The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (43 page)

THE THIRTY COMRADES

A little more than two years before, on 14 August 1940, just as the Luftwaffe was beginning its bombing raids over England, two young Burmese men smuggled themselves on board a Norwegian cargo ship bound for the gritty port city of Amoy in China. One was Aung San, the ex-student leader, who was on the run from the colonial police. It was a slow and uncomfortable journey, the first long sea voyage for both men, and was followed by weeks of wandering aimlessly in Amoy with little money and no precise plan. They had apparently thought about making contact with the Chinese Communists but eventually arranged to be picked up by the Japanese and taken via Taiwan to Tokyo, arriving in the Japanese capital on the very day that the new Axis pact with
Germany was being signed and celebrated by giant flag-waving crowds.
⁷
Aung San was now part of Tokyo’s grand plan to snatch away Britain’s empire in the East.

For Colonel Keiji Suzuki, the Japanese “Lawrence of Arabia,” Aung San’s arrival in Tokyo was just what he was hoping for. His idea was to foment an anti-British rebellion inside Burma, to help pave the way for an eventual Japanese conquest. He did his homework well, traveling to the country (posing as a journalist) for long periods and making all the right contacts. And now he had Burma’s most promising young politician in Tokyo.

Aung San spent the rest of 1940 in the Japanese capital, learning Japanese and apparently getting swept away in all the fascist euphoria surrounding him. “What we want is a strong state administration as exemplified in Germany and Japan. There shall be one nation, one state, one party, one leader … there shall be no nonsense of individualism. Everyone must submit to the state which is supreme over the individual … ,” he wrote in those heady days of the Rising Sun.
⁸
He spoke Japanese, wore a kimono, and even took a Japanese name. He then sneaked back into Burma, landing secretly at Bassein. He changed into a
longyi
and then took the train unnoticed to Rangoon. He made contact with his old colleagues. Within weeks, in small batches and with the help of Suzuki’s secret agents in Rangoon, Aung San and his new select team traveled by sea to the Japanese-controlled island of Hainan, in the South China Sea. There were thirty in all—the Thirty Comrades—and they would soon be immortalized in nationalist mythology.

Aung San at twenty-five was one of the three oldest. He took Teza meaning “Fire” as his nom de guerre. The other two took the names Setkya (A Magic Weapon) and Ne Win (the Bright Sun). All thirty prefixed their names with the title Bo. “Bo” meant an officer and had come to be the way all Europeans in Burma were referred to, signifying their ruling status. The Burmese were now to have their own “bo” for the first time since 1885. But six months of harsh Japanese military training still lay ahead. It wasn’t easy, and at one point some of the younger men were close to calling it quits. Aung San, Setkya, and Ne Win received special training, as they were intended for senior positions. But all had to pass through the same grueling physical tests, saluting the Japanese flag and learning to sing Japanese songs. They heard tales of combat and listened to Suzuki boasting of how he had killed
women and children in Siberia.
⁹
It was a bonding experience that would shape Burmese politics for decades to come.

In 1941, in the months before Pearl Harbor, they were moved to Bangkok, the riverside capital of Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram’s pro-Axis dictatorship, and there they formed a Burma Independence Army (BIA) under Colonel Suzuki’s enthusiastic supervision. Suzuki himself had taken the Burmese nom de guerre Bo Mogyo, meaning “the Thunderbolt,” an astute choice that played on the (allegedly) old local prophecy that “the umbrella” (meaning “the British”) would eventually be struck down by “the thunderbolt.” Tokyo had yet to decide its Burma policy as both the Imperial Army and Navy jockeyed for influence and argued whether an amphibious or land offensive made most sense. But Suzuki’s heart lay increasingly in Burma, and he encouraged the young men under him to themselves lead the fight for Burmese independence and move ahead of the emperor’s forces. A rumor spread that Bo Mogyo was none other than a son of the prince of Myingun, Mindon’s eldest son, who had rebelled against his father in 1866, then fled east to Saigon.

