A Delicate Relationship: The United States and Burma/Myanmar since 1945

A DELICATE

RELATIONSHIP

The United States and Burma/

Myanmar since 1945

Kenton Clymer

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Burmese Nationalism and the Path to Independence

2. The Leaky Derelict

3. The Trial of the Burma Surgeon

4. The Kuomintang Embarrassment

5. China, Communists, and Other Insurgents

6. Changing Course on the Kuomintang

7. The Neutrality Conundrum

8. The China Border, a Polite Coup, and Return to Democratic Government

9. The U Nu Interregnum

10. Ne Win’s Way to Socialism

11. The Relationship Stabilizes

12. The Narcotics Era

13. Revolt

14. The Thaw

Appendix

Notes (including archive abbreviations used in the notes)

Selected Bibliography

Index

Preface

In addition to the scholarly reasons for writing this book, there is a personal one. In 1987, when my wife, Marlee Clymer, and I were in India where I was researching a book on US interest in India’s independence, like the British before us we fled to the cool hill station of Shimla (Simla) for a month during New Delhi’s extreme heat in June. In Shimla I worked at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. One of the long-term fellows at the institute was Michael Aris, an Oxford professor of Himalayan studies with a particular interest in Bhutan. At that time I was teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso, perhaps the only place outside of Bhutan where the buildings are all constructed in the beautiful Bhutanese style. A few days later, Michael’s wife, Aung San Suu Kyi, arrived, and we became friends, going on picnics together, eating out in restaurants, our children playing with their children of about the same ages. I had vaguely heard of Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San, the leader of Burma’s independence struggle who was assassinated in 1947, but knew little of Burma’s history.

We also shared some tense days when stories appeared in the Indian press indicating that the government was suspicious of the activities of the few foreigners at the institute and was probably going to arrest them. One day I returned to our room to find eight Indian policemen there. They were impeccably dressed and very polite, but they asked for our passports.

Suu Kyi loved the challenge. I had a very different reaction. A stay in an Indian jail loomed, I feared. I booked a telephone call (as was necessary in those days) to the American embassy, which sent a Chevrolet Suburban van, along with Foreign Service officer Susan Jacobs, to demand the return of our passports and rescue us if need be. Ultimately the passports were returned, and there was no need to shorten our stay in Shimla. But Suu Kyi’s reaction was revealing.

By this time I had come to know much more about Aung San Suu Kyi. In particular I had learned that her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, had served as Burma’s ambassador to India. But she, Michael, and their children lived in Oxford, and there were as yet no hints that she would become famous as the leader of the Burmese opposition to Ne Win’s oppressive dictatorship. But within months Suu Kyi was back in Rangoon to care for her mother who had suffered a debilitating stroke. She was there when the revolutionary events of 1988 took place and ultimately accepted the mantle of leadership that her ancestry demanded. She did not leave Burma again for well over two decades and spent much of those years under house arrest. Consequently I followed events in Burma with interest and determined eventually to write something about the history of United States relations with that country. This is the result.

A note on nomenclature. Burma derives its name from the predominant ethnic group, the Burmans (or Bamars). The British took over Burma in three successive wars in the nineteenth century and used that name for their colony. When Burma achieved independence, the new rulers retained the name. However, in 1989 the ruling military junta changed the official name to Myanmar and also changed the names of many cities and roads. Thus, for example, the capital Rangoon became Yangon. Normally name changes of this sort have not resulted in much controversy. But not in Burma. Because the change of names was instituted by what was perceived to be an illegitimate and oppressive regime, the opposition forces continued to use the older names, as did the United States government. Thus what name to call the country has a political dimension. Those who most strongly supported the opposition and condemned the military government used Burma, while those with a different perspective generally preferred Myanmar. Not surprisingly this has also caused division in the ranks of scholars and public policy analysts, who often sparred with each other over a variety of issues, including the efficacy of sanctions and the nature of the government. There are honorable people on both sides of this debate. In this book Burma is used for the years before 1989. After that Myanmar and Burma are used interchangeably, reflecting the mixed usage in the United States. As the country has opened up, Myanmar has been increasingly accepted. The term Burmese applies to all of the people of country, not just the Burmans. As for Chinese names, the newer pinyin transliteration is usually used (thus Mao Tse-tung is Mao Zedong), but I have sometimes used the older Wade-Giles spelling in cases where it is still commonly used. Thus Chiang Kai-shek is used rather than Jiang Jieshi and Kuomintang rather than Guomindang.

All authors have persons and institutions to thank for inspiration, assistance, and support. Aside from the inspiration of Michael Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi, I have many to thank. I began this study at the University of Texas at El Paso, which was always supportive of my work. President Diana Natalicio kindly asked Marlee and myself to represent the university at the memorial service for Michael Aris in Oxford. After I moved to Northern Illinois University in 2004 the Department of History, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and the Center for Burma Studies all supported me in various ways, including with a sabbatical leave in 2009. Northern Illinois University provided a generous subvention for this book. I also appreciated the assistance of my colleagues who are Southeast Asian specialists, especially Eric Jones, Trude Jacobsen, Theraphi Than, Clark and Arlene Neher, Danny Unger, Judy Ledgerwood, Kheang Un, and Catherine Raymond. Southeast Asia librarian Hao Phan responded to my requests for materials. My former colleague Alicia Turner, a Burma specialist now at York University, was kind enough to review a portion of the manuscript.

