Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  The dissipation of the Force 136 problem did little to calm the nerves of the British either. They were now, like the Indians, deeply worried about the fate of their own subjects in Burma and also by the possible total forfeit of British economic interests in the country, which were still far from negligible. The alarm had been raised as early as June when Mr Forbes, manager of the Shan Hills Rubber Estate, had been murdered, along with his wife, by communist rebels in the vicinity of Thaton and there were several other attacks on rubber planters.73 Though Forbes was said to have been rather unpopular locally, there had been unsuccessful attacks on other estate managers around the country and the embassy reckoned that at least twenty British subjects were seriously exposed in the interior. Then there were large numbers of Britons in Rangoon and Maymyo, not to mention the British services mission, a particular target of the communists. Questions had already been raised in Parliament about the expatriates’ safety and several commentators drew disturbing parallels with contemporary assassinations in Malaya. Was this part of some region-wide communist plot?74 The problem was that if British fears became public this tended to undermine confidence in the already battered and impecunious Burmese government. If, on the other hand, the British flexed their muscles, this played into the hands of the Burmese left. The left was correct to be suspicious. Bowker, Britain’s man in Rangoon, was advocating a full expeditionary force to save British interests in the country. Somehow Reuters got wind of this and put out a report to the effect that a large British rescue force was waiting to sail from Ceylon. This had to be shamefacedly denied and, in truth, it had never been under consideration in London. The long memory of the Foreign Office recalled that the last time something like this had been attempted was in 1882 when the British had occupied an insurgent Egypt. Troops were sent in and ‘they are there to this day’.75

  As the year drew to its end the situation in Burma still seemed so grave that the Americans, acutely alert to the threat of communism, were now seriously worried. The sporadic fighting and endemic dacoities surged backward and forward across the delta, the Irrawaddy valley and the forest areas to the north. Of course, this does not mean that the country was in complete anarchy. In many places authority had simply gravitated to the level where it had always been most secure – with the village and township headmen and the chiefs and councils of the wooded and hill areas. But to the Burmese nationalists and the old British Burma hands looking on, the worst nightmares had already come to pass. Murray noted that ‘our only consolation is that we now have nothing left worth losing’. British firms had begun to leave with whatever they could still get their hands on.76 Yet even the communists were divided and incapable of putting on a united face to negotiate with the government. A number of the saner leaders were held under Section 5 of the Preservation of Public Order Act. Because the word for ‘five’ and the word for ‘fish’ were the same in Burmese, people said they were ‘eating fried fish’.77 Many Burmese were now contemplating military rule as the only solution. The problem was that even the military seemed incapable of throwing up a strong leader.

  Symptomatic of this dismal end to Burma’s year of hope was the fate of Tin Tut, the redoubtable and clever former ICS officer who had fled with Dorman-Smith to Simla and re-emerged as minister and financial expert of the independent government. Tin Tut had been pushed out of the economics ministry into the Burmese Foreign Office because he was not really acceptable to the former hardline nationalists who resented his earlier connection with the British. In August he had resigned from the government altogether and had taken a commission in the army, complaining that the dictatorial socialists refused any initiative that did not come from inside their own ranks. On 17 September his car was attacked with a hand grenade as he drove through the streets of Rangoon and he died a few hours later in hospital.78 A strong Burmese nationalist, even while within the ranks of the ICS, U Tin Tut, CBE, was almost the last of his kind. Why was he assassinated? Furnivall, by now perhaps prey to endemic Burmese political paranoia, believed that he might have been on the point of declaring a dictatorship with the help of the British services mission. Certainly many Burmese thought so: ‘The Europeans and the few Burmese with any land or money were all resting their hopes in Tin Tut.’79 This easily merged with rumours about Australian bootlegging aircraft dropping caches of arms to the Karens and the shenanigans of adventurers such as ‘Pop’ Tulloch. There was a strong suspicion that Aung Gyi, deputy inspector of the ‘anti-rightist’ and semi-criminal Sitwundan militia, was responsible for the assassination.80

  In the long-lost pre-war days, there had been little connection between Burma and Malaya. Now events seemed to be pushing the two regions into a single frame of reference as far as the British, Americans and their communist enemies were concerned. In September Nu himself had written a rather ponderous and complacent letter to Malcolm MacDonald, British Governor General of Southeast Asia. He pointed out that they were both bulwarks against international communism and espoused a moderate democratic socialism that he claimed represented both the British and the Burmese way. As the Governor General contemplated his own equally intractable mix of ethnic conflict, communist insurrection and anti-imperialist fervour, he may well have smiled wryly.

