by Frank McLynn
The next stage of the campaign turned into a race for Monywa, a vital town as it dominated the Chindwin and had a railway north to Yeu. If the Japanese managed to get there first, they would cut the retreating British off from India. It was touch and go, but Slim’s men just pipped the enemy to it.80 General Scott then dug in at Yeu for another rearguard action to hold up the pursuing Japanese. Slim had his last ever meeting with Alexander there on 1 May, where they discussed the unexpectedly determined efforts of the enemy to intercept them. There were three major anxieties for the military leaders: that the Japanese would cut them off; that food supplies would give out before India was reached; and that the monsoon would break while they were still struggling over the mountains in the border country.81 By the first week of May, most of the British troops had already reached Kalewa, but on 10 May there was bitter fighting between the pursuers and the Gurkhas in the rearguard at Shegwyin. That night the Gurkhas broke off and made a swift march along a track to Kaing, opposite Kalewa, then joined the mass exodus north from Kalewa to Tamu, a 90-mile trek through the Kabaw valley. With their inimitable gallows humour, the troops soon nicknamed this ‘Death Valley’ because of the high mortality from malaria. The Japanese broke off the pursuit after Kalewa, realising that they could not overhaul their prey. But 2 Burma Brigade, taking a different route up the west bank of the Irrawaddy and then north-west to follow the Myittha valley, ended up fighting not the Japanese but large forces of Burmese dacoits.82 By 9 May, however, most of BURCORPS was west of the Chindwin. Now began the slog to the Indian border. A popular story had the soldiers querying how they were supposed to get back to India, eliciting the grim reply: ‘You walk, mate. You walk or you die.’83 Entire histories have been devoted to this, the longest retreat in British military history, but the horrors of the trail never diminish in rereading. All who were there agreed that the trek through the jungle and across razor-backed mountains seemed unending. Food drops from planes operating out of India and Assam eased the worst pangs of starvation, but there was a permanent shortage of water, and disease – malaria, typhus, blackwater fever and cholera – was rampant. One of the worst problems was vitamin C deficiency, which engendered jungle sores that reddened, suppurated and would not heal.84 The entire tatterdemalion army looked like a bunch of ragged scarecrows. Beards were ubiquitous; even Slim tried to grow one, but gave up when a glance in the mirror convinced him that the corps commander looked like Santa Claus; he resumed shaving with the rusty relic of a blade.85
On 12 May the monsoon burst on the column of retreating soldiers and the clouds of refugees who clung close to them for imagined safety. Those who dropped dead were simply washed away and those who remained were made even more vulnerable to disease. The one consolation was that the monsoon halted both the Japanese pursuit and the constant air attacks. There were no proper roads, only jungle tracks, and many cursed the name of the Assam–Bengal railway and the tea companies who had deliberately impeded the building of proper infrastructure so that they could enjoy a transport monopoly. But the army never degenerated into an indisciplined rabble, owing largely to the example set by Slim from the top. After describing the misery his men endured, he then spoke with pride of their esprit de corps.
Ploughing their way up over slopes, over a track inches deep in slippery mud, soaked to the skin, rotten with fever, ill-fed and shivering … their only rest at night was to lie on sodden ground under the dripping trees, without even a blanket to cover them … All of them, British, Indian and Gurkha, were gaunt and ragged as scarecrows. Yet as they trudged behind their officers in groups, pitifully small, they still carried their arms and kept their ranks, they were still recognizable as fighting units. They might look like scarecrows but they looked like soldiers too.86
At last, on 15 May, the vanguard began entering Assam, and by the 28th nearly all the troops of BURCORPS had crossed into India, having accomplished a 900-mile retreat. Parties of refugees continued to dribble in until October. No reliable estimate has ever been attempted of fatalities on this grim march. Altogether over a million fled from Burma, and at least 100,000 Indians (some say 200,000) died on the trek north.87 Slim estimated that he sustained casualties of 13,000 dead and wounded in BURCORPS, that he took only 38 out of 150 big guns from Burma into India, and that he was left with just 50 lorries and 30 jeeps.88 Some humanitarian attempts were made to feed the starving columns of refugees, but most of these foundered on the irreducible rock of human nature. The RAF dropped supplies, but these were largely looted by gangs of armed Punjabis and Sikhs.89
