Burma

Burma. (For the fighting in Burma see Burma campaign, below.) British colony, the largest country on the South-East Asia mainland, with an area of 680,000 sq. km. (262,000 sq. m.). It is a country of contrasts: high mountains, jungle hills, swampy coastal plains, alluvial deltas, with a dry central plain at its core. It is affected by a monsoon biannually and malaria was endemic (see medicine). There are several large rivers running north to south—Chindwin, Irrawaddy, Sittang, Salween—and these were the principal means of communication, the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company (see also Force Viper) running regular services along the 1,300 km. (800 mi.) navigable length of the river, as well as on the Chindwin. Almost all the roads and railways which connected the capital, Rangoon, with inland towns ran north–south, too, though the Burma Road, opened in 1938, ran eastwards from Lashio into China.

The country's central plain is ringed on all sides by mountains (reaching to 6,000 m./20,000 ft. in the far north), which in 1941 were populated by about a million hill tribesmen (Kachins, Chins, Nagas). The balance of the 17 million population—10 million Burmans, 4 million Karens, and 2 million Shans—inhabited the rest of the country. As the British had made Burma administratively part of India in 1862, there was also an immigrant Indian population of about one million which held great power in the country's bureaucracy and trade. Many of these died when they fled to India in front of the advancing Japanese.

Under the government of Burma Act of 1935, Burma ceased to be governed from India in 1937, and a House of Representatives and a Senate were established. The former had 123 seats and was to be elected every five years; half of the latter was appointed by the governor ( Reginald Dorman-Smith from May 1941). About a third of the male population, and about 10% of the women, were enfranchised. The governor retained control of such crucial matters as foreign affairs, the administration of the hill tribes, and the country's defence. The Burmese also had no control over the economy of their country. Their natural resources of timber—they were the world's greatest exporter of teak—oil, rubber, and tungsten (see also raw and synthetic materials) remained under British control, while the Chinese and Indians, Burma's entrepreneurs, handled the rice trade to which 70% of Burma's agriculture was committed. The main oil wells were at Yenangyaung and the oil was then piped direct to refinery plants around Syriam, south-east of Rangoon. The mines at Mawchi produced 10% of the world's tungsten supplies.

The Burmans and the Shans were Buddhists. The former lived in central Burma; the latter mostly on the country's central and north-eastern borders. The Burmans had ruled Burma until the British, from 1824, progressively took it over, and the educated minority did not want colonial rule. There was a long history of civil disturbances during the 1930s and two premiers, Ba Maw and U Saw, negotiated secretly with the Japanese to oust the British, as did the Thakin student leader Aung San. But the Karens, who were mostly Christians and lived in the Irrawaddy delta and in the hills between the Sittang and Salween rivers, were pro-British, as colonial rule had suppressed persecution of them by the Burmans. The Kachins, Chins, and Nagas were pro-British, too, and had long provided men for the local militia and police. After the Japanese occupation of Burma the British raised levies from them and they provided members of V-Force.

At the time of the Japanese invasion there were 27,000 troops garrisoning Burma: 15,000 were indigenous Burmese, most of whom were serving as infantry in the Burma Frontier Force and the 1st and 2nd Burma Rifles. The Burma Rifles, which normally took recruits only from the Karens, Kachins, and Chins, had formed extra battalions by recruiting Burmans. By December 1941 this had brought the number of native battalions up to fourteen, and these were divided among the brigades of the 1st Burma Division which had been formed in July 1941. The only local artillery belonged to the Burma Auxiliary Force, a territorial unit manned by Europeans, Anglo-Burmans, and Anglo-Indians, and the Burma Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve possessed just five motor launches and a few miscellaneous vessels. All these units fought with the British forces defending Burma, but, like them, they were no match for the Japanese. Many escaped to India with those British forces that had survived, others just melted away, but by the end of the Burma campaign in August 1945 thirteen battalions, all drawn from the Kachins, Karens, and Chins, had been re-formed. In March 1945 Karen levies some 10,000 strong, armed and led by British officers, played an important role in preventing the Japanese from reinforcing Toungoo in southern Burma from the east, and they killed many thousands of them.

Once the British had been ousted from Burma in 1942 the Japanese initially entrusted the civil administration of some occupied areas to the Burma Independence Army (BIA). However, this was not successful and the BIA was responsible for some unpleasant atrocities against the minority populations. Then, in May 1942, Thakin Tun Oke, a Burmese dissident trained in Japanese administration, was appointed to head a Central Burmese government (Bama Baho) which concluded a treaty with the Japanese, but in August this was replaced by a more extensive civilian administration under Ba Maw. The Burmans, having looked to the Japanese to rid them of the British, now looked to them for their freedom. But though Burma was given independence in August 1943, when Ba Maw formed a one-party state and declared war on the Allies, the country remained subservient to the Japanese occupying forces. It was stripped of two Shan states, Kengtun and Mongpan, which were given to Thailand, and remained firmly part of the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. By 1944 many Burmans were working secretly against the Japanese, just as they had earlier worked against the British, and in August 1944 Aung San formed the Anti-Fascist Organization (later the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League), an underground, communist-inspired movement to fight the Japanese. Aung San, who had served as his country's minister of defence after independence, defected with his army to the British in March 1945. He later formed the first post-war administration and negotiated Burma's independence with the British, but he was assassinated on the orders of U Saw shortly before Burma was declared an independent state on 4 January 1948.

Louis Allen

Bibliography

Ba Maw , Breakthrough in Burma (New Haven, Conn., 1968).
Thakin Nu , Burma under The Japanese (London, 1954).