Fighting on all Fronts (47 page)

The wartime history of Burma remains controversial. In particular, the Japanese occupation remains a source of bitter contestation. Did the Japanese defeat of the British provide a major impulse towards freedom by undermining the idea of British “invincibility”?
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Was the occupation and the limited independence it offered a training ground that talented Burmese nationalists proved capable of passing through, with some adversity, on their way to independence?

These questions are perhaps a crude way of forcing the issue, which is that the Japanese or Axis presence in Burma seems to have a better reputation than all of the other occupations that took place under the Axis powers. Caveats about acknowledged war crimes aside, this does seem to hold up, but only because the Bamar nationalists who sided with the Japanese were by and large the same people who later led Burma to freedom against the British, and like other histories, this one, too, has been written by the victors. The occupation did, briefly, provide an interlude during which a Burmese leadership and national institutions could begin to be formed. But its role was largely one of a catalyst for forces that had been at work since before the war.

Aung San towers over these events to the point that it is hard sometimes to separate the story of the country’s wartime fortunes from his personal saga.
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Aung San became, during the course of the war, the undisputed leader of Burma’s independence. Nearly seven decades after his
death his legacy remains deeply contested. To the British he was alternatively a traitor and a nationalist hero. Since Burma’s independence he has been in turn an icon of the bizarre Ne Win dictatorship beginning in the 1960s, and a symbol of the pro-democracy movement led by his daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, from the 1980s. All of official Burma reveres him, and wonders what things might have been like had he lived a bit longer.

It is not necessary to attribute to Aung San any quasi-supernatural prescience or military ability enabling him to lead Burma to freedom, as some official accounts have it. His career is best understood as that of a pragmatic nationalist whose highest goal was Burma’s freedom, and who found himself in a succession of fortunate circumstances in which he was able to prosecute that goal from different angles throughout the war. But even in this more realistic role, his leadership still depended on the social forces that British colonialism had unleashed. It was the hunger of the peasant, the resentment of the monk and the humiliation of the Bamar student that made Aung San who he was, much as any other great leader. He was able to understand these forces to a limited extent and drive them to the necessary, but unfinished, conclusion of independence.

As Peter Ward Fay writes of Bose and the Indian National Army (who collaborated with Aung San during the period he was an ally of the Japanese), their story is less frequently told than that of Gandhi because it demonstrates the possibility of a more radical, militant path to Indian freedom than the one that ended up being taken.
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Similarly, the independence of India’s next-door neighbour, which had once been ruled as part of India by the same colonial power, shows a militarised struggle for freedom which took place in the pressure cooker of the Second World War. Because of it Burma’s road to freedom was shorter, though more violent, than India’s.

The wartime history of Burma deserves to be fully integrated into the history of the Second World War precisely because it shows the fundamental ambivalence which the nationalists, contradictory yet genuine fighters for Burma’s freedom, saw in both the democratic British and militarist Japanese. It shows, too, that patriots in this instance had, in order to be true to their country, to fight “on all fronts”, sometimes with the British, sometimes with the Japanese, sometimes against both. That is the kind of complicated history this book exposes.

1
      For an enchanting fictional account of the end of the Burmese kingdom and Indo-Burmese relations in the years leading up to independence, see Amitav Ghosh’s
The Glass Palace
(New York, Random House, 2002).

2
      The dominant ethnicity of Burma, often incorrectly called “Burmese” or “Burman”, are here referred to as the “Bamar”. “Burmese” signifies all the country’s inhabitants. The Burmese language is the language of the Bamar, and each ethnic group has its own language, typically written in the Burmese script.

3
      A comprehensible but not overly simplified account of these divisions is found in chapter two of S Tucker,
Burma: The Curse of Independence
(London, Pluto, 2001).

4
      This is not to give in to the post-independence revisionism of some Burmese historians who assert that Burma has always had a national identity that was simply awakened in the early 20th century—M Charney,
A Modern History of Burma
(Cambridge, University of Cambridge, 2009), p32.

