Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  Help was a long time in coming; the government machine was virtually shut down for a time. Muslim clerks in the local telegraph office intercepted and destroyed messages from Hindu inhabitants of Noakhali and Tippera begging for help. When the security forces arrived, as one British subaltern remembered, it was often too late.27 Whole villages had been plundered and dozens of people killed. In order to suppress the disturbances, the authorities eventually had to deploy 1,800 troops, 600 armed police, 130 unarmed police and even the Royal Air Force. By then the damage had been done; 50,000 people in the two districts were homeless. Thousands of Hindus from the surrounding villages fled into Dacca city, making its neighbourhoods yet more tense.28 Another 25,000 sought shelter in Calcutta. Hindus elsewhere sought revenge. From late October into November, Hindus to the west, in Bihar, slaughtered 25,000 of their Muslim neighbours, sparking a massive migration of Muslims towards the east. By December a single abandoned USairbase in Burdwan was playing home to more than 30,000 refugees from Bihar.29 Over the next decade as many as 4 million people would move from their ancestral homes, pursued by fear of their erstwhile neighbours. At first it was the more prosperous Hindus of east Bengal who moved off to Chandpur or Calcutta, never to return. Many had relatives and property in Calcutta and decided to cut their losses in the east. Later, poor Hindus followed them. Noakhali, even more than Calcutta, destroyed the ancient co-existence between Hindus and Muslims that had characterized much of rural Bengal. One refugee remembered: ‘The change was so sudden, you see. Even a year ago we had played Holi [a Hindu festival] together with Muslim girls. But Noakhali changed everything. As young girls we began to feel insecure.’30 The alternating waves of refugees from east and west further spread fear and hostility in the province. Hindus in the western parts of Bengal worried about the influx of Muslims fleeing from Bihar and were only too happy to see them decamp further to the east along with local Muslims.31

  His perpetual gloom now deepening to despair, Wavell wrote home that British rule was on the point of dissolution. He was not getting much help from Indian politicians. During the Calcutta massacres Gandhi, refusing further concessions to Muslim League politicians, had thumped the table in front of the viceroy shouting, ‘If India wants her bloodbath, she shall have it!’32 Gandhi was in fact appalled by the violence and spent much of October and November touring affected villages in Bengal trying to encourage dialogue between Hindus and Muslims. But he could not help but compare the vigorous action of the British to suppress the Quit India movement of 1942 with their slowness and inaction now. In this he had neatly caught the viceroy’s mood. All that could be managed, Wavell concluded, was to preserve the lives of British civilians and get the army out in some kind of order. His officials agreed. After Noakhali, John Tyson, a senior official in Bengal, recorded simply: ‘I think the sooner we clear out the better.’33 At one time Wavell contemplated a ‘breakdown plan’, whereby the British would roll back from one province after another, retreating to the northeast and the northwest of the country. Privately, he called this ‘Operation Madhouse’. If order could not even be preserved in Bengal, the ancient core of the British Empire in the East, where could it be preserved? This thought was particularly sombre since the only force capable of pacifying the fractious colonies of the crescent was the Indian Army. But that army was now no more than a withered limb of the British state. Its regiments were worried, decimated by demobilization and made uneasy by the rise of Hindu–Muslim tension, as Suhrawardy had predicted. More seriously, the new quasi-independent Indian government had made it clear that Indian troops should not be used in Burma or Malaya, let alone farther afield. Congress was infuriated that Indian soldiers had died the previous winter in Indo-China and Indonesia putting down what its leaders regarded as fraternal national liberation movements. British rule seemed as precarious as it had done in the spring of 1942. Yet this time there was little to fight back with.

