Reginald Dorman-Smith

Rt Hon Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, [GBE]

Colonel Sir Reginald Hugh Dorman-Smith, GBE (10 March 1899 – 20 March 1977) was an Anglo-Irish diplomat, soldier and politician in the British Empire.

Early life and politics

Dorman-Smith was educated at Harrow School and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. After serving in the army, he continued his career with a strong interest in agriculture, becoming president of the National Farmers Union (the NFU) at the age of 32, and then later Minister of Agriculture. He was first elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Petersfield in the 1935 general election as one of a handful of MPs sponsored by the NFU and served as the Union's president for the following few years. As a MP, Dorman-Smith was a member of the English Mistery and its successor, English Array. English Misery was a mystical "back-to-the-land" movement that sought to discover the "lost secrets" of the English as way as bringing about some sort of neo-feudal political and social order.

In the late 1930s, the British Government's agricultural policy came in for heavy criticism from the NFU, Parliament and the Press and in January 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain took the bold step of appointing Dorman-Smith as Minister of Agriculture. In October 1939, Dorman-Smith instigated the Government's Dig for Victory campaign, aimed at increasing food production from allotments. However, when Chamberlain fell, Dorman-Smith was not included in the government of his successor, Winston Churchill.

Dorman-Smith was referred to in the book "Guilty Men" by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard (writing under the pseudonym 'Cato'), published in 1940 as an attack on public figures for their failure to re-arm and their appeasement of Nazi Germany.

Governor of Burma

Dorman-Smith was appointed Governor of Burma from 6 May 1941 to 31 August 1946, and was therefore in office at the time of the Japanese invasion - and was expelled from the country by the Japanese. Burma was a turbulent colony as the Bamar had never really accepted the British conquest of Burma and the Great Depression by collapsing the price of rice had devastated Burma's economy. The thesis beyond British rule in Burma was an implicit social contract under which the Burmese economy would grow in exchange for the acceptance of colonial rule; most Bamar took the viewpoint that the Great Depression had put an contract to the social contract, a viewpoint not shared by the British. The British historian Michael Leigh wrote: "Dorman-Smith was complicated. Urbane, thoughtful, and fair, he was prepared to defend the underdog and could be intensely loyal to his friends".

Dorman-Smith had a strong liking for the Burmese prime minister, U Saw (like most Bamar U Saw had only one name). He complained most of the Burmese politicians were corrupt, petty men who preached a highly chauvinistic version of Bamar nationalism. He especially disliked Ba Maw who had instigated bloody riots against the Indian minority in 1938, seeing him as a perfect example of the jingoistic Barmar nationalist. Dorman-Smith called U Saw a "true patriot" and a "likeable rogue" whose private army, the Galon, could be used for the defense of Burma. In October 1941, Dorman-Smith arranged for U Saw to go to London to discuss Dominion status for Burma with Leo Amery, the India Secretary, and Winston Churchill, the prime minister. The talks were inconclusive as Churchill met U Saw only once and while Amery told U Saw that nothing could be done about granting Burma Dominion status until after the war. On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the British empire. On his way home in December 1941, U Saw stopped by the Japanese embassy in Lisbon to offer his support for Burma joining the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. The British had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and were aware of U Saw's offer, leading for Amery to send a telegram to Dorman-Smith saying that U Saw had just committed "a treacherous act" and was to be arrested immediately upon his return to Burma. U Saw was arrested upon his arrival in Rangoon and was exiled to Uganda for the rest of the war.

