The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  Leese’s early contacts with Mountbatten and Slim were not auspicious. He arrived in Delhi on 8 November, then flew down to Ceylon, where Mountbatten whisked him off to his birthday party in a ballroom. Leese was shocked by the permissive atmosphere. A very pretty Wren kissed the Supreme Commander passionately in a long clinch, while the band played ‘Happy Birthday’. Leese looked on, starchily unimpressed, and later wrote to his wife: ‘They were at extreme pains to explain that it did not happen very often. But I doubt that. It was gay and full of life – full enough of drink – and very odd. Most girls were U’s [Mountbatten’s] and other secretaries and they seemed to spend their time sitting on the arms of U and others’ chairs. It all seemed a pity somehow, as it gives the Playboy atmosphere, in terrible contrast to those from the battle.’81 On 12 November Leese was appointed Commander-in-Chief, Allied Land Forces South-East Asia (ALFSEA), which included all American forces in action in Burma (but not China), and three days later set up his HQ at Barrackpore, where he met Slim and Christison. Forthcoming operations in the Arakan were assigned to Christison, with an independent command, to free Slim entirely for the campaign beyond the Chindwin. The encounter with Slim was superficially friendly, though it was obvious that the two men did not get on at any profound level. Leese’s impressions were not particularly favourable, although he patronisingly remarked that Slim was a good tactician. Slim showed no signs of being glad to have Leese in Burma and, according to Leese, ‘bellyached’ a lot.82 Leese was one of those curious individuals who regarded any mounting of a critique, however sensible, as ‘whingeing’. Slim’s misgivings were intensified when Leese began to pack his HQ administration with 8th Army veterans. Even in his autobiography, where Slim in Thumper-like mode barely breathes a word of criticism of anyone, there is a hint of the underlying tension: ‘His staff … had a good deal of desert sand in its shoes and was rather inclined to thrust Eighth Army down our throats.’83 This was deeply resented by 14th Army, which considered itself at least the equal of 8th Army. Slim took to bombarding Leese’s staff with gratuitous praise of 14th Army, and so the tensions escalated. Leese was heard to say that he did not consider Kohima-Imphal in the same class as the victories in North Africa and Italy, claimed that Slim considered himself a better general than Montgomery, and in general ludicrously underrated the brilliant commander of 14th Army.84

  Unlike Giffard, who always supported Slim, gave him his head and basically let him do what he wanted, Leese was another micromanager in the Noel Irwin mould, who wanted to be the true commander; in a curious way, he had a similar personality to the Supreme Commander, whom he rapidly came to loathe, and described as ‘crooked as a corkscrew’.85 He failed to understand that most of the pieces in the Burma jigsaw puzzle were already in place by the time he arrived, and that nobody needed his input. He resented the special rapport between Slim and the soldiers of 14th Army, and even more the close working relationship between Mountbatten and Slim, to say nothing of the offence Mountbatten gave by stating in private that it was harder to win the Victoria Cross in Burma than it was in Europe, and that the individual warriors of 14th Army, man for man, outclassed those of 8th Army.86 Idiotically, Leese would often issue ‘new’ orders, identical to those Slim had given weeks and months ago. He was an incubus Slim could well have done without as he planned the final stages of CAPITAL. On 14 December, Slim and his three key corps commanders, Scoones, Stopford and Christison, were all knighted in a special ceremony at Imphal by Wavell, who appeared in the regal role by special permission of the King. Observers at the ceremony thought Slim looked tired and drawn.87 Quite apart from the Leese factor, the reason for tension was obvious. Slim realised he would have to slow down the speed of his advance and restructure CAPITAL or risk a premature assault on the wide and strongly defended waterway. While he considered his options, he put the final touches to the Chindwin operations. Five new Bailey bridges were built, including the longest floating in the world at that time (1,154 feet), which was assembled and installed on the Chindwin on 7–10 December.88 Elephants were crucial in the task of moving timber as trees were felled, bridges built and new airstrips laid. At the Chindwin Slim put on an impressive display of river power as part of the infrastructure for his onward march. Five hundred river barges were constructed at Kalewa, and gunboats bristling with machine guns and cannons launched to protect the river traffic.89 All that was needed now was Slim’s revised strategy to outwit Kimura so that he could reach Rangoon before the monsoon began.

