Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  And an unpleasant wait it was. Sixty-one gliders had set off. The full complement for Broadway and Piccadilly had been eighty, but we had agreed that sixty was about the most we could hope to land on one strip in the hours of darkness, so the rest had been held back. I sat in the control tent, at the end of the airstrip, to which all messages and signals came. At the rough table with its field telephones was Tulloch, Wingate’s chief staff officer, who proved himself quick, reliable, and cool in crisis, and Rome, another admirable staff officer. As the moon came up, in spite of hurricane lanterns and one electric lamp, it was almost lighter outside than within. There was a pause. Then came a report of red flares, fired from the air a few miles away. That meant a tow in distress—ominous if difficulties were beginning so soon. I took a turn outside and thought I saw a red Very light fired high up in the distance. I returned to the tent to find more rumours of gliders down or tows returning before they had crossed our lines. Not so good. Then another long wait. We looked at our watches. The leading aircraft should be over Broadway now with the gliders going in. We ought to get the first wireless message any minute. Still it did not come. Wingate prowled in and out, speaking to no one, his eyes smouldering in a pallid face. Tulloch sat calmly at the phones. A garbled report over the telephone from another airfield told us that a tow pilot had seen what looked like firing on the Broadway strip. It was the time when doubts grow strongest and fears loom largest. Then, just after four o’clock in the morning, the first signal from Broadway, sent by Calvert, came in plain language, brief, mutilated, but conveying its message of disaster clearly enough—‘Soya Link’. The name of the most disliked article in the rations had been chosen in grim humour as the code word for failure. So the Japanese had ambushed Broadway! Wingate was right and I had been wrong. He gave me one long bitter look and walked away. I had no answer for him.

  Then more signals, broken, hard to decipher, but gradually making the picture clearer. Gliders had crashed, men had been killed, there were injured and dying lying where they had been dragged to the edge of the strip—but there was no enemy. There had been no ambush. A great weight lifted from me as I realized that this was going to be like every other attack, neither so good nor so bad as the first reports of excited men would have you believe. We had to recall the last flight, as Broadway was too obstructed by smashed gliders to accept them. The situation was still far from clear to us as I left the control tent after dawn, but I was confident that if only the Japanese did not locate them for the next twelve hours, the Chindits would have the strip ready for reinforcements by nightfall.

  Of the sixty-one gliders dispatched, only thirty-five reached Broadway. The airmen who said that one Dakota could not tow two gliders had been right. In practice the steep climb to cross the mountains, so close to the start, put too great a drag on the nylon ropes and many parted. It also caused overheating in the aircraft engines and unexpected fuel consumption, with dire results. Many gliders and a few aircraft force landed, some in our territory, nine in Japanese. There was a brisk battle near Imphal between the Chindits of a crashed glider, convinced they were behind the enemy lines and determined to sell their lives dearly, and our own troops rushing to their rescue. Gliders by chance came down near a Japanese divisional headquarters and others beside a regimental headquarters far from Broadway. These landings confused the enemy as to our intentions and led to a general alert for gliders and parachutists through all his units.

  Long afterwards we discovered that it was not the Japanese who had obstructed Piccadilly but Burmese tree-fellers, who had, in the ordinary course of their work, dragged teak logs out of the jungle to dry in the clearing. The firing reported at Broadway was a nervous burst from a shaken glider pilot.

  Even without the enemy, that night at Broadway was tragic and macabre enough. One or two of the leading gliders, circling down to a half-seen gap in the jungle, had crashed on landing. The ground control equipment and its crew were in a glider that failed to arrive so that, until a makeshift control could be improvised, it was impossible to time landings. Some gliders hurded into the wrecks, others ran off the strip to smash into the trees or were somersaulted to ruin by uneven ground concealed under the grass. Twenty-three men were killed and many injured, but over four hundred, with some stores, and Calvert, the Brigade Commander, landed intact. Most of the engineering equipment did not arrive, but the small party of American engineers, helped by every man who could be spared from patrolling, set to work with what tools they could muster to drag the wreckage clear and prepare the ground. Never have men worked harder, and by evening a strip was fit—but only just fit—to take a Dakota.