The forces defending Burma were inadequate with the 17th Indian Division-which had been assigned to defend Burma-being considered one of the worse divisions in the Indian Army. Despite the fact that Thailand had allowed Japanese forces transit rights, British planners had assumed wrongly that the jungles on the Burmese-Thai border were "impenetrable", hence the decision to assign one Indian Army division and a particularly bad one at that to defend Burma. Burma had some of the most productive rice fields in Asia; was rich in oil, rubber and other raw materials; and the port of Rangoon was one of the largest ports in Asia which led the Japanese to make the conquest of Burma a priority. Furthermore, one of the central Japanese objectives to sever the Burma road which linked India to China, and by 1940 was the only route by which arms had reached China. The Japanese saw the conquest of Burma as the means to finally win the war against China which they had been fighting since 1937; by contrast British military planners in London did not seem to understand the Japanese obsession with severing the Burma Road and assumed the Japanese would not attempt an invasion of Burma from Thailand. Finally, reflecting the "Germany First" grand strategy, the Royal Air Force aircraft assigned to Burma were all obsolete, leading for the Japanese to have complete air superiority. Only the American Volunteer Group (AVG) under the command of General Claire Lee Chennault which on their way to China when the Japanese invaded were the only force capable of defending the skies above Burma as the AVG had modern aircraft, but even then the AVG was heavily outnumbered. On 23 December 1941 the Japanese bombed Rangoon for the first time and returned for a second time on 25 December 1941. Dorman-Smith and his wife, Lady Dorman-Smith, were forced to spent Christmas Day and Boxing Day visiting hospitals to offer moral support for those injured by the Japanese bombing raids. Outside of the Government House, the residence of the Governor of Burma, thousands of Indians gathered outside looking for his help in fleeing Burma.

The bombing of Rangoon was deeply demoralising to people of Rangoon. The bombing of Rangoon started a mass flight out of Burma, which was to hamper the defense of Burma and caused much suffering. During the invasion, relations between British civil and military officials in Burma were often strained, though Dorman-Smith had cordial relations with General Thomas Jacomb Hutton and General Archibald Wavell. Dorman-Smith appointed a "civil defense expert" to manage the refugee problem strained relations with the British officers who charged that the expert was ignorant, and many officers complained that massive columns of refugees on the roads hindered their ability to move troops and supplies forward to the front. On 20 January 1942, the Fifty-fifth Division of the Imperial Japanese Army based in Thailand invaded Burma and proved adept at using jungle trails to bypass the Indian troops. General Sir John Smyth, the GOC of the 17th Indian Division, thought that the Japanese would aim for Rangoon and stationed most of his forces in southern Burma; in fact, the Japanese were more concerned with severing the Burma Road and invaded northern Burma, which caught the British off-balance. Dorman-Smith came to serve as a scapegoat for all of the failures of British policy in Burma in 1942, with the journalists blaming him for the loss of Burma.

Burma was a highly multicultural and diverse colony. The business and commercial life of Burma was dominated by Indian and Chinese merchants who were extremely unpopular with the Bamar majority who resented the economic success of the Chinese and Indian merchants. The results of the 1941 census were destroyed by a Japanese bombing raid. The 1931 census, which survives, reported of the 14, 647, 497 people living in Burma, 1, 017, 825 were Indians. Virtually all of the doctors in Burma under British rule were Indians, which fueled resentment by the Bamar; even more damagingly was the fact that virtually of the policemen in British Burma were Indians, which led the Bamar to identity the entire Indian minority with British rule. When the Japanese invaded Burma in January 1942, the Indian merchants were the victims of attacks by the Bamar who looted their homes and stores while "roughing up" the Indians. A delegation of the most wealthy Indian merchants visited Dorman-Smith to ask for his help in arranging protection for the Indian community, only to be told that there was little that could be done as most of the Indian policemen had deserted and fled back to India, leading to anarchy all over Burma. More out of fear of the Bamar than the Japanese, as the British retreated from Burma there was an exodus of the Indians in Burma into India. The flight of the Indians took place amid much suffering, and Indian newspapers frequently featured stories about the British placing the evacuation of British families ahead of the Indians, and that the British colonial authorities were generally indifferent to the plight of the Indians. Thousands of Indians died of heat exhaustion, starvation, disease or were killed by Bamar gangs while trying to walk though what were called Burma's "jungles of death" to reach the safety of India. Dorman-Smith came to face much criticism for the massive numbers of Indians who died while attempting to escape Burma. American newspaper correspondents covering the war in Burma were less bound by British censorship and were especially vocal in condemning Dorman-Smith for the mismanagement of the campaign and of the evacuation of the Indians. The war correspondent Leland Stowe of the Chicago Tribune was one of Dorman-Smith's most vociferous critics, whom he had lacerated in his articles as a bumbling buffoon hopelessly out of touch with reality, and gave him the unflattening nickname of "Doormat-Smith". Much of the rage of the American war correspondents and to lesser extent the British war correspondents as well was due to Dorman-Smith's tendency to put the most positive gloss on the news, which was sharply contradicted by the fact it was clear that the Japanese were winning in Burma.

