The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (44 page)

My grandfather remembered no one’s being executed in Pantanaw itself for political reasons. Instead the Japanese policy toward the local people seemed to be one of “brutal disdain and condescension.” He wrote:

A Japanese private, for instance, would slap a Burmese who looked disrespectful to him. As a result, the sense of intense fear and of utter helplessness was characteristic of the Burmese mood during the four-year Japanese regime … What amazed me was the fact that the Japanese people, who, in my experience, are among the most cultured, the most civilised and the most courteous of all people, could turn into the most arrogant and brutal masters.

For most Burmese, surprise at their self-styled liberators turned quietly into a desire for action.

JAPAN CONSIDERS ITS NEXT MOVE; THE BRITISH PLAN A COUNTERATTACK

For the British the winter of 1942–43 was a time to figure out what had gone wrong and plan for taking Burma back. For a while there was a stalemate, and along the front lines both sides tried to probe for each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Feeling in need of a morale booster, General Wavell ordered an advance into Arakan, but it failed, lowering morale even further as the Japanese fought well and held their ground.

Into this grim picture leaped the Chindits. They were to be the largest of the Allied Special Forces anywhere in the world and took their name from the Burmese
chinthé
, or “lion.” The Chindits were under the command of the diminutive and bearded brigadier Orde Wingate, the father of modern guerrilla warfare, who had trained the first Jewish commandos in Palestine and was known for his many eccentricities, such as wearing a raw onion on a string around his neck and occasionally biting into it as a snack. His Chindits parachuted deep behind enemy lines and lived and fought entirely cut off from bases in India, relying only on occasional supplies by air. There were two expeditions in all, and the second expedition, consisting of no fewer than twenty thousand British and other Allied soldiers, was the second-largest airborne assault in the war.

The Kachins, in the tribal mountains of the far north, also proved themselves excellent fighters. Thousands joined Detachment 101 of the American Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central 
Intelligence Agency. From a line of jungle outposts, Detachment 101 units mounted repeated attacks on Japanese supply lines, blowing up bridges and railroads, disrupting communications, and providing intelligence. During three years of jungle warfare they killed over five thousand Japanese and wounded perhaps twice that number. For the Japanese, the tenacious Kachin fighters were to be greatly feared, and the constant threat of ambush in the mountains sliced away at their self-confidence. For every Kachin casualty, they were able to inflict twenty-five on the enemy. These adept soldiers of proven loyalty naturally later expected loyalty from the British Raj in return. They also distrusted the Burmese whom they saw collaborating with the Japanese. This would be another volatile component in Burma’s postindependence mix.

THE TURNING POINT IN IMPHAL

In Tokyo in September 1943 a meeting at the Japanese Imperial Headquarters was chaired by the emperor himself. A lot had happened over the past year, and now things weren’t looking too good. The Americans were massing in the Pacific, in a long arc from the freezing waters off Alaska to the white sand beaches of Papua New Guinea. In Europe the Red Army was finally pushing their German allies back across the Ukraine. The assembled war chiefs in their gleaming boots and Prussianstyle uniforms agreed their best hope was a knockout blow against both the Chinese and the British in India. This would allow them to concentrate on the coming threat from the Americans and be in a position, whatever happened to Germany, to negotiate the best peace settlement possible.
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In March 1944 they would launch their last great offensive in Southeast Asia, from their bases northwest of Mandalay to Assam via the little hill towns of Imphal and Kohima.

For the Japanese and the British, these battles in early 1944 in the little principality of Manipur, three thousand feet up, were the turning point of the Burma campaign. Both sides knew it and gave it everything they had. The British brought up massive reinforcements and now assembled half a million soldiers with tens of thousands of additional laborers, fifty thousand vehicles, and every spare elephant in India, all along the wet and thickly jungled front. Against this the Japanese threw
the two hundred thousand men they had under the command of General Renya Mutaguchi. When the fighting began, Lieutenant General Sir William Slim and his Fourteenth Army ensured that Imphal held out for three months against a ferocious Japanese onslaught, while Chindit forces hacked away at supply lines and the American and other Allied planes provided support from the air. The Japanese were stopped and when the attack was over, both at Imphal and at Kohima, more than eighty thousand Japanese and seventeen thousand Allied troops lay dead. What was left of Japanese forces fell back to the Chindwin River hundreds of miles to the east and then beyond, Orde Wingate’s Chindits fast on their heels.

