Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [155]
The sense of crisis radiated across the whole region. The authorities in Malaya were also facing strikes in hospitals and industrial units while the Malayan Communist Party staged a huge demonstration that drew more than 10,000 people into the streets. South East Asia Command made it clear to the cabinet that the whole of Britain’s Southeast Asian empire was spiralling down to disaster. Wavell, now at his gloomiest, continued to ponder ‘Operation Madhouse’ and drew up a plan to save the lives of British residents in India in case of a total breakdown of order. At last Clement Attlee was obliged to look up from Britain’s domestic troubles and contemplate the looming catastrophe in the East.
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.43 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. It also had to be remembered, Montgomery warned, that India was now a virtually independent country under its own interim government. If Nehru demanded the withdrawal of Indian troops or refused them for use in the case of serious internal trouble in the country, ‘we should not be able to handle the situation in Burma’.
Hubert Rance was unimaginative but hardworking. He did not have Dorman-Smith’s literary flair. But he was intensely practical and, as Mountbatten’s ADC in the British Military Administration, he knew a lot about Burma. Straightaway he understood that suppression of the radical nationalists was impossible. The appreciation of the situation that he wrote for the Burma Office on 15 September 1946 was clear-eyed and unsentimental. He 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]’.44 Like many other British officials, he thought Aung San, though young and apparently indecisive, was at least sincere. Rance believed the problem was that if the British were to hitch themselves irrevocably to the AFPFL, its leftward trend might sour relations with the potentially powerful Buddhist monks, whom, perhaps mistakenly, he did not see as a radical force. Yet the alternative – the suppression of the AFPFL – really was out of the question. There were not enough British troops to go round and the hybrid Burma Army – part BNA and part old-style colonial force – would fragment on political and ethnic lines if he tried. Worse, Wavell and Auchinleck continued to tell him that there was no way he could use Indian troops to suppress Burmese nationalists.
Rance had one other option. This was to try to build up a moderate party of the old order, perhaps including some of the more conciliatory nationalists. His assessments of the available politicians were not so different from Dorman-Smith’s. He quickly concluded that Sir Paw Tun was past it,