As Governor, Dorman-Smith was forced to join the retreat out of Burma. Dorman-Smith wrote in the third person when he heard of the fall of Singapore in February 1942 that his "Mistery training stood him in good stead throughout the crisis and gave him the strength to carry on". On 1 March 1942, Dorman-Smith and his family fled the Government House in Rangoon to escape the advancing Japanese, and thereafter lived on the run on what Dorman-Smith called the "inglorious retreat" from Burma. Dorman-Smith later wrote that most people in Britain did not understand what it felt to be invaded, and that "only those who been the victims of an invasion can realise what it means to have a rutheless enemy ever pressing forward". The stories that appeared in the Indian newspapers about the British colonial authorities putting the evacuation of British civilians from Burma ahead of Indian civilians, and that thousands of Indians had died while trying to walk out of Burma caused a firestorm of criticism in India. Much of the coverage was based upon reality. The British population of Burma had tried as much as possible to segregate themselves from "the natives" before the war and even in the emergency of 1942 refused any kind of shared accommodation with the Indian community, insisting the buses, lorries, ships and aeroplanes that were to take them to India not have any Indians abroad.

On 30 April 1942, Dorman-Smith sent a telegram to Churchill asking him "to scrounge up a few more aeroplanes" to fly him and his family out of the jungle in Burma where they were staying to the safety of India. On 1 May 1942, Dorman-Smith received a telegram from the India Secretary, Leo Amery, saying that the News Chronicle had run a story saying the British colonial authorities had prevented Indians from boarding flights out of Burma and refused to allow Indian refugees to cross into India. Amery was due to face hostile questions about the News Chronicle story in the House of Commons on 7 May 1942, and he demanded Dorman-Smith either confirm or rebut the story. As Dorman-Smith was in the jungle with no records waiting impatiently to be flown out of Burma, he send Amery a rambling telegram noted for its grammatical errors that did not answer his questions. General Harold Alexander, the GOC of the British forces in Burma asked that Dorman-Smith leave Burma at once before he captured by the Japanese as he stated he did not want the governor's capture "to add to my anxieties".

Dorman-Smith's mood swung erratically from one option to another on a hourly basis as he declared he would stay in Burma until the Indians were evacuated; demanded that a plane be sent to fly him out; or that would walk out of Burma via the Hukawng Valley as a way of showing support for the Indians who walked out via the same route. Amery told him that walking out was a "crackpot" idea and Dorman-Smith was forced to concede the Hukawng Valley was "no route for obese governors". Finally, Dorman-Smith decided to "clear out by air", but expressed concern that he "took up a seat that could be used by a refugee". On 2 May 1942, he telegrammed Amery asking that for "a Blenheim [bomber] in India which be used" to allow him to escape. He seemed not to understand reserving an entire bomber to fly him might look worse than taking up a seat for a refugee. Dorman-Smith spent all of 3 May 1942 in Myitkyina waiting anxiously amid a tropical downpour while being assailed by mosquitos for an airplane to arrive to pick him up, saying he felt "thoroughly trapped" as no plane arrived and he was resigned to "capture by the Japanese" as the Imperial Japanese Army continued it's advance to Myitkyina. Very late on the evening of 3 May, what Dorman-Smith called "two RAF types" knocked on his door to tell him that they had been sent to fly him to India.. The officers had with them a letter from Churchill telling him that that he was to leave Burma at once as there was nothing for him to do. On 4 May 1942, the first anniversary of Dorman-Smith being sworn in as Governor of Burma in 1941, Dorman-Smith boarded a Blenheim bomber that flew him to India. On 9 May 1942, Amery sent another telegram to Dorman-Smith demanding answers to four "simple questions", namely what arrangements had Dorman-Smith made for the evacuation of the Indians from Burma; how many Indians had been evacuated since January; how were the Indians treated in the refugee camps along the India-Burma border; and what had happened to the Indian refugees who walked along the Tamu route to India? Dorman-Smith did not answer this telegram, and instead the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow replied on his behalf, to say that 40, 000 Indian refugees had been received since January. In his hideaway in the Burmese jungle, Dorman-Smith was haunted by a sense of guilt over the chaotic and badly managed evacuation of Burma.

