Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  While in Rangoon, Driberg had several private meetings with the AFPFL leadership in which he urged them not to attend the ceremonies welcoming Dorman-Smith back to the country in case they should appear to be angling for jobs with the new administration. He also told them to demand at least equal treatment with India in the matter of constitutional reform. And he assured them that, whatever problems they had with the civil affairs administration, they could believe that Hubert Rance, its effective head, was their friend. Later a copy of a letter from Driberg about his consultations with the AFPFL found its way to Dorman-Smith, who reacted furiously. The acrimonious and ultimately violent developments on the path towards the end of colonialism in Burma over the next two and a half years were in some degree a consequence of the fact that the British, as much as the Burmese, had broken down into contending factions.38

  Driberg did not drop Burma on his return home. Through the Orwellian-sounding Union of Democratic Control, a London-based pressure group, he used the many contacts he had made on his trip to link up disgruntled British forces personnel and Asian nationalists with left-wing opinion in Parliament and the press. As conditions neared mutiny in several stations, soldiers from India and South East Asia Command wrote to him denouncing their ‘filthy conditions’ or marvelling that ‘the terrible Jap Rat is quite a good fellow when defending European imperialism’.39 Colonel John Ralston wrote com plaining that the ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ had built up a huge and unnecessary staff in Singapore.40 This pained Driberg, who had thought Mountbatten ‘genuinely progressive’. Driberg had obviously made himself known widely, if somewhat imperfectly. From Burma a ‘poor cultivator in Sangyaung’ wrote to ‘Mg. Drie Budd, P. M.’ to complain of agricultural distress and the return of a dreaded class of Indian landowner-bankers: ‘I am unable to plough the field now. It is not easy… Lands are in the hands of “Chettyers”.’41

  While the nationalists took an increasingly dim view of the machinations of Dorman-Smith, none of them appears personally to have disliked him. It was widely recognized that he was not responsible for the mess that was Burmese administration before the war. At Simla, however, he had got too close to what they regarded as the sleazy old order, particularly Paw Tun, the exiled Burmese prime minister. There was a feeling too that U Saw was lurking in the wings. U Saw had been the dominant politician in Burma in the late 1930s. A big, jovial and ruthless man, he had charmed many British officials. He held great parties, he was forever surrounded by pretty women and, above all, he was nothing like the ice-cold intellectuals of Indian politics whom so many of them disliked. He had seriously blotted his copybook in 1941 after Pearl Harbor when he had contacted the Japanese and offered to help them invade Burma. Reports of his treachery were deciphered by British codebreakers at Allied intelligence and he had been sent off to exile in Uganda.42 Now, he was about to return, with a brand-new German ‘wife’, who was very much the talk of the town as he already had a wife and a clutch of mistresses there. The British seemed to be prepared to forget, or at least forgive, U Saw’s overtures to the Japanese. Besides, everyone knew that Dorman-Smith had a soft spot for him. The AFPFL suspected that the governor would use U Saw to try to build up a kind of pro-British centre party in order to bypass them. In December Aung San said as much to Montagu Stop-ford, now GOC Burma Command, who duly passed it on to Mount-batten. The British military, Aung San was reported as saying, simply had no idea how corrupt Burmese politics had been before the war. There was graft and favouritism in all departments. Aung San ‘knew who the crooks were’ and wanted Burma to be a free and decent country. The problem was that there were a lot of crooks already in the army’s civil affairs secretariat and the return of the governor had simply made matters worse.43

