On the night of 31 December 1941, at the height of the Imperial Japanese march across Asia, thirty young Burmese men gathered in a house in occupied Bangkok. A silver bowl was brought among them, and a syringe passed around. Blood was drawn from each man’s arm and secreted into the bowl. Together, they pledged loyalty to Burmese independence and eternal comradeship. Through that ceremony, through the spilling and sharing of blood, the Burmese Independence Army was brought into being, and thus the embryonic stage of the Tatmadaw.
The leader of the men, known as Aung San, had found an unlikely sponsor in the Japanese. Just two years earlier, he had been one of the seven founding members of the Communist Party of Burma. The fledgling party had sent Aung San overseas to find international backers for their revolution. He had tried in vain to reach out to the insurgent Red Army in China, hoping for support, training, arms, and an alliance. The young Aung San, only twenty‑four, was instead picked up by the imperialist Japanese forces, who, somewhat ironically, agreed to support his revolutionary endeavour.
Aung San managed to get a cluster of his comrades out of Burma, where they went for training with the Japanese in Hainan. On the eve of 1942, during the founding blood‑letting ceremony in Bangkok, a twenty‑five‑year‑old Aung San was the oldest of the thirty comrades.
Among the thirty were the men who would become the faces of Burmese politics for the next four decades. Some would be killed in battle, like Bo Let Ya and Bo Zeya; some killed in purges by their own party, like Bo Yan Aung; some would die in exile in China, like Bo Kyaw Zaw; and some would rise to become dictator of Burma and the epitome of Burmese ethno‑nationalist militarism, like Ne Win.
As for Aung San, he was assassinated just five years later, at the dawn of Burma’s independence. While Ne Win would come to define the Burmese military- the Tatmadaw- for better or worse, it would be Aung San’s daughter, Suu Kyi, who would eventually define the fight against it. It is a complicated story, born in the blood of the thirty comrades.
The story told in this series is that of the Tatmadaw itself. The institution that started with the comrades in Bangkok has held firm throughout the longest‑running civil war on the planet, comfortably outliving the entire Cold War, and now stands as one of the most fierce apparatuses of ethno‑nationalism anywhere on earth. Today that civil war is as hot as it has ever been, with pundits and opposition figures predicting the imminent collapse of the Tatmadaw, but the country has been here before, certainly more than once, in its long history.
Several key questions blare out:
Why has there never been a political settlement?
Is the Tatmadaw a unique institution worldwide?
How can it possibly still continue to function?
Was there ever any way of avoiding this?
Colonial History
The narrative, of course, begins in the colonial era, as this is where the Tatmadaw’s institutions and ideology were first shaped. The British colonial machine kicked into high gear towards the latter half of the nineteenth century, around the 1880s as they pushed the territory of the Raj (British India) eastwards into the Irrawaddy Delta area, and then further north and eastwards into the hill regions, what today are called the Karen, Shan and Kachin regions. In doing so, they incorporated what is today called Myanmar into the Raj.
The colonisers partitioned the Burma territory into two zones. The first, ‘Ministerial Burma’ or ‘Burma Proper’, comprised the central valley plains and the Irrawaddy Delta, and was governed directly by the British state. The second zone, the ‘Frontier’, consisted of the hill regions still forming the country’s borders today- areas populated by groups like the Shan, Mon, Karen, Karenni, Chin and Kachin.
Burma Proper was rapidly developed by the British. Roads, railways, telegraph lines, irrigation, bridges, banks, schools, churches, and police forces followed the familiar colonial pattern. Much of the newly urbanised citizenry of Burma Proper were not Bamar; they were imported en masse from India and Nepal, alongside typically Christianised minorities from the Frontier, most often the Karen. Divide and rule, as the saying goes.
British trading houses powered this project, exploiting lucrative sectors like gemstones, oil, mass rice surpluses and teak. Much of the smaller capitalist market space was dominated by Indian or Chinese merchants, as was typical across Southeast Asian colonies at the time. What developed, then, were classes and demographics built and defined by the colonial administration through economic and state capacities. Much of this resembles the development of British Malaya, but a key difference is the pace of imperialist capital development in Burma, which took place over a much shorter period.
In short, the colonial era saw a huge upheaval. What had been a largely subsistence feudal economy, where the rhythms of daily life centred around agricultural production and Buddhist holidays, was fast‑tracked into a modernist capitalist latifundia- a mass plantation of the British Empire with its own localised market. This brought a huge increase in competition for fertile land, the introduction of credit, loans and interest rates, and ruin to countless Bamar farmers who lost land their families had farmed for generations. At the turn of the century, the capital Rangoon had the highest crime rate and the highest murder rate in the empire. Outside the cities, banditry was common- though it was never centrally organised as an explicit anti‑imperialist revolution; often these armed gangs of young men were patronised by local rural elites who had been supplanted by the British.
