Forgotten Wars (77 page)

The Commonwealth leaders duly met in New Delhi, where they drew up a plan and issued a joint declaration stating their willingness to help negotiate a peace treaty in Burma.
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But they had already overplayed their hand. Nu’s government had no option but sharply to reject these overtures.
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The military under General Ne Win, now increasingly influential, would allow no further concessions to the Karens. The ranting about ‘imperialist machinations’ on the Burmese left would have become even louder if Nu had accepted Commonwealth mediation. Nu remained suspicious of the British because of the pro-Karen activities of the rogue British officers the year before. Nehru tried to reassure him that the British government had no more interest in Karen separatism than did the Indians. At a press conference in Delhi he made a careful distinction between ‘the imperialists’, meaning the ex-Force 136 types on the fringes of Dorman-Smith’s and Churchill’s circles, and the British government itself, which, he
said, merely wanted stability and the resumption of Burma’s full rice exports to India and Britain. But even as Nehru tried to reassure the Burmese of Britain’s good intentions, the Dutch were in the midst of their ‘police action’ against the nationalist regime in Indonesia; there was good reason to think that ‘imperialism’ was far from dead. At the same time, the international situation seemed to be going the way of the communists. Burma was, as Nu later said in one of his homely metaphors, ‘a tender gourd among the spiky cactuses’. If Nehru had been ready then to head up a bloc of non-aligned South and Southeast Asian nations, Burma might have taken shelter under its umbrella, but Nehru was still wary of antagonizing China, where the communists were carrying all before them.

Any deals, therefore, between the Burmese government and noncommunist powers had to be private ones. Burma’s new foreign minister, E Maung, and General Ne Win went to London and negotiated a shipment of 5,000 rifles from the British government under the aegis of the defence agreement. More significantly, Nu flew to Delhi and persuaded India to furnish a large consignment of small arms, ammunition, and, it was thought, covert military advice.
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Having pleaded lack of military supplies, the Indian government finally scratched together something for the Burmese, though Nehru insisted that the whole negotiation remained strictly secret in case the communists or the minorities vented their anger on Indian expatriates. India’s ambassador in Rangoon was M. A. Rauf, a Muslim businessman who was close to those AFPFL members who represented Indian interests in Burma. To him Nehru wrote sternly: ‘We shall give them something, though not nearly as much as they want. This too must be kept completely secret.’
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Actually, India seems to have been quite generous with its low-key military aid. Six years later Nu let slip in one of his wordy speeches that India had given two batches of 5,000 small arms to its neighbour. The first batch had immediately fallen into rebel hands when the white-flag PVO revolted, but Nehru considered the situation critical enough to replace it with another consignment.
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Moreover, India, Britain and Japan, which was now firmly in the Western camp, stepped up their purchases of Burmese rice, despite the fact that prices were soaring on the world market as a result of the demand generated by the Korean War. The war had disrupted
Korea’s production and sent hundreds of thousands of Allied troops into the region, putting pressure on food supplies. Britain and India also gave Burma the facilities for a large loan. India had little cash and Britain was stretched as warfare erupted in Malaya and Korea, but the loan was negotiated by releasing the frozen ‘sterling balances’ that Britain owed India as a result of debts accumulated during the Second World War. Though not much of this loan was actually taken up, it buttressed Burma’s credit on the international market at a critical time. For a time, American aid was also forthcoming, though right-wing US commentators berated the administration for supporting a ‘red’ government and Burmese opinion was uneasy. Ever mindful of the need to keep a balance, Nu’s became one of the first noncommunist governments to recognize communist China. This also helped with domestic interests because the large Chinese minority in Burma, mainly small businessmen, wanted to keep the borders open regardless of the ideology of the men in power in Beijing.

New arms, new money and control of a good rice crop kept the government’s head just above water in Rangoon and Mandalay. Out in the countryside the political struggle ebbed and flowed from day to day. In the first three months of 1949, the authority of the government showed little sign of reviving. Two-thirds of the country was still subject to the sorties of insurgent groups – communists, rebellious PVOs, mutinying soldiers and police, cattle rustlers and the Karens. Government authority survived only where a resolute district officer held on supported by small numbers of loyal troops and backed by local headmen and notables. One such defiant officer was Balwant Singh, the Sikh civil servant who always stood out from his Burmese charges because of his height. The leading townspeople of Yamethin in the Shan states had persuaded him to stay on even after Karen rebels had swept through the town looting its stores and severing its road and rail links to the outside world. Balwant Singh established what he called the ‘City State of Yamethin’ and held this against successive bands of communists, minority group rebels and bandits for more than two months, with little idea of what was going on elsewhere in the country.

