Fighting on all Fronts (46 page)

From 1942 the Japanese had embarked on the project of building a railway from Bangkok to Rangoon in an attempt to shore up their supply lines to defend Burma and in preparation for an eventual invasion of India. This became known as the “Death Railway” and was among the most notorious of the Japanese crimes against humanity during the war.
Allied prisoners of war (POWs) from Britain, Australia and elsewhere are, of course, the best remembered of these victims. But the majority of its victims were Asian labourers from Malaya and Burma.
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The death toll of the railway accelerated in tandem with military imperatives, as the American victory at Midway opened the Pacific and threatened the survival of all the Japanese armies in South East Asia.

British POW Jeffrey English described how the massive death toll from Japanese violence and disease came to be treated as a matter of course by the labourers:

We burnt the bodies in the afternoon… Some men would put on some bamboo shoots or wild sweet potatoes to roast in the embers. If, on trying to recover them, you got the odd toe or wrist by mistake, you just threw it back and went on scrabbling for your potato, probably using a charred rib as a rake. Death had long since lost its dignity.
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The conditions for the native labourers in Burma were equivalent if not worse as they were unprotected by even the semblance of concern for the welfare of POWs. The railway upon its completion had consumed as many as 100,000 lives. But we need to draw no special conclusions about the Japanese psyche from the “Death Railway” or any of their other horrific crimes. For the Japanese were trying to catch up with the “civilised” empires of Britain and France, and in the course of this ended up competing with the death tolls they had accumulated over a much longer period of time during the few years of the war. The railway, like the Shoah in Eastern Europe, was the outcome of this process, the realisation of a dream that “projected Japanese dreams of industrial fortitude, economic robustness, and Asian domination”.
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By the time the railway had been completed, however, the purpose for which it had been built was coming into question. The Imperial Army, with aid from the BNA and Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, had entered north eastern India only to be ignominiously thrown back at the battle of Imphal. As the US Navy swept across the Pacific towards Japan, Britain prepared to retake Burma. The nationalists who had aided Japan would again have tough choices ahead of them.

The post-war mythology of the Burman state likes to cast Aung San and his compatriots as semi-clairvoyant political actors who knew precisely when to side with the British or Japanese, and precisely when to abandon
them when this would be to the advantage of Burma’s freedom.
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While we can certainly recognise the pragmatism of Aung San, it strains credulity given what we know of him to deny a certain naivety about the role of the Japanese when the war began. Similarly, while he clearly had thoughts of abandoning his Japanese allies as early as 1943, his actions did not match this until somewhat later.

For the Bamar nationalist leadership and the BNA to switch sides required both Japanese setbacks in the war and the growing resistance movement in Burma itself. Though the British had evacuated Burma completely, as they left their native soldiers faded into western jungles rather than surrender and abandon their arms. This was the case for the soldiers of the Burma Rifles battalion, who returned to their villages with their rifles to await the opportunity to aid in the British reconquest.
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Other hillmen along with Indian troops followed the British to Manipur, where they would fight the Japanese and their countrymen at Imphal. But though the British loyalists were among the fiercest fighters against the Japanese occupation, another component came from the pre-war nationalist cadre, particularly those identified with communism.

In one respect it was fortunate that there had not been a well-established Communist Party in Burma (CPB) before the war, as it would have been subjected to the same pressures all Moscow-oriented parties came under to conform with the waverings of Soviet foreign policy. The Indian CP next door, for example, risked being completely discredited by standing with the British against the Quit India movement.
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Whether due to their allegiance to the Soviet perspective or their adroitness in guessing the nature of the coming Japanese occupation, the Thakins of the CPB would play a central role in shifting the entire nationalist movement towards the side of the British.

Thein Pe was the major figure in this regard. Having been an early leftist among the Thakins and a supporter of an anti-fascist alliance between Bamar nationalists and Britain since before the war, he set out from Mandalay on foot as the Japanese advanced and reached Calcutta, offering his services to the Communist Party of India (CPI) and eventually the British government-in-exile of Burma.
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In India and briefly in China, Thein Pe worked as a left propagandist for the Popular Front, publishing a book on the Japanese conquest of his country
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and writing long features for
People’s War
, the newspaper of the CPI. As Japanese fortunes dimmed, the British would see his use as an asset for their eventual reoccupation of Burma, and his place as a link between Britain and the Burmese communists would become particularly important.

Meanwhile in Burma other leftist Thakins operating as the CPB were laying the ground for rebellion against the Japanese within the BIA. Thakin Soe in 1943 began meeting with some of the lower-ranking BIA officers to instruct them in Marxism and recruit handfuls of guerrillas here and there to communism, relying on his and his party’s reputation as a nationalist but anti-Japanese force.
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His delicate and untiring work under conditions of hostile occupation were soon rewarded; Aung San and others in the BNA finally reached the conclusion that the time had come to sever links with the Japanese. In August 1944, at a clandestine meeting, the leaders of the CPB, the BNA and Ba Maw’s People’s Revolutionary Party agreed to form the Anti-Fascist Organisation that would rise against the Japanese at the opportune hour.
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Renamed the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), this was the united nationalist coalition that would become the ruling party of independent Burma.

When the Japanese asked for the BNA to assist them in defending the crumbling frontier, it was decided that the time was right.
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Maung Maung records that Aung San gave a rousing speech in Rangoon on 17 March in which he declared that “the time had come to go out and fight; he himself would lead; danger, hardship and perhaps death lay ahead, but they would all go forward together”.
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But he forgot to mention the name of the enemy.

To expand too much into the fate of the Burmese after the end of the war would run quickly beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, a few brief outlines on the unstable post-war colonial settlement, as a prelude to independence and the simultaneous break-up of the nationalist communist coalition can be written in order to see the effects of the war.

