Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

Marshall, David (b. 1908). First chief minister of Singapore, 1955–6, on a Labour Party platform. Of Baghdadi Jewish background, he was a noted trial lawyer and human rights campaigner.

  Maung Maung, Bo (b. 1920). Young recruit to Aung San’s BIA who took part in the anti-Japanese revolt in 1945 and went on to a career in the Burmese military after 1948.

  Mountbatten, Admiral Lord Louis (b. 1900). Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, 1943–6. Rebuilt army morale 1943. Overall director of Imphal–Kohima campaign, 1944. Cultivated relations with Aung San’s Burma Defence Army in 1945 and aided its rebellion against the Japanese that March. Viceroy of India 1947, then governor general of independent India.

  Mustapha Hussain (b. 1910). Malay nationalist. Vice-president of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda. Accompanied the Japanese advance to Singapore, but soon became disillusioned with them. Detained briefly after the war, and narrowly defeated by Tunku Abdul Rahman in UMNO’s presidential election of 1951.

  Ne Win (b. 1911). One of ‘Thirty Comrades’ of the Burma Independence Army. Military commander of Burmese Defence Forces, 1943–5. Commander of Burmese armed forces in 1948. Later dictator of Burma.

  Nehru, Jawaharlal (b. 1889). Indian Congress Socialist leader. Favoured the Allies over the Axis, but went to jail following the Quit India movement in 1942. First prime minister of independent India, 1947. Architect of Bandung Conference and Non-Aligned Movement.

  Nu, Thakin (later U Nu) (b. 1907). Burmese student activist and devout Buddhist. Minister in Ba Maw’s government 1943–5; AFPFL, 1945–6. Became head of government for independent Burma following the assassination of Aung San in 1947, and its first prime minister in 1948. Architect of Bandung Conference, 1955.

  Onn bin Jaafar, Dato (b. 1895). Leading Malay of Johore. In 1946, headed the United Malays National Organization. Left UMNO to form multi-racial Independence for Malaya Party, 1951–4, known from 1954 as Party Negara. Failed to win seat in 1955 election, but elected MP in 1959.

  Paw Tun, Sir (b. 1883). Conservative Arakanese politician. Prime minister of Burma 1942. Exiled to Simla in India with Dorman-Smith. Member of Governor’s Executive Council 1945–6.

  Pearce, Major General Sir Charles Frederick (b. 1892). Governor’s secretary, Burma, 1939. Commissioned into the army, he became a key figure in Civil Administration Secretariat (Burma) during reconquest, 1943–5. Counsellor to Governor, 1946.

  Pethick-Lawrence, 1st Baron (Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence) (b. 1871). Secretary of state for India and Burma, 1945 to April 1947. Member of Cabinet Mission to India, 1946.

  Purcell, Victor (b. 1896). Civil servant in Malaya and a key figure in its post-war planning. Returned there as adviser on Chinese affairs in 1945. Later critic of Templer regime; historian of the Chinese in Southeast Asia and Cambridge University lecturer.

  Rance, Major General Sir Hubert (b. 1898). Served on Western Front, 1939–43. Director of civil affairs in Burma, 1945–6. Governor of Burma, August 1946 to January 1948.

  Saw, U (b. 1900). Minister of forests for Burma 1939; prime minister, 1940–42. Flew to London in 1941 on goodwill mission. Imprisoned in Uganda during war for contacting Japanese. Returned to Burma 1946. Convicted of assassination of Aung San 1947. Hanged 1948.

  Shamsiah Fakeh (b. 1924). Malay radical and leader of AWAS women’s movement. Took to jungle in 1948 and active in the 10th Regiment of the MNLA. Married briefly to Ahmad Boestamam.

  Sjahrir, Sutan (b. 1909). Indonesian socialist born in West Sumatra and educated in the Netherlands. Experienced imprisonment and internal exile by Dutch, 1934–41. First prime minister of Indonesia, 1945–7, he led negotiations with British and Dutch.

  Slim, General (later Field Marshal), Sir William (b. 1891). Commander 1st Burma Corps, 1942, during retreat with Gen. Harold Alexander. Main figure in rebuilding 14th Army and success of its Burma campaigns 1944–5. Commander Allied Land Forces South East Asia, 1945. Later governor general of Australia.

  Smith Dun, Colonel (b. 1906). Karen military officer who fought with 14th Army in Burma campaign, became commander-in-chief of Burma’s armed forces 1948, but was speedily dismissed.

