Forgotten Wars (14 page)

Aung San had already turned politician by the time Dorman-Smith returned. His political creed, however, was ambiguous. In 1941, when he was being trained by the Japanese, he had written ‘Blueprint for Burma’. This pamphlet spoke of the supremacy of the state and adopted the eugenicist’s language of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ peoples: all the trappings of quasi-fascism, in fact. But it was probably designed for circulation within the Japanese Army and it may well have been Aung San’s enemies who published it for a wider audience in 1946.
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Judging by his speeches and writings after the war, he was a kind of populist democrat, a non-doctrinaire socialist, who believed in ‘one man one vote’, but only insofar as it delivered a government in the people’s interest. This proviso, of course, left room for political intervention by strongmen. Later military dictators exploited this aspect of Aung San’s legacy though, on the whole, Aung San seems to have had a higher regard for democratic values than many contemporary political leaders in Southeast Asia. He must have realized that, as the senior Burmese commander within the newly constituted British Burmese Army, he would have little room for manoeuvre. As head of the AFPFL, however, he would command a wide range of political cadres and working-class activists as well as the numerous members of the People’s Volunteer Organizations, paramilitary bodies that were now becoming home for those members of the BNA who were rejected by or resisted joining the British-officered force. The PVOs, a loose melange of armed men biding its time on the fringes of the state, and sometimes hostile to it, inherited the traditions of the paramilitary nationalist volunteer groups of the 1930s. It also prefigured the emergence after independence of armed bands of dubious loyalty prowling the countryside.
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On resigning his military role, Aung San had written to Mountbatten that he would have preferred to continue as a military officer, but his colleagues had decided he would have to lead the AFPFL as a civilian. Striking a warning tone, he told the British supremo that he ‘would always retain an affectionate corner in my heart in spite of all the vicissitudes that may or may not arise between Burma and Britain in the political sphere in the future’.
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Aung San had some contact with people on the left of British politics, notably Tom Driberg. The MP and war correspondent first met him and other members of the newly recognized Patriotic Burmese
Forces at Mountbatten’s headquarters in Kandy in early September 1945. Driberg had formed a good impression of Aung San, describing him as ‘a slight, boyish figure with a surprisingly deep voice; physically and mentally agile with an irrepressible sense of humour and a gift for cynical wisecracking which he exercised impartially at the expense of his Burmese friends and of the British.’
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Soon afterwards Driberg flew into Rangoon with Mountbatten. He had a vivid impression of swooping down to central Burma’s ‘flat green, soggy plains overwhelmed by angry monsoon clouds’ in unbearable heat. He visited the Shwedagon pagoda and was surprised to find that the numerous book and trinket shops that filled the temple’s lower levels were still selling Japanese military propaganda magazines.
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The state of the city appalled him; it was as bad or worse than anything he had seen in Calcutta. Even Burmese employees of the civil affairs administration lived in ‘wretched shacks 6 foot by 6 foot with bamboo walls, palm thatching’ and no latrines. Driberg was invited by Aung San to sit on the platform with him at a political rally in a central Rangoon park attended by some 10,000 people. The rally had become a huge picnic for the city’s workers. Even the few remaining buses had forsaken their normal routes to bring people there. The lawns surrounding the large central meeting hut were ‘jammed and strident with musicians, red banners, sweetmeat vendors and family parties. The heat was overpowering.’
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Driberg had plenty of time to absorb the atmosphere: Aung San and others made characteristically lengthy speeches in English, which were then translated into Burmese, Tamil and Urdu.

