Ghosts of Empire (31 page)

In October 1945, at the start of the new academic year, when Pearn found himself the ‘solitary non-Burmese member' of the staff at Rangoon University, he found that conditions within the university had completely changed. He complained that ‘British standards of work and discipline . . . were no longer respected.' Sir Hubert Rance, who would be the governor of Burma for a short time in 1946–7, noticed that ‘a great many changes had taken place in Burma', changes which ‘perhaps had not been properly appreciated by the planners in Simla'.
²⁸
Simla, the summer capital of British India, was the location to which the government of Burma under Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the Governor, had retreated after the humiliation of the first part of 1942. The altered political climate in Britain, where Labour had won an historic landslide victory in the general election of July 1945, also affected the mood. To traditional Tories like Dorman-Smith, the world had changed immeasurably in a very short time. Dorman-Smith had been born in 1899 in Ireland and, after Harrow and Sandhurst, had distinguished himself by becoming president of the National Farmers' Union at the age of thirty-two, which he used as a springboard to a political career. He had been elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative in 1935, and served briefly as minister for agriculture, before being sent out to Burma as governor, where, it was assumed, his agricultural background would prove useful.
²⁹

Dorman-Smith was a self-styled Colonel Blimp. In December 1942, Leopold Amery, the Conservative Secretary of State for India, had written a couple of letters to Dorman-Smith expressing their shared attitude to Burma and the fate of the British Empire. In the first letter Amery voiced concern about the ambitions of America and China in Burma: ‘Why
should these foreigners poke their noses into the British Empire?' In the second he boasted to Dorman-Smith that he was ‘at least as Colonel Blimpish as you are'. Amery was a small man, and some said he made up for this by being pugnacious. In the letter he went on to say that he was ‘not at all prepared that anyone, Yank or Chink, should poke either projecting or flat noses into the problem of the reconstitution of Burma'.
³⁰
Of course by 1945 the ‘Yanks and Chinks' were immeasurably more powerful than they had been in 1886, when Burma had been annexed.

It was not only foreign powers, alien to Burma, that were threatening to ‘poke their noses' into Burmese affairs. Significant numbers of Burmese were now beginning to assert themselves in their attempts to win independence from the British. The precipitate collapse of the British position in 1942 was matched by an equally rapid disintegration after the war. Dorman-Smith, although governor, was now subordinate to Lord Mountbatten who had become the supreme Allied commander of the new South-East Asia Command in November 1943. As Mountbatten became a significant player in the region's affairs, it was apparent that the likes of Dorman-Smith and Leo Amery would no longer be dominant figures in determining Burma's future. The Labour victory in 1945 meant that traditional Conservative politicians would, for a period at least, be sidelined. Dorman-Smith himself was summarily dismissed when he went to see Fred Pethick-Lawrence, Labour's secretary of state for India. Dorman-Smith returned to his room at the Burma Office in Whitehall and tersely informed Tom Hughes, an official in the Governor's Office, ‘I've been sacked.'
³¹

Mountbatten, in contrast to Conservative Party men like Leo Amery and Reginald Dorman-Smith, saw himself as a thrusting, youthful and modern figure who had no bleary-eyed sentimentality about the British Empire. In an interview with the BBC given in early 1969, he portrayed himself as a pro-Burmese figure. He contrasted his liberal attitudes to the views of those ‘Civil Affairs officers' who had run Burma before the war. They were keen, Mountbatten claimed, to keep power from the Burmese.

This, of course, was partly true. Churchill himself had declared in 1942 that he had not been appointed the King's first minister ‘in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire'.
³²
Amery and Dorman-Smith
agreed with these sentiments, while Mountbatten boasted of his more progressive attitudes. His career was greatly helped by the fact that the Labour government, after the war was over, believed him to be a sympathetic figure, untrammelled by the hidebound Conservatism which they believed would block Britain's path to a new, brighter future. Mountbatten, distantly related to the British royal family and uncle of the man who would marry the future Queen of England in 1947, considered himself grand enough not to be influenced by what he might well have believed to be the cheap, late Victorian music-hall rhetoric of empire. He dealt in power; he had a clear grasp, so he thought, of reality.

