2

1945: The Pains of Victory

BURMA INTRANSIGENT

The night of 12–13 August 1945, three days after the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, marked the high point of good relations in Burma between the returning British and the local population, proudly led by their new army. That night news and rumours that the Japanese emperor had offered to surrender spread like wildfire through Rangoon. Streets were soon filled with cheering crowds. Jeeps bulging with people roared up and down the main highways. Ships’ sirens blared forth the victory sign. Very lights stabbed the blackness of the night. The next day’s Rangoon Liberator, the administration-sponsored newspaper, carried the banner headline ‘Japan Surrenders. Rangoon goes wild with joy’.¹ In fact, the formal surrender did not come until two days later. Even then no one in Burma was quite sure that the fighting was finally over because units of the Japanese forces were still active in Tenasserim, the southern peninsula, and the southern Shan hills. The atom bomb also stoked fears about the future. Yet most people of whatever background now believed they would survive the war. That shrewd leader of the 14th Army, General William Slim, soon to become commander of Allied land forces, South East Asia Command, had once been worried by the possibility of conflict between Aung San’s forces and the British army.² Now he congratulated Aung San on his fighters’ patriotic resistance. Relations between the powerful Buddhist priesthood, the Sangha, and the Allied liberators remained cordial, too. Friendly contact had been established two months earlier. A hundred chief monks under the leadership of the Venerable Alatewa Sayadaw welcomed Mountbatten as supreme commander, and thanked the administration for the excellent breakfast prepared for them that day. The meeting also established a committee to advise the British administration on all matters connected with the monks.³

In the countryside, Japanese forces had been fighting on, pursued by the British and the Burma National Army.⁴ Slowly the news filtered through to the remotest places. Maung Maung, one of the leading soldiers of the BNA, remembered: ‘One night in August the camp of the Indian Brigade broke up in light and noise. Guns boomed, searchlights danced, flares went up to send out showers of stars.’⁵ The war began to end here, too. Delicate negotiations were in train as captured Japanese officers and Japanese-speaking British liaison personnel tried to convince the pockets of desperate Japanese troops that the emperor had told them to lay down their arms. Some soldiers surrendered with resignation; others ‘would crumble to the ground weeping and tearing the ground with frantic hands’.⁶ A few attempted suicide. One man blew himself up with a grenade in front of the victors. Maung Maung recorded that the strange and ambivalent comradeship between the Japanese and the old Burma Independence Army flickered to life again, despite the mutual killing of the previous four months. Even in the despair of their defeat, the Japanese were easier to deal with than the British, many of whom still seemed ‘snobbish’, determined to reassert their superiority over what they saw as a gaggle of Burmese youths.⁷

The British were themselves caught between feelings of relief and horror at the magnitude of the task of reconstruction that faced them.⁸ Ironically, their only advantage in this was the large number of docile and disciplined Japanese POWs they now held who could be assigned tasks previously reserved for the meanest Indian coolie. The authorities hurriedly tried to improve Rangoon’s conservancy department, which had no more than a handful of sweepers to cleanse the latrines of hundreds of thousands of dwellings. House owners were exhorted to collect and properly dispose of rubbish rather than throw it into the shattered drainage system. There was an ever-present danger of disease. Slowly the city began to creep back to a basic level of normality. The Rangoon Liberator of 27 September carried a letter redolent of the sweet old days of trysts in the shade of the Sule pagoda: to ‘H. H. Princess of Magnolia. My most sincere apologies for the indiscreet note – pray remember memories of Radio – darling, forgive me – meet me at the “MARINA” – always awaiting you there – “S.”’⁹ Perhaps this was a plant by the secret services to improve morale. More convincing was the advertisement of Tong Hin Co. of 705–7 Dalhousie Square announcing a lottery. The prizes included ‘a piece of silk for making Lady’s Shanghai dress’ and a bottle of hair cream and a box of face powder, all rare commodities in the battered metropolis. Alarmingly, the Lightning Chemical Institute of 314 U Wisara Road announced in the same issue: ‘The old order has changed. Our Lightning Brand gin helped to bring in the new.’¹⁰