The British responded with the Village Act of 1886. This pacification programme did away with what remained of traditional village governing structures, replacing indigenous local authorities with imported Anglo‑Indian governors. Much of the conscious anti‑British resistance was framed within a Buddhist context, as the sangha and the power of the local temples found themselves significantly maligned by British rule. These programmes only increased anti‑British and subsequently anti‑Indian sentiment among the local Bamar.
To quote one Anglo‑Indian soldier from the period:
“In practically all engagements with the enemy we had to fight an invisible foe. The dacoits waylaid our troops as they came up the river in boats or by road marches, and poured forth a heavy fire upon the advancing forces as they got within range. Not only was it difficult to locate the enemy in their hidden lairs, but our men laboured under the vast disadvantage of having to force their way through the close undergrowth of an unknown forest, whilst the enemy knew all the ins and outs of their tangled labyrinths and were able to keep concealed. … Our only means of punishment was to burn these villages.”
The British ended up pouring more and more colonial troops into the territory, eventually quelling the rebellions, though at great financial cost. The annexation of Burma was supposed to be an easy win; over time it became an increasingly painful headache for the empire.
The colonial military at the turn of the century was composed of a few hundred British officers, while the bulk of the military was made up of approximately fifty percent Indian troops and fifty percent local Chin, Karen and Kachin- with no Bamars whatsoever. “Divide and rule” has become a catchphrase, but it overlooks the very real and profoundly brutal policies of Empire. What can be seen here is the genuine implementation of that policy, and its consequences would unfold in due course. This treatment of the majority Bamar population echoes other cases of British rule in Malaya (with the ethnic Malays) and Ceylon (with the Sinhalese).
As much as we at DinDeng despise George Orwell, one of his short stories, “Shooting an Elephant”, contains a valuable passage describing his time as a colonial police officer in Burma in the 1920s, offering insight into colonial life:
“In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub‑divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti‑European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves.
The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans. All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.
Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock‑ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long‑term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill‑educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil‑spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.
With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”
One aspect of Colonial Burma often underscored is how disinterested the British actually were in the colony compared to India or Malaya. The Burma colony was seen as an appendage to the Raj, something tacked onto the end. As such, the state they built there was relatively slim compared to their other colonial holdings. Furthermore, while India is, of course, extremely diverse and complex, the lands of Burma had historically always been a completely separate entity. This appendage lumped together the people of Burma with the far more populous people of India within the same umbrella of governance. Burma was developed colonially as an appendage, rather than as a completely different polity.
As Mary Callahan wrote in her book Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (2004):
“At best, the British built a skinny state, aimed at letting commerce flourish (which it did) and at making the colonial state pay for itself (which it never did) by taxation of land and some commerce.” And later: “The British never built a colonial state in Burma; they merely packed up some components of administration in India and shipped them to the new territory.”
The Periphery
The territory was divided into two sections: Burma Proper and the Periphery. In the periphery, the story was totally different. Historically, the hilly periphery was ruled by far more localised governing institutions, which would at times pay tribute to the Bamar kingdoms in exchange for a large degree of local governing autonomy. This was an outcome of pure geography- the lowland valley kingdoms literally lacked the capacity to conquer or, more importantly, impose taxation and legislation on those distant communities.
When the British conquered the valleys, little had changed. The periphery was still too far‑flung to impose, for example, the Village Act. The British allowed local autonomy in exchange for occasional taxes and open trade. They also recruited extensively from the ethnic minorities of the periphery, particularly into the military, while pushing Christianising efforts. There were, of course, minority groups who put up a fight against the British and were brutally cracked down on, but generally speaking, in the periphery region, the British era is seen as a time of relative peace. This can also be attributed to the avenues of mobility for any upwardly minded local elites, who could gain a relatively high position in the military or the colonial administration if they were so inclined.
It was under these imperial apparatuses that the Burmese independence movement was birthed, with the embryonic stage of the future Tatmadaw fostered in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Anti‑Colonial Movement
From Callahan:
“One compensation for the inclusion of Burma in British India, however, was the development of higher education: Rangoon College was founded in 1878 as an affiliate of Calcutta University, and became a full‑fledged university in 1920. By the 1930s the campus had become a hotbed of anti‑colonialist agitation; it was here that a new layer of Burmese leaders would be formed, among them such figures as U Nu, Aung San, Kyaw Nyein (later deputy prime minister) and Thein Pe, later leader of the Communist Party of Burma. Also Ne Win! They took over the stodgy Rangoon University Student Union, formerly a social club for the sons of government officers, and transformed it into a militant campaigning body. The nationwide Dobama Asiayone, or ‘Our Burma Association’, formed in 1930, was distinctly to the left of the Indian National Congress (and on occasion, stridently anti‑Indian). Aiming to promote unionization and worker–peasant solidarity, it was in the forefront of the strikes and demonstrations of the time.”
