THE LONGEST RETREAT
Despite all the frenzied preparation (at the expense of Burma), the “impregnable fortress” of Singapore fell on 15 February, and Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, with knobby knees and in short khaki trousers, surrendered at the Ford motor factory to the much smaller force of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the bull-necked “Tiger of Malaya.” No fewer than seventy thousand imperial troops—British, Australians, and Indians—had been defeated by thirty thousand Japanese. Contrary to myth, the problem was not that Singapore’s famous large-caliber stationary guns were unable to turn around from the sea and face the attacking force to the north. The problem was the guns had only armor-piercing shells, designed to penetrate the hulls of warships. Against foot soldiers coming down jungle roads they were of little use.
To the north the Japanese Thirty-third and Fifty-fifth Divisions seized Moulmein, Burma’s third-largest town, on the first day of February and were soon peering over the banks of the Salween River toward Rangoon and the heartlands of Burma on the other side. All this time the American pilots, led by John Van Kuren “Scarsdale Jack” Newkirk (who cut short his honeymoon to get back to Burma), did their best to beat off the waves of bombers. Though outnumbered, the Americans, joined by British, Canadian, Australian, and Indian airmen, managed to shoot down 122 enemy planes (including 25 for Scarsdale Jack) while losing only 5 of their own Tomahawk and Hurricane fighters.
In late February, Rangoon was readied for evacuation. Hospital patients and staff were sent to Mandalay, and the lunatics in the asylum were released together with all the common criminals in the Insein jail. The police were soon pulled out, and law and order predictably broke down as the poor of the city set fires and broke into shops and warehouses. In 1824 British soldiers had emptied the cellars of Rangoon on the very first night of occupation. In a fitting bookend to nearly 120 years of occupation, some emptied the cellars again under the pretense of denying comfort to the enemy.
Around the same time, the first tanks ever seen in Burma arrived together with the Seventh Armored Brigade from Egypt, but it was not enough to stanch the Japanese juggernaut. On 22 February the British blew up the bridge over the Sittang River (less than a hundred miles east of Rangoon), only to find that two brigades of the Seventeenth Indian Division were still left on the other side.
The situation was obviously becoming desperate, and at this point Churchill asked Prime Minister John Curtin of Australia to reroute the Australian Sixth and Seventh Divisions, which were then on their way home from the Middle East. Curtin refused, and though Churchill ordered the convoys to go to Burma anyway, he finally backed down in the face of Curtin’s indignation. The Australian prime minister was worried about a Japanese landing in his own backyard. The one force that might have saved Burma now sailed by.
As the Japanese crossed the Sittang and moved west toward the Pegu road (which connects Rangoon northward to Mandalay), Dorman-Smith prepared for his last night in the capital. There was almost no one left at Government House, a great Victorian pile not far from the hilltop Shwedagon Pagoda. There was his aide-de-camp and son-in-law Eric Battersby, and his military liaison officer, Wally Richmond, and they and the governor and two war correspondents from London ate their last meal in the cavernous teak-paneled dining room. Out of 110 staff, only the head butler and cook were left, and the cook prepared mutton, a sheep that Dorman-Smith had become attached to after seeing it for several days grazing quietly outside his window. They also decided to drink all the remaining claret and port before merrily smashing up all the large portraits of Burma’s prim and supercilious exgovernors hanging along the walls.4
Though there were few reinforcing battalions and divisions to be had, new generals were sent, like expert doctors to a dying patient. General Sir Harold Alexander, the future field marshal and the last commander off the beach at Dunkirk, flew in to take over Allied forces in the country, as did General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, President Roosevelt’s choice to head up the Chinese armies in Burma in a special arrangement with Chiang Kai-shek. But they could do little to stop the tide, only to help manage what became the longest retreat in British history.