Within days new strains began to emerge. People had been prepared to bear privations in the months following the city’s liberation, but now the world war was supposedly over they began to wonder why they were still dressed in rags, why prices were rising and why new supplies of cloth and other essential commodities had not been brought in.¹¹ Someone should wave a magic wand and put things back to where they had been in 1942. There was disgruntlement about the employment policies of the civil affairs secretariat set up by the military administration. Many Burmese complained that former Burmese members of the middle and lower civil service had not been reemployed. Instead, ‘second-rate’ Anglo-Burmans, Anglo-Indians and Indians, who had been hangers-on at Simla, where the Burmese government had been in exile during the war, were flooding back into the country.¹² On the other hand, the British seemed remarkably careless in screening those few Burmese who did regain government employment. Only four Burmese officers who were known to have been particularly active collaborators with the Japanese had been refused employment and those who had not collaborated were enraged that in many cases the sins of the occupation had apparently been washed away. All this fed into a wider disaffection about pay scales and ranking in the new order. Worse, individual civil servants found themselves caught between a resentful people and an administration determined to get back on top with punitive measures.

Balwant Singh, a young Burmese-born Sikh, observed all this first hand. He had joined the Burma civil service in 1942 and had survived the war working on the railways, having first learned basic Japanese. In 1945 he rejoined the civil service and became assistant to a Burmese township officer. He found himself forcing rigid price and commodity controls upon an uncomprehending population, and was often shocked by the harsh sentences his superiors handed out for breaches of them. Even forced labour continued after the Japanese occupation: ‘Life was full of hardship in a country now being occupied for the second time and for people struggling to survive under conditions of chaos. It was bewildering for men such as me who were new to the administration.’¹³

Another man who resumed a job interrupted by war was the medical missionary Gordon S. Seagrave. He had been born in Burma but educated in the United States and his ancestors included some of the earliest American missionaries in Asia, who had arrived in Burma before the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1824–6. ‘Dr Cigarette’, as he was affectionately known to local people because of his chainsmoking, had worked among the Kachin people of the far northeast frontier adjoining China.¹⁴ His medical work and mission had been savagely disrupted by the Japanese invasion. He had been commissioned as a medical officer in ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s American and Chinese forces as they pushed through on their arduous and disease-ridden march to the Myitkyina airfield in 1944. Now Seagrave returned to his hospital at Namkham to face a medical and social emergency of unequalled proportions.¹⁵ In their own way, the frontier regions had suffered even more from war than Burma’s cities. The Japanese and returning Allied troops had done massive damage to an already parlous infrastructure. Food and medicines were virtually unobtainable. Bacillary dysentery had wiped out whole villages throughout the north. Plague was ‘going strong’. Lepers had gone untreated. Cattle had been eaten by the Japanese army. On top of all this, many of the frontier peoples still distrusted Western medicine. The Sawbwa or local prince tried to stop Seagrave’s hospital from reopening. He was quite happy poisoning himself with Shan medicine, according to the doctor.¹⁶ At the time of Seagrave’s return, stray Japanese troops were still taking pot shots at passing vehicles. Worse, here as elsewhere, the war had armed and militarized the minorities, presaging further tension and conflict, not only with the returning British but with any potential independent government in Rangoon. Over the next few years the life of an American medical missionary was unlikely to be much easier than that of a junior Burmese administrator of Sikh origin.