  16

  When Stilwell returned to China in early September, having visited Chungking just twice since he went to the front in January as a battle commander, he found things as bad as ever but the labyrinthine web of intrigue and jockeying for advantage even more complex and Byzantine. Ever since the failed army coup by young officers the year before, the iron fist of the KMT had clamped down even more tightly. It was typical of Chiang that, after seeing off a grave challenge to his position, he should then settle back into his old ways and do nothing about the circumstances that had caused the coup in the first place. With morale low, corruption rampant and increasing, the economy stagnating and even the old warlords of the 1920s and 1930s enjoying a revival, all the generalissimo could think of was that perennial obsession the threat from the Communists. It never seemed to occur to him that all his policies – conscription, confiscations, compulsory levies on rice, widespread corvées, trying to buck the market and beat inflation with a compulsory freezing of prices – all alienated the peasantry even further and thus played into the hands of Mao Tse-tung and the Red Army.1 What kind of resistance to the famous Eighth Route Army was likely when the Kuomintang soldiers were not paid and scarcely even fed? Since all copy by foreign journalists was censored, it was difficult for the outside world to get a line on the true state of affairs, but those in power in Washington who were really interested could have read Ambassador Gauss’s lucid reports, where the entire fiasco was analysed. The trouble was that Gauss was telling FDR and Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, things they did not want to hear. He did not exactly help his case by constantly predicting the downfall of the KMT, which, however, managed to limp on from month to month.2 The atmosphere of a topsy-turvy Alice-in-Wonderland failed state and all its attendant absurdities was well caught by Mountbatten in a diary entry on 18 July. The rumour reached him that Chiang was to become a father again but no one knew who the mother was, since his wife, the much-admired Madame Chiang, had walked out on him in July and gone to Brazil after he refused to banish a concubine; she did not return until September 1945. Mountbatten commented: ‘In the western world the reverse is often enough true but it takes China to turn the facts of Nature inside out.’3

  Gauss and Stilwell had long argued that in China the only people doing any real fighting and killing Japanese were the Communists, and that therefore Washington should consider cutting Chiang adrift and supporting Mao and the Red Army. Stilwell was a Republican and a man of conservative views (Roosevelt was too liberal for him), but as a battling general he had no interest in ideology and was concerned only with the most effective fighters. The situation was almost exactly analogous to that in Yugoslavia at the same time. Both Churchill and his envoy, the ‘Balkan brigadier’ Fitzroy MacLean, were vehement anti-Communists, but in wartime their only interest was which Yugoslav faction was killing the most Germans. When MacLean found that this was Tito and his Communist partisans, Allied aid was directed to them. The reluctant Serbian nationalist fighters, the Cetniks, under their leader Mihailovic, were cast adrift because they shirked from battle with the Germans and often actively collaborated with them.4 If reason alone was the lodestar for US foreign policy, this is what should have happened in China. Gauss had long urged Chiang to forge an alliance with the Communists so that both could fight the Japanese; if Chiang refused, he recommended his Lend-Lease be discontinued. Growing impatience with the generalissimo, and the evidence of their own eyes at the Cairo conference in 1943, led key decision-makers in Washin
gton eventually to investigate the fighting potential of Mao and the Red Army. On the Yugoslav analogy and example, it was obvious that US support should have been switched immediately to the Communists. In northern China, where there was the greatest concentration of Japanese troops and industry in the entire country, the Reds controlled 155,000 square miles and 54 million people and had a well-trained and disciplined army of 475,000, to say nothing of the impressive inroads they were making on the hearts and minds of the Chinese peasantry. Clearly nationalists and Communists ought to collaborate against the common enemy, but this was not Chiang’s agenda. Fearing that he was growing comparatively weaker day by day, he wanted to attack the Communists while FDR’s attention was elsewhere, focused on Europe, before US reinforcements arrived in China or Russia entered the war by invading Manchuria. Finally, in late 1943, Chiang gave three American correspondents permission to visit Mao.5

