Fighting on all Fronts, page 33
In the first decades of the 20th century Burma had only made halting steps in the direction of modernity. Still ruled as a province of India, it was among the most backward of British possessions. However, it was not guarded against the winds of change from the outside world, especially those of anti-colonial resistance. British rule would bring together explosive ingredients that would catapult Burma to the forefront of anti-colonial struggles, and, within the native educated elite it sought to help rule the country, it would help create the men who could lead this process.
Early nationalism: From Buddhism to the Dobama Asiayone
The earliest expression of nationalist consciousness in British-ruled Burma took the form of associations of elite Bamars aiming to protect their culture, especially Buddhism, which they saw as being under attack by American and British missionaries who were engaged in proselytising, especially among Burma’s ethnic minorities. The Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) was founded in 1906 by English-educated barrister U May Oung, who with other moderates set himself the aim of promoting and defending Buddhism and the glories of classical Bamar civilisation. Though inspiration is frequently cited in the British YMCA, this organisation was just as much the outgrowth of the monastic culture of Burma as foreign influence.11 Like the men who had founded the Indian National Congress in 1885, the members of the YMBA had aims that were mostly non-political, and hoped merely to increase Bamar influence within the colonial administration.
But also like the Congress, the moderate, gentlemanly and pro-colonial stance of the YMBA would be challenged in ways that forced the organisation to reinvent itself in order to express its people’s aspirations. It transformed itself into the General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA) in 1919, the year its members began to lead protests demanding that the British respect the Buddhist temples by removing their shoes and demanding due reverence to holy images.12 Though the GCBA was displaced in the 1930s, it would be the crucible for many cadres of the later nationalist movement.
Developments under British rule and in the rest of the world were bringing to fruition the conditions that could foster a more militant nationalism that would take its cue from the anti-colonial present rather than Burma’s illustrious monarchic past. Central among these was the developing antagonism between the Bamar and Indians who had been brought to Burma by British rule. The colonial capital of Rangoon, though in the centre of the Bamar homeland, was dominated by foreigners among whom the Indians were the most conspicuous at the top as administrators, in the middle as soldiers, and at the bottom as labourers. The British relied on these Indians to run the most important functions in colonial Burma, a responsibility which was increasingly taken amiss and served to radicalise young men of the emerging middle class.
In 1930, on cue with the Saya San rebellion, race riots between Indians and Bamar rocked the capital city. The immediate cause was a labour dispute over jobs being given preferentially to Indians, a source of strife that continued throughout the 1930s. Out of this strife emerged the Dobama Asiayone (We Burmans Association). Dobama quickly grew into the vanguard of militant Bamar nationalism. Its members were largely students at Rangoon University who had sworn loyalty to the cause of the Burmese race and were known as “Thakin” (master). This was a calculated provocation to the British, who were addressed as “thakin” in Burma just as they were addressed as “sahib” in India. Two young Thakins, U Nu and Aung San, led the nationalist cause. In 1936, when they were both expelled from university for printing anti-British tracts, their supporters went on strike and won their reinstatement in addition to the firing of the chauvinist rector.13
Thakins led all the major disturbances against British rule during the 1930s, from boycotting the colonial elections to organising unions of Bamar workers. A number of these campaigns came together in the “1300 Revolution,” in 1938, named after the year in the Burmese calendar. The Thakins were supremely confident in their ability to lead their people forward to freedom, especially after disturbances in the mid-1930s led the British to give Burma its own administration separate from that of India.
The prominent nationalists of this decade were Bamar almost to a man, and saw their own patriotism as being consonant with that of the whole territory of Burma that the old monarchy had once ruled. Their ideology developed, as with all nationalisms, in the form of a highly eclectic mix of influences from home and abroad. Arguably the most important among these was Bamar racial pride. A Dobama song, a version of which would later become the national anthem of Burma, went:
…Be brave, be brave, like a true Burman,
Burma, Burma for us Burmans.
Act and behave like Masters,
For Burmans are a race of Masters…
For so long as the world will last,
Burma is ours, Burma is ours.