  The animus and suspicion beneath the surface was revealed in early October by a controversy involving the Rangoon Liberator. In spite of their official sponsorship, the Burmese editors of this newspaper carried an article headed ‘Major-General Aung San speaks’.44 The British were immediately irritated because by this stage Aung San had formally surrendered his military rank. Worse still, Aung San used the article to denounce an earlier editorial that had called the failure of the BNA and other partisan units to hand in their weapons a betrayal of Mountbatten. Not so, he stated: all nations had the right to keep arms for their own defence and in Burma it was particularly necessary because the British appeared to be arresting people on suspicion and violating their civil liberties. He went on to reject charges that he had planned a coup in 1938–39 and ridiculed rumours that the plans for this could be found in a hostel on the south side of the Shwedagon pagoda. This was a fabrication put about by the British security services, he said, implying that they were paving the way for his arrest. Put under pressure by the British, the editors of the Liberator temporized. They argued that just as the American commander, Douglas MacArthur, had accepted the Philippines nationalist army as genuine allies of the Americans, so too the British should accept the BNA. On the other hand, Aung San had to ensure that his forces did not impose their views on the people, for this would be ‘fascist’.45 This, at least, was a line with which many British civilian and military personnel agreed. For them, Aung San’s was indeed a fascist organization and they had not fought for six years to see it win out in ‘their’ Burma. The year ended in deadlock. The AFPFL demanded the immediate creation of a dominion-style governor’s council in which they would run the lion’s share of the ministries.46 This was to be accompanied by the announcement of a forthcoming election with a universal franchise. Aung San pleaded for peace but prepared for war. Dorman-Smith acknowledged the influence of the AFPFL but formed an executive council from members of other political parties. He adhered rigorously to the long timetable of Churchill’s White Paper; what he had once found ‘infuriatingly vague’ now turned out to be rather convenient.

  In the long term, Burma’s fate, still in the balance in 1945, was to be determined mainly by big, impersonal considerations. How many troops could the British Empire deploy around the world while rebuilding the home front? How deeply entrenched in the countryside were the Burma defence forces and the volunteer armies of communists and nationalists? What ultimately was the value of Burma’s teak, oil and rice to businessmen and governments in London, Madras and Bombay? Yet Burmese political society was a small and intimate one compared with India’s. Personalities mattered a lot and their mutual clashes went a long way towards determining the form, if not the wider outcome, of Burma’s struggle for independence. In turn, the fact that Burma gained that independence not only outside the Commonwealth but also outside the influence of communism was to be of great significance for the future of the crescent and indeed the whole of South and East Asia.

  As 1945 drew to a close the big players of Burmese politics manoeuvred to gain a tighter hold on their opponents. Dorman-Smith, embittered by the British failures of 1942 and out of sympathy with his new Labour masters, was less genial than he seemed on the surface. Two men in particular seemed to stand in the way of his desire for a moderate Dominion of Burma under the British crown. One was Aung San, a national leader, but one still being pressured by his own communist allies and at times seemingly doubtful of his political touch. His rhetoric became more violent towards the year’s end as the provisions of the detested White Paper still seemed to be in place. The governor, he claimed, had become ‘fascistic’, ironically the AFPFL’s most derogatory term of abuse.47 The other obstacle to Dorman-Smith’s plans was ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, whom he instinctively disliked as a royalist radical, too flippant for high imperial office. Then there were the other big egos flitting in and out of this little political world. U Saw’s imminent return was to be followed in mid 1946 by that of the ex-Adipadi Ba Maw, released from detention in Tokyo by the British. Who knew how much political support he could muster among those who still had a pang of nostalgia for the Japanese days? Would Thakin Nu, Buddhist nationalist and minister under Ba Maw, return from religious retreat to strengthen the nationalis
t centre against the old politicians and the left? And what of the communists? Thein Pe, the communist leader who had fled to India in 1942, was anxious to reassert his influence over the young comrades drilling and polishing their weapons in the villages. Thakin Soe, who was even more hard line than Thein Pe, was already dug in, Mao Zedong-like, into his ‘base areas in the countryside’.

