Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  Some weeks after the plans to arrest Aung San were shelved, the security of the country deteriorated markedly. Aung San was building up his strength in the villages and small towns, aware that he might still need to stage a show of force against either the British or his communist ‘allies’. The drilling, marching and counter-marching of more than 80,000 volunteers became feverish in the weeks after the first anniversary of the BNA’s revolt against the Japanese. Then came the crisis. On 18 May a fatal shooting took place at Tantabin in Insein district, a small town with a mixed Burman/Karen population. A band of local volunteers was moving through the town protesting against the Defence of Burma rules. These prohibited quasi-military marching and arms drill, even when carried out with dummy weapons. The exact sequence of events is unclear, as defence and prosecution witnesses flatly contradicted each other,128 but there had evidently been ill feeling for some time between local leaders of the PVO and the police sub-inspector, Maung Gale. The authorities believed that the nationalists were collecting arms. Some people deposed that leaders of the crowd were carrying dummy weapons. The yebaws, or volunteers, allegedly told people to resist the police if they attempted arrests during the demonstrations: ‘Let the masses surround the authorities and forcibly take back the persons arrested.’129 On the day of the shooting, things had got out of hand as people converged on one of the main teashops in the town. The police started to beat members of the crowd with their rifle butts. The crowd attacked the police with bamboo poles. The police then discharged at least sixty live rounds, killing five people and wounding many others before the crowd retreated. Three hundred yebaws were arrested, but it was never clear if the order to disperse was actually given to or understood by the crowd before the firing began.130 As in so many incidents in British imperial history, from Ireland through Egypt to India and beyond, a relatively minor but bloody police action galvanized people’s perception of British rule as irredeemably repressive. An ominous feature of the situation in Tantabin was that the crowd was composed of villagers, not students or ‘agitators’. They were protesting because of demands for the repayment of agricultural loans in a terrible season of shortage and hardship. Tantabin was an indication of the strength of the bonds that had been forged between the yebaws, the volunteer corps of the old BIA, and the villages in 1942. It was a portent of a major revolt.

  The government of Burma set up a commission to investigate the incident while Dorman-Smith urged London to take a hard line against nationalist leaders whose speeches stirred up popular demonstrations of the sort that ended with the Tantabin firing. Once again he seems to have had Aung San in mind. When news of the incident had broken, Aung San put all the blame on the British government. According to Aung San’s agreement with Mountbatten at Kandy some eight months previously, members of the BNA were to be absorbed into the British Burma Army and more men would be recruited to turn it into a truly national force. But the British had not even begun to honour this pledge. Many former BNA personnel were unemployed and resentful, while village youths were pressing to enlist. Aung San was uncomfortably aware that people of this sort could easily shift allegiance to clandestine communist cadres unless the nationalist elements of the AFPFL moved fast. Besides, he asked, why was drilling by the volunteers illegal in the first place? Who had deemed it so?131

  As it turned out, Aung San had already won the game. Attlee had finally begun to take a closer interest in Burma, aware that a flare-up there would do enormous damage if it came at the same time as mass demonstrations in India and Malaya. He had decided that Dorman-Smith was becoming erratic. This was not without reason. In early May, shortly after resuming his demands for the arrest of Aung San, the governor made an apparent volte-face by holding out the possibility of recruiting some new blood into his old-fashioned executive council, perhaps even Aung San himself. He also finally conceded the need to review the White Paper. By 7 May Attlee had concluded that the governor ‘changes his policy from day to day’ and was ‘losing his grip’.132 He would have to be relieved on the grounds of ill health. Attlee’s conclusion was only confirmed by Dorman-Smith’s vacillation and indecision after the Tantabin shootings. Blowing hot and cold, he first called for strong action against those who had fomented the agitation, only to reverse his policy in favour of a general amnesty for these and other political prisoners, a recommendation that infuriated senior police officers and civil servants.

