by Frank McLynn
All columns endured a dreadful march back to Inywa. The mules were slaughtered as they went, which caused great grief to the muleteers. It soon became clear that the Japanese were following them, and all the indications were that this was part of a master plan for interception. Colonel Tomotoki Koba had set up three defensive lines between the Chindits and the Indian border, the first at the Irrawaddy, the second along the Mu valley and the third following the line of the Chindwin. Meanwhile the pursuers who dogged the Chindits were supposed to drive them into the trap as if this were a wild beast hunt.48 Wingate tried to throw the enemy off the scent by feints and decoys, including an attack by Fergusson’s No. 5 Column on the village of Hintha, halfway between Baw and Inywa.49 The feints seem to have worked, for the bamboozled Japanese never caught up; they thus missed their best chance by not trapping the Chindits in the Shweli loop. The main body of the raiders reached Inywa at 4 p.m. on 28 March, and once again their luck was in. Although the Japanese had commandeered all boats on the Irrawaddy, they had neglected to do the same on the Shweli. After collecting a number of country boats, the Chindits began to cross the river. No. 7 Column went first, followed by No. 2 and No. 8, but No. 8 was fired on by the enemy when halfway across. By the time No. 7 embarked, they were having to repel the Japanese from the landing area. It was fortunate for the Chindits that the Japanese had only a small force and lacked heavy machine guns. Even so, they did so much damage with mortars, rifles and light automatics that Wingate called off the embarkation and left No. 7 to its own salvation while he and the others melted away into the forest.50 He moved to a ‘secure bivouac’ 10 miles east-south-east of Inywa and 10 miles south of the Shweli, right at the top of the ‘loop’. Here he divided his columns into five ‘dispersal groups’ and arranged for supply drops. From now on it was sauve qui peut. Wingate’s own group was 43 strong and the rest of the groups had similar numbers. With the remnants of the Southern Group on its mission impossible in the Karin hills, Northern Group also seemed in imminent danger of destruction.51
The first to suffer from the disintegration was Fergusson’s No. 5 Column. After the fight at Hintha, Fergusson sent his second in command to Wingate, who advised him about the rendezvous and airdrop. But by the time Fergusson got there, the rest of the brigade had gone and he had missed both drop and supplies. Since his radio had been destroyed during the fast and furious encounter at Hintha, he was on his own in every sense. He decided to make for the Kachin hills and likely sanctuary. But the crossing of the raging Shweli turned out to be a nightmare. Some of his men were swept away by the flood, as were some of the animals. Another 46 men were abandoned on a sandbank in the middle of the river, since the Japanese were arriving on the far bank and Fergusson had no time to rescue them: ‘the decision which fell on me there was as cruel as any which could fall on the shoulders of a junior commander’.52 Fergusson’s group staggered on, half crazed with hunger and thirst, all the men obsessed with thoughts of food and particularly the sugary kind. Fifteen days after crossing the Shweli, they reached the Chindwin on 24 April and limped in to Imphal two days later. No. 5 Column suffered grievously, with only 95 survivors out of an original complement of 318; the toll would have been higher had some fortunate individuals not made their way to China or Fort Hertz.53 Major Ken Gilkes and No. 7 Column managed to get to China with 150 survivors and then flew back to India. All the dispersed groups had terrible tales to tell about Japanese atrocities, the treachery of Burman villages, the constant battle to stay awake, the snatched shards of sleep in trees or caves while the enemy hunted for them, and the agony of hunger and thirst. Rice and buffalo meat were rare luxuries for the refugees; more often the menu would be python and nettles.54
Later some bitterness was evinced among Chindit veterans that Wingate and his group had taken the easy way out, holed up in a secure billet while the rest of the dispersed columns were used as decoys. Certainly Wingate’s party found themselves a secure eyrie in the neighbourhood of the supply drop (which made it all the more ironic that Fergusson had not found them). Here they stayed put for a week, sleeping, resting and eating (which meant the silent slaughter of horses and mules so as not to alert the enemy by gunshots), gathering strength for the long march back to the Chindwin. Wingate was never a taciturn man, but during this week he became positively loquacious and expansive, talking about a wide range of subjects: Plato’s Republic, H.G. Wells, Shaw, world government, the League of Nations, eighteenth-century painting, Leonardo da Vinci, the symphony versus the concerto, detective fiction, contemporary cinema and especially the psychology of strip cartoons, with special reference to Popeye and Jane.55 On one