The British got their victory in Burma, but it came at a heavy price. Rangoon fell in May 1945, as the monsoon rains began again and as Russian tanks were fighting their way into Berlin. The Japanese army evacuated the Burmese capital without a shot being fired, just as the British had done some three years earlier. It felt like an anti-climax. The Japanese left behind a devastated city, its streets buried under mud, rubbish and filth, as well as piles of now worthless Japanese occupation banknotes. There were no trams or buses. Shops and offices had been comprehensively looted in the anarchic period between the Japanese withdrawal and the arrival of the first British soldiers. Allied bombing raids had destroyed many buildings. There was no electricity or sanitation. Somehow, the 2,500-year-old Shwedagon Pagoda had stood undamaged through it all, and it rose majestically above the stinking wreckage of the city, its golden Buddhas retaining their perpetual calm.
The last weeks of war were fought in heavy rain as the British, now with Aung San’s Burmese forces on their side, did their utmost to prevent the Japanese from escaping to the south and east. Although it still numbered some 70,000 men at this point, the Japanese army was, in General Slim’s words, ‘broken and scattered’. Many units had lost their artillery and transport. The soldiers caught in the Arakan made frantic efforts to rejoin their comrades further east, but many drowned on river crossings, or were killed by British artillery or Burmese guerrillas. For the first time, Japanese soldiers surrendered in their hundreds. Japanese casualties were appalling. Overall, some 185,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in battle or died of starvation or disease in Burma, more than half the total invasion force of 300,000 men.*
By now, British generals were looking ahead, to the invasion of Malaya, and they pushed forward with all their might. Only the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the horror to an end, and even then isolated groups of Japanese soldiers fought on for weeks, apparently believing that reports of the Emperor’s surrender were Allied propaganda. It was the longest campaign fought by the British Army in the Second World War, some three years and eight months of toil and bloodshed.
The diaries and memoirs of the British officials who struggled to re-impose their authority in Burma after the Japanese surrender make for dismal reading. It wasn’t just Rangoon that was in ruins. Towns like Prome, Myitkyina and Meiktila had been flattened. Railways, mines, oil refineries, pipelines and river barges across the country had been destroyed, by the departing British in 1942 and their subsequent bombing raids, as well as by the retreating Japanese in 1945. Of some 1,200 passenger railcars in service before the war, only 12 remained.* Dacoits, or bandits, roamed the countryside, armed with weapons that the Japanese had left behind.
The British would discover that their ability to rule faced another challenge, which was less tangible but ultimately more significant than all the physical destruction had been. Before the war, the Burmese had acquiesced in British rule, even if only under duress. Now, many no longer accepted it. Those British officials who expected that the majority of Burmese would be delighted to see them again after the chastening experience of Japanese rule were to be sorely disappointed. With the benefit of hindsight, all the sacrifices of the Burma campaign look strangely futile. Only three years would pass before Burma gained its independence, and, in a painful snub to Britain, it chose not to become a member of the Commonwealth.
Balwant Singh, a civil servant of Indian origin working in the British administration, had survived the Japanese occupation. He immediately sensed when the British returned after the war that it was impossible to put the clock back. Nobody could forget how the colonial masters had run away in 1942. General Slim’s brilliant campaign had ensured an eventual victory on the field of battle, but ‘the rules of the game had changed…the old aura of power and prestige was gone’.* In 1945, Singh went to the installation in Mandalay of a British district commissioner. He watched the attendants in white robes and traditional headdresses, standing stiffly by the Sidaw, the ‘Royal Drum’ once used by Burman kings. The commissioner, in blue shorts, a white shirt and knee stockings, made an awkward speech about British plans for the future. ‘The speech done, he gave away the awards and the ceremony was over,’ Singh wrote in his diary. ‘The Commissioner marched away grinning. I could almost believe that he saw the charade – the vain attempt of the British Raj to reestablish its prewar prestige.’* Singh was posted to the countryside south of Mandalay, but his attempts to collect taxes were thwarted by dacoits and the growing separatist and Communist insurgencies. He and a dedicated group of policemen risked their lives several times to try to maintain order, but eventually lost all contact with the central government in Rangoon.
