The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  The British also took great heart from the victory. With the news only just starting to come in, Churchill told the War Cabinet, as noted by an assistant in the secretariat:

  Losses at sea signs of fear on part of Japs – the Navy is a political force in Japan – which will perhaps be more inclined to a restrictive and cautious policy – this policy be in harmony with sending out submarine raiders – if we think of this as having an effect on the Japanese situation – think they will go for China and Chiang Kai Shek conquest. I don’t think they’ll try India or Australia. This gives us 2 or 3 months breathing-space. We must come to rescue of China – it would be an appalling disaster if China were forced out of the war – and a new government set up. The General Staff must think of attacking lines of communication in Burma. If carrier losses confirmed – review consequences of diminution of enemy forces. If Japan adopts conservative course it is a chance for us to get teeth into her tail.15

  *

  Midway made possible the landing on 7 August 1942 of US forces on the island of Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands, the first offensive land operation undertaken by the Americans since Pearl Harbor nine months previously. Once it was known that the Japanese were attempting to build a runway there, which would have had the effect of interdicting air traffic between the United States and Australia, 18,700 men of the Marine Corps 1st Division under Major-General Alexander A. Vandergrift made an amphibious landing on Guadalcanal and also the nearby islands of Tulagi and Gavuth. Taken by surprise, the Japanese garrison of Guadalcanal fled into the thick jungle of the ‘steamy, malaria-ridden, rain-sodden island’, while 1,500 of them put up stiff resistance on Tulagi, but were almost all killed, at the cost of 150 Marines.16 Having taken the runway on 8 August, which they named Henderson Field after a hero of the battle of Midway, the 11,145 Marines on Guadalcanal threw up a defensive perimeter of 2 by 4 miles, and dug in. That tiny area was about to receive a battering equal to any similarly sized battlefield in American history.

  As the Marines were still bringing equipment ashore for Operation Cactus, disaster overcame their naval escort when a Japanese force from Rabaul made a night attack, in what became known as the battle of Savo Island. Armed with new, liquid-oxygen-propelled Long Lance torpedoes which could carry a 1,000-pound warhead at 37 knots for up to 25 miles, the Japanese slipped past Captain Howard D. Bode’s patrol south of the island – Bode was asleep in his bunk in the USS Chicago at the time – and attacked the cruisers under the command of the Australian Rear-Admiral Victor Crutchley vc, who was himself ashore on Guadalcanal. Four cruisers – the American Vincennes, Astoria and Quincy and the Australian Canberra – were sunk, as they and the Chicago were lit up by flares dropped by Japanese planes. (A guilt-stricken Bode later shot himself, proving that the Japanese had not entirely monopolized the honourable tradition of hara-kiri.) 17

  With more than a thousand Allied sailors dead, Crutchley’s stricken flotilla was forced to leave the environs of Guadalcanal, from which Fletcher had already removed the aircraft carriers Saratoga, Wasp and Enterprise after losing twenty-two fighters out of ninety-eight. This meant that the Japanese based at Rabaul had an opportunity to reinforce the island and attempt to fling the Americans off it. The Henderson Field bridgehead was subjected to day and night bombardment from Japanese naval vessels as well as aerial bombing from Rabaul, and on one day – Dugout Sunday – there were no fewer than seven air raids. The Cactus Air Force of nineteen fighters and twelve torpedo-bombers of the 23rd Marine Air Group did what they could, but until they were reinforced they could not protect the airfield adequately. On 17 August Lieutenant-General Haruyoshi Hyakutake landed from Rabaul with 50,000 men of the Seventeenth Army to attack on the ground. Rear-Admiral Razio Tanaka also began a series of landings of men and supplies along the Slot, a channel of islands between Rabaul and Guadalcanal, in a six-month series of often night-time operations nicknamed the Tokyo Express by the Marines who found themselves on its painful receiving end.

  Instead of attacking simultaneously, which was difficult to do in the light of his lack of reinforcements, Hyakutake sent in assaults on Henderson Field piecemeal, which in desperate fighting the Marines managed to fight off and occasionally to counter-attack. In the battle of Tenaru River (which was actually fought on the Ilu river), Colonel Kiyono Ichiki’s attack of 917 men ended on 18 August with the loss of almost every man in the unit. Ichiki himself burnt the regimental standard and committed hara-kiri. On 12 and 13 September, during the hard-fought battle of Bloody Ridge, a mile to the south-west of the airfield, the Japanese got to within 1,000 yards of the runway. Yelling ‘Banzai!’ (One thousand years!) and ‘Marine, you die!’, 2,000 Japanese rushed out of the jungle and overwhelmed the right flank of Lieutenant-Colonel Merritt A. ‘Red Mike’ Edson’s Provisional Force of two battalions. Three Japanese even got inside Vandergrift’s bunker, where they were killed by his clerks. Edson won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valiant defence, in which 143 Americans were killed and 117 wounded, but 600 Japanese were killed and 500 wounded.

