The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  Slim had secured a signal victory. The battle of the Admin Box in particular was a great triumph, since the Anglo-Indian forces had for the first time decisively worsted the allegedly invincible enemy and had proved that there was an answer to Japanese infiltration and encirclement. The ensuing battles, moreover, had proved that the bunkers were not impregnable. All the aces the Japanese had hitherto held now looked like jokers. In their own way, as Mountbatten said, the battles in Arakan were as important as Alamein.87 Slim was entirely justified in writing: ‘It was a victory, a victory about which there could be no argument and its effect, not only on the troops engaged but on the whole Fourteenth Army, was immense…. The Arakan battle, judged by the size of the forces engaged, was not of great magnitude but it was, nevertheless, one of the historic successes of British arms.’88 A British force had defeated the Japanese and followed up with a successful counterattack; the British and Indians had proved themselves, man for man, the equal of the Japanese infantry; and most of all the myth of Japanese invincibility was shattered, leading to sky-high morale in the 14th Army. But, as always, Slim had his critics, who said that a minor victory had been talked up into a second Waterloo, that he had three-to-one numerical superiority over the enemy and therefore could scarcely have lost, and that the real winners of the campaign were the RAF and the USAAF.89 The point about numbers can hardly be contested in aggregate, though it should be remembered that the 14th Army held its own even in local brushes where they did not have numerical superiority. The criticisms make no dent whatever in Slim’s reputation when it comes to basic principles. The campaign vindicated his credo at every point, whether relating to a war of movement, the principle of hammer and anvil or the method for dealing with bunkers. He knew that the Japanese war of movement meant they had to travel lightly armed and lightly provisioned, and he calculated correctly that in a stand-off battle like that of the Admin Box infantry and light artillery would make no impression against tanks and heavy armament. Most of all, it demonstrated that Slim’s ability to take a calculated gamble was singularly well-judged. He was criticised for rushing his reserves from Imphal to Arakan just when Mutaguchi was about to strike in Assam, but he knew exactly what he was doing and had contingency plans to effect their return in time for the defence. He was a master of timing, and though committing six of the 12 SEAC divisions to the Arakan to deal with a feint, leaving only three at Imphal, looks like folly, the point is that Slim knew from his intelligence roughly when the blow on the Assam plain would fall. He calculated correctly that he could achieve the massive defeat of the enemy he needed in Arakan and still get his divisions back to Imphal in time to sustain the fresh onslaught. His management of risk was likewise outstanding, since he had acquitted himself with distinction while fighting a considerable battle in conditions of crisis management.90

  The issue of airpower is complex and far-ranging. Slim’s critics try to belittle his achievement at the Admin Box by saying that it could not have been achieved without massive Allied air support. Clearly the airlift of supplies to the Box was crucial, but airpower really came into the picture after the defeat of the Japanese at Sinzweya (the Box) and during the campaign to take the Golden Fortress. In the early stages of the Arakan campaign the Allies did not have that massive air superiority they were later to enjoy, and the Japanese made a spirited attempt to gain control of the air by putting up entire 100-strong fighter groups.91 In the winter of 1943–44 the Japanese air force experienced something of a general revival, for the 7th Air Brigade and the Imperial Japanese Navy collaborated in a successful air raid on Calcutta, hitting the dockyards and destroying 10 British fighters. Buoyed by this, the Japanese put up large fighter sweeps along the entire Arakan front.92 The RAF tended to be complacent about its superiority to Japanese fliers, and it was thought that little would disturb the even tenor of Allied airpower, with a troika in effective action: transport planes making airdrops to the armies, bombers providing support for ground operations, and Spitfires intercepting any enemy attempt to interdict either of the first two. But on 8 February a surprise Japanese attack on the planes supplying 15 Corps, which took out two of them, forced a rethink.93 More and more Spitfires were assigned to deal with the enemy, and two days later the RAF defiantly made 60 airdrops to 15 Corps while RAF Wellingtons and USAAF Liberators raided Rangoon. By the middle of the month Japanese air units were forced to withdraw from the skies over Arakan. Three main factors contributed to Allied air superiority. One was numerical: in the Burma-India theatre the Japanese had 370 aircraft but the Allies could call on 719. A second was the calibre of Allied planes. The Japanese Zeros and Tojos were no match for the later models of Spitfire (the V and the VIII) and lost heavily in dogfights. In the first 13 days of the battle for Arakan, Spitfires accounted for 65 enemy planes for the loss of 13 of their own.94 A third, and not unimportant factor was cultural. The bushido honour code meant that Japanese pilots tended to see themselves as samurai of the air rather than professional masters of a new way of fighting. Honour codes meant the pilots were unable to fit armour, take advantage of cloud cover or even adopt a professional attitude to take-offs, landings and air–ground communications. The World War I mentality that only gentlemen and aristocrats should fly planes led to a shortage of pilots and even of skilled mechanics.95 Once the amateurs in their Zeros and Tojos were swept out of the skies, Slim could resupply his armies at will, while the Japanese continued to suffer from shortages of supplies. Mountbatten showed his continuing support of Slim by diverting 25 Commando aircraft from the Hump for three weeks.96 Without doubt airpower was crucial to Anglo-American successes in Burma, and this would be proved in dramatic fashion when Wingate at last made a return to the fray.