The tide had turned, and the Allies under Slim prepared for what had long been thought impossible, an overland reconquest of Burma. The British Fourteenth Army crossed first the Chindwin in November 1944 and then the Irrawaddy in January 1945, in the longest opposed river crossing anywhere in the world, meeting intense Japanese resistance every step of the way. Its front line in Burma was longer than either the eastern or western fronts in Europe. Despite its name, the Fourteenth Army was a multinational force, constituted primarily of units of the Indian Army as well as a large contingent of troops from East and West Africa. In March, Meiktila, the heart of the Japanese operation, was captured by the Seventeenth Indian Division after five days of fierce and close combat in the furnacelike spring heat. Only one huge leogryph survived; the rest of the town was obliterated. Less than three weeks later the Nineteenth Indian Division retook Mandalay, with the Fourth Gurkhas fighting their way up the north side of Mandalay Hill and reaching the summit just as the first sunlight illuminated the Shan hills in the distance. The Japanese tried to make a desperate last stand within the walls of the old royal city but eventually withdrew, the entire palace in flames. Nothing but the walls of the old city was left. By now British and Indian forces, joined by two West African divisions, had moved far into Arakan, taking Akyab in December 1944 and opening up a new front.

In a strange twist of fate, something the Burmese might call karma, Captain Basil Hamilton-Temple Blackwood was shot and killed by a stray bullet in March 1945 in front of the old palace walls. The old royal city of which the palace was a part was named Fort Dufferin, after the captain’s grandfather the first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.
Basil was the fourth marquess, an officer in the Royal Horse Guards, and a man Evelyn Waugh called the brightest mind of his generation, and he was killed at almost the exact spot where his ancestor had exiled Thibaw six decades before. It was six full days after the Nineteenth Indian Division had completed the capture of Mandalay and was as if Thibaw’s ghost had decided to settle an old score with the erstwhile viceregal family.

The rains were only weeks away. The British were now racing to Rangoon.

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By now things were not looking very bright for those who had thrown their lot in with the Japanese. Some Burmese politicians had never wanted to join forces with Tokyo, mainly the Communists, like Thakin Soe, who hid in the southern marshes to organize his men, and Thakin Thein Pe Myint, who walked out to India to make contact with British authorities. But by as early as 1944, when the battles at Imphal and Kohima were deciding the fate of the Japanese Fifteenth Army, many in the Rangoon puppet regime were also beginning to have their doubts. Dr. Ba Maw remained loyal to his sponsors to the end, fleeing to Japan and winding up in an American prison. But Aung San, Ne Win, and the rest decided that their only loyalty was to Burma’s independence and began conspiring. Fascism wasn’t quite all it was cracked up to be, and some, including Aung San, began shifting back toward their earlier left-wing inclinations. Messages were sent out to the Allies, offering to turn sides and help drive out the Japanese. An underground resistance movement was formed, called the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, with Aung San at the head. When to openly challenge the Japanese and launch an armed revolt? Every day in Rangoon under the Japanese thumb was a day that could lead to arrest, horrible tortures, and death. The word from India was to wait.

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U Thant and his old Pantanaw friends retained a shortwave set, and every night at nine o’clock they went to a neighbor’s house and listened upstairs while the family played records loudly below. They learned of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the Allied landings in North Africa and then at Normandy and suspected the days of occupation were
numbered. They also learned about the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League and prepared to do their part to help, secretly storing away rice for a future uprising. It was risky business for Thant, who was already being watched for refusing while at the Education Ministry in Rangoon to make Japanese-language instruction compulsory in schools. Then, one day in early 1945, Japanese soldiers came to Thant’s house and took him to their nearby base. My grandmother and others felt sure they would never see him again. But when Thant arrived at the office of Lieutenant Oyama, he was surprised to find that Oyama wanted only to ask for his help. The Japanese officer had been living with a Burmese woman, and she had recently given birth to a little boy. He asked Thant to protect them as best as he could, and Thant agreed.

