Writing in a Rangoon paper in 1939, thirty-year-old U Thant criticized the direction things were taking and his country’s political immaturity turity, accusing his countrymen of being unable to think critically. “Burmese politics have no meaning save to keep Burmese newspapers busy,” he wrote, adding, “We need not despair. Recognition of the causes of a malady are half the cure.”17 But time for a more nuanced debate was running out.
THE APPROACHING WAR
On 1 September 1939, fifty-six Wehrmacht divisions, including six panzer divisions, led by Colonel Generals Feder von Bock and Gerd von Rundstedt, crossed the border into Poland, and the British Empire declared war on Germany. Over the next eleven months much of Western Europe fell to the armies of Adolf Hitler. By June France had surrendered, and Britain was the only country left standing against what was then the strongest military power in the world. In the Battle of Britain that followed, London was bombed day and night, with as many as three thousand civilians killed on a single raid.
For a while Burma remained comfortably far away. Many on the Thakin side leaned to the left and were willing to see fascism as a threat. But others saw opportunity as well. Dr. Ba Maw now came back into the picture as the head of a new Freedom Bloc, which had three demands: (1) Britain’s recognition of Burma’s right to independence, (2) preparations for calling a constituent assembly, and (3) bringing all the special authorities of the governor immediately within the purview of the cabinet. Ba Maw was appointed the anarshin (the dictator or literally the “Master of Authority”) of the new group. Aung San was appointed general secretary. Taking advantage of war to gain independence was the only goal.
There were differences of opinion about how to do this. Some like Ba Maw were inclined to seek out a secret alliance with the Japanese. Some were attracted to the idea of a partnership with the Chinese, and this faction included moderates like U Nu; a mission in late 1939 crossed the mountains to Nanking to see what might be possible.
Another politician now entered the picture: U Saw, who maneuvered his way to the prime ministership in 1939. Cunning and opportunistic, with little formal schooling and a virile dose of political ambition, he banned all militias and used London’s 1941 Defence of
Burma Act to put in place severe restrictions on the press. He took over the once-respected Sun newspaper and turned it into his party’s mouthpiece, stirring up ethnic divisions. Communists and Thakins and other political rivals were locked up. Ba Maw, U Nu, and dozens of others wound up in the Mandalay jail. U Saw toned down some of his own violent rhetoric, in part to cozy up to the British, but he still demanded home rule. In 1941 he flew to England to make Burma’s case in person to Winston Churchill, only to be politely dismissed; determined to get something somewhere, he then made contact with Japanese agents in Lisbon, was found out by British intelligence, and was promptly arrested. But he would be back, with a special vengeance.
THE THUNDERBOLT
The Japanese had been stealthily gathering political and other intelligence in Burma for a few years, secretly paying for pro-Japanese articles in The Sun and New Burma newspapers. They had a modest intelligence network in the region, drawing on an expanding Japanese expatriate presence in the region: photographers, pimps and prostitutes, barbers, and chemists. At home, preparations were beginning for what some hoped would be war against the Americans and Europeans in Southeast Asia. Schools taught Burmese, Thai, Malay, and Indian languages, and young men made themselves ready for the coming battle through daily sumo wrestling and martial arts.18 Skirmishes between China and Japan had already turned into all-out fighting; the entire Chinese seaboard was in Tokyo’s hands, but early wins had not translated into quick victory. The Chinese fell back onto the inland city of Chungking, far up the Yangtze, and the British and the Americans were pulled into the conflict, providing support to the besieged Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek. With war in Europe, war in the Pacific seemed increasingly inevitable. For some, the dream of a Japanese Empire across Southeast Asia was closer than ever.