  Across the country, in the hills and minority areas, dozens of spokesmen for newly armed peoples were waiting to stake their own claims for power and autonomy in Burma’s dimly prefigured future.48 The ‘frontier areas’ had always had a separate administration since the onset of British rule and, whether deliberately or not, this had fostered a sense of difference between Kachin, Shan, Karen and Chin peoples and ‘ethnic’ Burmese. The war had made the difference starker. The British had clung on in the northern hills, whether in the guise of Chindits, Force 136 or lone British officers, such as Hugh Seagrim who had died trying to shield the hill peoples from Japanese atrocities. British special forces had also released thousands of weapons to guerrilla armies of the hills, viewing the BNA askance even when it had come over to the Allies. The situation with the principal minority of the Burmese plains, the Karen, was similar. Many of the 1.5 million Karens had been Christian since the nineteenth century, an enduring source of suspicion to their Burmese neighbours. They were widely literate in English and often spoke it at home or sang English hymns in their Baptist churches. In some cases they even praised God in Welsh. Many wore clothes typical of the respectable people of the English countryside, floral skirts or grey flannels, rather than the traditional Burmese longyi. For generations they had lovingly tended and passed on a special history which asserted that they had been Christian even before they received the Gospel. Persecution by the Burmese Buddhist kings reinforced this consciousness of being a separate people. The British, who had commercial interests in the Karens’ teak forests as well as the rice-producing plains, cultivated this sensibility. They fostered conservative Karen notables such as Sir San C. Po, author of the pre-war Burma and the Karens,49 and awarded the community special constitutional recognition. The war had brought particular hardship. In 1941 gangs on the fringes of Aung San’s Burmese Independence Army had massacred several hundred Karens in the delta. Isolated Japanese and Burmese atrocities against them and other minorities continued throughout the war. When the British returned the Karens received them with enthusiasm, inviting British soldiers into their churches and homes. For their part, the British applauded the formation of the Karen National Organization in 1945 and put substantial amounts of money into the hill and minority areas. The Seagrim Hospital was founded as a memorial to the heroic special operations officer who had led them. Christian priests even gave the Karens a kind of national anthem: ‘You’ve been persecuted and enslaved as well/The white brother liberators, God sent them back!’50 At this stage only a few Karen, Kachin, Shan or Chin radicals were talking about political separation from Burma, but with partition in the air all around – in India, Palestine, Ireland and Poland – expectations had been raised to a dangerously high level. The confused military settlement between Aung San and the British had made matters worse. At the negotiations at Kandy in September 1945 little attempt had been made to merge the armed minorities with the armed Burmese. Instead there was to be a ‘two-wing army’, one wing consisting mainly of Kachins, Karens and Chins officered by British regulars, the other mainly of Burmese elements in the British army and 6,000-odd BNA men. The officer corps of this second wing was to be ‘Burmanized’. This, of course, was a recipe for long-term ethnic conflict, particularly in view of the existence of tens of thousands of other Burmese who were organized into the PVOs and had access to illicit arms.51 Southeast Asia’s bloody conflicts had merely paused for a few months in the afterglow of the atomic bomb.

  INDIA: THE KEY

  During the two years between the atom bomb and Indian independence, Indian concerns drove British policy in Southeast Asia. The availability or otherwise of the Indian Army to suppress dissidence determined events not just in Burma and Malaya, but even in Indo-China and Indonesia. Public perceptions of the East were shaped above all by events in India, much to the dismay of nationalist leaders in Burma and Malaya who wanted to get their concerns to the top of the agenda. Even after 1947 India cast a long shadow over the region, though the new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, scrupulously tried to avoid the perception that ‘greater India’ would now replace the British Empire east of Bengal. British policy towards India over these years was formed by a set of assumptions and sensibilities that went far back into the past of the Labour Party and the Indian National Congress. Attlee, Cripps and Nehru had a long and tumultuous history of mutual admiration and mutual distrust. Attlee had served on the Simon Commission of 1927–9, an all-white committee of constitutional enquiry which Indian nationalists believed had hijacked their country’s future and perpetuated British power by a policy of divide and rule. Nehru and Cripps, old socialist thinkers, had parted company with bad grace in 1942 after the failure of the Cripps mission to find a solution to the constitutional tangle.52 Nehru and many other Congressmen had spent most of the rest of the war years in British Indian jails.