  In Burma, December was a dangerous month. The Karen delta towns had been the scene of the fiercest claims for a separate state. Here some Karens had declared independence at the very time in January 1948 when Burma was celebrating its own freedom. By the summer, as Karen forces moved north towards Rangoon, there were once again communal murders in the villages. Attempts were made to arrange a ceasefire and several of the delta towns were handed back to the Rangoon government at one point. But the conflict was out of control. Later in the year the government attempted to disband the remaining ‘loyal’ Karen battalions of the army, fearing they too would mutiny. On Christmas Eve 1948, Burmese irregulars threw hand grenades into a Karen church where people were celebrating the festival. The fleeing congregation was shot down or bayoneted.81 The insurgent Karen forces now went on the offensive, digging in at Insein, close to the capital, even after they failed to take Rangoon itself. They sang as they marched: ‘Death and Life are in God’s hands. Hey, why should we fear the Burmese?’82 Increasingly, Karen officers in the regular army joined their insurgent brothers or collaborated with them privately. Massacre and counter-massacre spread across the delta region as ‘ethnic cleansing’ began. Meanwhile Rangoon civilians took day trips out to the front where the army allowed them to take pot shots at the Karen fighters for one rupee a bullet. Boys’ Day in Burma had become a vicious dogfight. The only hope, as Furnivall put it, was that ‘it is not that the rebels are strong, but the Government is weak’.83

  INDIA RECEDES, INDIA REBORN

  In early 1948 the independent government of India had sent saplings from a leafy descendant of the tree in Bodh Gaya, under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, to celebrate Burma’s own independence. Yet no more than Burma were India and Pakistan dancing in streams of gold and silver during that cold weather. Scarcely had the communal massacres died away than tension between the two dominions began to increase on the borders of the disputed state of Kashmir. Scarcely had Nehru written his first New Year message as prime minister than the aged Gandhi was shot to death by a right-wing Hindu assassin after his daily prayer meeting in Delhi. John de Chazal, one of the remaining and now increasingly disillusioned British police officials, remembered the outpouring of grief in his distant part of south India when an urn of Gandhi’s ashes arrived there to be scattered, symbolizing the unity of the nation. Mourning was so intense that it reminded him of family stories of Queen Victoria’s funeral. As the ashes were consigned to sacred rivers and lakes across India and even sent to Burma to be scattered on the Irrawaddy among crowds of mourning Indians and Burmese,84 ‘drums beat all night and men and boys shouted “Gandhi-ji ki jai; Gandhi-ji ki jai [victory to Gandhi!]” till they were hoarse’.85 The remaining British officials and military men already kn
ew their days in the subcontinent were numbered, some feeling that their lives’ work had been for nothing. Their authority now in rapid decline, they scattered across the empire. Some went to commercial jobs in Britain, Canada or Australasia; others entered the Nigerian or Kenyan civil service or police. For them, the long tradition of the Raj came to an end with regret and resentment.