The BIA, after marching from Rangoon under Japanese command, wheeled around and began attacking isolated Japanese units. The Imperial Army, under intense pressure from the British and betrayed by their only local allies, fled from Rangoon, leaving the 26th Indian Division to occupy the city unopposed just as the Imperial Army itself had done three years earlier.
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When the war ended on 16 August, all effective resistance from this quarter ceased. For the price of one ticket’s entry to the war, Burma was twice devastated by occupying armies. Before evacuating, the British set fire to all operating oil refineries near Rangoon, in addition to disabling the city’s rail services and scuttling
almost all ships in the merchant fleet.
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In turn, the Japanese before evacuating “destroyed everything from the Irish girls’ school on Prome Road to the Yacht Club on Inya Lake”, surely a bitter welcome for the returning Raj.
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The devastated city was soon filled by thousands of squatters from the countryside, which had if anything received much worse treatment from both sides.

The policy of the returning British for Burma and its population was as contradictory as the Japanese policy had been. One section of the military and colonial bureaucracy saw the nationalists as traitors to be punished harshly as part of the process of turning the clock back to the 1930s. It was this sentiment that British general William Smith, the first to meet with Aung San, had expressed when he refused to recognise any authority of the AFPFL and demanded that the soldiers of the BIA be disbanded or placed under British command, a demand which Aung San acceded to in any case.
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But to Lord Louis Mountbatten, newly created Earl of Burma and overall commander of the British forces’ south eastern divisions, it was imperative to show collaboration with native forces in the climate of post-war peace and security. A cautious policy of encouraging Burmese collaboration with economic reconstruction of the country and in exchange having their political voices heard within a Governor’s Council (similar to the 1935 set up) to be followed by Home Rule and eventually independence within the Commonwealth was set as British policy in the government White Paper of 1945.
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It was certain from the conclusion of hostilities, however, that this set up could not count on any kind of stability. The British were incapable of peacefully returning a twice-occupied country to its rule. Burma’s people suffered under lingering wartime economic devastation, which the British exacerbated by declaring all Japanese currency invalid and wiping out millions of people’s resources overnight.
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The promise of new elections and expanded freedom for their country did little to appease the Thakin party led by Aung San, who had tasted independence, however briefly, and were determined to renew the struggle at the earliest opportunity.

The communist/nationalist alliance that formed the core of the AFPFL began to fracture, with Aung San’s nationalists increasing in prominence and claiming political leadership of the country. In one respect this was because they could claim, with some credibility, to be more left wing and militant fighters for freedom than the CPB. The Communists, who had led the way in forming a wartime alliance with the British, had drunk deeply from the well of Popular Frontism that erased the differences between rulers and ruled in the anti-fascist war.
Thein Pe had written early on that the natural development of the war internationally would naturally eliminate “the use of violence, bloodshed, and armed uprising in a people’s fight for freedom”,
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an opinion that was seconded by Than Tun as late as 1945:

If we have to arm or rebel it will mean that our second revolution is against the masses of the world and the countries of the allied nations. Even though we say we are fighting for freedom we will in fact become the first army of the Japanese… If such a thing comes to pass the English… will ignore the world and continue to rule us cruelly.
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This policy was transmuted to the CPB through their close links to the CPI, especially its general secretary P C Joshi, who, in calling Churchill “more or less progressive” and foreseeing Indian independence coming about peacefully through the agency of British-Soviet collaboration, was primarily responsible for the articulation of what would be called “Browderism” in India and Burma.
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The CPB was expelled from the AFPFL under the personal authority of Aung San, who had been its first general secretary and briefly returned to membership at the end of the war.
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A split in the CPI between Joshi and the hardliners led by B T Ranadive, culminating in Joshi’s expulsion for Browderism, would precipitate a similar crisis in its Burmese sister party; Soe, who went to India and met with Ranadive and other CPI hardliners in September 1945, returned convinced of the errors of Browderism and determined to launch an underground struggle.
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The CPB split into the CPB (Red Flags) led by Soe and the uncharitably named CPB (White Flags) led by Than Tun. The former would lead the uprising several years later leading to a long period of Communist insurgency.

Following the split in the AFPFL, Aung San seemed to go from success to success. A general strike maintained with AFPFL leadership allowed him to first scrap the White Paper by demanding representation for his party that equalled its popular support in the governing council, then staring the British down when he was set to be prosecuted for the execution of Karen villagers, as mentioned above. In January 1947 he sat down in London to sign an agreement with Clement Attlee that guaranteed Burma’s independence within a year. He was 32 years old.

Barely six months later, soldiers armed with rifles burst into a meeting of the Executive Council, which Aung San headed as the last head of state prior to independence. They fired indiscriminately, killing the
Bogyoke
and six of his ministers. U Saw, the chief minister of Burma
before the Japanese occupation, was implicated in a plot involving some British officers and was quickly arrested, tried, convicted and executed.
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At the time of his death Aung San was to all appearances earnestly trying to settle the problem of the national minorities, breaking away from some of the chauvinist legacies of Thakin nationalism and actively soliciting Shan and Karen participation in Burma’s independence set up. To them he promised a united federation “with properly regulated provisions as should be made to safeguard the rights of National Minorities” including a constitution that would ensure each ethnic unit autonomy within the union of Burma.
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Some have concluded on this basis that had the
Bogyoke
not died so young, he might have averted independent Burma’s exclusive Bamar domination and bloody record of ethnic strife. It is impossible to say, but it is likely that Burma’s chronic economic underdevelopment presented such an intractable problem at independence that it would have stymied even a leader as talented as Aung San.