Everything Slim saw on the retreat convinced him that his initial diagnosis of the ills of Burma had been correct. Even if only 5 per cent of Burmese could be counted actively hostile to the British, there were just too many self-seeking groups, too many bandits and dacoits, and too few Burmese fighting men who had been trained to be of the right calibre. The lack of preparation on the British side – since no one had expected an invasion of Burma – was woeful, compounded by poor and overlapping civil administration. There was an overall lack of clarity over British aims, with neither Slim nor Alexander being given lucid guidelines: they were told neither to conduct a fighting retreat nor to slug it out to the bitter end. Inadequate airpower virtually told its own story, as did the poor and inadequate British intelligence about Burma. Worst of all, the British had been consistently outpointed and outgeneralled by the enemy. Although it was a myth that the Japanese were ‘naturals’ at jungle warfare, they had trained their troops thoroughly in this aspect of fighting and the British had not; all foreign-theatre training had concentrated on the very different conditions of campaigning in the desert. Moreover, the Japanese tactics of using roadblocks had demoralised the British, giving their foes a clear psychological advantage. Most impressive of all was the Japanese use of the ‘hook’, whereby they would use river transport to appear suddenly in BURCORPS’s rear.90 Worst of all aspects of the terrible defeat in Burma was the blow to Britain’s imperial prestige. After the sinking of two of its capital ships, the fall of Hong Kong and the ignominious surrender of Singapore, the rout in Burma was the very last thing the reputation of the empire in Asia needed.91 Beaten in preparation, execution, strategy and tactics, Slim was quite prepared to put himself down as well: ‘For myself I had little to be proud of; I could not rate my generalship high.’92 Here he protested too much, for the situation he faced in Burma in March–May 1942 was beyond the reach of even the most consummate military genius. In the face of stresses and strains that nearly derailed even the ‘laid-back’ Alexander, Slim had remained unflappable and imperturbable, never lurching into panic, even at the most perilous moments, like the encounter at Shegwyin or the race for Monywa. And it was his grip on the disciplined retreat that enabled the cream of his fighting troops to retain their morale and hope for a return match with the enemy. The success of the withdrawal from Burma was Slim’s work and Slim’s alone.93
Neither Alexander nor Wavell, his immediate superiors, gained much kudos from the Burma campaign in early 1942. Alexander was always overrated as a commander and did so well in the Second World War largely because he was one of Churchill’s pets. It is highly significant that he devotes just three pages in his memoirs to his unhappy five months in Burma (he was transferred to the Middle East in July); in his heart he knew that that episode in his career did not redound to his credit.94 Slim skirts carefully around the question of Alexander’s performance, but it is clear from the subtext that he was not impressed.95 In some ways Wavell appears in an even poorer light, initially complacent and overconfident, then consistently jumping the wrong way, as when he proposed that the British army retreat into China.96 When Churchill blamed him for the fall of Rangoon, Wavell tried to shift the blame on to Alexander, insinuating that he should have fought on and not destroyed the oil installations in the city. Alexander very properly retorted by pointing to Wavell’s own order that he should pull back if he feared the imminent destruction of the whole army.97 Wavell always had a v
ery high opinion of his own abilities, but the suspicion arises that he was far too much au-dessus de la mêlée to be a really effective commander-in-chief. His severest critics accuse him of trying to be a Marcus Aurelius, maintaining a posture of Olympic detachment while the heavens fell around his ears. There is a suspicion of unjustifiable levity in the poem he wrote at the very moment the British army was plodding along the via dolorosa to Assam. It is a pastiche based on Kipling’s famous poem about Mandalay.
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, at the corner of my map
There’s no Burma girl awaiting, but a nasty little Jap.
Yet the cipher wires are humming, and the chiefs of staff they say
Get you back, you British soldier; get you back to Mandalay.
Get you back to Mandalay
Where mosquitoes fall in May:
And the Jap comes up through jungle like a tiger after prey.
The anopheles is buzzing, and his bite is swift and keen,
The rain falls down in torrents, and the jungle’s thick and green;
And the way back into Burma is a long and weary way
And there ain’t no buses running from Assam to Mandalay.
On the road to Mandalay
Where the flying Zeros play
And the Jap comes up through jungle like a tiger after prey.98
No one could ever accuse Slim of not having a sense of humour, but unlike Wavell, he was more sensitive to the right time and place for levity.