In Burma the most important political development during the autumn of the victory year was the rapid souring of relations between Aung San and the British. At his first meeting with Slim, Aung San made it clear that he expected to be treated as the military commander of a provisional Burmese government. He had repeatedly asked that the civil wing of the Burmese patriotic or defence forces, the clumsily named Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), should be regarded as the sole legitimate body politic in Burma. In early September at Kandy, Mountbatten’s headquarters in Ceylon, a temporary accommodation was reached. Aung San had to accept a period of British administration as a ‘necessary evil’. Neither the British nor Aung San could go it alone. The Japanese were still to be disarmed in southern Burma, Malaya and Indo-China, and the British needed the support of the BNA and particularly the information it could command.¹⁷ The BNA, for its part, was too ill equipped and too small to have inflicted any strategically significant defeat on the British. The agreement between Mountbatten and Aung San stated that about 5,000 men from the BNA would be absorbed into a new British-led Burma Army, with a few more thousand kept up as reserves.¹⁸ This did not solve the looming unemployment problem but it did put to rest concerns about ‘rebellion against the king’. Everyone was well aware that Burma desperately needed supplies of cloth, oil, chemicals and food. All but the most radical Burmese politicians accepted that, for the foreseeable future, these could only come from British and American sources. Just as the Malayan communist leader Chin Peng was meeting senior British commanders in Malaya, so his cautious, ‘snub-nosed, square-headed’ Burmese counterpart, Than Tun,¹⁹ warily seated himself around a table in Kandy with Mountbatten and Reginald Dorman-Smith, the returning governor. Yet less than two months after the atomic bomb had fallen on Hiroshima, the truce broke down at a political level. In the words of Mountbatten, Aung San chose to become a Churchill rather than a Wellington. He resigned his military commission to become political leader of the AFPFL.²⁰ There began a long and ill-humoured struggle between the two rivals for civil legitimacy, Aung San and Dorman-Smith. Ironically, and to Dorman-Smith’s enduring disgust, the Burmese people never accepted Aung San in civilian guise. To them he would always be Bogyoke – the General.

The ill will should have been expected, but the politicians in London and even in Simla had never really grasped the depth of the change that had overtaken Burma’s politics since the Japanese invasion. As almost one of its last acts in the early months of 1945, Churchill’s wartime coalition government had published a White Paper, a political briefing document, on the future of Burma. This had had the singular effect of making even Dorman-Smith seem like a moderate. He might have been dismissed by Churchill as ‘the man who wants to give Burma away’, but the governor-in-exile was hardly looking to a quick transition to independence for the country. He considered that another five years of pre-war-style British administration would be needed before Burma even qualified for dominion status.²¹ But the White Paper drawn up by Churchill and his secretary of state for India and Burma, Leo Amery, was light years behind this thinking. It had no time scale at all for independence. It seemed to be retrogressive, even by the standards of the 1936 arrangements that had given the country very limited local autonomy. Worse, to Burmese nationalists, it threatened to create a Balkans-type decentralized state in which tribal and minority areas would remain more or less permanently under British tutelage. Dorman-Smith was less sure of the document’s import; he judged it ‘infuriatingly vague’.²²

The AFPFL had set their sights on the White Paper while they were still fighting the Japanese. One thing they particularly noted was the much higher priority given to India in the political discussions that took place as the war drew to its end. The viceroy, Lord Wavell, was forever trying to conciliate India’s fractious politicians, while in Burma a substantial element in the civil affairs administration, represented by pre-war civil servants such as Frederick Pearce and Frank Donnison, seemed determined to keep Aung San at arm’s length. This was despite the fact that Aung San, unlike India’s Congress leaders, had latterly come to the aid of the Allies. Nor was it just a matter of Churchill’s old antipathy for Burma’s aspirations; the AFPFL expected to be sold down the river by Clement Attlee’s new Labour government, too. At worst, they felt Labour were conniving at the return of a Tory governor; at best, Attlee seemed to be concentrating his efforts that autumn on labour unrest in Britain and other domestic problems. Sir Stafford Cripps, Labour’s elder statesman of Asia, was tied down by Indian problems. Frederick, later Lord, Pethick-Lawrence, the new secretary of state for Burma, was not exactly a big hitter within the Labour movement and was derided by the opposition as ‘Pathetic Lawrence’. Despairing of progress, the AFPFL and the BNA decided to flex their muscles. In every village and on every major urban building fluttered the ‘victory flag’, the red and white-starred banner of Burmese nationalism. Huge demonstrations began to take place in the burned-out ruins of Mandalay and around the Shwedagon pagoda, the great temple at Rangoon’s heart.

