Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Nor could Hutton, General Officer Commanding Burma, escape censure. He had told Wavell that what was needed was a corps headquarters, and, now that 7 Armoured Brigade was in station and 1 Burma Division was relieved from static defence, he would get one. The newly formed Burma Corps would be commanded by acting Lieutenant-General William Slim, and Hutton would return to India as Secretary to the War Resources and Reconstruction Committee. He was replaced by General Sir Harold Alexander, who became Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Burma. It is one of the more unfortunate assumptions propounded by British class warriors that, because someone is well bred, has been to a decent school and speaks properly, he is therefore foppish and incompetent. Alexander’s reputation, at least among the general public, is that of a bear of little brain. Born a younger son of the fourth Earl of Caledon in the Irish peerage* and educated at Harrow, the Honourable† Harold Leofric George Alexander was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1910 and in his twenties commanded his battalion and 4 Guards Brigade on the Western Front in the First World War. In 1919 and 1920 he served in the allied intervention force against the Bolsheviks and commanded a Polish brigade of ethnic Germans. His personal courage and leadership proven, he showed intellectual ability too by passing the examination for the Staff College and, later, by being selected to attend the Imperial Defence College before he became a brigadier in 1935 and the youngest major-general in the army in 1937 at the age of forty-six. He was a competent divisional and corps commander in the Battle of France and the last general officer to be evacuated from Dunkirk. A lieutenant-general from December 1940, he was knighted and promoted to full general in January 1942. Fluent in German, Russian and Urdu, he was a man of considerable charm and, as he was to prove in North Africa and Italy, well able to smooth ruffled feathers, and it is largely due to Montgomery’s bagging all the credit for North Africa and Alexander’s association with the secondary campaign in Italy that history has not placed him in the top rank of military commanders. In his short period in Burma there was little he could do except try to manage the retreat and do his best to help the army get back to India without it disintegrating, and he did that as well as anyone could have.

  The disaster at the River Sittang did at least delay the Japanese, who had two options: cross the Sittang and capture Rangoon, or turn north-east and take on the Chinese. In the end it was the precarious state of their logistics chain that forced the decision: only by the capture of a sizeable port could sufficient supplies to keep the Japanese Fifteenth Army in the field be delivered, and on 3 March the Japanese crossed the Sittang and headed for Pegu, on the road and railway link to Rangoon and forty miles north of it. Alexander, egged on by Wavell, initially intended to hold Rangoon. As the fighting in and around Pegu intensified, it became clear that to attempt to hold Rangoon would only lead to his troops being cut off from India and defeated in detail, and on 6 March he ordered the port installations and any stores that could not be moved to be demolished and the garrison to move north-north-west to Tharrawaddy, on the Prome road and on the direct route back to India. Rangoon’s docks were soon blanketed by a pall of smoke as oil installations and stores depots were fired; Lend-Lease vehicles that could not be driven away by the troops were disabled, and as there would now be nobody to guard and look after them, the prison was opened and the occupants released, and the residents of the lunatic asylums turfed out on the streets. The cages of the animals in Rangoon zoo were opened, and a story did the rounds that a chaplain of the Gloucesters, the garrison’s British infantry battalion, decided to have a rest on a conveniently placed log only to find that it was a sleeping crocodile.*

  Alexander was lucky, for his original decision to hold Rangoon and the delay in withdrawing that resulted very nearly lost him a large part of his army. The Japanese had cut the road to Tharrawaddy and it was only a misapprehension by their divisional commander, who thought that the British intended to fight for Rangoon, that persuaded him to withdraw his troops from the road in case their presence gave away the Japanese axis for their attack. After deploying for an attack to clear the road from the south, the British discovered that there were now no enemy on it, and pushed on to Tharrawaddy. When the Japanese marched into Rangoon on 8 March, they found to their astonishment that no one was there – Alexander and his staff had left just six hours before them.

