In 1942 and 1943,
Indian and British troops performed poorly, unused to jungle conditions and
Japanese tactics. The war was to become bogged down in the frontier and hill lands
between India and Burma. It is worth considering these regions for a time
because it was the stubborn resistance of their inhabitants and the aid they
gave the Allied armies that were to be crucial in blocking the further advance
of the Japanese. In fact although In the Naga hills, the Lushai levies provided
a valuable buffer for British India but the Nagas were on the front line of the
retreat of the British army and the refugees in 1942. Two years later they were
once again at the heart of the war. The scene of these terrible events was one
of the most beautiful and picturesque places in the world. A British
anthropologist, Ursula Graham Bower, recalled her first visit to Nagaland a few
years earlier. She had passed up and beyond Imphal with its thirteen European
residents, ruined palace and tennis club, later to be the scene of one of the
bloodiest battles in south Asian history.
By the late summer,
as the monsoon reached its height, the British began to go back on the
offensive and to raise armed levies of local people as they had done in the
Chin hills to the southeast. This was easier said than done. Some of the Zemi
Nagas among whom Bower was now working were pro-British, especially some of the
older men who had fought in the First World War or had served in the Assam
Rifles. A few were actively hostile, remembering earlier British punitive raids
when white men had burned their villages and slaughtered their cattle. The
majority wavered. As her Naga interpreter put it: `They say this isn't our war,
and we ought to leave it alone. We aren't Japs, we aren't British, we are
Zemi.' (Ursula Graham Bower, Naga path, London, 1950, p. 167.)
Anyway, what would
happen to his wife and children if he helped the British and then the Japs
came? Bower was much less sentimental about loyalty and the benevolence of the
Rai than McCall down in Lushai. She well understood that recruitment into the
levies was a matter of complicated local politics. She attended a meeting at
which fierce debates had broken out amongst the Nagas. People stood up and
threw insults at each other. Some asked why they should fight for the British
when they had never fought for the local Hindu ruling dynasties or the Naga
local bosses. Others said that they owed the British something for stopping
raiding and giving the hills a few roads and salt markets: `Don't we owe them
something for that?' (Ibid., p. 187) Bower perceptively noted that when a
trickle of recruits came in it was from the helot classes, bound as field
workers to the Naga aristocracy, or very poor people attracted by the low pay
the British levies offered. Inter-tribal and inter-village rivalry determined
how people would jump in this crisis, not vague ideas like loyalty and
patriotism. Bower, as one of the few British people who understood anything
about the hills, laboured hard to expand the size of
the levies. She helped distribute weapons and replace the dangerous, ageing
muskets which some families had hidden when the British disarmed the population
after earlier revolts. Yet she was constantly on the defensive, patronized or
ignored by male officers who simply would not believe that a woman could
organize men for war. As one of the more sympathetic observed, she was always
wrong twice: `Once for being wrong, and once for being a woman. (Ibid., p.
195.)
By the following
autumn, however, Bower had helped to put into place the rudiments of a defence force which would be of great service in the
battles of 1944 and '45. The legend of the `Queen of the Nagas' was born,
though as she always herself admitted, the prime actors were the Nagas and not
Britons acting out the romances of Rider Haggard. She was, as she later wrote,
built up as a propaganda tool.
A third zone of
tribal resistance and Allied guerrilla activity lay a further zoo miles even
further to the east in the hills of northern Burma beyond the upper Chindwin.
This tract was important because it remained the only tenuous land connection
between India and China, once the Japanese occupied Myitkyina. Here lived the
Kachin peoples. On the east, their high, remote forested lands bordered on the
Chinese province of Yunnan. This was a kind of no-man's land of shifting
populations interspersed for part of the year with waving fields of red opium
poppy, the fabled Golden Triangle. Following the collapse of the defence, the Chinese armies had retreated northeast into
Yunnan, living off the land - or `plundering as they went', as the British put
it. Chinese soldiers established themselves semi-permanently near the southern
Shan state of Kengtung and also further north in the Shan country north of the Shweli river. Until the early 1950s Chinese `deserters' or
settlers, depending on the point of view, were to carry on a kind of tug-of-war
for territory along this northeast border, first with the Japanese, then with
the British and finally with the government of independent Burma. Throughout
the war an Allied strong-point called Fort Herz held
out in the far north of the triangle.
Another
Anthropologist, Edmund Leach after seven weeks of walking he struggled into
Kunming and was flown off to Calcutta, weak with dysentery. Soon, Leach was
again lurking in the hills around Fort Herz with a
radio set Leach's adventures were, he wrote, `a strange mixture of the absurd
and the horrible', but he had learned to appreciate the great variety of the
types of Kachin society and language and this became the basis of his later
academic writings. (Edmund Leach, Current Anthropology, 2-7, 4 ,1986, pp.
