by Frank McLynn
Grimly struggling on, Calvert’s Chindits successfully assailed the village of Naungkyaikthaw after an aerial blitz on the Japanese bunkers. Calvert claimed that he killed 100 Japanese that day, but his own numbers were diminishing alarmingly, with disease and battle vying to notch up the greater tally of dead. Just when his situation was beginning to seem desperate, his Gurkhas made contact with the Chinese on 18 June at Lakum village, two miles from the town of Mogaung.101 Calvert conferred with the Chinese commander, but found his allies curiously reluctant to make a frontal attack and excessively concerned about casualties. They considered the Chindit method of fighting headstrong, reckless and wasteful. In a curious reversal of the usual stereotype, it was the British, not the Chinese, who seemed to hold human life cheap.102 What followed was one of the most bloody and savage battles even by the gruesome standards of the Burma campaign. After a massive artillery barrage, Calvert called down an air strike by seventy Mustangs on the enemy position. On 23 June battle was joined with mortars, anti-tank grenades and flame-throwers. The carnage on the 23rd was terrific, and the Gurkhas won two Victoria Crosses in a single day for conspicuous valour. Another assault next day was largely carried out by the Chinese and their heavy artillery.103 By noon on the 25th the Japanese were effectively beaten, but the Gurkhas did not begin to edge cautiously into the town until the next day. They found the enemy fled.104 Mogaung was one of the great infantry battles of the war, but it was effectively 77th Brigade’s last hurrah, for casualties were enormous. Calvert lost 800 men dead and wounded – almost half his force – and his brigade was no longer an effective fighting force. Only 300 men were left who could walk, let alone march. In some accounts of the battle, the Chinese and the American airpower tend to get written or airbrushed out, but to his great credit, in his own version of the battle, Calvert gave them full credit.105 Victorious but at their last gasp, the Chindits blamed Stilwell for much of what had gone wrong. Unaccountably, some pro-Chindit authors write as if the mere fact of being under Stilwell’s command of itself generated the huge casualties, which is absurd. But they are on firmer ground in complaining that planes failed to arrive regularly to ferry out the wounded, which may well have been the result of incompetence at his headquarters.106 Certainly Stilwell showed himself an ingrate on this occasion. There were no messages of congratulation, just a curt ‘we have it’ in his diary. He compounded his sins by claiming later that the victory at Mogaung had been a walkover, won against starving Japanese with few Allied casualties.107 He also briefed the BBC correspondents that the battle had been won by his Chinese. This was presumably his revenge for the many times the BBC had written him out of their reports or changed purely American successes into ‘Allied victories’. Calvert was incandescent with fury when he heard on the radio that Chinese-American forces had taken Mogaung. He wrote: ‘The Chinese-American forces having taken Mogaung, 77 Brigade has taken umbrage.’108
It is often alleged by the pro-Wingate coterie of historians that Slim and Stilwell were particularly hard on Calvert, as he was a Wingate loyalist and therefore the butt of their displaced (and posthumous) dislike of the prophet of the Chindits. This view can hardly survive an examination of Stilwell’s treatment of Lentaigne, Morris and Masters, the so-called anti-Wingate Chindits. The truth is that Stilwell piled unacceptable pressure on all the Chindit brigades and set them impossible tasks because he feared the domino effect of allowing them to retire with their hard-won battle honours. The reasoning was that if he let the Chindits return to India on furlough, he would then have to do the same with the Marauders while Myitkyina was still in enemy hands, and in that case what about the Chinese, who had been in the field longer than either?109 Certainly his treatment of Morris and his Chindit detachment, known as MorrisForce, was even worse than that he had meted out to Calvert and 77 Brigade. A close friend and ally of Lentaigne, Morris, described as ‘peppery, authoritarian, obstinate and impetuous’, loathed Wingate and seems to have had an almost paranoid fear of him.110 Like Lentaigne, he attracted obloquy from critics, who said he was weak and indecisive, and both Stilwell and his chief of staff Boatner seemed to have played on this. Boatner ordered MorrisForce to assail the Japanese formations east of the Irrawaddy and Morris’s men made eight separate attacks on well-entrenched enemy positions. Morris signalled that he was losing one third of a platoon daily from sickness and asked permission to pull out and go to India on furlough.111 Boatner refused in Stilwell’s name, having asked the Chinese what they thought and received the negative answer he expected. Soon Morris’s strength was down to three platoons, and his men cursed the very names of Boatner and Stilwell. Boatner actually went down to MorrisForce and 77th Brigade to tell them to their face that he thought they were ‘yellow’ – faithfully echoing his master, with whom real or alleged cowardice was an obsession.112 A Chindit colonel was said to have remarked: ‘Boatner will kill us all before he is finished’ and fulfilled his side of the prophecy by being killed in action next day.113 It was only after massive pressure from Mountbatten that Lentaigne was finally permitted to agree to Morris’s request on 21 July, by which time MorrisForce was a skeleton crew in more senses than one.