Between May 1942 and Oct 1945, he was in exile at Simla, India. Dorman-Smith was sympathetic to Bamar nationalists and looked forward to the day when Burma would be granted Dominion status to join the Commonwealth. The Burmese politicians he chose to work in exile in Simla tended to the more moderate Bamar nationalists who saw Britain as a possible friend who help Burma after the war. Tin Tut wrote to Dorman-Smith in 1943: "that Burma will need a powerful friend [after the war] and where better can she find one than in an England who will prove her generosity and disinterestedness by the grant of Dominion Status?"

In April 1943 Dorman-Smith together with Amery met with Churchill to discuss the post-war future of Burma. Churchill committed himself to the restoration of British rule together with a promise of aid to rebuilt Burma, but refused to make further commitments such as Dominion status for Burma, claiming that the time was not right. Both Amery and Dorman-Smith believed that for Churchill the time would never be right and he intended Burma to be a British colony forever. On 1 July 1943, Dorman-Smith wrote to Amery: "I can not help thinking that it would be a bad thing politically actually to do away with the office of Governor of Burma, if only because it would be a welcome propaganda point for the Japanese who would doubtless use it to demonstrate either that we have given up all hopes of retaking Burma or that we visualise setting up a Military Government in Burma." In July 1943, Amery recalled Dorman-Smith to London for more meetings on the future of Burma. On 12 July 1943, Dorman-Smith wrote to Lord Linlithgow: "This home visit does not fill me with any great joy though it may serve the useful purpose of clarifying things a bit. But I am forced to wonder whether the position of a Governor without a country, whose country anyway has declared war on us does not in fact completely beggar clarification." Churchill was enraged by a speech Dorman-Smith had given in New Delhi where he said: "Burma belonged to the Burmese, and when the time came for full self-government, 'we must try to hand over the country for which we have done a good job of work!" Churchill wrote about Dorman-Smith's speech to Amery: "He seems to have been talking a lot of nonsense about our handing over Burma, etc. Let me have a full report of the speech." For his part, Paw Tun, the leader of the Burmese government-in-exile wrote to Dorman-Smith asking to press Churchill for a promise of independence, saying the recent statements about restoring Burma as a colony would "create a deep sense of despair" among the Bamar people. Paw Tun observed that the Japanese had created a puppet Burmese state headed by Ba Maw, and that many Bamar would conclude that the Japanese empire offered the Burmese more than the British empire. Tin Tut, another pro-British Burmese politician in exile in India, wrote to Dorman-Smith that most Burmese could see the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was a sham, but wanted the British to make a firm promise of independence after the victory over Japan. Tin Tut noted that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had given a firm promise that the United States would grant independence to the Philippines after the defeat of Japan, and wanted Churchill to make a similar promise for Burma. In October 1943, Dorman-Smith made a speech in London before the East Indian Association. His speech lamented the fact that while the British had talked for years about self-government and reform in Asia, they had delivered very little of it which had damaged their credibility. He said:

"Neither our word nor our intentions are trusted in that part of the globe ... We have fed such countries as Burma on political formulae until they are sick at the very sight and sound of a formula, which has come, as far as my experience shows, to be looked upon as a very British means of avoiding a definite course of action."

