Thailand And The Fall Of Singapore

A Frustrated Asian Revolution

Nigel J Brailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000314465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Focusing on the period between 1932 and 1968, this comprehensive study bridges the gap between recent political studies and available historiography, which generally conclude with the 1932 revolution. Dr. Brailey discusses the 1942 Japanese capture of Singapore that dragged a reluctant Thailand into World War II—a war Thai leaders believed was irrelevant to their national interests. He argues that this country, which had launched one of the East's earliest nationalist revolutions, had its political development reversed for a quarter century by the arrival of Japanese troops. Ironically, the Japanese presence in the region enabled most of Thailand's neighbors to promote their own development through decolonization. Dr. Brailey demonstrates that Thailand, once freed from post-war trauma, achieved a level of political freedom unsurpassed in Asia without seriously compromising its stability.

Part One
Thailand and the War

1
The 24 June 1932 Coup

Before dawn on 24 June 1932, a small group of Thai army officers arrived outside the cavalry barracks in Bangkok. They comprised the mastermind of the incipient coup, Phraya Song Suradet (personal name, Thep Phantumasen), chief instructor in military affairs at the Army Academy, several of his associates at the same institution, Phraya Phahonphayuhasena (Phote Phahonyothin), usually shortened to Phahon, Deputy Inspector of Artillery, and a number of juniors from the cavalry barracks, of whom the most important was a Luang Thatsanai Niyomseuk. (Military officers holding the rank of Phraya were usually colonels; Luang equated to captain or occasionally major.)

Although the group must have been in a state of extreme tension— their plot had been postponed from eight days earlier, several participants had been in hiding ever since, and they could all recall the fate of a forerunner in 1912—the surprise of their attack was total. The cavalry's arsenal was broken into and its armoured cars and small tanks armed, while the commanding officer, Prince Phanuphan, was held under duress by Song's closest friend, Phra (Lieutenant-Colonel) Prasat. According to Song, the private soldiers offered the same unquestioning obedience to officers of other units as to their own, the NCOs were probably afraid of putting a foot wrong and endangering their livelihood, and the officers, many of whom had trained under Song at the academy, simply put their trust in him. However, Song later asked rhetorically why the cavalry, like so many after them, cooperated so meekly with the conspiracy: "Was it because these NCOs and officers agreed with the revolution? No! None of the officers, NCOs, and privates knew anything. Since their birth they had never witnessed or known how a revolution was staged and for what purpose. They were all puzzled, full of curiosity. And this was the main reason for the success."¹

In fact, this indicates no more than the opportunity for rebellion. Sufficiently prompt counter-measures by the ruling regime of King Prachathipok, backed by the full force of the Bangkok garrison, several regiments strong, should have enabled it to isolate the conspirators and overawe them into surrender. Even the emergence of the as yet hardly committed cavalry on the streets of the capital should have set the alarm bells ringing in the Defence Ministry.

But this is where Song's brilliant strategy played its part. In the first place, two of the civilian conspirators at the Posts and Telegraph Department, Prayun Phamonmontri and Khuang Aphaiwong, made a vital contribution. Through them, according to another participant, "By 5 A.M. on the day of the Revolution, he [Song] succeeded in disrupting all communications-trains could not move, telegraph and telephone lines ceased to work."² And the previous day, Song had arranged that a couple of infantry battalions commanded by acquaintances of his should take all their experienced second-year conscripts to the Royal Plaza, facing the Ananthasamakhom Throne Hall at the head of Rachadamnoen Avenue, at 6:00 A.M., supposedly to attend an anti-tank demonstration organized for the Army Academy's cadets. This provided the necessary cover for the conspirators to lead the cavalry too out of their barracks, the non-combat personnel transported aboard the trucks of the Artillery Regiment whose commander, Phraya Rit, had been awaiting the appropriate moment to join in. At the Plaza, the various units were cunningly mixed up. And when Phraya Phahon, as the conspiracy's titular leader, jumped up on a tank and proclaimed the revolution in favour of democratic government, the enthusiastic cadets were quickly joined even by their confused seniors in a universal shout of the patriotic cheer, "Chaiyo!"