  12

  It was December 1943 before the stricken Wingate was fully able to return to his usual regime of harrying, exhortation and bullying. A kind of early watershed was 17 November, the date he left the Wavells at the vigeregal lodge and moved on to convalesce with Sir Humphrey Trevelyan’s family. To mark his semi-return to active duty, Mountbatten invited him to lunch that day to meet Stilwell, where the trio discussed aerial back-up for the Chindits. Stilwell made it plain he did not want this to involve any diversion of planes from the Hump. Wingate promised to integrate this caveat into his overall plans for LRP.1 It was something of an irony that for the first time Stilwell could talk to a British officer who agreed with him that too many people in the British army were lazy and defeatist. To Mountbatten and others Wingate still seemed far from well, and there were suspicions that something more than just tropical diseases was involved. One suggestion is that he suffered from arcus senilis – a white ring at the outer edge of the cornea that indicates degenerative processes associated with premature ageing.2 But there was little general sympathy for him in Delhi. He had succeeded in alienating almost everyone in the regular army command; as Major General George Symes said: ‘He was an egomaniac and he revelled in offending others and creating difficulties for the sheer joy of overcoming them.’3 Apart from his habitual rudeness, two things particularly incensed the authorities in Delhi. One was his notorious description of the Indian army as ‘a system of outdoor relief’, which by now was common knowledge.4 Another was his perverse talent for feeding Churchill’s crazed prejudices about the Indian army and particularly his insinuation that it was a million-strong force full of idlers. Auchinleck actually went to the trouble of refuting this by a detailed breakdown of numbers, which showed conclusively that there were only 413,000 men available to fight in India. Yet facts and figures made little impression on Wingate. When he returned from his triumph at the Quebec conference, Auchinleck and his officers were forced to live ‘in the rancorous atmosphere of criticism when Wingate was in the full tide of his power’.5 The long illness removed him from the scene, but on his return he was soon back to his old habits. He always refused to engage in point-by-point debate with Auchinleck’s officers, but when confronted by irrefutable logic that rebutted his theories, he simply lost
his temper and said he would appeal to Churchill.6