  Although the Marines were finally reinforced by air on 20 August, Hyakutake received reinforcements via the Tokyo Express throughout September and October, and between 23 and 25 October his assaults were flung back with 2,000 killed against 300 American killed and wounded. After that Vandergrift felt he could expand the perimeter, and go on the offensive.18 Although malaria in the fetid conditions badly affected the American forces, the Japanese were hit by malaria and severe hunger too, and once the US Navy had won a four-day battle off the island on 15 November – the last of seven major naval engagements in the six-month campaign – the Japanese were reduced to releasing drums of supplies from passing destroyers, hoping they would float ashore and be retrieved.

  On 8 December, a year and a day after Pearl Harbor, Vandergrift, ‘the Hero of Guadalcanal’, and his Marines were finally relieved by Major-General Alexander M. Patch’s US Army regulars, who forced the Japanese, in a ‘desperate and well-conducted rearguard action’, back to Cape Esperance in the east of the island, from where 13,000 of them, including Hyakutake, were miraculously evacuated by night on 9 February 1943 by Tanaka’s Transport Group.19 They were the lucky ones; Japanese left in the interior of Guadalcanal looted native villages to survive, and so ‘The islanders exacted terrible revenge, and Japanese heads decorated the native long-houses for years afterwards.’20 In the entire land campaign, the Japanese had lost 25,000 dead and 600 planes, the Americans 1,490 killed and 4,804 wounded. Both sides lost twenty-four ships, but the Japanese far more tonnage. The first rung of the ‘Solomons ladder’ had been successfully trodden, and the Americans would now move north. Most importantly, though, just as Midway had proved that the Imperial Japanese Navy was far from invincible, Guadalcanal showed the same for the Imperial Japanese Army. In all 103,000 American lives were to be lost defeating Japan, as well as 30,000 British, Indian, Australian and Commonwealth. Guadalcanal was to be the first of several stations on a via dolorosa whose names – such as Kwajalein, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa – are ‘written in blood into American history’.21

  The onset of the monsoon in May 1942 had halted the Japanese advance into India, and Commonwealth attempts to attack in the Arakan and retake Akyab came to naught in 1942 and 1943, so the British resorted to a new type of warfare for their forces in Burma in 1943: long-range penetration jungle fighting. This innovative strategy was the brainchild of one of the most glamorous, unconventional and controversial figures of the war: Brigadier (later Major-General) Orde Wingate. Churchill called him ‘this man of genius who might well have become a man of destiny’ and likened him to Wingate’s relation Lawrence of Arabia, who had been a friend of Churchill’s.

  The Chindits, Wingate’s British, Indian and Gurkha troops of the 77th Indian Brigade, fought deep behind Japanese lines in northern Burma. The heavy losses they suffered, on occasion having to abandon their wounded, makes Wingate’s military legacy something that histo
rians continue to debate.22 There is disagreement over how the name Chindit originated; some believe it came from Wingate’s mishearing of the Burmese word for lion, chinthe, others that it was after a figure of Hindu mythology, others after the Burmese word for griffin. Whatever its genesis, the force soon found great popularity with the British public, which appreciated the high courage shown in spending long periods of time operating far behind enemy lines.

  Wingate could be unscrupulous, especially in leapfrogging senior officers by using his access to his admirer Churchill, and he made a fair number of enemies in the Fourteenth Army in building up his command from a brigade to a division, but for all the sometimes bitter criticisms of him he was undoubtedly one of the true originals. On 31 August 1940, lunching at the War Office, ‘He said he had acquired quite a taste for boiled python, which tasted like chicken,’ the Director of Military Operations Major-General John Kennedy recorded. ‘His men kept remarkably fit – he thought chiefly because they knew they would fall into the hands of the Japanese if they didn’t. He is a man of great character, a good talker and a very good writer too.’23 A manic depressive who tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a knife in a hotel in Cairo in 1941 after the Ethiopian campaign; a nudist who frequently wore only a pith helmet and carried a flywhisk in camp; someone who never bathed but instead cleaned himself by vigorous scrubbing of his body with a stiff brush, Wingate ate raw onions for pleasure and has been described as a ‘neurotic maverick’ and a ‘foul-tempered, scruffily dressed egomaniac’.

  Born in India when his father was fifty-one, Wingate was raised a strict Nonconformist, who was thus excused chapel at Charterhouse. He came sixty-third out of sixty-nine candidates entering the Royal Military Academy Woolwich in 1921, and hardly shone there either, graduating fifty-ninth out of seventy. It was actual experience of guerrilla warfare in Palestine and Ethiopia that convinced Wingate that a small force could wage a new type of long-range penetration warfare beyond the Chindwin river. ‘If you’re in the Army you have to do something extraordinary to be noticed,’ he once said. He certainly achieved that in his comparatively short life. When fighting the Italians in Ethiopia and the Sudan or Arab terrorists in Palestine – Wingate was an ardent Zionist – or indeed the Japanese, Wingate often found himself also ranged against the British military High Command, who tended deeply to distrust his unconventional methods. He struck his own men in both the Sudan and Palestine, hardly adding to his popularity. Yet as the writer Wilfred Thesiger, who served under him, pointed out, the defeat of 40,000 Italian-led troops by two battalions of Ethiopians and Sudanese could have been achieved only with Wingate in command.