While many ordinary Burmese feared for the future, the Indians in the country were the ones who were perhaps the most afraid of what a non-British Burma would have in store. More than a hundred thousand Indians were now fleeing in the direction of Arakan, entire families on foot or by bullock cart, their possessions piled high, and dying by the thousands of hunger, disease, and exhaustion. Another hundred thousand were camped outside Mandalay and near Amarapura. British authorities permitted only five hundred a day to proceed up the road in order not to hold up the retreating British Army. No one knows how many died, but the number is likely in the tens of thousands. About two hundred thousand finally made it over the mountains into India.
Along the middle Irrawaddy, the river town of Prome fell, and then Toungoo, as both British and Chinese armies gave way to superior Japanese confidence, tactics, and fighting ability. Then the bombs rained over Mandalay. On 3 March the railway station was blown to bits together with the firehouse and the hospital. The remains of people and horses were scattered along dusty streets or were floating among the lilies in the old royal moat. Two-thirds of the town was then engulfed by fire, with huge flames whipping across Mindon and Thibaw’s city in the intense hundred-degree Fahrenheit heat. Almost no trees or buildings were left intact. Telephone lines lay across the cratered streets, and a terrible smell blanketed what little was left of Mandalay.
More destruction would come. The oil wells that had provided fat profits over so many years to businessmen in Glasgow and London were now blown up by the retreating British, and great clouds of black smoke drifted over the nearby medieval ruins at Pagan. It was now early March, and Dorman-Smith was at Maymyo, the summer capital in the eastern hills. The Japanese had taken the entire southern half of the country and showed no signs of slowing down. General Alexander planned to take his army across the Irrawaddy westward toward India, leaving the Chinese to fend for themselves as best they could.
The Japanese would soon enter Maymyo. Everything at the governor’s residence there had already disappeared to looters. There were no carpets left, or even spoons or forks. Dorman-Smith and his aides burned his papers only to find at lunchtime there was also nothing left to eat. When an old Burmese messenger appeared and Sir Reginald politely asked him for some food, he replied that he had only his own lunch, and this he would happily share. And so the king’s representative ate a meal of rice and curry with his fingers. Not far in the distance, angry and humiliated Chinese soliders were hiking back to Yunnan, torching villages and butchering civilians along the way.
From Maymyo Dorman-Smith headed north into the Kachin hills. When he reached Myitkyina on 28 April, many of his personal staff and other officials were already there and waiting for him, as was his wife and their pet monkey, Miss Gibbs. The airfield there was the only one left in Burma that was still in British hands, and the highland town was choked with refugees, many of them Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Burmese government workers and their families, the most loyal citizens of the Raj, all of whom were now desperate to be flown out. Dorman-Smith was himself ill with dysentery but thought the noble thing would be to hide in the jungle and not to desert the Burmese entirely. At the very least he should share the hardships of the others and walk out. Calcutta said he must fly out at once, but even then he hesitated until ordered directly by Churchill. Lady Dorman-Smith and Miss Gibbs having left already, he was escorted out immediately by the Royal Air Force.5
Though that was the end of the story for now for Sir Reginald, his wife, and his monkey, for hundreds of thousands of others there were still hundreds of miles of torturous mountain tracks between the advancing Japanese and the relative safety of India, northwest through dense rain forest and then pine-shrouded hills. Those who crossed were mainly Indians, but there were also many others, Burmese and European. At least two thousand who made the trek
were already wounded. What made everything much worse was that the monsoon downpours were just beginning, thunderous sheets of water drenching the men, women, and children to the bone, dragging them down in knee-deep mud, with clouds of sandflies and mosquitoes buzzing all around and leeches dropping off the trees, with many suffering from malaria and dysentery and all hungry from a lack of proper food. Narrow, slippery paths wound their way around cliffs a thousand feet high. People usually made their way in small groups and passed through Kachin mountain villages, often deserted because of recent attacks by renegade soldiers. Everywhere along the way were dead bodies. Only once they had crossed the four-thousand-foot-high Pangsau Pass would they be in Assam and on safe ground. Many were met on the other side by the volunteers of the Indian Tea Association.
