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and choosing his successor. Certainly Tom Driberg, thought so. He believed that Mountbatten had privately briefed against Dorman-Smith and had impressed Attlee with the idea that only a rapid move towards independence could avoid the sort of situation that had arisen in Indo-China, where the French were desperately fighting to suppress the Vietnamese resistance.134 For his part, Driberg kept up the pressure on Mountbatten, relaying to him the fears of Aung San and other local politicians who valued him as one of their few direct links to domestic British opinion. On 12 June Aung San wrote to Driberg of ‘the blind prejudice and stark policy of bureaucratic intransigence he had encountered’.135 He alone, he claimed, was trying to restrain his infuriated followers from attacking British interests. Driberg duly passed this on to Mountbatten.

It is unsurprising that Dorman-Smith, Pearce and the hardliners of the military administration loathed Dickie and his men. But their poisonous hatred of Aung San, whom they regarded as a creature of Dickie’s, was dangerously infectious. It entered the bloodstream of Burmese politics and fed the festering resentment of U Saw and his followers towards Aung San. Naively, Dorman-Smith disassociated his own actions from U Saw’s machinations. Till the end he retained some regard for Aung San as a strong man and military hero. Did he see in him an Asian Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator of Burma, perhaps? At any rate, having tried for three months to have the man hanged, he left a surprisingly emollient assessment of him for Sir Henry Knight. Aung San was ‘Burma’s popular hero and… I look upon him as a sincere man… He has enough sense to realise that an uprising can only mean added misery.’136 Dorman-Smith did not extend this benediction to Mountbatten, however. Back in England, he poured out his bile. He railed against the impression that Dickie’s ‘sea-green incorruptibles’ had replaced ‘our old corruptibles’, adding in a deplorable piece of word-play that one of his own senior officials had been pushed out ‘unhonoured and Aung San’.137 He always knew he was persona ‘not very grata’ to Attlee, he said, but he really felt it when he arrived back in London. Unlike the old days when Leo Amery used to meet him at the railway station, there was no one waiting at Euston this time. He duly turned up at Whitehall. ‘Then I saw the Pathetic One [Pethick-Lawrence] – “Out you go”… So that was it. Exit Smith.’ Pethick-Lawrence had consulted him on nothing, had not enquired after his health – the alleged reason for his recall – and had not even bothered to get up from his chair to shake hands when he entered the room. Now he was sure that Mountbatten had plotted against him. He got wind of rumours that Mountbatten was destined for ‘some monumental appointment in the East’. Surely not the viceroyalty of India? But that would explain a lot. As viceroy Mountbatten would want to have his own man in Burma: ‘I HATE Dickie having a finger in the Burma pie because I think he is so unsound.’138 None of this would have mattered very much except that it encouraged the former governor to stick his own fingers in the pie. Over the next two years he remained dangerously close to Saw, the rogue element in Burmese politics, and he cultivated the radical Karen separatists, irreconcilables who were almost to blow apart the future Union of Burma.

Almost all the pieces were now in place for the endgame of British Burma and the emergence of the new republic. But one other tangled set of events in the early part of 1946 set the scene for the country’s future and arguably for much of the rest of Southeast Asia. This was the implosion of the Burmese Communist Party, an event that ensured, in the long term, the relative isolation of Burma from the Cold War. Like the creaking British administration, the communist split was very much a matter of personalities. Since the beginning of the war, the communist hard man Thakin Soe had been quietly building up his cadres in the countryside. Soe took a dim view of erstwhile comrades such as