The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  This story, which was solemnly entered as fact in the Guinness Book of Records as the greatest ever human loss to dangerous animals, offends every single canon of historical verifiability. We are told that the observer sitting parked at the edge of the swamp in a motor launch was one Bruce Wright, a naturalist, but diligent research has turned up no trace of him nor of the book or journals in which this account was written. As in all urban myths, close investigation involves one in a vicious circle, where one comes back to the same, single, unsubstantiated, anonymous and unverifiable source. So much for provenance. What about internal coherence? Are we seriously to believe that Japanese firepower, which tore such holes in British tanks and armour, was helpless against crocodiles? That none of the Japanese who failed to emerge from the swamp was hit by British strafing fire or bitten by snakes, or succumbed to dehydration and disease? Most of all, there is a simple zoological problem. If ‘thousands of crocodiles’ were involved in the massacre, as in the urban (jungle) myth, how had these ravening monsters survived before and how were they to survive later? The ecosystem of a mangrove swamp, with its exiguous mammal life, simply would not have permitted the existence of so many saurians before the coming of the Japanese (animals are not exempt from the laws of overpopulation and starvation).50 Finally there is the issue of external evidence. The official British military records for the occupation of Ramree contain no corroboration or even mention of the story, Japanese survivors of Ramree knew nothing of it, and there is no record in the oral tradition of the Ramree islanders themselves.51 The indefatigable professional researcher W.O.G. Potts and other interested parties conducted minute investigations into the story, interviewing elderly Ramree islanders, Japanese survivors of Ramree and members of the Anglo-Indian armed services. All of them denied that any such incident took place.52 We are left, then, with two possibilities. Either nothing remotely like the horror described by ‘Bruce Wright’ ever took place. Or, more plausibly, a few of the Japanese wounded may have fallen prey to some saltwater crocodiles (certainly not ‘thousands’). What we confront here is not an authentic wartime memory but a version of the Bermuda Triangle syndrome or a variant of the Angel of Mons legend transmogrified in diabolic fashion.53

  Stories like the Ramree crocodile ‘massacre’ or an overemphasis on the menace from poisonous snakes carry the danger that the real experiences of the fighting men in Burma may be distorted. Overwhelmingly, the memoir and anecdotal evidence suggests that what the troops feared most were leeches and mosquitoes and insects of all kinds. When the British irregulars the Chindits were marching north from Mogaung on 9–10 June 1944 through marshes and mud, what oppressed them was not snakes or crocodiles but large vicious striped mosquitoes, biting flies and leeches.54 Yet even with all these natural hazards and afflictions, not all the British who served in Burma perceived it as a green hell. The hill stations were especially prized as oases, and before the great battle there in 1944, Imphal was viewed as something of a paradise, with its cornucopia of plant and bird life. Peach trees, oaks, teak, wild banana and bamboo mingled with irises, jasmines, marigolds, lilacs, primulas and asters. Wagtails, pigeons, orioles, parrots, peafowl, pheasants, crows, herons and paddy birds competed for space on the lake and its islets with snipe, ducks and geese.55 In January 1945, the Gurkhas’ own newspaper tried to put the beauty and terror of Burma into proper balance:

  Much has been written on the horrors of Burma warfare, of rains and leeches and snakes, of unseen enemies and deadly ambushes. This time we experienced none of these things. The Burma hills in January are cool and fresh, and when in the sunset the hillsides turn to all the greens and browns of an English woodland in autumn, their beauty is unsurpassed … Who can convey on paper the charm of the little pagodas, standing in clusters large and small, guarded on their hill tops by the chinthes, and with their tinkling, silver-voiced wind bells that never stay silent? How clean the villages are, so unlike those of India, where the sanitary arrangements are nil and a circus of hawks wheel above. The livestock seemed in first-class condition, small sleek cattle and poultry that would rival the pride of English farmyards. It was indeed delightful to trek through in those January days.56

  Given the perennial motif in Japanese poetry of the juxtaposition of beauty and death, it could be argued that warfare in Burma had a certain organic functionality to the homeland culture. Their successes in the early months of the war certainly seemed to support that view.