One thing that crystallized the nationalists’ hostility was the physical reappearance of Dorman-Smith. Mountbatten and Slim they could just about abide, but on 20 June Dorman-Smith made a quick visit on HMS Cumberland to what remained of Rangoon harbour.²³ He did not step ashore because he had no jurisdiction there until mid-October, when the civil government was due to resume some of its functions, but he invited many of the Burmese old guard on board, including Sir Paw Tun and Htoon Aung Gyaw, lately pensioners at the viceroy’s pleasure in Simla. The governor noted that he would be returning to a politically transformed Burma and spoke of the huge task of reconstruction. Yet here he was courting the old gang all over again. The nationalists were deeply suspicious. Even a moderate like the high-court judge U Ba U warned Dorman-Smith not to try to return Burma to the status of a ‘third-class crown colony’. But, perhaps despairing of Dorman-Smith’s capacity for change, the judge also buttonholed Mountbatten, inviting him to speak in the newly opened Orient Club in September.²⁴ Nationalism was not explicitly on the menu: the dinner consisted of ‘Orient soup’, baked fish and a tactful ‘victory pudding’.²⁵

Above all, Dorman-Smith’s reappearance brought to the surface the underlying conflicts between the British and the nationalists in Burma. The British had refused to set a date for Burmese independence. In their minds – and the Burmese knew this – independence was not really to be full independence anyway. Burma would still be under the crown, a symbolic issue of great importance for both sides. Worse, the great Anglo-Indian trade nexus was set to engulf the country again. British firms were already pressing the administration to recommence their Burmese operations and Rangoon’s Indian Chamber of Commerce and evacuees in India were demanding the return of their lands and installations. The economic exploitation of Burma by foreign interests was an article of faith even for moderate Burmese politicians. They had in their minds wildly inflated estimates of the real wealth that British companies had sucked out of the country during the Depression years and after. Communists and socialists alike were convinced that ‘British imperialism’ and Indian capital were hovering in the wings waiting to pounce. Some of the British understood this. They had read enough Marx and Lenin to know that the British connection would have to take on a different complexion from now on. ‘We Burmans today are not the Burmans of 1942,’ Aung San warned them.²⁶

In August 1944 Mountbatten himself had said that he favoured some kind of policy statement that the returning British would safeguard Burma from outside exploitation, ‘and particularly from Indian moneylenders’. He acknowledged that under the Japanese ‘a great burden of debt must have been lifted from the shoulders of the Burmese cultivator and I should be very sorry to think that its reimposition would synchronise with our return.’²⁷ An old Burma hand, R. M. MacDougall, had also advised Dorman-Smith that however illusory the Japanese-sponsored ‘ten anna’ independence of 1943 had been, it ‘powerfully affected the imagination of the Burmese’.²⁸ Ba Maw’s tenure as president or ‘Adipadi’ of Burma from 1943 to 1945 had had its Gilbert and Sullivan moments, notably some fanciful official dress and obscure titles, but ultimately the Japanese had pulled the strings. Even so, MacDougall believed it had been ‘an honest attempt’ to restore normal life to the country. Dorman-Smith, however, had retained close connections with both the Indian and the British business communities in Simla. In spite of MacDougall’s warning, he seems to have felt that only foreign private capital could revitalize the Burmese economy. His return to Rangoon on 18 October to take up the civil administration heralded the reappearance of impatient British and Indian firms in the Burmese market.

