I find it difficult to gauge how great the reluctance is to eat eggs.’98 Nu did his best to calm the situation on the more important issues. He called a press conference to urge editors not to spread rumours that might ‘rouse the masses’. But he also complained that not enough information was coming from the British army about who precisely was involved in the arms ‘losses’. Nu’s position was extremely difficult. His relations with Rance were much closer than Aung San’s had been. Any direct charge by the AFPFL leadership that the British had been involved in the assassination would have compromised his own position at a time when Soe’s communists were on the point of rebellion. The British had to be seen to be doing something. They arrested one Captain Vivian, an associate of U Saw, who had run a trucking business with him.99 He had recently been seconded to the civil police as an arms adviser in the police supply department, a position that lent itself to lucrative illicit dealings. Later Captain Moore, the commandant of the Base Ordnance Depot, was also put under arrest. Moore was a drinking companion of Saw. The police already had on record a statement from Moore that Saw had told him when drunk that he had enough arms for a private army hidden in his lake. Another British officer closely associated with Saw was Major Daine, who had been seen at the house dressed in a white shirt, blue longyi and gold embroidered chappals or Indian slippers.100 He and Saw had a mutual interest in ballistics. Daine testified that Saw was armed to the teeth and was expecting another five lorry loads of weapons from someone who seemed to be a British officer. This testimony was so embarrassing that Rance tried to have it hushed up. But it was not only the army that fell under suspicion. Kyaw Nyein, the home member and strong socialist who later indicted Attlee, said that European business firms had been secretly financing Saw in the hope of promoting a non-socialist government that would leave their interests unaffected.101 Some credence was given to this because Mr Bingley of the British Council had apparently been in conversation with Saw about his attitude towards British firms.
The rumours created intense suspicion between the British and Nu’s new government, but in the short run both parties had an interest in maintaining a smooth momentum towards independence. General Briggs, the local British commander, made a point of personally placing a wreath on Aung San’s coffin. The Burma Star, the forces newspaper, formally denied any official British involvement in the plot. The New Times of Burma pointedly published a photograph of Briggs at the funeral ceremony separated by just a few column inches from a piece which denounced people spreading wild rumours, meaning those who were blaming the British government.102 Crucially, the British were able to prove that the weapons and ammunition used in the murders were not those stolen from the Base Ordnance Depot.103 Meanwhile, the police investigation was making some headway. A number of members of Saw’s household had been forced to testify against him. Several of the assassins were supposedly identified and one was conveniently shot dead trying to escape from a police jeep which was conveying him to Rangoon.104 The plan was evidently to concentrate minds on Saw and not to try to unravel the rest of the conspiracy for fear of where it might lead. On 24 September Saw’s trial began; seventy-eight witnesses were to be examined. People in the street hooted and howled at him as he was transported to court.105 Throughout he expected to be bailed out by his friends in Britain who included, he said, ‘three ex-governors and many ex-ministers’. Dorman-Smith certainly intervened on behalf of the clever and likeable rogue who had so pleased him in 1941. But it was to no avail. Saw was sentenced to death by hanging, although the sentence was not carried out until after Burma’s independence the following year. In a letter from his condemned cell to Bingley, the British Council man, he wrote: ‘I took a grave risk, as advised.’ On another occasion, he told his jailer that ‘the governor was no use as he had already been bought by Aung San and Thakin Nu for 20 lakhs’.106 This must have come as news to Rance, whose idea of the good life seems to have been a night out at a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.
By mid August the vacuum left by the assassinations had been partially filled. The immediate attempt to bring the communists into government had failed. What was thought to be an auspicious day was chosen and the governor was called away from the golf course to swear in Nu and his colleagues. Rance could not find the oath of office, but luckily Tin Tut, a member of the new cabinet, had memorized it.107 Giving up on the communists, Nu spent much of the next two months trying to assuage the Karens and other minority groups and to disarm the restive PVO bands. The task seemed all the more urgent as every day brought news of fresh massacres across northern India, where Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were engaged in tit-for-tat killing. There was unfinished business to do with the British, too. The agreement at the start of the year between Aung San and Attlee had not tied up the loose ends of independence, especially on the financial side. The details were important especially because the communists were continuing to make political capital out of what they described as the ‘rightist’ AFPFL’s compromise with the ‘imperialists’. In September, therefore, Lord Listowel, secretary of state for Burma, visited Rangoon, while in October prime minister designate Nu flew to London for a final set of talks.108
Listowel’s job was basically one of public relations. He took tea with Aung San’s widow, Daw Khin Kyi, and her son and two-year-old daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, and presented his condolences. He disavowed the neo-imperialist aims that the communists were imputing to the British. The hard negotiating was done by Nu and cabinet ministers in London. Nu found Attlee’s government wrestling with a host of domestic industrial difficulties and worrying about the rise of communism in China and Southeast Asia. They were privately assailed by feelings of guilt about the bloodletting in India. The Conservatives were offering little support. Churchill was on the rampage about Labour’s scuttling out of Burma. His father Randolph had been responsible for the conquest of the country in 1885–6; now he insulted and abused Attlee and Aung San in an ‘outrageous speech’ that did enormous damage in Burma, according to Gilbert Laithwaite.109 Ministers were keen to maintain intact as many British financial interests in the country as possible. They also confirmed that a British services or military mission would remain in Burma after independence. This was ostensibly to train the Burmese army, but the real reason was that it would tie Burma, however loosely, into the Western anti-communist alliance. In September the international communist propaganda body, the Cominform, met in Poland. Andrei Zhdanov, its secretary, propounded a new militant line, calling for putsches against capitalist and imperialist governments.110 The world was in arms again. As the year drew to an end the brief and imperfect peace after the Second World War was evaporating. In a few short months, the red armies had replaced the Axis armies as the mortal enemies of ‘Western democracy’. The Cold War was about to begin, but in Asia it was to take the form of many small ‘hot’ wars.
