The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  Moreover, Stilwell, a classic love-him-or-hate-him personality, seemed to make new enemies every day. The antipathy of Hopkins, Soong and Joseph Alsop might seem small beer alongside the support of Marshall, Stimson and Theodore White (an infinitely more talented journalist than Alsop), but this trio nonetheless constituted a deadly menace who directed a steady stream of misinformation and special pleading on China and Stilwell to the Oval Office.75 Marshall did his best to offset Alsop’s influence in the USA. When Roosevelt wanted to give Alsop a commission in the US Army, Marshall launched a blistering attack on him for arrogance and stupidity, vehemently opposing the presidential move. He may have thought that Roosevelt would not snub him by using his prerogative as commander-in-chief and appointing Alsop anyway, but that is precisely what FDR did.76 Apart from this trio, Chennault was a daily gadfly but he was gaining adherents among US diplomatic personnel. Colonel James McHugh, US naval attaché in Chungking, was another enemy, who as far back as October 1942 had written to his superiors in Washington to press for Stilwell’s dismissal and his replacement as Commander-in-Chief, China, by Chennault.77 And with Mountbatten’s arrival had come another jealous rival in the shape of Al Wedemeyer. Initially reluctant to serve under Mountbatten as his US liaison officer, Wedemeyer was persuaded to accept the ‘poisoned chalice’ by promotion to major general.78 Stilwell, to his own cost, always underestimated the wildly ambitious Wedemeyer and failed to spot the scope of his enmity. He minuted that Wedemeyer’s skills were limited to staff work and he was useless as a putative field commander, but in fact Wedemeyer had achieved some success in combat operations in Sicily and had been singled out for praise by no less a figure than General Patton.79 The most accurate criticism of Stilwell is that he was a polarising figure, who never truckled and therefore never went in for the grubby compromises that are the stock-in-trade of politics. If he really wanted to bring Chiang to heel, he had to make sure that all US political and military personnel presented a united front alongside him. Sadly, he never even attempted such a ‘coalition of the willing’.

  11

  Before the Cairo conference the Allies had had ambitious plans for Burma and had envisaged an attack in seven places. The British and Indian forces would occupy the Maryu peninsula in Arakan, seize the Andaman islands, make airborne drops with India-based parachute regiments, promote large-scale LRP activity by Wingate and make a diversion across the Chindwin to distract Japanese attention from Stilwell’s activities in the north. The Chinese meanwhile would advance from Ledo (with Myitkyina as the ultimate objective) while the army at Yunnan would penetrate into the Lashio-Bhamo area. Such an offensive would be bound to paralyse the four Japanese divisions in Burma. As a result of the decisions taken at Cairo and Chiang’s peevish reactions, this super-ambitious strategy was whittled down to two immediate and two longer-term aims. The immediate objectives would be the attack on the Arakan and Stilwell’s advance from Ledo, with the LRP and Chindwin operations scheduled for a little later.1 Stilwell was accordingly the first into the fray. Buoyed by his position as absolute commander of the Ledo force, he was also delighted by the progress of the Ledo road. A new director of the project had been appointed in October 1943, a man after Stilwell’s heart named Colonel Lewis A. Pick, known to his troops as ‘Old Mud and Guts’; the road itself became known as ‘Pick’s Pike’. Establishing round-the-clock shifts and insisting that all personnel, whatever their expertise, do stints with pick and shovel, the aptly named Pick drove the project forward with ferocious energy.2 The first US combat units also arrived, including a crack anti-aircraft battalion to provide the road-builders with protection from Japanese air attack. When Pick promised to complete a military highway to Shingbwiyang by 1 January, even Stilwell was sceptical, but Pick proved as good as his word. By fiendish willpower he had enthused the workforce and conquered mountain passes and gradients thought insurmountable. Pick was yet another unknown and unsung hero of the Burma campaign. It was his energy that ensured that by 27 December 1943 the road stretched 103 miles from Ledo and that the most difficult stretch of all, over the Patka mountains, had been conquered. The one snag with the Ledo road was that the longer it became, the more troops had to be detached to guard and maintain it, lessening the numbers of combatants at the front.3

