Lt. John Randle of the Baluch Regiment was holding a position west of the Salween river when he realised Japanese troops were behind him. ‘I sent my runner, the company bugler, with a message to my CO to tell him there were a lot of Japs about. They cut in behind us and we could hear the runner screaming as they killed him with swords and bayonets … The Japs butchered all our wounded.’ His battalion lost 289 men killed and 229 taken prisoner in its first engagement. Randle said: ‘We were arrogant about the Japs, we regarded them as coolies. We thought of them as third rate. My goodness me, we soon changed our tune. The Japs fought with great ferocity and courage. We had no idea about jungle fighting, no pamphlets, doctrine etc. Not only were we raw troops, we were trying to do something entirely new.’
By early March Rangoon was a ghost city, where the remaining policemen and a small British garrison skirmished with mobs of looters. Fighter pilots of Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, transferred to Burma from China, sustained the only significant resistance to Japanese air attacks. The defence was collapsing. British liaison officer W.E. Abraham reported from Rangoon: ‘The general atmosphere of gloom was almost impossible to describe. GHQ at Athens when getting out of Greece was almost light-hearted by comparison.’ Wavell, raging against the alleged defeatism of his subordinates, sacked both his Burma C-in-C and Smyth, a sick man struggling to direct the remains of his division in a battle he never thought winnable. The British government pleaded with Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, to allow two Australian formations then in transit between the Middle East and their threatened homeland to be diverted to Burma. Curtin refused, and was surely right: the Australians, fine and experienced soldiers though they were, could not have turned the tide in a doomed campaign.
Wavell was haunted by memories of the allegations of pessimism and defeatism thrown at him by Churchill before his 1941 sacking as Middle East C-in-C. In South-East Asia, he strove to show himself a man of steel, to put spine into his subordinates. ‘Our troops in Burma are not fighting with proper spirit,’ he signalled London. ‘I have not the least doubt that this is in great part due to lack of drive and inspiration from the top.’ In truth, so much was wrong with Britain’s Far East forces that the rot was unstoppable in the midst of a Japanese offensive. Wavell seemed to acknowledge this in another signal to London: ‘I am very disturbed at lack of real fighting spirit in our troops shown in Malaya and so far in Burma. Neither British, Australians or Indians have shown real toughness of mind or body … Causes go deep, softness of last twenty years, lack of vigour in peace training, effects of climate and atmosphere of East.’ Wavell became a regular visitor to Rangoon, likened by one historian to ‘a Harley Street specialist, complete with a black bag, coming to see a very sick patient’.
On 5 March Lt. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander arrived to take command. The impeccable ‘Alex’, Churchill’s favourite general, could only contribute his unfailing personal grace and serenity to what now became a rout. Initially he ordered a halt to the British retreat, then within twenty-four hours accepted that Rangoon could not be held and endorsed its evacuation. The invaders missed a priceless opportunity to trap the entire British army in Burma when a local Japanese commander withdrew a strong roadblock closing the road north. Misinterpreting his orders, he supposed that all the attacking forces were intended to close on Rangoon for a big battle. This fumbled pass allowed Alexander’s force to retreat northwards – and the general himself to escape captivity.
In desperation, Wavell accepted Chiang Kai-shek’s offer of two Chinese Nationalist divisions with their supporting elements. Chinese willingness to join the campaign was not altruistic. The Japanese advance in the north had closed the ‘Burma Road’, by which American supplies reached China. Reopening it was a vital Chinese interest. Wavell’s caution about acceptance of assistance from Chiang’s troops was prompted by knowledge that they lacked their own supply system and aspired to live off the land. There were also doubts about who gave their orders: US Gen. Joseph Stilwell claimed that he did, only to be contradicted by Chinese Gen. Tu Lu Ming, who told Burma’s governor, Dorman-Smith: ‘The American general only thinks he is commanding. In fact he is doing no such thing. You see, we Chinese think that the only way to keep the Americans in the war is to give them a few commands on paper. They will not do much harm as long as we do the work!’
