Weller's War

by George Weller

  Quite without knowing it, the natives of the Shan States who responded to Stilwell's call for 10,000 guerrillas have been proving two things new in American history: that an American G.I., be he only a private bucking for pfc, can lead ably natives of all levels of civilization, from the most primitive Kachins to the Christianized, educated Karens; and secondly, that native guerrilla bands, operating in tropical country behind enemy lines, supplied, organized and commanded by Americans, can soften the advance of a mechanized army (here the British Imperial forces plus some Chinese troops) in a degree as great if not greater than similar underground movements of more intelligent and more patriotic partisans in the Balkans and Western Europe.

  None of the motives of Greece's ELAS, of the Chinese Communists, of the Philippine patriots have induced these strong-minded regionalists of eastern Burma to fight under the American flag. They are partisans only in the sense that they do not like foreigners. Especially they dislike the southern or lowland Burmans. What attachment the hill people feel toward the British is founded on appreciation for London's treating them separately from the rice-puddlers of the Irrawaddy delta. The Japanese, in setting up a puppet play of Burman independence, mistakenly played ball only with the Burmese of the Irrawaddy. Consequently the highlanders who eventually made up the American guerrillas distrusted Japan from the beginning. Besides, the Japanese gave two of the Shan States to Thailand. When American air power was infused into the campaign, making it possible to nourish British ground forces exclusively by parachute, doubt vanished. The people of the Shan States have an Asiatic inclination to be with a winner.

  When the first Americans leaped into empty air to muster these Burmans—whose tiny, flatchested women wear white shirtwaists all the time and smoke cigars in the middle of their mouths—the Japanese Imperial Army was the only force east of India. In France, the Low Countries and the Balkans, large and self-contained partisan armies already existed to meet in-dropping guerrilla leaders; in northern Burma there was only political paralysis. Thus the Jingpaw Rangers were an experiment not only in harassing the enemy from the rear, but in initiating and raising a hostile army right under his nose.

  The people of eastern Burma are not united even among themselves. The Karens and Kachins, the best fighting people, come from the extreme south and extreme north and can converse with each other only through the hated lingua franca Burmese. Many Karens are devout Baptists of the American sect. They do not fight on Sunday except under duress, because it interferes with the four or five services they like to hold on that day. The Kachins, on the other hand, are animists. They believe that human affairs are in the hands of nats. A nat is a small, vicious spirit who lives in rivers and trees, and not invisibly, either. A Kachin cannot merely imagine a nat; he can actually see him. When he sees him, he shoots him. The thousands of Japanese who have fallen to the Rangers have mostly been rubbed out by threes and fours. The number of nats, seated in bushes or flying through the air thumbing their noses, who have been picked off by the Kachins is simply countless.

  A singular fact about the Rangers, who have done more to protect the Burma Road into China than any other force of like numbers, is that there are very few Burmese among them. Besides the hill-born Karens and Kachins, there are Gurkhas and Chinese, who speak Burmese but are not even truly Burman. A Burman is anyone native to Burma. A Burmese is a lowlander of the Irrawaddy delta.

  Nearly everything is a little bit special or tricky about the Rangers. Its Gurkhas, for instance, are not the same breed as the true-born Gurkhas of Nepal who have served a century, father and son, as part of the Indian army. These Gurkhas are immigrants of the second or third generation in Burma, and do not belong anywhere in particular. Even the Chinese in the Jingpaw Rangers are peculiar. They are renegades, drifting sons of the great, fertile mother beyond the Yunnan mountains. The nat-beset Kachins, who are themselves immigrants from Tibet, hate the Chinese. Chinese troops in Kachin country are not given the freedom of the village, but sometimes take it. And the final tribe mustered by the parachuting American officers, on the old guerrilla principle of having every indigenous tribe represented in your force no matter how unmartial they may be, was the Shan. The Shans are a torpid, unbelligerent clan of bullock-slappers and elephant herders who live smack between the Baptist Karens and the animistic Kachins, believe in a transcendental Buddha and will have none of either of their neighbors.