Aung San had already turned politician by the time Dorman-Smith returned. His political creed, however, was ambiguous. In 1941, when he was being trained by the Japanese, he had written ‘Blueprint for Burma’. This pamphlet spoke of the supremacy of the state and adopted the eugenicist’s language of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ peoples: all the trappings of quasi-fascism, in fact. But it was probably designed for circulation within the Japanese Army and it may well have been Aung San’s enemies who published it for a wider audience in 1946.²⁹ Judging by his speeches and writings after the war, he was a kind of populist democrat, a non-doctrinaire socialist, who believed in ‘one man one vote’, but only insofar as it delivered a government in the people’s interest. This proviso, of course, left room for political intervention by strongmen. Later military dictators exploited this aspect of Aung San’s legacy though, on the whole, Aung San seems to have had a higher regard for democratic values than many contemporary political leaders in Southeast Asia. He must have realized that, as the senior Burmese commander within the newly constituted British Burmese Army, he would have little room for manoeuvre. As head of the AFPFL, however, he would command a wide range of political cadres and working-class activists as well as the numerous members of the People’s Volunteer Organizations, paramilitary bodies that were now becoming home for those members of the BNA who were rejected by or resisted joining the British-officered force. The PVOs, a loose melange of armed men biding its time on the fringes of the state, and sometimes hostile to it, inherited the traditions of the paramilitary nationalist volunteer groups of the 1930s. It also prefigured the emergence after independence of armed bands of dubious loyalty prowling the countryside.³⁰ On resigning his military role, Aung San had written to Mountbatten that he would have preferred to continue as a military officer, but his colleagues had decided he would have to lead the AFPFL as a civilian. Striking a warning tone, he told the British supremo that he ‘would always retain an affectionate corner in my heart in spite of all the vicissitudes that may or may not arise between Burma and Britain in the political sphere in the future’.³¹

Aung San had some contact with people on the left of British politics, notably Tom Driberg. The MP and war correspondent first met him and other members of the newly recognized Patriotic Burmese Forces at Mountbatten’s headquarters in Kandy in early September 1945. Driberg had formed a good impression of Aung San, describing him as ‘a slight, boyish figure with a surprisingly deep voice; physically and mentally agile with an irrepressible sense of humour and a gift for cynical wisecracking which he exercised impartially at the expense of his Burmese friends and of the British.’³² Soon afterwards Driberg flew into Rangoon with Mountbatten. He had a vivid impression of swooping down to central Burma’s ‘flat green, soggy plains overwhelmed by angry monsoon clouds’ in unbearable heat. He visited the Shwedagon pagoda and was surprised to find that the numerous book and trinket shops that filled the temple’s lower levels were still selling Japanese military propaganda magazines.³³ The state of the city appalled him; it was as bad or worse than anything he had seen in Calcutta. Even Burmese employees of the civil affairs administration lived in ‘wretched shacks 6 foot by 6 foot with bamboo walls, palm thatching’ and no latrines. Driberg was invited by Aung San to sit on the platform with him at a political rally in a central Rangoon park attended by some 10,000 people. The rally had become a huge picnic for the city’s workers. Even the few remaining buses had forsaken their normal routes to bring people there. The lawns surrounding the large central meeting hut were ‘jammed and strident with musicians, red banners, sweetmeat vendors and family parties. The heat was overpowering.’³⁴ Driberg had plenty of time to absorb the atmosphere: Aung San and others made characteristically lengthy speeches in English, which were then translated into Burmese, Tamil and Urdu.