The speech said that pre-war British policy on these subjects was discredited and a new credible approach was required after the war. In March 1944, Dorman-Smith compared the Bamar to the Irish, writing that like the Irish the Bamar are ""a romantic people, fed from childhood on the pristine greatness of their country; superstitious...and very gullible but being mostly a nation of peasants they have the cunning and shrewdness of the eternal peasant...The honesty of their politicians and minor officials may be open to question but I have seen too much of the ways of politicians and officials in other countries to be over-shocked by such petty graft as went on in Burma." Extending his comparison, Dorman-Smith wrote that Burma had been conquered by the British in 1885 and the Bamar had never accepted British rule, writing "the fact is that they never really accepted our rule any more than the Irish accepted it...they never ceased to be ardent and active nationalists." He concluded the reason why the Bamar welcomed the Japanese as liberators in 1942 was because the British had lied to the Bamar too many times about possible independence, writing "we signally failed to rouse their enthusiasm for our cause".

Major-General Sir Hubert Rance, the British military commander, took control of the country for the military after the liberation of Rangoon, but Dorman-Smith returned as governor in 1946. Dorman-Smith considered arresting Aung San for a murder he committed in 1942. In that year, Aung San had stabbed the restrained headman of Thebyugone village to death in front of a large crowd. Dorman-Smith was convinced by his superiors not to carry out the arrest.

While Dorman-Smith was back in the UK for medical reasons he was replaced by Rance, who was supported by Lord Mountbatten of Burma and fully backed a policy of immediate unconditional independence for Burma under the leadership of the AFPFL.

Simla Conference 1944

As the Governor of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith met with Anglo-Burmese leaders in Simla in 1944, to discuss the future of the Anglo-Burmese community after the war.

The Anglo-Burmese delegates were:

• Mr. G. Kirkham
• Mr. H.J. Mitchell B.Fr.S.
• Mr. J. Barrington I.C.S.
• Mr. K.W. Foster B.C.S.
• Mr. E.A. Franklin I.C.S
• Mr. W.A. Gibson
• Mrs. K. Russell
• Mr. H. Elliott
• Mr. C.H. Campagnac
• Mr. J.A. Wiseham
• Mr. J.F. Blake

One result of the conference was an assurance to the Anglo-Burmese community that they would be allowed to preserve their freedom of worship and allowed to teach their own religion, freedom to continue their own customs, and maintain their own language of English.

After leaving Burma, Dorman-Smith continued to take an interest in its affairs. He believed that if London had not intervened, he could have influenced the course of events in Burma so as to prevent the country from leaving the British Commonwealth.

Family

Dorman-Smith was born to a Protestant Anglo-Irish father and an Irish Catholic mother at Bellamont House, Cootehill, County Cavan, Ireland, and was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. He served briefly in the British Indian Army before being invalided out, then joined a volunteer battalion of the Queen's Royal Regiment.

One of Dorman-Smith's two brothers, Eric Dorman-Smith, was a major-general in the British Army in the Second World War. After falling out with the British establishment, he became an Irish republican sympathiser and changed his name to Eric Dorman O'Gowan. His other brother, Victor Dorman-Smith, was a Royal Navy captain who served as a member of Combined Operations HQ during World War One.

His daughter Patricia married the novelist Gwyn Griffin in 1950.

Further reading

• Bayly, Christopher Alan; Harper, Norman (2004). Forgotten Armies The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945. Cambridge: Belknap Press. ISBN 9780674017481.
• Griffiths, Richard G (1980). Fellow Travellers of the Right British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9. London: Constable. ISBN 0571271324.
• Leigh, Michael (2014). The Evacuation of Civilians from Burma Analysing the 1942 Colonial Disaster. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781441163943.
• Pham, Julie (July 2004). "Ghost hunting in colonial Burma: Nostalgia, paternalism and the thoughts of J.S. Furnivall". South East Asia Research. 12 (2): 237–268. doi:10.5367/0000000041524734.
• Tarling, Nicholas (September 1982). ""An Empire Gem": British Wartime Planning for Post-War Burma, 1943-44". Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 13 (2): 310–348. doi:10.1017/S0022463400008729.
• Taylor, Robert H. 'Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith'. In Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to  East Timor. Santa Barbara, Ca.: ABC-Clio, 2004.
• Woods, Philip. Reporting the Retreat: War Correspondents in Burma, 1942. London: Hurst & Co, 2016, esp. chs. 2 & 9.

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Reginald Dorman-Smith
• Burma's history - data website