Keiji Suzuki, nominally head of the Shipping Section in the General Staff Headquarters, was given the special and secret task of developing an offensive strategy in Asia and closing off the Burma Road. Like Lawrence of Arabia, he was tasked with cultivating a local cadre that could help his country’s broader war aims. He was a graduate of the prestigious General Staff College, spoke English fluently, and had a lifelong passion for grand strategy. More recently he had established the Minami Kikan (meaning the “Southern Agency”) as a covert operation run together with other creatively minded imperialists from the elite Nakano spy school in Tokyo.19
Also like Lawrence of Arabia, he came increasingly to identify with the cause of native nationalism. A photograph taken in Burma after the Japanese conquest shows him in full Burmese formal dress, and he encouraged rumors that he was secretly the long-lost son of the prince of Myingun, the elder half brother of Thibaw’s, and the man considered by many in the 1880s the rightful claimant to the throne.
In May 1940 Suzuki and a colleague slipped into Rangoon and set up a secret office at 40 Judah Ezekiel Street, and were soon nurturing the networks that would form the basis of the Minami Kitan and help drive the British from Burma.20 They made contact with the Thakins, hoping for future collaboration. Then, one day, word reached Suzuki that two of the Thakins, including the ex-student leader Aung San, had been found wandering the streets of Nippon-occupied Amoy, in China. This was exactly what Suzuki needed.
*
The 1930s were the formative years of Burmese politics. That this decade was dominated by extremist and militant agendas worldwide was something that left a lasting mark on the country. The debates of the Student Union and the meeting rooms of the young politicians would echo for a long time to come, abstract and ideological debates of the far left and the far right, about agitation and subversion, underground movements and mass demonstrations. There was never any room for pragmatism or compromise. The Great Depression had wiped out the savings of millions, and many in the up-and-coming generation were geared up for action. And colonial institutions had proved themselves singularly unable to manage the multiethnic and multicultural nature of British Burma; they had displaced the old hierarchies but were unable to offer anything convincing in return. There was only one ingredient left, war.
Notes – 9: STUDYING IN THE AGE OF EXTREMISM
1. Harvey, British Rule in Burma, 28.
2. Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, 22 April 1918, quoted in Cady, A History of Modern Burma, 201.
3. Ba U, My Burma: The Autobiography of a President (New York: Taplinger, 1958).
4. U May Oung, “The Modern Burman,” Rangoon Gazette, 10 August 1908.
5. On the nationalist movement from the First World War to independence, see Maung Maung, Burmese Nationalist Movements 1940–48 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989); Maung Maung Pye, Burma in the Crucible (Rangoon: Khittaya, 1951); Josef Silverstein, Burmese Politics: The Dilemma of National Unity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980).
6. George Brown, Burma as I Saw It, 1889–1917 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925).
7. Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, Amelia: A Life of the Aviation Legend (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 1999), 210.
8. S. R. Chakravorty, “Bengal Revolutionaries in Burma,” Quarterly Review of Historical Studies 19:1–2 (1979–80), 42–49.
9. Quoted in Cady, A History of Modern Burma, 290.
10. Ian Brown, A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma’s Rice Cultivators and the World Depression of the 1930s (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005).
11. Bertie Reginald Pearn, Judson of Burma (London: Edinburgh House, 1962).
12. On Aung San, see Aung San Suu Kyi, Aung San (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1984); Maung Maung, Aung San of Burma (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1962).
13. Maung, Aung San of Burma.
14. Bingham, U Thant: The Search for Peace, 128–2
9.
15. Khin Yi, The Dobama Movement in Burma (1930–1938) (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988).
16. For Ba Maw’s account of this period and the war, see Ba Maw, Breakthrough in Burma: Memoirs of a Revolution 1939–46 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
17. Pantanaw U Thant, “We Burmans.”
18. Chris Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941–45 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 4.
19. Stephen Mercado, Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Elite Intelligence School (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003).
20. For the best account of wartime and immediate postwar Burmese politics, see Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies.
* The “woolsack” refers to the seat of the Lord Speaker in the UK House of Lords.
TEN
MAKING THE BATTLEFIELD
The Second World War engulfs Burma, setting the stage for the country’s civil war; and the unlikely story of Aung San, the young man who seemingly stood down the British Empire
Fifty-six years after Harry Prendergast’s overthrow of King Thibaw, British rule in Burma collapsed like a house of cards, its soldiers and officials tossed out together with hundreds of thousands of panic-stricken refugees by the elegantly mustachioed lieutenant general Shojiro Iida and his Fifteenth Imperial Army. The Burmese had nothing to do with the war, but it destroyed their country.