  It was not only British India but also the wider British Indian empire, from the Arabian seas to the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal, that came to an end. The year 1948 saw Indian power recede from Burma for the first time in 130 years. One of the most venerated public places in Mandalay, particularly in the year of independence when enemies were pressing in on all sides, was the pagoda that held the great image of Buddha Mahamuni. This had been taken from the kingdom of Manipur on the Burma–India border in the late eighteenth century when the Burmese king Bodhayappa had been trying to create a Buddhist empire in Southeast Asia. The raid into the northeast of the Indian subcontinent had attracted the attention of a much bigger and well-armed commercial empire, that of the East India Company. From the 1820s onward, Burma had been subject to successive waves of invasion by British troops, colonial logging companies, ruby and oil interests and, finally, Indian merchants and labourers. In 1944 and 1945 the British Indian Army had invaded the country and as late as October 1947 there had still been thousands of Indian soldiers there. That influence had now been withdrawn. Indian troops had left Burma along with the last British officers and civil servants. Up to 800,000 Indian civilians remained in the country, some like Balwant Singh in positions of authority. But India’s proxy empire in Burma disappeared with the end of British rule in the subcontinent. India’s new rulers were to keep a weather eye on events in their neighbouring country and even, on occasions, to intervene with money and military aid. Yet Nehru and his foreign-affairs expert Krishna Menon had no desire for a greater Indian empire. They discouraged both the Indian businessmen and labour unions which wanted to keep a hold on their smaller eastern neighbour. Pakistan retained an interest in the Muslim population of Arakan, but was keen to avoid any further ethnic and religious conflicts that might compromise its bizarre set of borders. The huge land mass of the Indian subcontinent continued to exert its gravitational pull on Burma, like a monster planet influencing a satellite moon, but empire had given way to moral and economic suasion.

  In part, this was because the great subcontinent was absorbed in its own problems and because residual British influence was deployed to keep the new dominions from each other’s throats. Mountbatten, the last British leader to span both India and Burma, was preoccupied with the problems that arose from partition. Some of the British who ‘stayed on’ accused him of ‘too much pomp, overacting and creating a “Hollywood atmosphere”’.86 But Indians enjoyed seeing newsreels where he and his wife Edwina were shown deep in discussion with Gandhi or at the recently assassinated leader’s funeral. Later in the year an unofficial war broke out between India and Pakistan over Nehru’s beloved state of Kashmir. The Indian Army was deployed in the mountainous country along long lines of communication to combat invasion by Muslim irregulars, who were determined to bring the Muslim-majority state into Pakistan. The remaining British soldiers and military attachés on both sides tried to prevent the situation from degenerating into full-scale war between two members of the Commonwealth.87 Hindu, Sikh and Muslim soldiers who had been comrades in arms in the Burma campaign a mere four years before found themselves on opposite sides. Some old comrades were killed by their erstwhile friends. Major K. K. Tewari, who had fought through the third Arakan campaign and taken part in the reoccupation of Malaya, lost one of his closest comrades in the fighting.88 This man’s mutilated body could be identified only by the Japanese pistol he had in his holster and the copy of the Bhagavad Gita, part of the ancient Hindus scriptures, he kept in his pocket. Roy Bucher, who remained commander-in-chief of the Indian army until 1949, was put in the invidious position of treating his opposite number in Pakistan, Douglas Gracey, as an undeclared enemy. That autumn the Indian Army was also used to occupy and absorb into India the recalcitrant princely state of Hyderabad, whose royal line was Muslim. The ostensible enemy were bands of Muslim irregulars called Razakars, who opposed union with India. But a wider shadow was now falling across the whole of South and Southeast Asia. Bucher and his boss, Vallabhbhai Patel, noted the creeping advance of communism in Asia. They viewed with alarm the beginning of communist ‘base areas’ in the Andhra areas of Madras and nearby southeast Hyderabad. Bucher wrote that the ‘greater fragmentation of India which would have occurred had Hyderabad become independent, must have resulted in Communism making more headway in this continent’.89

  Here Bucher was anticipating a theme which President Eisenhower would coin into that masterful, if erroneous, concept of the ‘domino theory’ in which communist insurgency would topple one postcolonial country after another in South and Southeast Asia. By 1948 China, Vietnam and Burma seemed seriously threatened by the new political contagion. Even in India, observers espoused a kind of ‘minidomino theory’. Hyderabad might link up with Andhra and even with Kerala in the southwest, where communist parties were making electoral headway. In turn, southern Indian communism might be linked through Bengal with Arakanese and Burmese communism and on into Southeast Asia. Actually, for most of Bengal’s population in 1948, the most pressing issue remained the fate of the refugees. People continued to flood across the new border in both directions, fleeing murder and arson during the great Hindu and Muslim festivals, but now scarified by local militias trying to firm up the lines of Radcliffe’s notional border. Communal warfare remained endemic, yet in both north and south Bengal poor peasants were still agitating for better economic conditions, urged on by communists who claimed that Hindu–Muslim conflict was really a smoke screen behind which capitalists, imperialists and ‘feudal elements’ pursued their wicked ways. In the northeast of India, the leadership of a section of the Naga people, which had declared independence the previous August, remained intransigent, waiting to see how Indian administration would turn out in practice.