Stilwell, an inveterate anglophobe, was underwhelmed by his first meeting with Alexander on 13 March. He wrote in his diary with accustomed sourness: ‘Astonished to find me – mere me, a goddam American – in command of Chinese troops. “Extrawdinery!” Looked me over as if I had just crawled out from under a rock!’ Stilwell was given the assistance of a British-led Frontier Force mounted unit, for reconnaissance duties. Its leader, Captain Arthur Sandeman of the Central India Horse, achieved the doubtful distinction of becoming the last British officer to die leading a cavalry charge. Blundering into the path of Japanese machine-gunners, he drew his sabre, ordered his bugler to signal the attack, and advanced on the enemy until he and his companions met their inevitable fate.
The Chinese intervention provoked the Japanese to reinforce their two-division invasion army, sending two more formations to Rangoon by sea. The British were reorganised into a corps commanded by William Slim, a shrewd, rugged Gurkha officer who would eventually show himself Britain’s ablest general of the war. On 24 March the Japanese struck hard at the Chinese in the north. The British counter-attacked to relieve pressure on their allies, but the enemy prevailed on both fronts. Slim’s Burcorps, struggling to avert complete collapse on the east bank of the Irrawaddy, called for Chinese assistance. Stilwell was predictably contemptuous, writing on 28 March: ‘Riot among British soldiers at Yenangyaung. British destroying the oil fields. GOOD GOD. What are we fighting for?’ Yet to the astonishment of Stilwell as well as the British, a Chinese division, led by one of Chiang’s ablest officers, Gen. Sun Li-Jen, pushed back the Japanese and achieved a notable little victory. Although an imperial formation was almost wiped out in the fighting around the Irrawaddy, Slim emerged from the battle full of respect for Gen. Sun’s men, whose intervention was decisive in enabling the British to avert the annihilation of Burcorps.
But the Allied position in Burma had become untenable. The Japanese considered that the Chinese formations fought more bravely and energetically than the Commonwealth forces, but within days they were falling back northwards, eventually into China. The pursuing Japanese were content to halt at the border. Stilwell, who bore substantial personal responsibility for mishandling the Nationalists under his command, abandoned them and set off westwards with a motley party of Americans, press correspondents and just two Chinese. He walked through the jungle for two weeks before reaching the safety of Imphal, in British-ruled Assam, on 20 May. Stilwell wrote: ‘We got a hell of a beating. It was as humiliating as hell. We ought to find out why it happened and go back!’ By 30 April, Slim’s men were safely across the Irrawaddy. They then retreated westward preceded by a rabble of deserters and looters, who behaved with predictable savagery towards the civilian population. On 3 May, Burcorps began its withdrawal across the Chindwin river boundary between Burma and India under Japanese fire. The Burma Rifles platoon defending Slim’s headquarters melted away into the night. Most of his men made good their escape, but almost all transport and heavy equipment – some 2,000 vehicles, 110 tanks and forty guns – had to be abandoned on the east bank of the river. Even when the fugitives reached safety, they found no warm welcome. ‘The attitude of the army [in India] to those of us back from Burma was appalling,’ said Corporal William Norman. ‘They blamed us for the defeat.’
The Japanese had advanced across Burma for 127 days, covering 1,500 miles at an average speed of almost thirty miles a day, while fighting thirty-four actions. The British had lost 13,000 men killed, wounded and captured, while the Japanese suffered only 4,000 casualties. This was not a disaster of the same magnitude as Malaya, and Slim conducted his retreat with some skill. But the
Japanese now occupied Britain’s entire South-East Asian empire, to the gates of India. An Asian wrote of the spectacle of Western PoWs driven to hard labour alongside the native peoples: ‘We always felt that they were superior to us. The Japanese opened our eyes; because [the white men] were sweeping the floor with me … walking without shoes.’ This proved an enduring revelation. Meanwhile, the Burma Road to China would remain closed for almost three years.
