The Burma Wars: 1824-1886 (Conflicts of Empire)

by George Bruce

  Expecting the Burmese to make a lightning attack during the confusion, Campbell ordered the drums to beat to arms for picquets to man the defence. At the same time companies of men ran off at the double through the surging smoke and the showers of sparks to try to stop the blaze reaching the danger area.

  Exactly how this was done — by a human chain of water buckets, by thousands of men beating out the flames or destroying the flimsy houses and removing all timber from the fire’s path — not even the meticulous Snodgrass reported, but after two hours, the flames were ‘completely got under’, with only slight damage to military property — and the destruction of a quarter of the town.

  Surveying the smoking ruins — evidence of Bundula’s power — next day, Campbell determined to undertake the risky task of sending a force through the jungle to Kokeen after him as soon as possible, which was two days later, 15 December. He must have realised that the time had come for him to regain the initiative, despite the risks.

  They were considerable for, first, with their numerical superiority, excellent sources of information and perfect knowledge of the jungle, the Burmese might overcome Rangoon while many of his troops were away assailing the Kokeen stockade. Secondly, he would have to march this force through the winding jungle footpaths where the Burmese snipers, from trees and thicket, could knock out hundreds of his men long before he reached Bundula’s stronghold. Finally, he would have to order his troops to attack without artillery a fieldwork stronger than any they had yet faced, for they could take only one or two light guns.

  But he had no choice, and early on 15 December, having left about 3,000 men to hold Rangoon and the Shwedagon he moved out against Bundula in two columns, the right of 340 men, British and Indian, under Brigadier-General Cotton, and the left, 800 strong, under his personal command. Cotton’s force was to make a detour and attack from the rear, while Campbell’s took them from the front. Surprisingly, Bundula’s troops made not one attack on them during their short march north.

  The Burmese position was of great strength, made up of two large stockades on either flank connected by a central trench. Each wing was some 400 yards long by 200 broad, and projected far beyond the centre. It was found to be defended by about 20,000 men. Campbell later reported that Bundula had thus shown ‘a judgement in point of position such as would do credit to the best-instructed engineers of the most civilised and warlike nations’. As for the reaction of the British troops, Snodgrass noted grimly that ‘they well knew there was no retreating, and that no choice was left between victory and an honourable grave.’

  On emerging from the jungle they were met by a hail of rounds from hidden positions in nearby trees. At once Campbell ordered the signal guns to be fired to warn Cotton that he was about to attack, and hearing the reply while his men were deploying he launched the assault in two columns, one against each wing, while Cotton’s force escaladed the high stockade walls with practised skill, drove back the enemy with disciplined volleys then went in with the bayonet. Cotton’s division, especially HM’s 13th, suffered heavy losses while exposed to the enemy’s fire when storming several entrenchments in front of the main work. Finally, it too burst in and after some twenty minutes’ close fighting the Burmese defenders dropped their arms and fled into the jungle.

  Snodgrass was there to take careful note of the scene. ‘The interior of the stockade, as well as the ditch,’ he observed, ‘were strewed with dead and dying, and many of the enemy, who found escape impossible, with the never-failing cunning and ingenuity of their nation, besmeared themselves with blood, and lay down under the dead bodies of their comrades, in the hope of escaping when darkness set in, but they were mostly discovered, and made prisoners.’

  It was a quick victory, but the British paid dearly for it, in relatively heavy losses of 136 killed or wounded, the 13th regiment alone losing 11 officers and 51 men. The navy’s always active Lieutenant Kellett, on board the Diana steamboat, had attacked the enemy’s war-boat flotilla nearby during the fighting and by clever tactics captured 30 boats, including one gilt one mounting three guns, and destroyed many others, numbers of them loaded with ammunition and food for Bundula’s forces.

  These successive defeats of Bundula’s troops before Rangoon changed the entire trend of the war, in so far as they crushed, for the time being at least, the Burmese hope of driving the ‘rebel foreigners’ from Rangoon and destroying their army. Bundula’s shrunken forces retreated to Danubyu and he merely placed troops on the Hlaing and Panhlaing rivers to slow down the enemy advance. This coincided with the arrival of land and water transport for the British. So now that the way seemed open Campbell prepared to advance north and dictate peace terms within King Bagyidaw’s ‘golden city’ of Ava.