  Against this background the city of Calcutta hosted a series of massive communist meetings. The aim was to show solidarity with the Soviet Communist Party, whose secretary Andrei Zhdanov had recently declared an international struggle against ‘American neocolonialism’. It was also designed to warn off India’s tough, right-wing home minister, Sardar Patel, who was now locking up communist agitators with as much despatch as the British had once done.90 From 19 to 26 February a South East Asia Youth Conference met in the city. Thirty thousand people marched through Calcutta alongside representatives from Malaya, Vietnam, Burma and China. A Chinese youth carried aloft the bloodstained shirt of a comrade who had died on the battlefield, in protest against ‘reaction’.91 Old conflicts between Bose supporters and hardline communists re-emerged. But the popular mood was heady. It received further fuel when the second congress of the Communist Party of India convened in Calcutta a little later. Than Tun arrived proclaiming the need for Indian and Burmese communists to link and overthrow the ‘sham independence’ with which the imperialists had saddled Burma and, by implication, India.92 Malayan communists rapidly moving towards open insurrection followed the proceedings with rapt attention. It was not surprising that British and American observers looked at these events, put them together with the attempt of the USSR to starve out the city of Berlin, and decided that a worldwide communist conspiracy was afoot.

  For most people in India, however, independence was far from a sham. Despite the troubles, there was widespread rejoicing and nowhere more so than in the army. Despite the bloody dawn of independence observers spoke of a ‘spirit of joyous freedom’. The Indian Army in Kashmir, said the Indian attaché to the British high commissioner in Delhi, ‘was as joyous and happy as a daughter-in-law who had managed to shake off her troublesome and nagging mother-in-law and set up her own house’.93 The ‘infamous libel’ that the Indian Army would collaps
e without British officers had been disproved. Yet some homely British traditions lived on in spite of the prevailing bloodshed. General Kodandera Cariappa, appointed commander-in-chief of the Indian Army after Bucher, gave a lecture on the Kashmir operations to the ‘Delhi snowball knitting party’. He later privately commented that practically all the knitters were British ladies. Nehru’s independent India – high-minded, austere, supercilious – had already set its distinctive tone.

  Britain’s old colonial Indian Army, which had once ranged across the whole of the crescent from Bengal and Assam to Singapore, victorious in North Africa and Italy, was broken up. In November 1947, the last of the Indian legions had departed from the subcontinent. Among the last to leave were the 2 Royal Lancers – the ‘Bengal Lancers’ of legend – to be divided between India and Pakistan.94 But many of the military stores went to Malaya to build up the fortress there; one third of the small island of Singapore was now given over to the military. Each service demanded two square miles of valuable land to house their radio transmitting and receiving stations. Among the baggage train were large stocks of whisky. It was shipped back to the United Kingdom: a telling augury of the end of empire. This infuriated British officers stationed in Singapore, for whom decent liquor was in short supply.95 But Britain still looked to South Asia to defend its Eastern empire, specifically to the Gurkhas. Two regiments of these Nepalese fighters were detached from the Indian Army to become a Brigade of Gurkhas within the British one. There was trouble in their camps, between those who stayed in India and those who opted to follow their British officers. Four out of the eight battalions of troops in Malaya were Gurkhas, and a Gurkha officer, Major General Charles Boucher, was to take over the Malaya command. Many were raw recruits; some of the veterans former prisoners of war. The Gurkhas, most of them stationed in an isolated barracks near Ipoh, were ill at ease in Malaya. The only common language between gunner instructors and 2/7 Gurkha was said to be Italian: a legacy of older campaigns. ‘We were’, recalled one soldier, ‘kept inside a camp that had wire around it like a lot of sheep…’ They were turned out first in mid 1947, to confront the radical Malay nationalists of API in demonstrations in nearby Kuala Kangsar, when the British could not rely on their Malay policemen to do so.96 Fifty years later Gurkhas would still serve Southeast Asian regimes as praetorians of last resort. The new arrivals in Malay were soon to experience one of the most vicious small wars of peace.