by Frank McLynn
From Imphal, Slim was transferred to Calcutta, in command of the newly formed 15 Indian Corps, where his immediate concern was to take precautions against a possible seaborne invasion across the Bay of Bengal and in particular to guard against amphibious operations by the Japanese in the Sunderbans, that complex delta of waterways through which the combined Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers pour into the sea across a 200-mile front. To this effect he held manoeuvres in July with the RAF and Royal Navy. In fact the threat of Japanese invasion was non-existent, for their carrier force had been destroyed in the great American victory at Midway on 4–6 June, though of course this was not known at the time.18 Although at one level the pressure on Slim was eased when Noel Irwin was replaced by Geoffrey Scoones as commander of 4 Corps (Irwin was transferred to the newly formed Eastern Command), this serendipity was more than upset by six weeks of serious rioting throughout India. The British government had effectively promised India independence in the 1935 India Act, but Indian nationalists, represented in the powerful Congress party, remained suspicious and resentful.19 After Pearl Harbor it was thought particularly important to enlist Congress in the Allied cause, and Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Privy Seal in the Churchill government, went out to India in March 1942 on a mission to gain the support of Gandhi, Nehru and other leading lights among the Indian nationalists. As an austere left-winger, Cripps was looked on favourably by Congress, but when he offered what was tantamount to virtually immediate self-government, he was effectively disowned by Churchill and the viceroy Lord Lithlingow. Cripps was caught in the crossfire and blamed by Nehru and his other friends in Congress, who thought this yet another example of ‘perfidious Albion’ at work. Gandhi made a point of dismissing the gelded Cripps proposals as ‘a postdated cheque on a bank that is obviously failing.’20 He was not confident that the British Empire would win the struggle with Japan, so what, he reasoned, was the point of signing up to an agreement the other side might not be able to deliver? The machinations underlying the Cripps mission are still controversial, with Lithlingow and Wavell, as commander-in-chief, fundamentally opposed to any real change in wartime, while American diplomats, at FDR’s urging, exerted pressure behind the scenes to get virtual Indian independence. Yet another problem was that the British proposed to give individual provinces an ‘opt-out’ right from the new nation, which raised the fear of ‘Balkanisation’ and separatist and racial enclaves.21
Cripps returned to London with his mission a failure. The suspicion arises that many parties to a would-be agreement, especially Churchill, were secretly pleased at this outcome. But Gandhi reacted with indignation to what he now saw as an elaborate charade. Unmoved by the reservations of some in Congress, who thought that his actions might be construed as giving comfort to Japan, and heedless of the global military implications, he launched a ‘Quit India Now’ movement and announced that there would be a new wave of satyagraha, or non-violent civil disobedience – the tactic he had used so effectively since 1930. Gandhi and the entire Congress executive committee were arrested in Bombay in August 1942 and imprisoned; Gandhi stayed in jail for two years.22 The predictable response to this on the streets was anger, followed by violence. Strikes, demonstrations and mass absenteeism quickly escalated to military mutiny, bomb outrages and the burning alive of policemen. The authorities cracked down hard in response: hundreds of thousands were arrested, including 30,000 Congress activists, and thousands of demonstrators were killed or injured by police gunfire. So far British military personnel had not been targeted, and warnings were always given in advance about railway sabotage. But as the indigenous death toll mounted, the popular mood turned ugly and troop trains were attacked, especially in the bandit country of central Bihar on the line to Assam and the Burmese border.23 There were also serious disturbances in the coal- and iron-producing areas of the north-east. There was immense disruption to transport and industry, to the production of munitions and to the building of airfields. From Calcutta Slim reported that the riots there were not serious, but it was a different story in the countryside, and the destruction of the railways was particularly serious. There could be no thought of offensive action in Burma with such a grave situation in the home base. Wavell was forced to deploy no fewer than 57 infantry battalions in the worst hotspots, and it is estimated that the entire war against Japan in South-East Asia was put back a good two months by the troubles.24 Incredibly, having shown himself as much out of his depth in India as in Burma, Wavell had the gall to petition Churchill at this very juncture for promotion to field marshal. Over the very reasonable protests of the Secretary of State for War, P.J. Grigg, Churchill, abetted by Alanbrooke, approved the promotion. In October Wavell received his baton. Perhaps in recognition that he was the real worker in the India-Burma theatre, Slim was given the consolation prize of a CBE.25
