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Although the siege of the Admin Box was broken by late February, plenty of Japanese troops in the area chose to fight to the death rather than surrender. “They were in a pitiful state… they were starving and disease-ridden… but they still fight,” Norman Bowdler of C Squadron marvelled. The tanks sortied out with infantry to clear remaining Japanese positions. Bowdler remembered that the Japanese along Ngakyedauk Pass had built “damn great bunkers… cleverly sited, just around the bend. You wouldn’t see it until you got round the bend and by then it was too late and they were firing at you.”

On 25 February 1944, a dozen B Squadron tanks rumbled up the dirt road from the Admin Box. Tom Grounds wrote, “As this was a journey and not a battle, the tank commanders did not close down the hatches on the turrets but kept their heads out.” The Lees increased their speed around Tattenham Corner where a very well dug-in Japanese anti-tank gun was still active. John Leyin’s tank passed Clive’s near there. Just past the curve Leyin’s crew got “an urgent wireless” signal that Clive’s tank “was in serious trouble.” Leyin’s tank halted and he ran back. Leyin wrote: “The crew had just laid the body of its tank commander, Sergeant Branson, in the shade beside the tracks of the tank as we got there.”

Clive had been standing partly out of the hatch for navigating when a Japanese shell blasted “the whole of the back of the sergeant’s head completely away, leaving a pulpy red mash, a sight so terrible it numbed the senses,” Leyin recalled. “How it must have affected the 37 millimetre gunner and his loader, when his body, with the back of his head a gruesome blood spouting mess, fell into the turret and across them, as it must have done, is beyond comprehension. Indeed, I tremble as I write this.”

Woody Guthrie’s guitar was famously painted with “This machine kills Fascists.” That was literally true of Clive’s Lee tank. It dealt death to soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army fighting for the wrong cause, but human like him. Now it was Clive’s turn. An instant death, traumatic as hell for his comrades but a clean shot.

In the midst of Tony Gilbert’s recollections of the Spanish Civil War, recorded by the Imperial War Museum (IWM), he turns to his reunion with Clive in the Admin Box: “I used to wave to him every morning as the tanks went forward to try and clear the Pass, and wave joyfully when they came back about an hour or two later.” Decades later, Gilbert’s voice breaks a bit as he continues, “And one terrible morning Clive’s tank didn’t return. That was a terrible sad loss because he was very gifted, both painter and poet. As well as being a very convinced Socialist.”

Noreen compiled Clive’s World War II letters in a book, British Soldier in India, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1944 with an introduction by Harry Pollitt who quoted “one of [Clive’s] mates” from the Army: “He now lies buried somewhere among the green-covered hills, but he has left us a high idea of the meaning of human dignity and the immortality of life.” Graham Stevenson’s Encyclopedia of Communist Biographies quotes Clive’s commanding officer at the Admin Box: “He was a very gallant man in action.” The May 1944 issue of The Volunteer for Liberty had Clive smiling in uniform on the cover and a lengthy obituary ending with a friend’s words: “I shall always think of Clive as a model of how to live.”

After temporary burial near where he fell, Clive’s body was transferred to Taukkyan War Cemetery in Rangoon (Yangon). His grave marker, unfortunately lacking a hammer and sickle, is inscribed with “Clive Branson, Who, above all, wanted friendship between the British and Indian people.” His ideal of a worldwide proletarian revolution might be the proper epitaph. India was undeniably important to him, and Noreen ended the book of letters with a note sent to her by “Clive’s Indian friends”, whom he’d seen “the evening before he left for the front”, mourning him as a “cheerful and kindly comrade” and “the valuable friend of the Indian people he has always been.”

Clive never returned home to things he wished for: an artist’s studio, a chance to write the history of art, or to teach his daughter Rosa to paint. Would he have become an ex-Communist, appalled at Stalin’s purges like many pre-war CPGB members? Or perhaps he might have turned into a hardcore apologist for that? Would he have just made art? World War II artists often turned afterwards to peaceful subjects, producing pictures of flower markets and happy seasides.

In December 1943, with Noreen working perilous shifts as an air raid warden and Clive heading to the frontlines, Clive wrote, “If anything should happen to either of us, never say, ‘It is finished.’ For we have both lived for one purpose, the emancipation of the working people.” Noreen stayed Red, writing the two-volume History of the Communist Party of Britain. Rosa has had a long career as a painter of hyper-realist montages depicting the work of charity organisations. She incorporated references to her father’s life and death in some of her paintings.

During World War II, Bernard Stevens, a young Marxist British composer and soldier, wrote a Symphony of Liberation, dedicating it “to the memory of Clive Branson, killed on the Arakan front 1944.” I found someone in the Czech Republic with a CD recording to sell. In ‘Enslavement’, the first movement of Stevens’ Symphony, a melodic oboe gets overwhelmed by furious strings, horns and timpani. ‘Resistance’ is short, with the string section building barricades or taking up guns. ‘Liberation’ starts out ambiguously: is it mourning the price of freedom? Then it turns triumphant: brass blaring, some clarinet, crowds of strings and a final heroic fanfare of everything, including more timpani.

