The Burma Campaign
Page 36
Operation THURSDAY’s D-Day was 5 March. In the original scheme Fergusson would be attacking Indaw at the very moment of the fly-in of 77 and 111 Brigades. That morning Slim flew in to the gigantic airstrip at Hailakandi from which the operation would be launched. A massive flotilla of gliders was parked there, and around the edges of the airfield were the Dakotas that would fly them in. The plan was for 77 Brigade to fly in in two halves to establish strongholds on flat stretches of the Kaukwe valley code-named ‘Piccadilly’ and ‘Broadway’ north-east of Indaw while 111 Brigade established itself at ‘Chowringee’, east of Indaw. All the strongholds would be far from roads and villages but close to plentiful water supplies. Fergusson’s overland expedition would meanwhile set up the fourth stronghold at ‘Aberdeen’, north-west of Indaw.84 Everything at Hailakandi seemed to be going smoothly until the inevitable hitch occurred. Colonel P.C. Cochran, very sensibly, had taken the precaution of sending his spotter planes out on a reconnaissance of the Kaukwe valley, but Wingate was furious and complained about ‘insubordination’ (absurdly, as Cochran was not under his command). The aerial photographs clearly showed the putative landing space at Piccadilly covered by teak logs arranged in four symmetrical lines so as to block any aerial put-down; the obvious inference was that the secret of the landings had somehow been blown and the Japanese were waiting for them. Wingate exploded in fury and told Slim that the Chinese must be the traitors.85 However, since Broadway and Chowringhee had also been photographed by aerial reconnaissance, revealing no blockage, Slim at first suggested diverting the landings there. Wingate’s blood was now up and, inconsolable, he declared that the Japanese ‘must be’ preparing an ambush there also. According to Slim, he took Wingate aside and talked to him calmly, outlining a threefold optimistic scenario: there was only one obstructed airfield; the Chinese were unlikely to have betrayed them; and the Japanese, nervous of Allied airborne assault, had blocked a number of likely sites and by chance hit on one of the correct ones. He probably did not endear himself by pointing out to Wingate that he himself was partly to blame for the blockage of Piccadilly, for it was a site he had used on the 1943 expedition and a photograph of it had appeared in an American magazine – which was how the Japanese knew about it.86
Eventually Wingate calmed down, reiterated his feelings about the risk and said to Slim: ‘The responsibility is yours.’ Slim was uneasy, knowing that a wrong decision might well torpedo the entire Burma campaign. He then consulted Calvert, who said that he was prepared to take the risk. There were just a few nights of the full moon left and the Japanese were massing against Imphal, so this might be the last chance for LRP. Slim then announced that the operation would proceed.87 His reasoning was fourfold: the Chindits were keyed to a pitch of readiness and would never be able to regain that peak if not used now; he could not let Stilwell down, having promised him a diversionary attack; he could not leave Fergusson and 16 Brigade isolated and twisting in the wind at Aberdeen; if he kept the Dakotas and gliders crowded together on the airfield, it was probable that the Japanese would discover them and destroy them.88 Wingate seemed to greet the decision with relief, but now another wrangle developed as he announced that the troops originally destined for Piccadilly would go to Chowringhee instead. Slim did not like this, as Chowringhee was on the eastern shore of the Irrawaddy whereas the railway and road links to be cut were on the western side. Another confrontation with Wingate loomed, but fortunately Calvert too opposed Chowringhee, as did Cochran, the US air commander, who pointed out that the new airstrip was very different in configuration and he would not have time to rebrief his pilots. When Air Marshal John Baldwin, in charge of the Tactical Air Force, also opposed Chowringhee, Wingate accepted the majority decision and switched the Piccadilly-destined brigade to Broadway instead. The entire consultation had lasted just 70 minutes. Cochran caught the spirit of the proceedings by jumping on the bonnet of a jeep and calling to his fliers: ‘Say, fellers, we’ve got a better place to go!’89