  In October 1943 the Chinese 38th and 22nd Divisions, under generals Sun and Liao, were transferred from Ramgarh to Ledo. Stilwell’s strategy was to seize the airstrip at Myitkyina, the key to airpower in northern Burma, and to advance on ‘Mitch’, as the Americans called it, through the Hukawng and Mogaung valleys, to be coordinated with a British advance from Imphal to Indaw across the Chindwin. Stilwell was preoccupied with the negotiations that would culminate in the Cairo conference, so left the command of the armies to General H.L. Boatner, who unfortunately at once fell foul of Sun. The two men argued about the real strength of the Japanese in the Hukawng valley. Sun claimed that the Japanese forces there were formidable, but Boatner waved away his objections by airily remarking: ‘My dear fellow, you don’t have to fight; just march in!’4 It turned out that Sun was right. Part of the problem was that, with the notable exception of Mountbatten, whose training had made him peculiarly sensitive to signals, the approach of the Allied generals to intelligence was amateurish. Stilwell relied almost entirely on OSS agents working with the Kachins, while Giffard despised information obtained by cracking codes, either because he did not believe in its efficacy or because, as someone else notably remarked, ‘gentlemen do not read each other’s mail’. Mountbatten received a constant stream of MAGIC (diplomatic) and ULTRA (naval and military) intercepts, but some authorities claim that decipherment played less of a role in the struggle with the Japanese than in the war in the West. On the one hand, the Japanese did not use enciphered messages nearly as much as the Germans, and on the other intercepted naval traffic, a vital tool in the US victories at Midway, Leyte Gulf and elsewhere, was of little importance in the CBI theatre.5 This failure was serious in the case of the Hukawng valley, for in fact some of the Japanese crack regiments, veterans of the Singapore campaign, were there, preparing a bridgehead across the Turung river, ready for a projected invasion of India. Whatever the exact reasons for the failure of intelligence, when Boatner’s estimates of enemy strength proved false, Sun lost confidence in him and asked Stilwell to remove him. Stilwell at first thought Sun was playing games to mask a secret order from the generalissimo to go slow. But when he arrived at the front on 21 December, he found the advance already a month behind schedule and the Japanese at Yubang Ga, where the Ledo road would cross the Turung. The Chinese 112th Regiment (from 38th Division) had got itself into a trap, and Boatner and Sun had been unable to relieve it.6

  The arrival of Stilwell transformed matters overnight. For the next seven months, apart from frequently intrusive SEAC meetings, he spent his time with his troops in the jungle. For this he was much criticised, just as he had been when he elected to trek out of Burma in May 1942. There were gibes about ‘the best three-star company commander in the US Army’ and the ‘platoon war in Burma’, but Stilwell was convinced that only his personal leadership would do the trick in this instance. All the best authorities agree that he was right. Slim noted that Stilwell’s decision was controversial but was the right one, since the Chinese would fight hard under him but not otherwise.7 Stilwell dismissed his lacklustre commanders, reprimanded Sun for putting personal animosity above the common struggle, exhorted his troops in a way only a Chinese-speaker could, and coordinated the hitherto ramshackle advance. The army surgeon Gordon Seagrave testified that wherever Stilwell went, something happened, or as Slim put it: ‘The Chinese really began to get their tails up. For the first time they were attacking and defeating a modern army – something that had never before happened in the history of China.’8 Slim was referring to the dramatic events of the last week of December, when fierce fighting drove the Japanese out of Yubang Ga. The 38th Division lost 315 killed and 429 wounded, but their costly victory was their first
in Burma.9 And it was not gained against second-raters, since the crack Japanese 18th Division was commanded by one of its ace generals, Shinichi Tanaka. Stilwell, aping Richard the Lionheart as he so often did, was in the thick of the action and censured for it; he could have been hit by sniper fire. To the horror of the US advisers, the Chinese celebrated their victory with a parade of Japanese heads stuck on bamboo poles.10

  Stilwell’s tactics were to press the enemy frontally while the real attack came through the jungle from the flank, with a roadblock well behind. He liked to use a series of short hooks, arguing that the ‘hook’ was more efficacious than long-range penetration. His tactics were in a sense the mirror image of those used by the Japanese themselves in 1942, but then, as Slim pointed out, Stilwell ‘was one of the Allied commanders who had learnt in the hard school of the 1942 retreat’.11 He aimed to envelop the foe in packets and annihilate them, at this stage in proceedings using a sledgehammer to crack a nut (always sending an entire Chinese regiment against a single Japanese company) and ensuring that if a Japanese company was to be liquidated, one of the rawer Chinese regiments should be sent in to finish the job. But here he was up against the ingrained culture of the Chinese army, for military lore enjoined that one should respect Sun Tzu’s dictum and leave a surrounded enemy an escape route.12 For this reason the Chinese proved markedly reluctant to surround the enemy and fight a fierce battle to the death, preferring instead to form U-shaped ambushes with a way of escape. To encourage them to adopt his new methods, Stilwell attached US advisers or ‘commissars’ to each regiment; they had no powers of military veto but could influence what happened through the power to veto or delay supplies. Equipped with radio sets, the commissars kept Stilwell informed of what was really happening so that he could checkmate the lies of indolent Chinese commanders. Stilwell had hoped that the Chinese trained at Ramgarh would form a ‘New Model Army’, and to an extent his optimism paid off. But the improvements in Chinese morale were incremental and gradual. All the training and equipment in the world did not enable them to shake off a fundamental conviction that, man for man, the Japanese were markedly superior. And it was difficult in a short time to transform the attitudes and calibre of corrupt and scrimshanking officers. Moreover, at a deep psychological level, the Chinese would always opt for Sun Tzu over Stilwell, which was why, again and again, Stilwell’s carefully baited traps were sprung by his own troops.13