  On 14 June Dorman-Smith’s recall was made public and Sir Henry Knight became acting governor pending the arrival of Sir Hubert Rance, who would take over in August. Knight was an impeccable old India hand who had previously been acting governor in both Madras and Bombay. This change in personnel reflected a much deeper policy switch, for Rance had been Mountbatten’s right-hand man. The conservatives in the Burmese civil service were appalled. As Dorman-Smith left, Frederick Pearce, counseller to the governor, sent him a note of commiseration. He had been right all along, Pearce said. He had been unfairly made to carry the can in 1942 because military morale was too fragile to be told the truth. He had tried to defend the Burmese civil administration against the false accusations of the war correspondents. Finally, his policy had been undermined ‘by the wilfully blind conceptions and pre-emptive conclusions of that Heaven-inspired politician Dicky M.’133 For Pearce himself, the bitterest blows were to find himself accused of mismanaging the military administration and having his old boss replaced by Rance. Pearce hinted and Dorman-Smith believed that Mountbatten was covertly responsible for the governor’s sacking. They were probably right. True, Mount-batten had not been Dorman-Smith’s only handicap – a Chamberlain appointee was never likely to reach a meeting of minds with Labour ministers who disliked his politics and personal style, and Attlee quickly lost patience with him – but it does seem likely that Mount-batten played a key role in ejecting Dorman-Smith and choosing his successor. Certainly Tom Driberg, thought so. He believed that Mountbatten had privately briefed against Dorman-Smith and had impressed Attlee with the idea that only a rapid move towards independence could avoid the sort of situation that had arisen in Indo-China, where the French were desperately fighting to suppress the Vietnamese resistance.134 For his part, Driberg kept up the pressure on Mountbatten, relaying to him the fears of Aung San and other local politicians who valued him as one of their few direct links to domestic British opinion. On 12 June Aung San wrote to Driberg of ‘the blind prejudice and stark policy of bureaucratic intransigence he had encountered’.135 He alone, he claimed, was trying to restrain his infuriated followers from attacking British interests. Driberg duly passed this on to Mountbatten.

  It is unsurprising that Dorman-Smith, Pearce and the hardliners of the military administration loathed Dickie and his men. But their poisonous hatred of Aung San, whom they regarded as a creature of Dickie’s, was dangerously infectious. It entered the bloodstream of Burmese politics and fed the festering resentment of U Saw and his followers towards Aung San. Naively, Dorman-Smith disassociated his own actions from U Saw’s machinations. Till the end he retained some regard for Aung San as a strong man and military hero. Did he see in him an Asian Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator of Burma, perhaps? At any rate, having tried for three months to have the man hanged, he left a surprisingly emollient assessment of him for Sir Henry Knight. Aung San was ‘Burma’s popular hero and… I look upon him as a sincere man… He has enough sense to realise that an uprising can only mean added misery.’136 Dorman-Smith did not extend this benediction to Mountbatten, however. Back in England, he poured out his bile. He railed against the impression that Dickie’s ‘sea-green incorruptibles’ had replaced ‘our old corruptibles’, adding in a deplorable piece of word-play that one of his own senior officials had been pushed out ‘unhonoured and Aung San’.137 He always knew he was persona ‘not very grata’ to Attlee, he said, but he really felt it when he arrived back in London. Unlike the old days when Leo Amery used to meet him at the railway station, there was no one waiting at Euston this time. He duly turned up at Wh
itehall. ‘Then I saw the Pathetic One [Pethick-Lawrence] – “Out you go”… So that was it. Exit Smith.’ Pethick-Lawrence had consulted him on nothing, had not enquired after his health – the alleged reason for his recall – and had not even bothered to get up from his chair to shake hands when he entered the room. Now he was sure that Mountbatten had plotted against him. He got wind of rumours that Mountbatten was destined for ‘some monumental appointment in the East’. Surely not the viceroyalty of India? But that would explain a lot. As viceroy Mountbatten would want to have his own man in Burma: ‘I HATE Dickie having a finger in the Burma pie because I think he is so unsound.’138 None of this would have mattered very much except that it encouraged the former governor to stick his own fingers in the pie. Over the next two years he remained dangerously close to Saw, the rogue element in Burmese politics, and he cultivated the radical Karen separatists, irreconcilables who were almost to blow apart the future Union of Burma.