This was a very personal war. When PVOs of doubtful allegiance arrived in Yamethin demanding weapons, the townspeople clinging
to their remaining small arms and Bren guns met them warily. A powerful local resident said: ‘We have our arms and we intend to keep them, and use them. No one will force us to give them up.’
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The speaker sat down, smiling widely with his betel juice-stained lips. Another man, a local lawyer, warned the insurgents: ‘The armed men here are mostly the sons of the town. They belong to it and are here to defend it. The town fully supports the SDO [Balwant Singh] and the armed men under him.’ At this the PVO band decided to forgo a fire fight and themselves retreated smiling. These were times of confusion and uncertainty. Balwant Singh and his supporters listened to the radio news from Rangoon, which always put a brave spin on events, but critical local news was scarce: ‘As an alternative we turned to what is normal in the East – spirits, mediums, soothsayers and astrologers.’
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Balwant Singh considered that these authorities’ predictions had a good chance of being true, and besides, the mediums provided the sort of service that would fall to psychiatrists in the West. A palm-reader made a good stab at predicting his career, while the abbot of the local monastery broke the rules to allow a medium to go into a trance within the walls. The medium, guided by the
nats
, gave useful advice about the morale of the Yamethin armed forces. Meanwhile, most people began to wear invulnerability charms, as Burmese country people often did during times of crisis. Balwant Singh himself was given a couple of charms and put them on: ‘Courage was not a natural commodity with me, and I needed all the outside help I could get.’ All the same, he sensed that the crisis was past its worst.

J. S. Furnivall had spent part of the year lecturing on Southeast Asian history and politics in Chicago. On his return in the middle of the year he also felt a change of mood. The opposition was split and the splits were widening. In August he wrote to a correspondent in England, the Burmese linguist C. W. Dunn, that the communists were now even more at odds because Than Tun had argued for bringing in the Chinese to resolve the civil war.
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This his communist colleagues flatly rejected. Meanwhile the Christian Karens, themselves worried that the communists might win, were beginning to drift back towards the government.
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So, by the end of 1949, Burma’s crisis was beginning to pass. The country would be battered by insurrection and violence
for years to come. But it would neither disintegrate nor become communist. Yet the savage civil war had already put the army into a strong position within the new state, a position which it would consolidate over the next decade.

Across the region, men in arms once more dictated political futures. Fresh levies from Europe began the long journey east. The Grenadier Guards came straight from ceremonial duties at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. They sailed from Liverpool in August 1948 in an old wartime troopship; it was a four-week journey through the last outposts of the British Indian Ocean. They were met with the usual jeers – ‘Get your knees brown!’ – as they passed the British garrison at Great Bitter Lake on the Suez Canal. But now there was no period of acclimatization in Bombay; the troubled situation in Egypt made it difficult to give men shore leave at Port Said. On arrival in Malaya the men were plunged into an exotic tropical world, and a war for which they were unprepared. They were issued with unfamiliar gear – mosquito nets, jungle green and jungle boots with canvas tops and rubber soles – and had to acclimatize quickly to the heat and humidity; the ‘bashers’, (
bashas
) or open-sided huts, and squat toilets, and the terrors of the undergrowth: the snakes, scorpions, centipedes and fire ants. Within two weeks they were on long marches in the forest with tattooed Iban ‘head-hunters’, a first taste of the
ulu
, a Malay word for upriver which now became British military argot for the back of beyond. Between 1 January 1949 and 30 May 1950, 4,500 national servicemen were despatched to Malaya.
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By October 1950 twenty-one infantry regiments, two armoured car regiments and one commando brigade were deployed: a total of 50,000 men. This was more British soldiers than were in Malaya at the time of its fall to the Japanese.

