Britain, the United States and the end of civilian government, Conclusion

The litany of problems that confronted Burma at independence in 1948 was daunting in the extreme. The government’s writ barely ran further than the suburbs of Rangoon, and at times not even as far as that; beyond the capital, the small and ill-equipped army faced an array of communist, religious and ethnic insurgencies. The economy had still not recovered from the depredations of war and Japanese occupation, and internal communications had virtually collapsed. As one British official, former Assistant Commissioner Leslie Glass, rather unkindly joked: ‘like Dr. Johnson on the dancing dog, the wonderful thing is not that the Burmese Government is not functioning well, but that it is functioning at all’.1