For the Japanese, modernization and militarism had long gone hand in hand. The Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown in 1868, and the new reform-minded and West-looking oligarchs were committed from the start to armed forces strong enough to bully their neighbors. At the turn of the century, war against China had led to decisive victory, and vast tracts of the Manchurian plain as well as the island of Taiwan were annexed to the infant Nippon Empire. By 1905 the Japanese were even able to defeat a major European power, Russia, sending shock waves through the West and leading to the revolution against Czar Nicholas that same year.
All these things buoyed up Japan’s self-image as a global force on the same scale as Britain and France; and when the First World War ended, Tokyo resented deeply not being treated as an equal. An even more expansionist policy followed. In 1931 the remainder of Manchuria was swallowed up, and a puppet government was established under the last Qing emperor, Aisin Guoro, “Henry” Pu Yi. In 1937 Japan invaded China proper, and condemnation by the foundering League of Nations did little to prevent the blood-soaked aggression to follow. By this time on the other end of the Eurasian landmass the Spanish civil war was already in full swing, with Germany’s Luftwaffe and the Condor Legion Fighter Group intervening in support of General Francisco Franco’s fascist rebels. In less than two years all Europe would be at war.
War in Europe meant opportunity for Tokyo’s schemers, who were increasingly drawn south to the tropical shores of Southeast Asia. One attraction was control over the raw materials of the region—rubber, tin, and oil—including the oil fields of middle Burma. And control of Burma had another, more important attraction: it would sever the overland access between China and the outside world over the famed Burma Road, a mountain path of a thousand hairpin turns that ultimately linked Rangoon’s ports with the inland territories still controlled by Nationalist China. Cutting the road would be a deathblow to Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and finish off the Japanese conquest of the Middle Kingdom. There was also a third, final reason. An occupation of Burma would place the men of Nippon at the very gates of India. Perhaps, they thought, from here an invasion of India would lead quickly to an insurrection in Bengal and an end to the British Empire.
But could they really pull it off? Not everyone was convinced the Imperial Army had what it took to bring down the British and their American friends in the East. What they needed was an opening gambit so audacious, so unexpected that it would buy them time, time to create their East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere before the Allies had the chance to react. And so in late November 1941 a secret force of warships and planes assembled near the icy Kuril Islands and began creeping their way toward the Hawaiian coast.
THE LAST SUMMER
Just a few weeks before, during the height of the monsoon rains, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brook-Popham, the commander in chief of the British Far Eastern Command, came up to Burma from Singapore and had a look around. A veteran of the Boer War and a former governor of Kenya, he was cool and confident. The Japanese were already entrenched in French Indochina, but the prevailing wisdom was that the economic impact of new U.S. and U.K. sanctions would make any further Japanese advance unlikely. Brook-Popham and his officers believed that any attack on British territory, if it came at all, would be from northern Siam into the Shan States. He placed most of the single Burma Division in that remote corner. Only one brigade would guard the beaches to the south, where the country bordered Malaya. There was, he informed his masters in London, no need for reinforcements.1
Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill was not too sure, and sent his man Alfred Duff Cooper for a personal evaluation. Cooper, a Conservative politician and minister for information, found the whole British scene in Rangoon silly and stuffy but also didn’t sense that a Japanese invasion was around the corner. Cooper may also not have taken his task particularly seriously, bringing along his wife, Lady Diana, together with her over one hundred pieces of luggage. He told the British officers he met that they were unlikely to see any fighting.
