The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  There followed a meeting at Chittagong with the surprisingly phlegmatic Lomax. With Koga sweeping all before him, they agreed that the Japanese general’s next logical step must be an assault on the Maungdaw–Buthidaung line. As expected, this came on 20 April. Slim and Lomax devised a stratagem for catching Koga in a ‘box’ on the Mayu peninsula. The box would involve six battalions, two on the ridges of the Mayu hills, two along the Mayu river and two in hills just south of the Maungdaw–Buthidaung road, which would form the bottom of the box. The idea was that the Japanese would be bound to utilise the tunnels on a disused railway track, dismantled many years before because a shipping company disliked the competition (in Burma always the same monopolistic story). They would be allowed to enter the box on their way to the tunnels and the lid would be provided by a force of brigade strength.53 Ever since Hannibal’s victory over the Romans at Cannae, generals have sought to compass the perfect encirclement, but it always eludes them. So it was here. Slim and Lomax were using tired and demoralised men to carry out a scheme of geometrical perfection, when their only chance would have been with fresh, well-motivated ones. The Japanese walked into the trap, Lomax gave the order, but the bottom fell out of the box when the two battalions in the south failed to hold. By 8 May the triumphant Japanese had taken both Maungdaw and Buthidaung. Slim was bitter: ‘It was too much like 1942 over again, with the added bitterness that this time we had been defeated by forces smaller than our own.’54 It was only Slim’s incessant pressure that led to the order being given for Lomax to abandon Maungdaw; Irwin’s first instincts were to throw away further men in a pointless siege. In London Churchill noted: ‘This campaign goes from bad to worse, and we are being completely outfought and outmanoeuvred by the Japanese. Luckily the small scale of the operations and the attraction of other events has prevented public opinion being directed upon this lamentable scene.’55 He wrote at a time, after the Anglo-American victory in North Africa and the crushing defeat of the German army at Stalingrad, when it was becoming obvious to all but the purblind that the Allies would win the war in Europe. But he was furious with Wavell, whom he had always disparaged, and the feeling of distaste was shared by the Americans. Irwin refused to accept a scintilla of the blame, and, in lengthy correspondence with Wavell, blamed everyone but himself, and especially the cowardly behaviour of his troops.56 His final absurdity was a signal recommending that Slim be removed from command of 15 Corps. But Wavell, under severe criticism himself, was determined that Irwin would carry the can. Slim was informed that he should report to Irwin’s headquarters, and with stoical resignation told his staff that this had to mean he was about to be dismissed. But the very same day Irwin sent another signal: ‘You’re not sacked. I am.’57 When he heard this, Slim remarked: ‘I think this calls for the opening of a bottle of port or something if we have one.’58

  Everyone remarked on Slim’s mental toughness and his extraordinary ability to resist stress. The frustrations of defeat were not the only strains he had to bear, as he was constantly shuttling between his headquarters and the front. On one occasion his pilot landed on an airstrip that the British had already abandoned but which the Japanese, fortunately, had not yet taken over. To make matters worse, the pilot switched off the engine before realising his error and then could not start it again for a very long time, while Slim reconciled himself to spending the rest of the war in captivity.59 Always an optimist, he even found things that were encouraging about the disastrous Arakan campaign. British battle casualties amounted to 2,500 but could easily have been far higher, given the nature of the warfare and the frontal attacks. On the other hand, the British had learned about Japanese methods and the precise areas in which British military training and tactics were deficient.60 There had been 7,500 cases of malaria, but much had been learned about the disease. Troops were now routinely issued with mosquito nets and repellents, and by the autumn of 1943 a ‘wonder drug’, mepacrine, was developed, which made malaria less of a menace. By 1944 the pesticide DDT and the febrifuge sulphaguinidine had been added to the arsenal of weapons deployed against the anopheles mosquito.61 Yet the most important long-term development in 1942–43 was the gradual reassertion of Allied air superiority. By the end of 1942, 150 new airfields had been built, RAF pilots and aircraft began to arrive in large numbers, and the United States had sent 10,000 air force personnel to serve in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theatre. Heavy bombers – B-24 Liberators – appeared at the battlefront for the first time, and in November 1942 staged a spectacular 2,760-mile return trip to bomb Bangkok.62 The Japanese soon realised that all of their proposed Burma–Siam railway was vulnerable. When the war in the Middle East was finally wrapped up early in 1943, the USAAF transferred many of their heavy bombers to the Far East; there were substantial bombing raids on Bangkok, Rangoon and Mandalay over the Christmas period 1942–43. Gradually the Japanese were forced to cede air superiority, and this worried them. During the Arakan campaign a Japanese colonel issued the following telltale order: ‘There must be no fear of aircraft. As long as you are not discovered you must seek to remain so. If once our position is revealed, the enemy planes must be shot down. It is not permissible to suppose that our soldiers are no match for aircraft.’63 Even more significantly, the Japanese were forced to yield the skies above Arakan to the Allies even though they had been victorious on the ground. The RAF conducted search-and-destroy missions over Sinho, Thaitkido, Buthidaung and Akyab island, and in June, six Hurricanes of 17 Squadron escorted Blenheim bombers on a long-range raid on Ramree island. Allied air superiority would eventually become almost the crucial factor in the struggle for Burma.64