  2

  The man who would later be hailed in some quarters as the greatest general of the twentieth century had obscure and unpromising beginnings. This, coupled with his unpretentious and self-deprecating manner, often made people think he had risen from the ranks. The truth is a little more complex. Born in 1891, the son of a struggling Birmingham ironmonger, William Slim won a scholarship to a grammar school and showed academic promise, but the family’s financial plight forced him to leave school early. He began as a trainee schoolteacher in a primary school in the Birmingham slums. Undoubtedly his later famous rapport with the ordinary soldier and his instinctive understanding of his abilities and limits derived from that experience, which gave him insights into the life and mentality of the working class most conventionally educated officers could not dream of. Faced with boys who were routinely thrashed and brutalised by their fathers, and for whom violence was almost a way of life, Slim tried kindness and affection, which he found worked wonders. But he always had to temper this with firm discipline; he was shrewd enough to realise that the slum kids would eat a ‘do-gooder’ alive and were likely to interpret too much compassion as weakness. Exhausted by the emotional toll of such a tightrope act, he became a clerk in an engineering works.1 At 23 he was in a dead end, with no apparent way out. War was his saviour, then as always. In 1914 he applied to enrol in the Birmingham University Officers’ Training Corps, despite not being a student at the university. The urgent demands of wartime meant that the usual rules were waived, and in August 1914 he was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. The following year he was badly wounded at Gallipoli, but fought his way back to fitness through sheer willpower. He was then granted a regular commission as second lieutenant in the West India Regiment, reputedly the only one in the British army where an officer could live on his pay. In October 1916 he joined another battalion of the Royal Warwickshires in Mesopotamia, where General F.S. Maude was trying to rebuild British strength after the shattering defeat by the Turks at Kut the year before. Promoted full lieutenant in March 1917 and wounded a second time, he was awarded the Military Cross in February 1918 and given the temporary rank of captain.2

  Ever since Gallipoli, Slim had nursed an ambition to join the Gurkhas, and after the war he got his wish. In November 1918 he was given the temporary rank of major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles, formally promoted captain and transferred to the British Indian Army. Even for the chosen ones of Sandhurst, military promotion was painfully slow in the interwar period, and most of Slim’s next 20 years were spent in routine administration or education. In 1926 (the year he married his wife Aileen), he was sent to the Indian staff college at Quetta. It took him until 1933 to reach the formal rank of major, though he had been breveted with this rank before. His performance at the staff college led to appointments first to army headquarters in Delhi, then to staff college at Camberley back in England, where he taught from 1934 to 1937. In 1938, at the age of 47, he was promoted lieutenant colonel and given command of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Gurkha Rifles. So far he had enjoyed a steady though far from spectacular career. Money worries were never absent, to the point where he moonlighted as a fiction writer under the pseudonym of Anthony Mills, churning out adventure stories obviously influenced by his early reading of tales of Victorian military glory, but also evincing a shrewd notion of human nature and many shafts of dry wit.3 In June 1939, he was promoted colonel with the temporary rank of brigadier and appointed head of the Senior Officers’ School at Belgaum, India. On the outbreak of the war he
was given command of the Indian 10th Brigade of the 5th Infantry Division (India) and sent to the Sudan, where he took part in the campaign to liberate Abyssinia (Ethiopia) from the Italians. He was wounded for a third time in the fighting in Eritrea during an air attack; the surgeon removed not just a large bullet but chunks of Turkish ammunition he had carried with him since Gallipoli. For this and other exploits he came to the notice of General Archibald Wavell, then commanding in the Middle East. Wavell gave him the acting rank of major general, and in this capacity he commanded forces in the Anglo-Iraq war of 1941 (the insurgency of Rashid Ali), the Syria-Lebanon campaign and the invasion of Persia (Iran). Because the commander of the 10th Indian Division fell sick, it was a stroke of luck for Slim to lead it against the Vichy French in Syria, and he acquitted himself well and was mentioned twice in dispatches in 1941. When Wavell, since transferred to Burma, was looking for a corps commander with fighting spirit, he remembered Slim and sent for him.4