  Soe, Thakin (b. 1905). Communist leader. Set up ‘base area’ in Burma delta, 1942–5. Broke with Anti-Fascist People’s Front government and led Red Flag communists in rebellion against British and independent government of Burma, 1946–55.

  Stevenson, Henry Noel Cochrane (b. 1903). Joined Burma Frontier Service in 1926. Organized Chin levies, 1942–3. Served in Civil Affairs Secretariat Burma, 1944–5. Director Frontier Areas Administration, 1946 to February 1947, when he was replaced for being too close to minorities leaders.

  Suhrawardy, H. S. (b. 1892). Bengali Muslim politician. Minister of labour, Bengal, 1937. Minister of supplies in Bengal government during 1943 famine. Chief minister, Bengal, after 1946 elections. Implicated in Great Calcutta Killing, 1946. Founded East Pakistan Awami League.

  Sukarno (b. 1901). First president of Indonesia, 1945–66. Presided at Bandung Conference, 1955. Declared martial law and ‘guided democracy’ in 1957. Removed by Suharto after failed military coup in 1965.

  Tan Cheng Lock (b. 1883). Straits Chinese leader, businessman and legislator. Fled to India on Japanese invasion of Malaya. Figurehead leader of left-wing United Front in 1947; founding president of the Malayan Chinese Association in 1949. Knighted 1952. His son, Tan Siew Sin (b. 1916) succeeded him and was a minister in independent Malaya.

  Tan Kah Kee (b. 1874). Leader of the Overseas Chinese; headed the China Relief Fund, 1937–41. Spent the war hiding in Java, returning to Singapore to head China Democratic League. Returned to China in 1949.

  Tan Malaka (b. 1897). Sumatra-born leader of Partai Kommunis Indonesia and Comintern. In hiding in Singapore on outbreak of war, and later escaped incognito to Indonesia. Revealed himself in 1946 to lead calls for social revolution. Died at hands of republican soldiers in 1948.

  Templer, Sir Gerald Walter Robert (b. 1898). High Commissioner of Malaya, 1952–4. Earlier served in military government of occupied Germany and as director of military intelligence. After Malaya became Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 1955–8, and retired a field marshal.

  Than Tun (b. 1911). Student leader. Minister of agriculture under Ba Maw, 1943. Joined anti-Japanese resistance. Led Burma Communist Party in 1945. Broke with AFPFL in 1946

  Thein Pe Myint (b. 1914). Burmese communist who escaped to India in 1942. Author of What happened in Burma, an attack on the Japanese occupation. Sent to Chungking, China, but maintained links with Burmese resistance to Japanese. Secretary of the Burma Communist Party, 1945–55. Broke with AFPFL in 1946.

  Tin Tut (b. 1895). Barrister and Burmese member of Indian Civil Service. Accompanied U Saw to London in 1941. Joined Dorman-Smith in Simla, 1942. Left ICS and became financial adviser to AFPFL government. Accompanied Aung San to London, January 1947. Assassinated 1948.

  Tunku Abdul Rahman (b. 1903). Malay prince of Kedah. Served as a district officer during war. As head of the United Malays National Organization led Malaya to independence in 1957; prime minister until 1970.

  Wavell, Field Marshal Sir Archibald (b. 1883). Commander-in-chief, India, 1941–3. Viceroy and Governor General of India, 1943–7.

  Yeung Kuo (b. 1917). Malayan Communist Party leader. In Penang in 1946, aided Chin Peng in exposure of Lai Teck and was viewed as Chin’s deputy. Killed in the jungle shortly before the 1955 Baling peace talks.

  Preface

  In August 1945 the US dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so bringing to an end the Second World War. Yet in Asia the Second World War was only one intense and awful phase of a much longer conflict: ‘the defeat of Japan would not end war in Asia’, as one Indian newspaper mused when news of the Japanese surrender leaked out. This long and savage war had begun in 1937 with a full-scale attack on China by the Japanese imperialists. It continued after 1945 in a range of intense and bloody wars, both civil and against a revived European colonialism. These conflicts, variously call
ed the Indonesian revolution, the First Indo-China War, the Partition of India, the Burmese civil war, the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War, surged on into the 1970s and beyond. It was not really until the 1980s, with the economic renaissance of Japan, the rise of Singapore and Malaysia and the beginning of the transformation of Asian communist regimes towards free-market capitalism, that Asia began to claim its place in the sun as the dominant continent of the twenty-first century.