  For Slim’s biographer perhaps the most significant thing about 1942–43 is what it reveals about the general’s deep character and that of his bitter enemy General Irwin. It seems that Irwin was hostile to Slim on three separate grounds. The most obvious was that Slim had sacked his old friend Lieutenant Colonel G.A.M. Paxton because of his discreditable performance at Gallabat in 1940.65 But Irwin genuinely thought that Slim was partly responsible for the defeat in Burma in early 1942. Moreover, he entertained a snobbish attitude towards a man who was a product of the Indian army, a mere ‘sepoy general’. He, by contrast, belonged to the allegedly infinitely superior British army in India.66 People had been known to come to blows because membership of the latter body was confused with that of the former. Yet beyond this there was the visceral antipathy felt by the inadequate human being for the superior one. Irwin has been described as lacking in moral courage, of an aggressive temperament, outspoken, egocentric, dictatorial, inflexible, unimaginative, conservative and reactionary. With a penchant for acerbity, he inspired neither loyalty nor affection. A sycophant to those above him and a bully to those below, he had a deep-seated reverence for rank, hierarchy and authority. He would accept no questioning by subordinates but would not himself query the orders of his superiors.67 He was, in short, exactly the blimpish officer so loathed by Stilwell and often thought to be a mere caricature. That he should have been chosen for high command in Burma is yet another nail in the coffin of Wavell’s reputation, for it was Wavell who insisted on having him. To add to all his other faults, Irwin was a micromanaging control freak. Irwin was also, by nature, a meddler, as has already been pointed out.

  Slim, by contrast, was both brilliant as a military strategist and a deeply impressive human being. No one reading his memoir Unofficial History could doubt his wisdom or his ability to read human nature. He also had a great sense of humour and a very good ear for dialogue. He knew how the official military mind worked and he also knew how the army was perceived by the enlisted man. As has been well said, he had the head of a general with the heart of a private soldier.69 He had seen plenty of Irwins in his early life, as is apparent from some of the reminiscences he provided to the journalist Frank Owen. He spoke of seeing in his early years in Birmingham ‘Men who were fathers of families cringing before a deputy-assistant-under-manager who had the power to throw them out of their j
obs without any other reason than their own ill-temper or personal dislike’70 and claimed that one reason he liked the army was that there were fewer cringers and fewer martinets than in civilian life. But they certainly existed. In August 1914, he was a lance corporal on a three-week training course in Yorkshire. Slim takes up the story:

  It was a sweltering, dusty day and the regiment plodded down an endless Yorkshire lane. At that time British troops still marched in fours, so that Lance Corporal Slim, as he swung along by the side of his men, made the fifth in the file, which brought him very close to the roadside. There were cottages there and an old lady stood at the garden gate. I can see her yet, she was a beautiful old lady with her hair neatly parted in the middle and wearing a black print dress. In her hand she held a beautiful jug and on the top of that jug was a beautiful foam, indicating that it contained beer. She was offering it to the soldier boys.

  Slim took one pace to the side, grasped the jug and took a swig. There came a bellow from the front of the column, and the colonel rode back on his horse to ‘bust’ Slim to private on the spot. By mere chance he had looked back just as Slim put the jug to his lips. The colonel bellowed at him: ‘Had we been in France you would have been shot.’ Slim commented: ‘I thought he was a damned old fool – and he was. I lost my stripe, but he lost his army.’71 It is hard not to imagine that in Burma Irwin became for Slim a transmogrified version of that blinkered colonel. Yet when Slim was given command of the newly constituted 14th Army in May 1943, it turned out that Wavell, whether he knew it or not, had appointed a commander with unique and exceptional qualities.