It was decided that the number of gliders should be reduced from 80 to 61 and that they should all go to Broadway. Calvert’s men and Cochran’s American pilots were quickly rebriefed. The code words SOYA LINK (failure) and PORK SAUSAGE (success) were agreed. Shortly after 6 p.m. the Dakotas took off with their gliders, only 72 minutes behind schedule.90 Each plane took two gliders. There had been impassioned debate about the wisdom and practicality of this, as the Dakotas had only ever towed one glider before, but Slim, Wingate and Cochran had been among the optimists. It turned out that the pessimists were right. Soon Slim’s headquarters received the depressing message SOYA LINK, which was naturally taken to mean that the Japanese had been waiting for the Chindits. Slim reported: ‘So the Japanese had ambushed Broadway! Wingate was right and I had been wrong. He gave me one bitter look and walked away. I had no answer for him.’91 Then gradually more and more signals were deciphered and the position became clear. There had been no enemy ambush, but 26 of the 61 gliders had crashed. The Dakotas proved to be unable to tow two gliders after all, and the strain was simply too great. The steep climb at the beginning of the flight – necessary to clear the mountains – put too great a drag on the nylon ropes and some of them snapped. Other aircraft overheated and used more fuel than expected, so some of them had to make emergency landings; a few gliders even had the bad luck to land near Japanese forces. Even those that reached Broadway did not usually escape unscathed; several crash-landed and those coming in after them skidded into the wreckage in a general pile-up. Surprisingly only 23 men were killed, though several were badly injured. On the other hand, 400 Chindits landed safely the first night, along with stores. What triggered the dramatic code word SOYA LINK was that from the air the glider wreckage looked like a Japanese ambuscade.92 There was further irony. The crashed gliders actually helped with deception and disinformation, for when the Japanese found glider wreckage all the way from Assam to the Irrawaddy, they were at a loss to divine Allied intentions. It later transpired that the ‘ambush’ at Piccadilly was no such thing. By mere chance the piles of logs had been left there by Japanese woodcutters, who had brought the timber up from the river by elephant for drying. There was universal relief next morning when the codeword PORK SAUSAGE was received and the fly-in could recommence.93
Wingate had reached rock bottom on the night of the 5th when SOYA LINK was received. As he retired to bed, Derek Tulloch expressed the hope that tomorrow would bring better things. Wingate dismissed him as a ‘bloody optimist’. The most optimistic was Baldwin, who said he would return to Imphal and lay on a fighter sweep for the morning.94. By contrast 6 March was a day of triumph, with 55 Dakotas reaching Broadway and the first flights putting down at Chowringhee. Between 5 and 11 March, No. 1 Air Commando and 177 Wing RAF flew 579 Dakota sorties, landing 9,000 men, 1,300 animals and 250 tins of stores without loss.95 By 11 March all of Calvert’s 77 Brigade and half of Lentaigne’s 111 Brigade were at Broadway. There was a last-minute decision to scale down the operations at Chowringhee, so after 9 March no more reinforcements were sent there. The idea of establishing a stronghold there was abandoned in favour of something closer to guerrilla activities; for a night or two the other half of Lentaigne’s brigade dug in together with the Kachin levies who had been sent to raise the local tribes, then they moved off. It turned out to be a wise decision, for five hours after the Chindits left Chowringhee, the Japanese pulverised the area with saturation bombing. Broadway, on the other hand, conformed to Wingate’s dreams. There Calvert set up a true stronghold, complete with a hospital, shops, farms, chicken runs and cultivated fields – for all the world like a permanent settlement. Yet the fire-eating Calvert was not interested in homesteads or colonies. Leaving behind a garrison of two battalions, he took the bulk of his forces on a march across the Gangaw range and the deep Kaukwe Chaung to find a suitable location for a subsidiary stronghold – one that would block Japanese communications to Myitkyina from the south.96 Within days 77 Brigade collided with the enemy. When the Chindits r
eached the railway at Kenu on 18 March there ensued a battle as savage as a medieval combat, with ferocious hand-to-hand fighting – ‘rifle and bayonet against two-handed feudal sword, kukri against bayonet, no quarter to the wounded, while hand-grenades lobbed over the heads of the combatants incessantly’.97 The small-scale battle of Pagoda Hill, as it was called, cost Calvert’s men 23 dead and 64 wounded (a Victoria Cross was also won), but they counted 42 Japanese dead on the battlefield afterwards. Near the battlefield Calvert founded his second stronghold, codenamed ‘White City’.
