The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  At a deeper level Slim pondered how the British could make progress in a country where the population was either profoundly apathetic or overtly hostile. Perhaps only 5–10 per cent of Burmese were anti-British in the strong sense of being pro-Japanese, and the hill tribes such as the Karens had a long tradition of supporting the British, often to the fury of the mainstream Burmans, but the peoples of the plains and valleys were notably neutral and insouciant about the outcome of the war. Yet Slim felt that all these adverse structural factors could in the end be overcome if only Britain and her allies could attain superiority in airpower. In 1940 the chiefs of staff in London had calculated that Far East Command needed at least 14 squadrons or a minimum of 336 planes to be fully secure in the area, but no action was taken. It was the same story when Wavell reported in December 1941 that the entire area from Hong Kong to the Indian border was covered by just 200 aircraft, none of them long-range fighters, and pleaded for more as a matter of urgency.48 Once again nothing significant was done. The dribble of reinforcements consisted mainly of obsolete planes, of more danger to their pilots than to the Japanese. Although the Japanese Zero fighter was, plane for plane, inferior to both the RAF Hurricane and the P-40 Tomahawk fighter of the American Volunteer Group based in Rangoon, the Japanese knew they would win in a war of attrition, and began the way they meant to go on by destroying a number of Blenheims on the first day of the invasion. Thereafter they systematically demolished all cities and major towns by pattern bombing. From 23 to 26 January the skies over Rangoon were thick with dogfighting aircraft. The Japanese lost this first full battle in the air (Slim, with some hyperbole, claimed they lost 200 planes), but even the more sober estimate of 17 Japanese aircraft downed as against 12 Allied was ominous, since the Japanese could increase their numbers and the Allies could not.49 Quite what the disparity in planes was has always been disputed. Slim reckoned that on 31 January 1942 there were just 35 Allied aircraft against 150 Japanese, but that the gap had widened to 45 and 400 respectively by the time he arrived in Burma. Others say the true figures for February were 140 as against 900 Japanese.50 It is quite clear that the ratio was heavily in Japan’s favour and that the gap was becoming a crevasse. Slim took heart from a successful RAF bombing raid on 21 March when Hurricanes shot down 27 Japanese planes, but his solace was short-lived, since the enemy hit back by bombing Magwe non-stop (there were six raids in 24 hours with 250 planes) and extending their raids to the Akyab peninsula in the far west of Burma. Battered into submission and with most of their planes caught on the ground and destroyed, the RAF finally quit Burma at the end of March, with 3,000 airmen withdrawn to India. So low was air morale that the RAF did not even bother to notify Alexander of their withdrawal. This meant that Slim’s corps, already in retreat, was totally without air support.51

  The loss of Rangoon and the surrender of Java on 8 March gave the Japanese a great naval opportunity on which they failed to capitalise. Off Sumatra on 2 April, Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi proceeded to Ceylon with five of the six carriers he had commanded on the Pearl Harbor operation and shelled Colombo. With army cooperation he could easily have captured both Ceylon and Mauritius, giving Japan mastery not just of the Bay of Bengal but the entire Indian Ocean; certainly Allied sea contact with India would have been severed. Yet the army, displaying the stolidity and lack of imagination it so often evinced in the 1941–45 war, muffed this glittering opportunity.52 Meanwhile on land in Burma the disaster that was to disfigure the land in 1942 saw its opening chapters, as the first of the country’s million Indians, despairing of their future under a Japanese occupation, began the trek north. Hated by the ethnic Burmans for their wealth and privilege, many of these Indians fell victim to dacoits and even casual violence from the envious, resentful and racially prejudiced Burmese; the sickening litany of rape, murder, robbery, looting and violence was now heard on all sides.53 Slim had no time to listen to such tales, for his mind was concentrated entirely on saving his soldiers from destruction. After his initial consultation with Alexander at Prome, he was now based at Maymyo, the summer capital of Burma, pleasantly cool at an altitude of 3,500 feet, a kind of Simla transplanted and described by one observer as looking like a village in Kent or Connecticut.54 Here he set up the headquarters of the Burma army. Unlike Hutton, who had never got on with his second in command Smyth, Slim was singularly fortunate in that his closest collaborators were Major General J. Bruce Scott, commanding 1st Burma Division, and Smyth’s replacement Major General David Cowan, nicknamed ‘Punch’ because he resembled the choleric figure on the cover of Punch magazine.55 Not only were Slim, Cowan and Scott all Gurkha officers who thought alike, but they had been friends for 20 years and more. Slim told his officers that the newly constituted BURCORPS would be an amalgam of 1st Burma Division, 17th Indian Division and 7th Armoured Brigade. He explained the difficulties involved in fighting alongside the two Chinese divisions, which by this time Wavell had reluctantly accepted into Burma as allies. He warned them that heavy, severe and taxing fighting lay ahead, for it was clear that Japanese strategy would be to try to push the Chinese 5th Army back to Mandalay, capture the oilfields of Yenangyaung and then cut off the British and Chinese retreat west of Mandalay.

