Fighting on all Fronts, page 32
Despite the history of conflict, Johnston plays down the scale of insubordination. The soldier’s most common state, he reminds us, was fatalistic submission rather than enthusiasm or insubordination. This was partly because repression was so harsh in a military setting that “the basic foundation was fear of punishment”.61 Soldiers described the typical commander, only half in jest, as “held in respect by majors, awe by captains, fear by lieutenants, and fear and trembling by other ranks… After the war they usually become members of exclusive clubs and are attacked by gout”.62 Even keeping a diary was mildly subversive, since the brass preferred to forbid them for security reasons.
How significant we consider the recorded instances of individual rebellion is a matter of perspective. The provost marshal reported in November 1942 that only 89 assaults had been made on MPs in the course of 33,000 arrests between April and September. These are not large numbers in the great scheme of things.63 Still, the figures do show that military authorities made many thousands of arrests, and MPs experienced more than a few assaults. Had the war gone badly the number and impact of such incidents could have been much greater.
Two veterans have intimated more radical conclusions than Johnston about the significance of rebellion inside the military. Bob Holt, reflecting on the unrest on the Atherton Tablelands, thought it was all in fun; yet he suggested the authorities did their best to stamp it out because they had apprehensive memories of a similar agitation among French troops in the trenches during the First World War. That unrest was part of a European wave of discontent that culminated in social revolutions and the fall of governments. Admittedly much of the unrest Holt describes was spontaneous and anarchic, including an episode in which rank and file soldiers chased military police—“these louts”, as he calls them—back to their barracks in Cairns.64 There was also a force leading soldiers’ revolts that was better organised and more focused in its approach. This was the Communist Party, which had 3,000 to 3,400 members in the military. Ted Bacon, one of the wartime communists, reflected later on the impact of more carefully considered, better organised actions:
Successful strikes without victimisation of leaders were far more common than might be imagined by those who may believe a military bureaucracy is practically unbeatable. Refusals to parade until food or conditions were improved occurred in almost all training camps [and] even the most anti-democratic commanders were compelled to move cautiously in their dealings with the rank and file.65
The Communists were also leaders of the solidarity actions with the Indonesian independence movement, but again they were constrained by instructions from the Soviet regime, which did not want the war effort jeopardised. By the 1940s the Communist Party was no longer a force for revolution so that its agitation never exceeded certain limits.66 Tragically, fatalistic submission remained the norm. As a result the Australian military command escaped lightly from the consequences of unrest in the ranks. In a more radical political environment, revolts against brass-hatted stupidity could have grown into struggles against the stupidity and the obscenity of imperialist war itself.
Despite all the arguments in this chapter, the great majority of Australians would endorse the war effort on the simple grounds that a Japanese invasion must be avoided. Most scholarship today, however, accepts the fact that Japan had no plans to invade Australia. In fact, Japan intended PNG and Indonesia as the southern boundary of its empire rather than as a springboard to launch troops at Darwin. In any case, the Japanese forces were too devastated by fighting on the Kokoda Trail to even capture Port Moresby. Veteran war correspondent Osmar White recalled they were “exhausted, diseased and starving”—hardly in a condition to conquer the huge Australian continent.67
And with this recognition, the last argument for the war effort falls.
NOTES
1 Quoted in Kristin Williamson, The Last Bastion (Lansdowne, Sydney, 1984), p125.
2 On Australia’s 19th century Pacific imperialism see Tom O’Lincoln, The Neighbour from Hell: Two Centuries of Australian Imperialism (Interventions, Melbourne, 2014), ch 1.
3 Editorial, The Age (Melbourne, 12 August 1914), p8.
4 Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin, The Battle of Brisbane: Australians and the Yanks at War (ABC Books, 2001), p102ff.
5 These events are well summarised in Humphrey McQueen, Japan to the Rescue: Australian Security Around the Indonesian Archipelago (Heinneman, Port Melbourne, 1991), p282.
6 David Horner, “Strategic Policy Making 1943-45”, in Michael McKernan and M Browne, Two Centuries of War and Peace (Australian War Memorial, 1988), p293.