  Next night the fly-in continued. Fifty-five Dakotas landed at Broadway and the first flights reached Chowringhee, where also there was no sign of enemy. By the 11th March the whole of Calvert’s 77 Brigade and half Lentaigne’s 111 Brigade were at Broadway. Lentaigne’s Brigade Headquarters and the other half with ‘Dahforce’, a body of Kachins with British officers for use in raising the local tribes, were safely at Chowringhee. Between the 5th and 10th March, one hundred glider and almost six hundred Dakota sorties flew in nine thousand troops and eleven hundred animals. In addition, Fergusson’s 16 Brigade had reached Aberdeen after its long march, so that Wingate now had nearly twelve thousand troops well placed, as he put it, ‘in the enemy’s guts’.

  It was clear that the initial operation had been a success and, as a minor consequence, there was the usual fuss about publicity. I was in favour of saying nothing and letting the Japanese find out what they could for themselves, but that was quickly overruled. A fierce controversy then arose as to whether Wingate’s name should be mentioned. It was decided not to, on what grounds I was never quite clear, but to Wingate this was Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, and he was furious. He protested, with a good deal of reason, that all formations wanted if possible to see their names in the papers, and that to refer to his Chindits as ‘troops of the Fourteenth Army’ would gain nothing and miss a chance of giving their morale a boost. I agreed because I thought the Japanese were much more likely, if Wingate’s name were given, to take this expedition as merely a repetition of his minor and ineffective raid of 1943, and not be too urgent in concentrating strong forces against it. What we wanted was no interference until we were well established. After a certain amount of the silly temper on both sides that such matters always seem to evoke, Wingate’s name was announced.

  The Japanese reaction to the landings was surprisingly slow. It is true they had been nervous of airborne attack, but not in the rather inaccessible places we had chosen. Their major offensive towards Imphal was on the point of being launched and all troops were, as we had calculated, either massed on the eastern border for this or moving towards it. The number of our aircraft passing over, night after night, must have been some indication of the size of our force, but Kawabe and his army commanders decided—and kept to the decision—not to divert any considerable number of troops from the main Imphal battle. They took some time collecting and organizing into scratch formations a number of lines of communication and other odd units to deal with the Chindits. The only action taken against the landings was an air attack on Chowringhee on the 10th March, a couple of hours after Lentaigne had marched off, leaving only derelict gliders behind him. Three days later thirty enemy fighters attacked Broadway which was humming with activity. The Japanese pilots met with a surprise. By that time, not only was a troop of light anti-aircraft artillery in position, but a flight of Spitfires from 221 Group R.A.F. was stationed on the strip—the first time an operational airfield had been established behind the enemy. The Japanese lost from guns and Spitfires over half their strength.

  The slowness of the enemy reaction on land gave our troops the chance to strike first. Calvert’s 77 Brigade marched west and on the 16th March attacked a small enemy garrison near Mawlu on the Mandalay-Myitkyina railway, some fifty miles from Broadway. The Japanese detachment was destroyed and the brigade established an airstrip and a strongh
old which they christened ‘White City’, from the supply parachutes that soon draped the trees. Thus, eleven days after the beginning of the fly-in, Special Force’s first task had been accomplished—both the main road and rail communications to the Japanese fighting Stilwell had been cut. It was impossible for the enemy to ignore this. The 53rd Japanese Division was at this time arriving piecemeal in Burma and, based on the Divisional Headquarters, under Lieut.-General Kawano, and one regiment of the division, a group known as Take Force, which never much exceeded six thousand in strength, was formed to deal with the airborne invasion. The force was an improvised one and suffered, as such expedients always do, from a lack of cohesion, transport, supporting arms, signals, and administrative staff. Kawano himself was a sick man—he died soon afterwards—and was replaced by Lieut.-General Takeda. The first serious action was an attempt by Take Force to capture White City and destroy 77 Brigade. The Japanese delivered a series of ferocious assaults, day and night, which were everywhere beaten back in hand-to-hand fighting of the bloodiest kind. British and Gurkhas (my old regiment the 6th Gurkhas won two V.C.s here) proved themselves man for man the superior of the enemy. Take Force, having suffered heavily, withdrew badly shaken from White City, and they never took it.