This was the pre‑WWII period, and it must be framed within the context of the Indian independence movement. Burma was separated from British India in 1937, in part as a ploy to exclude the territory from concessions granted to the Indian anti‑imperialist movement. During these pre‑WWII years, anti‑British organising strongly intensified- notably with the founding of the Communist Party of Burma in 1939 and the All Burma Trade Union Congress a year later. Much of this organising was centred around a clear left‑wing current of thought and tactics, rather than any kind of ethnic identity. This left‑wing tendency was mostly confined to the revolutionary aristocracy- that is, the Rangoon university students- rather than the rural peasants or urban labourers.
The Thirty Comrades and Japan
A young Aung San was chosen as an emissary of the revolutionaries to find support from foreign powers. He wanted to make contact with the Chinese communists, but the situation was more complicated. There were plenty of revolutionaries just as eager to ally with Imperial Japan, and some had already made contact with Japanese undercover intelligence officials. The Chinese communists were by far the preferred ally, but given the CCP’s weak position in China and the lack of any contact between the two groups, many argued that the Japanese were the safer option- despite being considered both imperialist and capitalist by the Burmese revolutionaries. At this point, while the Japanese were annexing and fighting in China, it was pre‑Pearl Harbor and they had yet to begin their push across Southeast Asia.
In June 1940, the British issued an arrest warrant for Aung San. Before the debate on who to ally with was settled, Aung San and a compatriot, Hla Myaing, left Burma under fake names on a Norwegian cargo ship for Amoy (today called Xiamen) a port city in eastern China.
In Aung San’s own words from his diaries:
“(We were) plunging into darkness, prompted by a sheer urge to sacrifice one’s life for one’s country; I was just authorized by my colleagues to make use of, for the country, whatever situation or development that I might come across outside, with my foresight and discretion.”
Angelene Naw, in her book Aung San and the Struggle for Burmese Independence, described what happened next:
“Just after passing Singapore, a storm lashed the ship for nearly two hours. Suffering from severe seasickness, Aung San lapsed into unconsciousness on the floor of a compartment filled with coconuts. Hla Myaing found the coconuts ‘running like little rats over the body of Aung San.’ Aung San and Hla Myaing arrived in Amoy on 24 August 1940, and stayed at an inexpensive lodging house in the international settlement known as Kulangsu Island, which was shared by American, Japanese, and Chinese administrations.”
While in Amoy, Aung San continued his attempts to reach the Chinese communists, but without success. As weeks passed, their predicament grew increasingly desperate. Money ran short and Aung San fell ill with dysentery. After two months of waiting and little progress, he wrote to Bo Let Ya in urgent terms, describing his sickness and destitution.
Bo Let Ya gathered funds and sent several hundred rupees to his stranded comrades. He also reached out to Dr. Thein Maung, who had recently established a connection with Colonel Keiji Suzuki of the Imperial General Headquarters’ Army Division. Dr. Thein Maung passed along the request for Suzuki to arrange the rescue of Aung San and Hla Myaing from Amoy.
In late August 1940, Thakin Mya, Dr. Thein Maung, and Colonel Suzuki drew up a “Plan for Burma’s Independence.” The scheme involved smuggling a group of young Burmese nationalists out of Burma through Thailand, with assistance from Colonel Hiroshi Tamura, the Japanese military attaché in Bangkok. Once in Japanese hands, these Burmese recruits would receive at least six months of military training, while supply bases were to be established along the Thai side of the Thai-Burmese border. After completing their instruction, the nationalists would return to Burma and lead an armed uprising against British rule. Back in Amoy, Aung San and Hla Myaing remained stranded.
Dr. Thein Maung approached Colonel Suzuki with photographs of the two men and requested passage for them to Japan. Suzuki turned to his friend Colonel Kiyoshi Tanaka, a senior staff officer with the Japanese Army Command in Taiwan, and asked him to locate the pair. Tanaka dispatched an officer to Amoy to make contact, and in November found Aung San and Hla Myaing. On 12 November 1940, at Haneda Airport, Aung San landed in Japan where he met Colonel Suzuki and his associate Sugii for the first time.
In short, a partnership between Aung San and the Japanese was essentially forced by those pro‑Japanese or Japanese‑sympathetic students back in Rangoon, and given the situation, he appears to have had little choice in the matter. Yet one cannot help but wonder what the country would be like today if he had managed to make contact with the Chinese Red Army in the 1940s.
To quote from Aung San’s diaries on his talks with the Japanese:
“I tried to answer as much as I could, without revealing much and yet without falsehood. … that I came out to China because we wanted international help; to the question whether I was a Communist, my answer was that I did not believe in the imposition of any foreign system upon a country and that I thought we must study all systems in the world and must adapt the best of them to our own conditions and that whatever objection we might have towards Communism, its planned economy was admirable and was imitated even by other countries including Japan, and so on.
To the question of our attitude towards the ‘China Incident’ (which was something like the Japanese casus belli for the war in China) I pointed out that we were more concerned with our national struggle and whoever opposed our enemy was our friend … I on my part told the Japanese whenever I had the chance to that I did not want to hide my patriotism, that I associated with them because I wanted to do something good for my country with their help, and that I wanted to be a true ally, if it was possible for me to be.”
