By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Before the Japanese surrendered in August, their last political act was to recognize a more radical government in Hanoi led by Ho Chi Minh. The incoming Chinese forces of Chiang Kai Shek also preferred a friendly independent Vietnamese government to the re-establishment of colonial rule. From the balcony of Hanoi 's baroque opera house, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of the Viet Minh nationalist coalition. He mixed the language of the American Declaration of Independence with violent invective against the French: 'They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood ... To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.' For nearly nine months the new regime was to act as a sovereign power, organizing elections, redistributing land to peasants and trying to combat the dreadful poverty that followed the famines. The ruling groups that emerged in distant Saigon were formally subordinate to the new regime in Hanoi. The two major leaders in the south were the communists Tran Van Giau and Dr Pham Ngoc Thach, the heads of the shaky local Viet Minh coalition which jostled for power with other armed popular groupings. The nationalists in Saigon tried to persuade Count Terauchi to arm them: 'You are defeated, now it is our turn to fight the white imperialists. Terauchi refused to surrender Japanese arms, but seems to have allowed French ones to find their way to the Viet Minh. The situation was extraordinarily tense. The new government had some arms but had little sway beyond the outskirts of Saigon. In Cholon, Saigon 's twin port city, French and Chinese business communities subsisted uneasily with a mafia-like organization called the Binh Xuyen. Up towards the mountain-goddess shrine of Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border it was the Cao Dai, a religious sect armed by the Japanese, who held power. (David Marr, Vietnam 1945, Berkeley, 1995, p. 135- 458; See also John Springhall, “Kicking out the Vietminh: how Britain allowed France to reoccupy south Indochina', Journal of Contempory History, 40, I, 2005, pp. 115-30).

Meanwhile Burma Governor Rance was to bowe to force majeure, noting that 12,000 Indian troops were scheduled to leave Burma in February 1947 and there would be no replacements. He urged the immediate passage of a House of Commons amending bill to expand the powers of the present government to include those formerly retained by the governor. Thus the AFPFL leadership was abruptly invited to London after New Year. (Rance, in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, pp. 139-44).

The goal was to keep Burma within the Commonwealth and out of Soviet clutches. If they were to go to London , Aung San and his supporters had to be assured of total success. Any temporizing by the British would compromise them completely. It would mean handing the leadership of Burmese nationalism to one or other of the communist factions. British power was already declining rapidly, but this was a decisive moment in the history of Burma and, arguably, in that of South and Southeast Asia as a whole. If Burma had become a communist state on independence, as later happened in Vietnam, the Cold War in Asia might have taken a very different course. Certainly, with the 'cold weather' of 1946-7 approaching, the communists were in a restive mood. Their aim, like their confreres in Vietnam, was to take over and dominate a coalition of nationalist forces. If they could not do this, they would adopt the tactics of the communists in China; they would go underground and fight the nationalists, denouncing them as stooges of imperialism. Fortunately for the AFPFL, the Burmese communists split into ideological and personal factions, with neither the Vietnamese nor the Chinese model triumphing. In the longer term it was to be military nationalists who would win out. As relations between the moderates and the communists worsened with the collapse of the strikes during October, the AFPFL voted to expel the communists. (Angelene Naw, Aung San and the struggle for Burmese independence, Copenhagen, 2001, pp. 177-81).

Meanwhile Than Tun, the most outspoken of the communist leaders, announced a parting of the ways: 'Yes, all Communists must put party first and AFPFL second. Party to them meant the true welfare of the peasants, the workers and their sympathizers, who constituted the country.’ Justifying their own position, the AFPFL leadership accused the communists of starting a 'whispering campaign' against Aung San and, less believably, of ganging up with the British military and civil administration against the 'socialists', that is, the moderates. The only reason that the AFPFL leaders were prepared to allow the split was that most now really believed that Attlee's government would concede independence early in the new year. Moreover, they could see that the communists were splitting into personal and ideological cliques. Thakin Soe, who had done much to build up communist cells in the north of the country, had begun to accuse Than Tun and Thein Pe of collaboration with the British and of 'right-wing deviationism'. He had been suspicious of much of the leadership since they had gone along with the deal that Aung San had worked out in Kandy back in September 1945 for the absorption of the BNA into a reorganized British force. (Extract from The Burman, 3 November 1946, 643/38, TNA, cited in Tinker, p.105).

Burmese supporters in London were put on their guard in October when a Karen 'goodwill mission' arrived in town and was entertained at the exclusive Claridge's Hotel by no less a luminary than Pethick-Lawrence. And as the AFPFL leadership considered the constitutional endgame, British intelligence warned that the situation was even worse than it had been in early October. Though this had no immediate impact on Burmese politics, the rise of communism throughout Asia weighed heavily on the minds of the British and the AFPFL leadership. Equally alarming was Hindu-Muslim and Muslim-Sikh conflict in India. Burma had seen comparable 'communal' outbreaks between Buddhists and Muslims in the 1930’s. In a lengthy interview with Reuters, Aung San deplored China 's civil war and India 's communalism. Events in China might lead to a Third World War, he said, while both conflicts would 'retard Asiatic unity and security'. (Reuter interview with Bogyoke Aung San, 16 December 1946', in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, p. 194).

