By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

In fact Churchill, the valiant fighter for the free nations of Europe, did not believe that that freedom should extend to the colored races. Privately he had specifically excluded them from the Atlantic Charter of 1941, that great Anglo-American clarion cry for freedom which had so raised expectations across the colonial world. Following the end of WWII in Europe, Churchill mused about the possibility of dividing the Indian empire into ' Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan', the last an amalgam of India's princely states. The first and the third of these entities would remain within the British Empire no matter what happened to the 'Hindoo priesthood machine' and its commercial backers. (Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel: a life, Ahmedabad, 1990 p, 433).

A May 1945 “White Paper” drawn up by Churchill and his secretary of state for India and Burma; Leo Amery, seemed to be retrogressive. Worse, to Burmese nationalists, it threatened to create a Balkans-type decentralized state in which tribal and minority areas would remain more or less permanently under British tutelage. The former British Governor in Burma Dorman-Smith was less sure of the document; and judged it ‘infuriatingly vague'. (Maurice Collis, Last and first in Burma, 1941-48, 1956, p. 243).

When the nationalist government in China pledged $ 5 million for the rebuilding of Chinese businesses shattered by the Japanese in 1946; ‘other’ Burmese  feared that this would tip the economic balance , and  its new British governor Hubert Rance,  noted  resentfulness because no grand British Cabinet Mission bothered to visit Burma. (Hugh Tinker (ed.), Burma: the struggle for independence 1944-1948, vol. II: From general strike to independence, 31 August 1946 to 4 January 1948, London, I984, p. 19).

On  I8 September 1945 in fact, the British government had already started to  make concessions,  as it authorized to negotiate on government servants' wages, to appoint a further Burmese to the governor's council with the defense portfolio and to arrange a general election for the spring of I947. (Letter of Aung San in Rangoon Liberator, 27 October 1945).

Thus it was not only Asian thinking about the ‘empire’ that had changed. Many young Britons, though not yet the Tory and Labour leadership, had come to see empire as an anachronism during the war. Not only did it divert valuable manpower and resources from where they were needed at home, it also threatened domestic liberties and seemed likely to blow Britain 's new socialist government off course. Before the election Churchill had been disgusted to hear from Sir William Slim that 90 per cent of the troops in the East were going to vote Labour and the other 10 per cent would not vote at all. Now those Labour supporters, heartily tired of dysentery, malaria, ENSA humour and poor pay, wanted to see the brave new world that their left-leaning tutors in the army education corps had promised them. Morale slumped and would soon lead to small-scale mutinies among British forces from Karachi to Singapore. Months after the surrender of Japan, British troops were incensed to find themselves fighting and suffering casualties in what seemed like completely unnecessary wars against nationalists in Indonesia and French Indo-China.

Not improving matters, it was becoming dangerous to try to defend the empire with a conscript army. in May 1946; men of the Parachute Regiment stationed at Muar in Malaya, recently returned from Java, protested at their living conditions. The men gathered in an angry mood and twice refused to obey the commanding officer's orders to return to their companies: 258 men were taken into custody and brought to trial en masse at Kluang airfield on 12 August, where they had been detained. Some were brought in handcuffs, having slipped over the wire to buy cigarettes and necessities in the town. They termed it a strike, but were rebuked by the judge advocate: 'The word "strike" is not in Army vocabulary,' he said. 'It is Mutiny or nothing else.' (The Times, London, 14 August 1946).

Of the 258, 243 were sentenced to three or five years' penal servitude (later commuted to two years' hard labor), and discharged with ignominy. Their defense was that men had protested similarly elsewhere and had not been punished. There were questions in Parliament and public petitions in their support. Eventually, all convictions were quashed, due to irregularities in the trial. Churchill himself condemned the conduct of the court martial in the Commons: “I unhappily presided over the Army when there was a shoal of mutinies, and no one ever attempted to bring large masses- of the rank and file to a mass trial.” (The Times,11 October 1946).

It was the British Army's Red Fort Trials. To the military it was a 'complete bombshell'. It seemed as if the new Labor government was capitulating to public opinion. The battalion was immediately dispatched to a transit camp and posted out of Southeast Asia.

For much of Asia the Second World War however was at best a hiatus in the fighting, and for many people the worst was yet to come. The continuing toll remained heaviest on civilians; the number of deaths from war-related famine in India, Indo-China and south China alone was close to 6 million. Millions more were driven from their homes and countries during the war and the numerous petty but lethal conflicts that surged on for decades in its aftermath. With the fall of Japan, the Asian War entered a new phase: it became a struggle against Western imperialism and its allies; a war for national freedom and for a new ordering of society. What gave the years from 1945 to 1949 their peculiar epochal quality was a sense of being part of a great acceleration in time, of living at a moment of unprecedented change. The days of Japanese occupation had a millennian edge to them; but any promise of peace and righteousness was soon destroyed by repression, exploitation and hunger. The fall of Japan came when many societies were at their lowest ebb: battle scarred, battle hardened, at war with one another.