  Stilwell's notion of having all these tribal irreconcilables fighting under a single American command in eastern Burma, that is, between Lord Mountbatten's* Anglo-American force in western Burma and the escape corridors into Thailand, was one that could be entertained only in a country where the force itself could be subdivided as never to get in intestinal squabbles. A united effect was actually achieved no less through the conciliatory leadership of the Americans who led individual companies, than through the topography of the country, which was ideal for warfare against a common enemy by tribal elements in themselves dissident. The companies of course had to be gathered by tribe, for they neither sang Jesus, Lover of my Soul in the same dialect nor saw the same nat sitting in the ear of an elephant. The country itself kept them apart, as guerrilla bands should be, and prevented any ELAS-EDES controversies arising between them.

  The Shan States, lying between Burma and the borders of China and Thailand, where most of the Rangers' fighting has been taking place, resembles upstate New York, or the Columbia Valley just above Portland. It is a country of bamboo brakes and rice paddies, like most Burma, but it is also a country of mountains, brooks and big timber. Even in monsoon time, when the rest of Burma is killingly damp and hot, the nightly mists of the Shan States are cool instead of suffocating. Its valleys are not thickly jungled, but lie open, clear and beautiful.

  Seen from the air, as pilots of the unarmed, low-flying grasshopper planes of the Jingpaw Rangers see the Shan States, Burma resembles an extended golf course, of brilliant green meandering along endlessly north-south between heavily jungled hills. There are level pastures, like golf greens, beside the villages. It has been the business of the Rangers to convert secretly these pastures into drop grounds for arms and food, and later into air fields for the use of their tiny L-1 and L-5 planes.

  It was the aim of the Japanese, after American and British fighters had swept the Japanese air force out of the sky, to try through patrols and espionage by native agents to locate these drop grounds and the nearby American forces and to wipe them out with superior numbers, supplies and firepower, the advantages of an army that is being needled in the rear by guerrillas.

  Guerrillas take to this sort of open golfing country better than to continuous dense jungle. The course suits their game. A happy sequence of Japanese medal players tees off solemnly from a village, having murdered and looted their fill, and starts down the fairway. At some elbow hole, where the fairway bends around the rough, they are suddenly enfiladed by machine-gun fire. Grenades burst among them. They dive into the nearest bunker, the roadside ditch, pulling in their wounded after them. Bunkered thus, they return fire in a burst of explosion shots, using knee mortars for niblicks. By the time the following foursomes have overtaken and reinforced them, and the sportsmen have collected their spirits for a banzai charge, their ambushers have departed, leaving only a few .303 clips, the waxed wrapper of a bar of American tropical chocolate, a few clumps of crushed grass and a faint smell of unwashed bodies. The Rangers have escaped into the rough.

  In about two years of fighting, by alternating southeast and southwest zigzags the Rangers have gone halfway the length of Burma, as far as 150 miles behind the Japanese front. They began fighting early last year around Myitkyina, helping the Marauders. Once 150 Kachins aided another battalion to relieve a thirteen-day siege when a force of Marauders were surrounded. Myitkyina settled, they zigged southwest to persecute the Japanese fighting the British in the Imphal valley. Here an American detachment blew up what was apparently the main Japanese munitions dump, some 400,000 pounds of shells, g
renades and cartridges. The blast broke up a breakfast of fifteen Japs a few yards away. This spring the guerrillas zagged southeast to gnaw the underpinnings from the Japanese defenses before Lashio, the key to the old Burma road. To do this they stealthily built and maintained a big transport strip 16 miles outside a village called Hsenwi, only an hour by road from Lashio. For nearly three months, in a country dominated by the Japanese army and infested with Japanese sympathizers, the guerrillas kept this air field open and busy, a miniature LaGuardia 60 miles ahead of the most advanced Allied troops. Finally in April, zigging southwest again, the Rangers managed in about three months' fighting to win two open battles with Japanese field forces. Finally they single-handedly took the town of Loi-lem as the summer monsoon broke, blocking the only Japanese route of escape into northern Thailand.