In the eyes of those British officials who deplored the end of empire, Mountbatten was the author of many of the subsequent misfortunes inflicted on Burma. He decided to arm and support the AFPFL, the rather long-windedly titled Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, headed by Aung San, a remarkable young guerrilla leader, only thirty years old. To the hard right, this was the essence of Burma's tragedy after the war. ‘In May 1945,' as Sir Arthur Bruce, a director of Wallace Brothers, the well-known finance company which operated in South-east Asia, remembered it, ‘the British in Burma were in a position of absolute supremacy–all powerful, all conquering.' How did this change? ‘How was it that, within two years, they were forced . . . to hand over effective control to a band of young communists, wholly inexperienced in the arts of government or the ways of commerce and industry?'
³³
These ‘young communists' were, in Bruce's view, the source of all Burma's subsequent problems.

Whatever the view of the young communists of the AFPFL and Aung San, they had simply stepped into a vacuum which had been created by the circumstances of Burma's history. The monarchy had been abolished. The court and religious authorities had been largely eradicated or marginalized. The British had successfully stamped their authority on Burma, but then this authority had itself been removed by force when the Japanese tanks rolled into Burma at the beginning of 1942. The consequence of these grave upheavals in a period of less than sixty years ensured that there were no leaders of Burmese society. This was noticed by the British officials themselves, such as Bruce, the businessman imperialist, who observed that the circumstances prevailing in Burma were ‘unique': Burma had an
extraordinary social structure; it had ‘no natural leaders, civil or military, no indigenous sources of capital . . . no native experience of the arts of government'. In Burma proper, as distinct from the Shan states on Burma's frontier, there was ‘no princely or natural ruling class of any kind'. There was ‘no aristocratic or patrician class'.
³⁴
This had been caused by the systematic nature of the pacification sixty years before. Burmese historians would claim that it was the imperialism of both Britain and Japan that had created the power vacuum and the opportunity for the young communists to seize power. Sir Charles Crosthwaite in the late 1880s, together with the Japanese brutalities of the 1940s, had eliminated the ‘natural leaders' of Burma.
³⁵

The young men, often described as the communists of the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, did not see themselves as communists. They were more akin to student socialists, young men who had read a smattering of Western political theory and who enjoyed debating at Rangoon University in the 1930s. Aung San emerged as the leader of this group. He had been born in 1915 and had graduated from Rangoon University in 1938. He was a student activist who had only recently gone into politics, and at Rangoon University in the 1930s, as a young nationalist, he was influenced by the usual texts written by revolutionary socialists like Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky; he also paid attention to the apparently successful movements led by Mussolini and Hitler. After throwing in his lot with the Japanese, Aung San went briefly to Tokyo where he was trained and entertained as a useful ally against British imperialism. At the end of March 1945, in an opportunistic move, Aung San turned on his Japanese friends. Mountbatten's decision to welcome him and his force, the newly christened Burma National Army, or BNA, as an ally against the Japanese infuriated the Supreme Allied Commander's Conservative opponents.

