BREAKTHROUGH IN BURMA Memoirs of a Revolution, 1939-1946 BREAKTHROUGH IN BURMA Memoirs of a Revolution, 1939-1946 Ba Maw Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1968 Copyright (c) 1968 by Theda Maw Sturtevant and William C. Sturtevant. Designed by John O. C. McCrillis, set in Baskerville type, and printed in the United States of America by The Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, Neio York. Distributed in Canada by McGill University Press. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers for the public press) , without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress catalog card number: 67-24504 Contents Foreword by William S. Cornyn ix Foreword by U Myint xi Preface xvii PART I 1. Introduction g 2. The War Begins 22 3. The Freedom Bloc 51 4. The Thirty Comrades 103 5. The Burma Independence Army Enters the Conflict 138 6. The B.I.A. Period 172 7. Prison and Freedom 218 PART 11 8. The Burmese Era 261 9. Visit to Japan’s Leaders 307 10. Independence 318 11. The Greater East Asia Conference 336 12. Netaji Bose 348 13. The Crisis 360 14. The End of the War 383 15. Departure and Return 405 Glossary 423 Historical Outline 427 Who’s Who 436 Index 447 List of Illustrations Frontispiece. Dr. Ba Maw on Radio Tokyo, March 27, 1943. PHOTOGRAPHS, following p. 2J2 1. Saya San, Tharrawaddy Jail, 1931. 2. Dr. Ba Maw as Saya San’s Defence Counsel, 1931. 3. Dr. Ba Maw and Daw Kinmama Maw, London, 1937. 4. Dr. Ba Maw and his sons, Rangoon, August 1940. 5. Bo Mogyo, 1941. 6. Some of the Thirty Comrades, Hainan, 1941. 7. Bo Yan Naing, Tokyo, 1943. 8. U Nu. 9. Thakin Than Tun. 10. The Provisional Administrative Committee, Maymyo, June 4, 1941. 11. Dr. Ba Maw, Lt.-Gen. Shojiro Iida and Mr. Hyogoro Sakurai, Rangoon, August 1, 1942. 12. The first Burmese delegation to Japan, Tokyo, March 1943. 13. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, Tokyo, 1943. 14. Dr. Ba Maw and family, Rangoon, May 1943. 15. Greater East Asia Conference, Tokyo, November 5, 1943. 16. The heads of the Greater East Asia nations, Tokyo, November 6, 1943. 17. Dr. Ba Maw and Netaji Bose, Tokyo, November 6, 1943. 18. Dr. Ba Maw and Zali Maw, Tokyo, November 6, 1943. 19. The Burmese Declaration of Independence, August 1, 1943. 20. Bo Yan Naing and Daw Tinsa Maw Naing, Rangoon, 1947. MAPS 1. Greater East Asia. XXV 2. Burma. xxvi 3. Detail of Burma. xxvii Foreword by William S. Cornyn Dr. Ba Maw, first Burman to be Prime Minister of Burma under the British in the thirties, Head of State during the Japanese oc­ cupation in the Second World War, member of the British Bar, practicing lawyer and leading politician and statesman in Burma for more than forty years, gives us in this book an invaluable record and analysis of the struggle of an Asian people against foreign domination and their search for a way to freedom and independence. The record is invaluable because it is unique. It is unique on two counts: there is no one else who for so long a time has been so thoroughly involved in the working out of the patterns that unfold in these pages; and it is also the highly personal account of a sensitive, intelligent, and humane man who for a time exercised total power within the limits of a military occupation of his country. To most Americans the events of World War II are becoming dim and are being obscured by later concerns, and to many of those who remember, the China-Burma-India theater has faded in comparison with the war in the Pacific, in North Africa, and in Europe. But even to those who can recall the campaigns in Burma there will in the reading of this book be a certain sense of unreality and even disorientation. Familiar names are missing: General Stilwell and the Ledo Road, Admiral Mountbatten, Gen­ eral Wingate (except for a passing reference), Merrill’s Maraud­ ers, and all the rest are absent. The slogans and notions of Allied and Axis propaganda are barely mentioned, and then only to be dismissed, the categories of the Cold War oppositions as we are accustomed to them now are absent, and the focus is steadily maintained on the struggle for an Asian solution to Asian prob­ lems. It is in this that the great value of the book lies. In times like these when American involvement in the affairs of peoples all over the globe is growing, it is of great importance X FOREWORD BY WILLIAM S. CORNYN that we learn to understand what it is that we are doing and what the reaction is on the part of the peoples we are trying to help. It is in this connection that this book is of the greatest interest. It is a clear and compelling statement of a deeply patriotic emo­ tion and of a sense of history of a nation that goes back to the time of the Norman Conquest of Britain. Feelings like these are not confined to Burma. There are passages of great eloquence when the author speaks of these emotions, there are passages of simple elegance when he describes the surroundings in which he found himself, and at vari­ ous places in his account he is direct and brusque, but always the style is personal and unmistakably his own. The portraits and vignettes with which these pages are filled are often fine and subtly drawn and tell much about both the author and his people. Breakthrough in Burma has been twenty years and more in the writing and it was not until 1966 that the manuscript became available to the West. The author at this writing is again in prison, this time with his eldest daughter Tinsa, who had her first baby during the escape from Rangoon to Bangkok. We have a lot to learn from this book. w.s.c. New Haven May 1967 Foreword by U Myint, Former Justice of the Burma Supreme Court I am in a real fix. In a reckless moment I undertook to write the introduction to Dr. Ba Maw’s war memoirs. But now that I am actually writing it I find the subject getting bigger and more complex till I almost find it too much for me. Meanwhile, I recollect that Dr. Maung Maung, a distinguished writer and jurist who is now a judge in our Chief Court, once in a public debate said of Dr. Ba Maw that he was “not a person, but an institu­ tion.” And U Nu, a former prime minister of Burma, who worked most closely with Dr. Ba Maw throughout the whole difficult war period and so should know Dr. Ba Maw at his best as well as his worst, has described him with so much admiration in his Burma under the Japanese that The Nation, our leading English-lan­ guage daily newspaper in its day, described the book as “nothing if not a deep tribute to Dr. Ba Maw’s leadership and courage.” Before I proceed to say anything about Dr. Ba Maw himself I want to give you the reasons I consider the present war memoirs so historically important that they should be read and studied by all with the slightest interest in the way the world, and espe­ cially Asia, has changed since the last world war. Firstly, it is the only account of the war period written by a Southeast Asian war­ time head of state and leader and consequently the only firsthand account of the period in Southeast Asia. Next, it is the first time the Burmese side of the full wartime story has been told by one who actually played the biggest part in it. Also, it is the first serious attempt to analyse objectively some of the biggest psycho­ logical problems as well as the consequences created by the Pa­ cific war— for instance, the relations between the Japanese and the other peoples of East and Southeast Asia. At a time when a good part of our continent is in ferment anyone who is capable xi