He later said: “I did not believe like the Japanese people in the divinity of the Emperor and I do not like a monarchy.” And when he bowed to the emperor, he did so “out of courtesy and with no intention of becoming [the Emperor’s] subject.” He was also horrified by the Japanese conception of war; when his handlers pressed the need to kill all the British in the colonies, including women and children, he described this as “barbaric.” Nonetheless, he and his comrades continued to cooperate with the Japanese on the Plan for Burma’s Independence drawn up earlier.
In February 1941, Aung San and Hla Myaing snuck back into Rangoon, where they met their comrades and recruited the thirty who would join them for training. He later wrote:
“At that time my comrades were very eager to know when Japan would invade Burma. I was a bit taken aback because I didn’t very much like the idea of the Japanese invasion of Burma. What my comrades thought was that if Burma was invaded by the Japanese, the British would be interlocked with the Japanese on the border when we would get a chance to rise up successfully for our independence. … we invited the Japanese invasion of Burma, not by any pro‑fascist leanings but by our own naive blunders and petty‑bourgeois timidity.”
The Japanese navy established a training camp on Hainan Island in China for the thirty comrades. They were divided into three groups. The first group, including Aung San, were trained for high command military organisation and administration. The second, including Ne Win, were trained for sabotage and guerrilla activities behind hostile lines. The rest, mostly younger members, were trained in general warfare.
In October 1941, Aung San and several other comrades went to Japan to participate in war games. There it was decided that immediately following the declaration of war, a Japanese brigade would be sent to occupy Moulmein, a port city in south‑eastern Burma, and the surrounding area. At the same time, the thirty comrades would be sent into Burma to organise a Burma Independence Army (BIA) to fight British troops. In mid‑December, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the thirty comrades were ordered to Thailand, which had just surrendered to Japanese forces. On 27 December, the comrades gathered in the house in Bangkok and cemented their revolution in blood.
On the eve of the Japanese occupation of Burma, a crucial question arises: what ideological and operational effect did the alliance with the Japanese have on the thirty comrades in the long term? If the Tatmadaw had been birthed out of the Chinese Red Army rather than the Japanese imperialists, the country today would surely look very different.
Kyaw Zaw, one of the thirty comrades, later described the moment they split up and headed back to liberate their homeland:
“When we parted to march in separate columns, we sat down and paid our respect to Bogyoke (Aung San), in Burmese style, by the Shikoe (hands together bowed in a kneeling position). It was sad and moving, and Bogyoke gave us his blessing in an unsteady voice. He asked us to march with stout hearts and carry on wherever the winds of circumstance might blow us. ‘In the early days of our history,’ he said, ‘when the Burmese armies sailed to Tennaserim on warlike missions, the winds would sometimes blow them away to the Arakan coasts instead. We might be similarly scattered, but those of us who reached the destinations must fight on.’”
To read from Angelene Naw again:
“Trusting in the Japanese promise of Burmese independence, the nucleus of the BIA marched into Burma in January 1942, and gave full support to Japan’s war effort. BIA troops took an active part not only in attacking the British forces but also in organizing an underground movement which directed sabotage activities, obtained labor and resources from their fellow Burmese, and collected information essential to the Japanese forces. Because of the underground movement’s successful recruiting drive the strength of the BIA grew constantly: a column which was only 150 strong when it occupied Mergui numbered 900 within a few days, and as the columns advanced, they picked up new recruits in every town and city. When they reached Rangoon in March 1942, the strength of the BIA had swollen to 10,000 men.”
The conquest of Burma began with the arrival of the Fifty‑Fifth and Thirty‑Third Divisions of Japan’s Fifteenth Army. BIA units stayed close to these two divisions and advanced into Burma exactly as the Japanese invasion forces did. After April, they were joined by the Eighteenth and Fifty‑Sixth Divisions, which had finished operations in Malaya and Singapore.
Misunderstandings and conflicts occurred between Suzuki’s BIA and the Japanese army from the very beginning. Before they marched into Burma in early January, Suzuki requested a wireless set and was refused by the commander of the Fifty‑Fifth Division. This enraged Suzuki, who instead of marching alongside the Fifty‑Fifth Division, decided to change his route and head further north up the Ping River into Papun, hoping to reach Rangoon ahead of the main Japanese force. This main column of the BIA, with Suzuki as commander and Aung San as his chief of staff, left Bangkok on Sunday, 11 January 1942. The 2,300 men carried three hundred tons of equipment.
Throughout his march into Burma, Suzuki kept in mind the Burma Operation plan, drawn up together with the Burmese nationalists, with the objective of obtaining Burmese independence and the establishment of a military administration under the BIA. Premier Tojo’s speech to the Imperial Diet on 21 January 1942 declared that if the Burmese agreed to cooperate with Japan in its war effort, Japan would in return grant independence to the Burmese. In spite of these promises from Tokyo, things turned out differently when Suzuki attempted to establish a local BIA administration after the fall of Moulmein on 30 January and was countermanded by the Japanese Fifty‑Fifth Army Division. Also refused was a Burmese request for the distribution of leaflets proclaiming the independence of Burma, even though this too had previously been agreed to. This caused another conflict before they reached Rangoon.