In 2011–12 the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars invited me to spend the academic year working on the book, and I am very grateful to my colleagues and staff members there. At the risk of inadvertently leaving someone out, I want particularly to thank Robert Hathaway, then the director of the Asia program at the Center, who helped me in numerous ways; and Marvin Ott, a senior scholar there who shared very valuable insights about China’s policies and American involvement in Burma. Other center people to be singled out include Xia Yafeng (who helped arrange a visit to East China Normal University’s Center for Cold War Studies), Christian Ostermann, Susan Leverstein, Michael Kugelman, Lindsay Collins, Arlyn Charles, Kim Conners, Louisa Clark-Roussey, Fabio Rugge, Mike Van Dusen, Zahid Hussain, Douglas G. Spelman, Julia Clancy-Smith, Robert Baum, Jill Jonnes, Jackie Hagan, Ren Xuefei, Dennis Kux, Elizabeth Wishnick, and Eric Arneson. I am also grateful for the important assistance provided by the four student interns assigned to me at the center: Ngo Khien Thien, Taiyi Pan, Daniel Fong, and Nay Min Oo. William Roger Louis kindly invited me to present my work at one of the weekly meetings of the National History Center’s seminars, which met at the Center.

There are too many other persons in Washington who assisted me in various ways to name them all. But I must single out David I. Steinberg of Georgetown University, the dean of Burma Studies, who invited me to Burma conferences even before I was in Washington, encouraged my work, and strengthened the manuscript in ways too numerous to mention. Karl Jackson and William Wise of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies kindly invited me to take part in SAIS’s Southeast Asian studies activities and to join their Burma Studies Group. Bill Burr at the National Security Archive provided leads on relevant documents, as did Matthew Jagel, a Ph.D. student at NIU. Murray Hiebert of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Southeast Asian Program invited me to Burma-related events at CSIS. Donald Jameson shared his knowledge about Burma with me. Sally Benson provided us with housing in Dupont Circle and also introduced me to persons with Burma connections.

Our daughter, Megan Haddock, who has been interested and involved in Burma matters for several years and who worked with Burmese student refugees in Mae Sot, Thailand, provided both inspiration and contacts with Burmese opposition figures. She also wrote an important article on one of the most famous Burmese prisoners, Min Ko Naing. Sue Newhall, author of an excellent memoir about the Burma Surgeon, Gordon Seagrave, and her husband Dr. Joe Newhall, of Bradenton, Florida invited me for several visits and provided important information and photographs about Seagrave. Lynn Hamilton sent me relevant clippings.

The staffs at the US National Archives and of all of the presidential libraries that I visited were invariably courteous and well informed. I am particularly grateful to Herb Pankratz, David Haight, and Carolyn Cain at the Eisenhower Library; to Michael Devine, director of the Truman Library; and Sarah Haldeman at the Johnson Library. In addition, both the Eisenhower and the Kennedy libraries kindly provided me with travel grants. Betsy Dunbar of the American Baptist Historical Society archives in Atlanta helped me navigate the papers of the American Baptist Mission in Burma.

The staff at the National Archives of Australia, and in particular Caroline Connor, could not have been more helpful. Daw Khin Khin Mya, Deputy Director at the Myanmar National Archives, was particularly helpful to me on the two occasions I was able to do research there. I am also grateful for the assistance of U Toe Hla, vice chairman of the Myanmar Historical Commission.

Professor Dr. Margaret Wong, head of the Department of History at Yangon University, kindly invited me to teach a short course in December 2013 on the history of United States relations with Burma/Myanmar since World War II. Teaching mostly History Department faculty members gave me a good opportunity to try out some of the findings in this book. Doctor Chaw Chaw Sein, head of the International Relations Department, invited me to speak to the new class of undergraduate students (the first admitted to the university since 1988). These were challenging, yet exciting opportunities to interact with faculty and students who have, for too long, been denied the opportunity to have international scholarly contacts. I am grateful for Open Society Foundation funding of my teaching assignment in Yangon, and to an NIU delegation, and in particular my colleague Tharaphi Than, for helping to arrange this. It was also a great pleasure to meet Lilian Handlin and Paula Helfrich in Yangon. I can’t say enough about the kindness and helpfulness of Saw Kalya Aye, manager of the Classique Inn (and a graduate of the International Relations Department at Yangon University), where we have stayed several times. Also in Yangon friends Jim and Debbie Aung Din Taylor provided numerous insights about Burmese developments. In addition to allowing me to interview him about his years as the American consul at Mandalay, David Harr and his wife San Harr have over the years educated me about Burma.

I am also extremely grateful to those in the United States and in Burma who consented to interviews. A list of those interviewed is included in the bibliography, and I thank them all. One of the most striking interviews was with U Thet Tun, a well-known Burmese economist and diplomat who, although in fragile health himself, drove over to the Classique Inn to meet with me the day after his wife had suffered a serious stroke. I appreciate the assistance of NIU colleague U Saw Tun for helping arrange interviews.

The two external reviewers for the press made valuable suggestions that have improved the book. Finally, much thanks to the entire staff at Cornell University Press and especially to Michael McGandy who encouraged this project over the years. Gavin Lewis did a superb job copyediting the manuscript, including probing questions of substance that improved the book.

An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as The Trial for High Treason of the ‘Burma Surgeon,’ Gordon S. Seagrave, Pacific Historical Review 81 (May 2012): 245–91, and portions of chapters 4 and 6 were published in The United States and the Guomindang (KMT) Forces in Burma, 1949–1954: A Diplomatic Disaster, Chinese Historical Quarterly 21 (May 2014): 24–44. These are included in this book with permission of the publishers.

Finally I must say how much I owe to my lovely wife, also a Burma aficionado, who organized my notes and documents, put up with the long hours I spent alone in the archives and my study, and urged me to apply for various grants. The book would have taken a lot longer to complete had it not been for her encouragement and help at every stage.

