Forgotten Wars (63 page)

The junior managers of the teak estates, with their carefully sequestered Burmese mistresses, at least lived alongside the people and the elephants. The Irrawaddy Flotilla Corporation, by contrast, was naked in its racial exclusiveness. The vast majority of managers had been British or Anglo-Burman; almost all its local employees were Chittagonian Indians. The IFC had a virtual monopoly of motor transport on Burma’s sacred river, so the Burmese had to travel on its boats, but most could not afford or were otherwise subtly excluded from its cabin-class accommodation. It is not surprising that the IFC was marked down for expropriation so early.

‘Boys’ Day’ was coming to a premature end, however, and Thakin Nu’s leadership was quite quickly forced back into a more suppliant mode towards the British and American governments by a prolonged burst of internal disorder. One group of people who knew exactly what was about to happen were the communist leaders who had broken with the AFPFL in 1946 when Aung San had brokered his deal with Rance.
²¹
These red-flag communists, led by Thakin Soe, had been joined by Than Tun’s ‘white’ communists, who had come to
blows with the AFPFL more recently over the Nu–Attlee agreement made in the autumn of 1947, which they saw as a sell-out. Than Tun was a longtime associate of Nu and his rebellion shocked the prime minister. To some degree, the new ‘white’ militancy resulted from the changed international situation. Soviet communism was going on to the offensive and its followers in eastern Europe, India and Southeast Asia followed suit. The Indian Communist Party hosted a major conference in Calcutta in February 1948, which was attended by Than Tun along with delegates from Malay and Indo-China. But Than Tun was also over confident.
²²
He predicted that the ‘bones’ of the AFPFL politicians would fill to the brim the Bagaya Pit near Rangoon. He was buoyed up by the huge gatherings of peasants that came out to hear the leftist leaders in February and March. Than Tun may have misinterpreted the peasants’ enthusiasm for communism: they were probably just looking for some excitement, now that independence had finally dawned and the colonial policemen had retreated from the country. Another communist leader, Thein Pe, believed that Than Tun had made a fatal doctrinal error. The AFPFL was not simply an imperialist and capitalist front; it had a serious ‘mass’ following.
²³
Than Tun and the others should have been good Marxist believers and waited for a bourgeois revolution and not allowed a workers’ and peasants’ putsch to go off half-cocked. The British felt that Thein Pe’s moderate communism might be even more insidious than that of the white and red revolutionaries.
²⁴

The communist ideologues, led by Than Tun and Hari Narayan Ghosal, the latter an Indian labour organizer,
²⁵
had scoured the history of the Russian revolution to come up with an analysis of their present situation. In a long, verbose minute, written in the unmistakable leaden language of international communism, Ghosal set out his justification for an immediate Burmese insurrection which was to take place in March 1948 at the latest.
²⁶
He argued in retrospect that Aung San and Thakin Nu were not really leaders of a revolutionary people but representatives of a new ‘Burmese bourgeoisie’ that would cooperate with international imperialism. They would allow British, American and even the hated Indian businessmen to carry on exploiting the Burmese people. They doubted that the new regime would push through nationalization, but if it did they believed that even the
limited compensation on offer to the likes of Steel Brothers and the Burmah Oil Company would cripple the young nation for a generation. Worse, it would drive Burma to take loans from capitalist countries and organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. Reactionary Tory British imperialism had now given way, they argued, to the Anglo-American ‘expansionism’ of the Labour Party. It amounted to much the same thing. The British would draw Burma back into the coils of their still-powerful Southeast Asian empire by manipulating the defence agreement which Nu had signed in the summer of 1947.

The communists had a point. Empire’s receding shadow still fell over Burma, even when it had decided to leave the Commonwealth. The British services mission set up in the Nu–Attlee agreement reflected the last flicker of the tradition of the Indian Army. John Freeman, a future British High Commissioner in India, had negotiated a treaty with Burma in the summer of 1947. The official doctrine was that it was undesirable that Burma should go outside the British Commonwealth for arms or military advice. The Labour government wanted a ‘stable and friendly’ Burma.
²⁷
It worried about an outbreak of ‘anarchy’ that would compromise the defence of both India and Malaya, encouraging communism and damaging British business as it struggled to recover from war. London and the Rangoon embassy both believed that the army was in a state of near chaos. As late as 1940 there had been no Burmese officers in the army and all the technicians, engineers and clerks had been Indian. Withdrawal of British and Indian expertise and experience could only lead to disaster. ‘Their fighting, like their politics, is essentially medieval’, haughtily minuted Peter Murray, who was in charge of the Burma desk in Whitehall.
²⁸
The head of the services mission, Major General Geoffrey Bourne, had the difficult task of persuading the Burmese to form an efficient military force which they could also afford. He had to offer firm strategic and organizational advice without appearing to be running the show.

Bourne had some things going for him. Above all, he had good relations with the new head of the Burma Army, Major General Smith Dun. ‘Four-foot’ Smith Dun was the Christian Karen army officer who had fought in the first Burma campaign, staging an ultimately
unsuccessful rearguard action to protect the Indian Army as it withdrew into India. To the British, who knew, from long experience, exactly how to patronize him, he had ‘all the Karen’s courage and loyalty’, but was not very bright. A minute noted that he always allowed himself to be pushed around by political magnates. Once, when he was refused a government aircraft to fly him to Maymyo to lecture at the staff college there, Smith Dun had meekly booked himself on to a crowded passenger flight. Later, as the Karen revolt gathered pace, Smith Dun was to find his position untenable and was probably unsurprised to be sent on ‘indefinite leave’.
²⁹
It is easy to see why he succumbed to the steely ruthlessness of General Ne Win. Still, as the old Burma hand B. R. Pearn minuted in the Foreign Office, quoting Erasmus: ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’
³⁰
By far the most effective parts of the army were the Karen, Kachin, Shan and Chin regiments, which were descendants of the old colonial Burmese and Indian Army units and not the nationalists’ Burma Defence Army with which they had been merged by Mountbatten and Aung San.

This meeting of minds between the British and the minorities-inarms was deeply suspect to the AFPFL, and especially to the enigmatic figure of General Ne Win, who glided to centre stage at this point of the drama. Ne Win and his socialist generals were not in the least concerned with the defence of British Asia. They were adamant that the British should be kept in a purely advisory role, not a tactical one. They still feared a British attempt to sheer off the frontier and minority areas of the country into a mini-Malaya. Above all, they wanted to use the army as a tool of nation building. Their aim was to absorb as many of the people’s militias as possible into an expanded Burma Army, so that these resentful youths did not line up behind their political enemies. But in order to expand the army’s payroll the politicians had to cut back on the purchase and renovation of transport. As early as February 1948 the British services mission to Burma noted that the army’s strength had risen from 20,000 to 23,000.
³¹
The result, according to the mission, was a large and relatively immobile force, when what Burma needed was a fast-moving strike force to damp down trouble as soon as it arose. At least in British eyes, the nation-building aspect of the Burmese government’s military policy also led
it to favour ‘less able’ Burmese officers, with links to local strongmen, over tried and tested Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burman officers who were regarded as politically suspect.

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.

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.