One man traveled another, more difficult way to India, over the death-defying and ice-covered Diphu Pass, fourteen thousand feet up. This was the world-renowned botanist and explorer Frank Kingdon Ward, who had gone north from Fort Hertz and then walked two months and four hundred miles alone along the Tibetan marches to Assam. But as one Indian civil servant remarked, “He had done that sort of thing all his life.”6
THE THIRTY COMRADES
A little more than two years before, on 14 August 1940, just as the Luftwaffe was beginning its bombing raids over England, two young Burmese men smuggled themselves on board a Norwegian cargo ship bound for the gritty port city of Amoy in China. One was Aung San, the ex-student leader, who was on the run from the colonial police. It was a slow and uncomfortable journey, the first long sea voyage for both men, and was followed by weeks of wandering aimlessly in Amoy with little money and no precise plan. They had apparently thought about making contact with the Chinese Communists but eventually arranged to be picked up by the Japanese and taken via Taiwan to Tokyo, arriving in the Japanese capital on the very day that the new Axis pact with Germany was being signed and celebrated by giant flag-waving crowds.7 Aung San was now part of Tokyo’s grand plan to snatch away Britain’s empire in the East.
For Colonel Keiji Suzuki, the Japanese “Lawrence of Arabia,” Aung San’s arrival in Tokyo was just what he was hoping for. His idea was to foment an anti-British rebellion inside Burma, to help pave the way for an eventual Japanese conquest. He did his homework well, traveling to the country (posing as a journalist) for long periods and making all the right contacts. And now he had Burma’s most promising young politician in Tokyo.
Aung San spent the rest of 1940 in the Japanese capital, learning Japanese and apparently getting swept away in all the fascist euphoria surrounding him. “What we want is a strong state administration as exemplified in Germany and Japan. There shall be one nation, one state, one party, one leader … there shall be no nonsense of individualism. Everyone must submit to the state which is supreme over the individual … ,” he wrote in those heady days of the Rising Sun.8 He spoke Japanese, wore a kimono, and even took a Japanese name. He then sneaked back into Burma, landing secretly at Bassein. He changed into a longyi and then took the train unnoticed to Rangoon. He made contact with his old colleagues. Within weeks, in small batches and with the help of Suzuki’s secret agents in Rangoon, Aung San and his new select team traveled by sea to the Japanese-controlled island of Hainan, in the South China Sea. There were thirty in all—the Thirty Comrades—and they would soon be immortalized in nationalist mythology.
Aung San at twenty-five was one of the three oldest. He took Teza meaning “Fire” as his nom de guerre. The other two took the names Setkya (A Magic Weapon) and Ne Win (the Bright Sun). All thirty prefixed their names with the title Bo. “Bo” meant an officer and had come to be the way all Europeans in Burma were referred to, signifying their ruling status. The Burmese were now to have their own “bo” for the first time since 1885. But six months of harsh Japanese military training still lay ahead. It wasn’t easy, and at one point some of the younger men were close to calling it quits. Aung San, Setkya, and Ne Win received special training, as they were intended for senior positions. But all had to pass through the same grueling physical tests, saluting the Japanese flag and learning to sing Japanese songs. They heard tales of combat and listened to Suzuki boasting of how he had killed women and children in Siberia.9 It was a bonding experience that would shape Burmese politics for decades to come.
In 1941, in the months before Pearl Harbor, they were moved to Bangkok, the riverside capital of Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram’s pro-Axis dictatorship, and there they formed a Burma Independence Army (BIA) under Colonel Suzuki’s enthusiastic supervision. Suzuki himself had taken the Burmese nom de guerre Bo Mogyo, meaning “the Thunderbolt,” an astute choice that played on the (allegedly) old local prophecy that “the umbrella” (meaning “the British”) would eventually be struck down by “the thunderbolt.” Tokyo had yet to decide its Burma policy as both the Imperial Army and Navy jockeyed for influence and argued whether an amphibious or land offensive made most sense. But Suzuki’s heart lay increasingly in Burma, and he encouraged the young men under him to themselves lead the fight for Burmese independence and move ahead of the emperor’s forces. A rumor spread that Bo Mogyo was none other than a son of the prince of Myingun, Mindon’s eldest son, who had rebelled against his father in 1866, then fled east to Saigon.