3
To put the disaster of early 1942 in Burma into wider perspective, we have to flash back to General Joseph Stilwell’s arrival in the country, just a few days before Slim. Born in 1883, Stilwell was a West Point graduate with a talent for languages, a hard-working professional soldier but also a genuine eccentric with a pronounced contempt for all formality, including army uniforms, a sincere commitment to the interests of the enlisted man and a caustic tongue. It is alleged that he was for a long time held at the rank of brigadier general because of his habitually insulting attitude to military superiors, but he had many powerful backers in the corridors of power in Washington, most notably General George Marshall, who rated him very highly and considered him the best corps commander in the whole US Army.1 The two men had served briefly together in China and were family friends. Marshall had a notoriously short fuse, and Stilwell has been described as ‘one of the few officers willing to test Marshall’s sense of humour … the only theater commander who dared rib him occasionally’.2 Highly intelligent and well read, Stilwell was also an outstanding linguist, who had been top of the class in French at West Point and later taught both Spanish and French there. Even more impressively, he had set himself to master Chinese over the years and was universally regarded as the army’s senior Chinese expert. He had other peculiarities, among them an avidity for movies that would later make him more than a match for the cinephile Louis Mountbatten. In December 1941 he went to see Walt Disney’s Dumbo, and enjoyed it so much that he sat through it twice.3
Physically Stilwell was unprepossessing. He looked prematurely old, with grizzled grey hair that made him seem an uncanny ringer for the playwright Samuel Beckett. Part of the problem was that he was half blind, having sustained serious injuries in World War I when an ammunition dump exploded. His left eye was so badly impaired that he could not count the fingers of a hand at a distance of three feet, while his right eye needed constant correction. With a squint, a strong nose and a scrawny neck, he looked like a wise old turtle, but constantly strove to surmount and minimise his physical frailties: at one time he was army handball champion in the Orient.4 While commanding at the staff college in Fort Benning, Georgia, Stilwell acquired the nickname ‘Vinegar Joe’. One of his students drew a caricature of the waspish commander rising out of a vinegar bottle. So far from feeling insulted, Stilwell was delighted and had multiple copies of the cartoon made.5 Stilwell had observed at first hand, often at great personal risk, every phase of the Chinese revolution since 1911, when the Manchu dynasty was thrown out by Sun Yat-sen. Fluent in Chinese, he was a veteran of three long military tours in China, most recently as military attaché at the US Legation in Peking (1935–40). During 1940–41 he commanded the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, California, and was in charge during the notorious post-Pearl Harbor panic in Los Angeles in December 1941, when the Japanese were falsely reported to have landed on America’s West Coast. Commanding the whole of the Californian coastline as far as the Mexican border, Stilwell famously telephoned the War Department in Washington to say that he was desperately short of ammunition with which to repel the invaders. The officer at the end of the line promised to do the best he could. ‘The best you can?’ Stilwell roared. ‘Good God, what the hell am I supposed to do? Fight ’em off with oranges?’6 He was initially selected to command the Allied forces in North Africa in what later became Operation TORCH, but the pressure of events brought him back to China.
It was a perennial worry of President Roosevelt that his ‘Europe First’ policy would disenchant Chiang Kai-shek to the point where he would sign a separate peace with Japan. This was the genesis of FDR’s cable to Chiang on 31 December 1941 to tell him that Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands had ‘agreed’ to the formation of a China Theatre of War, including parts of Siam and Indo-China, with Chiang as supreme commander. The reality of course was that this arrangement, like the associated ABDACOM, was simply a fait accompli Roosevelt had imposed on unwilling allies. But Chiang, duly flattered, went for the bait. On 2 January he cabled Washington to ask for a suitable US general as his chief of staff. It was considered that Brigadier General John Magruder of the American Military Mission to China was not senior enough, and anyway he was already disenchanted with the Chinese. Lieutenant General Hugh A. Drum was offered the post but turned it down as not prestigious enough.7 As the hunt for a suitable candidate went on, Stilwell’s name came up. The Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, FDR’s strong right arm in the prosecution of the war of 1941–45, was always a fervent admirer of Stilwell, and viewed him as ‘immensely capable and remarkably resourceful’.8 Perhaps to sweeten the pill, Marshall decided that the new post would combine the functions of Chief of Staff, China Theatre, with those of US Commander, China-Burma-India Theatre, and also supervisor of Lend-Lease materiel