On 13 December General Harold Briggs, the army commander in Burma, had sent a particularly gloomy assessment of the situation to his superiors. For political reasons, Indian troops could not now be used, he said. Burmese troops were of 'doubtful reliability'. And the British forces were 'weak' and could not hold the situation. The evidence suggests that Briggs painted the situation to be as dire as he could because he agreed with Rance and, more distantly, Mountbatten on the need for an immediate statement about the date of independence. (John H. McEnery, Epilogue in Burma, 1945-48, 1990, pp. 75-90).

By October 1946 the Burmese furthermore were sorely aware that the British had effectively handed power to India. And Aung San returned to the old sore point of the position of Indians in Burma and intimated vaguely that the Burmese could not have Indians and other 'foreigners' voting on their constitution. Privately, Churchill was furious that a British government was even considering parleying with someone whom he regarded as a 'quisling' and a 'fascist' such as Aung San. (McEnery, Epilogue in Burma, pp. 95-6).

Before the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, their last political act was to recognize a more radical government in Hanoi led by Ho Chi Minh. The incoming Chinese forces of Chiang Kai Shek also preferred a friendly independent Vietnamese government to the re-establishment of colonial rule. From the balcony of Hanoi 's baroque opera house, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of the Viet Minh nationalist coalition. He mixed the language of the American Declaration of Independence with violent invective against the French: 'They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood ... To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.' For nearly nine months the new regime was to act as a sovereign power, organizing elections, redistributing land to peasants and trying to combat the dreadful poverty that followed the famines. The ruling groups that emerged in distant Saigon were formally subordinate to the new regime in Hanoi. The two major leaders in the south were the communists Tran Van Giau and Dr Pham Ngoc Thach, the heads of the shaky local Viet Minh coalition which jostled for power with other armed popular groupings. The nationalists in Saigon tried to persuade Count Terauchi to arm them: 'You are defeated, now it is our turn to fight the white imperialists. Terauchi refused to surrender Japanese arms, but seems to have allowed French ones to find their way to the Viet Minh. The situation was extraordinarily tense. The new government had some arms but had little sway beyond the outskirts of Saigon. In Cholon, Saigon 's twin port city, French and Chinese business communities subsisted uneasily with a mafia-like organization called the Binh Xuyen. Up towards the mountain-goddess shrine of Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border it was the Cao Dai, a religious sect armed by the Japanese, who held power. (David Marr, Vietnam 1945, Berkeley, 1995, p. 135- 458; See also John Springhall, “Kicking out the Vietminh: how Britain allowed France to reoccupy south Indochina', Journal of Contempory History, 40, I, 2005, pp. 115-30).

June 1945 more than 35,000 Japanese POWs had been repatriated to Japan; the same number, however, remained behind and they were increasingly used as strike breakers and guards as the internal situation deteriorated. The graves of more than 8,000 Thai laborers could be identified. But alongside these 15,000 known victims were the unmarked graves of anything from 30,000 to 80,000 Burmese, Chinese, Indian, Malayan and Indonesian laborers. Most of them had been forced into service. They had died of disease, starvation or as a result of Japanese brutality. And in Singapore, the Upper East Coast Road, a site of the massacres during the Japanese 'screening' of the Chinese, was a telok kurau, a haunted hill. The absence of remains was an obstacle to the performance of rites to appease the 'hungry ghosts' of the ancestors. An atmosphere of acute psychic crisis arose. Taoist priests, according to a report in the Straits Times, 'peered into the underworld' and saw 'thousands of naked hungry and discontented ghosts roaming about the earth, their wrath threatening calamity to the land'. (See Fujio Hara, Malayan Chinese and China, Singapore, 2003).

In India British officers where to contemplated the once unthinkable demise of the Raj were beset by mounting worries. Nehru's emotional attachment to the princely state of Kashmir seemed the most likely cause of conflict between the two new dominions, no one knew whether it was going to join India or Pakistan. While in Burma Governor Rance bowed to force majeure, noting that 12,000 Indian troops were scheduled to leave Burma in February 1947 and there would be no replacements. He urged the immediate passage of a House of Commons amending bill to expand the powers of the present government to include those formerly retained by the governor. Thus the AFPFL leadership was abruptly invited to London after New Year. (Rance, in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, pp. 139-44).