Abbreviations

Burma/Myanmar’s administrative divisions

INTRODUCTION

The story of American relations with Burma since 1945 is an important one that has until now not been told. Study of Southeast Asia, and particularly American relations with the region, has blossomed in recent decades, largely because the War in Vietnam focused attention on it. Despite being the largest country in mainland Southeast Asia, however, and occupying an important geographical position between the two most populous countries in the world, India and China, Burma is an outlier, a country largely ignored in historical study about its relations with the United States.

A small group of scholars has written important historical works about Burma, and there have been many studies of contemporary relations between the United States and Burma, mostly by international relations specialists and journalists. But serious historical studies of the relationship are scarce. There is, in fact, no comprehensive historical account of American relations with Burma. This lack of historical scholarship is probably because after 1962 military dictator General Ne Win kept Burma decidedly neutral in the Cold War, played little role in the Vietnam war and generally isolated the country (even discouraging tourism—for a time visas were valid for only twenty-four hours), so that it was mostly ignored by the American public, except for occasional stories about narcotics trafficking and ancient Buddhist monuments. To be sure, in 1976, Harvard University Press published The United States and Burma by the eminent historian and diplomat John Cady. Despite its title, however, the book is mostly about Burma, not the relationship with the United States.

American relations with Burma reveal persistent and often contradictory elements on both sides, which interacted to produce both fluctuation and continuity in that relationship. On Burma’s side, these elements included anti-imperialist isolation versus the need for outside help, military regimes versus democratic oppositions, nationalist integration versus minority separatisms, placating versus resisting Communist China, and policies driven in different directions by personal rivalries among politicians and military men. On the US side, the issues involved were democratic values and human rights concerns versus Cold War calculations and commercial interests, racial prejudice versus winning friends and influencing people, letting loose the Nationalist Chinese versus reining them in, its own problems of placating versus resisting Communist China, and policies driven in different directions by institutional rivalries among agencies and constituencies within the government. The result was that the relationship was almost always a very delicate one.

Burma’s Importance

The story of the United States–Burma relationship is also important to tell, since without it our understanding of the American relationship with Southeast Asia in general across the decades is incomplete and distorted.

After 1947 the overwhelming context of global international relations was the Cold War which emerged when the Grand Alliance of World War II disintegrated and the United States and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies, became bitter rivals. When in 1946 and 1947 George Kennan proposed a policy of containment of Soviet expansive tendencies, his attention was on Europe, but by the end of the decade containment grew to global proportions, particularly after Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War in 1949. This traumatic development for the United States led to almost frantic efforts to prevent the rest of Asia from coming under communist control.

In American eyes Burma was one of the two most threatened Southeast Asian countries (the other being Vietnam). Burma might well be the first domino to fall, thus giving China a great strategic advantage, as well as dominion over a source of significant natural resources. Burma shared a very long border with China, its governing class was suspiciously leftist in its political orientation, and within weeks after it attained independence on 4 January 1948 a communist insurgency arose that appeared at times on the verge of victory. Communist control would not only endanger the rest of Southeast Asia but also threaten neighboring Pakistan and India. The United States hoped to lessen the chances of this occurring.

By the 1960s the war in Vietnam had become the greatest American concern in Southeast Asia. Burma remained important, however, for the United States hoped that as a large, neutral country, it would support the adventure in Vietnam, or at least would resist Chinese pressure to criticize American actions. Furthermore, China’s policy toward Burma remained a major source of anxiety for the United States, since China was wooing Burma with significant aid, and also settled a complicated border dispute on generous terms. When Ne Win visited Washington in 1966 the Lyndon Johnson administration pulled out all the stops to ensure the warmest possible reception for Burma’s military dictator and to heal previous rifts in the bilateral relationship. In the end Ne Win refused to take sides on Vietnam, much to China’s irritation, and Burma-China relations became antagonistic for the rest of the decade.

In 1971, when the United States changed its policy toward China, Burma became less of a Cold War concern. The United States did not cease to watch developments in Burma from a Cold War perspective, in particular because the Burma Communist Party (BCP) was still engaged in a revolutionary struggle against the government while receiving support from China. From 1971 to 1988, however, the primary focus of American interest in Burma was control of narcotics. President Richard Nixon had become deeply worried about cheap drugs, increasingly produced in the Golden Triangle area of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, reaching American soldiers in Vietnam, as well as by the epidemic of illegal narcotics flooding into American cities. In response, Nixon initiated the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs was bipartisan, and both the Jimmy Carter and the Ronald Reagan administrations tried to encourage Burma’s government to stop the traffickers. They received some cooperation, and provided assistance and equipment to reduce the opium crop. At a time that Ne Win had cut off close connections with outside countries, the antinarcotics discussions provided one of the very few ways to have close contact with Burmese officials.

By the 1980s, the antinarcotics campaign was becoming controversial. Critics charged that American-supplied equipment was being used against ethnic insurgents as much as against drug traffickers and that chemical spraying was seriously endangering human life, particularly in minority areas. The Reagan administration hit back hard at the human rights campaigners, however, and continued its antinarcotics practices.