It is difficult to see how Mountbatten could have acted differently. Aung San's movement had the support of the people of Burma, although some perhaps doubted how deep that really was. It was a nationalist movement, but the ideas inspiring it seemed shallow and superficial, and its vaunted socialism was more a rhetorical ideal than a systematic programme. Aung San's speeches of the time were little more than student debating exercises. He delivered one at the meeting of the East and West Association on
29 August 1945 at Rangoon's City Hall. On this occasion he described the ‘feudal' system that had existed in Burma before the British came. He acknowledged that British capital had been poured into the country and that railways and roads had been built. He talked in general terms about the ‘humanizing influence of Buddhism'. But there was little in the speech that he wouldn't have heard in the debates at Rangoon University.
³⁶
The student warrior-thinker's political philosophy may have been trite and unoriginal, but it is undeniable that Aung San possessed charisma. Small, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, he cut a pretty ‘insignificant' figure in terms of physical presence. Yet he managed to charm Mountbatten when they met at the latter's headquarters in Kandy, Sri Lanka, at the beginning of September 1945. With his cropped hair and simple Japanese soldier's uniform, he portrayed himself as a man of destiny, the man to bring peace and independence to Burma. A common theme in the memoirs of British officials was a comparison of Aung San with Louis Botha, the South African Boer leader who was reconciled to the British and became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, under the flag of the British Empire. Tom Hughes, the British civil servant based in the Governor's Office in Rangoon, remarked that Mountbatten ‘continued to placate Aung San by treating him as Botha had been treated in South Africa, i.e. as an ex-rebel who had seen the light'. Sir Arthur Bruce, the Rangoon-based bank director, in his no-nonsense way thought that the analogy was ridiculous. ‘Lord Mountbatten, drawing what might be thought a ludicrously false analogy between Boer Leaders [Jan] Smuts and Botha and a small group of communist extremists led by Aung San, disregarded the advice of the men who were competent to know and decided to support Aung San both militarily and by implication politically.'
³⁷

To Sir Arthur Bruce and other officials who were now ‘disturbed that the A.F.P.F.L. was rapidly assuming the mantle of the only political party in Burma', Aung San was no Jan Smuts. He was, in the staunch view of Bruce, ‘the leader of a band of Maoist revolutionaries–men who were determined to seize power, and who were well aware that power resides in the barrel of a gun'.
³⁸
John Wise, the counsellor to the Governor of Burma from 1940 to 1946, agreed that Aung San was the wrong man to be
entrusted with the future of Burma. He felt that Burma's tragedy was that ‘decisions on . . . vital questions came to be dealt with in the end by persons who were unfamiliar with the old political scene'. These new people ‘were unduly swayed by the somewhat tarnished glamour of the active resistance fighters'. He held Mountbatten responsible for throwing his ‘powerful influence behind the rise to supremacy of a party which was basically undemocratic and traditionally hostile to the British'.
³⁹

Many British officials such as the Chief Civil Affairs Officer, Major General C. F. B. Pearce, were alarmed by the rise of Aung San, the young man who had enjoyed such a meteoric political ascent. The Burmese politicians whom the thirty-year-old superseded were also incensed. One politician who had dominated Burmese politics in the 1930s was U Saw. He and Aung San were ‘uneasy bedfellows'. Aung San had made it known that he would never accept U Saw as leader.
⁴⁰
U Saw was a lawyer who had defended Saya San, the priest-king, at his trial in 1931, and had been a prominent figure at a time when Aung San was still struggling with Karl Marx's theories at Rangoon University in the 1930s. He had been born into an affluent family in 1900, and in 1945 felt, not unreasonably, that he had a good claim to be leader of an independent Burma. The rivalries between the foremost figures in the Burmese independence movement often spilled over into acts of violence. At about 3.30 on the afternoon of 21 September 1946, U Saw emerged from the Governor's Office and went to the offices of the paper he owned, the
Sun
. At 4.30, he left with a driver, in his own car. Two members of his political party followed in another car. As this small convoy approached a roundabout, U Saw noticed four men, all dressed in uniform, in a jeep which was advancing towards him. He then spotted the muzzle of a gun pointing at his car. There was a shot; a bullet passed through the back of the car. The driver stopped and the jeep sped off. U Saw had not been hit, but the broken glass had cut him very badly about the face and eyes, and he was taken to the General Hospital. U Saw was convinced that his assailants were members of Aung San's AFPFL. Sir Hubert Rance, the governor who had replaced Dorman-Smith, visited the injured man in hospital. The Burmese politician was angry and said that he knew to which party his would-be assassins belonged. He would get even with them one day, even if it meant that ‘he
had to swing for it'.
⁴¹
Aung San, some days later and after being urged by the Governor, visited U Saw in hospital and publicly denounced the attack, but the rift between the two political leaders was there for all to see.
⁴²