by Baker Chris
On 8 November 1947, the military seized power by coup. Phibun was the figurehead, but the coup was plotted among veterans of the 1942 Shan States campaign – especially the expedition head, General Phin Choonhavan, and his aide and son-in-law, Phao Siyanon – with firepower from Colonel Sarit Thanarat who controlled men and tanks in the capital. Phin claimed that Pridi’s Seri Thai forces were about to launch a republican revolt. The coup group announced that they acted ‘to uphold the honour of the army’, to clarify the royal ‘assassination plot’, and to install a government ‘which will respect the principles of Nation, Religion and King’ – a conscious revival of Vajiravudh’s royal-nationalist formula.4 The British ambassador reported that the coup was ‘a right-wing movement supported by the royal family’.5 The regent (Prince Rangsit) endorsed the coup within 24 hours. Two weeks later the king sent from Switzerland a message stating that ‘those who were involved in this operation do not desire power for their own good, but aim only to strengthen the new government which will administer for the prosperity of the nation’.6
For the next five years, the coup group and Pridi’s supporters waged a low-key civil war. After the coup, Pridi and a few others narrowly escaped overseas. The coup group purged the army of Seri Thai men, and replaced Pridi’s men on the boards of state enterprises and banks. In 1948, several northeastern supporters of Pridi were arrested and accused of plotting a rebellion, but subsequently released. In February 1949, Pridi returned to Bangkok and attempted to seize power with the help of the Seri Thai arms cache. Sarit again showed the importance of the city garrisons, bombarding Pridi’s forces inside the Grand Palace (hence, the ‘Palace Rebellion’). Pridi fled once again, this time finally. A month later, three pro-Pridi MPs and one associate were shot while in police custody. Another pro-Pridi MP was shot a month later after surrendering to the police. In June 1951, some remaining Pridi supporters in the navy attempted a coup by seizing Phibun during the ceremony to accept a vessel donated by the USA (the ‘Manhattan Coup’). Phibun’s lieutenants bombed the navy’s flagship to the bottom of the Chao Phraya River. The fact that Phibun was aboard and had to swim ashore emphasized that power now lay with Sarit and Phao, rather than the figurehead. They proceeded to dismember the navy. The Pridi group had lost to the gun.
After the 1947 coup, the royalist Democrat Party dominated the Cabinet, while the generals held power in the background. But the royalists and generals shared no common platform beyond opposition to Pridi and political liberalization. The royalists wished to revive something of the old political and social order. Phibun saw himself as the custodian of a new, modern nation. For four years, the two groups fenced over appointments and positions. When the government rejected Phao’s claims to become police chief, Phao challenged the Democrat interior minister to a duel. In 1951, the Democrats prepared a new constitution that greatly increased the king’s formal powers: he appointed the Senate, directly controlled the armed forces, had the power to veto legislation, could dismiss any minister, issue decrees, and reform the constitution. The generals appealed to the young king completing his education in Europe to moderate these provisions. When these appeals failed, they took another course. On 26 November 1951, on the eve of the king’s return to Thailand to reign, they executed another coup (the Silent or Radio Coup), pushed the Democrats aside, and scrapped this constitution. They brought back a slightly modified version of the 1932 constitution and formed a Cabinet with 19 of the total 25 from the military. The regent refused to approve the new charter but was simply ignored. Subsequent elections and appointments created a military-dominated parliament. The royalists had been demoted to junior partners in the ruling alliance. The military was in command for the next two decades.
The main justification given for the Silent Coup was that communists were infiltrating the parliament and Cabinet. This vocabulary signified a momentous change. The local battle over the control of the Thai state was being absorbed within a worldwide ideological struggle.
American patronage, anti-communism, and militarism
In the 1945–46 peace negotiations, the USA became Siam’s protector, warding off any extension of British colonial influence. Initially, the USA was interested in Thailand as part of a regional plan for rebuilding Japan’s economy. With the explosion of leftist anticolonialism in neighbouring countries in 1947–48, the ‘loss’ of China to communist revolution in 1949, and the commitment of US troops in Korea in 1950, the USA grew steadily more interested in Thailand as an ally and base for the prosecution of the Cold War to stem the spread of communism in Asia.