In 1988 everything changed with the dramatic events of 8 August that came to be known as the 8888 Revolution. Several thousand protesters were killed, and Burma became the center of popular American attention to Southeast Asia. Because there were so few concrete American interests in Burma by this point, human rights, which had been only a secondary concern at best in American policy, suddenly became its main focus. This was heightened by the emergence of the charismatic and articulate opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of independent Burma’s founder, Aung San. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and she has had a committed following in the United States. As Burma scholar David I. Steinberg points out, from 1989 to January 2010 Suu Kyi was mentioned in the Congressional Record 1,598 times. No living foreigner, he writes, has shaped contemporary United States policy toward a single country more than Aung San Suu Kyi.¹

The 8888 uprising and its aftermath, including the junta’s refusal to recognize the results of an election that it had sponsored in 1990, led to a vigorous debate about how to improve the awful human rights situation in Burma/Myanmar. Although US administrations resisted imposing strong sanctions, fearing that they were too inflexible and would constrain their freedom of action, the debate was all about sanctions. Eventually public and Congressional opinion forced their enactment—in an effort to bring about regime change. When that did not seem to produce positive results, the Barack Obama administration embraced pragmatic engagement to bring about regime modification. That ultimately proved to be more successful (although sanctions played an important, if indirect, role in bringing about change). Indicating the level of American interest in recent developments in Burma, Hillary Clinton visited the country in November 2011, the first secretary of state to do so since 1955. A year later Obama himself came to Yangon, the first US president ever to visit the country while in office, and he made a stirring speech at Yangon University. Many other factors contributed to the changes in Myanmar, but the US role was not without influence.

The focus on human rights did not completely shut out other American concerns. Despite objections from activists, the administrations of the 1990s continued to work with the Burmese government on narcotics control, for example. With the Cold War nearly over and with sentiment strong to cut off virtually all ties with the junta, however, human rights issues dominated American discussion about Burma, and eventually American policy as well.

Burma and the US Role in Southeast Asia

In some ways American policy was much the same across the region. The effort to prevent communist expansion, for example, characterized US policy toward all of Southeast Asia and beyond. It is not widely understood, however, that before Vietnam consumed American attention, the United States considered Burma to be of equal, or near equal, importance. This newly independent state, not yet recovered from the devastation of World War II and beset by numerous internal difficulties of the first order, was thought to be very vulnerable to a communist takeover. Focusing only on the fascinating developments in Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, distorts the larger picture that American diplomats saw in Southeast Asia.

At the same time Burma differed from other Southeast Asian countries in terms of American connections and interests, perhaps most importantly in the existence of an unusually large and influential American missionary community, with roots going back to 1813. In no other Southeast Asian country were the missionaries so prominent. Burma was the first Southeast Asian country to experience an American missionary presence. The first missionaries, American (Northern) Baptists, arrived even before the British began their conquest of the country. Except for a small number in Siam, there were few if any American Christian missionaries in other Southeast Asian countries in the nineteenth century. When the United States annexed the Philippines in 1899 Protestant missionaries entered the Philippines in significant numbers, and American Roman Catholic priests joined their Spanish brethren who had been in the islands since the sixteenth century; but there were far more Americans of other professions in the Philippines than in Burma. A very few American missionaries went to Vietnam and Cambodia in the early part of the century, but it was only in Burma that the missionary presence was the single most important focus of attention prior to World War II.

In the mid-twentieth century much of the publicity about Burma came from Gordon S. Seagrave, the celebrated Burma Surgeon, sometimes compared to Albert Schweitzer. A fourth-generation Baptist missionary, together with his wife Marion Seagrave in 1922 he rebuilt a moribund hospital in Namkham on the border with China and made it into the most important hospital and nurses’ training center in northern Burma. Still, it might have remained obscure had it not been for Seagrave’s efforts to publicize his work in a series of books. During World War II, Seagrave and his nurses became heroes for their work with the Allied forces, exploits recounted in his most popular books, Burma Surgeon (1943) and Burma Surgeon Returns (1946). When the Burmese government put him on trial in 1950 for high treason for allegedly assisting an insurgency of the Karen minority people, Burma was again the subject of American attention and diplomatic involvement. There was no other American quite like Seagrave in Southeast Asia.

Burma also provides a good case study of how the United States reacted to neutral countries. The closest comparisons in Southeast Asia are American relations with Indonesia and Cambodia, with which the United States also had delicate relationships. In all three cases the United States demonstrated that, despite Cold War rhetoric about the immorality of neutralism, it could work with neutral countries. The United States funded and trained the Cambodian armed forces, for example, and provided economic assistance to Indonesia. However, there were differences. Under Sukarno Indonesia adopted a much more demonstrative, hardline anti-American posture. Unlike the Burmese government, furthermore, Sukarno sought international involvement, became a leader in the nonaligned movement, and was a near ally of China. Eventually the United States engaged in covert actions designed to destabilize his government, and it bears some responsibility for his overthrow in 1965 and the vicious massacres that followed. Cambodia’s leader, Norodom Sihanouk, was not as outspokenly anti-American as Sukarno sometimes was, though he could make American blood boil with some of his comments, and American covert activity was used, at times, to destabilize his government also. In Burma the United States also employed covert actions, and at the policy level working with antigovernment forces was allowed under some circumstances, but this never reached the same level of involvement as in Cambodia or Indonesia, and there was no American responsibility for a bloodbath. Thus more than with Cambodia or Indonesia, American policy toward Burma ultimately demonstrated flexibility when it came to working with neutral countries during the Cold War.

As with Indonesia and Cambodia, Burma’s neutral posture led to debates in the United States about how to respond. Some wanted nothing to do with countries that did not align themselves with American Cold War objectives. Furthermore, there was much sympathy with those ethnic minority groups with substantial Christian populations and who had fought on the Allied side in the war and who were not interested in entering the new Union of Burma without strong guarantees of autonomy; some insisted on complete independence. But in the end the Americans generally concluded that they must accept Burma’s neutrality and socialism and support the central government. Better a neutral Burma than a Burma absorbed into the communist bloc. In 1955 that famous denouncer of neutralism, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, traveled to Burma and personally invited the socialist, neutralist Prime Minister U Nu to visit the United States. In addition the United States extended some economic and military aid to neutral Burma to help keep it independent.

