Any of you WWII buffs familiar with "The Karen's of Burma"?
Burmese people from the Karen Hills area who fought valiantly during WWII.
"In the main, World War II was fought along racial lines. For the Burman majority, it was nothing less than an uprising for national liberation. For much of the war, however, ethnic Burmans appeared to be fighting on a different side than the ethnic minorities. It was to Imperial Japan that the independence hero, Aung San, and the "Thirty Comrades" traveled for military training, and more than 3,500 volunteers were armed by the Japanese in the Burma Independence Army (BIA), which entered the Karen hills from Thailand at the end of 1941 in the footsteps of the invading Japanese 15th Army.
The Ethnic Minorities
Seen from the perspective of Burma's minorities, the war appears in a very different light. Most were to fight on the Allied side. For example, some 12,000 Karen and Karenni in the southeast joined the British-trained Karen Levies, or underground Force 136; these units were to be perhaps the most effective of all the Allied forces in Burma, inflicting more than 12,000 fatalities on the retreating Japanese armies during 1945. For their loyalty to the British, however, they were to suffer grievously. It was the Indian community, some 500,000 of whom fled the country, who suffered the heaviest loss of life at the hands of Burman nationalists. But in communal attacks on Karen villages in the Delta, the Official Report for Myaungmya District alone put the Karen death toll at 1,800 villagers. In the eastern hills hundreds more were killed-again, many eyewitnesses still recall, at the instigation of BIA.
Eventually in the Delta community leaders on both sides tried to stop the killings, and two battalions of Karen troops, led by San Po Thin and Hanson Kyadoe, joined BNA-but the damage had already been done. Many Karen leaders say they had already decided the future safety of their people was now dependent on an independent Karen state, something they claim British officers repeatedly guaranteed throughout the war. During the hasty British withdrawal from Burma, however, such promises were quickly forgotten. But for one former Karen leader, Saw Marshall Shwin, who was tortured by the Japanese after being turned in by BIA, the years have not lessened the pain. His heartfelt testimony is still enshrined in the Frontier Areas Committee of Enquiry of 1947. In 1987 he told this writer, "The British probably forgot us a long time ago, but what they did to us at Burma's independence has proven a very bitter, a very tragic experience for the Karen people. I told the enquiry what we wanted was real autonomy and I told them of so many atrocities committed by Burman soldiers against Karen villagers during the Second World War, but they didn't listen. I still don't know why."
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Burma and World War II
For the rare outside visitor today it is perhaps hard to imagine that Burma, one of the most secretive and isolated countries in the world, was also one of the most violent theaters of conflict in the entire history of World War II. The country was to witness scenes of the most appalling death...www.culturalsurvival.org
I have sadly and shamefully neglected the Japanese occupation of south east Asia beyond the American theatre of operation. There is so much history there and in China with the Japanese that gets overlooked.