On his return from London, Nu entered the Buddhist monastery at Myathabeik Hill for a brief ‘religious recess’, followed by a nine-day pilgrimage. He ‘went to the pagodas around Keilatha Hill… where he practiced asceticism and is reputed to have encountered many yogis and ascetics’.111This was the region from which the medieval Burmese king, Anawratha, took monks when he founded the great temple city of Pagan. Nu himself went on to found a society for Buddhist meditation, aided by a group of conservative nationalist leaders and businessmen. The pilgrimage was intended to show that his agreement with Attlee was merely a technical diplomatic exercise. The real independence of Burma, Nu’s actions implied, would occur when the country reconnected itself to its glorious past and recognized Buddhist contemplation and self-control as the central discipline of the new state. After his pilgrimage, he emerged into the full glare of communist hostility and anti-Western rhetoric.
Nu’s opponents denounced the British services mission. They also attacked any plan to compensate the British firms that were to be nationalized on the grounds that they had exploited the Burmese people for generations. Than Tun, the communist leader, ‘proud, bitter and jealous’, began to plan for armed insurrection. The success of this revolution would depend on the play of interest and aspiration deep in the Burmese countryside. Here the importance of any ideology was profoundly constrained by poverty and poor education. As British rule drew to its close, not much seemed to have changed since 1886 when foreign invasion ended Burma’s freedom. The peasantry was impoverished. The ‘dacoit Po The’ was ‘ravaging, raping and murdering the inhabitants’ of the district of Thayetmo.112 From Mogaung, Balwant Singh, the district officer of Indian origin, remembered that about this time the new government decided to introduce elections for the post of village headman, previously an official appointment. This was all very well, but the practical difficulties were great. Head-manships were fine things for rich country people who could afford to spend time compiling statistics and going to see the district magistrate in return for local prestige, but most people did not have the time or resources. In many cases, the old headmen were voted back faut de mieux. Elsewhere, fierce factional disputes broke out between local notables. Balwant Singh remembered one case where the only suitable candidate was illiterate. He had to make out that the man was attending writing and reading classes in order to get him certified as eligible.113
Burma immediately after its independence seemed on the point of becoming the first of what are now called ‘failed states’. Even when a kind of central control was re-established after 1952, the country rapidly became a ‘failed democracy’. It never achieved India’s relative stability or the early prosperity of Malaya. It remained almost as poor as East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and the wars, civil disturbances and authoritarian rule that it suffered were even worse. The roots of the ethnic insurgencies that were to shake Burma in the years after independence lay far back in colonial history, when the British gave the minority peoples of the old Burmese Empire special administrative status and a relatively privileged position within British Burma. Yet this was not simply colonial divide-and-rule politics; many among the minority peoples never really saw themselves as part of Burma. The more immediate causes of the decline of the central state after 1948 lay in the events of the war and British reoccupation. The reconquering Allied forces had armed the Karen, the Kachin, the Chin and other minorities, but they had never really re-established control over the armed Burmese of the plains who had fought with Aung San but were excluded from the benefits of this second colonial occupation. The government, now trying to consolidate its power in Rangoon, was poverty stricken as a result of wartime damage and the collapse of Burma’s once lucrative exports. Foreign firms still controlled many of the country’s resources. The AFPFL leaders had neither cash nor goods with which to buy off the powerful men in the countryside. They were also split into ideological and personal factions. Very few of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa after 1945 began their quest for stability and respect with so few advantages.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Burmese days finally passed into history, marked by the usual concern with ceremonial. For some time Rance had fretted that there might be demonstrations as his governorship came to an end. He had in mind the unruly and embarrassing scenes in Government House at Calcutta.114 Rance had little to fear. As he knew, the AFPFL membership was under tighter control than the Bengal Congress had been. In November the whole Burmese government and their wives were invited to Government House to celebrate Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh. Over the New Year holidays of 1947–8, the governor made his exit with decorum and a touch of bathos. He told members of the Orient Club that he would not fully realize that he was leaving ‘until we see the Shwedagon disappearing as we proceed down the Rangoon river’.115 On 4 January 1948, the day of Burma’s independence, sailing far out beyond Kipling’s ‘old Moulmein pagoda’, Hubert Rance crossed the Bay of Bengal and took ship onward from Colombo. Gilbert Laith-waite had managed to secure two tickets to a West End performance of Annie Get Your Gun. He presented these to the governor and his wife to celebrate their return to London.