occasion the hidden Chindits had to take a big risk by starting a fire to scare away wild elephants. But the real hazard of this week’s stopover was the incessant plague of mosquitoes. At last, on 7 April, Wingate and his group started for the Irrawaddy, by now with no mules and no radio. Wingate thought the trek to India would take two weeks, but it took 22 days. For two days the party tried to find a way across the Irrawaddy but were always frustated by enemy patrols. Finally on 13 April, with the help of friendly locals who provided them with rowers, they built bamboo rafts and began floating across. They intended to cross in relays of three parties, but before the third could embark, the Japanese arrived; the luckless rearguard was left to its fate. Marching north-west, the survivors reached the Meza and again found friendly locals who got them across. By dusk on 11 April they had marched 70 miles on just eight hours’ sleep and had put two river crossings behind them. Always heading north-west or west-north-west, they reached rocky country, at its driest in this period just before the monsoon. They were dispirited, hungry, thirsty, and plagued with mosquitoes now that they had lost both veils and ointment, but Wingate tried to keep their spirits up with mini-lectures on Beethoven and the Italian Renaissance during rest periods.56
They began to approach the Wuntho–Indaw railway and were once again in a teak forest, though a far cry from the pleasant sylvan surroundings of two months earlier. Now that the great leaves had fallen in the dry season, the men found the experience like walking through crockery, and Wingate fumed at the din, audible 300 yards away. Still, there was nothing to do but trust to luck, and it held. They emerged from the teak forests on descending foothills and debouched on to the plain, where they hit the railway line. It was fortunate both that they arrived at midnight and that the teak petered out a long way before the railway so that their approach was not heard by the Japanese patrols. Once they managed to slip across to the teak forests on the other side, Wingate was heard to express contempt for the low standard of Japanese patrolling.57 Then it was uphill again as between the railway and the Mu valley they crossed the Mangin range, sometimes having to make mountaineers’ ropes out of their rifle slings. By now they had run out of all food, even biscuits and dates. It did not seem possible, but the men looked forward each night to python stew, which became the staple. Conscious that the Japanese might be dogging them, they never rested more than three or four hours at any time. At one village they bought rice, but at once the pro-Japanese villagers rang great gongs to summon the Japanese. At another village they fared better with apathetic neutrals and were able to buy a quantity of buffalo meat. On one occasion Wingate broke his own golden rule about sickness and stopped for 48 hours to tend a Lieutenant Spurlock, who was suffering from dysentery. His unwontedly humane gesture paid no dividends, however, as Spurlock was still too ill to go on and had to be abandoned. As they marched on through the dry uplands of the Mangin range, Wingate controversially prevented his men from collecting ripe limes on the grounds that the Japanese were close behind them.58
Near the end of their strength, the Chindits had a stroke of luck when their Burmese interpreter contacted a monastery and bought a veritable cornucopia of victuals: chickens, tomatoes, rice, bananas and five sucking pigs.59 Refreshed, the party crossed a river in the Mu valley and climbed up the Zibyutaungdan escarpment – a rock wall 1,500 feet high. By now convinced they woul
d be overhauled or intercepted, they took a chance and accepted an offer from a hermit to lead them over the scarp by backtracks unknown to the Japanese. Despite Wingate’s natural suspicions, the guide proved as good as his word. But stragglers were dropping behind all the time. A lance corporal who could not keep up walked off into the wilderness, Captain Oates style, so as not to slow his comrades up. On 23 April the marchers reached a high point from which they could see the Chindwin below. Wingate uttered one of his quasi-Biblical effusions: ‘Behold the Chindwin. It is a poor heart that never rejoices.’60 But Odysseus had long ago learned that the hardest part of any voyage is when journey’s end is sighted. The 30 miles to the Chindwin was the most gruelling experience yet, with Japanese patrols seemingly ubiquitous, in reality keyed to a high pitch of alertness by the recent passage of No. 3 Column. On 27 April Wingate and his men finally got to the river, about 20 miles south of where they had crossed 10 weeks before. With Japanese troops thick, fast and assiduous and all boats along the Chindwin commandeered, the travellers once more seemed to have reached impasse. But the resourceful hermit was not yet done. He located a friend who was able to provide exact details of the patrols’ timetable. Now it was a question of finding boats.61