  The greatest boon Stilwell conferred on his own men was his personal presence. Never was leading by example so well illustrated. He had his combat headquarters in the woods in a bamboo hut or tent, where he slept on a hammock, and lined up for ‘chow’ like the rest of the men. Hearing of his presence at the front, the Japanese put a price on his head if taken alive. He won the Chinese over by his solicitous regard for the wounded, so unlike the practice of their own commanders; his medical officers reduced the death rate from wounds to 3.5 per cent. He seemed to be everywhere, bullying, flattering, cajoling, shaming, bribing, goading. He issued unit citations and decorations and encouraged his men to be prodigal with ammunition, telling them that airdrops would bring further supplies over and over again.14 He involved his fliers intimately in the work of the army they were supplying by insisting that all pilots had to spend time on the ground at the front to learn how bad conditions really were. After a few days on a diet of Spam and water, the ‘fly boys’ took great risks to supply the men on the ground; they flew every day, in all kinds of weather, even when there were clouds on the treetops.15 The previous friction between Stilwell and General Sun was soon forgotten, as Sun jubilantly recorded that ‘the Chinese soldier has a tried and true record, now that he has been given a chance to prove what he can do when placed shoulder to shoulder with his ally and on equal terms with the enemy’. Neither Stilwell nor his commissars saw any reason to disagree.16 By February 1944 the Chinese had cleared the Japanese out of the Taro valley on the east bank of the Chindwin and removed a potential threat to the Ledo road in the Hukawng valley, since the two valleys were separated only by a range of jungle-clad hills. They now pressed on to the head of the Mogaung valley. The objective was the main enemy base at Mainkwan in the Hukawng valley. Progress was slower than Stilwell would have liked. ‘God give us a few dry days and we can go,’ he wrote on 1 February. But the elements were against him. In this, the supposedly dry season, Burma experienced freak rainfall. There were 12 rainy days in January, 18 in February, and 10 each in March and April, providing a total of 175 inches in four months, and all this before the monsoon season proper opened.17

  It was particularly frustrating for Stilwell, who was in his element with jungle warfare, to have to shuttle to and fro with Delhi on SEAC business. It was even more irritating that, having freed himself from Chiang and the spider’s web of intrigue and inertia in Chungking, he should have been pitched into a series of conflicts with Mountbatten. The Supreme Commander’s ambitions to be a second MacArthur and to have a streamlined Anglo-American organisation under him were largely to blame for engendering a series of clashes with his deputy. The largely unseen evil genius responsible for ratcheting up the tensions was Mountbatten’s American deputy chief of staff Albert Wedemeyer, a frighteningly ambitious general in his forties. Secretly a dyed-in-the-wool Chiang supporter and after the war a prominent member of the China lobby, Wedemeyer was shifty, calculating and devious.18 Initially reluctant to serve under Mountbatten, he was talked into it when he realised the post could be a springboard for his vaulting ambitions. Fundamentally anti-British, Wedemeyer had made his contempt for the ‘Limeys’ clear when General Carton de Wiart corrected his American pronunciation of ‘schedule’ (‘sked-ule’) and asked him where he had learned to talk in such a way. ‘I must have learned it at shool,’ Wedemeyer shot back.19 But he was shrewd enough to see that there was purchase to be made from the deep underlying friction between Mountbatten and Stilwell. An ally of Chennault and secretly loathing Stilwell for his attitude to Chiang, Wedemeyer realised that Stilwell had a host of enemies (FDR, Chiang, Mountbatten, Giffard, etc., etc.) and that only General Marshall stood between him and disaster. With Pownall no great fan of Stilwell either, there was no one on Mountbatten’s staff to argue the case for Vinegar Joe’s considerable merits. The fact that Brigadier General Benjamin Ferris, chief of staff of Stilwell’s rear echelon in Delhi, was also violently anti-British and disloyal to Mountbatten scarcely helped matters.20 Wedemeyer therefore swallowed his anti-British feelings and impressed Mountbatten as a doughty ally: ‘He is 100% loyal and straightforward,’ the Supreme Commander wrote. Another to receive praise was the American general Raymond Wheeler, ‘one of the nicest men I have ever met’ according to Mountbatten.21

