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By Root 4575 0

Burmese and Malayans were also horrified by the barbarity they had witnessed during the war’s ending and the future dangers it portended. The Bengal press adviser reported to the governor that people believed ‘the situation did not call for such indiscriminate havoc; and that the readiness to use such means has lowered the moral prestige of the United Nations’.1 The fiery nationalist apparatchik Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, general secretary of the Indian National Congress, commented that: ‘Entire cities, children, the old, animals and all have been wiped out. What a demonstration of the limitless cruelty of Western civilisation.’ Ominously, he went on to link Western barbarism with what he saw as the British attempt to perpetuate differences between Hindus and Muslims in India.2 Lord Wavell, viceroy of India and Patel’s main sparring partner, agreed about the atomic bomb: ‘It is not a weapon that any thinking man would willingly have put into the hands of the present-day world.’3

Indians asked themselves what was the point in condemning German and Japanese atrocities if the Allies themselves were prepared to massacre civilians on such a massive scale. Others were as concerned with the political as with the moral implications of the atom bomb. Would its existence so hugely increase the imbalance of power between the West and Asian peoples that the mirage of independence would once again vanish? A Bengali newspaper wondered if ‘the Asiatic people would not pass from the hands of one group of pirates to another’.4 Aung San, leader of Burmese resistance against first the British and then the Japanese, vowed that ‘no atom bomb can stop our march toward freedom’.5

What the British did not immediately appreciate was the extent to which Asian nationalism had been transformed by the war. Before it there had been movements of civil disobedience across India and Burma: peasant farmers had been goaded into revolt by the sufferings of the Depression of the 1930s; terrorist movements had flickered in Bengal and pan-Islamic ideologues had stirred the passions of the faithful throughout Asia; the Comintern had sponsored fledging communist parties in Burma and Malaya, where trade unions had flexed their muscles in its industrial areas. The Japanese war, however, had given nationalism a new face – a youthful, militaristic one. Before the Second World War Burma had been granted a form of semi-independence by the British. It had its own flag and its own prime minister, but it had no proper army. What passed for Burma’s defence forces comprised recruits almost exclusively from minority peoples, the Karen, Kachin, Shan and Chin, along with resident Anglo-Burmese, Gurkhas and Indians. Burmese Buddhists had effectively been excluded from the army since the final British conquest of the country in 1886. The reason given was that Buddhists were too pacific, a fiction contradicted by Burma’s impressive military traditions; the real reason was that soldiers from the minorities were cheaper and friendlier to the British Raj.

During the war all this had changed. With Japanese support, Burma had created its own army, the Burma Independence Army, renamed first the Burma Defence Army (BDA) after the Japanese invasion, and then the Burma National Army (BNA) after Japan’s installation of a nominally independent Burmese government in August 1943. One day in March 1945, the BNA had revolted against the embattled Japanese forces, hoping finally to secure real independence before the British reoccupied the country. By now the Burmese had military heroes as well. The young and intense former student leader, Aung San, had become ‘Bogyoke’, the general.6 He was the first Burmese commander since General Mahabandula in 1826 to embody the military spirit of the Burmese people and to be known and admired across the country. Aung San and his ‘Thirty Comrades’ had marched into Rangoon with the Japanese in early 1942. The contrast between these young men in uniform and the civilian politicians of the British era, Ba Maw and U Saw, was obvious to all Burmese youth. Volunteers