  Almost all the pieces were now in place for the endgame of British Burma and the emergence of the new republic. But one other tangled set of events in the early part of 1946 set the scene for the country’s future and arguably for much of the rest of Southeast Asia. This was the implosion of the Burmese Communist Party, an event that ensured, in the long term, the relative isolation of Burma from the Cold War. Like the creaking British administration, the communist split was very much a matter of personalities. Since the beginning of the war, the communist hard man Thakin Soe had been quietly building up his cadres in the countryside. Soe took a dim view of erstwhile comrades such as Thakin Than Tun who had spent the war in ministerial office under Ba Maw, or skulking in Simla or Chungking. In the quaint lexicography of contemporary leftist abuse, Soe accused Than Tun and others of ‘Browderism’ or compromising communist purity by making deals with ‘imperialists’. Browder was an American communist leader who had preached a gospel of accommodation with capitalism.139 Worse, Soe accused Than Tun of corruption, in particular the misappropriation of a large quantity of gold that had been accumulated by the left for the purpose of anti-Japanese resistance during the war. An open split occurred at a conference in March 1946 when Than Tun and other communists who did not favour immediate armed struggle hit back with a lurid assault on Soe’s personal integrity. They accused him of extending his disdain for private property to other men’s wives and daughters and produced a lengthy charge sheet, detailing ‘how Thakin Soe had forcibly taken to himself the sister of his first wife; how he had deserted both the sisters and married a third wife; how he again left her and appropriated to himself a young woman recruit to the Party from the hands of one of his lieutenants’.140 After this conference, the main aim of Soe’s ‘red flag’ or Trotskyite communists became the extermination of the ‘white flag’ or Stalinist communists led by Than Tun. Soe went underground and continued to build up a following of Karen and Burmese communists in the Irrawaddy delta districts, occasionally engaging in dacoit-like attacks on the police and their rivals. This disunity among its future enemies was one important reason for the survival of the AFPFL government in the dangerous years immediately after independence.

  A NEW WORLD ORDER?

  A year on from the end of the European war and the death of Hitler, the world seemed no closer to reaching lasting peace. In Britain prosperity remained elusive. As a winter of bitter cold and gnawing food shortages drew to a close, labour disputes reached a crescendo. To no avail: the socialist millennium was indefinitely postponed. Abroad, British troops were spread thinly in Germany, as relations between the Allies and the Soviet Union deteriorated. They were also spread desperately thinly across Southeast Asia. Acute shortages of manpower eventually resulted in the British garrisons pulling out of Indonesia and Indo-China. This brought relief to the British alone, for as soon as they withdrew bloody fighting erupted between the nationalists and the Dutch in Indonesia and the Viet Minh and the French in Indo-China. Moreover, the British troops released from Indonesia and Indo-China faced likely redeployment in the region. Burma and Malaya were seething with ethnic and industrial conflict. In the one, Dorman-Smith’s unceremonious exit had left a dangerous vacuum that the perennial administrative ‘Mr Fixit’, Governor Knight, was scarcely able to fill. In the other, Sir Edward Gent’s plan for a Malayan Union ran into ferocious constitutional opposition from Malays at the very time that Chinese and Indian labour unions were flexing their muscles.

  It was by only a small margin that the communists in Burma and Malaya failed to take to arms in early 1946. A fair wind seemed to be blowing for revolution as Mao Zedong and his red cadres declared all-out war against Chiang Kai Shek and capitalized on their gains during the war. If Southeast Asian communists had followed the Chinese, the British would have been in an impossible position. British troops had to be demobilized to kick start the home economy in a period of desperate financial crisis. That old standby, the Indian Army, could no longer fill the gap as Nehru and Patel were demanding that Indian troops be brought home. In India itself, the results of the March provincial elections led to an impasse between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs worse than anything the gloomy and mordant Wavell had predicted. Calcutta daily inched closer to riotous violence and mass murder. Meanwhile, Sarat Bose and other Indian radical politicians played up the issue of the INA detainees for all they were worth. Ironically, Britain’s real saviour in these dark days of the eastern empire was the Japanese army. ‘They have been carrying out their “defeat drill”’, Esler Dening told Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, ‘with the discipline and determination which characterised their aggression.’141 Deprived of British and Indian troops, the British authorities used Japanese POWs to put down Indonesian and Vietnamese insurgents, police a restive Burma and build a real Fortress Singapore.