  BRITAIN’S TERMINAL CRISIS IN BURMA

  In Burma, too, events on the ground were spinning out of control. Dorman-Smith’s departure and Knight’s interregnum had given the Burmese radicals the signal for revolt. Old friends returned to stir the political pot. Out in the districts there was an ominous tide of minor revolts and clashes between different ethnic and religious groups. Ba Maw, the former Japanese-sponsored Adipadi, returned from a brief imprisonment in Tokyo, announcing on the steps of the aircraft that his government had not been a ‘Jap regime’ but a ‘Burma regime’.34 Sarat Bose, Netaji’s brother, made a speech, closely monitored by the CID, in which he prophesied that the British would be driven out only by the shedding of blood and urged Burmese to live up to the ideals of Netaji. A thousand people heard him speak, including 300 ex-INA men in uniform.35 Burma’s Indian population remained uncertain. Most Hindu, Sikh and Christian Indians fully identified with the AFPFL, but feared that the anti-immigrant element in Burmese politics would rise to the surface in a time of crisis. By contrast, many Indian Muslims held themselves aloof from the AFPFL, which for them still had a whiff of communalism about it from the pre-war days. In Arakan, Muslims identified with Jinnah’s inchoate Pakistan, particularly after the communal riots in Calcutta in August and September. Industrial trouble spread. A few Indian radicals and workers on the partially restored oilfields heeded the call of P. C. Joshi, Secretary General of the Indian Communist Party, for a union between Burmese communists of all races and all factions in anticipation of a general Asian rising against ‘monopoly capitalism and imperialism’. Large numbers of Indian postal workers struck in sympathy with their counterparts in the subcontinent who were suffering as a result of high prices. Relations between Burmese and Chinese, usually less tense than those between Burmese and Indians, also deteriorated. The nationalist government in China pledged $5 million for the rebuilding of Chinese businesses shattered by the Japanese.36 Burmese politicians feared that this would tip the economic balance back towards the Chinese in areas where they had benefited during the war. Meanwhile, clandestine groupings such as the Black Star Society and paramilitary bodies such as the People’s Volunteer Organizations hoarded the vast numbers of Allied and Japanese weapons that had fallen into their hands over the past few years.

  As India’s interim government took office in September, the fact that their big neighbour had already achieved a kind of independence goaded Burmese politicians to greater intransigence. Hubert Rance, the new governor, immediately noted that the Burmese were hostile and resentful because no grand British Cabinet Mission had bothered to visit Burma – ‘the most devastated country in the empire’.37 The Burmese had suddenly begun to appreciate the fragility of British power in Asia. Aung San’s hungry and frustrated supporters looked on impatiently as some aspects of the old regime seemed to totter on regardless. As soon as he arrived, Rance was therefore plunged into the worst Burmese political crisis since the reoccupation of Rangoon. September 1946 saw a mass movement on a scale that appalled the authorities. It only just failed to become another 1886 or 1930 rebellion, mainly as a result of the good judgement of Aung San. Large areas of the countryside were out of control of the central authorities, principally the ones that had caused trouble throughout British rule and before: the ‘badlands’ of Shwebo, north of Mandalay; the impoverished middle Irrawaddy basin with its difficult lines of communication; and the old haunts in the delta of the rebel monk of the 1930 uprising, Saya San. The anti-government forces had got their hands on automatic weapons and large reserves of ammunition that had presumably been buried since the Japanese withdrawal. Two thousand police were already on strike and the number of dacoities was soaring. In one incident in a town southwest of Rangoon 17,000 bags of rice were looted in a single raid.38 Elsewhere a Burmese district magistrate evacuated himself and his treasury from town on hearing that a small army of bandits was about to attack. Special Branch reported gloomily that ‘prolonged rebellion will probably reduce the civil population to starvation’.