Driberg’s less public encounters left an equally strong impression on him. At a dinner in the Rangoon Orient Club, Driberg joined Mountbatten, Dorman-Smith and Burmese politicians of the older generation, the latter catching his attention with their ‘dainty pink and mauve head dresses’. Aung San was there too, but he had been relegated to an obscure corner of the room and his presence was not recorded on the menu card.³⁵ Mountbatten refused to go along with the slight. He told the dinner’s organizers that he would not speak unless Aung San was moved to the top table and invited to speak too. This had an immediate effect and Driberg was left admiring the ‘acumen of this prince of Battenberg’ who understood so well ‘the new nationalist forces’ in Asia. The deep divisions among the British on how to proceed were brought home to him, too. He spent a ‘fascinating evening’ with Mountbatten and Dorman-Smith, noting the governor’s fury over the way that the supreme commander was now courting Aung San just as he had courted Nehru. The two men bickered over copious quantities of drink: ‘Each time one of them went out of the room to pee, the other would say: “Take no notice of what he’s saying. He’s just a hopeless reactionary” (or an “irresponsible radical”, as the case may be).’³⁶ Driberg wrote off Dorman-Smith as ‘a blimp of the old school’, an opinion that was not entirely justified. But he was certainly right about the nationalist leadership. He wrote in Reynolds News of Burma’s young leaders: ‘You will hear more of these men.’³⁷ He compared them to the Greek socialists who had fought against the Nazis and applauded Mountbatten for engaging with the AFPFL, whereas in Greece the British had begun to suppress the radicals.

While in Rangoon, Driberg had several private meetings with the AFPFL leadership in which he urged them not to attend the ceremonies welcoming Dorman-Smith back to the country in case they should appear to be angling for jobs with the new administration. He also told them to demand at least equal treatment with India in the matter of constitutional reform. And he assured them that, whatever problems they had with the civil affairs administration, they could believe that Hubert Rance, its effective head, was their friend. Later a copy of a letter from Driberg about his consultations with the AFPFL found its way to Dorman-Smith, who reacted furiously. The acrimonious and ultimately violent developments on the path towards the end of colonialism in Burma over the next two and a half years were in some degree a consequence of the fact that the British, as much as the Burmese, had broken down into contending factions.³⁸

Driberg did not drop Burma on his return home. Through the Orwellian-sounding Union of Democratic Control, a London-based pressure group, he used the many contacts he had made on his trip to link up disgruntled British forces personnel and Asian nationalists with left-wing opinion in Parliament and the press. As conditions neared mutiny in several stations, soldiers from India and South East Asia Command wrote to him denouncing their ‘filthy conditions’ or marvelling that ‘the terrible Jap Rat is quite a good fellow when defending European imperialism’.³⁹ Colonel John Ralston wrote com plaining that the ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ had built up a huge and unnecessary staff in Singapore.⁴⁰ This pained Driberg, who had thought Mountbatten ‘genuinely progressive’. Driberg had obviously made himself known widely, if somewhat imperfectly. From Burma a ‘poor cultivator in Sangyaung’ wrote to ‘Mg. Drie Budd, P. M.’ to complain of agricultural distress and the return of a dreaded class of Indian landowner-bankers: ‘I am unable to plough the field now. It is not easy… Lands are in the hands of “Chettyers”.’⁴¹

While the nationalists took an increasingly dim view of the machinations of Dorman-Smith, none of them appears personally to have disliked him. It was widely recognized that he was not responsible for the mess that was Burmese administration before the war. At Simla, however, he had got too close to what they regarded as the sleazy old order, particularly Paw Tun, the exiled Burmese prime minister. There was a feeling too that U Saw was lurking in the wings. U Saw had been the dominant politician in Burma in the late 1930s. A big, jovial and ruthless man, he had charmed many British officials. He held great parties, he was forever surrounded by pretty women and, above all, he was nothing like the ice-cold intellectuals of Indian politics whom so many of them disliked. He had seriously blotted his copybook in 1941 after Pearl Harbor when he had contacted the Japanese and offered to help them invade Burma. Reports of his treachery were deciphered by British codebreakers at Allied intelligence and he had been sent off to exile in Uganda.⁴² Now, he was about to return, with a brand-new German ‘wife’, who was very much the talk of the town as he already had a wife and a clutch of mistresses there. The British seemed to be prepared to forget, or at least forgive, U Saw’s overtures to the Japanese. Besides, everyone knew that Dorman-Smith had a soft spot for him. The AFPFL suspected that the governor would use U Saw to try to build up a kind of pro-British centre party in order to bypass them. In December Aung San said as much to Montagu Stop-ford, now GOC Burma Command, who duly passed it on to Mount-batten. The British military, Aung San was reported as saying, simply had no idea how corrupt Burmese politics had been before the war. There was graft and favouritism in all departments. Aung San ‘knew who the crooks were’ and wanted Burma to be a free and decent country. The problem was that there were a lot of crooks already in the army’s civil affairs secretariat and the return of the governor had simply made matters worse.⁴³