  This book is the story of the first and most intense period of the birth pangs of this new Asian world. It concentrates particularly on the great crescent of territory between eastern India and Singapore which had once been the commercial heart of Britain’s Asian empire and which a revived and self-consciously ‘constructive’ British Empire now wished to reclaim as its own. The book focuses on the years between 1945 and 1949 and is a sequel to our earlier work, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (Allen Lane, 2004). British troops, including a large contingent of Indian and African soldiers, poured into Burma from northeastern India, reversing the humiliating defeat which they had suffered at Japanese hands three years earlier. The British went on to occupy Thailand, much of the former French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia, ostensibly in order to disarm the Japanese. But this revivified British Empire attempted to recreate itself in conditions vastly different from those that had prevailed a few years earlier. The British now faced a variety of powerful, armed and embittered nationalist leaderships determined to claim immediate independence.

  Forgotten Wars tells the story of how Burmese resistance and the collapse of the British Raj in India brought Burma to independence in 1948, but how that independence was corroded by inter-ethnic conflict and the irresistible rise of the Burmese army which remains dominant in the country today. It shows how Britain was able to maintain its grip in Malaya and Singapore only because it garnered and received the support of conservative Malay and Chinese leaderships which feared the powerful Malayan Communist Party whose cadres Britain itself had helped to arm during the conflict with Japan. It charts the beginning of the long Indo-China war which culminated in the American defeat in southern Vietnam in 1975 and the bloody and little-understood lurch towards Indonesian independence after the fall of Japan. In the process, the book analyses the emergence of the Cold War in Asia. To the north of the region, China became a communist monolith. To the east, North Vietnam seized independence from the French. But to the south, Britain’s rigorous campaign of counter-insurgency against the Malayan communists determined that the future states of Singapore and Malaysia would remain pro-Western and capitalist. These events sowed some of the seeds of East Asia’s great economic miracle which was to blossom in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Burma took a unique road to isolation and stagnation as its leaders battled both communist insurgency and the demands of minority peoples for autonomy.

  This book describes the struggles of proconsuls, colonial military commanders and nationalist leaders. But, like Forgotten Armies, it also tells the story of many ordinary people, both Asian and British, who were swept up in the violence of insurgency and counter-insurgency, communal rioting and renewed economic privation. The four years after the fall of Japan were Asia’s time of revolution. Amid the turmoil, people still looked forward to an age of plenty when they would ‘dance among showers of gold and silver’, according to a Burmese verse. This bright future was still long decades away in the year 1949. Many people are still waiting.

  In writing this book we have accumulated many more debts than we can possibly recount here: research has been undertaken in many places and over a long period of time. Historical research depends on dedication and specialist expertise, and the staffs of archives and libraries in Asia and Britain have consistently provided both. We would like to mention Kevin Greenbank of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, and Rachel Rowe of the Centre and the Royal Commonwealth Society Collections in the Cambridge University Library. Our thanks to the librarians and archivists in the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum, the Liddell Hart Centre in King’s College, London, and the library, archives and Burma Star Collection in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta. In Southeast Asia, the Perpustakaan Universiti Malaya, the Arkib Negara Malaysia, the National Archives of Singapore, the National Library of Singapore and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore have been particularly helpful.

  We owe a special debt of thanks to Simon Winder, who has not only been a patient and indulgent editor but has also plied us with historiographical queries like the most genial of research supervisors. Katherine Prior once again contributed the index and helped us to clarify important questions. Thanks are due also to Chloe Campbell, Michal Shavit and Trevor Horwood for their editorial help over the two volumes and to Sophie Brockley, Bruce Hunter, Dr Romain Bertrand and Stuart Martin for their support and encouragement. Many other debts have been incurred. Sunil Amrith, Chua Ai Lin, Neil Khor, Gerard McCann, Emma Reisz, Felicia Yap, Lim Cheng Tju, C. C. Chin, Ronald Hyam, Christopher Goscha, Dr Syed Husin Ali and Professor Jomo K. S. all provided us with new material or insights. We owe special thanks to Professor Robert Taylor and Professor Robert Anderson for their helpful comments on portions of the manuscript. Any errors that remain are, of course, ours. Magdalene College and St Catharine’s College in Cambridge; Ms Véronique Bolhuis and the Centre Asie, Institut d’Etudes Politique, Paris; Oommen George, Yeo Seok Lian and many others in Kuala Lumpur all provided wonderful conditions in which to write. Our most unfailing supporters have been Susan Bayly and Norman and Collette Harper. We are very grateful to everyone who has helped us.