This is our country, this our land,
This our country till the end.14
Along with racial pride, the Bamar people were influenced by a bewildering mixture of foreign ideologies. The activists who had joined the GCBA in the 1920s hoping for militant action against British rule had been fascinated with Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916, and many continued to look to Sinn Féin as a successful example of anti-colonial resistance.15 Others found in the new government of Mustafa Kemal in Turkey an exemplar of the national strength and unity they desired. The racial pride that had been bred into early Bamar nationalism also accorded well with the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, who seemed to some to show that nationalist revival was best accomplished through strong leadership rather than attention to the welfare of democracy.16
Right wing and left wing trends within Thakin thought were not so much in competition as collaboration, as both were part of the mélange of foreign ideologies that Bamar intellectuals reached out to for inspiration for the economic and political revival they felt their country desperately needed. As with all colonial peoples, the Burmese had heard of and taken inspiration from the October Revolution in Russia. Many Thakins as anti-colonial intellectuals in the 1930s looked to the Soviet Union as a model for economic transformation and revival, as they felt its experiences of being a backward country were similar to their own. Texts such as Lenin’s Imperialism and the Comintern’s documents on the Popular Front began to circulate in Burmese through the agency of the Red Dragon Club, which aimed to distribute popular Marxist pamphlets and the works of Thakins aiming to analyse Burma’s conditions through a Marxist lens.17 In 1939 the Indian communist Narendra Dutt brought together Aung San, Ba Hein, Soe Hla Pe, and others to form the first communist cell in Burma.18
Other influences were closer to home. Collaboration between Burmese and Indian nationalists led to Aung San and others attending the 1939 Ramgarh meeting of the Congress Party, when Subhas Chandra Bose was elected to its presidency on a militant platform of wartime resistance to British rule.19 Ba Maw, who was elected to head the colonial ministry in Burma that year, was so impressed by Bose that he named the new party he formed with Thakin collaboration the Freedom Bloc after Bose’s Forward Bloc. Indian nationalism in the forms of Gandhism, Bose’s militant anti-colonialism, and Nehru’s democratic socialism would be key reference points for Burma’s leaders throughout the war. Like Bose and other Indian leaders, many of the Thakins were inspired by Japan’s rise in the east following its defeat of Russia in 1905, though they were divided on their views of the Japanese occupation of China. The question of attitudes to Japan would obviously be a key area of contention.
Thus the twilight of British colonialism in Burma in the 1930s produced a generation of nationalist cadre who sought to free their country using militant methods. While drawing inspiration and ideology from a wide and contradictory array of sources, the apprenticeships they served in activism and (for some of them) government and the military would prepare them to play leading roles in the coming conflict when Britain was defeated.
A deep breath: Burma on the edge of world war
Pre-war Rangoon was a cauldron of plots, suspicions and covert activities by the British government, Japanese agents and Bamar nationalists that could provide the stuff of a great spy novel. While labour disturbances and nationalist agitation continued apace, Ba Maw’s attempts to gain the promise of Burmese autonomy in any possible war followed by a guarantee of independence ran into typical chauvinist obstruction from the British both in Rangoon and London. The leaders of ethnic minorities such as the Karen and Shan felt British rule teetering on the abyss, and a grim future of Bamar domination ahead of them. Meanwhile the Japanese were already preparing the ground for invasion. Keiji Suzuki, a colonel in the Imperial General Headquarters, had come to Burma disguised as a businessman, and arriving in Rangoon made contact with several Thakins hoping to lure them to the side of Japan, promising an independent Burma as part of the “East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.20 Suzuki entered the realm of a Bamar nationalism that was beginning to fracture under the pressure of the coming war. Ba Maw, who considered his attempt to win over the British to independence pretty much failed, had resigned his ministry and travelled to London to seek an audience with Churchill in a last-ditch effort. The Thakin movement was deeply confused about the nature of the coming war. By and large the left wing Thakins were not at first inspired by the aims of either Britain’s anti-fascist colonialism or Japan’s militarist colonialism. Aung San expressed this later when he wrote, “the war in Europe was plainly a war between two sets of imperialists and could have no appeal of any kind. We therefore firmly resolved to conduct an anti-imperialist, anti-war campaign”.21
But Britain’s difficulty was always Ireland’s, or Burma’s, opportunity. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Japan’s ally Germany did not resolve this question, as it did for communists and many left-leaning nationalists in other countries. Aung San, though he was general secretary of Burma’s first communist cell, maintained it would be acceptable to seek aid from the “fascist” Japanese as the war in Asia had a substantially different character from that in Europe.22 Other Thakins looked to democratic Britain as the lesser evil. Than Tun broke with Aung San while in prison in early 1941 when he drafted a document calling for unconditional support to Britain in the anti-fascist war.23 Others among the left wing Thakins sought to use Britain’s distraction as an opportunity to overthrow colonialism and then fight for independence against Britain and Japan alike.
Aung San had probably resolved by mid-1940 that seeking Japan’s aid held the best prospects for his cause. Though in August he escaped arrest by slipping on board a ship bound for China claiming to be seeking the aid of the Chinese communists, when Kempetei agents discovered him he was perfectly amenable to going to Japan to discuss his options.24 In Tokyo he and Suzuki hammered out a plan for achieving Burma’s freedom in collaboration with Japanese forces. As the Imperial Army prepared to extend its South East Asia campaign into British territory, Aung San and his followers would foment an anti-British uprising and become recognised by the Japanese as the official government of independent Burma as soon as it gained control of the south eastern districts. This would achieve the Imperial Army’s aim of cutting off the “Burma road”, which was the main supply route for the Chinese resistance, and would also leave the way open to India.25
In March 1941 Aung San covertly arrived back in Rangoon to begin recruiting his Thakin comrades to the force of pro-Japanese rebels he aimed to establish. These are the “Thirty Comrades” of nationalist mythology, who became the core of Burma’s independent wartime armed forces.26 They arrived at Hainan Island in China to begin a gruelling boot camp instructed by Japanese officers. To cement their loyalty to each other and Burma, the Thakins made a blood pact and adopted new names: Aung San became Bo Teza (Commander Fire) along with the honorific title Bogyoke (General), Tun Shein became Bo Yan Naing (Commander Vanquisher) and Shu Maung became Bo Ne Win (Commander Sun’s Brilliance).27 The Thirty Comrades then gathered their forces across the Burmese border in Siam and waited for the signal to rise.28
The signal came at the beginning of 1942. At the turn of the year Japanese troops swept down the Malayan peninsula on bicycles, first laying siege to and then capturing Britain’s naval base at Singapore, a catastrophe for the colonial power in the Pacific theatre of the war. The colonial administration was thrown into panic, deserting Rangoon as the Fifteenth Imperial Army marched into the south east, dragging thousands of British, Indian and minority Burmese along with it overland, to eventually re-establish itself in exile at Shimla in the Indian Himalayas. The stage was set for a long Japanese occupation, which Aung San and his comrades hoped would bring the prospect of Burmese freedom for the first time in 70 years.
