The Japanese surrender in Burma

On 27 August 1945, at Government House in Rangoon, the former residence of the British Governor of Burma, officers of Admiral Louis Mountbatten’s staff held talks with a Japanese delegation sent by Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi, commander of the Southern Expeditionary Army Group. During the night of 27–28 August Lieutenant General Takazō Numata, Terauchi’s chief of staff, signed a preliminary surrender agreement, and on Mountbatten’s behalf it was signed by his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Frederick Browning.

Describing this day as “the surrender of the Japanese armies in Burma at ceremonies in Rangoon” needs qualification. The Rangoon agreement was not the surrender of a single army but a preliminary agreement covering all of Terauchi’s forces in South-East Asia – from Burma to Malaya, Sumatra and southern Indochina. The formal surrender in the region came only on 12 September 1945 in Singapore, and the Japanese forces in Burma itself handed over their arms and swords at separate ceremonies over the following weeks. Japanese sources date the signing of the document to 28 August, while the talks had been going on since 26 August.

Burma in August 1945

The war in Burma had in practice been decided since May. After the capture of Meiktila and the British occupation of Rangoon on 3 May, General Heitarō Kimura’s Burma Area Army withdrew eastwards across the Sittang river to Moulmein (Mawlamyine) and Tenasserim. General Shōzō Sakurai’s Japanese 28th Army, cut off in the Pegu Yomas, tried in July to break out eastwards across the Sittang. The crossing of a river swollen by the monsoon, under fire from British and Indian infantry, artillery and aircraft, turned into a massacre; according to British estimates the Japanese lost more than 10,000 men killed, drowned and dead of other causes, while British losses were counted in tens.

From May the fighting in Burma was conducted by General Montagu Stopford’s Twelfth Army, formed from the headquarters of XXXIII Corps. General William Slim’s Fourteenth Army headquarters had returned to India to prepare Operation Zipper – a landing on the west coast of Malaya planned for September. Slim, appointed Mountbatten’s land forces commander, was to conduct this campaign from his new level of command. Japan’s surrender thus caught South East Asia Command (SEAC) in the midst of preparing its next offensive rather than carrying it out.

After Hirohito’s broadcast of 15 August and the ceasefire order of 16 August it was not certain whether the armies far from Japan would comply. According to Japanese accounts, Prince Haruhito Kan’in flew to Saigon, where Terauchi had his headquarters, to convey the Emperor’s will in person. Terauchi, who only a few months earlier had been preparing the defence of Malaya and Singapore, agreed to obey the order.

MacArthur’s ruling

On the same day, 15 August, in accordance with the decisions taken at Potsdam, SEAC’s area of responsibility was enlarged. In addition to Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Thailand and Sumatra, Mountbatten took over the rest of the Dutch East Indies, including Java, as well as Indochina south of the 16th parallel. General Order No. 1 confirmed that it was to him that Japanese forces in this area were to surrender. Mountbatten demanded that Terauchi send plenipotentiaries to Rangoon.

SEAC’s plans were upset by General Douglas MacArthur. As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, he stipulated that no commander of an Allied theatre could accept a local surrender or land in Japanese-held territory before the instrument of surrender had been signed in Tokyo. The ceremony was first set for 31 August and then, because of a typhoon, postponed to 2 September. Mountbatten and the British accepted the ban with irritation: it meant extra days of waiting for tens of thousands of prisoners of war and internees in camps in Malaya, Thailand, Sumatra and Java, many of whom were utterly emaciated. In these circumstances the meeting in Rangoon could only prepare the way for the Allied entry, not settle the matter.

Talks at Government House

The Japanese delegation flew into Mingaladon airfield near Rangoon on 26 August. Its aircraft, painted white and marked with green crosses in accordance with Allied instructions, were escorted by British fighters. The delegation was headed by Lieutenant General Takazō Numata and Rear Admiral Kaigye Chudo, who represented the Japanese navy in the region. The British received them coolly and kept their distance: the delegates were there to hear the terms and supply the information demanded, not to negotiate.

On 27 August talks continued at Government House. The British side demanded above all information: maps of minefields in the approaches to the ports and in the Strait of Malacca, the dispositions of Japanese units, depots and airfields, and especially the locations of prisoner-of-war camps and the numbers held in them. The Japanese were to provide the prisoners with food and medical care, admit Allied relief teams to the camps and halt all troop movements without SEAC’s consent. The agreement allowed Allied minesweepers to begin clearing shipping lanes even before the formal surrender.

When the talks ended, during the night of 27–28 August, Numata signed the document and affixed Field Marshal Terauchi’s seal to it; Browning then signed. The ceremony was filmed and photographed by British military crews – and it was these pictures that gave rise in the press to the image of a “surrender in Rangoon”.

From Rangoon to Singapore

The Rangoon agreement allowed relief operations to begin almost immediately. Leaflets, food and medicines were dropped over the camps, and paratroopers and doctors of the RAPWI organisation (Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees) jumped into them. Once the instrument of surrender had been signed in Tokyo Bay on 2 September, the Allies were free to move in: on 4–5 September the British entered Singapore, and on 9 September Operation Zipper began – the landing on the coast of Malaya, now carried out without a fight.

On 12 September, in the Municipal Building in Singapore, Mountbatten accepted the formal surrender of all Japanese forces in South-East Asia. Terauchi, who had suffered a stroke, could not attend; General Seishirō Itagaki signed on his behalf. Terauchi himself surrendered his swords to Mountbatten in Saigon at the end of November, and died in Malaya in 1946.

In Burma the soldiers of the Burma Area Army, scattered east of the Sittang, in Tenasserim and in Moulmein, were disarmed and concentrated in camps. Over the following months Kimura and other Japanese commanders in Burma surrendered their swords to British generals at separate ceremonies; Slim, as he recalled, insisted that Japanese officers hand over their weapons in person in front of the soldiers who had defeated them. In accordance with British practice, the Japanese were not formally prisoners of war but “Japanese Surrendered Personnel” (JSP), which allowed them to be employed on clearance and reconstruction work; most returned to Japan in 1946–1947. Kimura, formerly Vice-Minister of War, was sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and executed in December 1948.

Significance

The events in Rangoon brought to a close the Burma campaign, the longest land campaign of the Pacific War, fought since the Japanese capture of Rangoon in 1942. It cost the lives of tens of thousands of British, Indian and African soldiers and, according to various Japanese tallies, some 140,000–190,000 Japanese soldiers, most of whom died of starvation and disease; the people of Burma also suffered enormous losses.

The surrender did not, however, restore the old order. In Burma the Anti-Fascist League led by Aung San, whose forces had gone over to the Allies in March, demanded independence; Ba Maw, who had collaborated with the Japanese, fled to Japan. In September it was agreed at Kandy that Aung San’s forces would be incorporated into a new Burmese army, and in January 1948 Burma gained independence. The Rangoon agreement of 28 August was the first step in this transition: for the first time in the region, the Japanese submitted to the instructions of the command that was soon to take over authority from Burma to Java and southern Vietnam.