In 1945 the term of service for British soldiers had been reduced from four years to three years and eight months and this meant that repatriation to Britain was proceeding apace. Later, a full-scale demobilization began, a decision that effectively turned the 'British' garrison in Burma into an Indian and West African one. Therein lay the problem in 1946 when still a large numbers of Japanese paws where in the county, along with a few units of the INA who had not yet been returned to India.

In September 1946 Rangoon, saw a mass movement on a scale that appalled the British authorities. Large areas of the countryside were out of control of the central authorities. And the anti-government forces had got their hands on automatic weapons and large reserves of ammunition that had presumably been buried since the Japanese withdrawal. In one incident in a town southwest of Rangoon 17,000 bags of rice were looted in a single raid. Also serious trouble flared up between Burmese villagers and  British West African regiments in what was already a political powder keg. (John H. McEnery, Epilogue in Burma, I945-48, 1990, p. 56).

The bushfire revolts and affrays in the countryside were matched in the towns by an extraordinary show of trade-union strength, all the more pointed because people were still poverty stricken from the war. The political heat was turned up as the AFPFL demanded a date for independence from the British government. Basically, this was a revolt for better conditions. British rule seemed no better than Japanese: annual inflation was soaring away and real incomes had reduced by 25 per cent. And by the last week September, nearly 100,000 key workers were on strike.The government's publicity offices tried to make much of the plight of children in their propaganda against the AFPFL: 'If the trains from Rangoon to Mandalay do not run our kinsmen in Upper Burma and the Shan states will suffer,' wrote Maung Tin and F. B. Arnold in a press release. (Hugh Tinker (ed.), Burma: the struggle for independence, 1944-1948, vol. II: From general strike to independence, 31 August 1946 to 4 January 1948, London, 1984).

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, officials tried to persuade the strikers to exempt vital provisions from their blockades. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, victor at El Alamein and now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was also growing alarmed. He told the chiefs of staff committee on 23 September 1946 that Britain faced a critical problem if the internal situations in India , Malaya , Burma and Palestine continued to deteriorate in parallel.There were simply not enough troops left for the other colonies if substantial numbers were sent to Rangoon . Britain could not count on Australian help any longer and it would have difficulty in extracting its Commonwealth troops from the occupation forces in Japan. Nor, in view of the growing Soviet menace, could it switch troops from Greece or Germany to deal with a crisis in Southeast Asia. Hubert Rance wrote on 15 September 1946 that did not like the AFPFL, distrusting its authoritarian tendencies much more than Mountbatten had done. He noted that between Dorman-Smith's departure and his own arrival it had built up its power by 'taking all the measures so profitably used by Hitler, Mussolini and Ghandi [sic]'. (Note by Rance, 15 September 1946, in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, p. 22).

Like many other British officials, he thought Aung San, though young and apparently indecisive, was at least sincere. Rance however had one other option, and he first took to the recently repatriated U Saw, as so many British did. 'I was impressed by his virility and oratory', he wrote, describing him later as 'probably the most forceful character in Burma today'.

Saw, positioned a future independent Burma - under his rule - within the British Common-wealth. The United Nations was ineffective, he said, while Russia was ideologically purblind and the US was distant. Without British support the Burmese might wake up to find the Chinese in Mandalay one day, in Sagaing the next and Rangoon the day after: 'A hundred million Chinese in Yunnan could not be ignored.' (Note by Rance, 'Interview with U Saw', 12 September 1946, in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, p. 17).

Saw tried to persuade Rance that the British overestimated the AFPFL. He said that they were powerful in Rangoon and parts of the delta but elsewhere people were thoroughly sick of them. Writing a memorandum for Rance, Saw took the gloves off and railed against Aung San. He had been tutored by the Japanese and hated democracy. Throughout Burma it was the 'brute force and terrorism' of the AFPFL which prevailed. Most of its members were unemployed, Hence they resorted to extorting goods and money from people by using Aung San's alternative title Bogyoke, 'a title which inspired the awe and abject submission of a great bulk of the unthinking masses.’ The British, he concluded, had failed in their responsibilities since their return. They should have relied on the old ministers such as Saw himself. Instead, the 'Burmese felt that the British Government have wittingly or unwittingly handed over the administration of the country to a band of traitorous fascists whose avowed policy is to gain power and ‘ascendancy at all costs.’Though he sympathized with the spirit of such ranting, Rance was shrewd enough to see through U Saw. The AFPFL organization was much stronger than Saw's and Saw was unlikely to be able to exploit any splits within it. Saw's party, which was associated with pre-war sleaze, would certainly do poorly in an election. Rance quickly decided to back Aung San, recommend concessions to London and try to get the AFPFL to enter the Burmese cabinet. The alternative was a popular revolt, further damage to an already shattered economy and possibly even mass starvation. Rance's decision to work with Aung San to counter the gathering social crisis was easier said than done. The young nationalist leader had been languishing ill in bed for some time while the general strike gathered pace: 'Here I am helpless in bed, and I must remain quiet, God alone knows how long.' (Aung San to Rance, 17 September 1946, reproduced in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, p. 33).