After the 1947 coup, Phibun asked the USA for arms and dollars to strengthen the army. But the USA still viewed Phibun as a wartime enemy. Over the next two years, however, the US need for friends increased, while Phibun and his allies became practised at espousing anti-communist and anti-Chinese sentiments to appeal for patronage. In September 1949, following Mao Zedong’s revolution in China, the USA made US$75 million available for supporting allies in Asia, ‘such as Thailand’, and released £43.7 million, which Japan owed Thailand for wartime purchases. In March 1950, the Phibun government, under strong US urging, officially endorsed the French puppet, anti-communist emperor Bao Dai in Vietnam and was rewarded with US$15 million of the US funds. In July 1950, Thailand became the first Asian country to offer troops and supplies for the US campaign in Korea. Phibun told parliament that, ‘by sending just a small number of troops as a token of our friendship, we will get various things in return’.7 A month later, the USA provided another US$10 million in economic aid, the World Bank gave a US$25 million loan, and the arms supplies started arriving.
The USA was still concerned that the Phibun government’s support for anti-communism was lukewarm and repeatedly urged an internal crackdown. The USA even tried to manufacture the evidence to justify fiercer action. Believing that the Communist Manifesto had not yet been translated into Thai, the American embassy provided a grant for an American linguist, William Gedney, and a rising Marxist poet and intellectual, Jit Phumisak, to remedy this defect; but the project was never completed.
The military rulers were not concerned about Thailand’s left. Phibun told parliament in 1949 that ‘there is now no communist unrest in Thailand’.8 While the USA viewed Asia through the ideological spectacles of the Cold War, Phibun and other Thai leaders were more concerned with the longer-term complexity of their relationship to the big neighbour, China, and the existence of a large Chinese community in Thailand. Phibun was reluctant to provoke any retaliation from China. But he increasingly valued US support and saw the chance to use repression against other enemies, such as the Pridi remnants and opponents in the local Chinese community.
The unification of China in 1949 prompted another wave of nationalist feeling among Thailand’s Chinese. The use of Chinese names came back into vogue. Enrolment in Chinese schools soared to 175 000, ten times the number before Phibun imposed restrictions in the late 1930s. Remittances to China increased. At the same time, conflict between the KMT and communists intermittently erupted in battles on Bangkok streets. As in the late 1930s, this surge of Chinese nationalism and disorder provoked government efforts at control. Since the Phibun government perceived communism as largely a Chinese problem, the crackdown on communism and suppression of the Chinese were interlocked.
From late 1950, the government began to harass the press, deport Chinese involved in political activity, smash labour organizations, and use the military and Sangha for anti-communist propaganda. On 10 November 1952, under heavy US pressure, the government moved decisively against the local left. It arrested members of a small remnant group of leftists and Pridi supporters suspected of plotting a coup. It struck at members of the Peace Movement, a Stockholm-based campaign against nuclear weapons, which Beijing patronized to bring international pressure against US military action in China and Korea. The local branch included not only some communist party members but also independent leftists, such as the writer Kulap Saipradit. Over 1000 peop
le were arrested, mostly Chinese who were deported, but also sundry enemies of the regime including Thammasat student activists, and Pridi’s wife and son.
A new anti-communist law, phrased widely enough to target any dissent, was rushed through three readings in one day. Thirty-seven Thai citizens were jailed, including Kulap and other journalists, the president of the leftist labour federation, and several members of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT). The main leftist newspapers and bookshops were closed down. In December 1952, another prominent pro-Pridi MP and four other men were strangled, burnt, and buried by Phao’s police. In March 1953, a leftist newspaper publisher was shot on his honeymoon. In 1954, another pro-Pridi MP was strangled and dumped in the Chao Phraya River, tied to a concrete post. Phao gave the police a motto: ‘There is nothing under the sun that the Thai police cannot do’.