  7: VICTORY IN THE BALANCE

  Everything improved for the British after Bundula’s retreat from the Rangoon area. Burmese men, women and children, many exhausted and half-starved by unceasing forced labour on stockades, with little to eat except wild plants, straggled back into Rangoon from the jungle by the thousand every day. They willingly exchanged their own authorities’ ferocity, which included capital punishment for even trivial offences, for the wild foreigners’ decency and goodwill — and despite all its detractors, British rule did replace harsh tyranny by benevolent paternalism, a not inappropriate system for the day.

  Never a race to lament for long, the Burmese set to work energetically to rebuild their charred homes and take up their trades. Remarkably soon, Rangoon came to life again. Its merchants opened a bazaar, and soon venison, fish, fruit and vegetables on sale there improved the army’s diet. Beef the Buddhist religion forbade the Burmese to sell, but they had no objections to the sale of beef on the hoof. Many Burmese enlisted as drivers for the army’s supply department wagons, which, with 1,700 draught oxen, had arrived from India. Boatmen too came forward, though not enough of them until the good pay and friendly treatment proved an attraction.

  A steady flow of shipping from Calcutta and Madras with provisions and reinforcements gave the campaign new zest. The British were cheered by the arrival of HM’s 47th two squadrons of horse artillery, two of cavalry and a rocket troop, evidence that, far from being forgotten, the campaign was meant to be fought to a finish quickly. Campbell still hoped that the final dispersal soon of the Burmese forces at Danubyu might persuade King Bagyidaw and his counsellors to sue for peace. In January the delta country over which the army would have to march to reach the Irrawaddy and Danubyu was still too wet for the movement of artillery, even with the oxen teams now ready. Campbell decided that they should advance by 10 February and if peace did not follow a victory at Danubyu, in the short season before the next rains, they should be able to reach Prome, over 200 miles north and about a third of the way to Ava.

  A force of 3,000 local troops under the tough Lieutenant-Colonel Richards had since October been driving the remaining Burmese units out of Assam, in the north, whence they had not long ago threatened India. In high rugged country, the campaign there was exhausting, but a team of ambitious and energetic young British officers under Richards had completed the task and except for tribesmen’s occasional raids into the province, by the end of January India’s north-eastern frontier was secured.

  It was no less important to secure the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal, mainly Arakan, and for this purpose was assembled a force of 11,000 including four British regiments,[42] commanded by Brigadier-General Morrison and aided by a naval force which included some 80 small gunboats. After conquering Arakan, it was expected that Morrison would be able to follow in the footsteps of Bundula’s army and cross the formidable mountain range, the Arakan Yomas, into the Irrawaddy valley, and there link up with General Campbell. No less ambitious, a force of 7,000 under Brigadier Shuldham, had been assembled on the Sylhet frontier with the task of marching through Cachar and Manipur, then turning left and threatening Ava from the north.

  In face of the rout of Bundula’s forces that Campbell’s army had achieved, it wou
ld seem that the British were now blindly over-doing it, faced at the same time by very sketchy knowledge of both climate and terrain. And these were the real enemies. Shuldham, struggling with heavy artillery and long ponderous columns of red-coated infantry up and down the ridges of forested mountains which continually crossed his road, floundering through mile after mile of deep mud worsened by heavy February rains, losing camels and elephants by the hundred in trying to keep his roadmakers and advance guards in provisions, had to give up by the end of March and report to Calcutta upon the campaign’s impracticability.

