By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Way To Burma/Myanmar

One of the most dramatic effects of the coming war in South and East Asia was the way it forged the area into a bloodstained unity. First, the Japanese unified the peninsula from Singapore through Thailand to the borders of Assam by armed invasion. In response the British punched a land route from north India through the nearly impassable ranges of Assam and north Burma into the Irrawaddy valley. Reoccupying the Malay peninsula, they reclaimed their Southeast Asian patrimony. In fact, the designation Southeast Asia' (a term first used by the Japanese) was itself the brainchild of the military strategists who created South East Asia Command in 1943. Yet, as jazz-age imperialism drew to its end in 1939, there seemed little enough as yet, besides their rock-solid belief in British superiority, to draw together the white settler societies of the crescent.

There were tensions and divisions at the heart of these settler societies. These focused on people of `mixed race' - those descended from Europeans who had children by Indian, Burmese, Malay and Chinese partners. Their status was open to doubt and raises some difficulties of terminology. Generally speaking, these people themselves wanted to emphasize their part-British origins, calling themselves 'Anglo-Indians' or 'Anglo-Burmans', etc. By this period British expatriates generally referred to them as `Eurasiaps'. Occasionally and confusingly, though, the term 'Anglo-Indian' was also used of British expatriates who had spent a large portion of their lives in the East. These issues of identity affected all communities. A similar problem arises, for example, with the term 'Burman'. Sometimes this word was used to mean any indigenous inhabitant of Burma, but more often in the 193 os and '40s, it was used to mean people of ethnic Burmese Buddhist stock, so distinguishing them from the Karen, Shan, Kachin and other minorities who spoke different languages, had different customs and their own sense of history. Yet, after the war, the long imperial summer of the 193os would be remembered by the British in Asia as a lost idyll: a time of peace, prosperity and tropical chic. It climaxed in the literary voyages and celebrity tourism of that decade. Expatriate travellers moved by sea from luxury hotel to luxury hotel down the crescent. They disported themselves in the Great Eastern in Calcutta, The Strand in Rangoon, the Eastern and Oriental in Penang, and came to rest alongside the characters at the Long Bar of Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The days of Conrad's Eastern World had dimmed, but colourful relics of it lingered on in colonial clubhouses and quiet backwater outstations. Aldous Huxley, W. Somerset Maugham, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood all passed east and had the east leave a deep imprint on their writing. Their pen-portraits of colonial society in Asia were often cruelly satirical. Yet the remoter outposts of this world were suddenly accessible in a way they had not been a generation earlier. In the 19306 this tropical paradise became a playground for wealthy European tourists; the rich cultures of the region fascinated European artists. This was a world in which a Scottish-American hotelier could reinvent herself as the 'K'tut Tantri' of Balinese legend, and as the radio voice of a national revolution `Surabaya Sue'. See Timothy Lindsey, The romance o f K'tut Tantri and Indonesia: text and scripts, history and identity (Kuala Lumpur, 1997). For Bali's allure more generally, Adrian Vickers, Bali: a paradise created (Singapore, 1996).

Actors and film stars came east to visit some of their most enthusiastic audiences. Noël Coward was cornered by expatriate Mrs Worthingtons, who wished to put their daughters on the stage, and took his revenge in scandalizing planters' wives by awarding the top prizes in a beauty competition on his ship to two Eurasian girls. When, in 1936, Charlie Chaplin was fêted through Singapore and on to China, Japan and the Pacific, it was one of the last moments at which such a grand tour would be possible. As the long day of empire waned, British Asia had a filmic quality. Chinese entrepreneurs marketed Singapore as a location for Hollywood producers. Dorothy Lamour 'sexed-up' the new fascination with the tropics with her famous sarong. She was the most popular sex symbol in Malaya too, although locals observed that she sported her sarong `in a style no Malayan, Indonesian, or Polynesian ever wore'. (Desmond Pereira, The sun rises, the sun sets  Singapore, 1993, PP- 54-5) In 1940 she starred in the first of the `Road' movies with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby: The Road to Singapore. It could have been the road to anywhere: its working title was `The Road to Mandalay' and it was shot in California. Yet it lodged Singapore in the world's imagination. With bleak irony, British and Australian troops adopted its theme tune as a marching song when they retreated down the Malay peninsula in the face of the Japanese advance in December 1941.