The animus and suspicion beneath the surface was revealed in early October by a controversy involving the Rangoon Liberator. In spite of their official sponsorship, the Burmese editors of this newspaper carried an article headed ‘Major-General Aung San speaks’.⁴⁴ The British were immediately irritated because by this stage Aung San had formally surrendered his military rank. Worse still, Aung San used the article to denounce an earlier editorial that had called the failure of the BNA and other partisan units to hand in their weapons a betrayal of Mountbatten. Not so, he stated: all nations had the right to keep arms for their own defence and in Burma it was particularly necessary because the British appeared to be arresting people on suspicion and violating their civil liberties. He went on to reject charges that he had planned a coup in 1938–39 and ridiculed rumours that the plans for this could be found in a hostel on the south side of the Shwedagon pagoda. This was a fabrication put about by the British security services, he said, implying that they were paving the way for his arrest. Put under pressure by the British, the editors of the Liberatortemporized. They argued that just as the American commander, Douglas MacArthur, had accepted the Philippines nationalist army as genuine allies of the Americans, so too the British should accept the BNA. On the other hand, Aung San had to ensure that his forces did not impose their views on the people, for this would be ‘fascist’.⁴⁵ This, at least, was a line with which many British civilian and military personnel agreed. For them, Aung San’s was indeed a fascist organization and they had not fought for six years to see it win out in ‘their’ Burma. The year ended in deadlock. The AFPFL demanded the immediate creation of a dominion-style governor’s council in which they would run the lion’s share of the ministries.⁴⁶ This was to be accompanied by the announcement of a forthcoming election with a universal franchise. Aung San pleaded for peace but prepared for war. Dorman-Smith acknowledged the influence of the AFPFL but formed an executive council from members of other political parties. He adhered rigorously to the long timetable of Churchill’s White Paper; what he had once found ‘infuriatingly vague’ now turned out to be rather convenient.

In the long term, Burma’s fate, still in the balance in 1945, was to be determined mainly by big, impersonal considerations. How many troops could the British Empire deploy around the world while rebuilding the home front? How deeply entrenched in the countryside were the Burma defence forces and the volunteer armies of communists and nationalists? What ultimately was the value of Burma’s teak, oil and rice to businessmen and governments in London, Madras and Bombay? Yet Burmese political society was a small and intimate one compared with India’s. Personalities mattered a lot and their mutual clashes went a long way towards determining the form, if not the wider outcome, of Burma’s struggle for independence. In turn, the fact that Burma gained that independence not only outside the Commonwealth but also outside the influence of communism was to be of great significance for the future of the crescent and indeed the whole of South and East Asia.

As 1945 drew to a close the big players of Burmese politics manoeuvred to gain a tighter hold on their opponents. Dorman-Smith, embittered by the British failures of 1942 and out of sympathy with his new Labour masters, was less genial than he seemed on the surface. Two men in particular seemed to stand in the way of his desire for a moderate Dominion of Burma under the British crown. One was Aung San, a national leader, but one still being pressured by his own communist allies and at times seemingly doubtful of his political touch. His rhetoric became more violent towards the year’s end as the provisions of the detested White Paper still seemed to be in place. The governor, he claimed, had become ‘fascistic’, ironically the AFPFL’s most derogatory term of abuse.⁴⁷ The other obstacle to Dorman-Smith’s plans was ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, whom he instinctively disliked as a royalist radical, too flippant for high imperial office. Then there were the other big egos flitting in and out of this little political world. U Saw’s imminent return was to be followed in mid 1946 by that of the ex-Adipadi Ba Maw, released from detention in Tokyo by the British. Who knew how much political support he could muster among those who still had a pang of nostalgia for the Japanese days? Would Thakin Nu, Buddhist nationalist and minister under Ba Maw, return from religious retreat to strengthen the nationalist centre against the old politicians and the left? And what of the communists? Thein Pe, the communist leader who had fled to India in 1942, was anxious to reassert his influence over the young comrades drilling and polishing their weapons in the villages. Thakin Soe, who was even more hard line than Thein Pe, was already dug in, Mao Zedong-like, into his ‘base areas in the countryside’.