  This long history was no less apparent in the case of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Labour Party elder statesman and the newly appointed secretary of state for India and Burma in the Labour government. Pethick-Lawrence and his wife had been involved in Indian issues since the 1920s. Burma, by contrast, hardly entered their consciousness. In September 1945, as her husband took up his job, Lady Pethick-Lawrence wrote to Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, about her early days as a suffragette. ‘As long ago as 1909/10 Indian students were in the habit of attending our suffrage meetings in great numbers and I had many personal conversations with them.’53 They had associated the movement for women’s votes with the liberation of India and she now knew ‘how faithfully that promise has been kept’. Even when Pethick-Lawrence had been a member of the 1929 Labour government, his wife had remained a member of the pro-Congress India League.54

  The Labour Party of the 1940s was still essentially the political arm of a movement of moral, and specifically Christian, reform. Likewise the Congress was suffused with Gandhi’s neo-Tolstoyan and semi-Christian ideology, while even the socialism espoused by Jawaharlal Nehru was influenced by the rhetoric of Hindu and Christian moral uplift movements in India. But these religious influences were not necessarily recognized by the British, let alone applauded. In late 1943 Pethick-Lawrence had discussed the role of holy men in politics with the novelist Aldous Huxley, proposing that Gandhi’s ‘spiritual conception of Indian independence’ made him ‘intolerant of compromise’. He had, Pethick-Lawrence thought, displayed intolerance towards the untouchables in India in the 1930s and had worsened India’s problem of over-population by his stubborn opposition to birth control. Worst of all, he was unable to offer an ‘olive branch to the Muslims’. Indeed, ‘I think Gandhi himself has envisaged the breaking out of a civil war.’55 Pethick-Lawrence was inclined to agree with a friend who felt that ‘the neglect of human suffering is typical of Eastern mysticism’.

  Despite the apparent overlap of their ideals and political language, then, there was still a fundamental lack of trust on the part of the Labour government’s leaders towards the Congress and still more towards the Muslim League. The same was true on the other side. The Congress leaders had been let down by successive British governments, Labour politicians included, once too often. Right up to independence and beyond they expected to be sold down the river again. Somehow the chains would remain in place. Nehru wrote to Cripps in friendly terms in December 1945. He said he felt ‘a dull pain’ when he thought about Cripps’s actions in 1942, when the two leaders had failed to strike a compromise between the British government and the Congress. He must understand, Nehru went on, how vastly India had been changed by war: ‘People have grown desperate and it is no easy matter to hold them in check… There must be no prevarication�
� by the Labour government in its Indian policy.56 At Christmas, as a new Labour mission set out for India, Gandhi wrote to Pethick-Lawrence summoning up ‘the Prince of Peace’. He drew the secretary of state’s attention to an event nearly fifty years earlier when King Edward VII had supposedly played a ‘benign role’ during the peace negotiations between the British and the Boers at the close of the South African war.57 He hoped Pethick-Lawrence would exert a similar statesmanlike influence. But India must move immediately to independence. Through the dew of Gandhi’s Indo-Christian piety, the message was clear: there were at least two potentially armed and bitterly opposed forces. For Boer and Briton read Indian and Briton.

  Yet the speeches of nationalist leaders were only the surface wind. The real lessons were to be learned from the Indian Army itself, which had already metamorphosed into a genuinely national force. One fact that became increasingly clear in the autumn of 1945 as demobilization began was that the Indian Army would never be the same again. Even before VJ Day, commanding officers had noted that the troops were saying in their letters that the world must change. One army electrician writing in Urdu expressed his sense of shame when ‘an Italian peasant’ – presumably a POW or a volunteer – asked him why education was not compulsory in India. ‘I resolved in my mind that I will do my best to start a primary school in my village after the War.’58 Indian commissioned officers were even more vigorous in their political determination. They told their British colleagues in no uncertain terms that the INA’s aim of liberating India was entirely right.59 The only thing that was wrong was their method. The British must leave India immediately, now that it was under no threat of attack from Japan.