The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  There was one obvious snag about the compromise plan: it would require aircraft for supply drops, and where were they to come from? Allied airpower was now at full stretch in the defence of Imphal, and the only other source would be the Hump, which would mean a clash with Stilwell, or if not him, with Chiang and ‘Hap’ Arnold. Wingate thought he saw a chance to turn the tables on Slim, whom he considered had not been straight with him. He told Slim he was going to communicate directly with Churchill; Slim invited him to go ahead. Slim’s last view of Wingate was at this meeting on 22 March. ‘I said goodbye to him … and shook hands with him. As he went to the door he turned towards me again and said, a propos of nothing in particular, “You are the only senior officer in South East Asia who doesn’t wish me dead!”’110 Wingate sent an impassioned cable to London, routed through Mountbatten, claiming to be on the verge of annihilating four Japanese divisions. The cable read in part: ‘Get Special Force four transport squadrons now and you will have all Burma north of the 24th parallel plus a decisive defeat … General Slim gives me his full backing.’111 Slim complained to Mountbatten that Wingate had taken his name in vain, but what he really objected to was the hyperbole about four Japanese divisions, which Wingate implied he (Slim) was endorsing. As to the general request for four squadrons of Dakotas or similar, Slim in a separate signal to Giffard also urged this, though his intention was more direct; if he got Churchill’s backing for four more squadrons he intended to use them at Imphal, not on LRP operations.112 Mountbatten, meanwhile, was angry that after his recent pep talks with Wingate, the Chindit leader still seemed to have no conception of loyalty to the overall SEAC command. He called both Giffard and Peirse in for long consultations before sending Wingate’s cable on, and when he did so (on 23 March), he added a long covering note to say that neither he, Peirse nor Giffard knew why Wingate was requesting the extra planes. Churchill, however, immediately agreed to provide them and even promised he would mention the Chindits in his next broadcast to the nation.113

  Meanwhile Fergusson, unaware of all these developments, was labouring with his exhausted troops towards Indaw. Lacking the 900 men who had been detached to Lonkin, his force was 3,000 strong with 400 mules. They reached the outskirts of the airfield but blundered into Japanese outposts and were then ordered back to Aberdeen by Fergusson. The attack on Indaw has always been controversial, but was one of those occasions when everything that could do wrong did go wrong, simultaneously.114 At least seven different factors can be identified. First, the element of surprise was lost. The initial Japanese reaction to THURSDAY was astonishingly complacent. The commander of the Japanese air force in Burma, Major General Nazoe Noburu, was one of the few to spot the danger and to realise that this was no small-scale raid, like the Chindit incursion of 1943. But the arrogant know-all Mutaguchi dismissed his warnings and described the latest Special Force landings as ‘a mouse in a bag’. When the scale and scope of the LRP operation was realised, the Japanese called in reinforcements so that Indaw had been shored up by the time Fergusson got there. Even here, though, Wingate must carry part of the blame. Because he never informed his commanders of his overall plans on the ‘need to know’ principle and ‘for reasons of security’, he had not told Fergusson that 116 Brigade, in turn ignorant of Fergusson’s intentions, had fed pro-Japanese headmen the ‘disinformation’ that an attack on Indaw was planned. The ‘disinformation’ was of course solid intelligence.115 Second, there was a failure of intelligence and reconnaissance. Fergusson had not realised that there was no water available on the entire stretch between Aberdeen and Indaw, so that his men arrived at the target in an almost terminal state of thirst and exhaustion.116 Third, by an absurd contretemps Fergusson was out of radio contact with headquarters for 24 hours because Wingate decided to switch his base of operations. Hitherto he had had two different headquarters, one at Imphal and one at Sylhet. When it seemed that the Japanese might overrun Imphal, he switched completely to Sylhet, but the changeover took place on the very days (21–23 March) that Fergusson was attacking Indaw, so there was no proper liaison.117 Fourth, the Chindits in 16 Brigade turned out to be ill-disciplined and poorly trained and ended up firing on each other during the battle for Indaw.118 Fifth, Fergusson did not coordinate his attacks properly, so that his assault resembled ‘clutching fingers from all sides, and not as a fist’. In self-lacerating mode he later accused himself of not having adequately followed the precepts of the Master.119 Sixth, and most obviously, Fergusson had been misled and let down by Wingate, since he thought he had a guarantee of back-up from 14 Brigade. When he was later shown Wingate’s written order for the deployment of that brigade elsewhere, he remarked bitterly, as so many had before him, on Wingate’s mendacity: ‘At times the truth was simply not in him.’120 Finally, and incredibly, Fergusson received a report that the Japanese had sealed off his rear and were attacking Aberdeen. Quickly he called off the retreat and marched back, only to find that the Nigerian reinforcements had arrived in the form of 14th and 3rd West African Brigade.121