First Wingate divided his men into those he deemed strong enough to swim across the river and those who needed a boat. Then he set them to cut down 12-foot-high stalks of elephant grass in a massive copse by the riverside. By this time they were heedless about the noise they made. It took five men seven hours to hack a 700-yard path through these reeds. Once again their luck was in. It turned out there was no wide beach between river and copse; the Chindwin began virtually where the reeds ended. It was 3 p.m. Wingate decided to take to the water instantly. The swimmers took off their boots and cut off their trousers to form shorts. The Chindwin was 500 yards wide at this point, with a vicious current running, and even strong swimmers were in danger of drowning, only avoiding this fate by taking turns at floating on their backs. Wingate himself was one of those who came close to being swept away, and stayed afloat only because of the bamboo sticks that had been thrust into his pack for buoyancy.62 All who reached the far side of the river lay on the bank utterly exhausted, too tired to run for cover. To their great relief they learned from the locals that there were no Japanese on this side of the river. They devoured a meal in the first village and were then guided to a post manned by a company of Gurkha Rifles. It was then a question of finding boats to paddle back across the Chindwin to rescue the non-swimmers. By this time these men had had to move to a fresh location to avoid Japanese patrols and there was no way to contact Wingate. It was a do-or-die situation. Two unsung heroes who supposedly lacked the skills to breast the raging Chindwin somehow got across and alerted their comrades about the new location. Wingate sent his rescue party with a strong protecting contingent of the Gurkha Rifles. The Japanese spotted the flotilla of boats and opened up with mortars, but the Gurkhas gave as good as they got. Soon the survivors were safely on the far side of the Chindwin.63 Wingate’s dispersal group was the fourth to reach Assam; of the 43 who started the journey, 34 survived.
So ended Operation LONGCLOTH, or Chindit One, as it came to be called. Two issues immediately present themselves: Wingate’s character and behaviour on the expedition; and the quite separate issue of the military value of the LRP probe. On the first point, it is not surprising that extreme stress often showed up the brittle personality that had already manifested itself in ‘black dog’ episodes and a suicide attempt. Since in his own mind Wingate could never be at fault, and his mindset did not really admit mere contingency, it followed that after untoward episodes, mishaps or setbacks there had to be a search for a culprit. At the river crossing at Inywa he complained that his men were floundering about. But as General Julian Thompson has pointed out, it will not do to blame soldiers for incompetence if after six months’ training they do not meet one’s required standards. The correct deduction is that there is something wrong with the training or the leadership. In this case Wingate had simply failed to factor in the importance of river crossings – unpardonable, given Burma’s riverine systems. If Gwalior did not provide the geographical where-withal for such training, he should have taken his recruits somewhere else, at least for that part of the Chindit course.64 The crossing of the Irrawaddy has also been taken as an example of Wingate’s glory-hunting, an exploit that served no purpose and was meaningless. Wingate justified it by saying that he had the enemy between him and the Chindwin, but this was always going to be the case. Not only would the Japanese still be between him and the Chindwin when he returned from across the Irrawaddy, but on any conceivable wargaming of the campaign this was always going to happen anyway, whatever Wingate did or wherever he went. Another controversial incident is the ‘busting’ of the officer after the unsuccessful airdrop at Baw (see p. 149), which seems like simple scapegoating, though Wingate’s supporters pedantically insist that the punishment was for failing to reach an assigned position in time.65 But Wingate’s punishments were always draconian. He thought nothing of striking enlisted men and even officers in one of his rages, confident that King’s Regulations could not be applied in the jungle. He told his men that he would shoot anyone who pilfered from comrades, raided villages or even grumbled and that he would expel anyone who lost his rifle or equipment.66 It must be emphasised that this went beyond the normal army code, that Wingate had never been given such authority and that he was taking it on himself to assume such powers. Of course, when sentries fell asleep, as happened, something drastic had to be done or the security of the entire column was at risk. On one occasion a sleeping sentry was given three choices: he could be shot, sent into the wilderness alone to make his own way back to the Chindwin, or be flogged. Not surprisingly the man opted to be flogged. There was at least one other flogging for a similar offence. Needless to say, Wingate’s supporters attenuate these punishments by claiming that the beating was not so much an eighteenth-century cat-o’-nine-tails ordeal but more like a regular caning at an English public school.67