  Concurrent with the abandonment of Rangoon, the British evacuated the Andaman Islands, 200 miles south-south-west of Rangoon in the Indian Ocean and with good all-weather airstrips and ports that could be used to police the sea routes from Malay to Burma. With Rangoon gone, the Andamans could no longer be supplied or supported and the garrison, one Gurkha battalion, was withdrawn. The loss of Rangoon meant that links with China were severely curtailed, for it was through the port there that Lend-Lease equipment was provided. Burma was hardly defended at all before the war, and even after December 1941 very few people thought that Malaya would not be held, and, even if it could not, Singapore surely could. Once Singapore went, Burma was sure to follow, even if the command structure – the country was initially part of Far East Command, then placed under Indian responsibility, then transferred to ABDA but with India remaining responsible for administration, and finally given back to India – had been consistent, which it was not. There was little to reinforce Burma with. At one stage it was proposed to divert the battle-experienced 7 Australian Division, on its way back from North Africa, but this was very sensibly vetoed by the Australian government. Even if Rangoon could have been held for long enough to receive the division,itself doubtful,it would have been unable to tip the balance and would almost certainly have been cut off and destroyed.

  Safety lay in Imphal, in Assam, 600 miles north as the crow flies and through terrain that might kindly be described as inhospitable at best. The terrain was difficult anyway – few roads, mountainous ridges, steep valleys and wide, fast-flowing rivers – but would get far worse once the monsoon broke in May. The army not only had to contend with the pursuing Japanese but also with the Japanese-sponsored Burma Independence Army under the aegis of the Burmese communist leader Aung San. Having been educated by the British at Rangoon University, Aung drifted into ultra-nationalist politics and at the age of twenty-five formed the Thakin or Masters party, dedicated to the overthrow of British suzerainty. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and one of his more endearing tactics was to have Burmese villagers welcome British and Indian stragglers, feed them and give them somewhere to sleep, and then either cut their throats themselves or summon the Japanese to kill them. Very soon it became an absolute rule in Burma Corps that wounded were never to be left in the care of local Burmans. The BIA had been armed by the Japanese and told by Aung that they were immune to bullets. Great was their surprise when they discovered that they were not, but they never lost faith in Aung, who would not only get rid of the British but allow them to revert to the traditional Burmese pastime of enslaving and murdering Chins, Nagas, Kachins, Karens and other indigenous tribes-people – who even in the worst days of defeat remained steadfastly loyal to the British. Not only did the retreating army have to cope with the jungle and Burmese traitors but also with endemic malaria and ticks carrying scrub typhus, not to mention those constant companions of retreating armies in a hostile landscape, cholera and dysentery. Very soon the RAF aircraft had to be withdrawn to India, and those of the AVG to China, and, while the RAF continued to evacuate wounded from makeshift jungle strips, the Japanese ruled the skies.

  Any reasonably competent general can manage a victory, and it is unusual for a man to become a general unless he is reasonably competent, at least in Western armies, but it takes a great general to manage a defeat, and a lucky one to manage a defeat and survive. Bill Slim was that general. If Montgomery was arrogant, boastful, careless of the feelings of others and unwilling to give credit to his subordinates, then Slim was just the opposite: modest, unassuming, caring and always deflecting plaudits on to those he commanded rather than taking them for himself. If Montgome
ry was respected for his professional dedication and eye for detail, Slim was loved for his readiness to share the hardships of his men and for his determination never to let them down.

