by Frank McLynn
But on 19 August a cable came in from India, expressing dismay that the chiefs of staff were backing Wingate. In a private communication ‘the Auk’ told Alanbrooke that there was a danger that Wingate was becoming absurdly overrated; he was fine as a battlefront inspirer but would be a disaster in any senior position, such as corps commander. Then, in a formal memo for transmission to Churchill, he outlined in detail his objections to Wingate’s new LRP proposals. Wingate’s plans, he pointed out, took no account of transport requirements, called for vast numbers of aircraft that would be far better used in conventional warfare, allowed no time for proper training and made it impossible to carry out the traditional LRP tasks such as destroying oilfields and arms dumps. Moreover, Wingate’s ideas took for granted Chinese participation, when this was very doubtful, as Chiang would not make a move until he saw a general British offensive in Burma with conventional forces, which could not take place before March 1944 at the earliest. But the biggest problem would be manpower. Wingate’s requirement of 26,500 men could be provided only if all other operations were disrupted; divisions would have to be broken up, and even then only 60 per cent of those earmarked would survive the training. Moreover, Wingate’s plans would also impair Stilwell’s advance from Ledo and use up the reserves of animals and motor transport currently earmarked for the attack on the Ramree islands.52 Auchinleck’s riposte to Wingate was devastating and, on paper and other things being equal, should have killed his ideas stone dead. The problem was that Churchill had already given too many hostages to fortune. He could not now withdraw support from the Wingate proposals without provoking a backlash from the Americans.53 Typically, the Prime Minister dealt with inconvenient facts with an emotional outburst and was indiscreet and even disloyal to Auchinleck in his private assurances to Wingate.’The Auk’, a model of compromise, suggested just three LRP brigades in his cable of 19 August, as against Wingate’s eight; he did not mention that his own staff in India wanted none at all. Faced with Churchill’s intransigence, he signalled again on 21 August, proposing five brigades. But Wingate, typically ‘all or nothing’, rejected even this statesmanlike compromise and composed a 3,000-word memo in effect accusing Auchinleck and the top brass in Delhi of having supplied him with second-rate troops for LONGCLOTH, which now enabled them to claim that the Chindits were evaders, not true fighters. Wingate pretended that he in turn was being reasonable by suggesting the West African Division as one of the extra brigades. The upshot was that he got most of what he wanted. On 23 August the Joint Planning Staff gave approval to the new, improved LRP group with six brigades, to be formed by breaking up 70 Division and reorganising 81 African Division.54
When the Quebec conference finished on 24 August, it was obvious that Wingate had scored a great personal triumph, thanks to the resolute backing of Churchill and the Americans. The only cloud in an otherwise blue sky was that he had not impressed FDR, who took against him personally and much preferred Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the leader of the famous 1943 Dambuster Raids – another of the war-hero celebrities Churchill had taken across the Atlantic to impress the President. In high spirits nonetheless, Wingate accompanied Mountbatten to Washington, where they met General ‘Hap’ Arnold, commander of the USAAF, who was a Wingate enthusiast and promised full backing to the Chindits. Arnold really took to Wingate at an individual level, in contrast to FDR, showing once again that the mystery of personal chemistry and interaction can never be pinned down. Arnold’s testimony was eloquent: ‘You took one look at that face, like the face of a pale Indian chieftain, topping the uniform still smelling of jungle and sweat and war, and you thought: “Hell, this man is serious.” When he began to talk, you found out just how serious.’55 After Washington, Wingate flew back to England while Lorna sailed back on the Queen Mary. The parting of the couple, who had been inseparable throughout most of August, was caused by the sudden death in England of his mother, a genuine religious maniac who believed that prayer could move not just mountains but everything else in life too. Influenced by her, Wingate’s time in London was marked by a return to the devotional ethos he had laid aside in the secular atmosphere of Quebec. He told his sister that even great actions without faith were no good. ‘One must have faith and by that I mean faith in God.’56 In London too he had to make good the boasts with which he had spellbound his audiences in Quebec. He set about recruiting more officers for his columns and at first enjoyed limited success; the word was that Wingate alienated many by his Jamesian inability to give a simple answer to a simple question. Among the staff officers he did recruit were Philip Cochran and Derek Tulloch. He batted aside an offer of help by SOE, fearful that he would lose his independence, but he hardly needed them as, aided by Churchill, Alanbrooke and continuing glowing press publicity, he enjoyed a halcyon period in London. Finally, after visiting Chaim Weizmann in the Dorchester, he prepared to return to India.
