ABSTRACT
At Burma’s independence in 1948, the United States possessed few compelling ties with the country aside from the local educational and religious links formed through a century and a half of Baptist missionary work.1 US troops had fought in Burma during the Second World War, but their main aim was to open a land route to China rather than liberate Rangoon, and the Burma campaign was in any case always a distant second to the much more significant conflict in the Pacific. Burma had fallen, the Americans felt, through British ineptitude and arrogance, and the Burmese themselves scarcely merited rescuing from the Japanese. ‘I have never liked the Burmese,’ US President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Churchill in April 1942, ‘and you people must have had a terrible time with them for the last 50 years. Thank the Lord you have He-Saw, We-Saw, You-Saw under lock and key. I wish you could put the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice.’2