Across the country, in the hills and minority areas, dozens of spokesmen for newly armed peoples were waiting to stake their own claims for power and autonomy in Burma’s dimly prefigured future.⁴⁸ The ‘frontier areas’ had always had a separate administration since the onset of British rule and, whether deliberately or not, this had fostered a sense of difference between Kachin, Shan, Karen and Chin peoples and ‘ethnic’ Burmese. The war had made the difference starker. The British had clung on in the northern hills, whether in the guise of Chindits, Force 136 or lone British officers, such as Hugh Seagrim who had died trying to shield the hill peoples from Japanese atrocities. British special forces had also released thousands of weapons to guerrilla armies of the hills, viewing the BNA askance even when it had come over to the Allies. The situation with the principal minority of the Burmese plains, the Karen, was similar. Many of the 1.5 million Karens had been Christian since the nineteenth century, an enduring source of suspicion to their Burmese neighbours. They were widely literate in English and often spoke it at home or sang English hymns in their Baptist churches. In some cases they even praised God in Welsh. Many wore clothes typical of the respectable people of the English countryside, floral skirts or grey flannels, rather than the traditional Burmese longyi. For generations they had lovingly tended and passed on a special history which asserted that they had been Christian even before they received the Gospel. Persecution by the Burmese Buddhist kings reinforced this consciousness of being a separate people. The British, who had commercial interests in the Karens’ teak forests as well as the rice-producing plains, cultivated this sensibility. They fostered conservative Karen notables such as Sir San C. Po, author of the pre-war Burma and the Karens,⁴⁹ and awarded the community special constitutional recognition. The war had brought particular hardship. In 1941 gangs on the fringes of Aung San’s Burmese Independence Army had massacred several hundred Karens in the delta. Isolated Japanese and Burmese atrocities against them and other minorities continued throughout the war. When the British returned the Karens received them with enthusiasm, inviting British soldiers into their churches and homes. For their part, the British applauded the formation of the Karen National Organization in 1945 and put substantial amounts of money into the hill and minority areas. The Seagrim Hospital was founded as a memorial to the heroic special operations officer who had led them. Christian priests even gave the Karens a kind of national anthem: ‘You’ve been persecuted and enslaved as well/The white brother liberators, God sent them back!’⁵⁰ At this stage only a few Karen, Kachin, Shan or Chin radicals were talking about political separation from Burma, but with partition in the air all around – in India, Palestine, Ireland and Poland – expectations had been raised to a dangerously high level. The confused military settlement between Aung San and the British had made matters worse. At the negotiations at Kandy in September 1945 little attempt had been made to merge the armed minorities with the armed Burmese. Instead there was to be a ‘two-wing army’, one wing consisting mainly of Kachins, Karens and Chins officered by British regulars, the other mainly of Burmese elements in the British army and 6,000-odd BNA men. The officer corps of this second wing was to be ‘Burmanized’. This, of course, was a recipe for long-term ethnic conflict, particularly in view of the existence of tens of thousands of other Burmese who were organized into the PVOs and had access to illicit arms.⁵¹ Southeast Asia’s bloody conflicts had merely paused for a few months in the afterglow of the atomic bomb.