On 11 September, together with Tulloch and four other newly recruited staff officers, he flew to Lisbon. The party was there a day and a night and then proceeded to Cairo, where there was a 24-hour stopover before an onward flight to Karachi, two nights in Agra, and finally journey’s end in Delhi on the 19th. Wingate has been accused of shiftiness in thus delaying his return to Delhi to meet Auchinleck, but the atmosphere in the Indian capital was poisonously hostile. Wingate was considered to have double-crossed his colleagues in India by his grandstanding in Canada, and there was deep resentment that a man who had come out 18 months earlier as a major was now hobnobbing as a strategical adviser with the world’s leading statesmen. It was quite clear that Wingate was going to receive minimal cooperation in India. No accommodation, office, private aircraft, car or even stenographer had been provided for him. At a meeting with the deputy chief of staff on 20 September, the atmosphere was icy and the attitude of the hierarchy was clearly that Wingate ‘was regarded as a vulgar go-getter who had gone behind the backs of his superiors in India to indulge in audacious intrigues with politicians, on the strength of a very questionable achievement’.57 Everyone who spoke mentioned the near-insuperable difficulties of the operations Wingate proposed. He responded with fury, threatening to report them to Churchill for obstructionism. He was the proverbial bull in a china shop if anyone tried the ‘good administrator’ tactic of trying to cut through or shorten meetings. Acting even more the prima donna after his triumph in Quebec, he alienated many who might have been inclined to support him. One senior officer took Tulloch aside and told him that his career was at an end if he continued to associate with Wingate. Naturally Wingate’s supporters insist that if he had been conciliatory, the army bureaucracy would have buried the Chindits under a mountain of paper and a Fabian campaign of stalling, procrastination and tergiversation.58
Gradually Wingate wore down the opposition. In Delhi he was given the office, car and stenographer he had been promised at Quebec, but only on loan, and his staff were forced to work in the corridor. He countered by demanding the hotel in Gwalior as his headquarters and moving 70th Division to Bangalore. The divisional commander, Major General george Symes, agreed to serve under him as deputy, even though he was angry that the Quebec decision meant the breakup of the division. Meanwhile his enemies scored a minor victory by refusing to allow the Chindits to be called ‘Gideon Force’. At this juncture Wingate’s habitual rudeness was observed to reach new heights. When Fergusson came to Delhi to meet him, Wingate noticed that he was wearing the Palestine medal. ‘A badge of disgrace,’ he growled, reverting to his Zionist persona; pointedly he did not congratulate Fergusson on his recently awarded DSO.59 The beginning of October found him both restless and ill. The restlessness found expression in a meeting in Assam with General Geoffrey Scoones and General G.E. Stratemeyer, US Chief of Eastern Air Command.60 The illness was incipient typhoid, which he had contracted by drinking water from a flower vase in Cairo. The incident was classic Wingate. Impatient when drinks were not delivered fast enough at an Egyptian airfield, he quenched his thirst by draining the vase. Alth
ough he was daily becoming sicker, he forced himself to form part of the reception committee when Louis Mountbatten arrived as Supreme Commander South-East Asia on 7 October (see p. 195) His enemies took advantage of his failing health to deny him the Gwalior hotel as his headquarters on the grounds that it was needed to accommodate BOAC passengers. At first refusing to admit he was ill, Wingate was finally rushed to hospital, where, luckily for him, an expert diagnosis of his illness was made. He came very close to death and was in hospital for a month. Once again the invaluable Matron MacGeary took personal charge of his nursing.61
While Stilwell and Wingate enjoyed such mixed fortunes in the summer and autumn of 1943, Slim’s activities were far less flamboyant and pyrotechnical but ultimately more significant. In early June he returned to Ranchi from the Arakan front and resumed command of 15 Corps with responsibility for East Bengal. He was in good spirits, relieved that Irwin and Wavell were on their way out and that Giffard and Auchinleck had taken their place. Giffard ordered him to prepare for operations in the Arakan at the end of the monsoon and gave him three months to prepare a suitable army while the monsoon raged. The planned offensive was to be with three divisions and its objective was the capture of the Maungdaw–Buthidaung road by January 1944.62 Slim was promised two brigades