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By Root 4387 0

frontier adjoining China.14 His medical work and mission had been savagely disrupted by the Japanese invasion. He had been commissioned as a medical officer in ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s American and Chinese forces as they pushed through on their arduous and disease-ridden march to the Myitkyina airfield in 1944. Now Seagrave returned to his hospital at Namkham to face a medical and social emergency of unequalled proportions.15 In their own way, the frontier regions had suffered even more from war than Burma’s cities. The Japanese and returning Allied troops had done massive damage to an already parlous infrastructure. Food and medicines were virtually unobtainable. Bacillary dysentery had wiped out whole villages throughout the north. Plague was ‘going strong’. Lepers had gone untreated. Cattle had been eaten by the Japanese army. On top of all this, many of the frontier peoples still distrusted Western medicine. The Sawbwa or local prince tried to stop Seagrave’s hospital from reopening. He was quite happy poisoning himself with Shan medicine, according to the doctor.16 At the time of Seagrave’s return, stray Japanese troops were still taking pot shots at passing vehicles. Worse, here as elsewhere, the war had armed and militarized the minorities, presaging further tension and conflict, not only with the returning British but with any potential independent government in Rangoon. Over the next few years the life of an American medical missionary was unlikely to be much easier than that of a junior Burmese administrator of Sikh origin.

In Burma the most important political development during the autumn of the victory year was the rapid souring of relations between Aung San and the British. At his first meeting with Slim, Aung San made it clear that he expected to be treated as the military commander of a provisional Burmese government. He had repeatedly asked that the civil wing of the Burmese patriotic or defence forces, the clumsily named Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), should be regarded as the sole legitimate body politic in Burma. In early September at Kandy, Mountbatten’s headquarters in Ceylon, a temporary accommodation was reached. Aung San had to accept a period of British administration as a ‘necessary evil’. Neither the British nor Aung San could go it alone. The Japanese were still to be disarmed in southern Burma, Malaya and Indo-China, and the British needed the support of the BNA and particularly the information it could command.17 The BNA, for its part, was too ill equipped and too small to have inflicted any strategically significant defeat on the British. The agreement between Mountbatten and Aung San stated that about 5,000 men from the BNA would be absorbed into a new British-led Burma Army, with a few more thousand kept up as reserves.18 This did not solve the looming unemployment problem but it did put to rest concerns about ‘rebellion against the king’. Everyone was well aware that Burma desperately needed supplies of cloth, oil, chemicals and food. All but the most radical Burmese politicians accepted that, for the foreseeable future, these could only come from British and American sources. Just as the Malayan communist leader Chin Peng was meeting senior British commanders in Malaya, so his cautious, ‘snub-nosed, square-headed’ Burmese counterpart, Than Tun,19 warily seated himself around a table in Kandy with Mountbatten and Reginald Dorman-Smith, the returning governor. Yet less than two months after the atomic bomb had fallen on Hiroshima, the truce broke down at a political level. In the words of Mountbatten, Aung San chose to become a Churchill rather than a Wellington. He resigned his military commission to become political leader of the AFPFL.20 There began a long and ill-humoured struggle between the two rivals for civil legitimacy, Aung San and Dorman-Smith. Ironically, and to Dorman-Smith’s enduring disgust, the Burmese people never accepted Aung San in civilian guise. To them he would always be Bogyoke – the General.

The ill will should have been expected, but the politicians