by Harper, Tim
These strains made the mission’s work painfully difficult. Many of the better officers of the old Burma Army reluctantly realized that help from their former imperial master was essential if the country was to stay in one piece. But they resented the tone and manner of the professional British officers. Lieutenant Colonel Maung Maung, head of the officer training school at Maymyo, barked: ‘I don’t need any British advisers. I am the Commandant now and I will soon get rid of all of you.’32 Relations were further embittered by the fact that the remaining British officers occupied 90 per cent of the decent married accommodation at the major army bases. The Burmese, sporting their new national badges and epaulettes, were pushed out into leaking tents or bamboo huts as the first monsoon of independent Burma broke with patriotic violence. But, worse, there was a ghost at the feast: the Japanese. The most difficult thing of all to counteract, the British believed, was ‘the legacy of Japanese influence’.33 The Burmese admired the ‘simple ruthlessness’ of the Japanese. Many of the nationalist officers had been trained by them in 1941–2 and thought that the secret of Japan’s success had been the deployment of lightly equipped forces with a minimum of administrative control; they believed that their own army would be highly successful if trained along these lines. Despite Britain’s victorious fightback in 1944 and 1945, the Burmese thought that the British military tradition was still burdened with bumf, tied down with red tape, immobilized by protocols. After decades of colonial bureaucracy, the Burmese intensely disliked being drilled once again in spit, polish and paper.
Burmese politicians caught this mood easily. Once the communists and their other radical opponents began to accuse them of selling out to the old empire, the AFPFL began publicly to distance itself from the British mission. To the exasperation of the War Office in London, however, Nu and his colleagues freely combined public denunciations of unspecified ‘scheming imperialists’ with pathetic private appeals for aircraft, spare parts and ammunition, especially once the internal security situation began to deteriorate in March 1948. At the very moment when communist insurgency flared up in earnest, the Burmese minister of defence was about to make a private visit to Singapore to look at South East Asia Command’s hardware with an eye to future purchases. The Burmese government was forever demanding secondhand Oxford trainer aircraft, Spitfires and, above all, ammunition.34 The campaign of 1945 had made everyone only too well aware of the importance of fighter attacks in support of advancing troops. Thakin Nu himself had been surprised twice by British planes which came in to strafe Ba Maw’s house. But ammunition was the vital need, and here was a real problem. The War Office was alarmed because the Burmese demand for 6 million rounds was merely one among dozens of requisitions from newly liberated and newly embattled countries around the world from Greece to Malaya. There were two other particular embarrassments. Much of the new Burma Army’s equipment was Japanese. The British had to go cap in hand to the Americans in Japan to get them to release stores. Secondly, there was a nagging fear in the War Office that they were about to make a serious error. In China a great deal of Japanese war materiel had fallen directly into the hands of the communists or the Soviets in 1945. As summer arrived the mandarins’ nightmare was that the ammunition ships, Spitfires, Oxfords and all would enter Rangoon on the very day that the provisional Soviet Republic of Burma was proclaimed and the AFPFL was abruptly replaced with the red flag.35
This possibility dawned on the bureaucrats surprisingly late in the day. At first the British and Burmese governments were both fairly sure that the situation could be contained. Everyone agreed that the communists were only distantly linked to Moscow and certainly did not take orders from the Comintern. Foreign ideological links, insofar as they existed, were with India’s communists, who were better at discussions in coffeehouses than long marches. There had been sporadic trouble in the spring of 1947 and that had not come to very much. The only threat was that the army would itself lean to the left. When it first arrived the British mission thought this was unlikely. The Karens, Kachins and Shans were deemed to be uninterested in politics unless the government interfered in their ‘racial affairs’. Men from the old colonial army in Burma were either neutral or keenly loyal to the new regime. Even the fighters from the former Burma Defence Army were largely pro-AFPFL. There were, all the same, a few violent nationalists in the guise of communists in the 5th Burma Rifles, the training department, Burma Engineers and transport establishment.
THE GENESIS OF COMMUNIST REBELLION
As it turned out, everything was much more fragile than the authorities thought. The youth in the villages and in the volunteer organizations were deeply frustrated. The millennium had been promised for three years, it had dawned and nothing much had changed. The towns were doing better, but there were still areas of deep misery in the countryside, hungry for basic commodities let alone consumer goods. Land reform was in train but already it seemed that the people who were getting ‘peasant holdings’ sequestered from the Indian, Chinese and other landholders were the hangers-on of the AFPFL village committees and not young PVO men who had fought for their country.36 Indian moneylenders still collected their interest in the delta villages. Arrogant Europeans still patrolled the teak forests. Communist propaganda was quite effective. The young believed that Britain was still milking Burma of its resources and, worse, that the Burmese government was paying compensation to it for the nationalization of unprincipled British firms. Burma’s military forces were not even its own, as could be seen by the presence of the British services mission.
