Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  Everyone—staff, Sappers, Marines, Irrawaddy Flotilla officials—was working all-out and considerable progress was being made when on the 7th and 9th May the Japanese put in several heavy air attacks on what must have been an ideal target. Casualties were not as heavy as one would have expected, for the troops by now, without waiting for orders, automatically dug slit trenches, though a good many vehicles were destroyed or damaged. The boom was broken twice, but replaced at night. It was great good fortune that none of the steamers was hit, but the bombing, not unreasonably, proved too much for many of the civilian Indian crews. They deserted in large numbers, and those that stayed refused to bring their ships downstream of Kalewa. We put guards of soldiers on board to force them to work, but it was impossible to prevent the lascars from slipping overboard. It was only owing to the courage of the British ships’ officers and of a few stout-hearted Indian subordinates that any of the steamers at all could be got to the Shwegyin jetty. The number of ships and the rate of turn-round both decreased alarmingly.

  On the evening of the 8th May, Cowan and his rearguard of 48 Brigade and a regiment of tanks, to avoid the congestion that would have resulted from coming into the ‘Basin’, halted two miles down the track north-east from Shwegyin. Very wisely on the 9th he sent forward the 7th Gurkhas to reinforce the troops holding the escarpment. The battalion arrived after dark and bivouacked in the ‘Basin’.

  At my headquarters in the jungle just outside Kalewa I was very worried at the delays caused by air bombing, and the fear that either the Japanese or the monsoon would be on us before we could complete the crossing. Having collected the officer responsible for river transportation, and assured myself that he had done all a man could at the Kalewa end, I started off in the dark by launch early in the morning of the 10th May to visit Shwegyin and see what could be done there. My A.D.C. and I reached the jetty at about 0530 just as it was getting light. A steamer was alongside but loading for the moment was interrupted while the Sappers repaired the pier damaged by a lorry. Followed by my A.D.C., I walked across the steamer’s deck on to the jetty. Just as I set my foot on it a stream of red tracer bullets cracked viciously overhead and at once, from the south side of the escarpment to my right, a terrific din of rifle, machine-gun, mortar, and some artillery fire broke out. It was the most unpleasant welcome I have ever had. Obviously something quite big in attacks was starting and it was already close. What had happened to our outer defences I had no idea; they must have been either by-passed or overrun.

  I was now by myself, my A.D.C. having decided rather sensibly that, whatever was happening, I should want breakfast and that he had better fetch the box containing it. Rather put off by my reception, I walked up the track from the jetty, past a number of parked tanks, and turned off right towards Ekin’s Brigade Headquarters. A lot of stuff was coming over, all too high to be dangerous, but, judging by the noise, just ahead a proper fight seemed to be developing. I found myself crossing one of the larger open spaces, where, crouching behind every little mound and bush that dotted it, were men of the 7th Gurkhas, the battalion that had arrived the previous night. My inclination to run for cover, not lessened by a salvo of mortar bombs that came down behind me, was only restrained by the thought of what a figure the Corps Commander would cut, sprinting for safety, in front of all these little men. So, not liking it a bit, I continued to walk forward. Then, from behind a bush that offered scant cover to his bulky figure, rose my old friend, the Subadar Major of the 7th Gurkhas, his face creased in a huge grin which almost hid his twinkling almond eyes. He stood there and shook with laughter at me. I asked him coldly what he was laughing at, and he replied that it was very funny to see the General Sahib wandering along there by himself not knowing what to do! And, by Jove, he was right; I did not!

  It is a funny thing how differently the various races react to such a situation. A British soldier would have called out to me to take shelter and would have made room for me beside him. The average Indian sepoy would have watched anxiously, but said nothing unless I was hit, when he would have leapt forward and risked his life to get me under cover. A Sikh would have sprung up, and with the utmost gallantry dramatically covered me with his own body, thrilled at the chance of an audience. Only a Gurkha would stand up and laugh.

  But it was no use standing there being laughed at by a braver man than I was. So I went on a little farther to Brigade Headquarters. There I found Ekin and alarm, but no panic. It was clear—only too clear—that somehow a considerable force of Japanese with mortars and infantry guns had got through our outer guard and was now attacking the Indian battalion holding the escarpment in its southern sector nearest the jetty. This attack seemed to be being held—but only just.

  What had actually happened, although we did not, of course, know it at the time, was that the previous afternoon some seven hundred Japanese, with guns and mules, had landed from naval craft about eight miles south of Shwegyin. The landing craft had immediately turned round and brought in more during the evening and night. At the same time a larger force had come ashore on the west bank about six miles south. The party on the east bank moved inland to avoid the battalion defending the boom and ran into the Gurkha commando party, whose only wireless set failed to get in touch with the Brigade Headquarters at Shwegyin. For some reason the commander of the party did not attack the Japanese column, but attempted to withdraw, keeping his men between the enemy and the ‘Basin’. In the dark, the Gurkhas lost touch with one another and broke up into small groups, which made their way back as best they could. The officer himself was drowned trying to swim the Chindwin to escape capture. Some of his men arrived mingled with the Japanese, others made their way back individually, a large number were lost—and no warning was given.