Thus began the process of "radiation of involvement and checkmate" as a similarly organized coup seventeen years later was described.³ Song's strategy served to exploit what by now must have been a glaring gap between the army's loyalty to the new military system that the absolute monarchy had created over the previous three decades, and to the regime itself, a gap widened by the regulars' fear for their future in a time of financial retrenchment. Once separated from their commanders, "safety first" and "look after number one" considerations ensured at worst for the conspirators a merely passive response to events. However, further forthright moves maintained the momentum. Most senior loyalist officers were easily rounded up, along with Supreme Councillors Princes Damrong and Narit, and removed to the Throne Hall which was converted into the revolutionary headquarters. Both senior princes responsible for the army recently linked with the navy, Defence Minister Sing and Chief of Staff Alongkot, were absent from Bangkok, but Defence Under-Secretary Major-General Phraya Prasertsongkhram was persuaded to cooperate. Most of the city's other garrison regiments were gradually concentrated, detachment by detachment, at the Plaza. And while certain senior police officers managed to collect at the palace of the Interior Minister and heir-apparent, Prince Boriphat, the latter was apparently so dumb-founded at the news that he was able to give no effective lead, and they were all duly picked up by Phra Prasat when he arrived at the head of an armoured column.

Characteristically, Commerce and Communications Minister Prince Burachat was the sole important government leader in Bangkok on the morning of 24 June to escape the conspirators' clutches, seizing a railway locomotive and driving it down the 200 odd kilometres to seaside Hua Hin to warn the king. But he might have saved himself the trouble. Prachathipok had already obtained some news by radio, and received at midday, by Lt. Commander Suphachalasai's gunboat Sukhothai, an ultimatum from Song and Phahon demanding a constitutional monarchy. It is normally represented as striking him like a bolt from heaven, resolving in a flash his maze of conflicting prejudices and ideals. However, knowing that many of his relatives were being held hostage against his response was doubtless also a major influence. He declined to entrust his safety to the warship, but returned to Bangkok the same evening by rail,⁴ and on the 25th, received a deputation of the leaders of the new regime, bearing a copy of the provisional constitution that the young Foreign Ministry official and concurrent law professor, Dr. Pridi Phanomyong, had been assigned to prepare for his signature.

Awareness that a constitution had been under consideration by the absolute monarchy regime prior to the coup was sufficiently general for the King now to be able to pose as a frustrated democrat, only too willing to collaborate. But according to Prayun, one of the new regime's delegates, he did find cause at once to object to Dr. Pridi's use of various Soviet-style terms in the document, such as "People's Committee" for the new regime's answer to the absolute monarchy's Supreme Council. And it then emerged that neither Phraya Song nor probably most of the other new men present had pre-read the draft which they had expected to be based on the British system of government. Song then in fact offered profuse apologies to the King and a promise to amend the offending sections, and outside the palace, fiercely condemned Pridi's behaviour in insulting fashion, according to Prayun, the origin of the subsequent "irreconcileable rift" between the two men.⁵ Two days later, however, if only on a temporary basis while a revised permanent version was considered, the draft was accepted after all by the King. And it was its prompt promulgation that instituted the "Era of Constitutionalism" proper in what was soon to be transformed from old Siam into new Thailand.

Why, when so unlikely an affair, and the product of such highly ingenious and chancy planning, did the coup succeed so easily? It was certainly not a truly popular seizure of power, and many of its principal actors were devoid of populist convictions. As a transfer of power, it was only to be secured by a further coup of June 1933, and the repulse of an attempted counter-revolution in October of that year. The final explanation of its victory over the monarchy, whose prestige was to remain at an all-time low for the rest of the constitutional era proper, through to 1946, and thereafter, must lie with the monarchy itself, its utter bankruptcy during its last "absolute" days, both politically and morally. Right up to the eve of the revolution, it retained a deceptive aura of strength, but by then it amounted really to a house of cards. Topped by an unconvincing and indecisive sovereign, whose very accession had been symbolic of dynastic decline, the regime had become demoralized, and the initiative beckoned to any who had the nerve to seize it, almost whatever the means.