A unique feature of American policy toward Burma was covert support for the remnant Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Chinese forces who had fled to northern Burma as the communists swept to victory in China in 1949. This ultimately foolish involvement soured and complicated the already delicate bilateral relationship, but it does confirm a larger continuity across Southeast Asia: the fear of Communist China was an important driver of American policy across the region.

Burma’s Past

Americans knew about Burma first from the missionaries; secondly from accounts of British colonialism there, most notably George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days (1934); and finally as a result of World War II, especially through Seagrave’s popular accounts of the war. Still, Burma’s history of course goes back for millennia and helps explain even modern developments, such as the actions of Burma’s leaders today or the difficulties that Burma has had in creating a fully integrated country.

A highly developed, complex culture emerged in Burma thirty-five hundred years ago. It was one of the first regions to grow rice, make bronze, and domesticate chickens and pigs. By the early Christian era the people in the major river valley, that of the Irrawaddy, had developed a complex irrigation system, necessary because of the semi-arid climate. There were walled cities and large palaces. Most of the people became Buddhists, probably as the result of Buddhist expansion from southern India and Sri Lanka, though indigenous beliefs continue to influence religious observance, particularly the veneration of the nats (spirits).

The name Burma comes from the majority ethnic group, the Burmans, but the Burmans were actually relatively late on the scene. Prior to their arrival in about the eighth century AD, the region consisted of several kingdoms and city-states composed of non-Burman peoples. There were strong kingdoms in Arakan (the western part of contemporary Burma) and the Mon territories (in the south), with their own distinctive histories and culture and their own stories about the origins of the country. Today, however, the Burman story of the origins is widely taught. Schoolchildren learn that the first Burmese kingdom was founded in the ninth century BC at Taguang, near the present-day city of Mandalay, by a Sakiyan prince, Abhiraja, traveling eastward. (Sakiya was a clan of the ancient Vedic period [1750–500 BC] to which the Buddha belonged, in what is today the northeastern part of the Indian subcontinent. The Buddha’s father Suddhodana was ruler of the clan.) The Abhiraja story may well be apocryphal, the result of an effort in the eighteenth century to tie Burma’s founding closer to Buddhism, but it is widely believed.

Between the eighth and tenth centuries a Sino-Tibetan people from the Nanzhao Empire in what is today Yunnan, China, moved into Burma. They are generally understood to be the first Burmans. They called themselves the Myanma, or strong horsemen, and established their capital at Pagan (Bagan). Gradually they expanded, assimilating other peoples, and over time developed a language script and system of numeration. In 1989 the military junta in Rangoon, recalling this early history and appealing to nationalist sentiment, renamed the country Myanmar.²

From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, Pagan was one of the most impressive of the Asian civilizations. Led by King Aniruddha (Anawrahta), who seized control about 1044, the kingdom’s area greatly expanded, including through the conquest of the Mon kingdom of Thaton to the south, so that it extended more or less to the Burma’s current borders. The Pagan Empire, and the Khmer Empire in Cambodia were the strongest powers in Southeast Asia. Several thousand Buddhist temples were built at Pagan itself, two thousand of which have survived where they are among the wonders of the ancient world. In 1287, however, Pagan fell to Kublai Khan’s Mongols. Although Pagan was reduced to little more than a village, Burma was never fully integrated into the Mongol Empire. There emerged a number of smaller, often warring, principalities, one of which was the first Shan Kingdom of Ava, near present-day Mandalay. In the sixteenth century, however, King Bayinnaung from the small Burman kingdom of Toungoo, working with Portuguese forces, reunited the country, except for Arakan. He captured Ava, and even defeated the Siamese. His exploits in expanding Burman power are unequaled in Burmese history, and it is not surprising that he is, as Thant Myint-U writes, the favorite king of Burma’s ruling generals.³

After Bayinnaung’s death, the kingdom gradually weakened, and in 1754 Aung Zeyya (or Alaungpaya), the founder of the Konbaung Dynasty, managed to establish control over upper Burma. His successor, King Hsinbyushin, established his capital at Ava and then, in a battle still remembered with bitterness in Thailand, sacked and destroyed the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya in 1767. Thereafter the Siamese moved their capital to Thonburi and then to Bangkok.

The first major contact with the British occurred during the reign of King Bodawpaya (r. 1782–1819). In 1784 Bodawpaya conquered Arakan, which bordered on British India and thus brought Burma into direct contact with the British, but Bodawpaya’s fruitless battles with Siam (which had retaken Ayutthaya) weakened the kingdom. King Bagyidaw replaced Bodawpaya in 1819 and invaded Assam in 1821, thus threatening British Bengal. This set the stage for the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26), which led to the British annexation of much territory in the southern part of the country.⁴ It was not easy. Of the forty thousand British troops, some fifteen thousand died, more from disease and heat stroke than from wounds. A second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852 resulted in further concessions. And finally Britain took it all, destroying Ava in the third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885. The last Konbaung king, Thibaw, who traced his ancestry to the Pagan kingdom, and by extension back to the Sakiyans, was ignominiously forced into exile in India.⁵

Now Burma became a province of British India, an administrative arrangement that was to have dire consequences for the Burmese. Burma was, in effect, a backwater in the British Empire, a colony of a colony. British Indian administrative structures were introduced that were alien to Burmese society and disrupted traditional institutions. Because the British considered the Burmese backward, they brought in Indian civil servants to administer the country. Indians and Chinese dominated the colonial economy. Many Burmese farmers were deeply in debt to the Indian chettyars (moneylenders). As Steinberg writes, until late in the colonial period, the Burmans were cut out of the rewards, but not the dire effects, of the political and economic changes that had begun to have such an impact in the country.⁶

Only in 1935 did Burma get its own constitution under which Burma had what looked a lot like a real government. The new structure was implemented in 1937, and Dr. Ba Maw, who had been educated in England and France, and was well known in Burma because he had defended a nationalist rebel, Saya San, at his trial in 1931, became the country’s first prime minister. Real power still lay with the British, however.⁷ Ba Maw was later jailed for sedition but was freed when Japan took over in 1942, and served as prime minister in the supposedly independent state of Burma under the Japanese. He fled to Japan ahead of the advancing Allied troops, where he was captured and interned by the Americans after the war. Later he was allowed to return to Burma.