One night in a house in downtown Bangkok, not far from today’s backpacker mecca at Khao San Road, the Thirty Comrades slit their fingers, pooled their blood, and swore oaths of loyalty, reenacting a ritual of Burma’s extinct military aristocracy. Aung San’s little band then trudged off to the front line, pushing eagerly behind the infantry and mountain regiments of the Japanese Fifteenth Army. Ne Win led a special unit that reached Rangoon early, and others soon fanned out across the delta and through the towns of the middle Irrawaddy, clashing here and there with the retreating British but leaving nearly all the real fighting to the Japanese. Within months their numbers had soared, as they were joined by their old fellow nationalists and other excited youngsters across the country. On 1 May 1942 they entered the blackened ruins of Mandalay. As Thibaw’s ghost was being avenged, the Burmese civil war was also about to begin.

*

The bloodshed began in the western Irrawaddy Delta. Units of the Burma Independence Army, swollen with fresh recruits and patriotic pride, had just arrived alongside the black-booted Japanese and were beginning to disarm Karen soldiers as they were returning home. The
soldiers were Christian Karens from this area who had been part of the colonial army, who had decided not to make the trek to India and instead to go home and try to protect their families. Everyone knew the potential for trouble ahead. The BIA was very much a nationalist ethnic Burmese force, and the sight of armed Burmese in uniform, after more than a lifetime of colonial occupation, had ignited strong passions. And the Karens feared what might lie ahead. An elder in the Karen community, Sir San C. Po, was working hard to diffuse tensions, and it was thanks to his efforts that violence had just been averted in the big port town of Bassein. For a while it looked as if violence might be avoided altogether. But then a group of Karens hatched a plot, aimed at attacking the town of Myaungmya, driving out the Burmese soldiers and rescuing the Karens living there, who they believed to be in mortal danger. But the plot was discovered by the Burmese, who immediately shot the local Karen leader, Saw Pe Tha, together with his Scottish wife and their children. Sir San C. Po managed to prevent an even greater tragedy by then persuading the Karens not to go ahead with their attack. But the genie had been let out of the bottle.

Over the next many weeks the BIA, thinking that its worst fears of Karen treachery were coming true, started daily executions of Karens suspected of disloyalty to the new order. Dozens, if not hundreds, were murdered. The Catholic Mission headquarters as well as an orphanage were burned to the ground. In retaliation, Karens in nearby villages attacked random Burmese villagers, and communal violence spread swiftly across the delta. Only the intervention of the Japanese Army weeks later finally stopped the killings. What began in those days would soon lead to a war that has yet to end.

END OF EMPIRE?

The Japanese conquest of Burma shocked the British in India and in London as well. This was now the spring of 1942, and the threat of a German landing on the British Isles had faded. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had joined the war. But with victory at Stalingrad and the first landings in North Africa still months away, India, with over two and a half million of its own men in uniform, was vital for success. The sudden loss of Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore meant that
British prestige in the East was at an all-time low. More to the point, India itself was now directly threatened.

In March the austere Socialist lawyer Sir Stafford Cripps arrived by propeller plane in Delhi, carrying with him the Churchill government’s offer of future independence. The draft declaration he brought along stated that after the war an all-Indian constituent assembly would draw up a constitution for a new Indian union. Each province of India and each native state would be free to join or make separate arrangements. Both the Muslim League and the Congress Party rejected this and repeated their demands for immediate independence and a chance to fight in the war as equal members of the United Nations. Mahatma Gandhi called the offer “a post-dated check on a failing bank” and in July the Congress Party called on Britain to “Quit India.” By August and September, as Japanese troops hovered along the Manipur and Arakan frontiers, violent nationwide protests, rebellions, and terrorist attacks across the subcontinent shook British rule to its foundations.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DRESSING UP

In the summer of 1943 Japan granted Burma formal independence. In many ways this was a completely sham independence, in the manner of the Vidkun Quisling government in Norway and the puppet regime of Emperor Henry Pu Yi in Manchuria. But the Burmese were a people who had once lived and breathed ritual and ceremony and who had for sixty years under British rule been starved of any sort of pride, pomp, or circumstance. The mere semblance of government—and by mid-1943 everyone knew it would only be a facsimile of independence—still had an impact, as if the form of statehood, with all the uniforms and flags and parades, made them want even more the real thing.
¹⁰