Units under Suzuki and Aung San entered Rangoon on 18 March 1942, ten days after the Japanese had taken it. On their arrival in Rangoon, the BIA hoped to establish its headquarters in the Governor’s House but were preempted by the Japanese army, who had already occupied it and made it a centre for military administration. The Burmese soldiers began to think that no matter what they did, the Japanese would always be one step ahead of them. They again came into open conflict with the Japanese, and as the campaign progressed, the relationship between the two armies worsened.
Following the Japanese invasion, huge numbers of Indians and Anglo‑Indians fled Burma- historians Bayly and Harper put the number at around 600,000, which was until then the largest mass migration in history, though that claim is uncertain given what was happening in China at the time. In their book Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941‑1945, they detail how this mass migration resulted in the deaths of as many as 80,000 from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. Another often overlooked part of the invasion: when the British Indian forces retreated north, they linked up with KMT forces from China, who had already retreated from the Japanese in Yunnan in a failed attempt to make a final stand. This was a complete failure, and the British limped back into eastern India during the heavy rains of the monsoon.
Despite successfully driving the British out, the Burmese comrades soon discovered that their liberation was a false promise. As early as February 1942, the Japanese informed them that independence would have to wait until after the war. To again quote Angelene Naw:
“The continued alteration of Japanese policy exacerbated the friction with the Burmese. Since the long‑desired independence of Burma did not come as anticipated, BIA and civilian political leaders began to believe that in order to achieve their goal of true independence, the revolution would have to continue.”
Aung San later wrote:
“My plan then was that since the Japanese invasion was an inevitable reality, forestall it if we could to counter it with the accomplished fact of an independent Burma, so that it would not be necessary for us to get our independence blessed by the Japanese. Failing this, my next plan was to have a mass movement with its underground prepared to prevent the Japanese from consolidating their position in Burma and force the Japanese fascists to restrain their hands and thus, in that way, to alleviate the sufferings of our people. I saw here the role of the BIA and consoled myself, and also all my other comrades who shared my doubts and misgivings, with the fact that after all even if the Japanese turned false and bad, there was an army to give something back against the Japanese.”
Disputes between the Burmese army members and Japanese troops became more frequent, with fistfights often occurring. Aung San wrote:
“Clashes between our soldiers and the Japanese soldiers mounted. Up to Rangoon I was not given command of our troops. I was just Col. Suzuki’s Senior Staff Officer. We hatched amongst ourselves various plans for an anti‑Japanese uprising but everything was in confusion; all our comrades were not gathered together and we had almost no preparations of any kind.”
Aung San was sent to the north to restore order after the hurried British retreat, recruit more men, and eventually lead the campaign against the British further up country. Even as commander‑in‑chief of the Burma Independence Army, he was seen as extremely humble, wearing basic clothes and a longyi, carrying all his belongings in a simple bundle, walking alongside his troops in the jungle. This earned him deep respect among his men- in contrast to the Thai comprador generals of the time, who wore ostentatious jackets with medals down to their toes and lived in blatant luxury in the capital.
Angelene Naw writes:
“During these months, Aung San’s prestige grew, not only in the army but also among the civilian population. From the time of the northward march on, he was always affectionately referred to as Bogyoke (General) regardless of whatever formal title he might hold. Songs were composed about Aung San, glorifying him as the great military leader who liberated the country from the British. In these songs, his name was associated with ancient Burmese kings and military leaders, including King Alaungpaya, founder of Konbaung, Burma’s last monarchical dynasty.”
Meanwhile, the oppressive nature of the Japanese military government became intolerable. People lived in a world where torture, disappearances, and forced labour conscription were part of everyday life. According to Aung San’s intelligence officer, Brigadier Maung Maung, Aung San privately came to realise that the Japanese may have given the BIA northward marching orders simply to keep his forces busy and out of the way. After repeated compromises with the Japanese, the Burma Independence Army was dissolved and redesignated the Burma Defense Army (BDA)- with the Japanese declaring that the word “independence” in the name had to be deleted because Burma had yet to prove itself worthy of independence. Aung San wrote:
“I went to Japan to save my people who were struggling like bullocks under the British. But, now we are treated like dogs. We are far from our hope of reaching the human stage, and even to get back to the bullock stage we need to struggle more.”
An elder statesman, Ba Maw, was appointed head of state, fully aware that it was the Japanese who pulled his strings. Before Ba Maw took office, Aung San and other leaders left a note stating that the Japanese had cheated them, but that the only hope for the Burmese was to remain united. They urged Ba Maw to station the entire Burmese military in one place in order to mount the resistance against the Japanese fascists as quickly as possible. The plan was to slowly prepare the next revolution- to wait for loyal Burman recruits to be trained, armed, and in place before any revolt could take place. It was around this time that Aung San married; one of his children would feature heavily later in this story.