Basically Stilwell would not or could not grant the Chindits or the Marauders furlough while Myitkyina still stood defiant, though it was his fault and that of his commanders and planners that this was the case. Furiously pressing the attack without success, Stilwell was reduced to shuffling his deck of cards pointlessly, first replacing Boatner with Brigadier General Wessels temporarily, then replacing him with Hunter, and finally reinstating Boatner. Stilwell himself flew in to the airfield on several occasions, tearing his hair out about the rain, the poor morale of his men, the mutual recrimination of the commanders, the fact that aircraft had to land supplies and reinforcements even though they could not see the ground, and the general failure to make progress. His jotted pronouncements have all the hallmarks of a mind at the end of its tether. ‘Good God, what goes on in Mitch? … Rain – if we can’t land planes we can’t land troops … this is one of those terrible days when you wish you were dead … GALAHAD is shot … the wear and tear on the nerves continues. Are we attempting too much? Can they hold us? Is there a surprise ready? Counterattack? Will our people stick it out? Casualties too heavy? I can tell I’ve nearly had enough of this.’114 A contingent of 2,600 volunteers arrived from the USA to replace the Marauders, some of them used to jungle conditions as they were veterans from Panama, bored with the chore of guarding the canal. Rushed from Bombay to Ramgarh for a perfunctory week’s training, they were then hustled to ‘Mitch’, where, instead of replacing the Marauders, they were amalgamated with them. They entered a nightmare world of rain and mud, where most of the old Galahad men were so tired that they fell asleep even during battle or leaned over the trenches vomiting up their K-rations.115 Scrub typhus had by now become endemic, with 100 men a day going down. One regimental colonel was at his post with a temperature of 103°F and the men were not allowed to report sick unless they had run a temperature of 102°F for three days. The new recruits were largely hopeless. At least 50 were classified by the medical examiners as irremediable sociopaths, while the rest seemed frozen with terror at the mere thought of the Japanese.116 Ill-trained, the newcomers gave fresh meaning to the notion of a ‘scratch unit’, and some had their first taste of how to load and fire a rifle on the plane to Myitkyina. While Hunter was solicitous for the men and complained of their poor treatment (and was later sidelined for having done so), both Stilwell and Boatner came across as uncaring, indifferent and even cruel. Stilwell’s behaviour was untypical, for in normal circumstances he was no soldier-slapping Patton. This and his demeanour towards Mountbatten and Slim (described below) suggests that he might have had a mental breakdown at Myitkyina – not surprisingly, as the stress would have finished off most men in their sixties. Whatever the truth, he became as much a hate figure for the Marauders as he already was for the Chindits. Fuelled by marijuana, the Galahad men referred to their
commander and his staff as ‘stuffed baboons’ as well as more obscene and unprintable things.117 ‘Bloodless and utterly coldhearted, without a drop of human kindness’ was one of the milder criticisms of Stilwell. Two direct quotes from individual Marauders convey the general loathing. One said: ‘That bastard ain’t no American. He was born in his goddam Myitkyina and I hope he dies there.’ Another put it more graphically: ‘I had him in my rifle sights. I coulda squeezed one off and no one woulda known it wasn’t a Jap that got the sonofabitch.’118
Fighting in the monsoon with demoralised troops against a determined and well-entrenched enemy, Stilwell had to endure 10 weeks of mental turmoil until Myitkyina finally fell on 3 August. As if the stress of ‘Mitch’ was not enough, he also had to visit Chiang in Chungking in early June, when the generalissimo reverted to the old Chennault mantra about winning the war with airpower alone if only he had enough planes and fuel. Stilwell was gloomy: ‘The situation in China looks pretty bad. I believe the Peanut is going to pay dearly for being stupid and stubborn … Peanut much surprised over North Burma success.’119 Back at Myitkyina the battle went from bad to