The government reimposed strict restrictions on Chinese schools, resulting in enrolment dropping by two-thirds. It also increased the alien tax a hundred times to 400 baht, curbed remittances, reintroduced laws reserving occupations for Thai nationals, changed the Nationality Law to impede naturalization, and banned Chinese opera shows in Bangkok.
The USA was now impressed. In July 1953, the US National Security Council proposed developing Thailand as an ‘anti-communist bastion’ in order to ‘extend US influence – and local acceptance of it – throughout the whole of Southeast Asia’.9 After the French defeat in Indochina in 1954, the USA organized the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and committed itself to defending Thailand. The USA began to build strategic roads through the northeast, upgrade ports and airfields for military use, and launch a programme of psychological warfare aimed at both peasants and officials.
Thailand had become a US client-state under military rule. But the result was a severe division within Thailand’s ruling junta – between army and police.
Beginning in January 1951, the USA sent 28 arms shipments with enough equipment for nine army battalions. By 1953, US military aid was equivalent to two-and-a-half times the Thai military budget. With command of this patronage, Sarit Thanarat was able to strengthen his grip on the army. He brought all the troops in Bangkok under his old unit, the First Division of the First Army, staffed with his loyal subordinates. In 1954, he became army chief.
Simultaneously, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began to arm the police. These efforts began from a covert and failed attempt in 1950–51 to sponsor a counter-revolutionary expedition from the northern Thai hills into southern China. The CIA formed close links with the police chief, Phao, and subsequently provided him with tanks, armoured cars, aircraft, helicopters, speedboats, and training by 200 CIA advisers. The police became virtually a rival army. Sarit and Phao were soon locked in competition. Their manpower was roughly equal: 48 000 police and 45 000 in the army. They vied to take over the lucrative monopolies and business patronage originally developed by the Pridi group. They both visited the USA in 1954 and returned with aid commitments of US$25 million (Sarit) and US$37 million (Phao). They competed to control the opium trade, and in 1950 came close to fighting a battle over the crop. They jockeyed with one another for political succession. In 1955, Phao asked the USA to back him in a coup against Phibun but was declined. Phibun survived by mediating these conflicts. The USA increasingly supported him.
Phibun returned to the 1932 group’s mission of building the nation-state as the caretaker of the people’s welfare and the focus of their loyalty. But the project was no longer pursued by edicts designed to change people’s behaviour, but rather through the state’s adoption of traditional forms of rule. The government became a public patron of Buddhism. It restored 5535 wat and built some new ones. Phibun visited major wat during his provincial tours, and presented them with donations and Buddha images. The government also sponsored dance troupes and undertook restoration of major historical sites, beginning with Phimai, Ayutthaya, and Chiang Saen. A National Culture Council was formed in 1948 and converted to a ministry in 1952. Wichit Wathakan produced a string of plays on the theme ‘Power and Glory’, celebrating Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai and other figures in Thai history. Dreams of a Thai empire were quietly dropped. ‘If we can build nationalism in people’s hearts’, wrote Wichit, ‘in the same way that communists make people believe in communism like a religion, we don’t need to worry that the country will fall to communism’.10
Phibun wished to limit the expansion of royalism. He banned the king from touring outside the capital. The palace resented the obvious attempt to extend state patronage into cultural areas formerly monopolized by royalty. In 1957, Phibun oversaw a grandiose celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the Buddhist era. The king ducked his allotted role on grounds of illness.
In 1955, Phibun announced that he would ‘restore democracy’ to counter the growing financial and military power of Sarit and Phao. He lifted the ban on political parties, eased press censorship, promised to release political prisoners, cancelled many restrictions on the Chinese, allowed a public ‘Hyde Park’ for speechifying, passed a labour Act legalizing unions, and scheduled elections for 1957. In the face of opposition from the palace, he passed a law imposing a 50-rai ceiling on landholdings. He also (less successfully) launched a campaign to suppress opium and demanded that ministers drop their business involvements. On the pattern of his wartime diplomacy, he tried to gain some independence from the US patrons by reopening links with China. A secret mission went to meet Mao in Beijing and agreed to ‘normalize relations in the long run’. Restrictions on trade and travel were eased, and several leftists and leaders of Bangkok’s Chinese community visited Beijing.