On the non-fiction side, a former official Victor Bayley, produced in early 1941 a book entitled Is India Impregnable? A symptomatic rather than simply a stupid production, Bayley wrote in the aftermath of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939. His book was designed to show that the real threat to the British east was likely to come from a fresh Russian round in the `Great Game' of diplomacy and war in central Asia. The Russian Horde would mobilize northwards seeking alliances with the Afghan Pathan, `sitting alone in his mountain fastnesses staring out over the rich plains'. Here Bayley, true to form, invoked the spectre of the shadowy Pathan mullahs. Together, he speculated, the Russians and Afghan rebels would try to invade the `treasure house of the world', as the Great Mughals had called India. Nevertheless, India was ready, Bayley insisted. Food supplies were plentiful. The defenders of India would `never again have to face famine'. Strengthened with good strategic railways and fortified by her martial races, India would see off any threat from beyond the Khyber Pass.

By the time Bayley's book was published it was already out of date. By the end of 1943 events had falsified more or less every statement. Even before publication, the Soviets had become gallant allies of Britain, an embarrassment that Bayley turned to his advantage. He advised the reader in a hastily appended introduction that all he needed to do was to change the word `Russian' to `German' and everything in the book still held true. Among these verities was the fact that only an unlikely alliance between the Russian and Japanese fleets could shake the Anglo-American dominance in Far Eastern waters. Singapore, he went on, `cannot be attacked from the land for no army can march down the thousand miles of tropical jungle which covers the Peninsula - it is a sheer impossibility.  Is India impregnable?, London, 1941, p. 208)

In the month when this book was published, the Japanese high command finalized their plan to do just that. Shortly afterwards, they began to consider invading Burma through wooded passes over the Thai border, another `impossibility' according to the military planners in Whitehall and Simla.

The Burma Independence Army

The BIA backed by the Japanese, was what later the ‘Indian National Army’ (INA ) was trying to be. And as the BIA flanked by the Japanese marched on into their homeland, Burmese patriotic fervour sometimes took on a tinge of inter-communal hatred. They also took the opportunity to pay off old scores with the Christian Karen population of the lowlands whom they believed had been specially privileged under British rule. They were joined by local bandits. The Karen law minister of the government of Burma neither fled to India with the British, like two of his colleagues, nor co-operated with the Japanese as many more did. Instead, he went off to the delta and attempted to organize an anti-Japanese Karen strong-point. He and his English wife, along with hundreds of other local Karens, were eventually murdered by hangers-on of the BIA.48 When the BIA entered Arakan to the north a few months later, gangs also took it out on the local Muslim population and instigated Buddhist-Muslim riots as years of resentment were vented in violence. Some of the worst massacres of civilians in the war in Burma were carried out not by the Japanese, but by local Burmese gangs loosely associated with the BIA. Thein Pe, a young communist who later wrote about these early days, noted that the incidence of Japanese plunder and atrocity was much lower in districts where the BIA had a firm presence, though he was, of course, referring only to the safety of the ethnic Burman population.

The Japanese also hesitated about the form of local government they would introduce. In 1942, and again in 1944, there was talk of establishing a member of the last Burmese king Thibaw's family as a client monarch. But the British had done such a thorough job of dispossessing the Burmese royal family that using compliant members of a ruling dynasty as the Japanese had done in Manchuria, French Indo-China and Malaya was simply impractical.

Ultimately, the Japanese commander General Shojiro lida decided to form a Burmese advisory council with the flamboyant Dr Ba Maw as its head. Ba Maw, as a former prime minister, was a well-known figure on the political platform as well as being a consummate socialite and charmer. Besides, Iida was already suspicious of the Thakins. They were very young and inexperienced and, after all, were communists or crypto-communists. Elements associated with the BIA had already got the Japanese into trouble by massacring Karens in the delta and central Burma.

On the borders of Chinese Yunnan Karen, Shan and Chin fought a long guerrilla campaign against the Japanese invaders, not so much out of love for the British but because the Japanese were invading their sacred territory alongside ethnic Burmese to whom they were deeply antagonistic.
Most communities were torn by doubt and seething with rumour. . Amongst the Karen population in the eastern hills something called the Thompson Po Min movement had been spreading for some time in the atmosphere of crisis brought on by the Japanese advance north. Thompson Po Min seems to have been a millenarian shaman leader who with his brother Johnson Po Min were apparently associates of U Saw. Thompson predicted that the second coming and the end of the world would follow the Japanese invasion in short order." He also preached a more mundane salvation. The leaders persuaded people that by buying a picture of Thompson and putting it in their houses with a Japanese flag, they would assure their protection from the invaders. This seems to have been both a money-making racket and a religious movement, a variant of what anthropologists call an invulnerability cult. Other Karen leaders remained loyal to the British and opposed the Po Min brothers. The authorities were slow to react and many families uprooted themselves in the course of a kind of schism and moved off to the mountainous parts of the Karenni states,67 where the Japanese soon arrived. The fractious politics of faction and lineage, held in check for two generations by British frontier officers, broke out with a vengeance. Old political disputes and social divisions among the people often determined reactions to the war in all the hill and jungle territories.