  From Chowringhee one of our columns had struck east to the Chinese frontier and then turned north towards Myitkyina, cutting the important Bhamo-Myitkyina road. Lentaigne’s 111 Brigade, uniting the portions that had landed at Chowringhee and Broadway, moved well to the west of Indaw. These operations did not, as I had hoped they would, seriously disorganize the Japanese communications with the Assam front. Their chief effect, as far as the battle there was concerned, was to delay for a couple of months two infantry and one artillery battalions of the Japanese 15th Division on their way to take part in the offensive against Imphal.

  This offensive was now in full swing and dominated the whole Burma campaign. It was obviously the decisive factor, and it at once confronted me with two problems on Wingate’s front. The first was whether to fly in his second wave. The Imphal battle was putting a heavy strain on our air transport resources. If we were to fly in more of Wingate’s brigades we could only do so at a reduced rate and even then at some risk to the main front. All reports showed me that 16 Brigade, after its long march, while fit for possibly one more operation, would need early relief. Wingate was also pressing for larger garrisons for his strongholds. After weighing things up, I decided, in spite of the anxious tactical situation now developing about Imphal and Kohima, to fly in, at the best rate compatible with not seriously affecting the move of reinforcements to Assam, Wingate’s 14 Brigade and his West African Brigade. The fly-in to Aberdeen began on 22nd March. 14 Brigade under Brodie were in by the 4th April, and by the 12th the West Africans split up into battalions were garrisoning various strongholds.

  The second and greater problem was whether I should change Wingate’s main object from helping Stilwell to helping 4 Corps, now hard pressed about Imphal. The alteration had obvious advantages as it would use Special Force in direct tactical co-ordination with the main battle. Besides, Stilwell, who would get indirect aid from Wingate, had a considerable superiority over the 18th Japanese Division opposing him, and was in no dire need of help. However, I decided to adhere to my original plan, and Special Force continued to direct its efforts to the north rather than to the west. In this I think I was wrong. Imphal was the decisive battle; it was there only that vital injury could be inflicted on the Japanese Army, and I should have concentrated all available forces to that end. I fear I fell into the error of so many Japanese, and persisted in a plan which should have been changed.

  No sooner had these decisions been taken than Special Force suffered a tragic loss. Wingate, flying from Imphal to his new headquarters at Lalaghat in a Mitchell bomber, crashed by night in the wild tangle of hills west of Imphal. He, and all with him, were instantly killed. The cause of the accident cannot be definitely stated. The wreckage was eventually found on the reverse side of a ridge, so 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.

  I was at Comilla when the signal came in that Wingate was missing. As the hours passed and no news of any sort arrived, gloom descended upon us. We could ill spare him at the start of his greatest attempt. The immediate sense of loss that struck, like a blow, even those who had differed most from him—and I was not one of these—was a measure of the impact he had made. He had stirred up everyone with whom he had come in contact. With him, contact had too often been collision, for few could meet so stark a character without being either 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 its faults. Yet had he not done so, his leadership could not have been so dynamic, nor his personal magnetism so striking.

  There could be no question of the seriousness of our loss. Without his presence to animate it, Special Force would no longer be the same to others or to itself. He had created, inspired, defended it, and given it confidence; it was the offspring of his vivid imagination and ruthless energy. It had no other parent. Now it was orphaned, and I was faced with the immediate problem of appointing a successor. This was one of those cases in which seniority should not be taken much into account. To step into Wingate’s place would be no easy task. His successor had to be someone known to the men of Special Force, one who had shared their hardships and in whose skill and courage they could trust. I chose Brigadier Lentaigne. He not only fulfilled all these requirements, but I knew him to be, in addition, the most balanced and experienced of Wingate’s commanders. It is an interesting sidelight on a strange personality that, after his death, three different officers each informed me that Wingate had told him he was to be his successor should one be required. I have no doubt at all that they were speaking the truth.