  Slim’s first task was to relieve the Chinese army at Toungoo; Wavell had made this a priority. From 24 to 28 March the Chinese there fought grimly and gave a good account of themselves, but the Japanese gradually flushed them out, and in the confusion of the retreat the Chinese neglected to blow the bridge over the Sittang river. Meanwhile Cowan, commanding the would-be relieving force, took heavy casualties at Schwedaung, losing 10 tanks and 350 dead and wounded. The mission was pointless on two counts, both because the two Allied armies had to retreat and because resources were diverted from the more important objective of defending Prome.56 The Wavell–Alexander notion of defending both the Sittang and the Irrawaddy valleys simultaneously was clearly doomed. Alexander compounded the error by insisting that Slim hold both banks of the Irrawaddy, not only at Allanmyo but also at Taungdwingyi, 50 miles to the north-east. Disregarding this, Slim pulled back from Allanmyo and concentrated at Taungdwingyi, where he would have the Chinese under General Tu Lu-ming to support him. Marching south to meet him, the Chinese laid waste the town of Meiktila, looting, destroying and stealing, even from their allies.57 The Burmese campaign seemed to be rapidly deteriorating into a war of ‘all against all’. The Japanese shocked their opponents, who expected warfare to be waged in accordance with the Geneva Convention and were stupefied to learn that they were hanging prisoners upside down and using them for bayonet practice; they also strafed columns of refugees as target shooting. The Burmese, sensing that the Japanese were winning, began acting treacherously towards the retreating British, murdering foraging parties and stragglers. In response, attitudes hardened on the British side. There was a reluctance to take Japanese prisoners, and in revenge for the treachery of the ethnic Burmans, British troops took to burning settlements and, in at least one case, massacring an entire village.58 With even tame Burmese preying on Indian refugees, the cycle of atrocities escalating in the formal war, and organised dacoits taking their chances against all and sundry, it hardly needed the Chinese to add another wheel to this wagon of war crimes. However, they contributed a refinement of their own by shooting Buddhist monks in the belief that they must be spies since they were ‘in disguise’.59

  Slim’s first contacts with the Chinese led him to have the same exasperated feelings towards them that the US general Stilwell always had. He had arranged to rendezvous with them at Taungdwingyi but they failed to arrive on time, the first of many such contretemps that led Slim to remark exasperatedly: ‘It was rather like enticing a shy sparrow to perch on your windowsill.’ He gave an order to a Chinese colonel who said he could do nothing without the express orders of General Sun Li-jen. Slim explained that since he was General Sun’s superior, an order from him was ipso facto an order from General Sun. He repeated the command. ‘But I cannot move until I
get the orders of General Sun,’ the man protested doggedly.60 Alexander had a similar experience. He saw a battery of Chinese field guns one day, well dug in and expertly camouflaged. Next day they were all gone. When he asked General Tu Li-ming what had happened to them, Tu said they had been ‘withdrawn’. In which case, said Alexander, what is the point of having them? Tu explained that the Chinese 5th Army was Chiang’s best division only because of those field guns. It followed that he could not afford to lose them in battle, because if he did, the 5th Army would no longer be the best division.61 Slim claimed that he soon learned two vital lessons about the Chinese: timekeeping and punctuality meant nothing to them; and they would steal anything that came within range – stores, rations, lorries, trains, even noticeboards. On one occasion they tried to steal a British train to steam north in, and Slim faced the ticklish problem that he might have to open fire on an ally to stop them. He solved the problem by having the engines uncoupled and taken 10 miles up the line. When the Chinese poured aboard the train, they found there were no engines to pull it.62 But when the Chinese did finally get into action, Slim was impressed by their fighting qualities and even more by the talents of General Sun. ‘I had expected the Chinese soldier to be tough and brave,’ he wrote, ‘but I was, I confess, surprised at how he responded to the stimulus of proper tank and artillery support, and the aggressive spirit he had shown. I had never expected, either, to get a Chinese general of the calibre of Sun.’63