Wingate had virtually made a career out of thumbing his nose at regulations and doing things that, with a less fortunate individual, would certainly have led to a court-martial or dismissal from the service. A more salient issue is whether Operation LONGCLOTH achieved anything of significance. The casualty figures were appalling. Of the 3,000 men of 77th Brigade Wingate took into Burma, only 2,182 returned to India. About 450 had been killed in action and the rest ‘went missing’ or died in captivity. Only 260 men of the 1,000-strong Southern Group survived. The 13th King’s lost over a third of their 721 men. Even worse, of those who came back, only 600 were fit for active soldiering thereafter. The others, sick and broken, had fought their last campaign and were invalided out.68 What had been achieved to justify such losses? Most judgements have been harshly negative. According to the official Indian history of the Burma campaign, ‘the strategic value of the operation was nil’. The Gurkha official history endorses this: ‘Never have so many marched so far for so little.’69 Slim saw the whole venture as simply a modern version of the old-style cavalry raid, and summed up the operation as follows:
They had blown up bridges and cuttings on the Mandalay–Myitkyina railways that supplied the Japanese northern front, and attempted to reach across the Irrawaddy to cut the Mandalay–Lashio line. Exhaustion, difficulties of air supply, and the reaction of the Japanese, prevented this, and the columns breaking up into small parties made for the shelter of 4 Corps. About a thousand men, a third of the total force, failed to return. As a military operation the raid had been an expensive failure. It gave little tangible return for the losses it had suffered and the resources it had absorbed. The damage it did to Japanese communications was repaired in a few days, the casualties it inflicted were negligible, and it had no immediate effect on Japanese dispositions or plans.’70
Even Wingate’s own supporters admitted that the operation was a failure. ‘An engine without a train’ is how one of t
hem described it.71 Perhaps even more damning is this assessment from Fergusson: ‘What did we accomplish? Not much that was tangible. What there was became distorted in the glare of publicity soon after our return. We blew up bits of railway, which did not take long to repair; we gathered some useful intelligence; we distracted the Japanese from some minor operations, and possibly from some bigger ones; we killed a few hundreds of an enemy which numbers eighty millions; we proved that it was feasible to maintain a force by supply dropping alone.’72
Wingate’s admirers claim that this is ‘battle accountancy of the wrong kind’,73 that because Wingate’s exploits were talked up for propaganda purposes and because they lifted morale and raised the British public from a general atmosphere of gloom, LONGCLOTH was justified and can be judged a success. One can only reply that this is moral accountancy of the wrong sort. The sacrifice of 800 men on a pointless operation that was later used to promote a lie is a dubious proposition. The problem about lying propaganda is that it is ultimately self-defeating. Once the exaggerations and hyperbole are detected, and later events make them sure to be detectable, the cumulative effect on public morale is even worse, for people realise they have been lied to and will not trust government assurances again. And it is even difficult to see why the British government felt in such desperate need of favourable publicity. A year before the case might have seemed compelling, but this was 1943, when it was already obvious to any thinking person that the Allies were bound to win in the long run. Had not President Roosevelt already called for unconditional surrender in absolute confidence of victory? The answer seems to be that Wingate became the beneficiary of a ‘perfect storm’ of propaganda, with Churchill demanding quick and dramatic results on one hand, and the press eager for good, morale-boosting copy on the other. Churchill’s gloss on LONGCLOTH is famous. On 24 July 1943 he announced: ‘There is no doubt that in the welter of inefficiency and lassitude which has characterised our own operations on the Indian front, this man, his force and his achievements stand out; and no question of seniority must obstruct the advance of real personalities in their proper station in war.’74 Wingate’s press conference on 20 May was ‘spun’ by Allied propaganda into a glittering triumph. Reuters referred to ‘The British Ghost Army’; the Daily Mail hailed Wingate as ‘Clive of Burma’; and a glowing encomium by the then well-known columnist Alaric Jacob appeared in the Daily Express.75 Wingate in Burma had fulminated at the British habit of turning obvious defeats into glorious victories, instancing Dunkirk. But he had no objection when his own failures were transmogrified by propaganda. The global legend of Wingate, superhero, was already in the making.