  Mountbatten made many enemies by the way he tried ruthlessly to drive through his notion of an Anglo-American command where he would be a real supreme commander or generalissimo, and it is true that he sometimes behaved as if the CBI theatre was his own private war. But, with all his faults, he was never a negligible figure and proved it by his high talent for public relations. His contacts with Lord Beaverbrook enabled him to place favourable stories about SEAC in the British press. He tried to use his friendship with Eden to have a special Cabinet position created with responsibility for the war in Asia. This idea foundered on the rock of Churchill himself. The Prime Minister was adamant that he wanted no publicity about SEAC until he was in a position to feed the public daily stories about glorious victories. Mountbatten even tried to bring pressure to bear on Auchinleck to visit the Burma front, but Auchinleck, unwilling to be a pawn in Mountbatten’s publicity game, responded gnomically that the distance from Delhi to Assam was as far as from London to Leningrad.22 But Mountbatten did score two signal successes. He took on Frank Owen, the brilliant young editor of the London Evening Standard, as the Delhi-based editor of a new newspaper for his entire command, named SEAC. A beguiling mixture of gossip from home and other-ranks chit-chat, SEAC became hugely popular and Owen himself a key player in the Mountbatten enterprise. T
he appointment of Owen even survived a spirited attempt by the Minister of War, P.J. Grigg – an old enemy of Mountbatten – to blacken the editor in Churchill’s eyes by pointing to his known left-wing and anti-Conservative politics. On this occasion Churchill allowed expediency to overrule ideology, and Owen was confirmed.23 The other area of public relations where Mountbatten evinced outstanding flair was in morale-boosting, or, as his enemies said, self-promotion. Taking a leaf from Monty’s book, Mountbatten took to addressing the rankers from a soapbox, trying to take them into his confidence, cracking jokes and assuring them that their progress was being watched with loving interest by Churchill and the royal family; the Indian troops were particularly impressed by his royal blood and connections.24 He turned the idea of the ‘Forgotten Army’ to advantage by telling the troops that the important thing in any race was to finish fast; they might be forgotten now, but by the end of the war their fame would eclipse that of the Desert Rats and the Eighth Army. He was convinced that their ‘Forgotten Army’ status was an important psychological reason for their conviction that the Japanese were invincible.25 With his officers he tried the age-old Napoleonic stunt of having a file on every senior officer and memorising all their personal details before meetings, making each of them think he had a unique relationship with the Supreme Commander.

  But alongside these talents Mountbatten had faults that perhaps outweighed them. The most fundamental was that he was restless and impatient – disastrous qualities in a commander whose role called for superlative diplomatic skills. The constant desire to press on and cut corners manifested itself in other aspects of his life. To his reputation as an appalling driver he now added that of an incompetent pilot. Thinking that there was nothing to flying and that aeronauts tried to cover their vocation in mystique, he foolishly tried to take over the controls of a USAAF plane in mid-flight and nearly crashed it. But it could not be denied that Mountbatten had style. He made good his pathetic performance in the air by sending a charming and perfectly judged letter to his American colleagues afterwards.26 Another thing that incensed his co-workers was his hypocrisy. Flamboyant himself, he hated showmanship or larger-than-life qualities in others; one of the things he disliked about Admiral Somerville was that the man had a rapier-like wit. But he could charm people and make them think that his purposes were theirs. He took on Air Chief Marshal Philip Joubert de la Ferte as his chief of public relations and psychological warfare. Joubert was a stiff-backed RAF officer who had commanded the ‘Cinderella’ of the RAF, Coastal Command, in the first part of the war, and initial overtures to him were unpromising, with Joubert regarding Mountbatten as a jumped-up whippersnapper. But Mountbatten persevered, deeply impressed by the skill with which Joubert had had Coastal Command immortalised in wartime documentaries, with music by Vaughan Williams. Joubert finally agreed to take the job with the Supreme Commander, worked well with him and was accounted a great success.27 Mountbatten’s showmanship was also linked in some quarters with a somewhat sneering and depreciative stance on his movie-loving side. It is true that his diaries reveal a star-struck aspect that some might consider inappropriate. For instance, on 10 January 1944 he noted that one of his American pilots was Jackie Coogan, who starred as the child in Chaplin’s film The Kid and with whom he and Edwina had made a home movie in Hollywood when Coogan was five. And on 25 February he positively salivated when recording the lunch he had just had with the beautiful Paulette Goddard on her way to entertain US troops in China.28 But a lot of the criticism of him on these lines was plain snobbery, in an era when educated people did not yet appreciate the power or significance of the ‘Seventh Art’. ABC Cunningham, for instance, always a man for a quip and who had remarked that the new admiral (Mountbatten) at the Cairo conference was certainly at sea, viewed the Supreme Commander’s enthusiasm for the silver screen as simply a transmogrified version of his egomania. Cunningham went to see the propaganda film Burma Victory and reported: ‘The Supreme Commander and his staff, and Slim and his staff, doing film-star work made me physically sick.’29