376-8.)
The stubborn
resistance of the tribal levies on the hills of the northeast gave British
India a breathing space. No one realized it at the time, but this was one of
the turning points of the war. Far distant in the Pacific Ocean on 4 June,
Admiral Yamamoto stood horrified and groaning with apprehension on his
quarter-deck as he learned that the Japanese navy had lost three aircraft
carriers in a great battle near Midway island. But even if the long-term
outcome of the war had already announced itself, the medium term was still
fraught with danger. In Delhi the authorities were deeply pessimistic about
India's chances of survival should a full-scale Japanese attack develop again
in the autumn. India did not have enough troops to prevent invasion and
penetration at all points along the east coast and Ceylon, if, as seemed
likely, the British had permanently lost naval supremacy. Strategists argued
that India Command should attempt to put in place an impregnable defence at two points. Calcutta was to guard the critical
coal and iron resources and the munitions industries of Bengal and Bihar.
Colombo, which, after the loss of Hong Kong, Singapore and Rangoon, remained
the only first-class naval base in the East, should also be defended. In
addition, most experts wanted to put together a mobile defence
force. This would strike back at a Japanese invasion on the coast around
Madras. It was also essential, they thought, to build up the Indian air force
as rapidly as possible. Claude Auchinleck, now
commander in the Western Desert, pondered on the fate of the Indian empire
which had been the scene of his whole career. He was convinced that, should the
choice between holding India and holding the Middle East present -pelf in
earnest, India must be saved first: `India is vital to our existence -we could
still hold India without the Middle East, but we cannot hold the Middle East
without India.' (John Connell, Auchinleck: a
biography of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck,
London, 1959, P 491.)
But there was another
Asia, the Asia of the minority groups. Some of these were inhabitants of upland
and wooded areas, including the Malayan Orang Ash (original people) and the Kachins, Nagas and Lushai of Burma and India. Others were
plains dwellers, such as the Karens of Burma, who
wore different dress from their Burmese neighbours
and prized a separate history. From the period of the Burmese kings and the
Mughal rulers onward, peoples such as these had developed varied relationships
with the majority population. Sometimes they fought for them, sometimes they
sent looting parties against them. Much of the time they traded with them. The
coming of British rule had put wholly new pressures on the tribals and
minorities. The Raj demanded peace and an end to local warfare. Vigorous
punitive expeditions had been sent into the hills. In the aftermath of the
First World War, for example, a British force had invaded the Naga hills,
punishing dissident tribes by burning villages and crops. The memory of this
savage local conflict was to colour attitudes even in
the 1940s.
With the coming of
more direct British rule, the hill-dwellers found themselves in a novel
economic environment. Forest officers were assigned to create woodland reserves
and stop their customary practice of slash-and-burn agriculture. Indian,
Chinese and Gurkha settlers and merchants penetrated the hills and forest
lands, exploiting the local people's ignorance of commerce but also giving some
of them, especially the chiefs and others with local power, the chance to make
money. Missionaries also found the hills to be a paradise for conversion since
they were not faced with an established priesthood, doctors of law or an
intelligentsia who would argue back against them, as was the case in the
plains. By 1940 up to 30 per cent of the Naga, Karen, Shan, Chin and Kachin population
of the hills of north Burma and eastern India had formally become Christian.
European missionaries were much thicker on the ground among these scattered
populations than were British officials.
Despite their desire
to tax, settle, trade with and convert these hill populations, the British also
wished, paradoxically, to `preserve' them. That aim became more pressing in the
1920’s and '3os when Indian and Burmese nationalists from the plains began to
make themselves known in the hills and forests, preaching a common alliance of
all ethnic peoples against imperialism. The British had long been solicitous of
the local chiefs: the hill rajas of Assam, the Naga chiefs, the Chin princes or
sawbwas and the lords of the Kachin hills. They often
gave them powers and privileges which they had never held in the looser
organization of the old order.
In 1947 when the
future of the Frontier Areas was under discussion a large volume of
documentation reaching back into the nineteenth century was put together, see
Burma Frontier Areas Committee of Enquiry, Cmd. 713 8 (1947) and related
papers, Clague Papers, Mss Eur Ez5z/z3,Oriental and
India Office Collection, British Library.
Now the British moved
more resolutely to establish protected areas, excluded areas and frontier
jurisdictions which, they hoped, would preserve what they saw as the political
innocence and conservatism of these peoples against nationalist 'agitators'.