  To make sense of this development, we have to rewind the historical reel and glance for a moment at Slim’s boss, Archibald Wavell. His career had been very different from Slim’s, starting with his privileged educational background at Winchester and Sandhurst. Commissioned into the Black Watch in 1901, he fought in the Boer war and then saw service in India until 1908. Seconded to staff college in 1909, he made an unusual career move in 1911 when he was appointed military observer to the Russian army for a year and took the time to learn Russian. After being staff officer at the War Office and promoted captain, he became brigade major of the 9th Infantry Brigade and in 1915 was wounded at the second battle of Ypres, losing his left eye.5 Having won the Military Cross, he was made acting lieutenant colonel and once again sent as liaison officer to the Russian army, this time in the Caucasus (1916–17). In 1917 he was liaison officer with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. After a short spell at the Supreme War Council at Versailles (between January and March 1918), he was appointed temporary brigadier general and sent out to Palestine, where he came heavily under the influence of General Edmund Allenby. Wavell and Allenby were both intellectual officers, lovers of poetry and literature, and Wavell admired his boss to the point where he would later write his biography.6 Promoted full colonel in 1922, Wavell held a number of general staff appointments and by 1933 had been promoted major general. Having previously been identified as a Russian specialist, he was now regarded as an expert in the Middle East and was sent out to Palestine in 1937 as General Officer Commanding British Forces in Palestine and Transjordan. Promoted lieutenant general in 1938, after a short spell as General Officer Commanding the United Kingdom Southern Command, in 1939 he was promoted to full general and given command in the Middle East. He made his name in the wider world by defeating the Italians in East Africa in 1940–41, though heavily outnumbered, but fell foul of Churchill when he showed himself reluctant to intervene immediately in the Rashid Ali rebellion in Iraq.7 Churchill at once replaced him as commander in the Middle East with Claude Auchinleck and gave him the consolation prize of commander-in-chief in India (July 1941).

  Burma in 1941 was a neglected area even within a neglected wider military sector. Although India was responsible for Burma’s defence administration, operationally it came under the control of the British Commander-in-Chief Far East, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, who had been appointed three months before Wavell became the military supremo in India. Wavell’s position in Burma was ticklish, since he was in a particularly impossible situation within a generally impossible one. Brooke-Popham immediately saw the lamentable state of defence in both Singapore and Malaya and asked for reinforcements, but Churchill, preoccupied with the war in North Africa, made it clear that none would be forthcoming.8 In early 1941, Churchill was adamant that a Japanese attack on Singapore was chimerical, but the truth was that Britain could not afford war with Japan and hoped that the totemic power of the British Empire and the Royal Navy would scare the yellow race away. Meanwhile the Foreign Office backed US policy on China, and in particular the idea of supplying China via the Burma Road, as a pis aller for a realistic policy. The Americans paid back this timid approach by isolationism, dislike of the British Empire and suspicion of being gulled by the ‘Limeys’.9 Faced by official myopia, chronic shortages in every area and a confused chain of command, Wavell returned to London in September 1941 and requested that Burma be placed under his operational command. The then Chief of the Imperial Staff Sir John Dill, who was later to prove the linchpin of the Anglo-American alliance in Washington, told him bluntly that British support for the American line in China and the consequent need to assuage the susceptibilities of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, meant that Burma would have to remain under operational control of Singapore.10 This was part of the deep subtext that would always bedevil Anglo-American cooperation in Burma. For the USA, China was always the priority; for the British, it was India, and both sides regarded Burma as a kind of subculture to their own predilections and aspirations.