5
      M Smith,
Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity
(London, Zed Books, 1991), pp41-44.

6
      I Brown,
A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma’s Rice Cultivators and the World Depression of the 1930s
(London, Routledge, 2005).

7
      Tucker, 2001, pp17-19.

8
      A Walker, “Seditious State-Making in the Mekong Borderlands: The Shan Rebellion of 1902-1904”,
Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia
29: 3, (November 2014), pp554-590.

9
      G Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”, available online at orwell.ru (accessed 29 December 2014).

10
    Maung Maung,
Burma and Ne Win
(Rangoon, Religious Affairs Department Press, 1969), p18.

11
    R Taylor, “Burma in the Anti-Fascist War”, in McCoy, ed,
Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation
(New Haven, Yale University, 1980).

12
    F Donnison,
Burma
(London, Ernest Benn, 1970), p105.

13
    Smith, 1991, pp54-55.

14
    Khin Yi,
The Dobama Movement in Burma, 1930-1938
(Ithaca, Cornell University, 1988), p8.

15
    Thant Myint-U,
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma
(New York, Farrar, Straus and Thiroux, 2008), p203.

16
    Tucker, 2001, p76.

17
    B Linter,
The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Burma
(Ithaca, Cornell University, 1990), p5.

18
    R Taylor, ‘The Burmese Communist Movement and Its Indian Connection: Formation and Factionalism’, in
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
14:1 (March 1983), p97.

19
    J Bečka, “Subhas Chandra Bose and the Burmese Freedom Movement”, in Bose, Sisir K,
Netaji and India’s Freedom: Proceedings of the International Netaji Seminar
(Calcutta, Netaji Research Bureau, 1975), p65.

20
    R Taylor, ‘Introduction: Marxism and Wartime Resistance in Burma,’ in Taylor ed and trans,
Marxism and Resistance in Burma 1942-45: Thein Pe Myint’s ‘Wartime Traveler’
(Athens, Ohio, University of Ohio, 1984), p9.

21
    Aung San,
Burma’s Challenge
(South Okkalapa, Tathetta Sapai, 1974), p17.

22
    Taylor, 1984, p9.

23
    B Linter, 1990, p8.

24
    Smith, 1991, pp58-59.

25
    Maung Maung,
Burmese Nationalist Movements, 1940-1948
(Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 1991), p27.

26
    Maung Maung,
Aung San of Burma
(The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), pp31-53.

27
    H Tinker,
The Union of Burma: A Study of the First Years of Independence
(Oxford, University of Oxford, 1959), p8.

28
    
J Bečka,
The National Liberation Movement in Burma during the Japanese Occupation Period
(Prague, Oriental Institute, 1983), p76.

29
    I Morrison,
Grandfather Longlegs: The Life and Gallant Death of Major H P Seagrim, GC, DSO, MBE
(London, Faber & Faber, 1947), pp186-187.

30
    Maung Maung,
A Trial in Burma: The Assassination of Aung San
(The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p59.

31
    J Lebra,
Japanese-Trained Armies in Southeast Asia
(Ithaca, Cornell University, 2010), p65.

32
    D Guyot, “The Burma Independence Army: A Political Movement in Military Garb”, in Silverstein, ed,
Southeast Asia in World War II
(New Haven, Yale University, 1967), pp51-57.

33
    Taylor, 1980.

34
    W Yoon, ‘Military Expediency: A Determining Factor in the Japanese Policy regarding Burmese Independence,’ in
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9:2
(1978), pp248-267.

35
    Maung Maung, 1991, p59.

36
    Yoon, 1978, p263.

37
    Something like a Burmese or Pali equivalent of “Führer” or “Duce”.

38
    Ba Maw,
Breakthrough in Burma
(New Haven, Yale University, 1968), pp327-328.

39
    U Nu,
Burma under the Japanese: Pictures and Portraits
(Oxford, Oxford University, 2012), p85.

40
    Ba Maw, 1968, p335.

41
    M Charney,
History of Modern Burma
(Cambridge, University of Cambridge, 2009), p56.

42
    “It is generally acknowledged that approximately 60,000-64,000 POWs and over 200,000 Asian labourers were used during the construction of the railway. It is estimated that approximately 12,626 POWs and perhaps between 15,000 and 90,000 labourers died”—K Tamayama,
Railwaymen in the War: Tales by Japanese Railway Soldiers in Burma and Thailand, 1941-1947
(Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p8. See also generally G McCormack and H Nelson,
The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History
(London, Allen & Unwin, 1993).