Another unfortunate result of British rule was to exacerbate the differences between the Burmans and the minority ethnic groups. The British were not responsible for the often antagonistic relationships (though the Burmans often accused them of a divide-and-conquer policy), but they did worsen the situation. For example, they recruited troops primarily from the minorities and governed them with separate administrative structures. In addition, during British times Christian missionaries converted far more of the ethnic minorities than they did of the devoutly Buddhist Burmans, thus creating a new cultural divide, so that it has proven extremely difficult to create a common sense of nationality. Today the government recognizes over 130 ethnic groups, though not the large and unfortunate Rohingya people in Rakhine State, which the government refuses to acknowledge. In sum, there have been kingdoms and states, but there has not yet been a unified nation of Burma.

The United States and Burma to 1945

A study of American interest in Asia begins with the age of Columbus and the Elizabethans—or even before, since the revival of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was related to the stimulus of the oriental trade. Columbus and the other explorers were out to find a new passage to India, to the fabled wealth and wonders of the east by going west. What Columbus found was America (although he himself always believed he had landed in Asia; thus he named the inhabitants Los Indios). Thereafter the American colonists were concerned primarily with immediate matters of survival, but the hope somehow to touch Asia going westward was never entirely subdued. As early as the seventeenth century some British American colonists recognized the commercial possibilities of trade with China and India, and with the arrival of independence in 1783, American merchants sought worldwide markets. The famous Empress of China departed from Philadelphia in February 1784, thus beginning the China trade of a newly independent United States. Less well known is that soon thereafter the two-hundred-ton United States also weighed anchor from Philadelphia. Destined for China, the ship went instead to India, the first American ship to call there.

Between 1784 and 1815 between thirty and fifty American ships called annually at Indian ports, and many thousands of people in New England grew dependent on the India trade for their livelihood. In the first thirty-five years of the national existence of the United States, the value of the Indian trade probably exceeded that of the China trade. Some towns, like Salem, Massachusetts, were transformed by the trade with India.⁸

By at least the early 1790s some of these ships were also stopping in neighboring Burma, where they traded with the independent Burmese kingdom years before the British presence was significant. Initially the trade was almost entirely in teak. Trading in Burma could be dangerous. In 1793 King Bodawpaya commandeered one of Elias Haskett Derby’s ships, Astrea, for his war with a neighboring kingdom; the captain and one officer became hostages until Bodawpaya’s troops were successful.⁹

Trading for teak remained the primary American commercial interest in Burma for many years. In the latter part of the nineteenth century American petroleum interests tried to enter Burma, but the British successfully resisted, and after a quarter of a century John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company gave up in a rare defeat. Herbert Hoover was more successful. In 1904 he learned of a long-abandoned Chinese silver mine in northern Burma and decided to revive it. After nearly a decade of frustration, the Bawdwin Mine was a considerable success, due to Hoover’s energy, audacity, and driving commitment. A very few other American commercial interests were also present in Burma, with Coca Cola establishing a presence there in1927. But generally speaking American economic relations with British Burma were, as Warren Walter Darkow put it, merely casual.¹⁰

More Americans knew about Burma because of the presence of the Baptist missionaries. The founder of the mission, Adironam Judson, and his wife, former party girl Ann Hasseltine, were not originally Baptists. Judson, in fact, was an important figure in founding in 1810 the American Board for Commissioners of Foreign Missions, a Boston Congregationalist organization that became the foremost American Protestant missionary society in the nineteenth century. The American Board wanted Judson to go to India. The Judsons went first to Calcutta where they were met by the famous British Baptist missionary William Carey, whom Judson greatly admired. The British were hostile to American missionaries, however, nor did they want them in Burma because of their tense relations with that country. The English missionaries also advised against going to savage Burma, so the Judsons left Calcutta and made their way to Madras, also a part of British India. In June 1813, fearing arrest there, they took passage on the first available boat, the Portuguese bark Georgiana, which, by chance, was going to Rangoon. The boat was unseaworthy and nearly shipwrecked along the way, but they landed in Rangoon in July 1813. In the meantime Judson had concluded that the Baptist view of the sacrament of baptism was the correct one and consequently severed his relationship with the American Board. In 1814 the Judsons became official missionaries of the American Baptist General Convention for Foreign Missions.¹¹ Thus began the remarkable Burma Baptist Mission, the most influential American institution in Burma well into the twentieth century.

The Baptists were not the first Christian missionaries in Burma. Portuguese and Italian Roman Catholics had preceded them by over a century. For the most part the Catholics were tolerated and treated well, though (and perhaps because) they had few converts. Among their most notable representatives was Father Vincentius Sangermano, whose knowledgeable accounts of Burma are still cited. An English Protestant mission, which included William Carey’s son Felix, was founded in 1807. Like some Catholic missionaries, Felix Carey won favor with the court at Ava, even receiving a title from the king for his services. But the British missionaries had little success and were happy to turn the their work over to the Judsons.¹²

FIGURE 1. Herbert Hoover Jr. and his baby brother Allan Hoover with their nurse and rickshaw driver in Burma, 1907. Courtesy of Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum. Photo 1907-01.