  Then occurred an event which underlines the power of knowledge of terrain and of simplicity in military operations. The Rajah of Manipur, dethroned by the Burmese, pleaded with Shuldham to be allowed to do the job himself with a mere 500 of his own men armed with British muskets and bayonets. Shuldham eventually agreed and the Rajah’s force left Sylhet on 17 May, accompanied by Lieutenant Pemberton. After a hard march over the forested mountains in constant rainfall, they reached the western boundary of Manipur, with great difficulty, on 10 June. A Burmese garrison in Manipur town fled on their advance to a position about 10 miles south. When the Rajah and Pemberton advanced to attack for the second time the Burmese again withdrew. They were then driven from the province entirely. Leaving a number of troops and armed inhabitants to defend the town, if necessary, Pemberton and the Rajah returned to Sylhet, arriving on 22 June.

  A few ‘undisciplined mountaineers’, as Wilson, the contemporary historian of the campaign calls them, had thus, at little expense, won this important campaign. Knowledge and simplicity — it was a lesson, to digress, which the Americans in Vietnam were slow to learn, nearly 150 years later. No echo of it informed General Morrison’s campaign in Arakan in 1825 and the outcome was a military disaster. He marched along the new road south from Chittagong in January with his force of 11,000, heavy artillery and a supply line with camels, elephants and oxen that trailed behind for nearly fifteen miles.

  At Cox’s Bazaar, eight miles south of the ill-omened Ramu, ignorance of the terrain began to baffle him. Numerous creeks and rivers stretched between him and Arakan. He had to decide whether to follow the coast and transport his entire expedition across where the rivers had become wide estuaries; or to wheel east and cross them higher up where they were presumably easily fordable.

  Morrison’s problem was not knowing whether any usable tracks ran east, but he did know that he would face mountains and forests which his infantry might cross in reasonable weather, but not his artillery or the heavily loaded pack animals. So he chose the coast.

  Fortunately, the British political agent had assembled large numbers of small boats, barges and rafts at Tek Naaf, about eight miles from the coast, where the river Naaf was some five miles wide. A detachment having crossed in them to Maungdaw and ascertained that there was no enemy and that the local people were friendly, Morrison ordered the entire force that had reached the bank by then to be ferried across. It was twelve days from 1 February to the 12, before it was safely over and ready to march on, but the baggage, stores, pack and beef cattle, camels and elephants were still on the other side, hundreds of them not yet having reached the river.

  Worse was to come. Morrison left a senior officer with two squadrons of cavalry and two batteries of guns at Maungdaw to protect the rest of the crossing, while he divided his force into two, one to go by sea and the other by land, for the next stage, to Mayo. The land column reached its destination by 22 February, but the one at sea met with a violent storm which sank some of the freight boats and forced the others to put back to shore. Eventually, it arrived on 27 February and in this complicated way the entire force, except for nearly all its pack animals, was assembled at the mouth of the great Arakan river ready to march on by 24 March.

  More similar problems faced Morrison, but the climate at this time was favourable, the troops were in good shape and supplies were plentiful. By 1 April he had taken Arakan city, in the fighting for which he lost only 23 killed and about 177 wounded. He then sent Brigadier-General Macbean south by water to occupy Ramree Island and Sandoway, on the coast lower down, where there was no resistance.

  Morrison had thus effectively taken possession of Arakan; and this should perhaps have been enough, but the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor-General in distant Calcutta wanted his entire army now to march over the Yoma mountains to link up with Campbell, on the Irrawaddy. It was the most formidable task of all and the prospect of it with the rains approaching must have shaken even the unflinching Morrison. First, between Arakan city and the foothills of the Yomas lay eighty miles of steaming jungle, then another ninety miles of rugged mountains and precipices across which guns, elephants and camels could be taken only with enormous difficulty, and at a very slow pace.

  Sensibly, Morrison formed a reconnaissance column of six companies of British and Sepoy infantry, commanded by Major Bucke, and shipped them some eighty miles south to Dalek with orders to march thence to Talek and reconnoitre the Talek Pass, instead of, for some reason, the Aeng Pass, which was the normal trade route between Burma and Arakan.

  On 19 May Bucke and his small force made their first tiring march up a steep, narrow and stony track. Then up a stony path, mostly wide enough for only one man, they climbed for the next three days. By the evening of the third day many of both British and Sepoys were either sick or exhausted, while those of their pack animals which had not tumbled down the mountainsides were too weak to go any farther.

