THE IMPORTANCE OF DRESSING UP
In the summer of 1943 Japan granted Burma formal independence. In many ways this was a completely sham independence, in the manner of the Vidkun Quisling government in Norway and the puppet regime of Emperor Henry Pu Yi in Manchuria. But the Burmese were a people who had once lived and breathed ritual and ceremony and who had for sixty years under British rule been starved of any sort of pride, pomp, or circumstance. The mere semblance of government—and by mid-1943 everyone knew it would only be a facsimile of independence—still had an impact, as if the form of statehood, with all the uniforms and flags and parades, made them want even more the real thing.10
The independence ceremony took place on 1 August 1943. Dr. Ba Maw, the prewar prime minister, became the adipati, or leader, in the manner of der Führer. The Japanese had thought of Aung San for the top job but found him too unimpressive in appearance and style and preferred the bigger and better-looking Ba Maw for their puppet. Being the emperor worshipers they were, they also considered restoring the monarchy and placing the septuagenarian prince of Pyinmana, a half brother of Thibaw’s, on the throne, and this had won a good measure of Burmese support. But like the British in 1886, they really didn’t want to go to all the trouble and dropped the idea.
Aung San did, however, make it as the number two. As slender as ever and now shaven-headed, he was to be the head of a smaller but more professional Burmese army and minister for war. Many of the thousands who had ballooned the ranks of the BIA and had caused so much trouble in the delta and elsewhere were demobbed, and the remaining officers were sent to undergo intensive training by Japanese instructors just outside Rangoon. These officers later dominated the upper echelons of the armed forces until well into the 1970s.
It was to be a dictatorship along fashionable fascist lines. Ba Maw made known his utter disdain for democratic principles and forms of government, and the slogan of the new army under Aung San was “One Blood, One Voice, One Command” (ta-pyi, ta-than, ta-meint), still today the de facto slogan of the Burmese military. Ba Maw liked the trappings of 1940s dictatorship, and his independence day ceremony was more like an ersatz coronation. Always a clotheshorse and a man known for his sartorial creations, he now had a field day in designing pseudoroyal outfits. The music was the music of Thibaw’s court, and a dwarf herald addressed the erstwhile St Catherine’s College undergraduate as if he were a king. Manipuri Brahmins were hauled out of long retirement and brought to Rangoon to bless the marriage of his daughter Tinsa with one of the up-and-coming officers in the Burma Independence Army.
Many soon tired of the show, especially when the Japanese, with their interrogation centers and summary executions, their new sake brewery at the Anglican Cathedral and their brothel at the Pegu Club, their hair-raising torture techniques and sex slaves, made increasingly clear who was actually in charge. Ba Maw and others went to Tokyo for meetings of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, where they sat around conference tables and posed for photographs with other real and pseudonationalists. But at home, even within the group around the adipati, there was a gnawing sense that history was about to favor a different side.
WARTIME AT HOME
U Thant was one of those always wary of a Nippon-led liberation. In October 1941 he had sent an article entitled “From the Frying Pan into the Fire” to the editor of New Burma, warning against expecting much from the Axis powers. Though everything else he had sent in was promptly published, this article never appeared in print. A week later he received a handwritten note from Dr. Thein Maung, the publisher of the weekly, apologizing profusely for not publishing the piece but saying that the theme went entirely against prevailing opinion. Thant never wrote for the journal again. Thein Maung became Ba Maw’s ambassador to Japan.
By March the Japanese had reached Pantanaw, and Thant came increasingly under suspicion, as a man with Anglophile and democratic leanings and as someone who would not always fall in line. He was, however, asked to take part in the new administration, mainly because he was in Aung San’s good books and because his best friend, U Nu, was now the new “minister for foreign affairs.” U Nu, aways ambivalent (at best) about the Japanese, remembered later that this was far from a real job and that most of the time at his fledgling Foreign Ministry was spent sending cables of congratulations to other Axis countries on their national holidays. Thant was asked to be secretary of the Burma Education Reorganization Committee; he thought it impossible to say no and accepted, moving for several months to a bomb-scared and half-deserted Rangoon.
Back in Pantanaw, he developed a fairly warm or at least collegial relationship with one of the several Japanese officers stationed in the town, a Lieutenant Oyama, who spoke and read English fluently. Oyama visited Thant’s house from time to time in his mustard-colored uniform and peaked cap and even borrowed books, perhaps Po Hnit’s Victorian novels or Thant’s collections of Fabian essays. This relationship, however, did little to prevent the daily brutalities of life under occupation, and hundreds of young Burmese in neighboring towns were later found in mass graves, killed for suspicion of opposing the Japanese.
My grandfather remembered no one’s being executed in Pantanaw itself for political reasons. Instead the Japanese policy toward the local people seemed to be one of “brutal disdain and condescension.” He wrote:
A Japanese private, for instance, would slap a Burmese who looked disrespectful to him. As a result, the sense of intense fear and of utter helplessness was characteristic of the Burmese mood during the four-year Japanese regime … What amazed me was the fact that the Japanese people, who, in my experience, are among the most cultured, the most civilised and the most courteous of all people, could turn into the most arrogant and brutal masters.