Sometimes they gave these ethnic groups and their leaders special political
representation on councils and committees which they convened in the hope of
holding the demand for freedom at bay. As the international situation worsened,
the British began to establish militia levies amongst all the tribal and
minority peoples. The need for some basic defence and
intelligence system outweighed the danger of arming these independent-minded
hill men. Karen, Kachin and Shan levies were organized by Frontier Service
officers. The middle and northern sections of the Burma-Thailand border gave
most cause for concern. Here in the eastern part of the Karenni
states amongst the teak forests, old Mauser rifles and other weapons left over
from the last big local rebellion in 1931 were brought out of cupboards in the
rural police stations. Each levy was issued with `one pair khaki shorts, one
khaki shirt with badge marked K.L. [Karen Levies], one pair rubber soled shoes
and one locally made bamboo hat'. `Karen and Kachin Levies', Burma
Governor's Papers, M/3/izz,, OIOC.)
Amongst the Kachin of
the northwest hills of Burma modern political radicalism had made little
headway. The Kachins seemed to regard the Burmese as
a `traditional enemy' and, in general, saw the British as protectors against
the incoming Burmese settlers and traders. (`The Kachins',
note by J. L. Leyden, 8 January 1943, Clague Papers, Mss
Eur E 252/44, ff. 29-36, OIOC.)
They, too, had a
substantial Christian population by the 193os. In one version, the word Kachin
was a Burmese corruption of the Chinese `yei jein' or `jungle man'. They actually called themselves Jinghpaw and were organized into clans which moved slowly
in a pattern of shifting cultivation through the hills. Hunters adept at using
poisoned arrows against their prey, the Kachin were also noted for their
rice-wine drinking bouts and elaborate rituals to keep the dangerous spirits of
the forest at bay. They gave their allegiance to powerful chieftains, but also
reserved the right to revolt against them and bring them to heel. This tension
between despotism and egalitarianism amongst the Kachins
struck many observers, including the London School of Economics anthropologist
Edmund Leach, who was carrying out research amongst them when the European war
broke out in 1939. News of the war puzzled the Kachin according to J. L.
Leyden, an officer who had worked among them for many years. They wondered why
the Germans in 1918 had `not been disarmed and enslaved in the manner in which
Kachin custom demands that Kachins deal with their
enemies'. (Ibid., f. 34, OIOC.) Under their chiefs, Kachins
flocked into the new territorial levies.
The British governor
of Burma as the Japanese approached was Sir Reginald 'Reggie' Dorman-Smith. He
was to remain a key figure in the politics of the country through to 1949. As a
career politician turned colonial governor, Dorman-Smith was a relatively
unusual figure in the later British Empire where civil servants usually headed
colonial administrations. An old boy of Harrow School, he was an Irishman with
family lands on both sides of the border and he remained a citizen of Eire. He
once startled British Cabinet colleagues who were casually discussing the
internment of Irish citizens at the beginning of the war by revealing his
citizenship. (Dorman-Smith, Memoirs, Mss Eur
E2-i5/3z, a/b, f. 207, OIOC.)
His nationality did
give him an interestingly ambivalent view of empire and nationalism. He claimed
to sympathize with nationalist aspirations though his political conservatism
meant that it was only pukka, old-style Burmese and Indian politicians that he
could really tolerate. He was armed with a mordant wit and considerable
literary talent, though it is clear that many of his colleagues regarded him as
`a bit of a phoney'. Dorman-Smith had been a member
of the pre-war Conservative administration as minister of agriculture. As the
war began in earnest, he fell out with Churchill and his powerful scientific
adviser Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell. Ejected from the Cabinet to make
room for Socialists and Liberals as the wartime coalition was formed, he joined
the army and found himself made a civil-military liaison officer in the Home Defence Executive.
Dorman-Smith
hesitated: Burma was so far from anywhere where there was likely to be trouble
that it might seem like ratting, running out on the nation during the Blitz. He
also hesitated because `my knowledge of Burma was precisely nil. I knew
approximately where it is on the map, that its capital was Rangoon and that the
Irrawaddy flowed through it, but my knowledge did not extend beyond this. This
was despite fancying himself as an `Empire man' in parliamentary speeches. Then
again, Dorman-Smith thought, Irishmen should always take up challenges of this
sort even though they seldom led anywhere.
Dorman-Smith arrived
to take up his brief and dramatic period of office in May 1941. The usual round
of official receptions and parties at Rangoon went ahead despite Japan's moves
in Indo-China. Though he later wrote of it as `a great cosmopolitan city' the
new governor really found his capital stiff, socially unpleasant and provincial.
(Maurice Collis, Last and first in Burma (London, 1956), p. 41. This is a
politer version of Dorman-Smith's memoir in OIOC. )
His wife disliked
their `enormous monstrosity' of a government house, nicknamed St Pancras
Station, preferring the `toy town' prettiness of the government's summer
retreat at Maymyo near Mandalay.( Lady Dorman-Smith
to Miss Mary McAndrew, 18 May 1941, Dorman Smith Papers, Mss
Eur Ez15/46, OIOC.) The couple had good reason for their disappointment.