Similarly, Robert Mole, the deputy commissioner who had been so upset with the behaviour of West African troops in the Arakan during the war, was posted to the Irrawaddy Delta in late 1945. The delta had never been a popular posting among British officials – the climate was hot and humid and the mosquitoes unforgiving – but Mole seemed to have a particularly unhappy time. He was a fluent Burmese speaker with an astute understanding of the country but he soon discovered that the respect he had enjoyed before the war as a member of the civil service had simply vanished. The police, instead of helping him fight the endemic banditry, were involved in it themselves. Each month, he received reports of some one hundred violent crimes, including robbery, murder and rape, in the surrounding countryside. Mole’s junior staff were ‘almost without exception, lazy, uninterested, and very much involved in politics’, in his account. The local politicians were ‘dismal and sordid’; they did not bother to turn up to meetings, and generally refused to co-operate with him.*
At least this time Mole was grateful for the presence of West African soldiers. The 82nd Division was still in Burma, guarding railways, escorting Japanese prisoners of war and patrolling through towns and villages to deter bandits. Some British officers reassured themselves with the idea that the Africans’ impressive physiques would intimidate would-be troublemakers among the local population. A brigade from the Gold Coast was sent to help Mole, and he was pleased to see how well they got on with the Burmese. Sometimes, very well. One day, an African soldier and a Burmese girl came to him and asked if he could preside over their marriage. Mole tried to dissuade them, on the basis that ‘the African could speak no Burmese and the girl had no English or African tongue, and how they managed to communicate their affection to each other was a mystery’.*
There were other West Africans who got into romantic difficulties after the war. An intelligence officer for the 82nd Division wrote in November 1945 that several men had paid expensive dowries to Burmese families, with a view to taking a bride home. Unfortunately for these men, in many cases, the romance was not to last. The women ran away before embarkation, leaving the men feeling cheated. ‘The Africans have been officially warned against this practice,’ wrote the officer, ‘but being as a race accustomed to fair dealing, they view these occasions with some resentment.’*
Thousands of men from the British Army remained in Burma into 1946. On 22 April, many of them gathered in Rangoon for a two-day athletics meeting. The West African soldiers gave a dazzling performance on the track, sweeping the awards in the sprints, hurdles and high jump. Later in the festivities, the West Africans’ massed bands, led by an elderly bandmaster and drummers draped in leopard skins, brought the spectators in the packed grandstands to their feet. But some of the more prescient officers who were there on those rousing days understood the poignancy of the event, at least as far as the British were concerned. John McEnery, a young lieutenant in the 82nd Division, knew that he was witnessing nothing less than ‘the last great manifestation of the British Empire overseas. Never again would there be such a mixed gathering of British, Indian, Burma Army and West African troops.’* At dusk at the end of the second day, the crowd hushed as the buglers played ‘Retreat’ and the Union Jack came down.
The Nigerians were the last West African soldiers to leave Rang
oon, in October 1946. They held a torchlight farewell tattoo through the streets. British power in Burma was draining away.
The Attlee government in London began negotiating Britain’s departure from India shortly after it won the election in 1945. Once Britain had made the decision to quit India, its position in Burma also became untenable. Its authority over Indian soldiers, who comprised the majority of men on the ground in Burma, was greatly diminished. Without the means to send other troops from further afield, the British lost their military power at precisely the moment when they needed it most. The nationalists, led by the uncompromising Aung San, sensed that Britain had no stomach, and not enough resources, for a fight. The Burmese police went on strike, forcing matters further. Even the assassination of Aung San by a political rival in July 1947 could not derail the movement for independence.
The last British governor, Sir Herbert Rance, presided over the independence ceremony at 4.20am on 4 January 1948. It was an inconvenient time of day for him but one deemed auspicious by Burmese astrologers. It was, oddly, the second time Burma had won its independence in the space of five years, but there was never any doubt that the British, unlike the Japanese before them, were sincere in handing over power. British officials wondered what their legacy in Burma would be. Some gloomily suggested it would not extend further than a passion for football. Unlike Indians, the Burmese had never taken to cricket, the quintessentially English game.
Burma had always been an unhappy colony, long before the Japanese tore away the fabric of imperial authority. ‘The Burmese had been a proud people, unused to living in subjection to an alien race, and throughout their history had generally been the conquerors rather than the conquered,’ wrote Mole.* The unceremonious ousting of the last Burman king in 1885, the incorporation of Burma into British India’s administration and the disruption of traditional land ownership structures had created deep resentments. But, just as in Africa, it was the Second World War that was the catalyst for change, and which hastened the end of the Empire. There was one important difference, however. In Nigeria, the war raised the colonial subjects up. In Burma, it dragged the colonial masters down. The result was a swifter, less dignified British departure from Burma.
Some Burmese argue that there has been no real peace in their country since the day the Japanese began their bombing raids over Rangoon in December 1941. Indeed, the historian Thant Myint-U has written, ‘In a way Burma is a place where the Second World War never really stopped.’* And, throughout the turbulent post-war decades, Burma has struggled with the most basic questions: what is this country, and who belongs to it?
Just as in Nigeria, the British created and then hurriedly pulled out of an inherently unstable country. With their departure, the minority populations – the Karens, the Kachins, the Shans and so on – could not help but view independence with trepidation, fearing it meant inevitable domination by the Bamar majority. They had been excluded from the talks between the British government and Aung San that set the timetable for an independent Burma. Although they were promised autonomy and equal rights, the agreements quickly unravelled following Aung San’s assassination. The departing British were berated by all sides. On the one hand, the new Burmese government accused them of ‘divide and rule’, the charge so familiar from Nigeria and many other colonies; on the other hand, the ethnic minorities said they had been betrayed by the imperial master, which many had served with loyalty, even during the bleakest days of the war.
