Forgotten Wars (53 page)

Nu was a complex character. Before the war he had found it difficult to reconcile his easy, outgoing personality and sociability with the dictates of the stern Buddhism that he followed. Experience of the Japanese invasion and the fighting had heightened his religious beliefs. Although he played a part in the early organization of the AFPFL, he had soon retired to a country town to write. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Aung San had persuaded him to stand for election to the constituent assembly in the spring. Now Rance had to twist his arm even more vigorously to get him to take on the role of prime minister. He agreed to serve until independence, scheduled for January 1948, though most people clearly expected him to carry on
longer. Nu quickly began to show his best asset: his capacity for conciliation. He broadcast to the nation: ‘My best friend and comrade has fallen. His mantle has fallen on my shoulders.’
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Nu gathered what remained of the nationalist leadership around him. He also recruited a young journalist and nationalist, U Thant, to act as his press adviser and personal confidant. More practical than Nu, Thant became a power behind the scenes in AFPFL politics over the next few years. Later he became a diplomat and ended his career as UN secretary general.
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Nu tried to coax the communists, especially his old comrade Than Tun, back into the nationalist coalition government. But this was not to be. The communists were too sure events were moving in their direction, while the AFPFL demanded that the Communist Party of Burma was dissolved before any such merger could take place. Five months before the Burmese regained their independence the troubles that would nearly destroy the young republic were clearly visible on the horizon. The minority issue and the tussle with communism were both put on hold rather than solved.

In the meantime it was essential that the British and the nationalists discover the assassins of Aung San and his colleagues. Though there was evidence that the red-flag communists had some inkling that a plot was in the air, the attack did not seem to be the signal for a leftist insurrection. By the late afternoon of the fateful day Government House in Rangoon was fairly sure that Than Tun’s communists were not involved. Nu was certain that Soe’s communists were also innocent. Suspicion turned quickly from the left to the right wing of Burmese politics, in particular to the former prime minister and wartime detainee, U Saw. Intelligence reports at the end of June had uncovered a good deal of night-time comings and goings around his house by ‘men in singlets’.
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On the afternoon of the assassination, British Special Branch raided his house and detained him and ten others. The police quickly discovered eighteen rifles and a Sten gun concealed in the house. Suspicion also fell on a jeep in the compound which carried no number plate. Later, when they drained an ornamental lake on the property, the police found thirty-seven complete Bren guns, fifty-nine spare barrels and eight revolvers. In another house connected with Saw’s party members a further forty-four hand grenades
and forty-nine detonators came to light.
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The British had been spying on Saw for some time. One night they had seen a party in a boat on the lake. But nothing was done on this occasion because Saw had been well dressed and it was assumed that this was simply one of his evening assignations with young women. Saw and illicit arms had a long history. His Galon private army had been suspected of stockpiling arms even before the war. There was also much evidence of a growing vendetta between him and Aung San as Saw tried to re-establish himself in Burmese politics. Saw blamed Aung San for the near-fatal attack on his car he had suffered the previous September.

As suspicions about Saw grew, Rance and Whitehall had to contemplate an embarrassing possibility. A British army major commanding the ammunition depot had been observed making visits to Saw’s residence over the previous month.
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The officer commanding informed the governor that the ‘previous history of this officer is unsatisfactory both as a non-commissioned officer in Burma before the war and in India during the war’. Once the possibility of any form of British involvement in the assassinations emerged, the Rangoon rumour mill went into overdrive. Spread by word of mouth to every village in the country, the accusation that the British had armed the opposition parties against the AFPFL became an article of faith. There was even a rumour that the governor had interviewed Saw and Ba Maw in an attempt to form a new government that would keep Burma in the Empire. Even today many elderly nationalists and their supporters believe that the British government connived in the murder of Aung San. Kyaw Nyein, the veteran independence fighter who had joined the delegation to London in January, was quite certain about this when he was interviewed by the historian Robert Taylor in the 1970s. Attlee, he said, had personally known about and approved of the plot against Aung San. It was an act of personal vengeance, Kyaw Nyein insisted. At the conference in London, Aung San had given Attlee his word that, in return for an immediate commitment to independence, Aung San would keep Burma in the Commonwealth. Aung San had broken his word and had thus called into question Attlee’s ‘personal role in history’. He had to die. But, he added, the nationalists had decided not to reveal their evidence because they feared it would delay independence.
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While even Nu was hard pressed to believe this
convoluted story, there is much circumstantial evidence to tie corrupt or rogue elements in the British armed forces and Force 136 to the plot. Privately, several British observers were unsurprised at the alleged involvement of their countrymen in graft and murder: ‘After what some of our own people did during the war in the way of lining their own pockets at the expense of the lives and safety of their own kith and kin, I am prepared to believe almost anything of our race,’ said one.
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The accusation that Dorman-Smith in London knew of the plot seems implausible, but it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility.