Despite the myth of the cheerful, friendly Burman and the old stories of happy
inter-racial marriage and sex, race relations were poor and had become poorer
during the Depression when a widespread peasant rebellion in the rice-growing
areas had been harshly suppressed by the British. It was almost as if the Burmanization of the civil service underway in the I93os
had made European non-officials even more determined to play the race card.
Rangoon prided itself
on its difference, but it had a lot in common with the other colonial port cities
of the region. As a resident told a journalist: `they are all much the same -
Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Shanghai - a garish show on top and a pretty
stinking world underneath. But you can't blame Burma for this. Rangoon isn't
Burma really. It's much more an Indian city, with a bit of China thrown in, run
by Scots and Irishmen."' In Rangoon, the Burmese were not allowed into the
main metropolitan haunts, the Pegu, Gymkhana and
Yacht clubs, though few of them would probably have wished to join. Only the
Gold and Turf clubs had Asian members. The main Asian club was the Orient Club;
this still had a few European members but no new ones were admitted in
retaliation for the colour bar operated by the
Europeans. (A. C. Potter to R. E. Potter, 7 September 1941, A. C. Potter
Papers, Mss Eur C414/6, OIOC.)
This aloofness
affected the whole society. G. H. Luce, the most important British scholar of
classical Burma and a profes¬sor in Rangoon
University, had a Burmese wife who was herself an academic. In consequence he
was ostracized by a large part of the 8,000-strong white population of the
city. (Donnison Memoirs, F. S. V. Donnison
Papers, Mss Eur B357, f. 307, 0I0C.) Even
out in the districts, relations were no closer. Many of those Europeans born
and brought up in Burma had golden memories of the country and its inhabitants.
People working among the minorities or in agricultural, forest and technical
departments felt that they were doing a worthwhile job. But it is striking how
many of the letters and memoirs of civil servants in Burma and India during
this period give a sense of disillusionment and regret at odds with the
romantic picture of the young Briton dispensing justice and good order to `the
natives. (John Clague, Memoir, Mss Eur Dz5z/72, PP.
3-4, OIOC.)
At Maymyo, according to Frank Donnison,
the financial secretary to government, the British sought `at all costs to
forget they were in Burma'." They attended Debussy concerts in spacious
parks and had picnics at the incongruously named Hampshire Falls. John Clague,
another civil servant, reminisced: `strange it is to look back and feel that we
Europeans lived in a world where very often the people hardly counted in our
human or intimate thoughts. No Burman belonged to the Moulmein Gymkhana. No Burman
came to dinner and breakfast.' Clague's days were spent in hot and smelly
courtrooms `listening to lies being interpreted', overwhelmed by a `sense of
injustice and illegality'.
British society in
Burma was not a wholly aloof or hedonistic one, of course. The expatriates
engaged in a certain amount of 'dogoodism', for this
was the era of moral rearmament. In the capital, the ladies of the Vigilance
Society made occasional raids into the native quarters to `save' women from
brothels. Other women were expected to join sewing parties. They could `work
for the Blind Deaf School or sell flags for causes that neither they nor the
Burmese had any interest in'. Yet this high moral tone stood in sharp contrast
to the pervasive mean spiritedness. The European war and the advance of the
Japanese did little to change attitudes. True, there were a few air-raid drills
and collections for the Lord Mayor of London's Relief Fund. Mostly it was still
bridge and whist, though there was a new game of `military whist' which was
said by the Rangoon Times to be ideal for entertaining a large party. This
half-hearted mobilization was scarcely designed to catch the Burmese
imagination and even moderate Burmese nationalism was ambivalent about the
unfolding struggle in Asia. Burmese women organized the Rangoon civil
evacuation scheme. Official voices and ministers made less-than-stirring calls
to aid the Allies. Local festivals began to include stilted anti-Nazi sketches.
(Maurice Maybury, The heaven-born in Burma , 1985, I, p. 82.)
The Japanese
penetration of Thailand to the south was watched with anticipation as well as
concern among Burmese. As Burma's leading literary figure Daw
Mya Sein said, Burmese had much in common with Thais. The Shans
in Burma were Siamese, according to national mythology, and those of the south
were probably the best-adjusted minority in Burmese society. Burma's version of
the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, was an import from Thailand. (Rangoon
Times, 15 August 1941.)