The goal was to keep Burma within the Commonwealth and out of Soviet clutches. If they were to go to London, Aung San and his supporters had to be assured of total success. Any temporizing by the British would compromise them completely. It would mean handing the leadership of Burmese nationalism to one or other of the communist factions. British power was already declining rapidly, but this was a decisive moment in the history of Burma and, arguably, in that of South and Southeast Asia as a whole. If Burma had become a communist state on independence, as later happened in Vietnam, the Cold War in Asia might have taken a very different course. Certainly, with the 'cold weather' of 1946-7 approaching, the communists were in a restive mood. Their aim, like their confreres in Vietnam, was to take over and dominate a coalition of nationalist forces. If they could not do this, they would adopt the tactics of the communists in China; they would go underground and fight the nationalists, denouncing them as stooges of imperialism. Fortunately for the AFPFL, the Burmese communists split into ideological and personal factions, with neither the Vietnamese nor the Chinese model triumphing. In the longer term it was to be military nationalists who would win out. As relations between the moderates and the communists worsened with the collapse of the strikes during October, the AFPFL voted to expel the communists. (Angelene Naw, Aung San and the struggle for Burmese independence, Copenhagen, 2001, pp. 177-81).

By October 1946 the Burmese would be sorely aware that the British had effectively handed power to India. And Aung San returned to the old sore point of the position of Indians in Burma and intimated vaguely that the Burmese could not have Indians and other 'foreigners' voting on their constitution. At the same time the British saw turmoil all around them. India was convulsed by the INA trials and communal violence. Malaya was fighting off a British constitutional settlement and gripped by communist-inspired labour strife. British troops had barely extricated themselves from the unrolling civil war in the Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China. The army was 'gloomy'. The British civilian services were on the whole in favor of independence, but were now concerned about the welfare of their wives and children and their own future employment.

Than Tun, the most outspoken of the communist leaders, announced a parting of the ways: 'Yes, all Communists must put party first and AFPFL second. Party to them meant the true welfare of the peasants, the workers and their sympathizers, who constituted the country.’ Justifying their own position, the AFPFL leadership accused the communists of starting a 'whispering campaign' against Aung San and, less believably, of ganging up with the British military and civil administration against the 'socialists', that is, the moderates. The only reason that the AFPFL leaders were prepared to allow the split was that most now really believed that Attlee's government would concede independence early in the new year. Moreover, they could see that the communists were splitting into personal and ideological cliques. Thakin Soe, who had done much to build up communist cells in the north of the country, had begun to accuse Than Tun and Thein Pe of collaboration with the British and of 'right-wing deviationism'. He had been suspicious of much of the leadership since they had gone along with the deal that Aung San had worked out in Kandy back in September 1945 for the absorption of the BNA into a reorganized British force. (Extract from The Burman, 3 November 1946, 643/38, TNA, cited in Tinker, p. 105).

Burmese supporters in London were briefly put on their guard in October when a Karen 'goodwill mission' arrived in town and was entertained at the exclusive Claridge's Hotel by no less a luminary than Pethick-Lawrence. And as the AFPFL leadership considered the constitutional endgame, British intelligence warned that the situation was even worse than it had been in early October. Though this had no immediate impact on Burmese politics, the rise of communism throughout Asia weighed heavily on the minds of the British and the AFPFL leadership.

In fact events were now moving very fast. When Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, was sent to Burma to discuss the AFPFL leaders' visit to London and concluded of Aung San: 'I think business could be done.' Churchill was furious that a British government was even considering parleying with someone whom he regarded as a 'quisling' and a 'fascist' such as Aung San. (McEnery, Epilogue in Burma, pp. 95-6).

On 13 December General Harold Briggs, the army commander in Burma, sent a gloomy assessment of the situation to his superiors. For political reasons, Indian troops could not now be used, he said. Burmese troops were of 'doubtful reliability'. And the British forces were 'weak' and could not hold the situation. The evidence suggests that Briggs painted the situation to be as dire as he could because he agreed with Rance and, more distantly, Mountbatten on the need for an immediate statement about the date of independence. (John H. McEnery, Epilogue in Burma, I945-48, 1990, pp. 75-90).

Equally alarming was Hindu-Muslim and Muslim-Sikh conflict in India, Burma had seen comparable 'communal' outbreaks between Buddhists and Muslims in the 1930’s. In a lengthy interview with Reuters, Aung San deplored China 's civil war and India 's communalism. Events in China might lead to a Third World War, he said, while both conflicts would 'retard Asiatic unity and security'. (Reuter interview with Bogyoke Aung San, 16 December 1946', in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, p. 194).

In fact the British saw turmoil all around them. India was convulsed by the INA trials and communal violence. Malaya was fighting off a British constitutional settlement and gripped by communist-inspired labour strife. British troops had barely extricated themselves from the unrolling civil war in the Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China. The army was 'gloomy'. The British civilian services were on the whole in favour of independence, but were now concerned about the welfare of their wives and children and their own future employment.

But it was India that hovered gruesomely before Aung San’s eyes as he set off to London on a British Overseas Aircraft Corporation flight on the second day of 1947.

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