  Though Attlee was beginning to tire of Wavell’s pessimism, it was to be several months before he confirmed the rumours of Mountbatten’s ‘monumental appointment in the East’.142 Mountbatten and Malcolm MacDonald had similar views about the future of empire, although they approached the issue from a different social perspective. Mount-batten was a high aristocrat with a popular touch, a military man who could deal with nationalists, who saw himself as a kind of latter-day Lord Durham, turning the old empire into a commonwealth of free nations. MacDonald, a member of the Scottish socialist elite who tended towards liberal Toryism, had a similar vision, but none of the military or royal charisma of Mountbatten. While Mountbatten delighted in state pageantry, MacDonald opted for the more intellectually respectable ceremonial of university degree days. He much preferred attending meetings in an open-necked shirt and was famously denounced by the colonial press in Singapore for not possessing a tailcoat or dinner jacket. Mountbatten seems to have got on with Indian leaders precisely because he was a royal, but formed few intimacies. MacDonald reportedly had a string of Chinese and Eurasian girlfriends and adopted a Dayak family in Borneo. When the Sultan of Johore loaned him what his frequent guest, the Eurasian writer Han Suyin, called the ‘Walt Disney fantasy castle’ at Bukit Serene, MacDonald had some Dyak friends to stay. The sultan was incensed: ‘Why’, he expostulated, ‘should I have his damned Dyaks with their backsides in my chairs and in my bed?’ He cut off the water supply to the swimming pool.143 Yet MacDonald did not find India’s intense and intellectual politicians entirely to his taste. Like Mountbatten, who had accompanied the Prince of Wales on his unhappy tour of India in 1921–2, MacDonald had had an earlier introduction to Indian politics. He had acted as a go-between for his father with Gandhi when the latter had visited London for the second Round Table Conference in 1931. MacDonald found the Mahatma to be both charming and perplexing but remembered particularly his strangely shaped set of false teeth.144 MacDonald’s own rather prominent teeth left much to be desired, but, like the handsome Mountbatten, he nevertheless delighted in the company of stage and screen celebrities. He was to remain in the region in high office for eight years. He oversaw, though never directly managed, the exit of Burma from the Commonwealth
and the Malayan Emergency. He underestimated the strength of communism in Indo-China, but helped to lay the foundations of the economic rise of Singapore and Malaya. The British Empire had entered a new and final phase.

  6

  1946: One Empire Unravels, Another Is Born

  For one last time events in India changed the situation in Burma and sent shock waves speeding towards Malaya. Following the Congress’s great victories in the March 1946 elections, it had become obvious to Wavell and Auchinleck that the Indian Army could not be used to put down a revolt in Burma. This conclusion had already been forcibly impressed on Dorman-Smith. Now, as the impasse in Indian politics deepened, it also became clear that the British withdrawal from the country would be faster than anyone could possibly have predicted. The political outcome of the elections in the Punjab in the spring had left the Muslim League deeply embittered, although it had done rather well in several other provinces, notably through its proxies in Bengal. Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade, A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Pethick-Lawrence on their Cabinet Mission failed to find any common ground between warring politicians in Simla or Delhi.1 Congress refused to allow the Muslim League ‘parity’ of power in a future independent central government.2 The only alternative for Jinnah and the Muslim League was a weak centre in Delhi, with powerful provinces, so ensuring that Muslims would be in a strong position in Bengal and the Punjab. But this raised fears in the Congress of the ‘Balkanization’ of the country and even of its total disintegration. No deal was possible. Cripps found himself baffled and disillusioned yet again, not only by what he took to be Jinnah’s perennial intransigence, but also by Gandhi’s unhelpful stance now that the transfer of power was clearly in sight. Among ordinary people hope and fear alternated day by day. The word ‘Pakistan’ was used as both threat and incentive. It had been in the air since 1940 when the Muslim League had officially endorsed the vague idea of a ‘homeland’ for Indian Muslims. But almost to the very moment of independence neither Hindus nor Muslims really knew what the word meant. Would this Pakistan be part of an Indian union – a kind of Austria-Hungary – or part of a grouping of provinces of a more centralized state, or an independent entity? Certainly in 1946 no one would have predicted the emergence of the geopolitical absurdity that was to separate the two halves of a sovereign country by a thousand miles and cut off a large area of northeast India from the rest of the national territory.