Since the fall of the
Burmese kingdom in 1886, the Thai king had been regarded as `defender of the
Buddhist faith' in Burma. Many asked themselves quietly whether a Japanese-led
Buddhist and Asian national solidarity was possible and whether this was
Burma's future. Unaware that Aung San and other young radicals were already
building a secret national army over the Thai frontier, most Burmese watched
and waited, untroubled by the small flurries of activity among Europeans.
One very distinctive
group among the whites in the city was the Americans, who were to provide one
of the few heroic stories in the defence of Burma
some months later. They had been there from before the European war, helping to
co-ordinate US government aid to the embattled Chinese nationalist government
at Chungking, goo miles to the northeast. Once the war started this turned into
an American lendlease operation. Some Americans were
already fighting. Men of the American Volunteer Group, the famous `Flying
Tigers', were also based at Rangoon's airport under the command of Claire
Chennault. They flew missions to protect the Burma Road against the
depredations of Japanese fighters. Though it had American government support,
the AVG was a voluntary organization, its pilots hard-living and hard-drinking.
They got a large bonus from Chiang Kai Shek for every
Japanese plane they shot down. One grouse they had when stationed in Burma was
that they did not get bonuses while there. They were reputed to hold the best
parties in town and to have a talent for sniffing out the most available girls.
The parties regularly got out of hand. The airmen `thought little of using one
of their smaller servants as a volley ball'. (Ma Than E, `Burma's ties with
China', Statesman Newspaper,Calcutta, 8 March 1942.)
But among the
circumstances that contributed to the survival of British India was that of the
hill people of the Burma-India who as we saw were themselves providing tough
resistance to Japanese patrols and 'providing material assistance to the Allied
war effort'. All the British efforts at gerrymandering and political balancing
in India's hill regions were blown apart in 1942 when the hills and the forest
became the main arena of warfare throughout the whole region. Previously
soldiers had sometimes penetrated into the hill people's fastnesses. Now whole
armies tramped across and fought on their lands, requisitioning or forcing labour to carry food and munitions, seizing their animals
and burning their forests. To the hill men these new conditions required
epochal decisions. How far should they support their old masters against the
new invaders? The chiefs and many of their followers were relatively satisfied
with the old order. However much they had resented or even resisted the initial
imposition of the Raj, they came to find that the British presence was not too
intrusive and even gave them some advantages. In many cases they had come to
dislike the assumption of the plains politicians that they would easily merge
into the new Burmese or Indian nations, forfeiting their political privileges
and long-cultivated special identities.
The rapid expansion
of the Christian confession had also given them a point of contact with their
white masters which few other Asians had. In the hills, some long-serving
officials and missionaries had created networks of friendship and patronage
which their indigenous friends and clients felt shame in violating. Most of
all, however, the hill people on both the Burmese and Indian sides were deeply
hostile to the intrusion into their territory of new and often violent
predators, be they Japanese or local Chinese nationalist warlords. To this
extent the British were able in the hills to draw on a reserve of qualified
good will relatively rarely encountered in other parts of their Asian empire.
Still, unpalatable dilemmas faced the local leaders and their British mentors
when making the decision to resist the Japanese and summon up this spirit of
ethnic patriotism in support of the empire. Was it ethical to encourage
resistance and expose whole populations to Japanese reprisals, when the British
were themselves evacuating as quickly as possible, sometimes in near panic?
How, in fact, could an authoritarian and paternalistic system of rule foster
the sort of popular guerrilla war which had broken out in Greece, Yugoslavia or
even parts of China during the Axis invasions?
This sharp dilemma
faced A. G. McCall, the local administrator, and the people of the Lushai
hills, set high above Arakan, during 1942. (A. G. McCall,
Superintendent, Lushai hills to J. P. Mills, secretary to government, 7 July
1942, McCall Papers, Mss Eur E361/34, Oriental and
India Office Collection, British Library.)
The British had paid
little attention to the Lushai until the mid 1930s,
when officials established a village welfare scheme with the aim of `bringing
together chiefs and non-chiefs, Christians and non-Christians'. (Manifesto, 6
May 1942, Mss Eur E361/35, OIOC.)
Village crafts and
hill products found a market in the outside world and a trickle of Lushais began to serve in the Assam Rifles and other
imperial units. McCall believed he had a mission to create a kind of Lushai
nationalism in the hills by bringing the chiefs and people together in darbars or consultative councils. Local nationalism would
inculcate a code of morality and hygiene and prevent wasteful forms of
customary slash-and-burn agriculture in the hills. This `guided democracy' of
the Mongolian people of the hills would create a new British Empire and hold at
bay the Indian and Burmese agitators from the plains. McCall probably
overestimated the British role. The real moving force in the hills was the
Christian Lushai of the Young Lushai Association at Aijal,
the headquarters town. In their congregational meetings the young men had
replaced the raunchy old tribal ballads with uplifting moral ditties in order
to face the modern world: Oh! YLA go on, ever on. Give of your best in doing
good. Strive now for all generations to come. (A. G. McCall, Lushai chrysalis ,
London, 1949, P. 298.)
