Fighting on all Fronts (45 page)

Thus the twilight of British colonialism in Burma in the 1930s produced a generation of nationalist cadre who sought to free their country using militant methods. While drawing inspiration and ideology from a wide and contradictory array of sources, the apprenticeships they served in activism and (for some of them) government and the military would prepare them to play leading roles in the coming conflict when Britain was defeated.

Pre-war Rangoon was a cauldron of plots, suspicions and covert activities by the British government, Japanese agents and Bamar nationalists that could provide the stuff of a great spy novel. While labour disturbances and nationalist agitation continued apace, Ba Maw’s attempts to gain the promise of Burmese autonomy in any possible war followed by a guarantee of independence ran into typical chauvinist obstruction from the British both in Rangoon and London. The leaders of ethnic minorities such as the Karen and Shan felt British rule teetering on the abyss, and a grim future of Bamar domination ahead of them. Meanwhile the Japanese were already preparing the ground for invasion. Keiji Suzuki, a colonel in the Imperial General Headquarters, had come to Burma disguised as a businessman, and arriving in Rangoon made contact with several Thakins hoping to lure them to the side of Japan, promising an independent Burma as part of the “East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.
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Suzuki entered the realm of a Bamar nationalism that was beginning to fracture under
the pressure of the coming war. Ba Maw, who considered his attempt to win over the British to independence pretty much failed, had resigned his ministry and travelled to London to seek an audience with Churchill in a last-ditch effort. The Thakin movement was deeply confused about the nature of the coming war. By and large the left wing Thakins were not at first inspired by the aims of either Britain’s anti-fascist colonialism or Japan’s militarist colonialism. Aung San expressed this later when he wrote, “the war in Europe was plainly a war between two sets of imperialists and could have no appeal of any kind. We therefore firmly resolved to conduct an anti-imperialist, anti-war campaign”.
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But Britain’s difficulty was always Ireland’s, or Burma’s, opportunity. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Japan’s ally Germany did not resolve this question, as it did for communists and many left-leaning nationalists in other countries. Aung San, though he was general secretary of Burma’s first communist cell, maintained it would be acceptable to seek aid from the “fascist” Japanese as the war in Asia had a substantially different character from that in Europe.
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Other Thakins looked to democratic Britain as the lesser evil. Than Tun broke with Aung San while in prison in early 1941 when he drafted a document calling for unconditional support to Britain in the anti-fascist war.
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Others among the left wing Thakins sought to use Britain’s distraction as an opportunity to overthrow colonialism and then fight for independence against Britain and Japan alike.

Aung San had probably resolved by mid-1940 that seeking Japan’s aid held the best prospects for his cause. Though in August he escaped arrest by slipping on board a ship bound for China claiming to be seeking the aid of the Chinese communists, when
Kempetei
agents discovered him he was perfectly amenable to going to Japan to discuss his options.
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In Tokyo he and Suzuki hammered out a plan for achieving Burma’s freedom in collaboration with Japanese forces. As the Imperial Army prepared to extend its South East Asia campaign into British territory, Aung San and his followers would foment an anti-British uprising and become recognised by the Japanese as the official government of independent Burma as soon as it gained control of the south eastern districts. This would achieve the Imperial Army’s aim of cutting off the “Burma road”, which was the main supply route for the Chinese resistance, and would also leave the way open to India.
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In March 1941 Aung San covertly arrived back in Rangoon to begin recruiting his Thakin comrades to the force of pro-Japanese rebels he aimed to establish. These are the “Thirty Comrades” of nationalist
mythology, who became the core of Burma’s independent wartime armed forces.
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They arrived at Hainan Island in China to begin a gruelling boot camp instructed by Japanese officers. To cement their loyalty to each other and Burma, the Thakins made a blood pact and adopted new names: Aung San became Bo Teza (Commander Fire) along with the honorific title
Bogyoke
(General), Tun Shein became Bo Yan Naing (Commander Vanquisher) and Shu Maung became Bo Ne Win (Commander Sun’s Brilliance).
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The Thirty Comrades then gathered their forces across the Burmese border in Siam and waited for the signal to rise.
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The signal came at the beginning of 1942. At the turn of the year Japanese troops swept down the Malayan peninsula on bicycles, first laying siege to and then capturing Britain’s naval base at Singapore, a catastrophe for the colonial power in the Pacific theatre of the war. The colonial administration was thrown into panic, deserting Rangoon as the Fifteenth Imperial Army marched into the south east, dragging thousands of British, Indian and minority Burmese along with it overland, to eventually re-establish itself in exile at Shimla in the Indian Himalayas. The stage was set for a long Japanese occupation, which Aung San and his comrades hoped would bring the prospect of Burmese freedom for the first time in 70 years.

Like any other country that suffered occupation by the Imperial Army, the Burmese people have plenty of bad memories of the Second World War. The suppression of the native population including ferocious reprisals against members of minority groups could be recounted at some length. The fate of slave labour forced to construct the Siam-Burma railway to supply the army is particularly well known even among the other horrors of the Japanese war effort in Asia and the Pacific.

Any attempt to describe the Japanese occupation has a difficult line to walk. Burma, like any other country in the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was regarded by the army as territory to be conquered and secured against its enemies. At the same time the Japanese had been favoured early on by native elements in Burma who saw their presence as a stepping-stone towards independence. Behind the scenes of official Japanese conquest there was an intense struggle going on led by Bamar nationalists Aung San and Ba Maw to make Japanese-sponsored faux independence a reality for their people, one that ended in the nationalists finally breaking with Japan.