  Under Lentaigne the Chindits did not slacken their activity. Rail Indaw was the centre of a Japanese maintenance area of scattered ammunition and supply dumps. It had, also, one of the best airfields in North Burma, which it had always been intended Wingate should take. Ferguson’s 16 Brigade, supported by part of Brodie’s 14 Brigade, moved out of Aberdeen and attempted to seize Indaw by surprise. Although the Japanese garrison was not large, it was well dug in, and the Chindits without artillery were too lightly equipped to dislodge it. They were compelled to abandon the attempt and fell back. 16 Brigade were now so exhausted by their march and this final abortive effort that there was nothing for it but to get them out as soon as we could. They were flown back in the empty aircraft returning from taking supplies and reinforcements to Aberdeen. Even without them Lentaigne had three mobile brigades, operating in a large number of columns, besides considerable numbers of ‘stronghold’ troops. The Japanese communications to their 18th Division were effectively cut. The railway was completely blocked and it was only on rare occasions that an enemy road convoy was able to sneak through. The Japanese, while still refraining from diverting any formation from their vital Assam front, swept up more odds and ends of units to add to Take Force, including part of a regiment of their 2nd Division, newly arrived in Burma. Lentaigne’s columns roamed the area north of Indaw on both sides of the railway, fighting many minor engagements with Japanese detachments groping for them. In May the concentration against White City grew too threatening. The Chindits quietly slipped out, to strike again on the railway at several places, and then, after an eighty-mile march acro
ss mountains, early in May established another stronghold block at ‘Blackpool’, just north of Hopin.

  While Wingate’s brigades had been flying in and operating round Indaw, Stilwell to the north of them had been driving his Chinese southwards. Using his American Marauders in short hooks to strike in behind the Japanese, much as they had done against him in 1942, Stilwell, after a tough fight at Jambu Bum on March 19th, his sixty-first birthday, broke into the Mogaung Valley which leads to the town of that name.

  The old warrior was well pleased with his progress and he had cause to be. Not only were the Chinese, under his skilful prodding, fighting well, but, reinforced by Admiral Mountbatten’s appeals to the Generalissimo, he had succeeded in extracting two more divisions from China. The 50th Chinese Division was now flying in to northern Assam and it was to be followed by the 14th Division. This, early in May, would bring Stilwell up to five Chinese divisions and the American contingent. If the main Japanese strength could be kept engaged on the other fronts, the chances of their already somewhat battered 18th Division, with its line of communication cut by Lentaigne, holding this overwhelming force should be slight. Myitkyina was no longer a distant vision but a practicable objective.

  Then, just as Stilwell felt the prize coming within his grasp, he saw it about to be snatched away by failure elsewhere. I could forgive him bitterness—and he was bitter even for Vinegar Joe—and some uncharitableness, when he saw, or thought he saw, that happening.

  The great Japanese offensive against 4 Corps had begun in the second week of March. With ominous rapidity Kohima was besieged and Imphal cut off. To Stilwell, as he so justly described it, ‘out on a limb’ to the north, the threat to his only line of communication up the Brahmaputra Valley, through Dimapur, was a stark danger that no commander in his position could ignore. If the Japanese in strength broke through at Kohima and bunt into the plain, all he could do would be to trek out over the hills into China. Knowing this only too well, and receiving, through sources far removed from the actual fighting, alarming reports of the situation around Imphal, he suggested to me that he should stop his advance, which had by now reached Shaduzup, well down the Mogaung Valley, and pull out the 38th Chinese Division, so that I could use it to help restore the position on his line of communication.