Quite apart from these local resentments, a deep sense that the world was changing had trickled into even remote areas. Something called communism, which promised to get rid of landowners and capitalists, was sweeping across eastern Europe. Burmese communists joined Indian ones at their great congress in Calcutta in February 1948, perhaps the high point of radical communism in India. The Party had finally began to throw off the taint that it had collaborated with the British during the war. A violent and partly successful communist movement was pitting peasants against landlords in the southern Indian state of Telengana (to the north of the old Madras presidency) and this was shaking Jawaharlal Nehru’s new polity. Burmese communists also met British communists in a conference in London that year. Meanwhile, Andrei Zhdanov and the Cominform were apparently preparing for a set of risings across Southeast Asia which would parallel the successes of communism in eastern Europe. Connections between these different groups of revolutionaries were indeed extremely indirect, but there was a general sense that the socialist world had emerged from the war in a strong position.
Back in Burma, nationalist defeats in China crept closer to the northern border and army deserters flooded into the Kachin and northern Shan states. A new charismatic name began to be heard among the youths arguing in the meeting places of small towns: Mao Zedong. There is little evidence that the Chinese communists had even the most distant relationship with the red- or white-flag communists in Burma before 1948,37 but Burmese translations of Mao’s works began to appear in large numbers in the early months of that year. Mao’s military language and insistence that the peasantry could be the vanguard of revolution appealed to young people whose world had already been turned upside down once in their short lives. It meant much more than the arid, Moscow-style logic chopping of orthodox communists and their Bengali admirers. Even the British embassy began to hear rumours of Mao. They telegraphed to London asking for English translations of his works. Yet no one in London seemed to know who he was.
Hari Narayan Ghosal and his allies must have sensed this change in public mood, so rather than risk being caught off guard by an outbreak of unco-ordinated popular uprisings in the delta and the north, they began in the early weeks of 1948 to plan a co-ordinated uprising for the late spring. Ghosal adhered to what was called a ‘working-class’ strategy. This involved the formation in the towns of armed workers’ militias. Than Tun and Ba Thein, two other leaders, favoured creating ‘base areas’
among the peasantry in what was rapidly becoming known as a Maoist strategy. In this ‘semi-feudal’ country, ignoring the peasantry was not an option. Ghosal himself addressed a mass meeting of hundreds of thousands of peasants in March 1948, promising them land and no taxes.38 The idea was apparently to move in March and April to create a series of communist-controlled base areas which would cut the country in two and isolate Rangoon from Mandalay. Then, as the monsoon set in and the already stretched and immobile government forces became bogged down in the mud, these base areas could be linked together. A working-class rising in the Rangoon docks and the southern oil installations would accompany a coup d’état which would foreshadow victory over imperialism and the Burmese bourgeoisie. As it was, the government, which was partially informed of these plans, made the first move. On 23 March several communist leaders were rounded up by the police and interrogated, but the operation was bungled and many of the most important leaders scattered into the hinterland.39
By 1 April the political situation in the country was very uneasy and a week later the typical signs of a Burmese insurrection were plain to see. Telegraph wires and bridges were sabotaged across the delta and police stations were under attack in a way reminiscent of the revolt against the Japanese three years earlier. Some of those more traditional symptoms of a coming uprising which generations of British officials were taught to expect had also begun to appear. People had their skin tattooed to ward off evil and insurgents tried to make themselves invulnerable to government bullets with spells.40 The old prophecies of the 1880s about Burma’s future were ransacked once again and spirit dancers at the nat spirit shrines mouthed apocalyptic premonitions. Villages were burned and police stations attacked across a wide range of territory in the south and the north-central part of the country. The six-month-long ‘Boys’ Day’ party abruptly broke up in tears. James Bowker, the British ambassador, described ‘a state of mind bordering on panic’ in the Rangoon secretariat.41 To add to its troubles, the government got into a long slugging match with the press about one of Burma’s periodic political sex scandals. The minister of agriculture was accused of seducing a ‘respectable’ married woman. The minister denied this and the AFPFL leadership began attacking newspapers and encouraging mobs to destroy several newspaper offices and presses. It mattered little that the public later discovered that the woman concerned had gone through no fewer than five husbands before she was twenty-four and, in Furnivall’s Victorian parlance, was ‘no better than a baggage’.42 The two years of press freedom which Burma had enjoyed effectively came to an end, never to return.
The government realized that the police were unrealiable, the volunteer brigades were hostile and the army was split down the middle. It vacillated, embarking now on a half-hearted purge of the army and pleading secretly for help from the British. At the same time, though, it confused matters by trying to improve relations with the communists in private discussions. To the annoyance of the British government, Nu again publicly denounced ‘imperialists’ – their identity was scarcely concealed – in an attempt to curry favour with his leftist former colleagues.43 Yes, of course compensation would be given to British firms, the government said, but this was no different from the compensation given to Western firms by the recently installed communist government in Czechoslovakia. And Burma’s debt repayment to the British was no different from the one embarked on by the communist USSR in the 1920s. Anyway, the British government was itself socialist; it had simply avoided the Soviet way of blood, pleaded Nu, once again longing for retirement to a monastery.