It was only in October that the alarm bells began to ring. Small and stocky, General A. P. Wavell was Britain’s most distinguished general but had been driven straight across the North African desert by Field Marshal General Erwin Rommel’s Deutsches Afrika-Korps. He was then commander in chief in India, an appointment intended, at least in part, to give him a chance to rest and take his mind off things. No one had reckoned an India posting would see much action. But the old soldier soon realized that prospects for war in his theater were far from a distant proposition and that Burma could well be overrun.2 He recommended immediate reinforcements as well as the building of an all-weather road from Assam to Rangoon. The battle cruisers Prince of Wales and Repulse were ordered to Singapore. But it was almost too late.
When the Japanese onslaught came, it was as if a sudden storm after long days of blue skies had made it difficult to imagine anything other than a light rain. At dawn on 7 December the American Navy at Pearl Harbor was destroyed. Then one by one the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya fell in rapid succession in a sort of reflection of the German conquests in Europe two years before. In Hong Kong twelve thousand British Empire troops were taken prisoner on Christmas Day. The same week Japanese troops entered Siam.
The British in Rangoon now finally saw the writing on the wall and urgently appealed for help. The nearest source of help was China, and Chiang Kai-shek offered and sent two of his armies then in Yunnan down into the eastern hills. London also promised troops, including the Seventeenth Indian Division from Iraq and two brigades of African troops. But time was short.
On the morning of 23 December, as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s The Road to Zanzibar was about to play at the New Excelsior Cinema, Rangoon was bombed for the first time. The city had no antiaircraft guns, only Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, an American volunteer squadron with a reputation for throwing good parties. They were based out at Mingaladon airport and were paid a handsome bonus by Chiang Kai-shek for every Japanese plane they shot down. They now engaged the Nippon fliers but were unable to stop them from attacking the city. The streets that day were packed as usual, and all along the Strand Road and up and around Fraser and Merchant Streets thousands stopped to stare skyward and watch the dogfights overhead just as the first explosives careered down. Within minutes downtown Rangoon was littered with blown-apart and horribly maimed bodies. Nearly three thousand people lost their lives (out of four hundred thousand altogether in Rangoon). Uncontrolled fires broke out. People panicked, as no on
e had been prepared for this at all. The medical and other emergency services collapsed, and by the time a second attack came on Christmas Day, the road north out of Rangoon was crammed with refugees. Those who could, especially in the Indian population, scrambled onto every available ship bound for Calcutta or Madras.
The man at the center of the unfolding tragedy was Burma’s governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith. A former agriculture minister, he was, like so many British officials in Burma, from an Anglo-Irish family. Particularly proud of his Irish background, he had once happily startled his cabinet colleagues during a discussion of the possible internment of Irish citizens by revealing that he had remained a citizen of Eire. He was also a staunch proponent of traditional farming as opposed to “scientific farming” and had once helped lead a group best known for its passionate opposition to pasteurized milk. Harroweducated and with slicked-back hair, Dorman-Smith also liked to present himself as someone who understood the anticolonial position. One day while he was enjoying a cup of tea in the badly lit cabinet office’s basement canteen, he was asked whether he would consider becoming governor of Burma. “Irishmen should always take up challenges of this sort even though they seldom lead anywhere,” he thought, and then accepted.3
When the first Japanese air raids were taking place, Dorman-Smith had been governor for barely six months. Neither he nor the army in Burma had much intelligence of what was going on, where the Japanese were, and what was likely to happen next. The extra troops that had been promised were now sent instead to Malaya, where a Japanese force had landed and was fast moving south toward Singapore. London thought that Singapore had to be defended to the end, come what may. Everyone knew that if Singapore fell to the Japanese, their navy would dominate the entire Indian Ocean from Australia to the Red Sea; Burma would have to accept that it was a lower priority. In the middle of January the coastal towns of Mergui and Tavoy were lost as Japanese forces scurried over the hills from Siam. The deputy commissioner in Mergui managed to escape but told Dorman-Smith: “I would rather have stayed and been taken prisoner … We will never be able to hold up our heads again.” Dorman-Smith also wanted to do the right thing. He wired the Burma Office in London: “I hate the idea of deserting the local population. I would welcome your views, my own view is that we all should stay.” Within a few weeks the mood had changed from cool optimism to acceptance of all-out defeat.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 29