worse. Well-aimed Japanese mortars were now seriously interrupting the air traffic over the airfield and at one time the Chinese-American force was down to a single day’s rations. It seemed entirely plausible that the Japanese might soon be able to take the runways. ‘There were days when a banzai charge by General Mizukami’s garrison or a determined push by 53 Division, which had been ordered to lift the siege, would in all probability have swept right over the airstrip.’120 By now the undisciplined Marauders were refusing to take orders and even threatening to ‘frag’ their officers. The entire weight of the fighting fell on the Chinese, who were predictably angry about having to sustain all the casualties, thus involving Stilwell in a further round of stress. The Allies did not win Myitkyina; the Japanese lost it when they were forced to pull out through sheer lack of food and ammunition. Mizukami committed suicide, and his body was found in the ruins when the Allies entered.121 Kamaing, Mogaung and Myitkyina were all lost at root through Nippon’s lack of resources. Yet the victories at Mogaung and Myitkyina decisively broke the Japanese hold on north Burma, and the results were dramatic, and not just in the increased tonnage flown over the Hump. US engineers were able to start work on a road through the Hukawng and Mogaung valleys through Kamaing to Myitkyina and then repaired the road south to Bhamo, which the Chindits had destroyed. From Bhamo the road ran northeast to link up with the old Burma road going up to Yungling and Kunming and eventually, 600 miles later, Chungking itself. The consequences of Myitkyina were thus momentous, but the cost had been high: 272 Marauders were killed and another 955 wounded, with 980 invalided out, even under Stilwell’s draconian strictures on illness. The Chinese lost 972 dead and 3,184 wounded and the Japanese 790 dead and 1,180 wounded.122 At last the desperate Marauders were homeward bound and officially disbanded in August, albeit later reconstituted as 75th Infantry Regiment. Unlike the Chindits, they were given a Distinguished Unit Citation for their pains.
It is a nice question whether Stilwell was more hated by the Marauders or the Chindits, but at least the Chinese factor could be adduced in mitigation of his treatment of his own countrymen. There was less justification for his attitude to the Chindits, which led to major confrontation with Mountbatten and Slim and extinguished the last embers of a dying relationship. The first great row came over Calvert and 77 Brigade, but this was resolved amicably after some tense moments. After the signal victory at Mogaung, Stilwell ordered Calvert to advance to Myitkyina and join in the siege there. Calvert, feeling that 77 Brigade had already performed far beyond the call of duty, ignored the order and shut down all radio contact with Chindit HQ. He then marched to Kamaing, expecting to be evacuated to India. He forgot that it would have been far easier to be flown out from Myitkyina.123 Stilwell was furious about the insubordination and there was talk of a court martial. Eventually Lentaigne managed to get in touch with Calvert and tell him it was imperative he faced the music. Despite the fact that Lentaigne and Calvert loathed each other, the new Chindit commander had been defending him to the best of his ability, but Stilwell’s detestation of Lentaigne did not help. Arriving at headquarters, Calvert was ushered into a room where Vinegar Joe, his son, Boatner and Lentaigne were sitting. The following conversation ensued:
STILWELL: Well, Calvert, I have been waiting to meet you for some time.
CALVERT: I have been waiting to meet you too, sir.
STILWELL: You send some very strong signals, Calvert.
CALVERT: You should see the ones my brigade-major won’t let me send.
STILWELL (laughing): I have just the same trouble with my own staff officers when I draft signals to Washington.124
Whether by luck or calculation, Mad Mike had struck just the right note to appeal to Vinegar Joe, and the ice was broken. There was no more talk of court martials. When Calvert launched into a detailed account of the Mogaung campaign, Stilwell kept saying: ‘Why wasn’t I told?’ It turned out he knew nothing of the history of 77 Brigade and was totally unaware that it had been in the field for four months.