Enforced civilian migrations were a major feature of the war almost everywhere around the globe that armies struggled for mastery. Few Burmese attempted to flee before the Japanese, because they believed they had nothing to fear from their victory, and much to hope for. When members of the newly mobilised Burma Defence Army marched through Rangoon for the first time under the eyes of its Japanese sponsors, an enthusiastic citizen wrote: ‘How thrilling it was to see Burmese soldiers and officers wearing assorted uniforms, bearing assorted arms, tricolour armbands on the shirtsleeve, seriousness on the face.’
But almost a million Indians also lived in the country, some dominating commercial life and others performing menial functions indispensable to the welfare of sahibs, but disdained by their Burmese subjects. The Indians were unloved, and fearful of local nationalism. As the invasion tide swept forward, the British did nothing to assist the flight of some 600,000 of these, their dependants. It was argued that the rulers had trouble enough saving themselves. But here, once again, British conduct highlighted the breakdown of the supposed imperial compact, whereby native peoples received protection as the price of accepting subjection. Rich fugitives bought airline tickets or cabins aboard ships bound for India. Indians bitterly dubbed the ferry up the Chindwin ‘the white route’, because access was almost the exclusive privilege of the British and Eurasians. As paddle steamers thrashed upriver, they passed corpses floating down, victims of hapless Indians’ overland ‘black route’.
Throngs of people too poor to purchase tickets to salvation were obliged to take to the roads and tracks north and westwards, towards Assam. The monsoon broke in May; thereafter, rain and mud clogged the passage alike of the fortunate in cars and the impoverished afoot. They were robbed and sometimes raped; they paid exorbitantly for scraps of food; succumbed to dysentery, malaria and fever. At ferries and roadblocks, their last rupees were extracted by avaricious policemen and villagers. No one knows exactly how many Indians died in the spring and summer of 1942 on the road to Assam, but it was at least 50,000, and perhaps more. Their skeletons littered the roadside for years, to shame British passers-by when they later went that way again. An officer searching for stragglers at Tagun Hill on the way to Ledo came upon a village of the dead:
The clearing was littered with tumbledown huts, where often whole families stayed and died together. I found the bodies of a mother and child locked in each other’s arms. In another hut were the remains of another mother who had died in childbirth, with the child only half-born. In this one [clearing] more than fifty people had died. Sometimes pious Christians placed little wooden crucifixes in the ground before they died. Others had figures of the Virgin Mary still clutched in their skeleton hands. A soldier had expired wearing his sidecap, all his cotton clothing had rotted away, but the woollen cap sat smartly on the grinning skull. Already the ever-destroying jungle had overgrown some of the older huts, covering up the skeletons and reducing them to dust and mould.
Among the fugitives were many mixed-raced Catholics, who had originated in Portuguese Goa. Customs officer Jose Saldhana walked for days through the jungle with his seventeen-year-old son George, having dispatched the rest of his family on a ship overladen with panic-stricken people. The walkers endured ghastly privations, relieved by a surreal moment in a camp in the jungle where a girl named Emily D’Cruz serenaded them: ‘Her voice soared clear and beautiful in the still of the night,’ singing ‘Alice Blue Gown’. Then George succumbed to dysentery. He persuaded his father to leave him, sitting against a tree deep in the jungle. After some hours, the teenager saw a Naga woman, from a tribe of notorious headhunters. Terror overcame his weakness, and he began to walk again. For days he stumbled north-westwards, living off berries which he saw monkeys eating, and thus assumed must be safe for humans. One day he came upon a flock of butterflies, of fabulous beauty. Fascinated, he approached them – only to recoil when he found them feasting off juices oozing from a decaying corpse. He fled onwards, and at last reached safety and a family reunion. Others were less fortunate. In the Hukawng valley, boys from a Catholic school in Tavoy came upon the body of their headmaster, Leo Menenzes. His weak heart had collapsed under the strain of the trek.