One night in a house in downtown Bangkok, not far from today’s backpacker mecca at Khao San Road, the Thirty Comrades slit their fingers, pooled their blood, and swore oaths of loyalty, reenacting a ritual of Burma’s extinct military aristocracy. Aung San’s little band then trudged off to the front line, pushing eagerly behind the infantry and mountain regiments of the Japanese Fifteenth Army. Ne Win led a special unit that reached Rangoon early, and others soon fanned out across the delta and through the towns of the middle Irrawaddy, clashing here and there with the retreating British but leaving nearly all the real fighting to the Japanese. Within months their numbers had soared, as they were joined by their old fellow nationalists and other excited youngsters across the country. On 1 May 1942 they entered the blackened ruins of Mandalay. As Thibaw’s ghost was being avenged, the Burmese civil war was also about to begin.
*
The bloodshed began in the western Irrawaddy Delta. Units of the Burma Independence Army, swollen with fresh recruits and patriotic pride, had just arrived alongside the black-booted Japanese and were beginning to disarm Karen soldiers as they were returning home. The soldiers were Christian Karens from this area who had been part of the colonial army, who had decided not to make the trek to India and instead to go home and try to protect their families. Everyone knew the potential for trouble ahead. The BIA was very much a nationalist ethnic Burmese force, and the sight of armed Burmese in uniform, after more than a lifetime of colonial occupation, had ignited strong passions. And the Karens feared what might lie ahead. An elder in the Karen community, Sir San C. Po, was working hard to diffuse tensions, and it was thanks to his efforts that violence had just been averted in the big port town of Bassein. For a while it looked as if violence might be avoided altogether. But then a group of Karens hatched a plot, aimed at attacking the town of Myaungmya, driving out the Burmese soldiers and rescuing the Karens living there, who they believed to be in mortal danger. But the plot was discovered by the Burmese, who immediately shot the local Karen leader, Saw Pe Tha, together with his Scottish wife and their children. Sir San C. Po managed to prevent an even greater tragedy by then persuading the Karens not to go ahead with their attack. But the genie had been let out of the bottle.
Over the next many weeks the BIA, thinking that its worst fears of Karen treachery were coming true, started daily executions of Karens suspected of disloyalty to the new order. Dozens, if not hundreds, were murdered. The Catholic Mission headquarters as well as an orphanage were burned to the ground. In retaliation, Karens in nearby villages attacked random Burmese villagers, and communal violence spread swiftly across the delta. Only the intervention of the Japanese Army weeks later finally stopped the killings. What began in those days would
soon lead to a war that has yet to end.
END OF EMPIRE?
The Japanese conquest of Burma shocked the British in India and in London as well. This was now the spring of 1942, and the threat of a German landing on the British Isles had faded. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had joined the war. But with victory at Stalingrad and the first landings in North Africa still months away, India, with over two and a half million of its own men in uniform, was vital for success. The sudden loss of Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore meant that British prestige in the East was at an all-time low. More to the point, India itself was now directly threatened.
In March the austere Socialist lawyer Sir Stafford Cripps arrived by propeller plane in Delhi, carrying with him the Churchill government’s offer of future independence. The draft declaration he brought along stated that after the war an all-Indian constituent assembly would draw up a constitution for a new Indian union. Each province of India and each native state would be free to join or make separate arrangements. Both the Muslim League and the Congress Party rejected this and repeated their demands for immediate independence and a chance to fight in the war as equal members of the United Nations. Mahatma Gandhi called the offer “a post-dated check on a failing bank” and in July the Congress Party called on Britain to “Quit India.” By August and September, as Japanese troops hovered along the Manipur and Arakan frontiers, violent nationwide protests, rebellions, and terrorist attacks across the subcontinent shook British rule to its foundations.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 30