The Ethnic Minority Response
The ethnic minority response to the invasion, particularly that of the Karen people, was critical. The Karen minority were overrepresented in the British colonial administration, and despite the invasion they continued to maintain contact with the British throughout the war. Historically, many older Karen leaders remained distrustful of the Burmese due to past mistreatment pre‑British rule.
During the British withdrawal in March 1942, many disbanded Karen troops who had served under the British army returned to their homes in the Irrawaddy Delta, taking their army‑assigned weapons with them. The BIA, badly in need of weapons for the upsurge in new recruits, decided to launch a campaign to seize them. The first few villages surrendered their weapons, but after doing so, many villagers were attacked and looted by well‑armed gangs soon afterwards- within the chaos of the transition from British to Japanese rule. Many Karen leaders concluded that the BIA was behind the robbery, since the BIA was the only well‑armed group operating in the area. As a result, the Karen decided to defend themselves and strike back with violence if necessary.
Karen villages stopped surrendering their weapons. The Japanese armies were occupied with the northern campaign and left the matter to the BIA. Before long, a savage communal gang war flared up in Myaungmya district and spread to adjoining Karen areas in Bassein, Henzada, and Pyapon. During this localised violence, a Japanese colonel was killed- a close friend of Colonel Suzuki. Suzuki was furious and ordered the complete destruction of two large Karen towns, Kanazogon and Thayagon, along with all their inhabitants. The BIA surrounded the villages at night and set fire to one end. As the men, women, and children ran out in panic from the other side, BIA troops waiting in ambush cut down everyone within reach of their swords, supposedly in traditional Japanese fashion.
The Karen, understandably, sought revenge and retaliated with brutal attacks on Burmese villages, causing the open war between the Burmese and the Karen to grow ever more fierce- much to the chagrin of figures like Aung San, who stressed unity against the Japanese and British at all costs. Meanwhile, in the far north, the British left stay‑behind forces embedded deep in the hills and organised long‑range guerrilla expeditions behind Japanese lines, largely irregulars made up of Gurkha troops and local ethnic minorities loyal to the British, like the Kachins.
WWII Revolt
The Japanese invaders were initially greeted by most Burmese as liberators, with townspeople throwing welcome parades and banquets. However, relations were quickly strained. The Japanese military police arrested people on the slightest hint of anti‑Japanese sentiment or communist leanings; physical punishment and death by torture were common. Japanese troops walked into local shops and took whatever they wanted without paying; there were many cases of sexual abuse and rape. Intense anti‑Japanese sentiment grew among the Burmese, almost all of whom had close contact with such atrocities.
Aung San encouraged those around him to prepare for the resistance. Outside the thirty comrades, resistance groups were already being formed, most prominently by communist activists- some, like Thakin Thein Pe and Thakin Tin Shwe, had fled to India with the help of the Burma Independence Army; others, like Thakin Soe, stayed behind. All these communists, none of whom were part of the thirty comrades, were highly critical of the Japanese alliance from the start.
Theoretically, Aung San was quietly pulling together an anti‑Japanese coalition comprised of Burmese nationalists, communists, ethnic minorities, and even those with previous ties to the former British administration, since the British were still looking to push out the Japanese. Within the contradiction of that coalition lay some of the coming fault lines in Burma’s politics, which still exist today.
The Karen became among the most important anti‑Japanese groups whose support Aung San sought. It was not an easy task to win their trust, but the Karen had been subjected to brutal Japanese treatment, and hatred for the Japanese had mounted. It is said that Aung San’s magnetic personality often turned enemies into friends, but it was not only charisma, he paid close attention to their wants and adopted many of their suggestions. He toured the delta areas in September 1944, offering apologies for the misdeeds of his men, which touched the Karen and made reconciliation possible. Aung San and other Burmese leaders met secretly with prominent Karen leaders, and all agreed to work together in the resistance. Karen‑Burman reconciliation had proceeded so well by late 1944 that when Thakin Nu went to a Karen village in Myaungmya district, he said “the people greeted us like long‑lost cousins.”
Aung San also publicly criticised the Japanese despite still working for them. In a speech in 1944 to celebrate the anniversary of Burma’s supposed liberation, he said:
“We are supposed to be free now, but who can enjoy this freedom? Let me tell you very frankly. The only ones who enjoy independence are myself, my ministers, our wives, servants and those try to win favour with us… If freedom is for only a select group of people, it is not freedom. Freedom must be granted to all of the people. Unless this is done, the freedom movement has not accomplished its goals.”
Following more secret meetings, the coalition against the Japanese began to come together. Aung San’s proposal to create the Anti‑Fascist Organization (AFO)- later known as the Anti‑Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) was approved, along with its manifesto calling for a countrywide resistance. The communists Thakin Soe and Than Thun were appointed to lead the organisation. Connections were made with the British and Americans, who agreed to support the movement with arms and logistics, though privately they were highly suspicious of Aung San and other leaders, particularly those of the thirty comrades.