It seemed the Japanese retreat was beginning in earnest. But what was to come next? A new British occupation? That was hardly desired, but there was no clear alternative. Perhaps in the new world to come, the United Nations would ensure a good transition to self-determination. But in the marshlands and mangrove swamps around Pantanaw, there was already a more realistic intimation of the future, as underground Communist cells, ex-Karen soldiers, and demobbed Burma Independence Army recruits, all armed, all young, and for now all quiet, swirled around, waiting for their turn.

LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN AND THE QUESTION
OF THE BURMESE PARTISANS

Back in October 1943 Admiral Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, a cousin of the king’s and later to be the last viceroy of India, was appointed the supreme Allied commander of the South-East Asia
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Theatre, meaning that he was overall in charge of the recapture of Burma. A career naval officer and a favorite of Winston Churchill’s, the forty-four-year-old Mountbatten brought an upper-class dislike of middleclass colonial prejudices and a desire to be and to seem to be on the right side of history. For many in the British Army, Aung San was a traitor, a Quisling, who needed to be brought to justice. But in February
1945 Mountbatten chose to go against his own colonels and generals and won London’s approval for arming Aung San’s league. Mountbatten argued that Burmese partisans working behind Japanese lines could make a difference; he also saw Burmese nationalism in a kinder light than did some of his fellow officers.

For Aung San and his Thirty Comrades, knowing that they would have Allied support in turning on the Japanese must have been a relief. The future was still murky, but at least there might be a way ahead if they restyled themselves “antifascists,” and presented the reconquering British with as much of a fait accompli as possible. Their demands would be the same as always—complete and unconditional independence—but this time they were not just students playing politics and jabbering away in the Student Union; they had guns, and they knew how to use them.

In a bit of daring theater, they decided first to hold a parade in Rangoon, near Government House, with Lieutenant General Hyotara Kimura, commander of the Burma Area Army, and other senior Japanese officers on the grandstand, saluting the somber marchers. Then, a few days later, on 27 March, a day now commemorated annually as Armed Forces Day, the young men in khaki drove out of the dusty city, saying they were off to meet the British enemy, but instead wheeling around and everywhere attacking their erstwhile masters.

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Aung San had made his move just in time. On 3 May in soaking rain, two days after Adolf Hitler had shot himself dead in the Führerbunker, the Twenty-sixth Indian Division strode into Rangoon unopposed. Aung San could say that his forces had helped the British in their drive down the Sittang Valley toward the capital. Mopping-up operations continued, but the war in Burma was essentially over with the new focus on a planned amphibious assault on the coasts of Malaya (Operation Zipper).

On 16 May Aung San went to see General Slim, the top British general in the country. Aung San was still dressed in the uniform of a Japanese major general, complete with sword, and startled some of Slim’s staff, who had not been warned of his coming. He then told Slim matter-of-factly that he was the minister of war of the Provisional Government of Burma set up by the Anti-Fascist League. The league
wanted an alliance with Britain until all Japanese forces were driven from Burmese soil. Afterward Burma would be independent. It wasn’t a demand, simply a statement of intent. Somewhat taken aback, Slim first thought Aung San was bluffing. He said he was in no position to discuss political matters but asked that Aung San incorporate his soldiers into the British-led forces. Aung San replied that as an ally he was happy to place his men under an Allied commander.

He had impressed Slim, who admired his boldness. When Slim said: “Don’t you think you’re taking considerable risks in coming here and adopting this attitude?” he had replied, “No.” “Why not?” “Because you are a
British
officer.” As Slim later wrote, Aung San scored heavily.
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