A fairly typical assessment of Prachathipok, last of the absolute monarchs, is that of Pierre Fistié: "At once feeble of character and full of good intentions, profoundly honest, liberal in ideas and temperament, he showed himself incapable of imposing his views on his entourage." Or again: "Arriving on the throne full of inexperience and modesty, his first desire was to please the princes of the royal family in reversing the methods of his predecessor."⁶ And he also describes Prachathipok as the "Louis XVI of Siam," struggling vainly to make good the excesses of his brother, Wachirawut's Louis XV.

By contrast, B.A. Batson's recent detailed studies of the reign represent a rather more sentimental view of the absolute monarchy. He has attempted to portray even Prachathipok, the diminutive last-born of King Chulalongkorn's enormous family, as a diligent, strong, and perceptive enough ruler, caught up in a very difficult era: "A moderate man in an immoderate time."⁷ And he cites in support, the apparent early success of his policies in restoring the state finances, and the evidence of wide-ranging and extensive discussion of political reform, largely initiated by the King himself. The Supreme Council, a new advisory body composed of experienced senior princes, was set up to revive honesty in government, and Chulalongkorn's Privy Council revitalized as a debating committee. And although the impact of the world depression on Siam's foreign trade forced further economies, principally bureaucratic retrenchment, recovery was already becoming apparent before June 1932, just too late to eliminate the discontent that fuelled the coup, but in time to add undeserved impetus to that movement. For Batson, the so-called "revolution" of 1932 is merely a "distorting filter" of Prachathipok's earlier efforts, giving a "negative and in part misleading picture." And he questions "whether anyone in his office could have succeeded in achieving the kind of peaceful, gradual, and limited political change Prajadhipok desired."⁸

But it is precisely those aspirations that are most in doubt with regard to the reign. Even a British diplomat quoted by Batson described it as "the return to Chulalongkorn."⁹ And although Prachathipok was an admirer of the pace and character of his father's reform programme of the turn of the century, and his supporters doubtless felt similarly, any such inclinations ran counter to the underlying reactionariness of his regime. One has only to consider the circumstances which brought him to the throne to comprehend his eventual fete. Invalided out of the monkhood some years before, where he had been marked to become, in due course, his uncle Wachirayan's successor as Prince-Patriarch, he had remained a reluctant candidate, and in his own eyes, even a "dark horse." But King Chulalongkorn's efforts to establish an unlikely Western-style male primogenital succession system in what was still a polygamous royal family had been at once doomed with the failure of his eldest surviving son by a chief queen, Wachirawut, to produce in turn a male heir of any sort.¹⁰ In any case, both these kings, Chulalongkorn and Wachirawut, had retreated from strict principle in the form of their various edicts and reported wishes supporting preference, irrespective of age and experience, for the offspring of Queen Saowapha over those of Chulalongkorn's other two surviving queens. Wachirawut had backed Prachathipok, his only surviving younger full brother, by name.

But such instruments, far from being binding after their authors' deaths, probably rather confused the question.¹¹ In 1925, when Wachirawut died, Prachathipok was effectively outranked in line of succession by two elder half-brothers, Boriphat and Mahidon, also chao fa "celestial" princes, and, according to Western reckoning, should equally have ceded precedence to the young sons of two of his eider, deceased full brothers.¹² And if Mahidon, like his child half-nephews, lacked governmental experience, and was also a notorious eccentric, Boriphat was eminently well-qualified, and according to Prachathipok himself, at the time the "only High Prince with any reputation."¹³ In acknowledgement of this, and as evidence of his own sense of unsuitability, Prachathipok apparently offered to stand aside in Boriphat's favour; the latter, notwithstanding his own evident ambition, reportedly declined to accept and offered Prachathipok his full loyalty.

In explanation of this outcome, Batson cites the views of the contemporary British Financial Adviser, Sir Edward Cook:

Most of the Thai elite had not been anxious for Boriphat to become king— the older generation because they feared that he would be too strong and overbearing, and the younger, foreign-educated generation because they wanted an end to absolute rule. These, accord...