In areas of south and central Burma which were directly affected by the fighting between the retreating British and the Japanese forces anarchy reigned. As the Indians left on their long and fatal trek to Manipur and Assam, the Burmese population had fled into the countryside, taking shelter in their home villages or in monasteries. A few attacks on Indians were recorded. Poor villagers looted the rich Indian merchants, the Chettiars, who had bought up their land during the Great Depression. Burmese women who had married Indians were sometimes the targets of abuse and derision as they trudged hopelessly along the roads. Yet many Burmese sympathized with both Indians and British. As Buddhists, they had compassion for the suffering refugees and put out small parcels of food for them or fed and gave them water as they waited exhausted at railway junctions waiting for the northward bound trains to start.

In general, the Japanese troops treated the Burmese population reasonably well in these early days. They tried to prevent local hoodlums in the train of the BIA murdering the Karens of the Delta and the Muslims in northern Arakan. By contrast, they behaved with exemplary savagery where they felt vulnerable and surrounded by enemies. Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmans were badly treated. The Japanese murdered all the wounded British soldiers they found as they entered Myitkyina and then proceeded to behead a large proportion of the male population of the town on the suspicion that they were British collaborators. Most ordinary Burmese wete still safe so long as they cooperated. Labourers quite liked the high prices paid for their services and there were even examples of marriage between Japanese and Burmese. Quite soon, however, local people became more wary. The Japanese military police or Kempeitai were to be avoided. Even ordinary troops had developed the habit of slapping the faces of Burmese for minor infringements of discipline or for irritating them in one way or another. To the Japanese this probably meant little. They slapped their own servants or menials in this way, but to Burmese Buddhists, for whom the head was the seat of divine wisdom, this was deeply offensive.

For example early in 1942 a group of villagers decided to welcome the advancing Japanese with gifts. They were poor people and had little else to offer the liberators except bowls of rice, a traditional sign of welcome. When the villagers tried to present their little gifts, the Japanese brusquely slapped them, taking this as a silly distraction, or even an insult. (S. Mitsuru, 'Minami Kikan', Mss Eur C614, f. 69, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library)

Japanese troops indulged in other offensive activities: they bathed naked by water hydrants on the streets, to the horror of Burmese women. In some cases they were surprisingly cavalier with Buddhist shrines, stripping them of wood for cooking fires and otherwise violating them.

One should not forget that the Japanese thought of themselves as ‘Children of the Sun’ a belief that is not so popular among young Japanese today (2005). On the other hand where in Nazi Germany the new (top) Government leaders where not actively involvement in the Nazi Government before , in Japan except for a few, the old guard was not replaced and thus school books in Japan today are still censored when it comes to WWII.

Also one should say that Japanese soldiers were popular with the Burmese young. The troops were genuinely fond of children. In fact parents worried that their offspring were being alienated from them and that the Japanese were using their children to spy on them.

Christians, Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese, Karens - anyone, in fact, that the Japanese police believed might favour the British - were pushed to the bottom of the social scale. Some were imprisoned and killed by the Kempeitai. Indian Christian servants of the British population of Maymyo escaped into the nearby forests and remained there for much of the war. (Ann Purton, The safest place, 198 2, p.169.)

The Allies originally envisaged a seaborne invasion of Burma and Malaya, but the demand for ships and landing craft in the Mediterranean scotched this. General William Slim's 14th Army, was a force which numbered between 80,000 and 100,000 men. It went on to reoccupy Burma, French Indo-China, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies in 1945-The majority of soldiers in the 14th Army were Indians, Gurkhas, and Burmese peoples (mostly Kachins, Karens and Shan).

But the huge mobilization of manpower is one of the untold stories of the South Asian war effort. Contractors raised large amounts of labour from eastern India. But the impact of this demand fell very unequally on the poor, the `tribal' groups such as the Santals of Bengal and the Garos of Orissa or the Nuniyas of Bihar. Nearly 200,000 Nagas were working as porters and carriers on the Assam front at any one time in 1944 or -1945. Areas which had hardly been touched by the outside world before the war, were called on to supply men to carry, scout or fight with matchlocks and bayonets. Across the Burmese border Karen, Kachin and Chin had been fighting and sacrificing their lives since 1942. There were thousands of other villagers from the minority peoples shot down in jungle fire-fights or massacred by the Japanese in retaliation for aiding the Allies. As in Malaya, the life of the forest and hill peoples would never be the same again after this brutal conflict with the outside world.

