Forgotten Wars (40 page)

Dorman-Smith, however, refused to relent. This was a struggle of wills between his authority, the AFPFL and London. Once the petition of Abdul Rashid’s widow was in the public domain, he decided on a struggle to the death, effectively handing victory to Aung San. Why was he so inflexible? It was this phase in Dorman-Smith’s career that was to tar him as a Tory reactionary, the character he plays in Aung San Suu Kyi’s memoir of her father and also in Fergal Keane’s 1990s television documentary on Aung San’s assassination. Certainly the Dorman-Smith of 1946 was not the genial Irish observer of nationalist movements who had soothed Tin Tut’s ruffled feathers in Simla three years before. His health was rapidly deteriorating. He was in the grip of his fourth attack of amoebic dysentery since his return to Burma. The season was terrible and conditions were poor even for a governor. He had difficulty in understanding the massive changes that had overtaken Burmese politics since 1942, used as he was to the likes of Paw Tun and U Saw. He was also truly horrified by what was now coming out about Axis atrocities. He was haunted by images of the
sook ching
massacres of the Chinese in Malaya by the Japanese in 1942, their torture of Major Seagrim and the Karen special forces in 1944, the Burma–Siam railway and, more distantly, the Holocaust. He was horrified by the brutal treatment of the Burmese and Anglo-Indian
Christians of Rangoon, among whom he had once felt at home. Aung San and his colleagues were indelibly painted in his mind as JIFS, Japanese-influenced forces, as ‘quislings’ and ‘fascists’. He was also deeply at odds with the Labour ministers in London, pining for his old expansive relationship with his ‘wonderful boss’,
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Leo Amery, rather than the stiff and self-righteous left-wingers who now held power. Attlee’s government seemed to embody dither and interference in about the same degree. Dorman-Smith once drafted a telegram to Attlee: ‘I had a dose of Eno’s [liver salts] last night. May I please be allowed to go to the lavatory tomorrow?’
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Some weeks after the plans to arrest Aung San were shelved, the security of the country deteriorated markedly. Aung San was building up his strength in the villages and small towns, aware that he might still need to stage a show of force against either the British or his communist ‘allies’. The drilling, marching and counter-marching of more than 80,000 volunteers became feverish in the weeks after the first anniversary of the BNA’s revolt against the Japanese. Then came the crisis. On 18 May a fatal shooting took place at Tantabin in Insein district, a small town with a mixed Burman/Karen population. A band of local volunteers was moving through the town protesting against the Defence of Burma rules. These prohibited quasi-military marching and arms drill, even when carried out with dummy weapons. The exact sequence of events is unclear, as defence and prosecution witnesses flatly contradicted each other,
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but there had evidently been ill feeling for some time between local leaders of the PVO and the police sub-inspector, Maung Gale. The authorities believed that the nationalists were collecting arms. Some people deposed that leaders of the crowd were carrying dummy weapons. The
yebaws
, or volunteers, allegedly told people to resist the police if they attempted arrests during the demonstrations: ‘Let the masses surround the authorities and forcibly take back the persons arrested.’
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On the day of the shooting, things had got out of hand as people converged on one of the main teashops in the town. The police started to beat members of the crowd with their rifle butts. The crowd attacked the police with bamboo poles. The police then discharged at least sixty live rounds, killing five people and wounding many others before the crowd retreated. Three hundred
yebaws
were arrested, but it was never clear
if the order to disperse was actually given to or understood by the crowd before the firing began.
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As in so many incidents in British imperial history, from Ireland through Egypt to India and beyond, a relatively minor but bloody police action galvanized people’s perception of British rule as irredeemably repressive. An ominous feature of the situation in Tantabin was that the crowd was composed of villagers, not students or ‘agitators’. They were protesting because of demands for the repayment of agricultural loans in a terrible season of shortage and hardship. Tantabin was an indication of the strength of the bonds that had been forged between the
yebaws
, the volunteer corps of the old BIA, and the villages in 1942. It was a portent of a major revolt.

