Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [41]
2
1945: The Pains of Victory
BURMA INTRANSIGENT
The night of 12–13 August 1945, three days after the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, marked the high point of good relations in Burma between the returning British and the local population, proudly led by their new army. That night news and rumours that the Japanese emperor had offered to surrender spread like wildfire through Rangoon. Streets were soon filled with cheering crowds. Jeeps bulging with people roared up and down the main highways. Ships’ sirens blared forth the victory sign. Very lights stabbed the blackness of the night. The next day’s Rangoon Liberator, the administration-sponsored newspaper, carried the banner headline ‘Japan Surrenders. Rangoon goes wild with joy’.1 In fact, the formal surrender did not come until two days later. Even then no one in Burma was quite sure that the fighting was finally over because units of the Japanese forces were still active in Tenasserim, the southern peninsula, and the southern Shan hills. The atom bomb also stoked fears about the future. Yet most people of whatever background now believed they would survive the war. That shrewd leader of the 14th Army, General William Slim, soon to become commander of Allied land forces, South East Asia Command, had once been worried by the possibility of conflict between Aung San’s forces and the British army.2 Now he congratulated Aung San on his fighters’ patriotic resistance. Relations between the powerful Buddhist priesthood, the Sangha, and the Allied liberators remained cordial, too. Friendly contact had been established two months earlier. A hundred chief monks under the leadership of the Venerable Alatewa Sayadaw welcomed Mountbatten as supreme commander, and thanked the administration for the excellent breakfast prepared for them that day. The meeting also established a committee to advise the British administration on all matters connected with the monks.3
In the countryside, Japanese forces had been fighting on, pursued by the British and the Burma National Army.4 Slowly the news filtered through to the remotest places. Maung Maung, one of the leading soldiers of the BNA, remembered: ‘One night in August the camp of the Indian Brigade broke up in light and noise. Guns boomed, searchlights danced, flares went up to send out showers of stars.’5 The war began to end here, too. Delicate negotiations were in train as captured Japanese officers and Japanese-speaking British liaison personnel tried to convince the pockets of desperate Japanese troops that the emperor had told them to lay down their arms. Some soldiers surrendered with resignation; others ‘would crumble to the ground weeping and tearing the ground with frantic hands’.6 A few attempted suicide. One man blew himself up with a grenade in front of the victors. Maung Maung recorded that the strange and ambivalent comradeship between the Japanese and the old Burma Independence Army flickered to life again, despite the mutual killing of the previous four months. Even in the despair of their defeat, the Japanese were easier to deal with than the British, many of whom still seemed ‘snobbish’, determined to reassert their superiority over what they saw as a gaggle of Burmese youths.7
The British were themselves caught between feelings of relief and horror at the magnitude of the task of reconstruction that faced them.8 Ironically, their only advantage in this was the large number of docile and disciplined Japanese