43
    J English,
One for Every Sleeper: The Japanese Death Railway through Thailand
(London, Robert Hale, 1989).

44
    W Huang, “The Death Railway: Semblances of Modernity”, in
Discoveries
6 (2005), p10.

45
    See Maung Maung, 1969, for a particularly egregious example. The respected historian was here forced to paint Ne Win as the loyal protégé of Aung San when his role in Burma’s freedom struggle itself was relatively minor. (This is not unlike subsequent upgrading of the role of Stalin in the Russian Revolution years after the fact.)

46
    Tucker, 2001, p47.

47
    For a recent account that emphasises the Indian Communist perspective, see D Gupta,
Communism and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1939-1945
(New Delhi, SAGE Publications, 2008).

48
    Smith 1991, p61, also Maung Maung, 1991, p93.

49
    Thein Pe,
What Happened in Burma
(Allahabad, Kitabasthan, 1943).

50
    Maung Maung, 1991, pp119-121. Though communist initiative in the anti-Japanese war cannot be denied, the later claim that the CPB cost the Japanese 60 percent of total casualties (Linter, 1990, pp8-9) is probably highly exaggerated in the light of the CPB Red Flags faction’s need to present itself as the most consistent nationalists in its long insurgency against the heirs of Aung San.

51
    Tucker, 2001, p51.

52
    Tucker declares that “the nationalists always had the option of siding against the Japanese” and criticises Aung San for opportunism in defecting so late in the day. In his haste to blame the nationalists he ignores the fact that the British command, through communications from Thein Pe to the AFPFL, had repeatedly requested them to delay the rising, probably hoping to position themselves better in post-occupation Burma—Taylor, 1984.

53
    Maung Maung,
To a Soldier’s Son
(Rangoon, Sarpai Beikman Press, 1974), p57.

54
    Thant Myint-U, 2008, p240.

55
    
Charney, 2009, p58.

56
    Thant Myint-U, 2008, p242.

57
    Viscount William Slim,
Defeat into Victory
(London, Cassell, 1956), pp516-519.

58
    “Burma: Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government”, May 1945. Archived at filestore.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-66-65-wp-45-290-40.pdf
.

59
    Charney, 2009, p59.

60
    Taylor, 1984, pp23-25.

61
    Ibid, pp62-63.

62
    P C Joshi,
The Communist Party of India: Its Policy in the War of Liberation
(Bombay, People’s Publishing House, 1941), p33. “Browderism” refers to Earl Browder, the wartime secretary of the American communist party, who, accepting American and Soviet propaganda, believed that their alliance would continue after the war and hence proposed that wartime class collaboration would continue, dissolving the CP into the Democratic Party briefly after the end of the war. While Browder was the one in the international communist movement to be officially identified with this policy, for which he was criticized by French CP leader Jacques Duclos and eventually expelled from his own party, the existence of parallel trends in European and South Asian communism suggests that this was not an isolated deviation, but a general idea flowing from some communists’ understanding of the Popular Front policy.

63
    Smith, 1991, pp68-69.

64
    Taylor, 1983, p107.

65
    Controversy surrounds Aung San’s death to this day. Thant Myint-U, 2008, accepts the official narrative and states that if British officers were involved, they were certainly acting under their own initiative. Tucker, 2001, pp155-158, concludes that the case against U Saw is highly implausible and casts Ne Win, who was passed over for promotion by Aung San several times, as the most likely culprit. This long after the event and with the mist of so much official and unofficial history attached to Aung San’s legacy, we are unlikely to get definitive proof either way.