In 1942 the Japanese Fifteenth Army, in collaboration with Aung San’s Burma Independence Army (BIA), successfully moved through and occupied Burma up to the Arakan frontier in the west and the tribal territories of the north. Establishing the occupation was a bloody job accomplished by both the Japanese and the BIA. In the course of establishing their autonomy the BIA often seemed to be matching the Japanese atrocity for atrocity. Immediately after crossing into Burma, Aung San himself took on the job of executing elders in a Shan village who were suspected of being in league with the British. The Shan and Karen, being the main nationalities besides the Bamar and the ones who had filled the ranks of the British forces in Burma, had the most to lose. Ian Morrison described the BIA’s treatment of one Karen Catholic village. First 152 men, women and children were massacred in cold blood. When they reached the compound:

Father Blasius, the Karen priest in charge, was sick in the clergy-house. The Burmans set fire to the house and burned him and the two men who were looking after him. They then burned down the church… The girls took refuge upstairs. The Burmans shot up through the ceiling… Four Karen lay sisters were killed. The great majority of the girls were cut down inside the mission compound, some on the road outside. The youngest victim was a baby of six months… [They] went in a mass to…the other side of the town. Here they killed another 52 people, all Karens, men, women and children… A few days later 47 Karen men were taken out and bayoneted to death.
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The atrocities committed early in the occupation by the Bamar are attributable to the lack of concern that the pre-war nationalists had for other Burmese nationalities, the celebratory mood that prevailed once the British had evacuated, and the profound disorder created by the power vacuum they had left. No organised force had emerged to join the 300 or so nationalist cadres of the BIA as they swept into the country on the heels of the Imperial Army, and it is doubtful that the Japanese would have encouraged or accepted one. Thus it was primarily the criminals, the outcasts and the dissatisfied of all shades that initially signed up. Maung Maung, who was Aung San’s aide at the time, contemptuously referred to early BIA soldiers as “a rabble without a minimum of military training”.
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Indeed, so many young Bamar men signed up to the BIA in the first few weeks of the occupation that its numbers skyrocketed from a few thousand when it crossed the frontier to as many as 200,000.
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This
created a problem both for the nationalist cadre in charge of the BIA, who had none of the resources necessary to command or even at times to keep track of them, and for the Imperial Army, whose commanders with a few exceptions were not given to much trust or indulge an independent native initiative in a country they felt they had conquered.

Some scholars, in awe of Bamar nationalism during the period, have termed the BIA “a political movement in military garb”.
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This is to project matters forward to the time when Aung San had regained control of the forces he had been carried along by after allying with the Japanese and was in the process of turning against them.
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This took several years in which they were bedevilled by Japanese intransigence and bewildered as to their next steps.

Aung San and the Thirty Comrades had expected, in accordance with Aung San’s agreement with Suzuki when they first met in Japan, that Burma would be granted its independence immediately after the British had been driven back from the south east of the country. The commanders of the Imperial Army had different ideas. Akiho Ishii, colonel of the Fifteenth Army and the officer responsible for command of civilian matters in Rangoon, denied any knowledge that Burma was to become independent and insisted, with the agreement of his command, that this would have to wait until after the war.
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A military administration was quickly established in the south east and, despite Suzuki’s promises that the BIA could set up a government when Rangoon was occupied, it was extended to Rangoon.
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A part of the Japanese military in Burma, as elsewhere, was deeply influenced by pan-Asian ideas and believed that granting Burma its independence was the only sure way to ensure support of the Burmese for Japan. Suzuki, who has since been regarded by Bamar nationalists as their Lawrence of Arabia figure, was among them. He clashed with Ishii, demanding the formation of a nationalist administration. In January the Tojo government in Japan came down on his side.
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The independent State of Burma was formally granted its independence in August 1943, with Ba Maw, who had returned from England via Portugal, as the
Adipati
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and Aung San as the minister of war in command of the BIA, renamed the Burma National Army (BNA). The institution of Burmese independence was accomplished with some fanfare, flags and other symbols of the old monarchy and a few of the fascist and militarist trappings adopted by other governments in league with the Axis powers. A declaration of independence cited Burma’s history of empire, the “long bondage” Burmese had endured under the British, and its “unconquered”
national spirit as the precursors to Burma before proclaiming Burma a “fully independent nation and sovereign state…as part of a world order which will ensure justice, peace and prosperity to all peoples”.
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But this was not to be a real independence, and every significant matter of state remained in the hands of Japan. U Nu, a prominent Thakin before the war who served as foreign minister, complained of Japanese condescension from the ambassador, who micromanaged all his ministry’s business and forbade Burma from establishing diplomatic relations with other nations, on down to the lowliest Japanese soldiers. He wrote of his daily business as minister:

From the day when independence was declared there were numerous telegrams to the Axis powers. But this was all trifling business… However, the wires were so numerous that before long the Foreign Office came to be known as the Telegraph Office. We noted down in a calendar the national days of every country and the birthdays of statesmen and that kind of thing, so as to send off our wires punctually. And we had to acknowledge the receipt of similar messages from other countries.
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He was not alone in his resentment of the Japanese, who even their highest collaborators began to think of as occupiers rather than liberators. Aung San certainly felt this way in mid-1943 and was confident enough to voice his feelings to Ba Maw, telling him that “the Japanese are insincere and overbearing”, and that the Burmese people were needlessly suffering for what was in the end “only the Japanese version of home rule”.
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How Aung San felt in 1943 must have been just a faint reflection of how the Burmese people in general were suffering. The elimination of Burma’s export markets, including its primary one in India, had led to a drastic decline in paddy cultivation. The efforts of the Burmese government to alleviate this by purchasing excess rice ran into problems of bureaucracy and lack of resources, and by the end of the year it was broadcasting radio programmes that encouraged peasants to look to the nutritional value of grass.
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Burmese auxiliary troops promised by the state to help maintain security were instead sent to Rangoon to labour under the Imperial Army, where most faced harsh and racist treatment.