  Yet with Toungoo lost, there was little point in trying to defend Prome. At a tripartite conference at Allanmyo, Wavell, Alexander and Slim all agreed that they had to abandon it. It was at this meeting that Alexander made the bizarre suggestion that 7th Armoured Brigade should retire to China. He said nothing about how the tanks were to be supplied with petrol in that case, but logistics was never Alex’s strong point.64 Slim resisted this suggestion and clearly was not over-impressed by his chief at any level. He found his legendary ‘cool’ embarrassing and inappropriate, as when he was machine-gunned from the air but refused to dive for a trench, instead taking shelter under a tree. Instead of admiring his sangfroid, Slim was annoyed with him for setting a bad example. As Japanese pressure mounted, Slim moved his headquarters back to Magwe. It was now April, which was the cruellest, and certainly the hottest, month in Burma, and at this very moment Slim’s troops were entering the most arid regions in the central plains. They were mired in heat and dust and permanently short of water – a nightmare for the physically fit but certain death for the wounded and pack animals.65 Two days before the move to Magwe, Japanese bombers blitzed Mandalay, reducing it to a smoking crater (6 April). It was said that a city that had taken a thousand years to build was destroyed in an hour. Masses of bloated dead bodies lay crawling with flies, picked over by crows, kites and hawks.66 As Japanese airpower progressively devastated all the urban centres, cholera and smallpox spread quickly. Assailed by heat, thirst and disease, beset by an enemy that seemed unbeatable, the British troops became despondent and morale plummeted to rock bottom. One unit suffered 59 suicides and desertions in four hours, reducing its strength from 220 to 161, after being ordered forward once more.67 And in an awful symbiosis with the retreating army there came a wretched line of refugees, suffering even worse travails than the troops. The progress of the army was reported as follows: ‘Men, mules and horses were strung out across the dusty hills under a white blazing sun. They were collapsing dog-tired in the sand for a brief rest, then heaving themselves to their feet again and marching forward. Bearded, dust-caked men, with the sweat salt dried white across their shirts, their water-bottles clacking dry against their hips.’68

  For four days from 10 April, BURCORPS’s 48th Brigade was engaged in desperate fighting as the Japanese in a lightning move got between them and the British 13th Brigade on the road between Magwe and Taungdwingyi. Slim wanted to unite all sections of his army as soon as possible, but Alexander reasoned that to pull his troops out of the nodal point at Taungdwingyi would demoralise the Chinese and might make them start retreating pell-mell for the Chinese border. For this reason the decision was taken to stand and fight the enemy outside Yenangyaung. What followed was the most brutal battle of 1942 in Burma. First Slim ordered the vital oil wells destroyed so that they could never fall into the hands of the Japanese. In a rerun of the Rangoon explosion (and with similar post-war legal consequences), a million gallons of crude oil soared skywards in flames reaching 500 feet high; the black cloud of smoke blotted out the sun. That was on 15 April.69 Next day, 1st Burma Division went into action against the enemy but were decisively routed. On 17 April, Slim tried to relieve the pressure on the badly mauled 1st Burma Division by launching a counterattack by 17th Indian Division, but this too was swatted aside. A further counterattack by the Chinese failed when, supposed to be catching the Japanese in a pincer movement, they simply failed to arrive at the rendezvous at the required time. At this point British morale cracked, and the men broke ranks in disarray, interested only in slaking their thirst. All in all, the four-day battle of Yenangyaung on 15–18 April was one of the blackest periods in the history of British arms to that date.70 Far too late the Chinese got into the battle, and although they acquitted themselves well, they were swimming against an unstoppable tide. Faced with the prospect of bloody hand-to-hand fighting in the smoking ruins, Slim ordered the Chinese out of the firing line. He conveyed the atmosphere well: ‘The temperature that day was 114; the battlefield was the arid, hideous, blackened shade of the oilfield, littered with wrecked derricks, flames roaring from the tanks, and shattered machinery and burning buildings everywhere. Over it all hung that huge pall of smoke. And there was no water.’71 But Slim did, in a sense, have the last word. When the victorious Japanese entered Yenangyaung, his sappers bade a defiant farewell by dynamiting the power station.72