In the immediate aftermath of the British departure, Burma was on the verge of breaking apart completely. Communists, ethnic rebels and mutinous soldiers took over most of the country. Gradually, through the 1950s, the Burmese army fought back, retaking territory and establishing control beyond Rangoon. Britain, at that time still hoping for a close relationship with its former colony, played a vital part in the government’s survival, supplying ten thousand rifles to replace those taken by mutineers, as well as Dakota aircraft and emergency aid.*
In Rangoon, the British maintained a cultural foothold. Wendy Law-Yone was part of the small Anglicised elite, growing up in 1950s Burma. She read the classics of English literature at home, and shopped at the Rowe and Co. emporium in an imposing Edwardian building in downtown Rangoon. It was a time of some optimism in the country, at least for the educated classes in the capital. The new Burma was a democracy, and under Prime Minister U Nu there were regular elections, an opposition and a free press. Wendy’s father, Edward Law-Yone, a courageous and outspoken man, was founder and editor of The Nation, an independent English-language newspaper. He was both a Burmese nationalist and a committed Anglophile, proud of his command of the English language. Indeed, when Edward Law-Yone was in full flow, it was difficult for anyone else to compete. He once returned from lunch with Somerset Maugham, complaining that the famous wit and raconteur was ‘a man of few words’; on another occasion, he publicly reprimanded the British ambassador for misquoting Shakespeare. He enjoyed going to the races and mixing with the cosmopolitan crowd that lived in Rangoon in the early years of independence. Their house, said Wendy, was often full of British embassy friends and ‘old Burma hands’.
The intellectuals at the top of Burmese society revelled in their new freedoms, even as they sometimes looked back with nostalgia to the days of Empire. When the British were here, they liked to say, things worked in an orderly way, and there was none of the chaos and corruption that they blamed on the local officials who’d taken their place. Wendy had a nagging sense that both Burma and her family were living on borrowed time, that something would eventually give way. The danger signs were there. ‘Even to a child,’ she said, ‘the adult conversations were peppered with dacoits and rebels and insurgents.’* Everyone had guns, including Wendy’s teenage brothers. Elections turned violent. Prime Minister U Nu lost his grip over his own party. Secessionist wars were also having an impact on Burma’s army – it had become a larger, more autonomous force as it fought to keep down the rebellious ethnic minorities. As the generals grew more powerful, they also grew more acquisitive, buying up commercial interests, including Rowe and Co.
The turning point came in 1962, when General Ne Win seized power in a coup d’état. Wendy remembered the sudden chill that descended over Rangoon in the days that followed. ‘The most frightening thing was the number of people who were jailed,’ she said. ‘There would just be rumours: “My god, he’s disappeared, nobody knows where he’s gone and nobody knows why.” It changed dramatically.’
Inevitably, the soldiers came for her father, arresting him at the family home in the middle of the night. Edward spent five years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. The Nation was shut down.
The new regime was determined to reshape society on puritanical lines. People became afraid of being seen or even talking to outsiders. Most foreigners were forced to leave Burma and visitors were restricted to twenty-four-hour visas. Horseracing and beauty contests were banned; nightclubs were closed. A few cinemas stayed open, repeatedly playing the handful of movies that survived the censors. Wendy and her brothers, starved of any other entertainment, could recite the screenplays of entire Bing Crosby films, verbatim. Hundreds of businesses and industries were nationalised, and soon the shops were empty. This was Ne Win’s ‘Burmese Way To Socialism’.
Of this time, Thant Myint-U wrote, ‘it was as if someone had just turned off the lights on a chaotic and often corrupt but nevertheless vibrant and competitive society’.* When Wendy tried to flee the country, she too was imprisoned. She was eventually released and allowed to go into exile in Thailand. Like many Burmese intellectuals who left in those years, she would never live in her country again. Edward was also released, and promptly got involved in a somewhat farcical attempt to organise an armed revolution against the military regime. When this failed, he moved to the United States where he died in exile.
Two weeks after Isaac gave me his letter, I looked up and down the grey slabs of stone of the cenotaph at Taukkyan Cemetery. Some of the
names evoked the mud-walled cities of northern Nigeria – Musa Gaya, Musa Sheriff, Musa Sokoto – while others spoke of fishing villages on the Gold Coast – Kofi Manu (38311), Kofi Manu (59904), Kofi Mensa, Kofi Osoedi, Kofi Sam. Then I found the section entitled ‘West African Army Medical Corps’, traced with my finger downwards and my heart missed a beat. For here was Company Sergeant Major Archibong Bassey Duke, who fell beside Isaac clutching his red enamel cup of tea. And here was David Essien, who gasped, ‘Take me, O God, take me, O God’ as he lay dying. And Daniel Adeniran, who was also killed on that riverbank that same morning; and Felix Okoro who drowned in the Kaladan a few days before the attack; and even poor Moses Lamina, who suffered a slow and lingering death some weeks later, and whose corpse was eaten by jackals. They were all obscure men, but each of their names cried out to me. To find them here was a validation of Isaac Fadoyebo’s memory.
He had never had access to an official casualty list, and he did not know these men’s families back in Nigeria or Sierra Leone. But their fates were seared onto his conscience, and he still wondered why he had lived and they had died. The answer, he was sure, was Shuyiman.
15
Natives of Arakan
Mohammedans, who have long been settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan…
Another Man's War Page 26