With 12,000 men now ‘inserted in the enemy’s guts’, to use Wingate’s picturesque phrase, and the strongholds seemingly working out well, it was time for triumphalism. On 11 March Wingate issued a self-congratulatory order of the day, full of fustian rhetoric, and next day communicated directly with Churchill in similar mode.98 The pendulum of the bipolar manic-depressive cycle had now swung back with a vengeance. But Wingate in this mood was almost bound to make enemies, and in a single week he managed to inveigle himself into three separate conflicts. The first, incredibly, was with Colonel Cochran, to whom he owed so much. Many observers thought that Wingate had been simply incompetent in failing to order aerial reconnaissance of his target landing areas, and his later lame excuse that to send out planes on such a mission would alert the Japanese fooled nobody.99 Cochran had made good his error, but instead of gratitude, Wingate railed at the American’s ‘insubordination’. To show who was boss, he flew in six Spitfires to Broadway without notifying Cochran. A furious Cochran, who was not in the least overawed by the English prophet, protested vociferously that Wingate had ‘bounced’ him and was giving the credit due to his fliers to the RAF, whom he described as mere headline-chasers. This was a potential cause célèbre that could have gone all the way up to General ‘Hap’ Arnold, Wingate’s staunch supporter. Swallowing hard, Wingate was obliged to forward Cochran’s complaint to Air Chief Marshal Joubert, Mountbatten’s talented head of publicity, together with a rare apology.100 Having shown himself inept at public relations, Wingate then proceeded to hammer the point home with an angry confrontation with Mountbatten. There had been disagreement about whether it was wise to publicise the Chindit operations (Slim thought it a mistake to do so), but the news soon leaked out and was given extensive coverage in Frank Owen’s SEAC newspaper, though without mentioning Wingate or the Chindits by name. In a towering rage, Wingate ascribed the situation to the usual jealousy and back-stabbing directed against him and issued an order forbidding SEAC to be distributed to his men. He had jumped the gun, for Owen was preparing to do a follow-up edition in which Wingate and the Chindits would receive full credit. For his own rather machiavellian reasons, Slim eventually agreed with Owen that Wingate’s name should be mentioned; his reasoning was that the Japanese would think it simply a reprise of his small-scale 1943 operation and not take it seriously until it was too late.101
Wingate now chose to escalate this dispute with Owen by sending a cable to Joubert saying that he could not answer for the morale of his troops in the light of this overt slap in the face and informing him that SEAC was now contraband among the Chindits. In his typical bull-in-a-china-shop way, Wingate had not seen through all the implications of his action and sent the cable en clair so that it went through normal channels and was read by cipher and signals staff. As such it was a public attack on Mountbatten’s entire organisation. On 19 March the Supreme Commander issued a stiff reprimand:
Has it not occurred to you that your assumption, that people are going to try and belittle or conceal the doings of your party, makes it all the more difficult for me to ensure that they get the correct measure of credit? For instance, your letter was quite unsuitable for circulating to Air HQ … In future I suggest that when you consider a direct response from me is necessary, that this should be written entirely objectively without any note of bitterness being allowed to creep in. If you wish to let off steam I don’t mind your doing so in a covering letter which no-one else sees, but if you mix vituperation and factual accounts it merely means that the factual accounts cannot be circulated. Your astounding telegram to Joubert has made me realise how you have achieved such amazing success in getting yourself disliked by people who are only too ready to be on your side.’102