  Slim is still probably underrated today simply because, as a modest meritocrat, he believed that talent would speak for itself and be recognised as such. He despised the gallery-touch antics and histrionics of the Montgomerys, Pattons and MacArthurs. Sadly, such is human nature, the meretricious and the self-advertising will always score over the merely talented. That is just one reason why men like Slim are scarce, but it is not the only one. It is rare to find a keen intellect coexisting with down-to-earth affability and humour, and rarer still to find such intellectual powers in harness with absolute personal integrity and uprightness of character.72 Yet human excellence was far from exhausting Slim’s exceptional traits. It has been pointed out that as a master of warfare he provided a ‘practical bridge’ from the theory of ‘indirect approach’ expounded by J.F.C. Fuller, Sir Basil Liddell Hart and others of the ‘English school’ of military strategy between the wars. Indirect or ‘manoeuvre’ warfare was dedicated to the proposition that strategy meant undermining an enemy’s strength and skill to win via a concentration of forces based on surprise, psychological shock, moral dominance and physical momentum. It is opposed to the idea of meeting strength with strength and force with force, as in the discredited approach of men like Field Marshal Douglas Haig; there would be no Sommes or Passchendaeles in Slim’s curriculum vitae. Instead of slogging and attrition, a ‘manoeuvrist’ commander relies on cunning, guile, tricks and deceit, working always on the enemy’s weaknesses. Because Slim did this on a battlefield and not in a book of theory, and left no treatise on general principles, his originality has been lost sight of.73

  Events began to move significantly in Slim’s favour in May 1943, not just with the sacking of Irwin following the Arakan fiasco but as a result of decisions taken at the Washington TRIDENT conference that month. In the first place, the man who replaced Irwin was especially welcome. Although General George Giffard would later have many vociferous critics, and even Slim eventually backtracked on his initially favourable estimate, at first he seemed like a breath of fresh air after Irwin.

  The new Army Commander had a great effect on me. A tall, good-looking man in the late fifties, who had obviously kept himself physically and mentally in first-class condition, there was nothing dramatic about him in either appearance or speech. He abhorred the theatrical, and was one of the very few generals, indeed men in any position, I have known who really disliked publicity … But there was much more to General Giffard than good taste, good manners and unselfishness. He understood the fundamentals of war – that soldiers must be trained before they can fight, fed before they can march, and relieved before they are worn out. He understood that front-line commanders should be spared responsibilities in the rear, and that soundness of organisation and administration is worth more than specious short-cuts to victory.74

  Even more welcome was the replacement of Wavell as Commander-in-Chief, India, by Sir Claude Auchinleck. ‘The Auk’ had always been a Slim supporter and recommended him to Wavell for advancement when Wavell was Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, in 1941. Indeed ‘the Auk’ had wanted to retain Slim in the Middle East and had fought hard to try to dissuade Wavell from taking him to Burma.75 Auchinleck was appointed basically because Churchill, who never held Wavell in high regard, was tired of his quasi-academic effusions and wanted a ‘fighting general’ in command in Burma. Moreover, a unique conjuncture allowed Churchill to get rid of Wavell without humiliatiing him. The Prime Minister had had great difficulty finding a new viceroy of India after Lord Linlithgow’s retirement. Wavell’s ‘promotion’ to viceroy and his replacement by ‘the Auk’ semed a perfect solution. Now the commander in India was a man respected by both Slim and, more surprisingly, Stilwell.76

  Implicit in Slim’s enthusiasm for Giffard and Auchinleck was an implied criticism of the old guard of Alexander and Wavell. While Slim liked Alexander personally and found him charming, he had no great opinion of his abilities. The subtext is there in his own account of the 1942 campaign, when he complains that no real counter-offensive against the Japanese was attempted. Typically, Slim turns this into self-reproach: ‘Thus I might have risked disaster, but I was more likely to have achieved success. When in doubt as to two courses of action, a general should choose the bolder. I reproached myself that I had not.’77 But any perceptive reader would realise at once that Slim lacked the power and authority to be bolder, that he was compelled to follow orders. Alexander’s time at the helm in Burma (February–July 1942) was characterised by mindless optimism and an unwillingness to face reality. His refusal to take risks grated on Slim, who always thought that the Japanese would never be disturbed by conventional responses but could be thrown off balance by the unexpected. Even Alexander’s biographers and champions concede that his brief, unhappy stay in Burma was not his finest hour.78 Later in life Slim allowed his true opinion of Alexander to emerge: ‘I don’t believe he had the faintest clue what was going on.’79 His opinion of Wavell was not much higher. Wavell had consistently underrated the Japanese at every level, even before Pearl Harbor, and in Burma had evinced a blinkered, unimaginative stolidity. This enabled the Japanese to take risks and use new methods against which the outdated tactics employed by Wavell were powerless. Chief among these were the roadblock and ‘hook’ methods, not really formidable in themselves if countered by a talented general. But in the ethos presided over by Wavell, they easily could, and did, lead to panic, confusion and chaos and to a defeatist mindset according to which the Japanese were invulnerable military supermen.80 The Japanese scored heavily in 1942 by engendering in the British army a sense of psychological dislocation and a devastating sensation of being trapped in a nightmare. The switch from facile optimism to equally fatuous pessimism was part of a culture that Slim implictly laid at Wavell’s door. Now with Auchinleck and Pownall at the helm, there was every chance that the British could finally turn the corner.