in South-East Asia and the Far East. This multiple role was to be the source of much confusion, bitterness and misunderstanding during the next three years. It was a bad mistake both in terms of lack of clarity of the overall chain of command and because Chiang himself never really understood it. Initially suspicious, he asked his brother-in-law T.V. Soong (Soong Tze-vun) to investigate the implications of the tripartite role, but Soong, an inveterate intriguer who always had his own agenda and who may even have aspired to replace Chiang as leader of the Kuomintang, reassured the generalissimo that the other two roles the new man would fill were entirely subsidiary to that of Chiang’s chief of staff. In other words, Chiang, worried that the British would pre-empt ‘his’ Lend-Lease materiel, would always get his way.9
Meanwhile Marshall pressed hard for the appointment of his protégé. He summoned Stilwell to Washington and told him flatly: ‘Joe, you have got twenty-four hours to think up a better candidate, otherwise it’s you.’10 Mischievously Stilwell suggested that General Drum, as the army’s senior-ranking officer, should be approached again. It is an interesting pointer to the warmth between Marshall and Stilwell that Marshall was prepared to listen to his friend’s slanderous diatribe about Drum, whom he despised as pompous, self-important and an overpromoted nonentity. Since Chiang was the original stuffed shirt, Stilwell argued, the best bet would be for the USA in turn to send out its own biggest stuffed shirt, i.e. Drum. At another meeting three weeks later, the army chief said: ‘It’s hard as hell to find anybody in our high command who’s worth a damn. There are plenty of good young ones, but you have to reach too far down.’11 Another Stilwell admirer was the Secretary for War, Henry L. Stimson, who had a number of me
etings with him in January. Stimson impressed on Stilwell that there were two immediate priorities for the new chief of staff. One was ensuring that Chiang was really prepared to let an American take operational charge of his armies; without this the mission would be a flop. The other was to patch up the appalling collapse in relations between the Chinese and the British, the result of Wavell’s refusal of Chiang’s help at the Lashio conference in December, which had caused the generalissimo to lose face.12 Under American pressure the British relented and invited Chiang to take up the defence of the Shan states on Burma’s eastern border, thus freeing up 1st Burma Division for the defence of Rangoon. Churchill was the next leader to have to save face: he told FDR that of course Burma was more important strategically than Singapore but that he had to concentrate on Singapore to keep the Australians happy. On 19 January 1942, Stimson formally asked Chiang to approve a US commander for Chinese troops in Burma. Chiang appeared to agree but, as ever, hedged his bets with a form of wording that was deliberately ambiguous. However, it satisfied Washington. On 23 January Marshall told Stilwell that he was definitely going to China. The dour ‘Vinegar Joe’ used the same words to him he had previously used to Stimson: ‘I’ll go where I’m sent.’13
There followed an interview with Roosevelt, who tried out on Stilwell the usual brand of easy charm he used for all comers. Vinegar Joe refused to buy the bill of goods; the truth was that he disliked and despised the President. He found FDR ‘very pleasant but very unimpressive’. Roosevelt was one of those people who was arrogant, overconfident and, in his own mind, all knowing, but also shrewd enough to realise that such attributes would make him unpopular. As a good politician therefore he masked his character under a carapace of frivolity and banter. He had other weaknesses, such as a tendency to make policy on the wing. When Stilwell asked the President if he had a personal message for Chiang, FDR at first stalled and then came up with what he thought was a clever bromide: ‘Tell him we are in this thing for keeps and we intend to keep at it until China gets back all her territory.’14 This was an unwise commitment, comparable to J.F. Kennedy’s ‘pay any price’ promise in his inaugural address, or FDR’s own ‘unconditional surrender’ announcement at the Casablanca conference in 1943. Stilwell would have been still more astonished to learn the President’s attitude to Burma. He confided to Churchill in April 1942 as follows: ‘I have never liked Burma or the Burmese, and you people must have had a terrible time with them for the past fifty years. Thank the Lord you have He-Saw, We-Saw, You-Saw under lock and key. I wish you could put the whole bunch of them into a frying pan and let them stew in their own juice.’15 He was even less impressed by Roosevelt’s éminence grise, the ubiquitous (in White House terms) Harry Hopkins – ‘a strange gnomelike creature (stomach ulcers) … He had on an old red sweater and crossroads shoes and no garters, and his hair hadn’t been cut for eight weeks’ according to Stilwell.16 This from a man who was notoriously careless of his own appearance. Hopkins promised he would commandeer the Normandie for use as a troop transport in South-East Asia. Next morning Stilwell heard that the Normandie had been gutted in New York Harbour. ‘Is that Fate?’ he confided to his diary.17