Aung San

Aung San raised an army with the Japanese, turned it against them, negotiated Burma's independence from Britain, and was shot with most of his cabinet six months before it arrived, at thirty-two. He was born in 1915 at Natmauk in the dry zone, the son of a lawyer, and at Rangoon University led the student strike of 1936 with U Nu, took the title Thakin - master, the word Burmese used for the British - that the nationalist Dobama Asiayone adopted, and by 1938 was its general secretary. In August 1940, with a warrant out for him, he stowed away to Amoy looking for Chinese communists and was found instead by Japanese intelligence, which took him to Tokyo. He came back in 1941 with the Thirty Comrades, trained on Hainan, and marched in with the Japanese invasion at the head of the Burma Independence Army. The occupation gave Burma a nominal state in August 1943 under Ba Maw with Aung San as minister of war, and taught him within a year that it was worse than the empire it had replaced. He founded the Anti-Fascist Organisation in secret in August 1944 with the communists and the socialists, and on 27 March 1945 turned the Burma National Army on the Japanese as Slim's Fourteenth Army came down the Irrawaddy. Mountbatten took him as an ally; the returning governor wanted him tried. In September 1946 the governor made him deputy chairman of the executive council, which was the premiership without the name, and in January 1947 he signed with Attlee in London the agreement that promised independence within a year. At Panglong on 12 February the Shan, Kachin and Chin leaders agreed to join a federal union on his word that they would have autonomy and the right to leave, a promise the state that followed did not keep. His league won the April election almost entirely. On the morning of 19 July 1947 gunmen in army uniforms walked into the Secretariat and shot him and six ministers at the council table; U Saw, the pre-war premier who had hired them, was hanged. Burma became independent on 4 January 1948 under U Nu. His daughter Suu Kyi was two.

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