  While they drew the knot tighter and tighter over the British windpipe in the west, the Japanese suddenly played their trump card by appearing in force in the east, moving with amazing speed through the Shan states and brushing aside all opposition. They reached Mauchi, with its valuable wolfram mines, on 13 April. They next attacked the Chinese 6th Army in the hills between the Mandalay–Rangoon railway and the Sittang river. After another easy victory, they seized Taunggyi, capital of the southern Shan states, on 20 April. This city had huge petrol stocks, and its seizure was timely, as the Japanese were running out of gasoline.73 With the British in full retreat and vast numbers of civilians in danger of not being evacuated fast enough, Slim addressed his officers and tried to find the proverbial silver lining. ‘Well, gentlemen, it might be worse,’ he began. A sepulchral voice said: ‘How?’ Slim takes up the story: ‘I could have murdered him but instead I had to keep my temper. “Oh,” I said, grinning. “It might be raining.” Two hours later it was – hard.’74

  Soon it was time for more serious conferences. On 19 April, Slim met Wavell and Alexander to lay contingency plans for a retreat into India and China should the situation in Burma become untenable, as it showed every sign of doing. Slim still hoped that the Chinese 6th Army could hang on grimly but began to change his mind when it was put to him that in that case, the British would have to stay on too, and the end of the road might be that they would have no option but to retreat with the Chinese into China. Slim was alarmed. ‘Personally, I did not like this plan at all. Above all, I disliked sending a British formation into China. Their administration in a famine-stricken area would be practically impossible, they would arrive in a shocking state and be no advertisement for us, while the men, both British and Indian, would be horribly depressed at the prospect.’75 It was therefore with some relief that he heard, at his next conference with Alexander six days later at Kyaukse, that Burma would definitely be abandoned but that no British troops would withdraw into China. The troops would leave for India in two general directions, via Imphal to Assam and to India through the Hukawng valley. Slim agreed with Alexander that if BURCORPS got out fast, General Iida would be denied the decisive ba
ttle he sought around Mandalay.76

  Morale in the army improved miraculously once it was known that there was a general retreat to India. Perhaps this factor accounts for the splendid actions fought by British units in the closing weeks of the campaign. While a holding action was fought in the eastern sector around Meiktila (and later at Wundwin when Cowan retired there) to stem the Japanese advance as the main Chinese forces retreated, BURCORPS regiments reached the west bank of the Irrawaddy on 30 April and blew up the great Ava bridge once their Chinese allies were safely across. They were able to get to the bridge before the enemy because of a valiant Rorke’s Drift-style stand by 48th Indian Brigade at Kyaukse on 28–29 April. Meanwhile other units ceded the crucial area around Monywa inch by inch, buying more valuable time.77 However, what Alexander had hoped would be the pièce de résistance failed to come off. He sent Major Mike Calvert with guerrillas of the so-called Bush Warfare School to ‘hold’ the 825-foot-high Gokteik viaduct, 30 miles east of Maymyo between Mandalay and Lashio, making it clear with many a wink and nod that he would like it destroyed, while formally ordering Calvert (for what he mysteriously refers to as ‘political reasons’) not to blow it. He hoped Calvert would read between the lines and disobey his orders, especially as the major had a reputation for being insubordinate, but the literal-minded Calvert abided by the letter of his instructions.78 The Japanese therefore secured the Gokteik gorge intact. The martial glories of the last days of April were somewhat dimmed by anxieties about river transport for the retreating divisions. The ferries for crossing the mighty Irrawaddy were found to be woefully inadequate. Slim rationalised his disappointment with an ‘old soldier’ anecdote, referring to the ‘blanket’ system of army administration: ‘And we says to ’im, “Jump and we’ll hold the blanket.” And he jumped and there weren’t no blanket!’ It was in this context that the crossing of the Ava bridge across the Irrawaddy must be accounted crucial. Moreover, the corps of Royal Engineers performed brilliantly, utilising bridge-building skills that enabled the river crossing even of 13-ton tanks.79