  They were now within two days’ march of the Burmese frontier. For Bucke, high up among these windy wastes, it must have seemed that the prize was within his grasp, but it was to be snatched away. News came in on the 23rd through his native scouts that a hostile post lay ahead. Bucke made plans to overcome it with a night attack, but shortly before it the scouts returned with the news that a strong enemy force straddled the road a few miles ahead; two of his guides had been shot and two made prisoner.

  Bucke’s small force was in no shape to embark on what could well turn out to be a long and hard fight. He prudently decided to retreat and quickly put as many miles as he could between his troops and the Burmese. Further misfortune now caught up with him. On the plain the rains had already begun, and malaria with it. Before Bucke rejoined Morrison the majority of his men had caught what seems to have been a virulent form of it and had died.

  Morrison and his troops in Arakan were no better off. Malaria and dysentery had struck them and the climate worsened the incidence. During July and August 103 inches of rain were measured, while often the temperature fell quickly from 92 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit and then up again.

  The troops, imprisoned in bamboo huts with nothing to do in the steaming tropical heat but drink rum or arak, took to drunkenness, which, inevitably, made their condition worse. Dysentery and malaria reached epidemic proportions and up to the end of September, when all but small garrisons in the healthier Cheduba and Ramree Islands, and Sandoway, were withdrawn, 600 British troops out of about 1,500 had died and 900 Sepoys out of a total of 8,000. Some 400 British and 3,600 Sepoys were in hospital. Morrison contracted malaria and was invalided home to England, but died on the voyage.

  Such was the outcome of the Government of India’s blind ordering of the army into this unknown tropical hell.

  Upon Campbell alone now rested the heavy task of bringing the campaign to a victorious end. Maha Bandula, apparently much affected by the disgrace of his defeat at Rangoon, had concentrated a fairly substantial force at Danubyu, which was already strongly fortified. Campbell had first to overcome this before beginning his advance north in two columns, one by water and the other by land. Had he possessed enough transport animals he might instead have advanced upon the capital by the shortest and best road, through Pegu and Toungoo, which would have enabled him, as well, to turn all the Burmese positions on the Irrawaddy; but for supply he was in every way dependent upon the river, so it was impossible. The plan he adopted, however, made no allowance for the defence of the
parallel valley of the Sittang. Britain’s allies, the Siamese, were therefore requested to advance upon Toungoo, though it was unlikely that they would do so.

  Under his personal command, Campbell took the land column, made up of 1,300 British infantry, a thousand Sepoys, two cavalry squadrons, a troop of horse artillery and the rocket troop. Twelve to fifteen days’ provisions for this force was the most the available pack and wagon transport could carry, and this only by cutting out those small food and drink luxuries to which in India officers and men were accustomed. (Sometimes these were considerable. An officer in Afghanistan in 1840 confessed that his regimental mess had two camel loads of the finest Manilla cigars!)

  Campbell’s force was to advance parallel to the Hlaing river and then follow the Irrawaddy, linking up with the river-borne column before it reached Danubyu. Commanded by Brigadier-General Willoughby Cotton, this consisted of 800 British infantry, a small battalion of Sepoys and powerful batteries of heavy artillery, carried in a flotilla of 60 boats. Captain Alexander, RN, commanded these, escorted by the men-of-war Satellite, Diana, and the Prince of Wales and a number of smaller craft. A third force, which Major Sale commanded, was to sail by sea for Bassein, about 100 miles west of Rangoon, take possession of it then, leaving a small garrison, try to assemble enough land transport to cross north-east some sixty miles of swampy delta country to Danubyu.

  Campbell’s column moved off on 11 February with high hopes that at last they were about to subjugate an empire. They reached Hlaing without incident, and re-loaded the provision wagons from the boats which had followed up river. But instead now of turning west, as arranged, so as to reach the Irrawaddy below Danubyu to meet Cotton, Campbell went on north and passing east of Danubyu eventually reached the river nearly fifty miles above it at Tharrawaw on 2 March. From here he intended to march on a hundred miles to Prome, expecting to be joined somewhere en route by Cotton and the river column.