  William Slim came from modest roots: his father was a wholesale ironmonger but the family had little money and Slim went to a grammar school in Birmingham and was employed as a teacher and a clerk while belonging to an Officer Cadet Training Unit of the Territorial Force.* Mobilized in 1914 and commissioned into Ninth Battalion of the Warwick-shire Regiment, he was wounded at Gallipoli but was impressed by his neighbouring battalion, 1/6 Gurkha Rifles, and after the war transferred to the Indian Army and that regiment. No doubt part of his motivation was the ease with which an officer of the Indian Army could live on his pay, and Slim was always short of cash, but soldiers and British officers alike took to him and admired his no-nonsense ways, his humanity and his uncluttered intelligence. In the interwar years Slim progressed steadily if unspectacularly up the promotion ladder. He was a student at the Indian Staff College at Quetta, commanded a battalion of 7 Gurkha Rifles, attended the Imperial Defence College and in 1939, at the age of forty-eight, was appointed acting colonel and Commandant of the Senior Officers School in India. In his own eyes at least, he had little hope of further promotion. But the war gave him his chance. Commander of the Indian 10 Infantry Brigade in Eritrea, where he was wounded, and subsequently of the Indian 10 Division in the Iraq rebellion, the Syrian campaign against the Vichy French and then in the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Persia, he was asked for by Alexander to command Burma Corps in March 1942.

  It was hardly a corps. Seventeen Division had been badly mauled in the retreat from lower Burma and its losses on the Sittang had not been completely replaced, while 1 Burma Division was composed of very shaky Burma Rifles battalions (albeit mainly composed of members of hill tribes and with very few Burmese) stiffened with a few British and Indian battalions. Slim had 7 Armoured Brigade, still relatively unscathed, and another British infantry battalion, First Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, flown in from India. There was insufficient air transport to provide corps signals and logistic units, however, and these had to be put together by milking units and formations already in Burma, a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs. Slim was lucky, however, with his divisional commanders. Major-Generals ‘Punch’ Cowan and Bruce Scott were not only of Slim’s regiment but they had all three served in the same battalion, 1/6 Gurkha Rifles, and knew well and trusted each other. Not only did Slim have to extricate Burma Corps from his headquarters in Prome, 150 miles north of Rangoon, but there were also the peacetime impedimenta to consider. British regiments and some of the British-officered Burma battalions had their wives and children in station with them. Children had mostly been evacuated when Rangoon fell, and those wives who stayed behind were inducted into the Women’s Auxiliary Service Burma, or Wasbies, and employed in rear areas as nurses, clerks and drivers, but moved well away from the front lines and the Japanese. First Gloucesters, stationed in Burma since 1938, had the problem of what to do with their mess silver and when it could not be sent to India for safe keeping, it was eventually buried in the jungle.*

  Burma Corps moved back, and on 3 April the Japanese bombed Mandalay. Law and order broke down, with panic, riots and looting, an unwelcome diversion for the army that now had to police the city as well as getting its troops back more or less intact. As the Japanese advanced up the Irrawaddy River, the British employees of the Burma Oil Company strove desperately to destroy the oil installations before they fell into enemy hands, while Burma Corps fought a delaying action at Kyaukse, south of Mandalay, to allow 7 Armoured Brigade time to get its tanks across the Irrawaddy. Viper Force, formed in February by Royal Marine volunteers manning an assortment of motor launches and river boats in the Irrawaddy, harassed the Japanese at every opportunity, and collected British and Indian stragglers where they could, but they were far too few to have any major effect. Once the troops, the tanks and as much equipment and as many vehicles as could be shifted were across, the Ava Bridge, the longest in the world at that time, was blown at 2359 hours on 30 April 1942 and any British pretence to rule Burma was gone. The Japanese routed Chinese armies sent to Lushio by Chiang Kai-shek to defend the Burma Road and cut the only overland route to China. From now on, all supplies for the Chinese would be delivered by air, flying from India over the Hump, a spur of the Himalayas between Assam and China. Two Chinese armies (equivalent to divisions) led by the American Lieutenant-General Joseph Stilwell marched into India, where their administration became the responsibility of the Allies.