7 Quoted in John Waiko, A Short History of Papua New Guinea (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993), p77.
8 Waiko, 1993, p93, p100, p101.
9 Alan Powell, The Third Force: Angau’s New Guinea War 1942-46, (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2003), p208.
10 Powell, 2003, p216.
11 Geoffrey White and Lamont Lindstrom, The Pacific Theatre: Island Representations of World War ii (Melbourne University Press, 1990), p23. John Robertson says New Guinea tribes “tended to support whichever army was in control of their area” (1981), p139.
12 Timothy Hall, New Guinea 1942-44 (Methuen, Australia, Sydney, 1981), p134.
13 Quoted in Waiko, 1993, p114.
14 Quoted in Peter Brune, Those Ragged Bloody Heroes: From the Kokoda Trail to Gona Beach (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1991), p52.
15 Humphrey McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1988-2001 (University of Queensland, St Lucia, 2004), p176.
16 McQueen, 2004, p176.
17 TAG Hungerford, The Ridge and the River (Penguin, Melbourne, 2003), p152. The book also mentions locals collaborating with the Japanese. Likewise Osmar White, Green Armour (Penquin, 1992), p165, describes villagers guiding Japanese patrols.
18 Clem Loyd and Richard Hall, Background Briefings: John Curtin’s War (National Library of Australia, 1997), p98.
19 Waiko, 1993, p124.
20 Grey, The Australian Army: A History (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001), p148.
21 Geoffrey White and Lindstrom Lamond, Pacific Representations of World War (Melbourne University Press, 1990), p9.
22 Christopher Wray, Timor 1942: Australian Commandos at War With the Japanese (Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1987), p29. My account of the Australian incursion mostly follows Wray.
23 Wray, 1987, p131.
24 Wray, 1987, p132.
25 B J Callinan, “The August Show on Timor”, in Norman Bartlett (ed), Australia at Arms (Australian War Memorial, 1955), p209.
26 Landman and Pires interviewed in Michelle Turner, Telling: East Timor (UNSW Press, Sydney, 1992), p36, p38.
27 Archie Campbell, The Double Reds of Timor (John Burridge Military Antiques, Swanbourne, 1995), p132, p134.
28 George Bliss, “Australian Army Coms in Indonesia”, Tribune (30 July 1980), p11.
29 Gavin Long, The Final Campaigns (Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1963), p569.
30 Peter Stanley, Tarakan: An Australian Tragedy (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1997), p191. Forty five Australian servicemen on Balikpapan wrote to Chifley supporting the proclamation of an Indonesian republic and deploring the use of Japanese forces to put down the independence movement, according to David Day, Chifley (HarperCollins, Sydney, 2001), p423.
31 Rupert Lockwood, Black Armada (Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1975).
32 Gavin Long, 1963, p572.
33 John Keay, Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East (John Murray, London, 1997), p266.
34 Alan Clifton, Time of Fallen Blossoms (Cassell, Sydney, 1950), pviii.
35 Bettina Cass, “Population and Families: State Conscription of Domestic Life”, in Cora Baldock and Bettina Cass, Women, Social Welfare and the State (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988), pp176-177.
36 Janey Stone, “Class Struggle on the Home Front”, in Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History (Red Rag, Melbourne, 2005), p70.
37 See Lynne Beaton, “The Importance of Women’s Paid Labour”, in Margaret Bevege et al, Worth Her Salt (Hale and Iremonger, 1982), p95 and throughout.
38 Quoted in Jesse Street: A Revised Autobiography (The Federation Press, 2004), p160.
39 “Victorian Textile Strike Vote Affects 20,000”, Melbourne Sun (9 September 1941), p3.
40 Stone, 2005, p82.
41 Stone, 2005, p81.
42 Geoffrey Blainey, Jumping Over the Wheel (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993), p178. From the context Blainey provides, these events mainly occurred in 1942.
43 Jin Hagan, Printers and Politics: A History of the Australian Printing Unions 1850-90 (Australian National University Press, 1966), p275.
44 Quoted in Tom Sheridan, Mindful Militants: The Amalgamated Engineering Union (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1975), p168.
