By early June the situation had deteriorated further. Burmese Muslims were on the point of rebellion in Arakan. To the far north sporadic rebellions among hill Karen, Shan and Kachin peoples became entwined with the politics of opium.50 In the south, in the countryside around Pegu, rebels showed a new level of determination, fighting on during the monsoon when once they would have retired to await drier conditions.51 They were also prepared to mount strong attacks on Burma Army units and police stations, taking heavy casualties in the process. This too was a new development. It was already, the British mission conceded, ‘a small civil war’52 and the ‘Irrawaddy valley was virtually dominated by the rebels’.53 The only thing that held the rebels back was a shortage of ammunition for their predominantly Japanese weapons. But this was true of the government forces as well. The government renewed its secret pleas to London for ammunition and attack aircraft. The War Office had already despatched an ammunition ship, but that was heading for Rangoon at a deliberately slow pace. The Burmese government fumbled on the political front too. It pronounced an amnesty and wasted fuel dropping leaflets over the countryside in imitation of Slim’s psychological warfare four years earlier. The communists made an easy riposte with their argument that the government was selling the country out. There were now twenty British ‘advisers’ in the Rangoon War Office. Then again, the government decided to try to recruit police into the army. But 800 of the 1,200 men concerned were declared unfit ‘due to VD and other causes’. In planning attacks on the rebel positions, Smith Dun always had the feeling that the descendants of Aung San’s army were not really ‘his’ men. ‘In short the whole five battalions of the ex-Patriotic Burma Force contingent… is not available for serious internal security purposes.’
In July, when the insurrections were making rapid headway, Nu reacted in a manner that was typical of his Buddhist beliefs and idiosyncratic politics. He knelt before an image of the Buddha in his house and made a vow of celibacy, or ‘extreme purity’, as he put it. Soon afterwards his wife moved out of the house and the couple separated. Perhaps Nu felt that this act of personal renunciation would help atone for the murder and destruction occurring all around him.54 The embattled prime minister now lived alone in what was commonly called ‘the concentration camp’ in Windermere Park. This was a heavily fortified, barbed-wire protected enclosure patrolled by trigger-happy guards who occasionally shot dead civilians who inadvertently got too close.55 A couple of months later a British press correspondent compared Rangoon to ‘a Mexican border city expecting a raid by Pancho Villa. It is a city of non-descript uniforms, sombrero wearing gunmen with pistols lashed to their thighs, multi-guarded politicians, funk holes and fear.’56
By early August, large parts of the army were not merely holding aloof, but actually pulling out of the government alliance. A unit of the elite Burma Rifles was supposed to move against the communists in Hwambi. Instead, they took the opportunity to desert and tried to establish a popular-front government with the communist and militia leaderships in the district. Burmese officers posted to the south of the country were openly saying that they would not lift a finger against their former colleagues because the government was bound to fall in two or three days. Meanwhile, the insurgency crept closer to the Syriam oil storage tanks and refinery and the remaining British personnel found themselves evacuating Bassein for the second time in the decade. As the end of the year approached, the territory ruled by the formal government of Burma was effectively reduced to a couple of patches of land around Rangoon and Mandalay.
The scale of the Burmese government’s problems was revealed by the case of General Zeya, the newly appointed Burmese military attaché in London. The British government could hardly hide its distaste that the appointee was a hardline nationalist and not a former Burma Army officer. Zeya had been president of the Rangoon University Students’ Union in 1940–41. As one of the original Thirty Comrades who had led the march into Burma in 1942, he had duly fled to Hainan, along with Aung San, to be trained by the Japanese. But Britain’s dislike of Zeya was soon rendered immaterial as Rangoon suddenly announced that he was ‘unavailable’ for the appointment. In fact, he was one of a large number of soldiers who had defected en masse to the communists while on counter-insurgency duty. The next time round, the Burmese government tried a little diplomacy. Zeya’s replacement was to be ‘Terry’ Tun Hla Oung. He was deputy inspector-general of police, but it was his stewardship of the Rangoon Turf Club and his reputation as a good drinking and racing man that made him attractive to the British. An Anglophile and ‘not close to the [Burmese] Socialist government’, ‘Terry’ should, the British embassy in Rangoon suggested, be put up for membership of ‘a British racing institution’.57 The mutiny of important units of the army, including elements of the prized Burma Rifles, reflected increasing doctrinal splits within the high command.58The strange signals sent out by the appointment to London first of Zeya and then of his ideological antithesis, Tun Hla Oung, simply confirmed this.