Mountbatten was in a peculiarly difficult position. Temperamentally disliking conflict, and knowing that Wingate was Churchill’s favourite, he had nonetheless become increasingly disillusioned with him as the loosest of loose cannons, and in any case, the proud and egomaniacal Supreme Commander would never tolerate a challenge to his prestige or amour-propre. Wingate’s many supporters have always resented Mountbatten’s part in his Burma career, accusing him of duplicity and insincerity; it is alleged that he never thought Chindit 2 would get off the ground, but that when it did and achieved initial success, he was keen to take the credit himself. Tulloch was a particular critic of Mountbatten on this score. ‘Mountbatten may well have felt a sense of shame in committing his friend to an operation which he himself had opposed and which he had no intention of exploiting even if it was successful.’103 There was more to it than that. It is doubtful that Mountbatten ever was a ‘friend’ of Wingate. Both men wanted to be the supreme figure in Burma and were in a sense competing for the same space. Wingate often complained that Mountbatten did not keep him fully informed about top-level decision-making and signals from Churchill and Roosevelt, but Mountbatten considered that was not Wingate’s business; in his view it was part of the definition of a supreme commander that he did not have to share secret information with a subordinate. Wingate, of course, regarded himself as a partner, not a subordinate. There is more merit in the idea that by early March Mountbatten committed himself more strongly to LRP because he was increasingly the target of hostile press criticism in the United States, alleging that he was a ‘do nothing’ waffler; so concerned was FDR by this that he communicated with Churchill about it on 25 February.104
Wingate was always keen to be at the front, so he visited Broadway on 7 March and Chowringhee on the 8th. He would probably have commuted between the strongholds indefinitely, had not Tulloch stressed to him the importance of being at headquarters; if not, hard pressed as they were at Imphal, the trinity of Mountbatten, Giffard and Slim might simply cancel THURSDAY. But it was difficult to keep him away, and the next tour of inspection took him to the subsidiary stronghold that the dauntless Calvert had established from Broadway: the so-called White City. Next (20 March) he flew to the Meza valley, where Fergusson had at last set up Aberdeen.105 Against Fergusson’s protests that his exhausted men needed rest, Wingate insisted that there must be no let-up, as this would allow the enemy, at present unprepared, to build up his strength at Indaw. He sugared the pill by saying that he guaranteed back-up from the reserve 14 Brigade, at which Fergusson reluctantly agreed to attack the Indaw airfields.106 What Wingate did not tell Fergusson was that his real intention for his reserves was to present Mountbatten with a fait accompli. He had been forced to sign Slim and Giffard’s unwelcome orders, but once he had control of 14 Brigade he intended to attack the rear of the Japanese attacking Imphal. In this way the limited aims of THURSDAY he had signed up to would be converted into the more ambitious plans for a general campaign involving Indochina that he had always cherished and in his secret heart never given up.107 From Aberdeen he flew to Broadway, and then met Tulloch at Lalaghat. Tulloch gave him the alarming news that the situation at Imphal was so serious that Slim was now seriously considering taking the reserve Chindit brigades (14th and 23rd Brigade) into the 14th Army defending that position. Slim had told Tulloch this in confidence, with strict instructions that he should not alarm Wingate by passing on the news, but Tulloch’s loyalty to Wingate overcame all other considerations; besides, he had always disliked Slim.108 Wingate’s immediate reaction was to fly to Comilla for yet another confrontation with Slim. The commander of 14th Army was sympathetic and said he had no desire to stymie the Chindits; but Wingate should understand how serious the
situation at Kohima now was. Finally the two men agreed a compromise: 14 Brigade would neither be amalgamated into the 14th Army nor sent to help Fergusson at Indaw. Instead it would proceed to a point 15 miles west of Wuntho and 60 miles south-west of Aberdeen to set up yet another stronghold where it could sever Japanese communications; the luckless Fergusson was to be kept in the dark about the new development.109