Slim’s nemesis Irwin got in touch with him in July to say that since he proposed to take direct control of a forthcoming offensive in the Arakan peninsula, he and Slim would be swapping headquarters at the end of August. Slim was delighted to switch from Calcutta to Ranchi, for as he said: ‘Its climate was vastly preferable to the steaming heat of Bengal, malaria was much less, and the tawdry distractions of Calcutta were absent.’26 But he found that the insurgency in India had seriously affected morale and esprit de corps, with a particular unwillingness on the soldiers’ part to go on parade; even his own Gurkha orderly proved recalcitrant. The new 15 Corps comprised the 70th British Division, 50 Armoured Brigade and some assorted corps units, and some of the battalions were work-shy to the point where they would have fulfilled all Stilwell’s anti-Indian-army strictures. Slim had to spend a good deal of time whipping his army into shape, insisting on regular parades and physical fitness. Having surmounted the first hurdle, he instituted his own training programme, based on his grim experiences earlier in the year. His eightfold credo was eventually turned into a pamphlet summarising his findings; Slim claimed he never deviated from them and that adhering to them would eventually win the war. The principles were as follows: soldiers must learn that the jungle is not hostile but merely neutral; patrolling is the key to jungle fighting; when you find Japanese units in your rear, do not panic but reason that it is the enemy who is ‘surrounded’; don’t hold long continuous lines in defence; there should never be frontal attacks but always responses to hooks or assaults on the flank and rear; tanks are useful but always in a pack and always in a cloud of infantry; there are no non-combatants in jungle warfare; never allow the Japanese to hold the initiative.27 All these tenets were conveyed to the recipients with dry humour. Slim discovered that his men were unnerved by the screams and ululations produced by the Japanese in night attacks, demoralising inexperienced troops and leading them to blast away into the darkness in terror, thus giving away their positions. He had a simple solution: ‘The answer to noise is silence.’28 He liked to sit down beside young, greenhorn officers with a mug of tea and an avuncular manner and ‘shoot the breeze’. Colonel James Lunt remembers such a ‘fireside chat’: ‘You know, Jimmy, we haven’t got a snowball’s hope in hell of beating those buggers – but the point we must make to everyone is that we mustn’t give up. Because once we give up, they will just corral us like cattle. We’ve got to fight … and maybe, who knows, we may suddenly find their weak spot or something of that nature, that will give us the opportunity, because we’ve still got a lot of fight left in us.’29
In the long run the Japanese in Burma did much of the Allies’ work of reconquest for them by a brutal, blinkered and exploitative occupation that gave the lie to the much-trumpeted Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – the Japanese project for a common market. Although they were supposed to have liberated Burma from British oppression, the Japanese imposed a tyranny that made Western colonialism seem small beer. Almost all the country was under direct military rule, and Hideki Tojo in Tokyo proclaimed that because of its proximity to India, the ‘economic independence’ promised to Burma would have to be deferred until the end of the
war. The anti-British Burma Independence Army, which had aided the Japanese invaders, was considered insufficiently loyal to the new masters; its ranks were winnowed, and the slimmed-down version became the vehemently pro-Japanese Burma Defence Army, led by Aung San, just 4,000 strong, so incapable of emerging as a third force.30 A joint policy of political indoctrination and re-education on one hand with terror on the other saw the rise of a Gestapo-like force, the Kempeitai, universally feared. Evincing contempt for Burmese culture and religion, Japanese commanders routinely desecrated Buddhist temples and insulted village elders. Inflation and other forms of financial distortion warped the agricultural economy, disgorging a flood of unemployed labourers and peasants. These were used by the Japanese as a gigantic corvée, and to this forced labour were added the unfortunate British prisoners, pressed into labour gangs and virtually starved to death.31 The prisoners of war were the focus of an especial rage in Burma, beyond the normal contempt expressed by the bushido code for men who had allowed themselves to be taken alive. This was because the retreating British had been so successful in destroying the infrastructure, tearing up rail track as they went, and in particular blowing up the Ava bridge, whose repair was considered unfeasible in wartime. All in all, the years 1942–45 were grim ones for Burma, but Japanese myopia meant there would be no regrets from the Burmese when the tide eventually turned in favour of the Allies. Almost the only group to be temporarily swayed from their normal pro-British stance was the Karens, whom the Japanese treated with extreme favour, thus increasing the hatred for them among ethnic Burmans. It is sometimes said that the Japanese achieved a masterpiece of social control in Burma by using just 300 civil servants from Tokyo and 540 Kempeitai, thus rivalling the British feat in the Indian Raj, but this is to discount the coercive effect of an army of occupation.32