The government of Burma set up a commission to investigate the incident while Dorman-Smith urged London to take a hard line against nationalist leaders whose speeches stirred up popular demonstrations of the sort that ended with the Tantabin firing. Once again he seems to have had Aung San in mind. When news of the incident had broken, Aung San put all the blame on the British government. According to Aung San’s agreement with Mountbatten at Kandy some eight months previously, members of the BNA were to be absorbed into the British Burma Army and more men would be recruited to turn it into a truly national force. But the British had not even begun to honour this pledge. Many former BNA personnel were unemployed and resentful, while village youths were pressing to enlist. Aung San was uncomfortably aware that people of this sort could easily shift allegiance to clandestine communist cadres unless the nationalist elements of the AFPFL moved fast. Besides, he asked, why was drilling by the volunteers illegal in the first place? Who had deemed it so?
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As it turned out, Aung San had already won the game. Attlee had finally begun to take a closer interest in Burma, aware that a flare-up there would do enormous damage if it came at the same time as mass demonstrations in India and Malaya. He had decided that Dorman-Smith was becoming erratic. This was not without reason. In early May, shortly after resuming his demands for the arrest of Aung San, the governor made an apparent
volte-face
by holding out the possibility of recruiting some new blood into his old-fashioned executive council, perhaps even Aung San himself. He also finally conceded the
need to review the White Paper. By 7 May Attlee had concluded that the governor ‘changes his policy from day to day’ and was ‘losing his grip’.
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He would have to be relieved on the grounds of ill health. Attlee’s conclusion was only confirmed by Dorman-Smith’s vacillation and indecision after the Tantabin shootings. Blowing hot and cold, he first called for strong action against those who had fomented the agitation, only to reverse his policy in favour of a general amnesty for these and other political prisoners, a recommendation that infuriated senior police officers and civil servants.

On 14 June Dorman-Smith’s recall was made public and Sir Henry Knight became acting governor pending the arrival of Sir Hubert Rance, who would take over in August. Knight was an impeccable old India hand who had previously been acting governor in both Madras and Bombay. This change in personnel reflected a much deeper policy switch, for Rance had been Mountbatten’s right-hand man. The conservatives in the Burmese civil service were appalled. As Dorman-Smith left, Frederick Pearce, counseller to the governor, sent him a note of commiseration. He had been right all along, Pearce said. He had been unfairly made to carry the can in 1942 because military morale was too fragile to be told the truth. He had tried to defend the Burmese civil administration against the false accusations of the war correspondents. Finally, his policy had been undermined ‘by the wilfully blind conceptions and pre-emptive conclusions of that Heaven-inspired politician Dicky M.’
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For Pearce himself, the bitterest blows were to find himself accused of mismanaging the military administration and having his old boss replaced by Rance. Pearce hinted and Dorman-Smith believed that Mountbatten was covertly responsible for the governor’s sacking. They were probably right. True, Mount-batten had not been Dorman-Smith’s only handicap – a Chamberlain appointee was never likely to reach a meeting of minds with Labour ministers who disliked his politics and personal style, and Attlee quickly lost patience with him – but it does seem likely that Mount-batten played a key role in ejecting Dorman-Smith and choosing his successor. Certainly Tom Driberg, thought so. He believed that Mountbatten had privately briefed against Dorman-Smith and had impressed Attlee with the idea that only a rapid move towards independence could avoid the sort of situation that had arisen in Indo-China,
where the French were desperately fighting to suppress the Vietnamese resistance.
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For his part, Driberg kept up the pressure on Mountbatten, relaying to him the fears of Aung San and other local politicians who valued him as one of their few direct links to domestic British opinion. On 12 June Aung San wrote to Driberg of ‘the blind prejudice and stark policy of bureaucratic intransigence he had encountered’.
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He alone, he claimed, was trying to restrain his infuriated followers from attacking British interests. Driberg duly passed this on to Mountbatten.