45 Mark Johnston, At the Front Line: Experiences of Australian Soldiers during World War i (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996), p140.
46 My compilation from Jean Beaumont, Gull Force: Survival and Leadership in Captivity (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988), p29, Table 2.6.
47 John Barrett, We Were There: Australian Soldiers of World War i i Tell their Stories (Penguin, Melbourne, 1987), p85.
48 Johnston, 1996, p141.
49 Johnston, 1996, p140.
50 Les Clothier, “Diary of a Soldier”, in Hugh Gillan (ed), We Had Some Bother: Tales From the Infantry (Hale and Iremonger for the 2/3 batallion association, 1985), p105.
51 Johnston, emphasis added, 1996, p98.
52 Johnston, 1996, p92, p93.
53 Johnston, 1996, p120.
54 Peter Medcalf, War in the Shadows: Bougainville 1944-45 (Australian War Memorial, 1986), p36.
55 Quoted in Johnston, 1996, p147.
56 Alex Tanner, The Long Road North (Alex Tanner, Adelaide, 1995), pp178-181.
57 Margaret Barter, Far Above Battle: The Experience and Memory of Australian Soldiers in War (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1994), p217.
58 Bob Holt, From Ingleburn to Aitappe: The Trials and Tribulations of a Four Figure Man (R Holt, Lakemba, NSW, 1981), p173.
59 Beverly Symons, “All Out for the People’s War: Communists in the Australian Army in the Second World War”, Historical Studies 26 (105) (October 1995), p61.2. David Horner, “Standing Up for Ourselves”, Week-End Australian (7-8 October 1995), p24.
60 Peter Thompson and Robin Macklin 2001, p158, p230. Barry Ralph, They Passed this Way: The United States of America, The States of Australia, and World War i i (Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 2000), p175, says US and Australian troops had a “resentment, indeed hatred” towards authority, especially armed and aggressive military police.
61 Johnston, 1996, pp157, 158.
62 An unnamed soldier, “About Officers”, in Australian Military Forces,Jungle Warfare: With the Australian Army in the South-West Pacific (Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1944).
63 Johnston, 1996, p154.
64 Holt, 1981, pp173-174.
65 Symons, 1995, p612.
66 On the Communists in the Second World War see Tom O’Lincoln, “Fatal Compromises: The Australian Communists in World War”, redsites.info/cpaww2.htm, 2011.
67 Osmar White, Green Armour (Penguin, Melbourne, 1992), p208. For a lively yet academic discussion see Peter Stanley writing under the ironic title Invading Australia (Viking, Melbourne, 2008).
8
Burma: Through two imperialisms to independence
William Crane
Introduction
Like all of South East Asia, Burma was subject to two occupations during the Second World War, firstly of British colonialism followed by a brief occupation by Japan, and then return to an even briefer interregnum of British rule before independence was gained in 1948. The fact that Burmese nationalists, anti-imperialists and leftists could be found on different sides of the struggle for Burma at any one time poses a thorny problem for the historian trying to reconstruct the war from below in this backward country.
Part of the forgotten history of the war in Asia, which for European historians is only of note once the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war in Burma is rarely treated as anything other than a conquest by the barbaric Japanese, followed by a heroic reconquest by the British. The classic movie The Bridge on the River Kwai is one such tale of subversion and heroism by Allied forces against the Japanese.
This point of view developed from British war memoirs and finds its reverse in the post-colonial memoirs and official histories of the Burmese military regime, for which the glorious national war of liberation surged forever forward, barely stopping to consider the complicated politics of its leaders’ manoeuvres between British colonialism and Japanese imperialism.
What both these trends of history have in common is that they deny the agency of the Burmese themselves in making the history of the war as they resisted both British and Japanese occupation and fought for self-determination. This chapter is a brief but necessary overview of their struggles.
Burma from the Ancien Regime to the Age of Colonialism
Entering the 19th century as the rulers of the territory now known as Burma, much of contemporary Thailand and north eastern India, the Third Burmese Empire ruled by the Konbaung Dynasty was ill-placed in the age of emerging western imperialism. Located right on the border between British ruled India and expanding French colonialism in Southeast Asia, the millennium-old Burmese kingdom was bound to become a component in the classic age of imperialism in one way or another.