If the Japanese position in Burma was essentially brittle and unstable, there was, however, little the British and Americans could do in 1942 to take advantage of this. Amazingly, Wavell, who always underestimated the Japanese military capability, was making plans for the reoccupation of Burma even as his troops retreated in disarray in May. This was the genesis of his notion of abolishing the peacetime commands of the Indian army, organised along administrative lines, and ‘transforming’ them into operational centres; Irwin’s appointment as head of the Eastern Army was the first fruit of this new bearing.33 But it was not possible to effect change by waving a magic wand or simply reshufflling the existing deck of cards, and additionally, Eastern Army had the serious internal security situation in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Assam to deal with. Training and recruitment for supposed new units was painfully slow, and only Slim had a real grip on what confronting the Japanese would really mean. Yet both public opinion in Britain and, more seriously, in America, demanded that something be done immediately. A campaign was needed both to raise morale in India and to show the world that Britain was not beaten.34 This was the context in which Wavell on 17 September 1942 ordered Irwin to begin operations in the Arakan pensinsula of Burma. The ultimate aim was to seize Akyab island, from which bombing raids could be launched at Japanese-held Rangoon. But a campaign in the Arakan meant challenging nature at its most difficult, even before the Japanese were encountered.35 From the Indian frontier to a point just short of Akyab island ran the Mayu hills, 90 miles long and 20 miles wide. Down the centre ran a ridge of razor-sharp scarps some 2,000 feet high, jungle-clad and precipitous. The narrow strips of land on either side of the hills were striated by numerous streams or chaungs, which on the western side were tidal, with treacherous mudbanks at low tide. This coastline was beautiful when observed by the traveller or tourist36 but pretty poison in wartime. From October to May, with chill evenings, campaigning was feasible, but with the monsoon season in May came 200 inches of rain. The menace of leeches, mosquitoes and malaria knew no seasons and in some ways posed more of a problem than the Japanese defenders.
Irwin’s animus towards Slim was such that, as far as possible, he tried to marginalise him during the Akyab campaign. The original conception of the campaign, under Wavell’s direction, called for a threefold approach: direct infantry attacks in the Mayu hills; guerrilla activities that in some ways anticipated the later long-range penetration strategy; and amphibious landings at Akyab island to coincide with this. Slim, who was not asked for his opinion, thought it a bad mistake to try to combine all three approaches, and favoured going for the penetration option.37 Wavell was at first inclined to put most weight on the amphibious approach, but soon discovered that he was woefully short of landing craft, simply because there was such heavy demand for them in other theatres, especially for the US Marines’ island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific, and Operation TORCH, the Allied landings in North Africa scheduled for November 1942. On 17 November he therefore abandoned his more grandiose scheme and ordered Irwin to blast a passage to Akyab island overland, through the Mayu hills.38 The next unexpected obstacle was heavy, unseasonal rains, which further delayed operations. Finally, in December, the advance got under way, led by Major General W.L. Lloyd. Since Slim was a corps commander, this was the point where he should have been brought into the picture. Lloyd had nine brigades under his control, a force three times the size of a normal division, and in all usual circumstances this would have entailed corps control, especially with Irwin overseeing everything from Calcutta to Fort Hertz in northern Burma and trying to control a domestic insurgency at the same time.39 Yet Irwin’s dislike of Slim overcame reason and expediency. Even worse, Irwin was a compulsive micromanager, who should never have become bogged down in the tactical minutiae of Lloyd’s battalions. Yet this is precisely what happened. It was a classic case of the wrong man in the wrong job. As one modern critic has pointed out, Irwin was a man of ‘dictatorial and egocentric temperament’ who treated subordinates ‘like indentured coolies deserving neither trust nor consideration’.40 Another student of Arakan has put it even more strongly: ‘Irwin was also, by nature, a meddler. He trusted no one but himself, and involved himself constantly in detail which should have been of no concern of an Army Commander. He gave little or no latitude to his subordinates to use their own initiative and ensured that in every point of detail his orders were carried out without discussion or deviation. This made him dangerously inflexible, finding it difficult to change his mind and approach when the situation demanded it.’41
