by Harper, Tim
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 t
he 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 forsake
n 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.