  While Wingate was ill, most of the planning for the next stage of LRP and the Chindits was done by his faithful lieutenant Derek Tulloch. After four months, by early December, the organisational shape of Chindits Mark Two was complete. There were to be six brigades – originally seven, but the seventh, the US 5307th Provisional Unit, under Brigadier General Joseph H. Cranston, was transferred to Stilwell by Mountbatten after the American’s vociferous complaints. It was remarked by many that Stilwell showed no gratitude to Mountbatten, but simply acted as if normality had been restored.7 The elite corps was the original 77 Brigade under Calvert, drawn from battalions of the King’s Regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, the South Staffs, the Burma Rifles and the Gurkha Rifles. The 111 Brigade, under W.D.A. Lentaigne, consisted mainly of Gurkhas, with a battalion each of the King’s Own Royal Regiment and the Cameronians. Then there was 70 Division, which Churchill had ordered Auchinleck to break up and distribute according to Wingate’s wishes. Major General George Symes, commander of 70 Division, had agreed to stay on as Wingate’s deputy, even though he outranked him, in the clear expectation that he would take over command of the Chindits if anything happened to Wingate. This was not so much self-sacrifice on Symes’s part as a desire by Auchinleck that he should have his own man inside the Chindits, to limit the damage he expected.8 Symes’s division was originally part of Slim’s 15 Corps at Ranchi, but when Slim was appointed commander of the 14th Army, detached from Auchinleck’s bailiwick, it was retained by Auchinleck and thus no longer under Slim’s command. Slim felt bitter both that he had not been consulted about this and that Wingate was being allowed to eviscerate it, for 70 Division was the showpiece of 15 Corps. It was the only British formation trained in jungle warfare and was more effective than Wingate’s 1943 Chindits, which were twice its size.9 All this was to be sacrificed for a whim of Wingate’s backed by a whim of Churchill’s. The division was now to be carved up, mixed with other units and divided into three brigades: 16th Indian Infantry Brigade, led by Bernard Fergusson, would comprise the 1st Battalion Queen’s Royal Regiment, 2nd Battalion Leicester Regiment and detachments from the Royal Artillery and Royal Armoured Corps; 14th Brigade, under Brigadier Thomas Brodie, would be made up of battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, York and Lancaster Regiment and the Black Watch; 23rd Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Lawrence Perowne, would take in the Border Regiment, the Essex Regiment and battalions of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. A sixth brigade was formed from the newly arrived West African Infantry.10

  All in all Wingate had the equivalent of two divisions at his disposal. While he languished in hospital and convalescence, Tulloch and his other henchmen put the six brigades through the usual training: forced marches, mule-handling, ‘watermanship’, digging, column-marching, column bivouac, patrolling, Royal Engineers signalling exercises, medical and veterinary tests, weapons training. Most noteworthy was the emphasis given to training in air supply, air support, airfield construction and glider training, for the cynics and wiseacres said that Wingate had not just been given a private army but a private air force as well. This was an exaggeration. The RAF was firmly opposed to seconding trained personnel to the Chindits and resisted all pressure, Churchill or no Churchill. The airpower Wingate relied on was almost entirely that of the USAAF, the fruit of the conversion to his theories by General ‘Hap’ Arnold.11 These American ‘air commandos’ were under the joint command of colonels Philip Cochran and John Alison, and it was their promise of gliders that enabled Wingate to write blithely to Stilwell shortly after the 17 November lunch meeting to say that the Chindits would not need to divert any planes from the Hump. Cochran was a genuine war hero and flying ace who had uncritically imbibed the Wingate doctrine during a meeting with him in London.12 No. 1 Air Commando Group, as the wing came to be known, was a 500-strong outfit of supply planes, troop carriers, bombers and fighters. Altogether there were 100 light aircraft, 30 P-51 Mustang fighters, 20 Mitchell bombers, 20 C-47 Dakotas, 12 larger transport aircraft, six Sikorski helicopters and 150 gliders with the promise of another 50 to come.13 The one snag was that the air commandos were mandated for just 90 days, and no one was sure what would happen after that. ‘Hap’ Arnold was a sincere Wingate admirer, but he was playing political games of his own, hoping for an expansion of the power of the USAAF without going through official channels in the Pentagon. Nevertheless, his role in Chindit 2 was crucial, and in this respect it is worth noting that Wingate had a peculiar appeal for Americans, even the curmudgeonly Stilwell, on the grounds that he was the one and only ‘can do’ Brit.14 This was one of the few points of agreement between Churchill and his American cousins. As his faithful Pug Ismay said: ‘The waffling which has gone on over our Far East strategy will be one of the black spots in the British higher direction of the war.’15