  The journalistic mission was headed by the Chinese-speaking Colonel David Barrett, famous as the only American who could tell jokes in Chinese convincingly to the Chinese themselves. Stilwell thoroughly approved of the mission, perhaps mindful that Chou En-lai had said in 1942: ‘I would serve under General Stilwell and I would obey.’6 He became more and more excited by the idea of a combined force, with 20 Communists in each company of 100 men. The chief of staff of Y-force, Hsiao I-shu, cautioned him that that meant the entire company would be ‘Red’ within a fortnight. A military mission to the Communists in Yenan was ready to go in February 1944, but the generalissimo, as usual, stalled and, when FDR repeated his request in March 1944, used his back-up ploy of simply making no answer. FDR responded by sending the mission anyway: this was the famous ‘Dixie mission’.7 Yet it was clear that the way forward in China was to bring Mao and the Communists into an anti-Japanese united front. This was the pretext for the Wallace mission to China, when Roosevelt sent out Vice President Henry Wallace to persuade Chiang to negotiate with Mao.8 There was the usual FDR machiavellianism at play here also, as the President wanted his unpopular ‘veep’ out of the country when the Democrat convention met in June. Careful preparations were made for the visit. Wallace was given the assistance of experienced China hands like Owen Lattimore, and Stilwell’s political adviser John Service prepared a long, lucid and cogent memo on the true state of affairs in Chiang’s China.9 Yet Wallace was made of crooked timber, only too willing to heed the anti-Stilwell faction. As soon as his embassy was announced, the Alsop–Chennault axis went into overdrive, arguing for Stilwell’s recall and absurdly talking up the achievements of Chennault’s air force.10 From 21 to 24 June Wallace parleyed with Chiang in Chungking. At first the generalissimo flatly refused to allow a formal, authorised military mission, then he backtracked and said he would authorise it if, as a quid pro quo, both Stilwell and Gauss were dismissed. Wallace was taken in by all Chiang’s nonsense and declared himself moved by his ‘distress’. Four of Stilwell’s deadly enemies – Chennault, Wedemeyer, Soong and Joseph Alsop – all buttonholed Wallace with demands that Stilwell should go.11 In his cable to FDR, Wallace accepted all their diaphanous special pleading at face value, and even suggested that Wedemeyer should be Stilwell’s replacement. Wallace and Stilwell did not meet each other. Stilwell despised him as a moron, and was anyway preoccupied with the struggle for Mogaung and Myitkyina. He did suggest that Wallace fly down to meet him in the Mogaung valley, but this was too close to the sound of gunfire for the fastidious Wallace. When Wallace’s ridiculous suggestions were discussed in Washington, Marshall, knowing only too well their provenance, made short work of them.12