  On the face of it, the British still had considerab
le strength in Burma. There were more than 10,000 British soldiers in the country in mid 1946 and they showed few signs of demoralization, let alone mutiny, unlike some of the forces in Malaya. Yet the situation was much more fragile than it seemed. In 1945 the term of service for British soldiers had been reduced from four years to three years and eight months and this meant that repatriation to Britain was proceeding apace. Later, a full-scale demobilization began, a decision that effectively turned the ‘British’ garrison in Burma into an Indian and West African one. Therein lay the problem: even in 1946 there were still large numbers of Japanese POWs in the county, along with a few units of the INA who had not yet been returned to India. British authority began to look stretched when West African troops conducted flag marches through the villages of southern Burma or were seen supervising Japanese soldiers building roads. Burmese villagers were wary of both groups of troops, with some reason. Their memories of the Japanese were only too recent and many Burmese were overwhelmed by the size, colour and radically different demeanour of the Africans. Not that this stopped some Burmese from exploiting the newcomers’ naivety. The West African men, isolated in the countryside, began to find companions among the Burmese village girls. In some cases they proposed to them and used their meagre savings to give the girls’ families ‘bridewealth’ in the traditional African form. These payments – between 30 and 100 rupees – signalled that the soldiers intended to marry the girls and would take them back to Africa when the time came. On more than one occasion, though, the love-smitten Africans came back to the villages only to find that the girls and their families had disappeared – along with the hard-earned bridewealth. Serious trouble flared up between Burmese villagers and the British and West African regiments in what was already a political powder keg.39 Still, the governor was grateful to have the West African troops. They were well disciplined and rarely inclined to pick a fight with the locals. And their striking physiques did lend a little glory to Britain’s shrinking power. Many of the Africans passed through a recreational camp near Rangoon. They visited the city frequently, impressing its fractious youth with the continuing reach of British rule.

  The bushfire revolts and affrays in the countryside were matched in the towns by an extraordinary show of trade-union strength, all the more pointed because people were still poverty stricken from the war. The political heat was turned up as the AFPFL demanded a date for independence from the British government. Basically, this was a revolt for better conditions. British rule seemed no better than Japanese: annual inflation was soaring away and real incomes had reduced by 25 per cent. First of all the Rangoon police went on strike on 9 September, then the postal service union on 15 September. Finally, a general strike was called on 23 September. By the last week of this troubled month, nearly 100,000 key workers were on strike.40 They included government servants, port workers, police and post-and-telegraph employees. Supplies were not coming off the ships in Rangoon harbour.41 There was concern that the oil, which provided Burma’s main foreign exchange earnings, would dry up. Worse, women and children still suffering from the malnutrition and disease of the terrible war years were once again under threat. The already spartan ration shops were running out of essential commodities such as groundnut oil. Places far upcountry, especially in the hills, could only be supplied from Rangoon and they rapidly ran out of supplies. Memories of 1942 resurfaced and the authorities planned food drops to the Karenni states and other remote points. One sign that this generation of British officials was rattled was provided by their references to the British general strike of 1926. The government’s publicity offices tried to make much of the plight of children in their propaganda against the AFPFL: ‘If the trains from Rangoon to Mandalay do not run our kinsmen in Upper Burma and the Shan states will suffer,’ wrote Maung Tin and F. B. Arnold in a press release. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, officials tried to persuade the strikers to exempt vital provisions from their blockades.42

  The sense of crisis radiated across the whole region. The authorities in Malaya were also facing strikes in hospitals and industrial units while the Malayan Communist Party staged a huge demonstration that drew more than 10,000 people into the streets. South East Asia Command made it clear to the cabinet that the whole of Britain’s Southeast Asian empire was spiralling down to disaster. Wavell, now at his gloomiest, continued to ponder ‘Operation Madhouse’ and drew up a plan to save the lives of British residents in India in case of a total breakdown of order. At last Clement Attlee was obliged to look up from Britain’s domestic troubles and contemplate the looming catastrophe in the East.

  Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, victor at El Alamein and now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was also growing alarmed. He told the chiefs of staff committee on 23 September 1946 that Britain faced a critical problem if the internal situations in India, Malaya, Burma and Palestine continued to deteriorate in parallel.43 There were simply not enough troops left for the other colonies if substantial numbers were sent to Rangoon. Britain could not count on Australian help any longer and it would have difficulty in extracting its Commonwealth troops from the occupation forces in Japan. Nor, in view of the growing Soviet menace, could it switch troops from Greece or Germany to deal with a crisis in Southeast Asia. It also had to be remembered, Montgomery warned, that India was now a virtually independent country under its own interim government. If Nehru demanded the withdrawal of Indian troops or refused them for use in the case of serious internal trouble in the country, ‘we should not be able to handle the situation in Burma’.

  Hubert Rance was unimaginative but hardworking. He did not have Dorman-Smith’s literary flair. But he was intensely practical and, as Mountbatten’s ADC in the British Military Administration, he knew a lot about Burma. Straightaway he understood that suppression of the radical nationalists was impossible. The appreciation of the situation that he wrote for the Burma Office on 15 September 1946 was clear-eyed and unsentimental. He did not like the AFPFL, distrusting its authoritarian tendencies much more than Mountbatten had done. He noted that between Dorman-Smith’s departure and his own arrival it had built up its power by ‘taking all the measures so profitably used by Hitler, Mussolini and Ghandi [sic]’.44 Like many other British officials, he thought Aung San, though young and apparently indecisive, was at least sincere. Rance believed the problem was that if the British were to hitch themselves irrevocably to the AFPFL, its leftward trend might sour relations with the potentially powerful Buddhist monks, whom, perhaps mistakenly, he did not see as a radical force. Yet the alternative – the suppression of the AFPFL – really was out of the question. There were not enough British troops to go round and the hybrid Burma Army – part BNA and part old-style colonial force – would fragment on political and ethnic lines if he tried. Worse, Wavell and Auchinleck continued to tell him that there was no way he could use Indian troops to suppress Burmese nationalists.

  Rance had one other option. This was to try to build up a moderate party of the old order, perhaps including some of the more conciliatory nationalists. His assessments of the available politicians were not so different from Dorman-Smith’s. He quickly concluded that Sir Paw Tun was past it, but he took to the recently repatriated U Saw, as so many British did. ‘I was impressed by his virility and oratory’, he wrote, describing him later as ‘probably the most forceful character in Burma today’.45 In the course of conversation with Saw, Rance remarked that he was also quite impressed with Aung San, especially since he had just managed to give a speech lasting for five and a half hours. But ‘U Saw was not impressed, as his record is twelve hours’. Saw held out some bait to the governor. He tried to diminish Aung San, saying that he was sincere ‘but not a strong character’, controlled first by the communist Than Tun, and later by other major figures in the AFPFL. Even more to Rance’s taste, Saw positioned a future independent Burma – under his rule – within the British Commonwealth. He readily accepted that free Burma would need British help. The United Nations was ineffective, he said, whil
e Russia was ideologically purblind and the USwas distant. Without British support the Burmese might wake up to find the Chinese in Mandalay one day, in Sagaing the next and Rangoon the day after: ‘A hundred million Chinese in Yunnan could not be ignored.’46 Saw tried to persuade Rance that the British overestimated the AFPFL. He said that they were powerful in Rangoon and parts of the delta but elsewhere people were thoroughly sick of them. Later, writing a memorandum for Rance, Saw took the gloves off and railed against Aung San. He had been tutored by the Japanese and hated democracy. Throughout Burma it was the ‘brute force and terrorism’ of the AFPFL which prevailed. Most of its members were unemployed. Hence they resorted to extorting goods and money from people by using Aung San’s alternative title Bogyoke, ‘a title which inspired the awe and abject submission of a great bulk of the unthinking masses’.47 The British, he concluded, had failed in their responsibilities since their return. They should have relied on the old ministers such as Saw himself. Instead, the ‘Burmese felt that the British Government have wittingly or unwittingly handed over the administration of the country to a band of traitorous fascists whose avowed policy is to gain power and ascendancy at all costs’.48