  While I was at Brigade Headquarters a second and heavier attack came in, rather more to the east, and after making some progress was beaten back, but the Japanese were now heavily mortaring the ‘Basin’. Their mortar, the equivalent of our three-inch, was their most effective weapon, and they handled it boldly and skilfully. A high proportion of our casualties in most of our engagements came from it. Fortunately its shell was not as powerful or lethal as our own or the effects would have been more serious, but it was unpleasant and trying enough for troops penned in a narrow space. Some time after the second attack, or more probably during it, numbers of Japanese infiltrated between our rather widely spaced posts and got on to the forward edge of the escarpment, dominating the eastern side of the ‘Basin’. The Gurkhas, with my old friend the Subadar Major well to the fore, then put in a very spirited counter-attack, right up the cliffs. There followed very confused fighting in which the Gurkhas and the Indians, who were still clinging in places to their positions, savagely clashed with large numbers of enemy in the precipitous jungle around the ‘Basin’s’ edge. The situation was restored, but enemy snipers continually crept forward and made themselves a nuisance. At one moment the Japanese brought up to the rim of the escarpment an infantry gun—the small field-piece that their battalions had—and proceeded to fire at point-blank range. A Bofors gun of an Indian light anti-aircraft battery engaged it and a duel ensued. It was quickly over; the Bofors scored several direct hits on the gun, turned it over, and wiped out its crew. Japanese aircraft flew over frequently, but did not attempt any actual attack, probably because from the air it was impossible in that close fighting to distinguish British from Japanese.

  After the Gurkha counter-attack I returned to the neighbourhood of the jetty to try and get in touch through the tank signals with Cowan and 48 Brigade. I could not get Cowan himself, but learnt he was already on the move towards the ‘Basin’. A steamer was alongside the jetty, its skipper, an official of the Irrawaddy Flotilla, holding it there by sheer will-power and courage, in spite of its crew. The twenty-five-pounders of 7 Armoured Brigade were being embarked and as the guns were brought down to the water’s edge they were kept firing until the last moment. Wounded were coming down the track in a trickle and being carried on
board, while certain administrative troops filed across the gangways. The loading went on steadily, but at the highest pressure, and there was no sign of panic. Even a crowd of about a hundred Indian refugees, cowering in the shelter of a bank, did as they were told and huddled there in mute misery. One poor woman, near the tank from which I was speaking, lay propped against the side of the track dying in the last stages of smallpox. Her little son, a tiny boy of four, was trying pathetically to feed her with milk from a tin a British soldier had given him. One of our doctors, attending wounded at the jetty, found time to vaccinate the little chap, but nothing could be done for his mother. She died and we bribed an Indian family with a blanket and a passage on the steamer to take the boy with them. I hope he got through all right and did not give smallpox to his new family. At the last minute, when the steamer was fully loaded and casting off, I let the rest of the refugees scurry on board, to cling precariously to rails and fill every crevice in the ship. It was no longer possible, as enemy pressure increased, to get ships alongside the jetty. Another and fiercer attack broke into the ‘Basin’ itself and penetrated towards the track. Everyone who could be scraped up was pushed out to hold back this vital thrust. Patterson-Knight, my ‘Q’ staff officer, who had been at Shwegyin for some days supervising embarkation and was a conspicuous figure in his exquisitely cut, but by now somewhat soiled, jodhpurs, took a tommy-gun and went into the fray. About an hour later he came back and exchanged the tommy-gun for a rifle, explaining that, ‘The little yellow baskets are a bit farther off now!’

  Ekin had handed over to Cowan, who had fought his way into the ‘Basin’, losing his A.D.C. wounded at his side in the process. Thinking with his arrival that this was no place for a Corps Commander and that I should be of more use if I could get some of the ships lying up-stream to come down again, I took to my launch and visited them. Three extremely gallant skippers, two civilians of the Irrawaddy Flotilla (their names, I think, Murie and Hutchinson), and Lieut.-Commander Penman of the Burma Naval Volunteer Reserve, in turn brought their ships inshore a few hundred yards above the jetty, under a cliff which gave shelter from mortar fire. Here they embarked wounded and administrative units for the last trips. After that no crews, whatever their skippers did to induce them, would come downstream again. That was an end to the last chance of getting anything out of Shwegyin except mules and men and what they could carry over the roughest and steepest of paths.

  At about 1400 hours a desperate attempt by the 7th Gurkhas to dislodge a strong Japanese party that still held a hill commanding the ‘Basin’ failed. All embarkation had stopped, and Cowan, who had my authority to do so, made the only possible decision—to get out before more Japanese arriving finally cut him off. Rearguards were laid out covering the track along the east bank, guns were ordered to waste down their ammunition, and all non-essentials started off up the track. At about eight o’clock that evening all guns put down a concentration on the escarpment as the Gurkhas and Indians holding it withdrew. It was by far the heaviest artillery concentration we had put down in Burma; for the first time the gunners were not stinting their ammunition, and they fired all they had in twenty minutes. Under cover of this barrage the last troops passed through the rearguard, leaving the ‘Basin’ lit by flames and explosions as guns, tanks, and vehicles were destroyed. It was a sad ending to all the effort that had brought them so far, but at this stage it was better to lose material than risk the destruction of the whole force. We had saved about one-third of the guns, and a fair portion of the best mechanical transport, the four-wheel-drive lorries, but the loss of the tanks was a terrible blow. True, they were worn out and in any case obsolete, but even they would be hard to replace in India, and they held such a sentimental place in our esteem for what we owed to them and heir crews that it was like abandoning old and trusted friends to leave them behind.