The independence ceremony took place on 1 August 1943. Dr. Ba Maw, the prewar prime minister, became the
adipati
, or leader, in the manner of
der Führer
. The Japanese had thought of Aung San for the top job but found him too unimpressive in appearance and style and preferred the bigger and better-looking Ba Maw for their puppet. Being the emperor worshipers they were, they also considered restoring the monarchy and placing the septuagenarian prince of Pyinmana, a half
brother of Thibaw’s, on the throne, and this had won a good measure of Burmese support. But like the British in 1886, they really didn’t want to go to all the trouble and dropped the idea.

Aung San did, however, make it as the number two. As slender as ever and now shaven-headed, he was to be the head of a smaller but more professional Burmese army and minister for war. Many of the thousands who had ballooned the ranks of the BIA and had caused so much trouble in the delta and elsewhere were demobbed, and the remaining officers were sent to undergo intensive training by Japanese instructors just outside Rangoon. These officers later dominated the upper echelons of the armed forces until well into the 1970s.

It was to be a dictatorship along fashionable fascist lines. Ba Maw made known his utter disdain for democratic principles and forms of government, and the slogan of the new army under Aung San was “One Blood, One Voice, One Command” (
ta-pyi, ta-than, ta-meint
), still today the de facto slogan of the Burmese military. Ba Maw liked the trappings of 1940s dictatorship, and his independence day ceremony was more like an ersatz coronation. Always a clotheshorse and a man known for his sartorial creations, he now had a field day in designing pseudoroyal outfits. The music was the music of Thibaw’s court, and a dwarf herald addressed the erstwhile St Catherine’s College undergraduate as if he were a king. Manipuri Brahmins were hauled out of long retirement and brought to Rangoon to bless the marriage of his daughter Tinsa with one of the up-and-coming officers in the Burma Independence Army.

Many soon tired of the show, especially when the Japanese, with their interrogation centers and summary executions, their new sake brewery at the Anglican Cathedral and their brothel at the Pegu Club, their hair-raising torture techniques and sex slaves, made increasingly clear who was actually in charge. Ba Maw and others went to Tokyo for meetings of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, where they sat around conference tables and posed for photographs with other real and pseudonationalists. But at home, even within the group around the
adipati
, there was a gnawing sense that history was about to favor a different side.

WARTIME AT HOME

U Thant was one of those always wary of a Nippon-led liberation. In October 1941 he had sent an article entitled “From the Frying Pan into the Fire” to the editor of
New Burma
, warning against expecting much from the Axis powers. Though everything else he had sent in was promptly published, this article never appeared in print. A week later he received a handwritten note from Dr. Thein Maung, the publisher of the weekly, apologizing profusely for not publishing the piece but saying that the theme went entirely against prevailing opinion. Thant never wrote for the journal again. Thein Maung became Ba Maw’s ambassador to Japan.

By March the Japanese had reached Pantanaw, and Thant came increasingly under suspicion, as a man with Anglophile and democratic leanings and as someone who would not always fall in line. He was, however, asked to take part in the new administration, mainly because he was in Aung San’s good books and because his best friend, U Nu, was now the new “minister for foreign affairs.” U Nu, aways ambivalent (at best) about the Japanese, remembered later that this was far from a real job and that most of the time at his fledgling Foreign Ministry was spent sending cables of congratulations to other Axis countries on their national holidays. Thant was asked to be secretary of the Burma Education Reorganization Committee; he thought it impossible to say no and accepted, moving for several months to a bomb-scared and half-deserted Rangoon.

Back in Pantanaw, he developed a fairly warm or at least collegial relationship with one of the several Japanese officers stationed in the town, a Lieutenant Oyama, who spoke and read English fluently. Oyama visited Thant’s house from time to time in his mustard-colored uniform and peaked cap and even borrowed books, perhaps Po Hnit’s Victorian novels or Thant’s collections of Fabian essays. This relationship, however, did little to prevent the daily brutalities of life under occupation, and hundreds of young Burmese in neighboring towns were later found in mass graves, killed for suspicion of opposing the Japanese.