The Japanese had about one million men in Southeast Asia as a whole. In addition, the Japanese could call upon about 80,000 friendly troops in the Indian National Army and the Burma Independence Army, the Japanese could call upon about 80,000 friendly troops in the Indian National Army and the Burma Independence Army. (See Donovan Webster, The Burma Road, 2004.)

Once the monsoon had begun in earnest the Japanese reverse in Assam became a rout. When it was defeated by the increased firepower of the British and Indian armies and American air power, it was cast aside and abandoned by its commanders. There were no reserves, little transport for the withdrawal, no food and medicines. The Japanese air force was almost entirely a fighter force and could not supply its troops by air.

For many their only recourse was suicide. Groups of soldiers huddled together over a grenade by the side of the road, while one pulled out the pin to end their misery. A British officer remembered encountering thousands of the dead or dying enemy. There were `strewn over gaseous, bloated bodies family photographs, postcards of cherry blossom and snow capped Mount Fujiyama and delicate drawings of flowers had fallen from dying hands as life ebbed away in the roar of the unceasing rains'. (John Nunneley, Tales from the King's African Rifles, London, 2000, p. 127.)

Finally, the Allies on the Burma front had something to celebrate. Leo Amery, the secretary of state, visited the war front. He spoke to Gurkha troops in Urdu, revealing that it was `a language I learned with my Ayah's [nurse's] milk nearly seventy years ago', (Eastern Times Newspaper, Lahore, 22 September 1944) a perfect example of how the whole British ruling class of those days was shot through with memories of India. General Wavell later flew to Manipur and held a durbar, or official audience, with the Naga chiefs, as the Japanese were finally cleared south into Burma, chased by deep penetration forces.

In the distant Punjab, the province from which such a large proportion of the troops came, there was quiet rejoicing. The National War Front published advertisements in newspapers and distributed posters proclaiming `Salute the Soldier!' The Maharaja of Patiala met returning troops and moved amongst them, chatting. Recruiting posters harped on the modernity of the armed forces: `Pilot today. Airline executive tomorrow!' But that quiet rejoicing was tempered by anxiety. The Railway Board published a notice depicting emaciated villagers staring at a railway carriage: `Travel less'. It urged people to refrain from leisure journeys when food distribution remained a priority. Hindu-Muslim hatred were stoked across the Punjab as Jinnah denounced Gandhi's most recent political plans as `a death warrant to all Muslims'. (Eastern Times, 13 October 1944.)

The last few years of the Raj were far from the `cushy billet' that expatriates had come to expect. Wartime restrictions on imports meant that people were forced to make do with poor-quality Indian goods: electric light bulbs that exploded with monotonous regularity, Indian beer which had to be upended in pails of water to let the toxins drift off. The cost of living had risen zoo-300 per cent in a few months. Private servants were in very short supply because of the demand for labour from swollen government offices and the military. Several officials suffered nervous breakdowns because of the pressures of extra work. Race relations deteriorated further. Indians were resentful of the new influx of British and Americans and their own declining standards of living. The imprisonment of Gandhi and the other Congress leaders was regarded as a national insult and the prospect of Gandhi's death from a hunger strike had threatened public order.

The British, for their part, were tense. They knew that the eastern war was still in the balance, but were poorly informed about what was actually happening. Water shortages became worse. Pumping stations could not cope with the greatly increased wartime population. Cholera made its appearance as people drank bad water and started to spread as the rains began.

Then around the middle of July All-India Radio began to broadcast news of the Japanese retreat from Imphal. British India was saved for its final three years. Not everyone rejoiced. The victory at Imphal and the Normandy landings in Europe triggered a slump on Indian stock markets. This was because `India was one vast black market' and the fun would end with the war. One Indian merchant wired his agent: `Situation Changing. Don't buy anything ... the future is not at all promising. It seems the war is drifting towards its end. (Intelligence report, 14 July 1944, L/WS/1/1433 OIOC.)

Arriving in Arakan north Burma the British found that Karens and Chinese had been subject to much surveillance and harassment by the Japanese. BIA henchmen had seized the property of the Chinese refugees to India and China, while the property of Indian refugees had been handed over to the Indian Independence League.

