The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (45 page)

THE WHITE PAPER: BRITAIN’S POLICY THROUGH 1946

Aung San may have scored heavily, but this did not affect the plans the mandarins in faraway London had approved for postwar Burma. A government-in-exile, headed by Governor Dorman-Smith and including a number of senior British as well as Burmese civil servants, had been living in Simla, the Himalayan station and summer capital of the Raj, for almost the entire war, brooding over the humiliating retreat, worrying about friends or family, and then busily imagining and writing about all the things that could be done to make up for the war, set things right, and build a better and more prosperous country.
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Of course Burma would become self-governed, in good time, but not right away. Everything had to be sequenced properly. First would be reconstruction. The Burmese would have a say in everything, but for a few years only through a council appointed by the governor. When the economy was up and running and law and order had been restored, then there would be fresh elections, a new government along the lines of the 1935 constitution, and eventual home rule within a new British Commonwealth.

This was the vision, and it was laid out by London in an official White Paper in 1945.
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The Burma Chamber of Commerce of mainly Scottish businessmen had also been busy lobbying and had strongly endorsed the focus on economic recovery, with British firms naturally playing a key role. Indian immigrants would be helped to return. Even the Chettyar moneylenders would have their lands restored. The United
States had advocated that Burma become a new trusteeship of the United Nations, but this suggestion was politely ignored.

For Sir Reginald and the men around him, it was a matter of making sure Burma had a bright future. But it was also a matter of doing the right thing for those who had stood by the British. Aung San and his league had their place, but so too did the older politicians who had refused to serve under the Japanese and had come out to Simla. There were also the Karens and the Kachins who had served with such distinction behind enemy lines, often at great cost to their own communities. Surely they had to be recognized and rewarded. Sir Reginald had a sense things had changed in Burma, even if London didn’t, but he didn’t realize how much.

In London few people were actually spending much time thinking about the future of Burma. In July 1945 a landslide election victory had returned the Labour Party to power and Clement Attlee became prime minister of a new Socialist government. And in the years that followed, the British people, exhausted from the war, concentrated on their own problems and their wish to create a modern welfare state. Transport and utilities industries were nationalized, and a national health service established. An estimated one-quarter of national wealth had been lost, and the national debt had tripled since 1939. And at this center of empire, food and coal were rationed. There wasn’t even much energy to debate the great colonial issues of the day—the independence and partition of India and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine—let alone a sideshow like Burma. And so the policy in the White Paper remained in place, until developments on the ground made London realize too late that it was courting disaster.

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Burma in the autumn of 1945 bore little resemblance to the British Burma of four years before. The Military Administration’s Handing Over Report said: “We do not think it any exaggeration to say that no British possession has suffered so much damage.”
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Rangoon was in shambles. Whole city blocks had been shelled into rubble. There was no electricity, and the harbor had been wiped out. Over five hundred trains and wagons had been blown up by the retreating Japanese, who had also destroyed everything from the Irish girls’ school on Prome Road to the Yacht Club on Inya Lake. Rubbish and sewage were everywhere,
and some streets were two feet deep in filth. Nearly everything of value had been looted. Soon the city was filled with tens of thousands of squatters living in squalid makeshift huts while other refugees crammed into apartments and houses abandoned by their owners. Disease and in particular sexually transmitted diseases were spreading fast, in large part because of the huge increase in prostitution during the war.
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Only a special production of
Hamlet
with John Gielgud in the title role at the Jubilee Hall in February 1946, complete with Elizabethan costume, helped to lift the morale of the returning Raj.
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But if Rangoon suffered, it was nothing like the scene in other parts of the country. Mandalay was effectively gone. Not a single building had been left standing. Bodies and carcasses lay rotting on the city’s streets and among the waterlilies in the old palace moat. Over 150,000 people had lost their homes. In many other cities and towns it was the same. Shwebo, Meiktila, Prome, and Bassein were simply wiped out, with nothing left of their handsome colonial buildings, manicured gardens, teak houses, and leafy boulevards. Mogaung in the far north, once a pleasant place with tree-lined streets and old wooden monasteries, was now a ghost town, covered in high grass and left to starving dogs. And everywhere were the corpses and makeshift graves of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, British, American, Indian, African, Chinese, Australian, and Burmese men and women.

The war ended on 14 August, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the unconditional surrender of the emperor Hirohito. Just days before, the Japanese Twenty-eighth Army in desperation had tried to fight its way out of the thickly forested Pegu mountain range and flee east across the monsoon-swollen Salween River. More than seventeen thousand died trying.

On 12 September, Lord Mountbatten accepted Japan’s formal surrender in Singapore’s city hall, later receiving his opposite number Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi’s seven-hundred-year-old samurai sword. As the commander on the ground Mountbatten had already set a policy of working with the league, and London felt in no real position to complain. Toward the end of the month he invited the young officers of the league, including Aung San, to Kandy in the tea-growing highlands of Ceylon, in order to reach an agreement on a new Burma Army. They agreed that a new army would include forces from both the Japanese-trained army of Aung San and the existing British-trained 
Burma Army, roughly in equal numbers of about five thousand each. The British part was heavily comprised of ethnic minorities, mainly Karens, Kachins, and Chins from their own hills areas (there were only three British-trained ethnic Burmese officers), all fearful of life under a Burmese administration and with increasingly rosy memories of British rule.