  While all this was going on, the Japanese had launched another ferocious attack against White City, which Calvert and his men beat off, but at the cost of 32 killed and 42 wounded. On 24 March, therefore, Wingate flew down to Broadway and White City on a morale-boosting mission to 77 Brigade. After a side trip to Aberdeen, he flew back to Broadway and then on to Imphal. This was the last time Calvert ever saw him. The flight back to Imphal was in a B-25 Mitchell bomber piloted by Lieutenant Brian Hodges of the USAAF with a crew of five and four passengers, Wingate, his ADC and two war correspondents.122 The plane reached Imphal at 6.23 p.m. and was closely guarded for the next half an hour before taking off at 8 p.m. for the Hailakandi airfield. Half an hour later it crashed into the Naga hills west of Imphal, near the village of Thilon. Cochran requested that Special Force send out a search party, which next morning found all the signs of a high-impact crash; almost certainly all the plane’s occupants were killed instantly. The usual culprits in the case of an air crash were cited: freak weather, engine failure, pilot error. But because this was Wingate, there was a general reluctance to accept that this was a routine accident, such as had accounted for thousands of airborne combatants in Burma. The official investigation concluded that there had been engine failure and that the pilot had unsuccessfully tried to return to Imphal.123 Many other theories were tested but found wanting. Sabotage was ruled out, because the B-25 was so closely guarded all the time, and anyway nobody knew Wingate’s intentions or flight plans, so there was simply no time for a bomb to have been planted. Thunderstorms or turbulence were cited as possibilities, but all the pilots in the air in the area that day confirmed that all thunderstorms were local and could easily be circumvented. Slim opted for extreme turbulence, even though the pilots’ testimony also ruled that out. ‘The wreckage was eventually found on the reverse side of a ridge,’ he wrote, ‘so that it was unlikely that the aircraft had flown into the hill. The most probable explanation is that it had suddenly entered one of those local storms of extreme turbulence so frequent in the area. These were difficult to avoid at night, and once in them an aeroplane might be flung out of control, or even have its wings torn off.’124 Opinions differ on weather conditions that day, but majority opinion is that they were not too bad. This disposes of the canard that the American pilot, Lieutenant Hodges, had not wanted to take off but the imperious and impatient Wingate browbeat him into doing so. Another view is that the pilot mistook the altitude and was flying too low, and this has some support from eyewitnesses. Yet another theory, based on reports that the plane was on fire when it crashed, was that the B-25 was carrying cluster bombs, which broke loose from the bays, rolled into the fuselage and detonated.125

  Given human nature, it is a moral certainty that several of Wingate’s old foes in the Indian army were glad to see him go, and there were many, whether ironically or not, who cited Shakepeare’s words in Macbeth: ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.’ From those who had kno
wn him well the reaction ranged from stupefaction through sadness to stoical acceptance. ‘Who will look after us now?’ said Captain Richard Rhodes-James. ‘Our master was gone and we, his masterpiece, were now ownerless.’126 Forgetting all his recent strictures and animadversions on his turbulent subordinate, and perhaps with that falsity survivors so often employ towards the troublesome dead, Mountbatten wrote to Edwina: ‘I cannot tell you how much I am going to miss Wingate. Not only had we become close personal friends but he was such a fire-eater, and it was such a help to me having a man with a burning desire to fight. He was a pain in the neck to the generals over him, but I loved his wild enthusiasm and it will be difficult for me to try to inculcate it from above.’127 Others jumped on the bandwagon and claimed they ‘knew’ Wingate was destined for an early death. Aware of the dangers of air travel, Tulloch never went in the same plane as Wingate and later came forward to say that he had had a premonition of disaster on 24 March and begged Wingate not to fly.128 Wingate himself had an innate dislike of flying but used willpower to overcome his fear. His attitude was that if he listened to people like Tulloch, he would never be able to board a plane, and that, for the commander of the Chindits, was both intrinsically absurd and likely to turn him and his Special Force into a laughing stock. Although the senior British commanders had disliked Wingate intensely, they had always tried to make allowances for him and to try to value his positive side while ignoring his many blemishes. As Rhodes-James pointed out: ‘They also protected him from himself when he did and said things he should not have done or said.’129 Some thought Wingate lucky in his death, for his premature end meant that his strategic theories were never fully refuted by events, as they would have been had he lived and continued at the helm. This allowed the legend of Wingate the peerless paladin to develop; it is still alive today.130 Perhaps the most judicious overall estimate came from Slim:

  With him, contact had too often been collision, for few could meet so stark a character without being violently attracted or repelled. To most he was either prophet or adventurer. Very few could regard him dispassionately; nor did he care to be so regarded. I once likened him to Peter the Hermit preaching his Crusade. I am sure that many of the knights and princes that Peter so fierily exhorted did not like him very much – but they went crusading all the same. The trouble was, I think, that Wingate regarded himself as a prophet, and that always leads to a single-centredness that verges on fanaticism, with all his faults. Yet had he not done so, his leadership could not have been so dynamic, nor his personal magnetism so striking.131

  13

  Even as Operation THURSDAY began and the campaign in the Arakan continued, simultaneously the Japanese opened a massive offensive in what would prove to be a four-month battle, the Stalingrad of the East. Slim knew that the enemy was planning a great push that they hoped would take them to Delhi, but his intelligence indicated that the battle would be joined on or around 15 March 1944. In fact the Japanese made their move a week earlier. Although Slim’s sources were far superior to those of his opponents, whose approach both to intelligence-gathering and its analysis was embarrassingly amateurish, they were, by the standards of the war in Europe, woefully inadequate. Slim sometimes made coded references to the fact that, unlike Montgomery, he was not given access to ULTRA and the other advanced cipher-cracking techniques.1 Reliant mainly on human intelligence, he faced the problem that the various espionage agencies were almost more interested in stealing a march on each other than fighting the enemy. A major obstacle to clarity was the very plethora of agencies: the American fledgling organisation the OSS (forerunner of the CIA); Force 126, responsible for organising guerrilla bands in the enemy’s rear; other irregulars known as V-Force, Z-Force and Detachment 101, which were part intelligence-gathering and part guerrilla; the Indian branch of MI6, known as the Inter-Services Liaison Committee; and especially D Division, the deception branch. There was much duplication of effort, mutual jealousy and a host of abortive or pointless ‘operations’; indeed, there was little point in planting double agents or sowing disinformation when the Japanese army paid no attention to reports from its own spies and secret police.2

  Slim’s intelligence, reliable on the enemy’s strength and resources, was less so on the intentions of its commanders. Nonetheless, it was obvious that the first target for the Japanese must be Imphal, for this was the key position in Manipur province, on the border with Burma; its capture would allow them to break into the Brahmaputra valley, cut all communications with Ledo, and thus end all prospects of Allied operations in Burma or China.3 The town of Imphal was now a busy complex of army camps, tarmac roads, cottage hospitals, supply dumps, ordnance depots and engineer parks; some said the 600 square miles of the plain was like a gigantic campsite, but especially vulnerable to land attack, since it was surrounded on all sides by high ground. The geography of Imphal was peculiarly difficult. The great plain, 30 miles long and 20 miles wide, at an elevation of 2,600 feet, was surrounded by jungle-clad mountains: to the north-east were the Naga hills, with summits as high as 5,000 feet, while to the south were the even loftier Chin hills, with peaks between 6,000 and 9,000 feet.4 The terrain made Imphal difficult to supply, for there were only two roads between Manipur and Assam, only one of which was all-weather. To the north, a road ran through high passes for 148 miles to the key railway terminal at Dimapur via the mountain village of Kohima in the Naga hills. When the first detachment of Japanese crossed the Chindwin on 8 March, aiming for Imphal, they caught Slim unprepared. Part of the problem was that his deputy, Lieutenant General Geoffrey Scoones, who commanded 4 Corps on the Assam front, had been preparing contingency plans for a limited offensive across the Chindwin in spring 1944, to support both Stilwell and Wingate.5 The result was that two of the three divisions nominally based at Imphal were deployed far to the south: 17 Indian Division, under General ‘Punch’ Cowan, was at Tiddim, 163 miles south of Imphal in the Chin hills, linked to Imphal by a dirt track that could be cut with ease by an enemy; 20 Indian Division, meanwhile, commanded by Major General Douglas Gracey, was at Tamu, 30 miles south-east of Imphal, whence a metalled road ran 25 miles to the all-important airfield at Palel on the edge of the Imphal plain. Although the two divisions were reasonably close to one another as the crow flies, the mountainous country meant they could not support one another in the event of an attack; both would have to return to the Imphal plain and then re-exit by the other route.6