Though Nu’s speech stirred up a flurry of pained letters from the British ambassador and even a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger epistle from Stafford Cripps, this trimming cut little ice with the communists.44 It also made the War Office even more suspicious about handing over military hardware to Burma. Relations between the two governments were further strained when the Burmese began alleging that British military procurement and sale in the whole of South East Asia Command was corrupt. They had been reliably informed that huge quantities of military stores, which should have gone to Burma under the Attlee–Nu agreement, were actually being sold off on the Singapore black market and were probably finding their way into the hands of Malayan and Burmese communists.45 In Rangoon itself there were persistent rumours and allegations that the British military supply board (a civilian organization) was in cahoots with local Anglo-Burmese and Indian businessmen. Rather than selling to government, it was secretly disposing of war surplus to the highest bidder, in the best traditions of the old ‘black-market administration’ of 1945. Whitehall was somewhat muted in its response to these allegations because they seemed only too plausible.
Besides denouncing the British, Nu tried other ways to revive national unity and outflank the communists. In early April he masterminded a final burial ceremony for the embalmed remains of Aung San and his colleagues. Medical opinion supported the interment; the bodies, still lying in state in the Jubilee Hall, were decomposing rapidly.46 But Furnivall understood the political motive behind the ceremony: Nu’s attempt to invoke the spirit of Aung San to revive the old wartime nationalist alliance. Members of the armed forces drew Bogyoke’s bier to his last resting place and some communist leaders attended the burial, but past comradeship could not hide present differences. On 8 May the final act of this older drama was played out. At dawn on this cloudy morning U Saw walked out of his prison cell wearing his usual jacket and a longyi. He chatted briefly with his guards and shook the hands of the men who were about to hang him.47 All appeals, private and public, had failed. Dorman-Smith could do nothing for him, even though he had written a letter to him claiming that the trial was biased and had publicly declared, ‘I know U Saw. I know him to be an honest man.’48 In fact, as Furnivall noted, ‘Dorman-Smith’s appeal for mercy on behalf of U Saw was perhaps the most certain way of ensuring his execution’, as most Burmese believed that Dorman-Smith was somehow connected with the assassination of Aung San.49 British associates who might have taken some of the blame for murder had been quietly frog-marched off the political stage, to the relief of both governments. In his final moments, U Saw turned to Buddhist priests, saying, ‘He who dares to do things, must dare bear the consequences.’ Two of his Burmese associates were hanged with him. Later that day Nu hosted a rally for peasants in Fytche Square, newly renamed Bandula Park after the antique Burmese martial hero. He urged his audience to grow more food. With U Saw dead, almost the last link with the Burmese high politics of the 1930s had been severed.
A SUMMER OF ANARCHY
By early June the situation had deteriorated further. Burmese Muslims were on the point of rebellion in Arakan. To the far north sporadic rebellions among hill Karen, Shan and Kachin peoples became entwined with the politics of opium.50 In the south, in the countryside around Pegu, rebels showed a new level of determination, fighting on during the monsoon when once they would have retired to await drier conditions.51 They were also prepared to mount strong attacks on Burma Army units and police stations, taking heavy casualties in the process. This too was a new development. It was already, the British mission conceded, ‘a small civil war’52 and the ‘Irrawaddy valley was virtually dominated by the rebels’.53 The only thing that held the rebels back was a shortage of ammunition for their predominantly Japanese weapons. But this was true of the government forces as well. The government renewed its secret pleas to London for ammunition and attack aircraft. The War Office had already despatched an ammunition ship, but that was heading for Rangoon at a deliberately slow pace. The Burmese government fumbled on the political front too. It pronounced an amnesty and wasted fuel dropping leaflets over the countryside in imitation of Slim’s psychological warfare four years earlier. The communists made an easy riposte with their argument that the government was selling the country out. There were now twenty British ‘advisers’ in the Rangoon War Office. Then again, the government decided to try to recruit police into the army. But 800 of the 1,200 men concerned were de
clared unfit ‘due to VD and other causes’. In planning attacks on the rebel positions, Smith Dun always had the feeling that the descendants of Aung San’s army were not really ‘his’ men. ‘In short the whole five battalions of the ex-Patriotic Burma Force contingent… is not available for serious internal security purposes.’
In July, when the insurrections were making rapid headway, Nu reacted in a manner that was typical of his Buddhist beliefs and idiosyncratic politics. He knelt before an image of the Buddha in his house and made a vow of celibacy, or ‘extreme purity’, as he put it. Soon afterwards his wife moved out of the house and the couple separated. Perhaps Nu felt that this act of personal renunciation would help atone for the murder and destruction occurring all around him.54 The embattled prime minister now lived alone in what was commonly called ‘the concentration camp’ in Windermere Park. This was a heavily fortified, barbed-wire protected enclosure patrolled by trigger-happy guards who occasionally shot dead civilians who inadvertently got too close.55 A couple of months later a British press correspondent compared Rangoon to ‘a Mexican border city expecting a raid by Pancho Villa. It is a city of non-descript uniforms, sombrero wearing gunmen with pistols lashed to their thighs, multi-guarded politicians, funk holes and fear.’56