For most Burmese, surprise at their self-styled liberators turned quietly into a desire for action.
JAPAN CONSIDERS ITS NEXT MOVE; THE BRITISH PLAN A COUNTERATTACK
For the British the winter of 1942–43 was a time to figure out what had gone wrong and plan for taking Burma back. For a while there was a stalemate, and along the front lines both sides tried to probe for each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Feeling in need of a morale booster, General Wavell ordered an advance into Arakan, but it failed, lowering morale even further as the Japanese fought well and held their ground.
Into this grim picture leaped the Chindits. They were to be the largest of the Allied Special Forces anywhere in the world and took their name from the Burmese chinthé, or “lion.” The Chindits were under the command of the diminutive and bearded brigadier Orde Wingate, the father of modern guerrilla warfare, who had trained the first Jewish commandos in Palestine and was known for his many eccentricities, such as wearing a raw onion on a string around his neck and occasionally biting into it as a snack. His Chindits parachuted deep behind enemy lines and lived and fought entirely cut off from bases in India, relying only on occasional supplies by air. There were two expeditions in all, and the second expedition, consisting of no fewer than twenty thousand British and other Allied soldiers, was the second-largest airborne assault in the war.
The Kachins, in the tribal mountains of the far north, also proved themselves excellent fighters. Thousands joined Detachment 101 of the American Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. From a line of jungle outposts, Detachment 101 units mounted repeated attacks on Japanese supply lines, blowing up bridges and railroads, disrupting communications, and providing intelligence. During three years of jungle warfare they killed over five thousand Japanese and wounded perhaps twice that number. For the Japanese, the tenacious Kachin fighters were to be greatly feared, and the constant threat of ambush in the mountains sliced away at their self-confidence. For every Kachin casualty, they were able to inflict twenty-five on the enemy. These adept soldiers of proven loyalty naturally later expected loyalty from the British Raj in return. They also distrusted the Burmese whom they saw collaborating with the Japanese. This would be another volatile
component in Burma’s postindependence mix.
THE TURNING POINT IN IMPHAL
In Tokyo in September 1943 a meeting at the Japanese Imperial Headquarters was chaired by the emperor himself. A lot had happened over the past year, and now things weren’t looking too good. The Americans were massing in the Pacific, in a long arc from the freezing waters off Alaska to the white sand beaches of Papua New Guinea. In Europe the Red Army was finally pushing their German allies back across the Ukraine. The assembled war chiefs in their gleaming boots and Prussianstyle uniforms agreed their best hope was a knockout blow against both the Chinese and the British in India. This would allow them to concentrate on the coming threat from the Americans and be in a position, whatever happened to Germany, to negotiate the best peace settlement possible.11 In March 1944 they would launch their last great offensive in Southeast Asia, from their bases northwest of Mandalay to Assam via the little hill towns of Imphal and Kohima.
For the Japanese and the British, these battles in early 1944 in the little principality of Manipur, three thousand feet up, were the turning point of the Burma campaign. Both sides knew it and gave it everything they had. The British brought up massive reinforcements and now assembled half a million soldiers with tens of thousands of additional laborers, fifty thousand vehicles, and every spare elephant in India, all along the wet and thickly jungled front. Against this the Japanese threw the two hundred thousand men they had under the command of General Renya Mutaguchi. When the fighting began, Lieutenant General Sir William Slim and his Fourteenth Army ensured that Imphal held out for three months against a ferocious Japanese onslaught, while Chindit forces hacked away at supply lines and the American and other Allied planes provided support from the air. The Japanese were stopped and when the attack was over, both at Imphal and at Kohima, more than eighty thousand Japanese and seventeen thousand Allied troops lay dead. What was left of Japanese forces fell back to the Chindwin River hundreds of miles to the east and then beyond, Orde Wingate’s Chindits fast on their heels.
The tide had turned, and the Allies under Slim prepared for what had long been thought impossible, an overland reconquest of Burma. The British Fourteenth Army crossed first the Chindwin in November 1944 and then the Irrawaddy in January 1945, in the longest opposed river crossing anywhere in the world, meeting intense Japanese resistance every step of the way. Its front line in Burma was longer than either the eastern or western fronts in Europe. Despite its name, the Fourteenth Army was a multinational force, constituted primarily of units of the Indian Army as well as a large contingent of troops from East and West Africa. In March, Meiktila, the heart of the Japanese operation, was captured by the Seventeenth Indian Division after five days of fierce and close combat in the furnacelike spring heat. Only one huge leogryph survived; the rest of the town was obliterated. Less than three weeks later the Nineteenth Indian Division retook Mandalay, with the Fourth Gurkhas fighting their way up the north side of Mandalay Hill and reaching the summit just as the first sunlight illuminated the Shan hills in the distance. The Japanese tried to make a desperate last stand within the walls of the old royal city but eventually withdrew, the entire palace in flames. Nothing but the walls of the old city was left. By now British and Indian forces, joined by two West African divisions, had moved far into Arakan, taking Akyab in December 1944 and opening up a new front.