During his first six years in Burma Judson devoted his energies to learning the language and translating religious texts. In 1819 he founded a guest house on the outskirts of Rangoon, began to preach, and achieved his first conversion from among the few curious Burmese who stopped by to hear him. King Bodawpaya tolerated the mission, but in 1819 his grandson, Bagyidaw, succeeded him. Bagyidaw was less tolerant of non-Buddhist religions, and when in 1820 Judson formally requested permission to preach Christianity, an angry Bagyidaw banished him from the kingdom. Judson hung on in Rangoon, however, and the following year, when Dr. Jonathan Price, a Baptist medical missionary famous for his delicate eye surgery, arrived, Bagyidaw invited him to Ava and Judson was the interpreter. This time Judson’s reception was much friendlier, and the king even gave him some property for a church.

With the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26) the missionary presence in Burma became difficult. Judson and other missionaries were accused of being spies and imprisoned for twenty-one months in very harsh conditions in Oung-pen-la Prison.¹³ In 1826, however, Judson and Price helped negotiate a peace agreement that included the cession of significant amounts of territory to the British. The missionaries were delighted to be under British protection, and the latter were pleased with the missionaries’ contribution to the peace. Thereafter the attitude of the British toward the missionary presence in Burma was highly positive. However, Bagyidaw was also grateful to the missionaries for ending the war and invited them to remain in Ava. Price did so, and the king honored him with a Burmese title for his services to the crown. Judson, on the other hand, worked with the British to establish their capital, Amherst (now Kyaikkami). Rangoon remained in Burma proper (that is, non-British Burma). Judson moved his mission headquarters to Amherst and offered a prayer of thanks for the rule of civilized authority and Christian toleration.¹⁴

For the immediate future, then, the American Baptists conducted most of their work in British Burma. Judson completed his famous Burmese-English dictionary in1826 and his Burmese translation of the Bible in 1834. More missionaries arrived, and missionary schools and medical clinics increased. The missionaries were incredibly dedicated and planned to live their entire lives in Burma, but for many years they had few converts.

Meanwhile in Burma proper the situation for the missionaries deteriorated after Bagyidaw abdicated in 1837. His successor, Tharrawaddy, banished all missionaries from Ava, and not surprisingly the missionaries welcomed the second British attack on Burma in 1852. Assisted by many Christian Karens (or Kayins)—one of the major ethnic minorities in Burma among whom the missionaries achieved many conversions—the British quickly annexed Pegu, a royal city and an area rich in rice cultivation.

Perhaps as a result of British successes, the new king, Mindon, like the Siamese rulers, decided that he must modernize his country and open it to Western influences if he was to be able to resist the British. He very much wanted to establish diplomatic relations with European countries and the United States and in 1857 engaged an American Baptist missionary, Eugenio Kincaid, to lead an official Burmese mission to the United States to deliver a letter to the president. Accompanying the mission was a delegation of Burmese men whom Mindon hoped to enroll in American institutions to learn engineering and shipbuilding.

James Buchanan responded to Mindon in the first communication to a Burmese ruler from an American president, expressing the hope that Burma’s sovereignty would not be further diminished. Mindon received the letter with great ceremony. He also wanted the United States to establish a consulate in Mandalay and urged the missionaries to encourage this. But the American Civil War intervened, and nothing materialized from this early contact. In any event, during Mindon’s reign the missionaries worked in Burma proper with relative freedom. His successor, Thibaw, was less solicitous, and the missionaries were glad when the British defeated him, completing their conquest of Burma in 1885. In general, although the missionaries were sometimes tolerated and even established friendships with high-level Burmese officials, in the nineteenth century they never felt secure in Burma proper and supported British efforts to expand their rule.

The missionaries’ impact on the majority Burman population was limited in terms of converts. Prior to World War II only about 2 percent of the entire population was Christian, and most of these were among the minority populations. About 20 percent of the Karens, for example, were Christians. The missionaries probably contributed to a sense of Karen nationalism, and much of the Karen leadership was Christian. Burma scholar John Cady asserted that Baptist work with the Karens and Kachins had brought about an amazing transformation of these peoples. The missionaries may also have had a broader, if indirect, influence on the majority Burman population, particularly through their many schools. By World War I the Baptists alone were operating 708 schools, and in 1920 their Judson College merged with an existing government college to create Rangoon University (today Yangon University). Cady believed that Burmese concepts of popular sovereignty, local self-government, and democracy came in part from the democracy of the Baptist congregations. Cady, who sought Christian overseas service and taught history at Judson College from 1935 to 1938, may have overstated the importance of the missionaries. But their influence should not be underestimated either.¹⁵ Louis Walinsky, who served in Burma for several years in the 1950s as an economic adviser, wrote in 1962 that the missionaries were quiet, self-effacing, dedicated people who … lived close to the people they served so well. Their schools and hospitals were of the best, and they were held in high regard.¹⁶

During World War II Burma was important to the United States primarily because it was one of the few routes into besieged China. Because the Japanese were in control of the Chinese coastline, in 1937 China began to construct a road to Burma—an heroic engineering feat, with the Chinese constructing the road with their fingernails. Opened in 1939, it was a lifeline to the Chinese forces, though not one of importance to the United States until May 1941 when the Americans began to supply Lend Lease equipment to China.¹⁷ Responding to Japanese demands, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who considered the Asian theater of minor importance, closed the Burma Road in July 1941; but three months later he opened it knowing that this would please the Americans. The increased shipments of goods resulted in congestion and delays, but by late 1941 strong American intervention had improved the situation significantly.¹⁸