The major groups involved were the Burmese military under Aung San and Ne Win, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Burma, various non‑Marxist political groups, trade unions, and various women’s, youth, ethnic, and Buddhist organisations. The manifesto read:
“Comrades, do you love freedom? Do you cherish peace? Do you want to lead a prosperous life? If you do so, drive out the Japanese, establish a free Burma and win our freedom, peace and better life. Destroy all the Fascists. Co‑operate with the democratic Allies.”
As the British mounted their assault from India, on 8 March 1945, the BNA commander at Mandalay initiated armed hostilities against the Japanese- a little early, as the full rebellion was due for 27 March. A pamphlet entitled “Revolutionary Front” was issued with the military plans, proclaiming that the AFO had resolved to continue its struggle against any foreign power infringing on national aspirations. Aung San set up command headquarters in the east while the British moved in from India. The revolt spread across the entire country, and the Japanese, already on the back foot in many military fronts, quickly capitulated. By the time the British arrived in Rangoon, it had nearly already fallen from Japanese control. By May, the Japanese were all but routed.
These circumstances brought back a familiar pattern: political upheaval, exiles before and during WWII, then a broad coalition of opposing factions formed against the occupying force. By the end of the war, all those factions suddenly met tensely in the capital, with no idea of what was about to come.
Independence and Assassination
On 15 June 1945, a victory parade was held in Rangoon. Taking part were the Burmese military, the Karen, the Kachin, the British‑raised and ethnically mixed Burma Rifles (drawing from Gurkhas, Kachin, Chin, and Karen soldiers), and other irregular forces. However, as the one million men marched down the streets, they saluted not Aung San but the British Supreme Commander Lord Mountbatten, while Aung San looked on as a spectator.
A comparison between Mountbatten and Aung San is telling. Aung San was without question a widely respected, sharply focused, diligent, and absurdly tough freedom fighter. Mountbatten, one of the fanciest lads the empire ever produced, with family spanning several European royal households, grew up with Queen Victoria as his godmother, developed interests in polo and sailing, and became obsessed with his own genealogy. After WWII he was appointed Viceroy to India and Lord Viscount of Burma. During the Potsdam Conference, he repeatedly brought up his ancestral connections to the former Russian royal family to impress Stalin, who was less than impressed. Mountbatten was also a known paedophile- an open secret that he would have boys brought to him wherever he was stationed, involved in a ring in Ireland that pulled boys from orphanages for powerful men of the empire; there are still ongoing legal cases from his victims. At the victory parade, a million men saluted that sicko, while the real man of the hour stood in the crowd. In 1979, Mountbatten was blown up by the IRA on a boating trip- a deep thank you to friends in Ireland.
Post‑war, it was clear that Aung San was the man to lead Burma into independence. The coalition he had formed with nationalists, socialists, trade unions, minorities, and even the British was remarkable. From Mountbatten and Aung San’s journals, it appears Mountbatten was grooming Aung San to become a British‑friendly leader post‑independence, a position unpopular among many British elites, especially with the AFPFL’s growing paramilitary wing that outnumbered British forces.
At a massive conference, the AFO renamed itself the Anti‑Fascist People’s Freedom League. Despite the organisation’s communist leadership history, Aung San, who chaired and took leadership, said:
“The AFPFL is not the Communist Party. There are some Communists in the leadership of the AFPFL, but the AFPFL does not belong to them. It belongs to the people; it represents the people. The AFPFL came into being during the occupation when there were uncoordinated efforts to organize the resistance. The Communists were working in their own way, the People’s Revolutionary Party in its own way, and so on. So I took the initiative to unite them in one undivided aim to strive for Burma’s freedom.”
Negotiations for independence began in London, while in Burma the Panglong Conference was held to guarantee ethnic minority rights. An agreement for localised ethnic autonomy was reached with the Kachin, Chin, Shan, and Kayah, with the Pa‑O, Palaung, and Wa subsumed under the Shan states. Significantly, the Karen did not sign; they had come out of the war stronger, with well‑organised military units and a cohesive leadership demanding a completely independent state with a seaport, and they had powerful friends in London. Also not included were the Mon, Rakhine, or Karenni.
At this point, a split occurred in the communist faction of the AFPFL. Thakin Soe’s radical faction broke away to re‑charter the Communist Party as a separate revolutionary entity outside electoral politics. Shortly after, most communists were kicked out of the league anyway, as the rift between them and Aung San’s moderates grew bitter, the communists accusing him of giving too much to the British, “kneeling before imperialism.” The Socialist faction, led by U Nu, became increasingly anti‑communist. U Nu; a bookish small‑town writer and playwright, a devout Buddhist who had started a Marxist book club at Rangoon University he had always struggled to reconcile Buddhism and Marxism. He was a close friend of Aung San’s and a reluctant revolutionary, repeatedly trying to return to his hometown to write novels, but Aung San convinced him to return to Rangoon for various AFPFL positions.