of 81 West African Division when it arrived in India in August, with the further promise that they would be supplied entirely by air. Here was the first clear evidence that military affairs in the India–Burma theatre were no longer plagued by factionalism and petty jealousy. Slim worked in a smooth, streamlined way with Giffard and he in turn got all the necessary approvals from Auchinleck by August. Slim’s notion of a campaign was based on a fourfold premise: it should be simple in conception; offensive in intention; it had to be given absolute and undeviating priority over all other operations; and it should always contain the element of surprise. His first problem was morale: had not the disgusted Irwin declared that the fighting spirit of his men was so poor that the Japanese could simply hike their way to Delhi?63 Slim knew all about the mistakes of 1942–43 but considered them contingent mistakes, based on the inadequacies of Irwin, Alexander, Wavell and their underlings. There was no intrinsic reason why the British, Indian or Nepalese fighting men should consider themselves inferior to the Japanese, and indeed the recent defeat of the Japanese by the Australians in New Guinea proved this beyond dispute. Slim hammered away at this theme in his many speeches to his men, the content of his addresses always emphasising the spiritual, intellectual and material foundations of military morale.’64 The main practical way he went about overthrowing the myth of Japanese military supermen was by sending out elite groups on special patrols into the Arakan into the monsoon, then carefully escalating operations to aim at Japanese outposts north of the Maungdaw–Buthidaung road. The successful patrols would return to hearten the rest of the men with tales of how they had trounced the enemy in the jungle. Naturally Slim omitted to mention that he had sent out only the crème de la crème.65
It was part of Slim’s military credo that morale, motivation and training were mutually reinforcing, so he sought practical ways to combat the tactics the enemy had used so successfully in 1942–43. Offensively the Japanese relied on envelopment and infiltration. Slim thought these could be stymied by the formation of a ‘box’ – a development of the infantry squares of old. When threatened by envelopment and infiltration, the British and Indian units should go into a defensive posture but ready to strike back, imitating the action of a snake when cornered. All troops should form themselves into ‘boxes’ or self-contained strongholds, to be supplied by air, ready to counterattack and sever the enemy’s supply lines. Strongholds would in effect be the anvil against which the hammer of the reserves would strike. Slim thought the ‘box’ idea was peculiarly likely to work, since he observed that the Japanese had the fatal flaw of being too pigheaded to realise when they had failed and of throwing good resources after bad.66 The codes of bushido, ‘face’, obedience to hierarchy and even kinship made them inclined to flog a dead horse. The Japanese, with their banzai charges, had a fanatical will to win, but this could be blunted and destroyed by really good troops. The key idea was to get them to exhaust themselves by battering away at the anvil until the hammer was ready to descend on them. Defensively, the Japanese bunkers posed a more ticklish problem, but they were static and were therefore vulnerable to envelopment and the cutting of communications. It must be emphasised that all this was relatively unconventional thinking at the time. But Slim’s ideas called for top-class troops and commanders who could hold their nerve. He aimed to turn all his men into tough professionals by training during the monsoon and putting them through rigorous manoeuvres, covering every conceivable contingency in every conceivable terrain.67 Slim’s talent can be seen especially in the way he transformed 5 Indian Division, which returned from Iraq in June 1943. Using his methods he very soon turned a force expert in desert warfare into a unit specialising in the jungle variety. He taught them to regard the jungle as more than a neutral, a potential friend even. He inculcated woodcraft and calmness under pressure; there should never be any panicky shooting in the direction of unidentified noises, for example.68
