Burmese Connection - Ashish Basu

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in Imphal and Kohima that the Japanese Army had to relieve both General Kawabe and General Mutaguchi of their respective commands. The Japanese Burma command and the fledgling INA disintegrated through surrenders quickly thereafter. Some of the senior officers of the INA faced trial in Delhi, India. The British Army regained momentum after its win in India and charged ahead.

      Aung Lung was thrilled when Myitkyina fell to the forces of American General Stilwell in August of 1944. That was the beginning of the end of the Japanese occupation. He was overjoyed when the infamous 33rd Imperial Japanese Army under General Honda was defeated in comprehensively and remaining parts of the Japanese Army surrendered. While the formal surrender of the Japanese forces happened in far-away Rangoon, bits and pieces of surrender-related news would trickle down to Northern Burma on a pretty regular basis.

      Most of the news came through the visitors who used the Myitkyina Airport. Aung knew that Japan was struggling for its survival by then. Many of the Japanese divisions in Burma were busy planning a hasty retreat into friendlier Thailand. But the retreat was not easy: most were getting caught along the way and captured as POWs. The good news was the Allies treated POWs very differently.

      Myitkyina was an important town for both sides not only because of its rail and river links to the rest of Burma, but also because it was on the Ledo Road. That was a huge advantage. General Stilwell and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek were planning to rebuild that road. After all, without any formal military training, Aung himself had made that same decision about Myitkyina’s importance sometime back.

      Aung knew that the fall of Myitkyina set the war for his homeland in an irreversible direction, but it was not over. As if to emphasize that point brutally, soldiers from the 3rd Battalion of the 215th Regiment of the Japanese Army entered the village of Kalagong in Mon State on July 7th, 1945, and rounded up all villagers regardless of age. General Yamamoto’s soldiers then shot six hundred plus Burmese villagers. There was no reason for the massacre. The villagers were not soldiers—they did not participate in the war. The villagers did not have to die.

      Aung was in his early twenties at this point; he had not seen life for very long. He had vaguely heard about the plight of the Jews in Europe but did not appreciate the scale and scope of that horror. Kalagong laid it bare for him. This kind of mass killing as a result of intense hatred from people of one culture or country for another was unfathomable to him till then. Aung had noticed that attitude earlier in 1942; many of the Japanese soldiers and officers considered themselves to be superior to the Burmese. It was as if the Japanese had the right to decide whether a Burmese person should live or die, and nobody called them out on that.

      What bothered Aung more was the deafening Burmese silence. Burmese reaction was muted—he did not hear very many leaders exploding in anger and resentment. As a matter of fact, he did not see much of a reaction at all! Aung’s distaste for Japanese imperialism grew even more. Once he heard the news, he could not eat or sleep properly for many days. He suffered from acute depression for quite a while after that event in Kalagong. He hoped that the Japanese soldiers would be prosecuted as war criminals some day in the near future.

      During the war and the Japanese occupation, much of Aung’s direct and extended family got scattered. Many members of Aung’s family perished without any trace; others left the village. Much of Aung’s 1945 was spent in search of his parents, siblings, and extended family. The Japanese Army was in a chaotic state toward the end of the war, and that meant tribal militias ruled. It was a total anarchy. A lot of displaced people from Shan States moved to Thailand around this time. Aung would often leave his home base in Myitkyina for several days with a handful of armed Kachin scouts and look for family members in the hills and places inside the Shan State up to the borders between Burma and Thailand. He had not given up hope—he continued trying.

      The Shan that went into Thailand were not easy to find. The borders were quite porous, so there was a good chance that his folks crossed over. Thailand had a lot of Japanese sympathizers; Aung always made sure he remained inside Burma and never crossed into Thai territory. Aung knew that Thailand had signed a military alliance with Japan in 1942 and that the Shan States were to be under Thailand’s control. Even though Aung did not like Thailand’s proximity to the Japanese Army, he knew that there were enough Shan people there to hide his relatives if they were to seek refuge. He sought to locate his family through his contacts in the British and Chinese forces, but none of those efforts succeeded. It seemed that they had vanished without a trace.

      Despite all his efforts, till the end of 1945, he could not connect up with any member of his direct family. His ancestral home was flattened by Allied bombers; the village itself had suffered major damage. When he spoke with the few remaining villagers, they said most families had fled toward Thailand. That sort of a vague guidance did not help Aung at all. In addition to the search he was conducting for his family, Aung was also tracking the changing political landscape in Burma.

      Several major political events took place in quick succession. Those events changed Aung’s homeland forever. In March 1945, the Burmese National Army rose up in a countrywide rebellion against the Japanese. Burmese national leaders like Aung San and others began negotiations with Lord Mountbatten and officially joined the British side as the Patriotic Burmese Forces. It was a good move that helped the Burmese nationalists. By switching sides, albeit toward the end of the war, the Burmese leaders gave themselves the much-needed legitimacy.

      At the first meeting, they represented themselves as the provisional government of Burma with Thakin Soe as Chairman. Aung San was the member of the ruling committee of the provisional government. Since the Japanese were completely routed from most of Burma by mid-1945, Patriotic Burmese Forces started formal negotiations with the British in due earnest. Despite the good performance of the British Army in the Burma campaign, it had setbacks that could have been avoided. Much of the British reputation for invincibility had been lost as a result of its many defeats at the hands of the Japanese Army.

      Demands for India’s independence had also assumed thunderous proportions around that time. In Burma, the nationalists, headed by Aung San and the Burmese National Army, gave valuable support to the British Army in the final stages of the Japanese defeat. As a result of all those factors, the British returned to Rangoon as victors but could not to stay for very long—they knew it when they returned.

      Around this time, the British public opinion was also shifting. The appetite for managing colonies far away from the British Isles was not what it used to be. Most British voters did not want colonies in distant places, and they participated in war for those colonies. The idea of the colony was going out of favor; the British had to accept that shift in domestic public opinion. Burmese nationalism was like a tsunami by then. The entire Burmese population craved independence. Having seized the administrative reins in the wake of the British advance, Aung San and his men were ready to take over the government right after the war.

      Although the British government attempted to put up a brave front, it had to face reality. Its colonial hegemony in Southeast Asia was ending soon. Aung San traveled to the UK in 1947 to negotiate terms for independence. It was widely believed that the world would see an independent Burma under the leadership of Aung San in short order. But that was not to be. Discussions were proceeding in the right direction. When everything looked all set for stability, suddenly, Aung San was assassinated along with his cabinet. That whole event was a shock to all. Eventually, when Burma gained independence, the Federated Shan States became the Shan State and Kavah State with the right to secede from the Union of Burma after a certain period.

      None of these developments changed our Aung’s day-to-day life in Myitkyina materially. The war had ended, but there were local skirmishes among various warring militias every day and all around. Being aligned with the victors, Aung and his scouts were treated with respect by the local militias; sometimes, they were called for advice. They still lived in Myitkyina and worked a security team for hire.

      One morning, he and two of his scouts were returning from a security assignment when they saw a couple of soldiers lying by the roadside ditch. They looked Chinese and looked hurt. One Christian missionary was trying to help them. Aung and his two scouts stopped to help.

      Aung asked in Kachin, “Father, could we help you?”

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