Driberg’s less public encounters left an equally strong impression on him. At a dinner in the Rangoon Orient Club, Driberg joined Mountbatten, Dorman-Smith and Burmese politicians of the older generation, the latter catching his attention with their ‘dainty pink and mauve head dresses’. Aung San was there too, but he had been relegated to an obscure corner of the room and his presence was not recorded on the menu card.
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Mountbatten refused to go along with the slight. He told the dinner’s organizers that he would not speak unless Aung San was moved to the top table and invited to speak too. This had an immediate effect and Driberg was left admiring the ‘acumen of this prince of Battenberg’ who understood so well ‘the new nationalist forces’ in Asia. The deep divisions among the British on
how to proceed were brought home to him, too. He spent a ‘fascinating evening’ with Mountbatten and Dorman-Smith, noting the governor’s fury over the way that the supreme commander was now courting Aung San just as he had courted Nehru. The two men bickered over copious quantities of drink: ‘Each time one of them went out of the room to pee, the other would say: “Take no notice of what he’s saying. He’s just a hopeless reactionary” (or an “irresponsible radical”, as the case may be).’
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Driberg wrote off Dorman-Smith as ‘a blimp of the old school’, an opinion that was not entirely justified. But he was certainly right about the nationalist leadership. He wrote in
Reynolds News
of Burma’s young leaders: ‘You will hear more of these men.’
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He compared them to the Greek socialists who had fought against the Nazis and applauded Mountbatten for engaging with the AFPFL, whereas in Greece the British had begun to suppress the radicals.

While in Rangoon, Driberg had several private meetings with the AFPFL leadership in which he urged them not to attend the ceremonies welcoming Dorman-Smith back to the country in case they should appear to be angling for jobs with the new administration. He also told them to demand at least equal treatment with India in the matter of constitutional reform. And he assured them that, whatever problems they had with the civil affairs administration, they could believe that Hubert Rance, its effective head, was their friend. Later a copy of a letter from Driberg about his consultations with the AFPFL found its way to Dorman-Smith, who reacted furiously. The acrimonious and ultimately violent developments on the path towards the end of colonialism in Burma over the next two and a half years were in some degree a consequence of the fact that the British, as much as the Burmese, had broken down into contending factions.
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Driberg did not drop Burma on his return home. Through the Orwellian-sounding Union of Democratic Control, a London-based pressure group, he used the many contacts he had made on his trip to link up disgruntled British forces personnel and Asian nationalists with left-wing opinion in Parliament and the press. As conditions neared mutiny in several stations, soldiers from India and South East Asia Command wrote to him denouncing their ‘filthy conditions’ or marvelling that ‘the terrible Jap Rat is quite a good fellow when defending European imperialism’.
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Colonel John Ralston wrote com
plaining that the ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ had built up a huge and unnecessary staff in Singapore.
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This pained Driberg, who had thought Mountbatten ‘genuinely progressive’. Driberg had obviously made himself known widely, if somewhat imperfectly. From Burma a ‘poor cultivator in Sangyaung’ wrote to ‘Mg. Drie Budd, P. M.’ to complain of agricultural distress and the return of a dreaded class of Indian landowner-bankers: ‘I am unable to plough the field now. It is not easy… Lands are in the hands of “Chettyers”.’
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While the nationalists took an increasingly dim view of the machinations of Dorman-Smith, none of them appears personally to have disliked him. It was widely recognized that he was not responsible for the mess that was Burmese administration before the war. At Simla, however, he had got too close to what they regarded as the sleazy old order, particularly Paw Tun, the exiled Burmese prime minister. There was a feeling too that U Saw was lurking in the wings. U Saw had been the dominant politician in Burma in the late 1930s. A big, jovial and ruthless man, he had charmed many British officials. He held great parties, he was forever surrounded by pretty women and, above all, he was nothing like the ice-cold intellectuals of Indian politics whom so many of them disliked. He had seriously blotted his copybook in 1941 after Pearl Harbor when he had contacted the Japanese and offered to help them invade Burma. Reports of his treachery were deciphered by British codebreakers at Allied intelligence and he had been sent off to exile in Uganda.
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Now, he was about to return, with a brand-new German ‘wife’, who was very much the talk of the town as he already had a wife and a clutch of mistresses there. The British seemed to be prepared to forget, or at least forgive, U Saw’s overtures to the Japanese. Besides, everyone knew that Dorman-Smith had a soft spot for him. The AFPFL suspected that the governor would use U Saw to try to build up a kind of pro-British centre party in order to bypass them. In December Aung San said as much to Montagu Stop-ford, now GOC Burma Command, who duly passed it on to Mount-batten. The British military, Aung San was reported as saying, simply had no idea how corrupt Burmese politics had been before the war. There was graft and favouritism in all departments. Aung San ‘knew who the crooks were’ and wanted Burma to be a free and decent country. The problem was that there were a lot of crooks already in
the army’s civil affairs secretariat and the return of the governor had simply made matters worse.
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The animus and suspicion beneath the surface was revealed in early October by a controversy involving the
Rangoon Liberator
. In spite of their official sponsorship, the Burmese editors of this newspaper carried an article headed ‘Major-General Aung San speaks’.
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The British were immediately irritated because by this stage Aung San had formally surrendered his military rank. Worse still, Aung San used the article to denounce an earlier editorial that had called the failure of the BNA and other partisan units to hand in their weapons a betrayal of Mountbatten. Not so, he stated: all nations had the right to keep arms for their own defence and in Burma it was particularly necessary because the British appeared to be arresting people on suspicion and violating their civil liberties. He went on to reject charges that he had planned a coup in 1938–39 and ridiculed rumours that the plans for this could be found in a hostel on the south side of the Shwedagon pagoda. This was a fabrication put about by the British security services, he said, implying that they were paving the way for his arrest. Put under pressure by the British, the editors of the
Liberator
temporized. They argued that just as the American commander, Douglas MacArthur, had accepted the Philippines nationalist army as genuine allies of the Americans, so too the British should accept the BNA. On the other hand, Aung San had to ensure that his forces did not impose their views on the people, for this would be ‘fascist’.
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This, at least, was a line with which many British civilian and military personnel agreed. For them, Aung San’s was indeed a fascist organization and they had not fought for six years to see it win out in ‘their’ Burma. The year ended in deadlock. The AFPFL demanded the immediate creation of a dominion-style governor’s council in which they would run the lion’s share of the ministries.
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This was to be accompanied by the announcement of a forthcoming election with a universal franchise. Aung San pleaded for peace but prepared for war. Dorman-Smith acknowledged the influence of the AFPFL but formed an executive council from members of other political parties. He adhered rigorously to the long timetable of Churchill’s White Paper; what he had once found ‘infuriatingly vague’ now turned out to be rather convenient.