  The march along the track to Kaing, opposite Kalewa, was arduous for weary, burdened men. The path was narrow, in places precipitous and everywhere rough, but the Japanese did not follow up. Their losses had been heavy and they were busy trying to salvage what they could in the smoking ‘Basin’. Although we did not then know it, we had fought the last action of the campaign. 48 Brigade and some other units were taken upstream from Kalewa to Sittaung, whence they marched through the hills to Tamu, while the steamers that carried them were sunk to avoid capture. The rest of Burma Corps marched from Kalewa, ninety miles through the Kabaw Valley, well-termed Death Valley on account of its virulent malaria, to Tamu—a grisly march!

  While the main body of Burma Corps was suffering these vicissitudes, 2 Burma Brigade, which had withdrawn up the west bank of the Irrawaddy and turned north-west to follow the Myittha Valley, had plodded steadily on. It had several skirmishes with large bands of armed Burmans, but had not been followed by Japanese. The brigade had supplemented its scanty pack transport by locally impounded bullock carts which carried its wounded and sick. Its feelings may be imagined, therefore, when an officer of the line of communication services, retiring ahead of the corps, demolished the only bridge over the wide Manipur River while 2 Brigade was still south of it. The carts had to be abandoned and the brigade with difficulty ferried itself across. It rejoined us at Kalemyo, west of Kalewa, tired, hungry, and angry.

  Even then we were not without further alarms. Our greatest danger was that the Japanese coming up-river in their naval craft might land south of Kalewa and, moving across country, cut the track between Kalewa and Kalemyo. Sure enough, one day we received apparently reliable and circumstantial news that the worst had happened. The Japanese, in strength, had established a roadblock between Corps Headquarters, then just north of Kalemyo, and our rearguard, a few miles east of Kalemyo. The rearguard was cut off. In one of our few remaining jeeps I at once returned to Kalemyo, where a couple of battalions of the 1st Burma Division were bivouacked. As I looked round the gaunt, ragged men, lying exhausted where they had dropped at the end of the day’s march, my heart sank. I thought, ‘Nothing can rouse them. They have reached the end of endurance!’ Yet, when their no less weary officers called on them, they struggled into their equipment, once more grasped their weapons, formed their pitifully thin ranks, and, turning their backs on safety, tramped doggedly off to another fight.

  There was, thank God, no fight. We had not gone far when the officers I had sent ahead to reconnoitre returned and told us that the alarm was false. There were no Japanese and no road-block. A staff officer, seeing from a distance our own troops making a traffic-control barrier across the road, and hearing at the same time the noise of a Japanese fighter strafe in the neighbourhood, had in his tired imagination combined the two into an enemy road-block. The troops were turned about, and, muttering curses on generals who disturbed them without cause, went back to their broken rest. I sent for the officer responsible for the alarm and told him what I thought about him in a way which, I fear, showed that my nerves were little better than his.

  Next day we resumed the march. The track through the jungle seemed unending. We had only fifty lorries and these we used to ferry troops forward, but, of course, the bulk did the distance, as they had done so many weary miles, on their feet. In too many cases literally on their feet, for their boots had given out. Clothing was in rags, officers and men had only what they stood up in. Beards were common as shaving kit had grown scarcer and scarcer. I had tried growing a beard myself at one time in the retreat when it was becoming rather fashionable, but mine appeared completely white, and the probable effect on the troops of having a Corps Commander who looked like Father Christmas was such that I resumed shaving with the relic of a blade.

  While Burma Corps had been thus laboriously and perilously making its way back to India, the remnants of V Chinese Army, covered by Sun’s 38th Division, fell back from Shwebo to the north. V Army Headquarters with parts of the 22nd and 96th Divisions, after great hardships, eventually staggered out through the Hukawng Valley. Their conduct on this terrible retreat was, perhaps understandably, not such
as to endear them to either local inhabitants or fellow fugitives. They seized trains, ejecting our wounded and refugees, women and children, took all supplies on evacuation routes, and looted villages. Their necessities knew no law and little mercy. General Stilwell with the American portion of his headquarters remained at Shwebo until the 1st May when, any further effort to control the V Army being obviously useless, he moved to Wuntho on the railway a hundred miles farther north, with a view to reaching Myitkyina and flying out. There he learnt that he could not reach the airport before the Japanese, and he was compelled to strike west, by car as long as the road lasted, then on foot with some pack transport to the Chindwin about Homalin, and through the hills to Imphal. It was a gruelling march and the party owed its survival to the astringent encouragement of the elderly general himself, who proved the stoutest-hearted and toughest of the lot. His party reached Assam on the 15th May.