It is unsurprising that Dorman-Smith, Pearce and the hardliners of the military administration loathed Dickie and his men. But their poisonous hatred of Aung San, whom they regarded as a creature of Dickie’s, was dangerously infectious. It entered the bloodstream of Burmese politics and fed the festering resentment of U Saw and his followers towards Aung San. Naively, Dorman-Smith disassociated his own actions from U Saw’s machinations. Till the end he retained some regard for Aung San as a strong man and military hero. Did he see in him an Asian Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator of Burma, perhaps? At any rate, having tried for three months to have the man hanged, he left a surprisingly emollient assessment of him for Sir Henry Knight. Aung San was ‘Burma’s popular hero and… I look upon him as a sincere man… He has enough sense to realise that an uprising can only mean added misery.’
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Dorman-Smith did not extend this benediction to Mountbatten, however. Back in England, he poured out his bile. He railed against the impression that Dickie’s ‘sea-green incorruptibles’ had replaced ‘our old corruptibles’, adding in a deplorable piece of word-play that one of his own senior officials had been pushed out ‘unhonoured and Aung San’.
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He always knew he was persona ‘not very grata’ to Attlee, he said, but he really felt it when he arrived back in London. Unlike the old days when Leo Amery used to meet him at the railway station, there was no one waiting at Euston this time. He duly turned up at Whitehall. ‘Then I saw the Pathetic One [Pethick-Lawrence] – “Out you go”… So that was it. Exit Smith.’ Pethick-Lawrence had consulted him on nothing, had not enquired after his health – the alleged reason for his recall – and had not even bothered to get up from his chair to shake hands when he entered the room. Now he was sure that Mountbatten had plotted
against him. He got wind of rumours that Mountbatten was destined for ‘some monumental appointment in the East’. Surely not the viceroyalty of India? But that would explain a lot. As viceroy Mountbatten would want to have his own man in Burma: ‘I HATE Dickie having a finger in the Burma pie because I think he is so unsound.’
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None of this would have mattered very much except that it encouraged the former governor to stick his own fingers in the pie. Over the next two years he remained dangerously close to Saw, the rogue element in Burmese politics, and he cultivated the radical Karen separatists, irreconcilables who were almost to blow apart the future Union of Burma.

Almost all the pieces were now in place for the endgame of British Burma and the emergence of the new republic. But one other tangled set of events in the early part of 1946 set the scene for the country’s future and arguably for much of the rest of Southeast Asia. This was the implosion of the Burmese Communist Party, an event that ensured, in the long term, the relative isolation of Burma from the Cold War. Like the creaking British administration, the communist split was very much a matter of personalities. Since the beginning of the war, the communist hard man Thakin Soe had been quietly building up his cadres in the countryside. Soe took a dim view of erstwhile comrades such as Thakin Than Tun who had spent the war in ministerial office under Ba Maw, or skulking in Simla or Chungking. In the quaint lexicography of contemporary leftist abuse, Soe accused Than Tun and others of ‘Browderism’ or compromising communist purity by making deals with ‘imperialists’. Browder was an American communist leader who had preached a gospel of accommodation with capitalism.
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Worse, Soe accused Than Tun of corruption, in particular the misappropriation of a large quantity of gold that had been accumulated by the left for the purpose of anti-Japanese resistance during the war. An open split occurred at a conference in March 1946 when Than Tun and other communists who did not favour immediate armed struggle hit back with a lurid assault on Soe’s personal integrity. They accused him of extending his disdain for private property to other men’s wives and daughters and produced a lengthy charge sheet, detailing ‘how Thakin Soe had forcibly taken to himself the sister of his first wife; how he had deserted both the sisters and married a third wife; how he again left her and appropriated to himself a young
woman recruit to the Party from the hands of one of his lieutenants’.
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After this conference, the main aim of Soe’s ‘red flag’ or Trotskyite communists became the extermination of the ‘white flag’ or Stalinist communists led by Than Tun. Soe went underground and continued to build up a following of Karen and Burmese communists in the Irrawaddy delta districts, occasionally engaging in dacoit-like attacks on the police and their rivals. This disunity among its future enemies was one important reason for the survival of the AFPFL government in the dangerous years immediately after independence.