  The Japanese attack on Imphal was directed by the wildly ambitious General Mutaguchi Renya, who made the eccentric direction to remain at Maymyo while doing so, out of close contact with his battlefield commanders. Seeing that Scoones had made all the correct defences against expected conventional attacks, Mutaguchi intended to seize Imphal by a combination of guile, surprise and dislocation. He correctly surmised that, if threatened, Scoones would try to hold both Tiddim and Tamu in strength, so disguised his main assault with a subsidiary attack to isolate Cowan at Tiddim by cutting the road to Imphal. He would then attack along the road from Tamu to Palel, forcing Scoones to commit his reserves (23 Indian Division based at Imphal under Major General Ouvry Roberts) to the two threatened sectors of Tiddim and Tamu. When all Scoones’s troops were engaged in the south, Mutaguchi would then attack in the north and east.7 The attack from the east would consist of 6,000 troops travelling with horses and bullocks. These would advance through the wild country between the Chindwin and north-eastern Imphal, following a line through Ukhrul, Sangshak and Litan, block the road north to Kohima, then cross to the west of the road and fall on Imphal from the unexpected direction of north-west. A back-up force of another 4,000 would pass through Ukhrul and establish itself on the Kohima–Imphal road, blocking any attempt to reinforce Imphal from the north. Meanwhile 20,000 men would attack Kohima to sever the link between Imphal and Dimapur and the Brahmaputra valley. Assailed from four main directions and completely cut off by land, Imphal would be slowly throttled to death. It was a bold and ingenious plan, but Mutaguchi made
three unwarranted assumptions: that Cowan and Gracey could be pinned down in the south; that the Anglo-Indian forces would panic and flee when outflanked by the Japanese, as they had in 1942–43; and worst of all, that his troops could hit all these complex targets while travelling light and carrying 100-pound loads.8 Taking a huge logistical risk, Mutaguchi gambled that the element of surprise would outweigh the Japanese lack of heavy artillery, and that his men would be able to live off the land. Overconfident of taking Imphal within a month, he boasted that it would fall in 10 days and therefore provided his units with just 20 days’ food supplies. Carrying rice, they could presumably hunt, fish and loot for the rest; or so he assumed.9

  For his offensive Mutaguchi used three divisions – the 15th, 31st and 33rd – together with some units of the so-called Indian National Army, though these were not used in the front line but mainly in propaganda exercises to persuade Indian troops serving under Slim to desert or join the other side. He began by sending regiments of the 33rd to cut off Cowan at Tiddim. One regiment set out on 7 March and the other the next day, crossing the Manipur river below Tiddim and then moving upstream on the west bank to try to outflank Cowan.10 The British responded slowly to this threat – so slowly that they only just avoided disaster. Slim had left the decision on the exact date for withdrawing 17 and 20 Divisions back to Imphal to Scoones, but Scoones was unaccountably tardy and even discounted Cowan’s reports of enemy activity. Increasingly concerned that he would be cut off, Cowan decided to act unilaterally and gave the order to retreat, in so doing ignoring Scoones’s explicit orders to hold firm. By the time Scoones finally woke up to the danger and formally ordered a retreat (13 March), the division was already on its way, whereupon Scoones put in an official report claiming that Cowan was the one who had moved too slowly.11 Slim, characteristically, took the blame for this slow reaction, thus covering up for his favourite. To make up for his error, Scoones sent 37 and 49 Brigades to assist Cowan, and Ouvry Roberts sent down reinforcements as well. Even so, it was touch and go for a while. For the next three weeks Cowan’s 16,000 troops, 2,500 vehicles and 3,500 mules fought their way northwards; the whole division went on foot, as transport was reserved for stores, ammunition and wounded. The Japanese followed the rear column cautiously, concentrating on working around the division and cutting the road ahead. General Motozo Yanakida, leading the pursuers, was a realist who already considered he was being asked to do far too much with the resources at his disposal, but his chief of staff, Colonel Tanaka, was another gung-ho enthusiast for Mutaguchi and his quixotic ideas and thus interpreted every piece of caution by Yanakida as cowardice. Angry exchanges between Yanakida and Tanaka hardly helped the Japanese cause.12