  Yet another anti-Stilwell intrigue had flopped, so badly that the New York Times took up with avidity the idea of Mao and the Communists being partners in the anti-Japanese alliance.13 Indeed, so far were Marshall and the Joint Chiefs from heeding Wallace’s advice that they were working in the opposite direction: they wanted to enlarge Stilwell’s authority in China, not remove him. China was no longer important as an air base for raids on Japan once Saipan, taken in July after a bloody three-week struggle with fanatical Japanese defenders, became available. On the other hand, the Joint Chiefs took seriously Stilwell’s warning that the large Japanese armies in China might decide to fight on even if Nippon itself was successfully invaded – doing by analogy what the British intended to do in 1940 if they had lost the Battle of Britain, carrying the struggle over into Canada.14 A protracted war on the Chinese mainland would involve the USA in two deadly dangers. If they transferred war-weary GIs from Europe to China, the American public would not wear it; even worse, the appearance of the Soviet Union in Manchuria would become a ‘racing certainty’, and this was diametrically opposed to US interests. Making Stilwell the commander of all Chinese forces, without any interference from Chiang, would also remove him from SEAC and stop the whispering campaign against him by Mountbatten and Alanbrooke. The US War Department wanted to promote Vinegar Joe to ‘Field Chief of Staff’ – a field marshal in all but name – in China.15 A memo on 30 June, strongly backed by Stimson, argued (correctly) that Stilwell had welded a proper and credible Chinese army in Burma in the teeth of unbelievable obstacles, and that the taking of Myitkyina airfield was an amazing feat of arms. Marshall wrote to Stilwell to suggest that after his stint at Kandy he should base himself permanently in Chungking so as to be ready to wage the expected long land war against the Japanese, pointing out that his absence from the SEAC theatre would both placate the British and transfer the pressure on to Chiang. Stilwell replied briefly: ‘I’ll go where I’m sent,’ but suggested to Marshall that it would be better if FDR read the riot act to Chiang first.16

  The main factor pushing Washington in the direction of Stilwell’s promotion was the alarming success of a new Japanese offensive in China opened in June and code-named I-CHIGO. This was a last-ditch attempt by Tokyo to defeat China before US bombers came within range of the homeland but, ironically, it was launched just before the Americans invaded Saipan on 16 June and achieved that capability anyway. I-CHIGO, involving half a million Japanese troops – the largest numbers ever deployed in the whole of Japanese military history – was nothing if not ambitious. Japanese merchant navy losses were by now restricting the flow of raw materials from South-East Asia, so the response of strategists in Tokyo was to try to forge a continental corridor, linking Korea, Manchuria and East China with Thailand, Malaya and Singapore. Sweeping the demoralised Chinese before them, the Japanese took Honan, then turned south from Hankow to strike at the air bases in eastern China.17 Changsha, the capital of the rice-bowl region, fell on 18 June, sparking the bitterest phase of the Chennault–Stilwell feud. Chennault virtually provided the refutation of his own tenets when his fabled 14th Air Force could not prevent the enemy advance, though they did slow it. He claimed that his failure was simply because of shortage of supplies, and tried to shift the blame to Stilwell and the Hump. Vinegar Joe rightly saw this as a campaign ‘to duck the consequences of having sold the wrong bill of goods’.18 He was livid with Chennault after an article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post stating that Chennault was the only man of genius in Asia and Stilwell a mere World War I foot soldier.19 Under extreme pressure from Chiang, Stilwell agreed to divert 1,500 tons of cargo from the B-29s to Chennault if Washington consented. Marshall, knowing full well that the Flying Tigers were more in the nature of a paper tiger and that Chennault was a charlatan, abruptly refused. By this time both he and many others had become convinced that the slow progress of the war in Europe was because so much materiel had been diverted to the Hump at Chiang’s request, in vain, point-lessly and uselessly. Stimson said of the Hump: ‘It has been bleeding us white in transport airplanes.’20 As for Chennault, he had already lost credibility and ‘got across’ MacArthur by boasting that he could bomb the Philippines from China. In MacArthur’s view, the Philippines were his personal bailiwick, and Stilwell chortled: ‘MacArthur in a sweat over Chennault trying to bomb Manila.’21 Marshall explained in his rejection note that nothing must interfere with the
B-29s. Stilwell replied: ‘Instructions understood and exactly what I hoped for.’ Now definitively rejected by the Joint Chiefs, Chiang and Chennault spewed out their rage towards Stilwell, whom they held responsible for their humiliation. Stilwell remained unfazed by I-CHIGO, reasoning that the Japanese would soon outrun their lines of communication. Meanwhile he intended to unite Y-force and his own NCAC, get more reinforcements from the USA, and then move into south-west China. With an army of 250,000 under his command he was confident that he could drive the enemy into the sea.22