Three wars were fought between dynastic Burma and British India during the 19th century. By the time of the second war, which ended in the 1850s, Burma was already de facto subjected to British rule, while the third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885 merely accomplished the formality of annexing the remnants of the Burmese kingdom. The pronouncements of the last king, Thibaw, who mobilised his army promising to defeat the British, conquer their country and convert them to the true religion of Theravada Buddhism, only served as pathetic bluster at the beginning of the road that would lead to the end of his kingdom. Promises of French aid never materialised, and Thibaw and his family ended up in exile in India while the British took over administration of their new province.1
Like India, Burma was a territory that was deeply divided by ethnicity and territory. If the Russian Empire had been “the prison house of nations”, pre-conquest Burma could perhaps be called at least a “garden shed of nations”. While the plurality of people at the centre of the country were from the dominant Bamar group,2 the majority of the eastern half of the country come from the Karen and Shan groups. In the north and north east Burmese territory becomes a bewildering patchwork of tribes and ethnicities with their own customs and long-established ways of life.3 Burma had always had strong trading links with China that had left a significant Chinese community in the eventual colonial centre of Rangoon/Yangon, and British rule brought with it significant numbers of Indians as administrators and coolies.
The British were prepared to use both existing divisions and those they established in order to rule Burma, which from its conquest until the 1930s was administered as a province of the Raj. Unlike India, however, Burma had a long and recent history of union, and the dominant Bamar had a recent memory of ruling over the area as a united kingdom.4 Both the existing divisions in Burmese society and the proto-national consciousness of the Bamar are factors that must be taken into consideration as we review Burma’s wartime history.
The British had gobbled Burma up in no small part because it helped to secure the Indian crown jewel against the nearby French possessions of Indochina. Just as it became politically dependent on colonised India in the form of a joint colonial administration, Burma also became economically subordinate to India as the main provider of rice to feed the subcontinent. Hence its economy entered the modern era as a periphery to a periphery.5 Intensive capitalist development did not take place in Burma even to the limited extent that it had started to in India. The place of the “rice bowl of India” in the global economy was decidedly marginal, and although rice production suffered a profound crisis with the Depression of the 1930s, the effects of this on countryside producers were highly varied and mitigated through a variety of strategies.6
The pacification of rural Burma was for the British authorities a never-ending job. Even where they would have preferred not to go, for example into the northern territory of the Wa people, known for their practice of head-hunting, their legendary filthiness and copious consumption of alcohol and opium, British forces felt they had to establish their authority to seal off the area from the influence of the French and Chinese, and because any future problems with their rule had to be dealt with pre-emptively.7 Meanwhile, they also had to deal with the occasionally rebellious mood of the Shan states, which had been divided between Britain, France and Thailand and whose leaders constantly attempted to play one off against the other.8
British colonial policemen in Burma, the Indian soldiers they commanded and the eventual recruits to the British army from the Karen and other native groups constantly felt themselves on the precipice of rebellion even in the most peaceful of times. George Orwell, who served for several years as a colonial official in towns on the river deltas of lower Burma, expressed this feeling when he complained of being hated by the vast majority of the people:
As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so… In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.9
We should not have too much sympathy for the policeman Orwell who, as a British representative trapped by the expectations of the subject Burmese, felt himself an “absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind” him. Nevertheless, his viewpoint turned out to be prescient when the river districts he had policed rose in rebellion under a religious leader three years after he resigned his commission and returned to England. The Saya San rebellion was only the climax of a series of rural rebellions that had taken place since the British conquest. Saya San, a traditional Buddhist healer, roused the countryside of Insein and Tharawaddy in revolt as pretender to the vacant Konbuang throne. The rebellion was commanded by a man who proclaimed himself “Glorious King of the Winged Creatures” and urged his followers into massacres armed with spears, crossbows and swords.10 Nevertheless, it was a rebellion that took two years and thousands of Indian troops to subdue.