Yet if relations with Calvert were resolved amicably, Stilwell could not be appeased about the rest of the Chindits and continued to complain about Lentaigne and the various ways in which Special Force had let him down: the unilateral abandonment of Blackpool, the poor and ‘cowardly’ showing of MorrisForce, the alleged ‘malingering’ of the other brigades, the many acts of ‘insubordination’ and defeatism by Chindit commanders, especially Lentaigne. Things got so bad that Mountbatten spent a lot of time flying up to the front to try to pour oil on the turbulent waters. A visit on 30 June is of peculiar interest, as both men recorded impressions in their diaries. Here first is Stilwell: ‘Mountbatten has been up again. He had the nerve to make a speech at our headquarters but he doesn’t fool our GIs much. They are getting a look at the British Empah with its pants down and the aspect is not so pretty. You can imagine how popular I am with the Limeys. I have been thinking of Mountbatten as a sophomore but I have demoted him to freshman.’125 Mountbatten’s ‘take’, as so often, was more Panglossian. He recorded the address to the GIs and continued thus:
After this we lunched in his tent with the rain beating down on us and the temperature inside so great that we were as wet from sweat as if we had been sitting in the monsoon rain outside … Although Stilwell has always shown himself quite remarkably friendly to me the meeting was not easy as there were several points of difference to be cleared up. However, he met me very handsomely more than half way (the problem is that Stilwell wants to be able to direct Lentaigne’s special forces). If only I could see him every day there would never be any difficulties in this command between the Americans and ourselves. Not that we do have many difficulties, as our relations on the whole are now very good.126
The diary entry smacks of humbug on two counts. By this time Mountbatten was actively intriguing to have Stilwell replaced as his deputy (see below). And if he wished for close contact with his commanders, why on earth had he relocated to Ceylon, which ruled out such contact? The visit ended on a disappointing note for the Supreme Commander. He expressed a desire to see Myitkyina, but both Stilwell and Lentaigne protested vehemently that this was too perilous. Mountbatten insisted he had to go, and the others reluctantly acquiesced. Suddenly the trip was cancelled. The Japanese had chosen that very day to make a massive fighter sweep over the battleground, and with only four Mustangs to protect him, Mountbatten would have been in serious danger.127 Mountbatten, it seemed, was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. The time he had arrived with 16 Mustangs he had brought too many escorts and attracted ridicule; this time he brought too few.
Continually plagued by Stilwell’s complaints about Lentaigne, Mountbatten tried using Slim as an intermediary, knowing that he and Vinegar Joe got on well. Yet even Slim hit a brick wall. The talks between the two started amicably enough. Slim jokingly reminded Stilwell that now that Kamai
ng had fallen, as per their agreement he was no longer the American’s commanding officer. ‘Well, general,’ said Stilwell, ‘I’ve been a good subordinate to you. I’ve obeyed all your orders.’ Slim replied: ‘Yes, you old devil, but only because the few I did give you were the ones you wanted!’128 Having, as he thought, got Stilwell in a good mood, Slim gently suggested that he might now agree to come under Giffard’s command, especially as Giffard would be in Burma only for a short time in a caretaker role. Stilwell adamantly refused; his contempt for Giffard had lost none of its old bite. This issue was patched up in a face-saving way: Mountbatten himself took over Giffard’s military role. Next Stilwell launched into a series of grouses about the Marauders and the Chindits. Cast down by the protracted siege of Myitkyina, ‘he was extremely caustic about his unfortunate American commanders, accusing them of not fighting and killing the same Japanese over and over again in their reports’.129 The complaints about the Chindits were the most difficult issue. Slim had a series of meetings with both Lentaigne and Stilwell, and tried to work out the rights and wrongs of Vinegar Joe’s lamentations. Lentaigne was bitter and told him that Stilwell was a hard driver who always asked the impossible, demanding that all the Chindit columns be simultaneously engaged and refusing to evacuate casualties. It was impossible to remonstrate with Stilwell, said Lentaigne, because he now refused any personal contact with the Chindit leader. Slim likened Stilwell and Lentaigne to Agamemnon and Achilles, this time with both men sulking in their tents: ‘I found Stilwell bitter and Lentaigne indignant and very understandably suffering from prolonged strain.’130 Trying to act the honest broker, Slim went back to Stilwell with his findings. His conclusion was that in many instances the Chindits had not carried out Vinegar Joe’s orders because they were incapable of having done so. When he heard this, Stilwell began to vaunt the achievements of the Marauders over those of the Chindits. Slim would have none of it. Calmly he pointed out that Galahad had been behind Japanese lines a much shorter time and had sustained higher casualties. As for MorrisForce, why accuse a unit of a few hundred of failing to achieve what 30,000 Chinese and Marauders had not been able to do? Expecting Myitkyina to fall imminently, Slim unwisely agreed to Stilwell’s suggestion that he retain the Chindits until that time and then release them.131 The problem was that ‘Mitch’ took until 3 August to surrender, and no one had foreseen this.