Even when surviving refugees reached British-controlled Imphal, there were no better facilities and medical aid for Indian civilians than for Indian soldiers. With all the resources of the subcontinent at its disposal, the Raj proved incapable of organising basic humanitarian support for the flotsam of its war. Kachin and Naga villagers gave more help to refugees than did the British. An Anglo-Indian manager of the Irrawaddy Steamship Company who reached a rescue station in Assam after a struggle across the mountains was met by a British officer who insisted that he could be fed only at the Indian canteen. Conditions were appalling in hospitals receiving stricken fugitives. A British woman wrote bitterly to a friend in England, the wife of government minister R.A. Butler, describing what she had seen in Ranchi: ‘The medical wards are like Gone with the Wind – pallets touching each other, people moaning for water and sicking up and so on everywhere. It’s all a shocking crime and may God forever damn the Eastern Command staff.’ Cholera broke out in some refugee camps.
Alexander’s beaten army was rebuilt only sluggishly and unconvincingly: two long years would elapse before it was able to meet the Japanese with success. In August 1942, the general himself was transferred to command Britain’s forces in the Middle East. The memory of that terrible Burma spring, and of its victims, remained imprinted upon the minds of all who witnessed it. Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, from the Indian prison cell to which he had been consigned by the British, commented with disdain on the collapse of government in Burma and the flight of colonial officials, who abandoned hundreds of thousands of his compatriots to their fate: ‘It is the misfortune of India at this crisis in her history not only to have a foreign government, but a government which is incompetent and incapable of organising her defence properly or of providing for the safety and essential needs of her people.’ This was just. The loss of Britain’s empire in South-East Asia brought disgrace as well as defeat upon its rulers, as Winston Churchill readily recognised.
Swings of Fortune
1 BATAAN
‘We cannot win this war until it … becomes a national crusade for America and the American Dream,’ wrote New York Times reporter James Reston in his 1942 book Prelude to Victory, which attained best-sellerdom. This was now, indeed, a global conflict. The American people’s initial response to finding themselves engaged in it was as muddled and well-meaning as had been that of the British in September 1939. There was a surge of enthusiasm for first-aid instruction – the most popular handbook sold eight million copies; thousands of high school students carved and glued wooden models of enemy aircraft for military trainers. Millions of citizens donated blood and collected scrap metal; resort hotels in Miami Beach and Atlantic City were turned over to army recruits. Bowing to the gravity of the new national circumstances, sport hunting and fishing, together with manufacture of golf and tennis balls, were temporarily banned. There was a boom in fortune-telling, checkers, sales of world maps and cookery books. Movies attained extraordinary popularity, partly because many people found more cash in their pockets: 1942 cinema audiences were double those of 1940. Prisoners in San Quentin volunteered for war-production duty, and began making anti-submarine nets.
From the outset, and aided by the fact that some big industrial commitments had already been made, America’s economic mobilisation awed visitors from poorer and less ambitious societies. Even intelligent and informed B
ritish people failed to recognise the almost limitless scale of the nation’s resources: ‘The Army … are aiming at a vast programme,’ British Air Marshal John Slessor wrote to the Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal from Washington back in April 1941, assessing the build-up of the US armed forces, ‘their present target being two million men, and they are now considering another 2 million on top of that. Who they are going to fight with an army of this size or how they are going to transport it overseas I do not know and very much doubt whether they would have aimed at anything like this if they had a really thorough joint strategic examination of their defence commitments and requirements.’
Such scepticism was dramatically confounded between 1942 and 1945. ‘After Pearl Harbor,’ Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan, British chief planner for D-Day, said of the Americans, ‘they decided to make the biggest and best war ever seen.’ The secretary of the American Asiatic Association wrote to a friend in the State Department, ‘It will be a long, hard war, but after it is over Uncle Sam will do the talking in the world.’ The federal budget soared from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945, and in the same period America’s GNP grew from $91 to $166 billion. The index of industrial production rose 96 per cent, and seventeen million new jobs were created. Some 6.5 million additional women entered the US labour force between 1942 and 1945, and their wages grew by over 50 per cent; sales of women’s clothing doubled. The imperatives of America’s vast industrial mobilisation favoured tycoons and conglomerates, which flourished mightily. Anti-trust legislation was thrust aside by the pressures of war demand: America’s hundred largest companies, which in 1941 were responsible for 30 per cent of national manufacturing output, generated 70 per cent by 1943. The administration overcame its scruples about monopolists who could deliver tanks, planes, ships.
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