In 1947, a road to independence was laid out and elections held. The AFPFL, led by Aung San, won in a landslide:173 seats out of 210, with communists winning just 7, though the elections were boycotted by non‑Panglong groups and by ultra‑nationalists like U Saw. The AFPFL militia were reportedly eager to “help” persuade people to vote. U Saw’s Patriot’s Party, founded before the Japanese invasion, was Burma’s experiment with Euro‑fascism, with a paramilitary wing similar to Thailand’s Phibun. U Saw, despite public unpopularity, was favoured by British administrators like Dorman‑Smith and by Winston Churchill, who personally despised Aung San.
Dorman‑Smith, the British governor, actually wanted to arrest and try Aung San for murder based on an execution admitted during the Japanese invasion. Dorman‑Smith, according to Labour leader Michael Foot, was a Nazi sympathiser. In 1945 Smith said: “My main impression from this meeting was that Aung San is a tired and deflated little man. I think that he has realised … that he has acquired a position which is beyond him. I doubt whether he enjoys the hero worship which is lavished upon him. He knows that AFPFL has no recognizable policy to put before the electorate. In general he is worried but, unless he is a first‑class actor, I do not think that he is out for trouble.” However, when Churchill was replaced by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, London warmed to Aung San.
A British Labour MP called Aung San the “Marshal Tito of Burma,” describing him as “essentially a stern man of affairs. Dynamic, with compelling personal charm; shrewd, with the calm canniness of the chess master; fearless, with the natural pluck of the born fighter; Aung San, the man of the moment, has captured the imagination of his entire people and is, to all appearance, capturing the entire number of votes at the poll to come.” Negotiations were far from smooth due to Dorman‑Smith’s constant obstructions, but the British were in a weak position inside Burma- their troops stretched thin, and the new Burmese army loyal to the AFPFL.
On the eve of independence, with a deal from the British, four key factions stood: the large umbrella of moderates under the AFPFL and Aung San; the communists; the ultra‑nationalists; and the British sympathisers and ethnic minorities.
To read from Angelene Naw for the last time:
“Aung San urged the people to trust in the leadership of the AFPFL, to be patient, and to work together. He warned them that there were people trying to mislead the nation. In fact, although he did not speak of it in public he had discovered that a large consignment of automatic weapons and ammunition had been issued by the army from the Base Ordinance Depot on forged papers. Some AFPFL members considered the diversion of arms as part of a British army attempt to encourage the opposition who were open to accepting dominion status. Although there were rumors of British complicity, it is unlikely that the governor had any hand in the affair. He had been apprised of the situation by Aung San several days earlier, and had reported in a confidential letter to the London Office on 18 July that ‘the acquisition of this large armoury in the hands of an opposition party might well affect the balance of power.’”
At 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, 19 July 1947, while Aung San presided over a meeting of the Executive Council in the secretariat chamber, gunmen with automatic weapons burst in and shot him and several colleagues. The weapons, later traced to U Saw, had been issued on forged papers. U Saw believed that if the AFPFL leaders were killed, the governor would call on him to form a government, and so ordered the assassination of the entire council. Aung San died at thirty‑two, alongside Thakin Mya, Deedok Ba Choe, Mahn Ba Khaing, Sao Sam Htun, Abdul Razak, U Ba Win (Aung San’s elder brother), U Ohn Maung, and Ko Htwe. The nation was shocked and grieved; the leader they trusted most was gone so suddenly.
What a short and dramatic life Aung San lived; the man who could somehow bring together almost all of the country’s contradicting factions would not be around to hold the alliance together. A few months later Burma gained independence, with the “anti‑communist socialist” U Nu as Prime Minister and his ally Ne Win taking control of the military. As for who really killed Aung San, it was revealed much later that the assassination was orchestrated by a group of powerful conservative politicians and former colonial administrators in London, either to make U Saw prime minister or to use him as a patsy; suspicions go very high, possibly to Churchill.
To close from Bertil Lintner’s Burma in Revolt:
“Without Aung San’s neutralising presence on the political scene, the confrontation between the Communists and the Socialists escalated. The minorities had lost perhaps the only Burman political leader they had ever trusted. As no single person any longer enjoyed the respect and undisputed loyalty given to Aung San among the rank and file as well as the officer corps of the armed forces, power struggles ensued. By mid‑1948, most units had mutinied and turned their guns against the government in Rangoon. The Communists also went into armed rebellion and were followed by the Karens, the Mons, the Karennis and some other ethnic minorities who resorted to armed struggle, demanding independence or autonomy for their respective areas. The disintegration of Burma had begun.”
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Article Readings
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii60/articles/mary-callahan-myanmar-s-perpetual-junta
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/184820/pdf
https://latefornowhere.wordpress.com/tag/defence-services-museum-myanmar-burma/