The USA initially welcomed Phibun’s support for democracy. But the US need for a client-state and its support for Thai democracy were at cross-purposes. Once press controls were relaxed, the Bangkok newspapers voiced strong resentment of the growing US role in Thailand and enthusiastic support for the resurgence of China. Left-wing parties reappeared. In the approach to the 1957 elections, the parties and papers representing both Phao-Phibun (now allied) and Sarit opportunistically espoused these anti-American and pro-Chinese sentiments. The launch of the film The King and I in the USA attracted a barrage of press ridicule.11 Phao and Phibun won at the 1957 polls, but Sarit accused them of chicanery and suggested the USA was complicit. On 18 September 1957, showing yet again the strategic importance of the First Army, Sarit executed a coup, sending Phibun and Phao into exile. The USA feared its decade of investment in Thailand might be forfeit. They had long written off Sarit as a corrupt and drunken libertine. In the 1957 election campaign, his press had been the most virulently anti-American. During the coup, his troops came close to attacking the CIA office because of its association with his rival, Phao.
But Sarit needed continued US patronage to retain control over the army. As an olive branch, he appointed as prime minister Pote Sarasin who was US-educated, a former ambassador to the USA, and currently secretary-general of SEATO. Elections in December created a parliament with many leftists that Sarit found difficult to control, even with generous use of bribes. In early 1958, Sarit went to the USA for medical treatment and held consultations with President Eisenhower. On 20 October 1958, he carried out a second coup, declared martial law, annulled parliament, discarded the constitution, banned political parties, and arrested hundreds of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and activists. The US cheered and granted US$20 million in economic aid. The State Department memorialized that this was not a coup but ‘an orderly attempt by the present ruling group to solidify its position’.12 Sarit called it a ‘revolution’.
Sarit now unified the armed forces. Units and hardware were removed from the police and placed under the army. Sarit’s old subordinates in the First Division moved into the command of the army and into the Cabinet. Future American funding was channelled through the army.
Sarit’s consolidation of power and crackdown on left and liberal dissent in 1958 made the USA more confident about Thailand as a base. The outbre
ak of civil war in Laos in 1960 made Thailand a frontline state in US thinking. In 1962, the USA committed to defending it against communist attack, stationed the Seventh Fleet in the Gulf of Thailand, and moved 10 000 troops to Thailand. These were shortly removed, but returned in 1964, and were steadily augmented until Thailand was host to 45 000 US army and airforce personnel by 1969. The first air strike on North Vietnam was flown from Thailand in December 1964. Three-quarters of the bomb tonnage dropped on North Vietnam and Laos during 1965–68 was flown out of seven US bases in eastern Thailand. Thai troops were secretly hired as virtual mercenaries to fight in Laos from 1960. Some 11 000 Thai troops went to fight alongside the US in South Vietnam in 1967.
From 1962, the US poured money into the Border Patrol Police and counter-insurgency operations inside Thailand. US military aid quadrupled over the 1960s and peaked in 1972 at US$123 million. Economic aid grew in parallel to peak at the same level, with much of it channelled to the police and military programmes. With US backing and with state power, the Thai military budget increased even faster, from around US$20 million a year in the 1950s to around US$250 million a year in the early 1970s. Dollars consolidated Thailand’s militarized state.
The USA built an imposing new embassy in Bangkok and sent a prominent Second World War soldier, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, to serve as ambassador. After the US located the SEATO headquarters in Bangkok, several UN bodies, international organizations, and American foundations followed this lead. Bangkok’s farang population increased rapidly. Unlike in the colonial period, when this population was very varied, now it was distinctly American. Bangkok was chosen for the GIs’ R&R (‘rest and recreation’) tours, with 45 000 visiting by 1967 (Figure 13). New Phetchaburi Road became an ‘American strip’ lined with bars, nightclubs, brothels, and massage parlours. Similar clusters mushroomed around the US air bases. The sex industry was not new; the public garishness was.