Now this little world
faced great danger. As the Japanese pushed up towards the fringes of Burma,
taking Akyab and threatening Chittagong, their
patrols came within a hundred miles of Aijal.
Officials and Anglo-Indian newspapers talked of mobilizing the people and
denounced the old stick-in-the-muds or so-called koi hais
who opposed such schemes. The Calcutta Statesman pointed to the terrible
example of Malaya. The new governor of Assam, it argued, should `kindle the
patriotism of the province and silence the jeremiads of the boys of the old
brigade. The jungle, instead of being a death trap for our own soldiers can be
made to come alive with hostility to the creeping ants', the Japanese. (StatesmanNewspaper,Calcutta, 10 March 1942.)
McCall decided to try
to draw on Lushai local patriotism and loyalty to the crown and create a
territorial fighting force. His model seems to have been the citizen armies of
Finland which had offered stiff resistance to the Nazis. The British home
guard, `Dad's Army', may not have been too far from his mind either. He called
the scheme the Total Defence Force and it was
composed of two sorts of pasaltha or rifleman
amounting to more than 3,000 men. Large numbers who already held licensed
weapons from muskets through to locally made hunting rifles were paid Rss per month to mount a watch-and-ward operation from
their own lands. (General notice, May 1942-, McCall Papers, Mss
E361/36, OIOC. )
The British army
supplied another smaller group of men with more advanced weapons and paid them Rsio per month to act as a mobile force which was ready to
move to any area where trouble was expected. The officials and Lushai headmen
drew up plans for the hiding of food and slaughter of animals as a prelude to a
sustained guerrilla war in case of an invasion.
The territorial
troops were given basic military training. In the event of an air attack they
were `not to look at any plane. Not to stand up. But immediately to run to a
nullah [ditch] and to fall down at full length, open mouth, and rest head in
hand, resting on elbows. Everyone remembered the terrible execution in Burma
when guileless people stood up and waved at the Japanese planes. Many of the
Lushai chiefs signed up eagerly to this display of loyalty. They proclaimed that
they would fight against the evil enemy who `had murdered the people of China
for five years'. They would create a defence on the
`same basis of total defence as the peoples of the
[sic] England, Scotland and Wales'. Enthusiasm for the war effort was helped
along, too, by counting the oracles in a more traditional fashion: Two snails
are procured from the river sides, and one is called Britain, the other the
enemy. The snails were placed in a battlefield, a hollowed-out bamboo trough.
Even in villages where the larger snail was called `German', the British snail
always won in the end.
The Lushai Hills
Total Defence Force was never put to the test to the
same extent as the Shan, Chin, Kachin and Naga resistance in the Indian and
Burmese hills to the north and east. But it certainly raised morale and gave
people the impression that the Raj remained resilient and virile. The diaries
of Bruce Lorrain-Foxall, a missionary further to the
south in the Lushai hills, give a sense of the foreboding and fear which reigned
throughout I942. (Diary of A. Bruce Lorrain-Foxall,
z8 August 1942, Mss Eur F185/9z, 0I0C.)
Lushai people
reported planes flying over and bombing down towards upper Burma. Lungleh, centre of the South
Lushai mission, was itself bombed. Fleeing sepoys and others passed on rumours of mass death and evacuation. In August 1942 one of
the men went south, where he `saw 50 Japs and said that as soon as September
sets in 1000 Japs are coming up to nearby Paletwa'.
It was important to have some sense that the authorities in Aijal
knew what they were doing. In Lushai, McCall's wife Jean stayed on beside him
at her post during the crisis of May, `sharing the risk of mutilation and death
accepted voluntarily by the families in the hills', while other ma-baps across
British Asia had decamped in their motor cars. McCall believed that his reward
was that the people stood resolutely beside him.
Yet the failings and
problems of the Total Defence Force also provided a
sharp example of the difficulties in which an autocratic and paternalist power
found itself when trying to organize a democratic resistance movement. British
military support from Eastern Command was minimal in the hills because there
was no road and transport by animal or manpower was deadly slow. As McCall
found to his irritation, there was a constant tension between the desire of the
military authorities to press-gang people into portering
and labouring jobs and their wish to have an
effective civil defence force. Squabbles arose
between McCall and the military. He really wanted local supreme power, perhaps
a little like the great servants of the East India Company who had become
virtual kings in their districts a century earlier. He had the problem of
weaving a path between the Assam authorities, the exiled Burmese government and
the split military commands in the plains. These continued to bedevil British
military efforts until late 1943.
