Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [227]
The communists had a point. Empire’s receding shadow still fell over Burma, even when it had decided to leave the Commonwealth. The British services mission set up in the Nu–Attlee agreement reflected the last flicker of the tradition of the Indian Army. John Freeman, a future British High Commissioner in India, had negotiated a treaty with Burma in the summer of 1947. The official doctrine was that it was undesirable that Burma should go outside the British Commonwealth for arms or military advice. The Labour government wanted a ‘stable and friendly’ Burma.27 It worried about an outbreak of ‘anarchy’ that would compromise the defence of both India and Malaya, encouraging communism and damaging British business as it struggled to recover from war. London and the Rangoon embassy both believed that the army was in a state of near chaos. As late as 1940 there had been no Burmese officers in the army and all the technicians, engineers and clerks had been Indian. Withdrawal of British and Indian expertise and experience could only lead to disaster. ‘Their fighting, like their politics, is essentially medieval’, haughtily minuted Peter Murray, who was in charge of the Burma desk in Whitehall.28 The head of the services mission, Major General Geoffrey Bourne, had the difficult task of persuading the Burmese to form an efficient military force which they could also afford. He had to offer firm strategic and organizational advice without appearing to be running the show.
Bourne had some things going for him. Above all, he had good relations with the new head of the Burma Army, Major General Smith Dun. ‘Four-foot’ Smith Dun was the Christian Karen army officer who had fought in the first Burma campaign, staging an ultimately unsuccessful rearguard action to protect the Indian Army as it withdrew into India. To the British, who knew, from long experience, exactly how to patronize him, he had ‘all the Karen’s courage and loyalty’, but was not very bright. A minute noted that he always allowed himself to be pushed around by political magnates. Once, when he was refused a government aircraft to fly him to Maymyo to lecture at the staff college there, Smith Dun had meekly booked himself on to a crowded passenger flight. Later, as the Karen revolt gathered pace, Smith Dun was to find his position untenable and was probably unsurprised to be sent on ‘indefinite leave’.29 It is easy to see why he succumbed to the steely ruthlessness of General Ne Win. Still, as the old Burma hand B. R. Pearn minuted in the Foreign Office, quoting Erasmus: ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’30 By far the most effective parts of the army were the Karen, Kachin, Shan and Chin regiments, which were descendants of the old colonial Burmese and Indian Army units and not the nationalists’ Burma Defence Army with which they had been merged by Mountbatten and Aung San.
This meeting of minds between the British and the minorities-inarms was deeply suspect to the AFPFL, and especially to the enigmatic figure of General Ne Win, who glided to centre stage at this point of the drama. Ne Win and his socialist generals were not in the least concerned with the defence of British Asia. They were adamant that the British should be kept in a purely advisory role, not a tactical one. They still feared a British attempt to sheer off the frontier and minority areas of the country into a mini-Malaya. Above all, they wanted to use the army as a tool of nation building. Their aim was to absorb as many of the people’s militias as possible into an expanded Burma Army, so that these resentful youths did not line up behind their political enemies. But in order to expand the army’s payroll the politicians had to cut back on