  Things were working out well for Wingate, but he was irrationally annoyed that he had been out of action for so long and had been in semi-helpless convalescence while great decisions were being taken at the Cairo conference. His habitual rudeness and bad temper reached new heights in December 1943, and even loyal supporters like Tulloch found him almost unbearable.16 The many tantrums Wingate threw at this time gave new meaning to the term prima donna. His erst-while supporter General Wilcox, who had given him invaluable help when Wingate was under Central India command and thus under Wilcox, was one of the first to feel the verbal lash. Assuming that Wingate would not be fit to resume duties until January 1944, Wilcox had helpfully (as he thought) put into effect a contingency exercise code-named WASP. When Wingate came roaring back into action, he ordered the original Operation THURSDAY, code for Chindit 2, to be implemented, only to find that the army had done a lot of work on WASP and did not want all their efforts wasted. With supreme ingratitude both for this well-meaning effort and his previous generosity, Wingate denounced Wilcox to Giffard as an incompetent. Essentially a weak man, Giffard lacked the stomach for a fight with Wingate and let him have his way.17 There were many other angry scenes and confrontations as ‘all or nothing’ Wingate gathered his strength. There was always bad blood between him and Lentaigne, and Wingate went out of his way to humiliate his brigade commander. After one exercise Wingate called his officers together in a cinema in Gwalior to discuss what they had learned. He asked Lentaigne to take the meeting and Lentaigne presided diplomatically. Suddenly an exasperated Wingate decided that Lentaigne was not being ‘tough’ enough and impatiently announced he would chair the meeting himself. On another occasion, after flying back from Ledo to Comilla, he was enraged to find that his onward transport was not waiting for him. As the Dakota taxied forward to the dispersal pen, he suddenly assaulted his head of Operations, Lieutenant Colonel. J.F.C. Piggott and kicked him out of the open door of the moving aircraft. Even the lethargic Pownall had to do something this time, and Wingate was forced to apologise. He did so, but in a classic of the ‘non-apology apology’ made the following statement: ‘I always used to kick my younger brother off moving buses and quite suddently the old impulse came over me.’18 Wingate had always thought of violence as the first, not last, resort in any situation, and the pro-Wingate clique in the Chindits had similar views. The cross-grained and intemperate ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert assaulted a senior officer (a lieutenant general) who had criticised the Chindits during drinks at the Delhi Officers Club. Waiting until he was leaving, Calvert charged the man and hurled him into a fountain, taking care that in the darkness he could not be properly identified.19

  Pownall, who loathed Wingate, and Mountbatten, who at this stage thought he liked him, tried to find an outlet for Wingate’s manic energies. On 17 December Mountbatten had him to stay with him and suggested a visit to Chungking to try to get Chiang to rethink his refusal to commit Y-force. On 29 December Wingate accordingly flew to China and had two meetings with the generalissimo, but was no more successful with him than any other Westerner had been; Chiang made it quite clear
that there would be no Chinese advance in north Burma before November 1944, at the earliest.20 Enraged by this, Wingate proceeded to what looked on paper as though it would be a furious encounter with Stilwell. Here after all were two men who were both notoriously abrasive – even one might say with atrocious manners – who were not prepared to be thwarted by anybody. When Wingate was told that the newly arriving American troops that had originally been assigned to him had been reassigned to Stilwell, he was incandescent. ‘You can tell General Stilwell he can take his Americans and stick ’em,’ had been his initial response.21 Surprisingly, there were no fireworks at the meeting at Shingbwiyang on 3 January. It was a curiosity of Stilwell that although he habitually claimed to loathe ‘Limeys’ – as one commentator has put it, ‘he entertained for the British people the kind of feelings a pious Nazi developed for the Jews: a spiritual disapproval informed by acute physical repulsion’22 – and thought them systematically deceitful, effeminate but highly dangerous, with the exception of Alexander and a few others, he always found a reason to make an exception for the Brits he actually encountered, as though his repugnance was for a kind of Platonic Limey rather than the flesh-and-blood variety. On this occasion he took a shine to Fergusson, whom Wingate had brought along as an observer, and said of him drily: ‘He looks like a dude but I think he is a soldier.’23 It is thanks to Fergusson that we have a memoir of the Wingate–Stilwell meeting, highlighting the contrast between the bearded, strong-bodied, beetling-browed Wingate, who with his piercing blue eyes appeared every inch the prophet, and the wiry, gaunt Stilwell, looking quizzically from behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. Fergusson, who sat with them while the military future was discussed, thought that Stilwell too looked like a prophet and that the encounter was a kind of Biblical clash of thaumaturges, with the two men having many points in common: vision, intolerance, energy, ruthlessness, courage.24 It worked in Wingate’s favour that he was persona non grata with the British military establishment in India, and Stilwell knew this. So the meeting passed amicably, with Wingate promising to create a diversion soon with his LRP groups and almost hinting to Stilwell that he placed more credence in his operations than Slim’s.25