  Stilwell, fifty-nine in 1942, had been a corps commander in California until war broke out, when he was sent off to be Chiang Kai-shek’s Chief of Staff as well as commander of all US troops in China, India and Burma. The wartime commander with perhaps the trickiest appointment of all, he found Chiang to be duplicitous and far more interested in amassing equipment and supplies to take on Mao Tse-Tung’s communists than in waging war against the Japanese, which he was quite happy to let the British and the Americans do for him, while most of the Chinese generals spent more time intriguing amongst themselves and against each other than in waging war. Even when Chiang did agree to commit his armies, he was constantly changing his mind, with the result that any deployment involving them took far longer than it need have. Chinese armies were always short of equipment – only two thirds of their men were armed, the rest being used as porters. Nevertheless, the Chinese had manpower resources that the Allies did not, and had to be tolerated and pandered to. Stilwell had a reputation, possibly deliberately fostered, for rudeness and abrasiveness – he was nicknamed ‘Vinegar Joe’ – and for being anti-British. He claimed to be unable to understand Alexander’s accent – which was odd, as Alexander spoke King’s English, as did just about every other British officer, and Stilwell seems to have had no problems with understanding the Chinese generals, many of whom barely spoke English at all (although, to be fair to Stilwell, he did speak some Mandarin). Slim, on the other hand, liked Stilwell and found him, in private at least, to be tolerant and utterly reliable.

  The British having crossed the Irrawaddy, the last obstacle before Imphal and relative safety was the River Chindwin, over which there were no bridges, only ferries that were inadequate for the task. Here more of the few vehicles and heavy equipment left to the corps were rendered unusable and dumped, and on 11 May the first units of Burma Corps began to arrive at Tamu, on the Assam–Burma border, just as the American and Filipino survivors of Corregidor were being rounded up. On the border was IV Corps of the Eastern Army (in peacetime Eastern Area), charged with receiving Burma Corps and with defending India against Japanese incursions. This corps was commanded by Lieutenant-General Stephen Irwin, who disliked Slim intensely and was prepared to give only the barest minimum of support to him and his beaten corps. Units arriving at the end of that long and desperate retreat, exhausted and short of everything from razor blades to socks, were directed to hastily erected tented camps on the plains of Imphal, with little drainage to protect them from the monsoon rains that began as the last soldiers of the corps trickled in on 17 May, a few days after Stilwell and his headquarters had arrived, having also evacuated Burma on foot. Slim went to see Irwin to complain, and found to his astonishment that, in failing to provide proper care for Burma Corps, Irwin was allowing his professional duty to be affected by personal feelings. Irwin was an officer of the Essex Regimenta and, when Slimcommanded 10 Indian Infantry Brigade in Eritrea in 1940, First Battalion the Essex Regiment was in his brigade, along with two Indian battalions and one Gurkha. At one point the Essex broke, and Slim, perfectly properly, sacked the commanding officer, who was a personal friend of Irwin’s. Things got better, but, as Irwin would shortly assume command of Eastern Army, it would be some time before it did.

  It was not only the British and Indian Armies that suffered in the retreat to India. Once the army had pulled out of Northern Burma and the Arakan, the Burmese fell with glee on the long c
olumns of refugees, Indians resident or employed in Burma who had fled before the advancing Japanese. Many Burmese – perhaps most – did not want the British in their country and, while, apart from assisting the Japanese and encouraging those Burmese in the Burma Rifles to desert, they could not directly attack the British, they could attack their unarmed lackeys – the Indians – and murder, robbery and rape of those unfortunates were commonplace once the British administration was withdrawn.

  The British Army is no stranger to retreats. The retreat to Corunna in 1808–09 lasted twenty days and cost 8,800 casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners of war), around a quarter of the force, and the commander, Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore, was killed; the retreat from Mons in 1914 lasted twelve days and cost 10,000 casualties or one sixth of the force, and the commander, Field Marshal Sir John French, was ultimately sacked; the retreat from Burma lasted 125 days and cost 12,000 casualties (including 3,000 Burmese deserters) or around half of the force. Worse, while prisoners taken by the French or the Germans could expect decent treatment, those taken by the Japanese could expect to be humiliated, starved, tortured, worked to death or all four. This was undoubtedly the worst retreat in British military history, but fortunately the commanders – Alexander at the top and Slim at ground level – survived and Slim would ultimately lead that same army to victory and the defeat of Imperial Japan.