Not all of them were fighting men. The military remained a massive consumer of men and materiel, a provider for thousands of locals who worked in the naval bases or the NAAFI. The sharply finessed black-market scams of the BMA period were revived; in one case, in
1953, six soldiers were convicted of stealing two bulldozers, a tractor, and a three-ton truck, together with a generator, cutting plant and six winches.
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New cantonments were thrown up at Nee Soon and Ulu Pandan in Singapore, and at Port Dickson and Sungei Besi, just outside Kuala Lumpur. For many men, they were a comfortable billet. ‘There’s too many vested interests in this Emergency,’ one Kuala Lumpur lawyer was overheard to gripe. ‘In fact, it’s no Emergency at all. It is a racket to find jobs for British officers.’
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The rankers at Nee Soon had a chorus:

We’re a shower of bastards,
Bastards we are…
We’d rather fuck than fight,
We’re the pay corps cavalry!
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Leslie Thomas, who arrived in early 1950, christened himself and his comrades ‘the virgin soldiers’: ‘idle, homesick, afraid, uninterested, hot, sweating, bored, oversexed and under-satisfied’.
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For them, barracks life was ‘as peaceful as a suburb’; its ennui only occasionally disturbed by transit of men from the jungle war: ‘The garrison soldiers would examine them with curiosity, at a distance, as though looking for bullet holes… There was a dullness about the infantrymen’s eyes, a redness about their faces, so that they looked like labourers or country boys.’
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For a colonial society still obsessed by prestige, there was the perennial problem of how to keep in line thousands of poor whites whose very presence transgressed the racial code. Handbooks of military Malay marked out the boundaries: ‘By a Malay, or by a Malay speaking Asian, the European male is addressed as “TOO-AN”… Master.’
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But the new arrivals discovered that few of the expatriates they were there to protect would have anything to do with them socially. The planters upcountry were more hospitable, but most of the clubs in Singapore were barred to men in uniform. A functional Britannia Club was built opposite the opulent Raffles Hotel, to keep soldiers out of trouble. But the native city had a compelling lure. Kuala Lumpur was invaded by serviceman as never before. Police lieutenants held wakes for fallen colleagues at Nanto’s on Batu Road; they would put up nearby at the Coliseum Hotel, which was, and still
is, famous for its baked crab and steak. The bars and cafés thrived. As one Gurkha on military police detail remarked of British soldiers, ‘I had a lot of working to do to keep them apart on a Saturday night from their drunken fights and away from the brothels in Kuala Lumpur. I couldn’t understand why they were so worthless.’
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The soldiers lived at a remove from the locals. Leslie Thomas was later to recall that he did not once eat Chinese food during his tour of Malaya. Local businessmen catered to English tastes. The local stout, brewed by Carlsberg, was increasingly popular, and remains an enduring legacy of empire. For Alan Sillitoe, an RAF signaller, an evening out in George Town was ‘a meal of rice with an egg on top at the Boston café, then to see a film such as “Cato” or “Watch on the Rhine”, followed by an evening with taxi-dancing Eurasian girls at the City Lights’.
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The cabarets were a rare opportunity to talk to local girls and to practise ‘bazaar’ Malay; the men paid 30 cents a ticket to dance with them for five minutes. The new sensation was the
joget modern
, a mixture of the samba, rumba and conga fused with the swaying local sound of the
ronggeng
. In Kuala Lumpur there were three
joget
‘parties’, the ‘Sentosa’, the ‘Lucky’ and the ‘Chendramata Joget’ in Bukit Bintang amusement park. The star turns became famous; Rose Chan’s python dance was legendary. But the cabarets generated great moral unease. Girls as young as twelve were to be found working in them. Welfare officers campaigned to raise the minimum age to fifteen, in the hope that a girl would then be ‘quite robust to stand any strenuous job and is quite matured mentally to understand the tricks and traps laid out by a man in his attempt to spoil her morality’. It was at least, the argument went, an alternative to prostitution.
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The best-selling Malay novelist of the day, Ahmad Lufti, combined frank accounts of the fall of young women with a sharp moral and religious commentary. His novels were pornographic to some, but they portrayed an acute sense of the vulnerability of women who had since the war been forced to consort with soldiers, of ‘a courage stemmed from the torments of the devil’.
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Suicide was on the rise in Singapore, and an incidence of 31.2 per 1,000 was estimated in the entertainment industry, not least among dance hostesses.
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