Over the next week the situation remained desperately tense. Rance got little sleep. The Communist Party of Burma (the ‘white flag’ group) had picked up an off-the-cuff remark by Tom Driberg that the Conservatives in Britain were backing U Saw and made it an issue. Almost as vexing to the governor was the problem of what to feed that austere vegetarian Stafford Cripps during his projected visit to Burma: ‘Please don’t forget to let me know what can and cannot be eaten,’ he pleaded with the Burma Office.
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Laithwaite replied promptly with a list of suggestions. ‘I hope this gives enough low-down on this vital subject,’ he wrote, although ‘I find it difficult to gauge how great the reluctance is to eat eggs.’
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Nu did his best to calm the situation on the more important issues. He called a press conference to urge editors not to spread rumours that might ‘rouse the masses’. But he also complained that not enough information was coming from the British army about who precisely was involved in the arms ‘losses’. Nu’s position was extremely difficult. His relations with Rance were much closer than Aung San’s had been. Any direct charge by the AFPFL leadership that the British had been involved in the assassination would have compromised his own position at a time when Soe’s communists were on the point of rebellion. The British had to be seen to be doing something. They arrested one Captain Vivian, an associate of U Saw, who had run a trucking business with him.
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He had recently been seconded to the civil police as an arms adviser in the police supply department, a position that lent itself to lucrative illicit dealings. Later Captain Moore, the commandant of the Base Ordnance Depot, was also put under arrest. Moore was a drinking companion of Saw. The police already had on record a statement from Moore that Saw had
told him when drunk that he had enough arms for a private army hidden in his lake. Another British officer closely associated with Saw was Major Daine, who had been seen at the house dressed in a white shirt, blue longyi and gold embroidered chappals or Indian slippers.
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He and Saw had a mutual interest in ballistics. Daine testified that Saw was armed to the teeth and was expecting another five lorry loads of weapons from someone who seemed to be a British officer. This testimony was so embarrassing that Rance tried to have it hushed up. But it was not only the army that fell under suspicion. Kyaw Nyein, the home member and strong socialist who later indicted Attlee, said that European business firms had been secretly financing Saw in the hope of promoting a non-socialist government that would leave their interests unaffected.
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Some credence was given to this because Mr Bingley of the British Council had apparently been in conversation with Saw about his attitude towards British firms.

The rumours created intense suspicion between the British and Nu’s new government, but in the short run both parties had an interest in maintaining a smooth momentum towards independence. General Briggs, the local British commander, made a point of personally placing a wreath on Aung San’s coffin. The
Burma Star
, the forces newspaper, formally denied any official British involvement in the plot. The
New Times of Burma
pointedly published a photograph of Briggs at the funeral ceremony separated by just a few column inches from a piece which denounced people spreading wild rumours, meaning those who were blaming the British government.
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Crucially, the British were able to prove that the weapons and ammunition used in the murders were not those stolen from the Base Ordnance Depot.
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Meanwhile, the police investigation was making some headway. A number of members of Saw’s household had been forced to testify against him. Several of the assassins were supposedly identified and one was conveniently shot dead trying to escape from a police jeep which was conveying him to Rangoon.
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The plan was evidently to concentrate minds on Saw and not to try to unravel the rest of the conspiracy for fear of where it might lead. On 24 September Saw’s trial began; seventy-eight witnesses were to be examined. People in the street hooted and howled at him as he was transported to court.
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Throughout he expected to be bailed out by his friends in Britain
who included, he said, ‘three ex-governors and many ex-ministers’. Dorman-Smith certainly intervened on behalf of the clever and likeable rogue who had so pleased him in 1941. But it was to no avail. Saw was sentenced to death by hanging, although the sentence was not carried out until after Burma’s independence the following year. In a letter from his condemned cell to Bingley, the British Council man, he wrote: ‘I took a grave risk, as advised.’ On another occasion, he told his jailer that ‘the governor was no use as he had already been bought by Aung San and Thakin Nu for 20 lakhs’.
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This must have come as news to Rance, whose idea of the good life seems to have been a night out at a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

By mid August the vacuum left by the assassinations had been partially filled. The immediate attempt to bring the communists into government had failed. What was thought to be an auspicious day was chosen and the governor was called away from the golf course to swear in Nu and his colleagues. Rance could not find the oath of office, but luckily Tin Tut, a member of the new cabinet, had memorized it.
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Giving up on the communists, Nu spent much of the next two months trying to assuage the Karens and other minority groups and to disarm the restive PVO bands. The task seemed all the more urgent as every day brought news of fresh massacres across northern India, where Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were engaged in tit-for-tat killing. There was unfinished business to do with the British, too. The agreement at the start of the year between Aung San and Attlee had not tied up the loose ends of independence, especially on the financial side. The details were important especially because the communists were continuing to make political capital out of what they described as the ‘rightist’ AFPFL’s compromise with the ‘imperialists’. In September, therefore, Lord Listowel, secretary of state for Burma, visited Rangoon, while in October prime minister designate Nu flew to London for a final set of talks.
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Listowel’s job was basically one of public relations. He took tea with Aung San’s widow, Daw Khin Kyi, and her son and two-year-old daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, and presented his condolences. He disavowed the neo-imperialist aims that the communists were imputing to the British. The hard negotiating was done by Nu and cabinet ministers in London. Nu found Attlee’s government wrestling with a
host of domestic industrial difficulties and worrying about the rise of communism in China and Southeast Asia. They were privately assailed by feelings of guilt about the bloodletting in India. The Conservatives were offering little support. Churchill was on the rampage about Labour’s scuttling out of Burma. His father Randolph had been responsible for the conquest of the country in 1885–6; now he insulted and abused Attlee and Aung San in an ‘outrageous speech’ that did enormous damage in Burma, according to Gilbert Laithwaite.
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Ministers were keen to maintain intact as many British financial interests in the country as possible. They also confirmed that a British services or military mission would remain in Burma after independence. This was ostensibly to train the Burmese army, but the real reason was that it would tie Burma, however loosely, into the Western anti-communist alliance. In September the international communist propaganda body, the Cominform, met in Poland. Andrei Zhdanov, its secretary, propounded a new militant line, calling for putsches against capitalist and imperialist governments.
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The world was in arms again. As the year drew to an end the brief and imperfect peace after the Second World War was evaporating. In a few short months, the red armies had replaced the Axis armies as the mortal enemies of ‘Western democracy’. The Cold War was about to begin, but in Asia it was to take the form of many small ‘hot’ wars.