British Soldier in India was reviewed in The Daily Worker by playwright Sean O’Casey who called it “the best book that the Communist Party has given us” and suggested, “not only Communists, but young artists should read this book, too. Its enthusiasm is very infectious.” The book was mentioned in a radio broadcast by E. M. Forster (author of A Passage to India) as “pro-food and economic reconstruction on communist lines.” Richard Knott’s The Secret War on the Arts (2020) features Clive as one of several leftist artists and writers harassed by British Intelligence agents. He mentions that novelist Doris Lessing read the book of Clive’s letters and “empathised with Branson’s anger and intensity.”

Clive’s letters remain important source material on the Bengal Famine and Indian anticolonialism, cited in books and lectures by historians including Madhusree Mukherjee and Yasmin Khan. On a February 2022 Times of India podcast, Abhilash Gaur expressed his appreciation of British Soldier in India, remarking “After browsing through Branson’s letters, I wanted to salute him. And believe me, you will too.”

In 1933, Clive and Noreen had helped establish the Marx Memorial Library where their archives are now held. Clive’s archive preserves sketches, poetry and notebooks full of unpublished essays. David Lomon, the last known surviving British International Brigades volunteer, visited the archive in 2012 to view his San Pedro portrait by Clive.

The Tate has five of Clive’s paintings, viewable on their website. A 2018 Tate show Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One included Clive’s ‘Portrait of a Worker’. Rosa owns many more of her father’s paintings. New attention for Clive’s art arrived with the exhibition Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War at Pallant House Gallery, 2014-15. Several works were displayed: Battersea scenes, prison camp landscapes, San Pedro prisoners and ‘Noreen and Rosa’.

Death spells

Besides those bayoneted or blown up in the Admin Box, the Allies who came to Burma to die included tens of thousands more British, Indian and Gurkha casualties. African soldiers of the 14th Army. Chinese troops of X Force. Commandos in long-range penetration units like British Chindits and American Merrill’s Marauders, pilots and crews crashing while flying over the Himalayan ‘Hump’ from India to China, intelligence officers, local guerrillas, road builders. World War II Burma was even more of a death trap for the Japanese invaders, bamboo thickets or hill bunkers hiding their bones far from home.

Arakan in particular was a place to die. ‘The Royal Inniskillings’ was painted by Anthony Gross at Donbaik. David Graves, son of British World War I poet Robert Graves, was blown to pieces at Donbaik. In 1942–43, Arakan was the setting for the worst inter-ethnic conflict of World War II Burma, when Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, loyal to different sides, acted out their own version of the war with massacres that left an estimated over 60,000 civilians dead.

I learned about Arakan and how it had become Rakhine State of Burma (Myanmar) when I was in Bangladesh in 1991. In Chittagong, Cox’s Bazaar and along the Naf River I listened to the festering memory of 1942–43 and the ceaseless repression by Burma’s military regime. While I was there, a cyclone struck, killing 139,000 along the Bangladesh coast in one night. I met the first families of Rohingya refugees who had arrived just before the cyclone and I wrote the first newspaper story about the refugee influx. They were followed by an estimated 250,000, languishing in Bangladesh until most were starved back to Burma.

Decades of forced population shifting, rice confiscation and land grabs kept Rakhine State’s ethnic groups mired in poverty and rivalry. In 2012, Rakhines attacked Rohingyas, who tried to fight back but ended up permanently interred in wretched camps around the state’s main city, Akyab (Sittwe). Raids by a new Rohingya armed group in 2016 were the pretext for “clearance” attacks on Rohingya civilians by the Myanmar military, whose leader was General Min Aung Hlaing. Then, in August and September 2017, Min Aung Hlaing dispatched Light Infantry Divisions 33 and 99—notorious for their brutality—to eradicate Rohingya villages. Over 700,000 Rohingyas fled the genocidal rampage of massacre, torture, rape and village burning, seeking safety in neighboring Bangladesh. The Admin Box battlefield had long ago reverted to rice paddies when Rohingya villages around the area were depopulated, trampled into boneyards and ash fields in 2017.

Conflict rippled through northern Rakhine State and adjacent southern Chin State in 2019 as the Myanmar military fought the Arakan Army, a predominantly Rakhine force. Then, as I began researching Clive’s death in Arakan, a new disaster hit Myanmar. On 1 February 2021, General Min Aung Hlaing, not satisfied with power-sharing with an elected government, staged a coup d’etat. The military regime this attempted to install is fascist—a descriptor, not just an epithet. Resistance to it has been unified, urban and rural, across ethnicities. Poets and painters, the kind of people Clive might have enjoyed knowing, helped build a nationwide movement which went from creatively themed mass marches to more Hong Kong- or Portland-type barricade protests with shields and helmets. But as the coup came from the barrel of a gun and the mind of a megalomaniac general, protests became yet another way to die in Myanmar.