Local politics also
played its part. Relations between the Lushai and the inhabitants of the Chin
hills, where the Japanese presence was a reality, were strained. (Later
correspondence on the pasalthas and civil defence schemes in the hills can be found in McCall Papers,
Mss Eur E361/37, 38 and 50, OIOC.)
Some chiefs here had
decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
Within Lushai itself there were a few people such as schoolmasters and those
who were regular visitors to the plains who saw eye to eye with the Congress.
They did not see why local people should stick their necks out and risk
Japanese reprisals in the event of an invasion when British power itself was
still in the process of ebbing away. By September 1942 McCall had lost control
of defence in the Lushai hills. The military would
not properly co-operate with him and had decided to move towards a system of
bigger and more costly levies of local men like the ones they were operating in
the Chin hills and Manipur. But the effort was not entirely stillborn. Nearly 5
per cent of all men in the hills served in the armed forces during the war and
many of the others participated in the various territorial defence
schemes. The Lushai met the demands for labour,
porterage and support put on them during the guerrilla wars in the nearby Chin
hills. McCall himself believed that the Japanese did not strike through Lushai
in the 1944 campaign precisely because they knew of the great readiness of the
local population. In a subtle way, indeed, the Lushai began to act as citizens.
One of their leaders, Buchawna, wrote that voluntary
enrolment and payment for service contrasted sharply with the old
'slave-servant' mentality which the nationalists so much disliked."'
Ironically, the mobilization of hill peoples across the region and the spread
of the idea of people's rights were by no means an unmitigated blessing for the
bureaucratic and military regimes which were to emerge in independent South and
Southeast Asia.
For many months from
1944 to 1946 Allied South East Asia Command ruled a large part of the whole
area from the borders of Bengal and Assam to Singapore and on to the seas north
of Australia. Its writ even temporarily penetrated into south China, Indo-China
and Indonesia. This was the first time in history that the region was forged
into a political unit. to operate as the classic `night watchman'. People thought
private enterprise was the way to get things done. Now, from left to right,
from Malayan communist to Indian businessman, everyone believed that planning
and state intervention was the way of the future.
The uniforms, the
marching, the drilling and the flag-waving of wartime had indelibly imprinted
themselves on the minds of the region's youth. Where in the past Indians,
Burmese, Malayans and Nanyang Chinese had at best been led by lawyers tiptoeing
around British constitutional provisions designed to render them powerless, now
all these nations had martial leaders who embodied a historic form of militant
patriotism. The problem was whose nation and whose state was it to be.
Everywhere up and down the crescent the war had mobilized ethnic minorities,
indeed it had even created them where they had existed earlier only as
categories for anthropologists. Nagas, Kachins, Karens, Lushai, Shans and the
Orang Ash of the Malay peninsula had acquired arms and leadership along with a
sense of brotherhood, sisterhood and identity. Myriad units of the forgotten
armies reforged themselves into the armies of militant small nationalisms.
The Nagas and other
hill peoples played a key role in the fighting. As the Japanese pushed towards
Manipur, the hill people found themselves right in the front line. The Naga
levies and the exiguous British forces sent to aid them - V Force - had set
into something of a routine since 1944.. They drilled, exercised and listened.
But the fighting on this front was over two hundred miles distant in 1943 and
the first months of 1944 as the Chindits of the second Wingate expedition and
Shan and Kachin levies carried on hazardous operations behind enemy lines. The
main enemies at this time were cholera and smallpox, which stubbornly revived
during the 1943 monsoon. But at least V Force now had food, clothing and
ammunition. A particular hit amongst the Nagas, who had a keen sense of colour, were red blankets. These were specially coloured for use in the region and were used as gifts and
payment throughout the hills. Amongst the Nagas, a leader was only first among
equals and his honour and respect depended on his
courage and his generosity in distributing prized items such as these.
Suddenly, the calm
was broken. Ursula Graham Bower recalled two sergeants coming up to her on 28
March 1944 with chilling news. `Fifty Japs crossed the Imphal Road about a week
ago and they ought to be here by now. We wondered if you had heard anything of
them."' The defensive belt had suddenly been rolled up and she and the
local Naga chiefs were facing the advancing Japanese army with 15o native
scouts, one service rifle, one single-barrelled
shotgun and seventy muzzle loaders. There was a nagging fear that they would
all be boxed in as the Japanese tide flowed round them on both sides. The code
`one elephant' was devised to signal that ten Japanese were approaching. A near
panic set in when someone arrived in the locality with forty real elephants. On
this occasion, the only 'Jap' sighted was an unfortunate squirrel which was
shot out of a tree by an over-eager scout. But the danger was real enough.