The Japanese themselves began to regard the Burmese as lazy and stupid. They failed to get them to learn Japanese. The Japanese found themselves paying extortionate amounts for supplies in the bazaars, especially for the opium on which many of them had become dependent. The Burmese in turn began to loathe the Japanese. One told the incoming British military administration, no doubt to curry favour, that the Japanese `look like dogs, they eat like dogs and now they are dying like dogs'. Even Aung San's Burma Defence Army,`gallant allies of the Nipponese race', were treated badly in brutal Japanese military training camps. One young man was beaten to death by the Japanese instructors because he kept fainting on parade. He died muttering deliriously 'Hancho [instructor] please stop beating, oh, Hancho, please excuse me.’

Hatred of the Japanese slowly built up inside the BDA, and they soon would rebel against the Japanese. New `ancient prophecies' began to appear among the astrologers and soothsayers. Shortly after a star had gone through the horns of the moon, the Japanese had arrived and in February 1944 this phenomenon had been glimpsed again, signalling their departure. Quite soon everyone had heard of this omen.

Admiral Louis Mountbatten, South East Asia Commander, having convinced himself and his immediate supporters, he issued weapons to the Karen levies in the Karen hills. But also to the BDA, after Aung San presented Mountbatten with a Japanese sword. General Sir Montagu Stopford, who had commanded the 33rd Indian Brigade at Kohima, later reassured his commander that, although this was a small stabbing weapon on the pattern used for hara-kiri, it should not be interpreted as a hint. (Montagu Stopford to Mountbatten, 26 September 1945, Mountbatten Papers, Southeast Asia, 8, microfilm, OIOC.)

As for 'Nagaland', a recent ceasefire between Christian Naga rebels and the Indian government have brought little sign of a solution. For half a century, Naga tribesmen fought the army in these mountains, before agreeing to the ceasefire in 1997. India's oldest insurgency had cost more than 20,000 lives. Today, the Indian army is trying to win the hearts and minds of villagers by distributing medicines, the rebels gradually losing support by only showing up to collect "taxes".

"In our childhood, we used to hear the sound of the Indian army vehicles and we would run and hide. But we would welcome the undergrounds," one villager said. "Now it is the other way round." But he is not quite sure he believes the Indian army's claim, written beside every camp of the Assam Rifles, that they are the "Friends of the Hill People". "After the ceasefire the Assam Rifles have become friendly, they don't molest our women now," he said. "But we know that if the ceasefire breaks they will go back to being hostile to the people."

In July, 2005, the main rebel faction -- the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isaac-Muivah) -- extended its ceasefire with India for only six months, instead of a year, frustrated by the lack of progress in talks, and India's reluctance to give ground. At the same time, the NSCN-IM has been extending its grip over Naga society, and is recruiting hundreds of new fighters every year.

It is probably the strongest rebel group in northeastern India and a settlement in Nagaland is considered critical for a broader peace in the under-developed region.
"Time is running out," warned Neingulo Krome, secretary-general of the Naga Ho-Ho, the supreme tribal council which represents all 32 tribes; three million people in northeast India and Myanmar. "Within these six months something new must come, and I don't know how the government of India will do it."

But of even greater concern to most Nagas is the lack of unity in the "freedom movement". Three factions, partly divided along tribal lines, claim to represent the Naga cause. Instead of fighting India, though, they often seem to be fighting each other.
"You can't really say the conditions for peace have been built," said one Naga intellectual, who declined to be named because of rebel threats in the past. "Violence could happen at any time, and the worst will be between the factions."
In Khonoma, 33-year-old schoolteacher Ronald Meru says many of the younger generation want peace above independence.

"I am a Naga," he said. "But those of us who have seen the outside world, seen Delhi and Calcutta, we feel we are just a small part of our country. We don't have so much to boast about, we should just obey the rules and live our lives."

In many other hearts, especially those who have lived through the darkest days of the insurgency, the dream of an independent Nagaland burns as strongly as ever. One thing is sure, the government can ill afford to take the Nagas for granted. "People are fed up with the violence, the killing, the fratricide," said the intellectual. "On the other hand the overall sentiment for independence is still there. Something honourable has to be worked out." A Council chief sayd his "blood" is Naga: "That is God's decision. That does not mean India is bad, but we are different."

"In 1956 our parents would say freedom first and peace second," he said. "Now in 2005, peace and unity is the first priority, then comes freedom."Then he pauses for a moment. "But if the rebels were united," he added, "I would fight for them tomorrow."  

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