4 - Showing the British Out (September 1945 to December 1947)

Summary

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Attributed to Sun Tzu

Not surprisingly, war and the threat of war, in all their varieties, punctuated the life of General Ne Win. After all, warfare is the trade of the military. War also creates strange alliances. Alliances of partners who have fundamentally conflicting goals place great strains on the relationships formed. These strains grow out of not only conflicting goals, but contradictory understandings of the history and nature of the societies from which and over which they are contesting, even if they are nominal allies. If the relationship between the Burmese Independence Army and their Japanese mentors deteriorated to disgust and then hatred in less than a year, the British and the Burmese had had thirteen decades to grow to dislike each other by the end of the Second World War. Ne Win, who had started his political career as an acolyte of one of the most radical nationalist leaders of the Dobama Asiayon, had now to serve under, take orders from, and accept the terms of service of the organization he had sworn to remove from his country, the British colonial state and its armed forces. However, conditions change as politics evolve, and while at the beginning of the next phase of Ne Win's career he may have felt he was working with his enemy, by the end he had learned to work with the British and even adopt some of their ways, if unwittingly.

In September 1945, Colonel Ne Win and other officers of the Patriotic Burmese Forces (PBF) were once more rebranded. From being officers of the Minami Kikanof the Japanese Imperial Army, to being officers of the Burma Independence Army (BIA), the Burma Defence Army (BDA), the Burma National Army (BNA), followed by the Patriotic Burmese Forces (PBF), they were sworn in as loyal officers of His Britannic Majesty's Army in Burma. Ne Win was Burma Commission Number Two, with Number One being Bo Let Ya. This was the result of decisions finalized at a conference held at the headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia, Lord Louis Mountbatten, in Kandy, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which was, in turn, required as a result of the earlier Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL) resolution at the Naythuyein meeting that Aung San had convened in August.