  The Americans in the Rangers, when you come to know them, seem no more adapted for this kind of Iroquois warfare than the fellow you roomed with at college. The educational level is high; even their latrines have alumni magazines as standard reading matter. But they are a mixed lot. Their commanding officer is a tall, 31-year-old regular army colonel, plainspoken and alert. Some of the Rangers come from the navy, the marines and even the coast guard, but most are army amateurs. The best “kicker”—that extremely essential person who stands in the windy open door of a cargo plane, reads the panels on the ground, and determines whether food and arms can safely be dropped without falling to the Japanese—is a sergeant who resembles Henry Fonda and once served in the Polish army. Like all Rangers, he has many talents. He not only can pack a parachute, but knows how to persuade a trembling Kachin to walk through a transport's empty door into space. He does this by pointing steadfastly out into vacancy and saying repeatedly teekhai, an Hindustani word meaning “goods.” Of tens of Americans and scores of natives who have jumped deliberately, without previous training, the parachute of none has “come a streamer,” that is, failed to open. Ranger luck in vertical warfare does not always hold, however. On one occasion a Ranger light plane, forced by monsoon clouds to swoop low over a complex of green dumplings held by guerrillas and Japanese, overshot the determined hill and dropped a set of orders into the Japanese camp.

  Though the Rangers have been mentioned casually in the Asiatic news, the curtain of censorship has risen enough to give an ankle-high view of them.

  Another secret item about the Rangers is the location of between two and three hundred air fields they have built behind Japanese lines, almost all of which are now back in the confines of the British Empire. About twenty of these fields are long and solid enough to accommodate big planes. Although they are located in one of the most important regions in Asia, strategically speaking, no overtures for their future use by American air forces have yet been made.

  The anonymity of the Jingpaw Rangers has political disadvantages for the United States. There are few Britons, for example, who realize that the southward march of imperial forces to Rangoon was made possible in good part by the exploratory slashes delivered by the Rangers in the Japanese rear. A guerrilla force has done a great deal if it merely annoys an enemy with sporadic attacks, even if ineffective. The aim is that he should be forever looking over his shoulder, expecting trouble behind him, like a fighter pilot.

  The Rangers have ways of making sure the enemy takes a long look. Say a Japanese division is holding off an Anglo-Gurkha-Indian division at some roadblock, a typical situation. An important Japanese ammunition dump is perhaps two miles in the rear. The Japanese infantryman in his foxhole feels a puff of air tap at the back of his helmet, and turns to see what it is. He hears a first explosion, then sees a column of black smoke lift in his rear. Soon he hears the uneven pumping of shells ineffectually exploded, shells his artillery will never use. Any soldier knows, under such circumstances, that retreat is likely.

  Recently I spent several days with the most forward Jingpaw companies. By this time most of them were no longer encircled by the Japanese, but were fighting frontally. This circumstance had arisen because the Japanese were so harassed by guerrilla pinpricks in their rear that they had decided to unload a few assets. They did this by shortening their front at the points where the Rangers were most troublesome behind it. The Jingpaw intruders, who had been muddling things in the rear, found themselves cold-shouldered outward to the Japanese flank. I learned with some surprise that they considered this flanking position that had been thrust on them far less comfortable than when they were what they sometimes call “safe and cozy behind the Japanese lines.” They felt this way because while no army can protect itself against airborne invasion from the rear if it has no air force, all armies get very worked up when they find a force on their flank. An army seems to mind being tickled in the rear more than being stabbed in the back.