In the long term, Burma’s fate, still in the balance in 1945, was to be determined mainly by big, impersonal considerations. How many troops could the British Empire deploy around the world while rebuilding the home front? How deeply entrenched in the countryside were the Burma defence forces and the volunteer armies of communists and nationalists? What ultimately was the value of Burma’s teak, oil and rice to businessmen and governments in London, Madras and Bombay? Yet Burmese political society was a small and intimate one compared with India’s. Personalities mattered a lot and their mutual clashes went a long way towards determining the form, if not the wider outcome, of Burma’s struggle for independence. In turn, the fact that Burma gained that independence not only outside the Commonwealth but also outside the influence of communism was to be of great significance for the future of the crescent and indeed the whole of South and East Asia.

As 1945 drew to a close the big players of Burmese politics manoeuvred to gain a tighter hold on their opponents. Dorman-Smith, embittered by the British failures of 1942 and out of sympathy with his new Labour masters, was less genial than he seemed on the surface. Two men in particular seemed to stand in the way of his desire for a moderate Dominion of Burma under the British crown. One was Aung San, a national leader, but one still being pressured by his own communist allies and at times seemingly doubtful of his political touch. His rhetoric became more violent towards the year’s end as the provisions of the detested White Paper still seemed to be in place. The governor, he claimed, had become ‘fascistic’, ironically the AFPFL’s most derogatory term of abuse.
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The other obstacle to Dorman-Smith’s plans was ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, whom he instinctively disliked as a royalist radical, too flippant for high imperial office. Then there were the other big egos flitting in and out of this little political world. U Saw’s imminent return was to be followed in mid 1946 by that of the ex-Adipadi Ba Maw, released from detention in Tokyo by the British. Who knew how much political support he could muster among those who still had a pang of nostalgia for the Japanese days? Would Thakin Nu, Buddhist nationalist and minister under Ba Maw, return from religious retreat to strengthen the nationalist centre against the old politicians and the left? And what of the communists?
Thein Pe, the communist leader who had fled to India in 1942, was anxious to reassert his influence over the young comrades drilling and polishing their weapons in the villages. Thakin Soe, who was even more hard line than Thein Pe, was already dug in, Mao Zedong-like, into his ‘base areas in the countryside’.