Nevertheless, at first the Arakan offensive seemed to go well. Despite appalling transport difficulties – ‘like fighting a modern war along stone-age tracks’42 – Lloyd enjoyed the advantage of both air mastery and considerable numerical superiority. The brilliant Japanese defence took all this into consideration. They made no attempt to hold the line between Maungdaw and Buthidaung, or to resist when outlying parties of British troops were flung out as far east as Kyauktaw. There was even more optimism at Lloyd’s HQ when his men reported, as a Christmas Day present, that the enemy had pulled out of Rathedaung on the eastern bank of the Mayu river. As this river enters the Bay of Bengal, it forms a long ‘sea loch’ between which and the Indian Ocean is a narrow peninsula in the form of an inverted triangle, with the apex at Foul Point, temptingly only five or six miles away from Akyab island across the Mayu delta. A few miles north of the point, at Donbaik on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, the talented Japanese general Koga dug in and waited. Having excelled in jungle warfare in gym kit, the roadblock and the amphibious ‘hook’, the enemy was about to reveal yet another unsuspected weapon: the bunker. Slim describes it thus: ‘For the first time we had come up against the Japanese “bunkers” – from now on to be so familiar to us. This was a small strong-point made usually of heavy logs with four to five feet of earth, and so camouflaged in the jungle that it could not be picked out at even fifty yards without prolonged searching. These bunkers held garrisons varying from five to twenty men, plentifully supplied with medium and light machine guns.’43 The bunkers were formidable defensive positions, impervious to field guns or medium bombs and sited so that any attack
ing force came under fire from at least two other bunkers. The redoubt at Donbaik was situated alongside a chaung, in itself a natural anti-tank position, with steep sides up to nine feet high up to the bunker. On 7 January 1943, the attacking forces had their first taste of trying to assault these positions. They were thrown back with heavy losses, and the same pattern continued for four successive days. Wavell and Irwin, both in high alarm, visited Lloyd on the 10th and told him that he must at all costs take Donbaik.44 He asked for tanks, and was granted them. But to Slim’s stupefaction, he was asked to supply just one troop from 50 Tank Brigade, part of his 15 Corps. He objected strenuously, pointing out, in accordance with his central tenets, that tanks should always be used en masse, that ‘the more you use, the fewer you lose’. His objections were overruled, and the decision was taken to deploy half a squadron of tanks on a narrow front. As Slim had predicted, eight tanks made no impression at all; at least a regiment of the armoured monsters should have been used.45
Massive British attacks were beaten off, with heavy casualties, in February and again in March. Koga knew that the reinforcements he wanted would not be fighting fit until the end of March and was determined to hold on until he could counterattack. Irwin meanwhile believed in overwhelming infantry power on narrow fronts – ‘an idea rich in casualties’, as one analyst has commented sardonically.46 Early in March, sensing that defeat was staring him in the face, he tried to coopt the detested Slim to share some of the blame,47 sending him to Maungdaw to see Lloyd and report on the situation there. When Slim queried whether that meant he was now in operational control, Irwin said no: he just wanted Slim’s assessment of the situation. He might be in operational control in the future, he added, but only when he, Irwin, said so, and even in that case Irwin would retain administrative control. This was dog-in-the-manger with a vengeance. As one historian has remarked: ‘Alice came across nothing more extraordinary in Wonderland; it was a Mad Hatter’s contrivance.’48 Slim found morale at an all-time low. He advised Lloyd to abandon the pointless frontal assaults and make a flank attack through the jungle. Lloyd replied that this was unfeasible and of course, because of Irwin’s absurd orders, Slim had no power to overrule him. He returned to Irwin and wrote a pointless report.49 For a while Wavell, completely out of touch with reality, urged just one more effort. Under pressure to make another attack, Irwin so ordered Lloyd, and the result was another disaster. By 20 March Wavell, Irwin and Lloyd were at one in accepting that they would have to withdraw to the Maungdaw–Buthidaung line.50 But Wavell secretly fumed and decided to make Lloyd the scapegoat. Lloyd was dismissed and replaced by Major General C.E.N. Lomax, who simply tried more of the same. But by this time Koga was ready to launch his counteroffensive. His troops quickly rolled up the British and annihilated 47th Brigade.51 Irwin, in a frenzy of blame-shifting, said that the brigade, not his own tactical ideas, was alone to blame and once more tried to inveigle Slim. This time he told him to hold himself in readiness to take over operational control and move his corps headquarters to Chittagong. Even so, he was to have neither administrative control of operations, nor even operational direction, until such time as Irwin gave him the nod. Irwin’s hatred of a superior talent meant he would rather burden one of his forward divisions with administration than give Slim a free hand. Slim saw Irwin in Calcutta on 5 April, having been (typically) recalled from leave in the small hours by his superior. In the evening he dined with Lloyd at the Bengal Club and heard his side of the story; remarkably, he found, without any bitterness at his shabby treatment.52