  One of the Ranger officers with whom I stayed behind the Japanese lines was gently critical of a recent film called Objective, Burma!, which he had not seen—the guerrillas do not yet have cinema in the Japanese rear—but which he had read in synopsis in a movie periodical. (All kinds of reading matter is dropped to the Rangers; they get so many Sunday newspapers that the average guerrilla hideout is a gaudy litter of red and yellow comic pages.) “As I understand it,” said my friend, “Errol Flynn is trying to lead back a whole company of paratroopers into our lines after their having destroyed a radar station inside the Japanese lines. He keeps losing men and manages to get back with only a few. Now I don't want to play expert, but all I can say is that Flynn must be a hell of an officer. You can drop me anywhere in the Japanese rear in Burma with a company of Rangers—American or Jingpaw, I don't care—and I'll bring back every man alive, except perhaps one or two I'd lose in the original assault. More likely I wouldn't lose even one man, and we'd have plenty of fun and games coming in. People don't realize how much safer it is behind the Japs than in front of them.”

  Once a party of Rangers found a camp full of Japs waiting for dinner, killed all five cooks, and sped away. This was an ideal guerrilla action. In killing by driblets more than 5000 Japanese, some of them two weeks' foot march behind the front, the Rangers have tried to strike a nice mean between that amount of losses which worries the enemy and that amount which makes him furious. Worried, the Japanese loses initiative and gets discouraged and scatterbrained. Furious, he is likely to set out like a Nazi on a general sweep of extermination. In such sweeps he includes all villages in his path. There was an early time when the Japanese in Burma stood for law and order. Soldiers who looted soon felt an officer's revolver at their heads, and went into the hereafter dishonorably. The old Burma Independent Army, when it tried to become a partisan government, was put down as thoroughly as the British liquidated ELAS in Greece. But in retreat the Japanese have turned completely vicious.

  A certain West Pointer, who has a close relative still in Japanese hands, has pondered more deeply about being a guerrilla than his brother officers. In a conversation I had with him ten miles beyond the most advanced British lines, within an easy walk of the Japanese mountain stronghold of Taunggyi, he told me: “I borrowed my creed for this job from an Englishman who did this work in France. Once he went ashore from a submarine and killed the Luftwaffe's six best bombing instructors in a few minutes. He told me, ‘In this work you have to be without fear, without pity, and without remorse. Without fear because otherwise you won't take on the job. Without pity because otherwise you won't carry it out. Without remorse because otherwise you won't sleep afterward!’” My host looked quietly at a yellow-clad Buddhist priest sitting in the sun and added, “My men are almost all Christian Karens who have escaped after being tortured by the Japanese. We are proud of one thing. We have never tortured anybody.”

  Twice I have been with Ranger outfits which were under attack by Japanese patrols, or “being bumped,” as the Rangers put it. I heard few orders. For a stranger it would have been difficult to discern who was in command. It is hard to tell an American officer of the guerrillas from an enlisted man. Insignia are almost never s
een. “I have been with this outfit two years,” a corporal told me, “and never yet received a direct order.” It is something new to hear a sergeant address a lieutenant colonel as “Butch,” or refer pleasantly to his superior in his presence as “the Beast of Buchenwald.” To realize at the same time that the mystic discipline of the chain of command still holds firm under the surface, and has not been broken, is exhilarating.

  The Japanese, listening these days to our walkie-talkies conversing from top to top off the 400-foot green dumplings south of Loi-lem, must frequently be perplexed at the words they overhear. In order to test, when addressing troops, the honesty of an interpreter, a habit of inserting a little double-talk has grown up among the officers, and now often creeps into their radio conversations. “Frottix on the litteraw” is a specimen commonly heard. Since the glib guerrilla interpreters never have any difficulty translating this phrase into the native dialects, the Americans have been forced to conclude that “frottix on the litteraw” has some sort of pan-meaning east of the Irrawaddy which was not perceived when they invented it… The great sticklers for speech among the guerrillas are the Kachins. They refuse to be called Kachins, because in Burmese the word means “sour-bitter.” They prefer to be known as Jingpaws, which in Tibetan means “cannibals.”