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 Japanese forces swept quickly through all of Southeast Asia, including Burma, which was important to Japan as a barrier against Allied attacks into Southeast Asia and also as a launching point for a possible invasion of India. Americans were involved in the immediate resistance to the Japanese, with General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers air force, based in Rangoon, delaying the Japanese long enough for the British to distribute fifty thousand tons of Lend Lease equipment to their ground forces. General Joseph Stilwell, then assigned to Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Chongqing (Chungking), was given command of Chinese and American troops in the Burma theater. The first foreigner since Marco Polo to command Chinese military forces, Stilwell had the job of keeping China in the war. All of this was complicated by the fact that Burma remained a British responsibility, and Chinese forces in Burma were also under the command of Sir Harold Alexander.

In March 1942 Rangoon fell to the Japanese, and the Allied forces began a difficult and costly retreat. Stilwell wanted to counterattack, but the British were committed to a scorched-earth withdrawal toward India, and Chiang would not permit the use of his forces, despite Stilwell’s theoretical command. Stilwell was frustrated. As he put it, he had been struggling with the Chinese, the British, my own people, the supply, the medical service…. Incidentally with the Japs.¹⁹ After the Japanese took the northern Burmese city of Lashio in April 1942, Stilwell joined the retreat and walked out of Burma, along with Gordon Seagrave and his Karen and Kachin nurses.²⁰ By the time Stilwell reached the safety of Imphal, India on 20 May, the Japanese had completed their conquest and closed the Burma Road. The only remaining supply route into China was the hazardous trans-Himalayan air route.

Stilwell resolved to reopen the Burma Road, but it took nearly two years before he could launch a major offensive. This was due largely to Burma’s low priority from the British perspective. The Americans thought Burma was important to their goal of keeping China in the war and ultimately prevailed—though only after alternative strategies, such as diverting supplies to Chennault’s air force in China, failed. The appointment of Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten as Supreme Allied Commander in the region (with Stilwell technically his deputy) was also instrumental in equipping an invasion force to retake Burma. Administratively, Stilwell was in a nearly impossible position, with responsibility to Mountbatten, Chiang Kai-shek, and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. After many delays, however, the Allied offensive began in January 1944. Among the American forces Stilwell commanded were the famous three thousand Merrill’s Marauders. Like the British Chindits, the Marauders were involved in long-range penetration movements. In August the Allies captured the important north Burma city of Myitkyina after a brutal seventy-two-day siege.

The one force that was unambiguously under American command was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Detachment 101. This clandestine unit began with only 21 men who arrived in Burma in June 1942. By July 1945 there were nearly 1,000 Americans in the unit, as well as 10,000 hill people. Initially concentrating on intelligence gathering, late in 1943 under Lt. Col. William Peers’ leadership Detachment 101 developed a guerrilla warfare capability. The unit contributed significantly to the Myitkyina campaign. For the remainder of the war it engaged mostly in guerrilla operations.²¹

After Myitkyina the Japanese were on the defensive. In January 1945 the Ledo (or Stilwell) Road opened from Assam, India through Myitkyina, Bhamo, and Namkham in Burma before connecting with the old Burma Road at Mong-Yu Junction near Wanting in southern China. There was now a supply line into China. On 21 March Mandalay fell to British troops, and in May they entered Rangoon. The war was over so far as Burma was concerned, but the country was devastated.

American interests in the war in Burma were of course entirely unconnected with the Burmese people themselves. But Americans viewed the ethnic minorities favorably, the result of long-time missionary work and their heroic assistance to the Allies, something Seagrave publicized in his books. The Burmans, on the other hand, were viewed with suspicion. An American report on the Burma campaign in 1942 commented there was a considerable pro-Jap element in Burma. Indeed, the Japanese were succeeding because the people provided them with intelligence. This was mostly because the Burmans disliked the British and hoped that the Japanese would give them independence. They take a very short view of things and it is doubtful whether many of them are awake to the ultimate issues or look far ahead, the report stated. Later the Americans reached similar conclusions about the Burmese during the Cold War, asserting that they did not fully understand the existential threat posed by the communists. The Buddhist monks were an object of particular suspicion. Most of the seditious and subversive activities takes place under cover of the yellow robes, the report asserted.²² President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed a famously low opinion of the Burmese, writing to Churchill in April 1942 that he had never liked the Burmese and was glad that Churchill had to deal with the likes of He-Saw, We-Saw, and You-Saw. Of course this came at a time when FDR was pressuring Churchill strongly over British repression in India, and perhaps he intended to soothe the prime minister’s feelings.²³

The fact that many important Burmese leaders, including the most important nationalists devoted to independence, joined the Burma Independence Army (later the Burma Defence Army and then the Burma National Army) and fought with the Japanese, hoping for independence, only enhanced American suspicions. Among these pro-Japanese nationalists were the future leaders of Burma including Aung San, U Nu, and Ne Win. Although they ultimately switched sides and joined the Allies, even toward the end of the war the president was uncertain about how we will handle that situation in Burma.²⁴

Overview

With the end of World War II, however, the United States had no choice but to grapple with that situation in Burma, and the subsequent discussion examines how it tried to do so. The first chapter treats the period after World War II until Burma’s independence in January 1948. In Burma, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the United States had to respond to the pressures of nationalists who were pressing for early independence— which the Americans favored for Burma, although not without ambivalence. They were nervous about Aung San, Burma’s emerging leader. He was young, had fought against the Allies, and had leftist political leadings. They also had a sympathetic understanding of the minority people, many of whom