The other part of the army brought a very different set of values and experience. They were largely former Thakin students, deeply devoted to the whole notion of anticolonialism and, after a nightmarish flirtation with fascism, politically of the left. They had learned from the Japanese a system of harsh punishments and strict loyalty to their superiors, never to act independently or to question authority, and always to place the army above all else. They were the generation of action, which would bring their country to independence after six decades of alien rule. They were confident and had no other life than politics and soldiering.

In a way, they were part of a new national mood, at least among the Burmese, one that believed that the future belonged to them and that whatever else, there could be no going back to the days when an all-white Pegu Club of linen-suited officials and businessmen ran their country behind closed doors.

DORMAN-SMITH TRIES TO IMPLEMENT THE WHITE
PAPER, AND THE LEAGUE IS UNIMPRESSED

Shortly after the war’s end, Reginald Dorman-Smith returned to Burma with the unenviable task of trying to implement the White Paper. He knew the league distrusted him and that the old conservative politicians—men he saw as friends, by and large—were tired and had nothing like the energy and determination of the up-and-coming generation. Before taking charge (from Mountbatten’s military administration), he had met with many of them on board a warship, the HMS
Cumberland
, docked off Rangoon, where in their silk jackets and
pasos
, they had listened politely to his pleas that this time British rule would be different, helping themselves to several generous scoops of ice cream and wondering whether the British would really have the nerve to see this through.

After taking charge, Dorman-Smith addressed a reception inside the
mildewed walls of Rangoon’s City Hall, saying, “Burma will—no longer ‘may’—take her place among the fully self-governing nations … Burma’s battle for freedom is over.” But they must first have an election. “Let us get on with this election job as quickly as we can.” In the meantime he would appoint an advisory council and place it in charge of government departments. It would be a representative council, representative of the pre-1942 political spectrum with a special place for the league as the obvious main force on the ground.

Aung San saw the situation differently. For him there was only one problem in Burma, and that was the presence of the British; change that, and everything else would soon fall into place. The old politicians and the ethnic minorities could be accommodated as necessary, but these were secondary issues. For now the need was for unity and discipline under a single authority, the league, to force the British into recognizing that the cost of staying was much greater than the cost of leaving.

When Aung San read Dorman-Smith’s offer of a new council and a special place for the league, he made a counteroffer he knew the governor could not accept: a majority of seats on the council for the league and the right to determine which league members would receive which departments, one of which had to be the Home Department, which controlled the police. It was meant to drive home the point that the league saw itself as the provincial government of Burma and could accept no other arrangement. It was a gamble, but Aung San was already used to making the toughest decisions with supreme confidence.

Whitehall ordered Dorman-Smith to stand firm. Aung San was being cocky and needed to be put in his place. The ex-BIA leader’s demands were refused. The league then denounced Dorman-Smith as a fascist, and Aung San began hinting of an armed uprising. British troops in Burma were being drawn down fast, and Dorman-Smith knew (and perhaps Aung San knew as well) that there were not likely to be enough soldiers to fight a counterinsurgency war. The British military was uncomfortable with the way things were moving and wanted to rethink policy. But London insisted that the White Paper be implemented. The Burmese would have to learn to accept what was on offer. But in every town and village Aung San’s men were making sure that would be impossible.

The next many months, from late autumn 1945 to the summer of 1946, were essentially a test of wills between the British and the league, as Aung San solidified his following and ratcheted up the pressure and as Dorman-Smith struggled in vain to implement the White Paper without provoking rebellion.
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Aung San had many of his top men inside the new Burma Army, as agreed to with Mountbatten at Kandy. But he needed something more, his own private army, and so he formed the People’s Volunteer Organization. It was made up of tens of thousands of ex-soldiers, those who had served under him as part of the Japanese-backed army but who were now officially demobilized and not included in the new (British-commanded) armed forces. There were also fresh recruits. For the young men of 1946, all they had seen was war, and now, with the war over, they wanted to make sure they too had a piece of the action. At the same time, Aung San, gaunt in his rumpled khaki unform and speaking in clear, simple language, called for unity around a single demand, independence, and organized mass meetings in protest. He sometimes also railed against British economic recovery efforts, arguing that these would lead to profits for only the City of London. The demonstrations were always peaceful, but with the hint of violence lurking in the background, controlled to show who now had the upper hand. Those outside the league, the more moderate politicians, stayed silent, understanding the weight of popular feeling and the growing adoration of Aung San.

Before Christmas, Dorman-Smith recognized this as well, writing, “The whole strength of the League appears to depend on the personality of Aung San.” He recommended that London invite him to visit. London ignored the suggestion. It was around then that the police opened fire and killed three people during a nationalist demonstration at Tantabin, a little town in the delta. The league decided there would be a public funeral and that Aung San himself would be there to speak. He met the governor beforehand, and the governor asked him whether or not he intended to start a rebellion and pleaded with him that working together would lead more quickly to freedom and greater future prosperity for Burma. Aung San wouldn’t agree. He said that freedom would come faster through him. But he said he would tone down his speech and guarantee a peaceful funeral. It wasn’t a threat but a veiled warning that London was running out of good choices.