For his battlefield commanders Slim would rely on Harold Briggs and Frank Messervy. Commanding a division each, these two generals had the great advantage of being popular with the men. Briggs was perhaps unimaginative but was reliable, phlegmatic and unflappable; Slim could provide the military brainpower.69 Briggs soon acquired a Stilwell-like reputation for being a fire-eater, and had five commandments that every member of his division had to learn: kill every Jap you meet; don’t let him trick you with ruses or ambushes, but read his mind and turn the tables on him; always hold fast until ordered otherwise, whatever happens; carry out to the letter and in detail every task assigned to you, with no half-measures; be determined and even fanatical.70 Messervy by contrast was a dynamo of energy, with something of the quality of the Confederate cavalry commanders in the American Civil War, full of ideas and imagination.71 With the right men trained in the right way and led by the right commanders, Slim then needed to ensure that transport and supply was first class. Realising that all modern warfare must be a combination of airpower and infantry fighting, he dinned airmindedness into his men. All thoughts of inter-service rivalry were banished as he built up a mutually respectful relationship with the RAF. Additionally, he turned himself into an expert on railways. The route from Calcutta to the front at Assam ran first on a broad-gauge track for 235 miles, then on a metre-gauge train from the Brahmaputra valley to Pandu, 450 miles from Calcutta. All goods wagons were then unloaded on to barges for a slow river crossing, reloaded and taken to Dimapur from the central front, now 600 miles from Calcutta; if bound for the northern front, there were another 200 miles to reach Ledo. The railway system had low capacity, as it was originally built to service the Assam tea gardens, but the peacetime daily capacity of 600 tons had already been increased to 2,900 tons by 1943. Eventually the Americans put in 4,700 trained railwaymen so that by October 1944 capacity had been raised to 4,400 tons and by January 1945 to 7,300 tons. The railway was vulnerable to bombing, floods, landslides, train wrecks and earthquakes that buckled the line, but against this could be set the vast US input; not just the manpower and the more powerful locomotives but the sheer ‘can do’ elan.72 It will be appreciated that Slim was not just concentrating narrowly on the Arakan campaign but was already thinking ahead to an invasion of Burma via Assam.
Not content with all this, he worked hard to solve the problems of food supplies and disease. The armies at the Burma front consumed 500,000 rations daily, even though most of the personnel were non-combatants. Feeding such a host would have been difficult in any circumstances, but in 1943 India was stricken by a famine in which more than a million died. It was fortunate indeed that Auchinleck proved to be such a good administrator and that he was so responsive to Slim’s concern about food supplies, even to the point of holding a kind of summit conferenc
e on the issue in Delhi in November.73 As Slim would so often point out in his bluff way, without meat a soldier could not fight, and without fresh fruit and vegetables at the front, a host of diseases, from scurvy to scrub fever, would break out.74 In some ways an even more serious problem was that of malaria, which had an incidence rate of 84 per cent in the Indian army in 1943, though it was far from the only scourge, with typhoid, cholera, dysentery, skin diseases and a special kind of jungle typhus caused by mites also rampant. In his darker moments Slim sometimes thought that his army would simply melt away, without any help from the Japanese.75 Chronically short of everything, guns, ammunition, food, Slim experienced particular scarcity with medical staff, doctors, paramedics, nurses and the most basic medical equipment. He took a fourfold approach to disease and illness. While not having Wingate’s obsession that all illness was hypochondria or malingering, he was not unaware of the psychosomatic origin of some maladies, and thought that the enhancement of morale would in itself cut down the sickness rate. In the case of the many genuinely ill soldiers, he advocated treating them as far as possible at the front instead of evacuating them instantly to India, which he thought a somewhat knee-jerk response. But he accepted that some serious cases would have to be evacuated. He was also very keen on following all the latest medical research and introducing any alleged wonder drugs as soon as possible. The most-used drug of the Burma war was mepacrine, which regimental officers had to ensure their men took daily.76 At first the men were cavalier and resisted taking their medicine. The barrack-room lore was that the drug was simply another bromide and was designed to make randy soldiers impotent. The officers initially tended to be sympathetic to the men and complaisant or lackadaisical about the orders concerning mepacrine. A few dramatic sackings and demotions changed attitudes. By 1945 the daily sickness rate was down to one in 1,000.77 By the time Mountbatten arrived as supreme commander in October 1943, Stilwell was in limbo and Wingate near death. It was Slim, the least flamboyant of the three, who was on an upward curve.