Several Naga scouts in the Imphal area went over to the Japanese and led the
Japanese to British arms dumps. Bower noted that they were from communities
that had taken part in a rebellion during the First World War. There was always
the fear that the whole scout force would break and flee as the attack
proceeded. After all, these men were scouts and not a fighting force.
Meanwhile, refugees once more tramped through the hills. Among them were
Bengali and Madrasi pioneers evacuated from Imphal.
Then came newly recruited and ill-disciplined Indian support staff, artisans,
drivers and mechanics, who all stumbled by with Naga porters and children,
sometimes accompanied by escaped Japanese prisoners. Morale hung on a
knife-edge until a platoon of Gurkhas came up to support Bower's detachment.
They maintained calm until Kohima was relieved.
The sense of chaos
and panic among the defence units of the hill people
hid a more important fact. This was the extent to which Naga, Chin and other
personnel contributed to the defence of Imphal and
Kohima and to the shattering victory that British and Indian forces
subsequently won against the Japanese. Army intelligence wrote in the summer:
`The quantity and quality of operational information received from the local
inhabitants has been a major factor in our success to date. A high percentage
of our successful air strikes have been the direct result of local
information.(Note on civil and military intelligence on the Arakan
front, 27 June 1944, and in private secretary to viceroy's letter to secretary
of state, 2.7 June 1944, L/PandO/4/z4, OIOC.)
The loyal Nagas gave
the Japanese false information about British troop numbers. They guided British
and Indian troops through the jungle and pointed out Japanese entrenchments and
foxholes to them. Finally, the great Japanese strength as jungle fighters was
being turned against them. Ironically, the Japanese high command was in part
betrayed by its own racial ideology, as the British had been two years earlier.
The Japanese found it difficult to see the Nagas and allied tribes as anything
more than illiterate primitives, more backward even than the aboriginal groups
that they encountered in Hokkaido island or Taiwan. Nor could they believe that
any Asiatic could reject the idea of `Asia for the Asians' unless they had been
bribed or bullied into doing so. No native people could possibly support the
British of their own volition. Nagas and Chins were therefore allowed to wander
around the Japanese camps even at the critical time when the Imperial Army was
moving against Manipur.
Slim told Ursula
Graham Bower a revealing story about Naga support. The Japanese commanders on
the Manipur front employed a number of Naga orderlies as batmen in the early
months of 1944. Naturally, they treated them as illiterate numbskulls. Two of
these Nagas decided to steal an operational map which they saw lying around in
a commander's tent. Only too well aware of the estimate the Japanese put on
their brainpower, they covered their tracks by pretending that this had been an
ordinary theft, and made off with clothing and small pieces of equipment as
well as the map. Within a few hours the map was on Slim's
table at British headquarters. As the attack developed, Slim was astonished to
find that the Japanese commanders had not modified their plan one iota, so sure
were they that no mere Naga orderly could have
understood the significance of a battle plan. Slim told Bower that this
intelligence was of very great importance in the defence
of Imphal and Kohima. Indeed, the debt of the British to the tribal people of
the hills was incalculable. Smith Dun, the four-foot tall Karen officer,
remembered how dependent he had been on intelligence supplied by the local
people during the fighting in the Chin Hills in 1943 and '44. By chance one of
the unit's batmen was the son of a member of the local Chin levies. Dun's force
was able to move around behind Japanese lines using the information supplied by
family members. But vendettas were also in the air. Smith Dun believed that the
batman was eventually betrayed by a rival Chin family. (Smith Dun, Memoirs of
the four-foot colonel: General Dun Smith, first commander-in-chief o f the independent Burmese armed forces, Ithaca, 1980, p.
41.)
In Simla during June and July, Dorman-Smith among many other
officials was aware of the critical situation in Manipur. Their optimism waxed
and waned day by day as they read intelligence appraisals and spoke to soldiers
returning briefly from the front. They listened to the English-language
propaganda broadcasts from Japanese and INA sources with a mixture of amusement
and anxiety, unable to evaluate what they heard. (Dorman-Smith to John Walton,
24 July 1944, Walton Papers, Mss Eur D545/T3, OIOC.)
The mood across India
remained apprehensive. Yet there was still no panic as there had been in
response to every rumour during 1942. Censorship was
tight and the Information Bureau of the government was by now so skilled in
packaging news of the campaign that, as an intelligence official recorded,
`even the civilians in Delhi failed to realise its
importance'. He remembered looking out over a quiet and peaceful Janpath,
Delhi's triumphal thoroughfare, during these weeks and later recorded that it
was impossible to conceive of the vast Arakan battle,
still less the looming fact of the independence of India and Pakistan. British
India seemed to have survived once again as it had survived every challenge
since the Maratha invasions of the eighteenth century.
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