The bruiser U Saw took this as weakness, but it seems as likely that Aung San was 'doing a Gandhi', using his apparent weakness to set the agenda, At any rate, Rance obligingly called on him at his home to discuss the political situation in secret. Rance painted a bleak scenario: prolonged strikes would lead to communal and anti-British riots and the destruction of the economy. The peasant, already overburdened, would be the great loser. (Rance to Pethick-Lawrence, 19 September 1946, ibid. pp. 47-8).

But Aung San needed more concessions from the British to see off the communist threat and damp down civil disruption. Comparisons with India remained irksome. In fact Aung San went on to try to dissolve what remained of British control over Burma 's internal affairs. On November 11, heavily tutored by the former ICS officer U Tin Tut, he made what was, in effect, his final set of demands. He denounced the governor's remaining discretionary power over certain 'imperial' subjects as incompatible with democracy.

The frontier areas would now have to be brought within the remit of a Burmese cabinet. So, too, would control over affairs concerning British and Indian imports. All expenditure would have to be made subject to a vote of the lower house. The British could no longer hope to 'reserve' subjects that bore on their own interests, as they had been doing for years. As for the future shape of a popular assembly in Burma, the AFPFL made it perfectly clear that the franchise would have to be universal in the general election that was scheduled for March 1947. No longer would the Burmese be outvoted by a combination of representatives of the European and Indian chambers of commerce; those great Indian moneylenders, the Nattukottai Chettiyars; and a plethora of Shans, Karens, Kachins, and so on. (Rance to Pethick-Lawrence, 13 November 1946, in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, pp.139-40).

Thus  as the Malay radical Mustapha Hussain  reflected, 'although the Japanese Occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender'. (Mustapha Hussain, Malay nationalism before Umno: the memoirs of Mustapha Hussain, translated by Insun Mustapha and edited by fomo K. S. (Kuala Lumpur, 2.005), p. 313).

Asia's revolutionary moment in fact joined movements that were fired by radical ideologies - social delegacy, religious revival, Marxism and Maoism. It was, to use phraseology of the Indonesian pergerakan, or movement, an ag motion, a world upside-down. New leaders addressed an often be dered people in exhilarating new language. In the words of  a Malay group: The People's Constitution of PUT ERA is based on elections, kedau/ rakyat [sovereignty of the people}, and moves towards social justice, egalitarianism, without upper and lower classes in the bangsa [nation]ac cording to the capability, intelligence and industry of the individual hope in this matter the rakyat no longer have any doubts, but instead more faith in the struggle and loyalty to their respective movements. Bee of this we appeal once more, struggle onwards with a fiery spirit, but w cool head until the sacred aims that we aspire to are achieved. Remen comrades, that the world is changing fast and we cannot live with the UI standings and feelings that we had in the year 1941. We are now in the 1947 in the atomic age, the old era has passed. (From Utusan Melayu, 2.3 August 1947, translated and quoted in Ariftin Omar, Bangsa Melayu: Malay concepts of democracy and community, 1945-50, Kuala Lumpur, 1993, p. 116).

For many, this sense of possibility, this call to be the agent historical change, was irresistible. Everywhere men and women were still in arms. During the Second World War the Allies and the Japanese had armed and militarized many ethnic minorities whose identities had previously conformed only loosely to the labels applied by colonial administrators anthropologists. Karens, Kachins, Shans, Chins, Nagas and, in Ma the Orang Asli all now possessed weapons, military know-how identifiable enemies to rally against.

The, reduced in political might and fearing the spread of communism, the waning colonial powers - Britain, France and the Netherlands - redeployed the weapons of the Second World War in the guise of counter-insurgency campaigns in those territories where they retained a fragile hold. Plus the United States also, became an arbiter; for example when American economic pressure on the Dutch forced them to withdraw from most of Indonesia. This was dictated by Cold War logic, to prevent the Indonesian revolution lurching to the left, and the same logic led to the United States ' commitment to support British colonial rule while it was containing communism in Malaya. ('The United Kingdom in South-East Asia and the Far East', October 1949, and cabinet conclusions on 'South-East Asia and the Far East ', in A.]. Stockwell, ed., British documents on the end of empire: Malaya, part II, London, 1995, pp. 158-70, 173).

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