In a strange twist of fate, something the Burmese might call karma, Captain Basil Hamilton-Temple Blackwood was shot and killed by a stray bullet in March 1945 in front of the old palace walls. The old royal city of which the palace was a part was named Fort Dufferin, after the captain’s grandfather the first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Basil was the fourth marquess, an officer in the Royal Horse Guards, and a man Evelyn Waugh called the brightest mind of his generation, and he was killed at almost the exact spot where his ancestor had exiled Thibaw six decades before. It was six full days after the Nineteenth Indian Division had completed the capture of Mandalay and was as if Thibaw’s ghost had decided to settle an old score with the erstwhile viceregal family.
The rains were only weeks away. The British were now racing to Rangoon.
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By now things were not looking very bright for those who had thrown their lot in with the Japanese. Some Burmese politicians had never wanted to join forces with Tokyo, mainly the Communists, like Thakin Soe, who hid in the southern marshes to organize his men, and Thakin Thein Pe Myint, who walked out to India to make contact with British authorities. But by as early as 1944, when the battles at Imphal and Kohima were deciding the fate of the Japanese Fifteenth Army, many in the Rangoon puppet regime were also beginning to have their doubts. Dr. Ba Maw remained loyal to his sponsors to the end, fleeing to Japan and winding up in an American prison. But Aung San, Ne Win, and the rest decided that their only loyalty was to Burma’s independence and began conspiring. Fascism wasn’t quite all it was cracked up to be, and some, including Aung San, began shifting back toward their earlier left-wing inclinations. Messages were sent out to the Allies, offering to turn sides and help drive out the Japanese. An underground resistance movement was formed, called the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, with Aung San at the head. When to openly challenge the Japanese and launch an armed revolt? Every day in Rangoon under the Japanese thumb was a day that could lead to arrest, horrible tortures, and death. The word from India was to wait.
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U Thant and his old Pantanaw friends retained a shortwave set, and every night at nine o’clock they went to a neighbor’s house and listened upstairs while the family played records loudly below. They learned of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the Allied landings in North Africa and then at Normandy and suspected the days of occupation were numbered. They also learned about the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League and prepared to do their part to help, secretly storing away rice for a future uprising. It was risky business for Thant, who was already being watched for refusing while at the Education Ministry in Rangoon to make Japanese-language instruction compulsory in schools. Then, one day in early 1945, Japanese soldiers came to Thant’s house and took him to their nearby base. My grandmother and others felt sure they would never see him again. But when Thant arrived at the office of Lieutenant Oyama, he was surprised to find that Oyama wanted only to ask for his help. The Japanese officer had been living with a Burmese woman, and she had recently given birth to a little boy. He asked Thant to protect them as best as he could, and Thant agreed.
It seemed the Japanese retreat was beginning in earnest. But what was to come next? A new British occupation? That was hardly desired, but there was no clear alternative. Perhaps in the new world to come, the United Nations would ensure a good transition to self-determination. But in the marshlands and mangrove swamps around Pantanaw, there was already a more realistic intimation of the future, as underground Communist cells, ex-Karen soldiers, and demobbed Burma Independence Army recruits, all armed, all young, and for now all quiet, swirled around, waiting for their turn.
LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN AND THE QUESTION
OF THE BURMESE PARTISANS
Back in October 1943 Admiral Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, a cousin of the king’s and later to be the last viceroy of India, was appointed the supreme Allied commander of the South-East Asia* Theatre, meaning that he was overall in charge of the recapture of Burma. A career naval officer and a favorite of Winston Churchill’s, the forty-four-year-old Mountbatten brought an upper-class dislike of middleclass colonial prejudices and a desire to be and to seem to be on the right side of history. For many in the British Army, Aung San was a traitor, a Quisling, who needed to be brought to justice. But in February 1945 Mountbatten chose to go against his own colonels and generals and won London’s approval for arming Aung San’s league. Mountbatten argued that Burmese partisans working behind Japanese lines could make a difference; he also saw Burmese nationalism in a kinder light than did some of his fellow officers.
For Aung San and his Thirty Comrades, knowing
that they would have Allied support in turning on the Japanese must have been a relief. The future was still murky, but at least there might be a way ahead if they restyled themselves “antifascists,” and presented the reconquering British with as much of a fait accompli as possible. Their demands would be the same as always—complete and unconditional independence—but this time they were not just students playing politics and jabbering away in the Student Union; they had guns, and they knew how to use them.
In a bit of daring theater, they decided first to hold a parade in Rangoon, near Government House, with Lieutenant General Hyotara Kimura, commander of the Burma Area Army, and other senior Japanese officers on the grandstand, saluting the somber marchers. Then, a few days later, on 27 March, a day now commemorated annually as Armed Forces Day, the young men in khaki drove out of the dusty city, saying they were off to meet the British enemy, but instead wheeling around and everywhere attacking their erstwhile masters.
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The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 31