Japanese occupation: A sort of independence
Like any other country that suffered occupation by the Imperial Army, the Burmese people have plenty of bad memories of the Second World War. The suppression of the native population including ferocious reprisals against members of minority groups could be recounted at some length. The fate of slave labour forced to construct the Siam-Burma railway to supply the army is particularly well known even among the other horrors of the Japanese war effort in Asia and the Pacific.
Any attempt to describe the Japanese occupation has a difficult line to walk. Burma, like any other country in the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was regarded by the army as territory to be conquered and secured against its enemies. At the same time the Japanese had been favoured early on by native elements in Burma who saw their presence as a stepping-stone towards independence. Behind the scenes of official Japanese conquest there was an intense struggle going on led by Bamar nationalists Aung San and Ba Maw to make Japanese-sponsored faux independence a reality for their people, one that ended in the nationalists finally breaking with Japan.
In 1942 the Japanese Fifteenth Army, in collaboration with Aung San’s Burma Independence Army (BIA), successfully moved through and occupied Burma up to the Arakan frontier in the west and the tribal territories of the north. Establishing the occupation was a bloody job accomplished by both the Japanese and the BIA. In the course of establishing their autonomy the BIA often seemed to be matching the Japanese atrocity for atrocity. Immediately after crossing into Burma, Aung San himself took on the job of executing elders in a Shan village who were suspected of being in league with the British. The Shan and Karen, being the main nationalities besides the Bamar and the ones who had filled the ranks of the British forces in Burma, had the most to lose. Ian Morrison described the BIA’s treatment of one Karen Catholic village. First 152 men, women and children were massacred in cold blood. When they reached the compound:
Father Blasius, the Karen priest in charge, was sick in the clergy-house. The Burmans set fire to the house and burned him and the two men who were looking after him. They then burned down the church… The girls took refuge upstairs. The Burmans shot up through the ceiling… Four Karen lay sisters were killed. The great majority of the girls were cut down inside the mission compound, some on the road outside. The youngest victim was a baby of six months… [They] went in a mass to…the other side of the town. Here they killed another 52 people, all Karens, men, women and children… A few days later 47 Karen men were taken out and bayoneted to death.29
The atrocities committed early in the occupation by the Bamar are attributable to the lack of concern that the pre-war nationalists had for other Burmese nationalities, the celebratory mood that prevailed once the British had evacuated, and the profound disorder created by the power vacuum they had left. No organised force had emerged to join the 300 or so nationalist cadres of the BIA as they swept into the country on the heels of the Imperial Army, and it is doubtful that the Japanese would have encouraged or accepted one. Thus it was primarily the criminals, the outcasts and the dissatisfied of all shades that initially signed up. Maung Maung, who was Aung San’s aide at the time, contemptuously referred to early BIA soldiers as “a rabble without a minimum of military training”.30
Indeed, so many young Bamar men signed up to the BIA in the first few weeks of the occupation that its numbers skyrocketed from a few thousand when it crossed the frontier to as many as 200,000.31 This created a problem both for the nationalist cadre in charge of the BIA, who had none of the resources necessary to command or even at times to keep track of them, and for the Imperial Army, whose commanders with a few exceptions were not given to much trust or indulge an independent native initiative in a country they felt they had conquered.
Some scholars, in awe of Bamar nationalism during the period, have termed the BIA “a political movement in military garb”.32 This is to project matters forward to the time when Aung San had regained control of the forces he had been carried along by after allying with the Japanese and was in the process of turning against them.33 This took several years in which they were bedevilled by Japanese intransigence and bewildered as to their next steps.
Aung San and the Thirty Comrades had expected, in accordance with Aung San’s agreement with Suzuki when they first met in Japan, that Burma would be granted its independence immediately after the British had been driven back from the south east of the country. The commanders of the Imperial Army had different ideas. Akiho Ishii, colonel of the Fifteenth Army and the officer responsible for command of civilian matters in Rangoon, denied any knowledge that Burma was to become independent and insisted, with the agreement of his command, that this would have to wait until after the war.34 A military administration was quickly established in the south east and, despite Suzuki’s promises that the BIA could set up a government when Rangoon was occupied, it was extended to Rangoon.35