  It must be emphasised that Wavell largely shared the complacent view of likely Japanese intentions in the British-held parts of South-East Asia. The General Officer Commanding Burma, Major General D.K. McLeod, discounted a possible threat from Siam (Thailand), while the Governor-General of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, believed that if the Japanese invaded his territory, the Burmese would rise up against them as one man.11 After a visit to Rangoon in October 1941, Wavell convinced himself that these were correct judgements: indeed his optimism went further and he stated that not only would the Japanese not invade Malaya, but that if they did, they would ‘get it in the neck’.12 His concern was chiefly administrative. He signalled Dill that since the defence of Burma was not vital to that of Malaya but was vital to the defence of India, it made no sense for Burma to continue to be under the operational command of Brooke-Popham; this arrangement was ‘the cardinal mistake’. Perceptions changed rapidly after Pearl Harbor. On 10 December, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Wavell a signal, finally putting Burma under his command and advising him: ‘You must now look East’, meaning that Malaya was in danger. On 15 December, Churchill further signalled Wavell to expect a Japanese invasion of Burma.13 He was appalled and alarmed by the sensational gains made by the Japanese in just over a week since the ‘day of infamy’ in Hawaii. US airpower in the Philippines had been destroyed by the raid on Clark airbase; the pride of the Royal Navy, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, had been sunk off Singapore; Hong Kong’s fall was imminent; and the Japanese were already making major inroads in Malaya, where Penang fell to them on 16 December. The sole consolation for Wavell was that the lacklustre Brooke-Popham was replaced by the more energetic General Henry Pownall as Commander-in-Chief, Far East. Yet there was not much Wavell could do apart from general exhortation. He flew to Calcutta to meet Pownall on 18 December, then, not having any reinforcements to offer Rangoon, he flew down and tried to impress the senior personnel there with his force of personality, as ‘compensation’ for lack of any clearer ideas.14

  From Rangoon Wavell flew to Chungking for what would be a disastrous meeting with Chiang Kai-shek. Wavell was scarcely charmed: Chiang, he wrote, ‘was not a particularly impressive figure at first sight: he speaks no English but makes clucking noises like a friendly hen when greeting one. Madame [his wife] of course speaks perfect English. We had long discussions until midnight.’15 Chiang offered two Chinese ‘armies’ (roughly equivalent to a weak British division) to help Burma, but Wavell turned down the offer. Quite apart from scepticism (warranted) as to whether Chiang would make good on his offer, Wavell did not want the Chinese in Burma for a number of reasons. Their presence might possibly encourage the nationalists in India; they might revive their ancient claims to parts of Burma, and anyway, how could he be sure of getting rid of them; there was certainly not enough food and transport in the country to accommodate foreign troops; the Chinese were deeply unpopular in Burma where they were viewed both as the exploitative ‘Jews of the East’ and, by their investment in banking and shippi
ng, as supporters of British imperialism. Most of all, though, Wavell was still convinced that the Japanese would never invade Burma, since they were already overstretched in Malaya and the Philippines.16 Wavell’s demurral caused grave offence. Chiang construed the refusal as loss of ‘face’ for him and raged in private. He was anyway always deeply anti-Britain both as the major power in South-East Asia and as the nation that had historically humbled China in the Opium Wars. He suspected that Pearl Harbor would be used by the British as an excuse to pre-empt the US Lend-Lease materiel being routed through Burma.17 His anger was compounded when Wavell told him that the British would indeed need all the Lend-Lease supplies reaching Burma and he would therefore not be sending any on to Chungking. Wavell reckoned that Chiang would be grateful if the British kept the Japanese out of Burma for him, but failed to realise that part of the point of Lend-Lease for Chiang was personal enrichment. It was a notable non-meeting of minds. The Americans in China meanwhile were gravely disappointed and feared that Wavell’s action would encourage Chiang to make a separate peace with the Japanese and thus release the 15–20 Japanese divisions bogged down in China for action elsewhere.18 It was somehow symbolic of the way things were going in general that Wavell flew back to Rangoon and landed there on Christmas Day in the middle of a raging air battle.