Because unarmed protesters were being shot in the streets or tortured to death in prisons, People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) formed with improvised and captured weapons. These guerrilla fighters soon held their own against the coup forces, even though they were outnumbered. Clive would have approved. It was not unlike the Spanish Civil War, with armed resistance defending legitimate representatives against a fascist coup. With Chinese and Russian aircraft, the Myanmar coup regime used airstrikes against civilian targets, as the fascists had in Spain.

There has unceasingly been armed conflict in Burma (Myanmar) since World War II, with the ethnic groups who had supported the Allies or Japan never really reconciled. The new PDF volunteers fought remarkably well alongside more seasoned ethnic fighters. Ever-increasing numbers of the coup regime’s soldiers defected. Many others died from Improvised Explosive Devices or the rifles of skilful snipers. Some were left dead in the mud for us to stare at on our electronic screens.

While this was going on, as well as doing what I could to publicise and support the resistance, I was learning about tanks, because that was what Clive did and I didn’t know enough about them. So I watched Humphrey Bogart command a Lee in Sahara and Pitt command a Sherman in Fury. Online videos took me inside a Lee and the firing turret of a contemporary US Army M1A2 Abrams. On a rural road in Idaho I examined a demobilised M1 Abrams, its 105 millimetre gun aimed squarely at some RVs across the road.

At night, via social media, I would track the halting progress of truckloads of Myanmar coup soldiers in convoys led by tank-like EE-9 Cascavel armoured vehicles (90 millimetre guns, wheels instead of tracks.) Photos showed the convoys slowly winding their way into Chin State on mountain roads. I knew those roads from a trip researching environmental issues in 2016, I knew the towns and villages the coup forces would shell and burn. Chin National Army and Chinland Defense Force guerrillas harassed the convoys. From the other side of the earth I wished death upon those EE-9s as hard as any Yankee Sherman crew ever wished destruction on a Nazi Panther.

I’m writing the end of this essay in Astoria, Oregon, a port town with a long history of worker organising. One wall of the rented flat is wallpapered with large drawings of moths. Straw shopping baskets like the one in Clive’s still life are placed on the floor. Nearby, The Magic Shop—this being the kind of town that has a magic tricks emporium—displays a large apparatus labelled ‘Hindu Basket Trick’ in its window. Lionel Branson wrote about this classic act in his book Indian Conjuring: swords thrust into a container holding a boy, who would then emerge unharmed. I thought of the magician’s young assistant, contorted to avoid thrusting blades. I thought of Clive, the son of the conjuror, peering through the slit in his tank, casting spells of death, throwing fire.

I walked along the riverfront to a historical marker about the founding of the Indian expatriate Ghadar Party, “often considered the beginning of the 20th Century Indian independence movement” at a 1913 meeting in the nearby Finnish Socialist Hall. According to the sign, “Ghadar became an international anticolonial resistance movement” and “the meetings here helped to set in motion the events that finally led to [India’s] self-governance and freedom.” The Labor Temple bar/diner was closed so I got lunch at a nearby food cart, Surf 2 Soul. This seems like Clive’s sort of place.

I open British Soldier in India to 25 July 1942: Clive in his birthplace, Ahmednagar, writing, “What times to be living through—how incredibly lucky we are to witness millions and millions of people getting up off their knees before Gods, Kings, ‘Leaders’ and Empires—to stand upright as men and women. How very small one feels, and yet how very happy to be one of them.” This reminds me of the old Socialist and Anarchist slogan “No Gods, No Masters” and young people daring to march in Myanmar with red-and-black flags, “There is No Supreme Leader” scrawled on their banner.

The twenty-first century heirs to the Spanish Civil War International Brigades legacy, especially the Anarchist component, are the volunteers who fought the vicious Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with the Kurdish anarcho-leftist Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG). In his combat memoir Desert Sniper, Ed Nash, a British volunteer, wrote that “when people ask me why I went to fight Daesh, I am, to be honest, baffled. How can any sane person not oppose such evil?” Like Noreen’s “It was perfectly clear.”

In February 2022 the government of Ukraine called for foreign volunteer soldiers to fight the Russian invasion. A new International Legion emerged quickly as an array of fighters who didn’t have to be asked twice packed their camo gear—avowed antifascists among them. Talk of the Spanish Civil War, complete with Auden quotes, was in the wind again. Tank warfare hit the news, turrets blown off Russian T-80s by Ukraine defenders with NLAWs and Javelins, tanks bogged down, tanks abandoned, tanks aflame. German tanks reappear, still named after jungle cats: the Leopards.

Meanwhile in Myanmar the forces rising up against the coup regime’s tanks and Russian aircraft don’t have enough weapons for their own recruits, let alone foreigners. International statements of “concern” have not translated into arms for the resistance or even help for refugees. But I believe the people of Myanmar will prevail and I look forward to returning, with some red roses for Clive’s Taukkyan grave.

Clive Branson has not been celebrated in the usual historical figure ways. As yet I know of no novel about him, no documentary film, no tweed-and-khaki BBC mini-series, no art monograph. But in the most fitting tribute, could there not be a Clive Branson Brigade of antifascists somewhere?