  Prologue: An Unending War

  As a little girl, Kimura Yasuko was evacuated from the city of Hiroshima to the countryside. When the war ended on 15 August 1945, group evacuations were abruptly ended and children began to return to their homes. The children of Hiroshima really had nowhere to return to. All the same, the authorities decided to send them back to where their homes had once been, if they thought a single relative had survived the atomic bomb. Kimura heard that her father was still alive and so she went back to the city in a truck with thirty or forty other children. She remembered:

  We arrived in the early evening. The reddish setting sun hung in the sky. The ruins from an ordinary fire are burned black, aren’t they? But the ruins of Hiroshima were brown, the colour of unfired pottery… The city didn’t look as if it had been burned. Yet it was flattened. In the middle of the ruins two buildings, a department store and the newspaper [office] stood all alone. There my father met me… I remember the tears in his eyes when I met him… I knew Mother had died.1

  The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the defining event of the twentieth century. Everywhere the news was received with deep ambivalence. The leaders of the USA and Britain had been determined to save Allied lives by bringing the war to a rapid conclusion, but now they were assailed by guilt and doubt. In London Sir Cuthbert Headlam, a Conservative politician and robust supporter of Winston Churchill, rejoiced that the war was over, but he stood aghast at ‘this new and fearful form of bomb’ and the wanton destruction it had caused. The bomb would mean ‘either the end of war or the end of civilisation’.2

  The Japanese themselves were torn by mixed emotions. In Hiroshima itself, some American prisoners of war who had survived the explosion hidden in a cellar were found and beaten to death. But the majority of Japanese viewed the disaster as they would a great calamity of nature.3 Kimura Yasuko later recorded that the bomb did not make her hate the Americans. In the two years before the bomb, life had been horrible and heartbreaking as city after city across Japan had been consumed by incendiary attacks.4 Some 3 million Japanese had been killed since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and millions more had been wounded, bereaved or made homeless. The country was so utterly devastated that the incoming victors were astonished that it had held out for
so long. The bomb finally ended that resistance. Some Japanese fainted when the high-pitched voice of Emperor Hirohito was heard over the radio, conceding defeat in stilted, formal Japanese. A few militarists and patriots committed suicide, while many other Japanese were shamed to the bottom of their hearts by their country’s defeat and awaited the coming of the Americans with trepidation. Others quietly rejoiced in the knowledge that the imperial house and the nation had at least survived. Hundreds of thousands of their young men would now escape almost certain death on the battlefields of East and Southeast Asia.

  The first Allied witnesses to this recessional were some of the Allied prisoners of war who had been sent to toil in the mines and heavy industries of Japan. Constantine Constantinovich Petrovsky was a White Russian doctor who had escaped the revolution to Singapore via China, and, like so many ambitious and talented people in Asia, found a home in its cosmopolitan world. In 1939 he had volunteered to fight for the British Empire. His war took him to Europe, then back to Singapore, where he experienced the trauma of its fall in February 1942. With the rest of the garrison he was herded into the prison camp at Changi, then sent to work on the Burma–Siam railway; he survived its horrors only to be embarked on one of the ‘death ships’ to mine coal fifty or so kilometres away from Hiroshima: of the 50,000 who began this journey, 11,000 perished. On the morning of 6 August 1945 there was an air-raid warning, as there had been most days that summer, ‘and suddenly phew! Like earthquake. And black smoke… a column of this coming up like mushroom, spreading out, black and so on. I said “My God! They shot one plane, one bomb, they got oil tanks”… They were all shuddering.’ The next day the Japanese guards came and announced that everyone in Hiroshima was dead.5 The bomb had killed a microcosm of people caught up in the terrible conflict: prisoners of war, Koreans and Chinese labourers, students from Malaya on scholarships, and perhaps 3,200 Japanese American citizens who were stranded in the city after Pearl Harbor.6 Later, American planes flew over again, but this time they dropped food and medicines. Some of these supplies landed near Petrovsky’s mine. Petrovsky and his fellow prisoners of war passed their supplies to the Japanese, who suddenly had nothing to eat. They realized that something quite extraordinary had happened when they noticed that all the flies and the bed bugs had disappeared. The prisoners were put to work digging a trench. They were told that it was an air-raid shelter; only later did they realize it was to be their own grave: if the Americans invaded, they were to be lined up beside it and shot.7