  There were two separate Chindit expeditions, with many lessons learnt in 1943 that were put into operation in 1944. Their training in India was comprehensive, with bayonet practice at 6 a.m. followed by unarmed combat, jungle-craft lectures, use of the compass, map-reading, two hours of fatigues in the afternoon, latrine-building and jungle-clearing with machetes. On exercise the Chindits would concentrate on blowing up bridges, disabling airfields and especially staging ambushes. Brigadier Michael Calvert, one of Wingate’s key lieutenants, later stated of this regime: ‘Most Europeans do not know what their bodies can stand; it is the mind and willpower which so often give way first. Most soldiers never realized that they could do the things they did… One advantage of exceptionally heavy training is that it proves to a man what he can do and suffer. If you have marched thirty miles in a day, you can take twenty-five miles in your stride.’24

  In the first Chindit sally, Operation Longcloth, Wingate crossed the Chindwin into Japanese-occupied northern Burma on the night of 13 February 1943 with 3,000 men. Using mules for transportation and air drops for supplies, he marched 500 miles in order to harass the Japanese and cut their rail links. Wingate’s Order of the Day stated:

  Today we are on the threshold of battle. The time of preparation is over and we are moving on the enemy to prove ourselves and our methods… The battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift. Victory in war cannot be counted on, but what can be counted on is that we shall go forward determined to do what we can to bring this war to an end… Knowing the vanity of Man’s effort and the confusion of his purpose, let us pray that God may accept our service and direct our endeavours, so that when we shall have done all we shall see the fruit of our labours and be satisfied.25

  On 18 February the Chindits succeeded in cutting the railway link between Mandalay and Myitkyina for four weeks. Thousands of Japanese were being diverted from other operations, especially against China, to try to swat the small force. Then, on 6 March, the Chindits blew up three important railway bridges in the Bongyaung region. On 15 March two Chindit columns, under Calvert and Major Bernard Fergusson (later Lord Ballantrae), crossed the Irrawaddy river with plans to destroy the strategic Gokteik Gorge railway viaduct. The east bank of the Irrawaddy, however, with its lack of adequate cover, made it much more difficult to operate there than in the jungle on the west side of the river. Although they were successfully supplied by air occasionally, food and sustenance were limited and constant forced marches burnt up energy. The fighting was fierce, too, and almost always against heavy odds. By 26 March only three-quarters of the Chindits were left of the original 3,000-strong force, of whom 600 were badly emaciated. With three Japanese divisions advancing on them, they moved north towards India and eventual escape, crossing back over the Chindwin in the second half of April 1943. Before they returned, however, they set an ambush for the enemy in which a hundred Japanese were killed at the cost of one Chindit.

  The fighting the Chindits had to undertake, and the appalling conditions they had to contend with in the jungle, made their two expeditions among the great military feats of the Second World War. A passage from Fergusson’s war diary for his column dated 30 March 1943 underlines the harshness of the situation by the end of the first expedition:

  Party now consists of 9 officers, 109 other ranks, of which 3 officers, 2 other ranks wounded. All weak and hungry in varying degrees. Addressed all ranks and told them: (a) only absolute discipline would get us out. I would shoot anybody who pilfered comrades or villages, or who grumbled (b) Anybody who lost his rifle or equipment I would expel from the party, unless I was satisfied with the excuse (c) Only chance was absolute trust and implicit obedience (d) No stragglers.26

  Sentries who fell asleep could expect to wake up to a flogging.

  For some of the wounded or simply exhausted men, the last 80-mile trek back to safety was simply too much. Sergeant Tony Aubrey of 8 Column recalled how one soldier, ‘whose feet were in a very bad state, made up his mind he could go no further. He lay down. His mates, worn out as they were, tried to carry him. But he wouldn’t allow them to. All he wanted was to be left alone with as many hand grenades as we could spare. So we gave him the hand grenades and left him. There wasn’t anything else to do.’ Stragglers got back as best they could. ‘At first we worried about him,’ Aubrey said of one such. ‘ “How’s so-and-so making out?” we asked each other. But after a time we forgot him. He was just another piece of landscape. This may sound like man’s inhumanity to man, but it wasn’t you know. We were just too tired to care.’27 Wingate himself, wearing the same corduroy trousers he had worn throughout the expedition, which were slashed to ribbons and his legs streaming with blood, swam back across the Chindwin. Once in camp he told the press that he was ‘quite satisfied with the results. The expedition was a complete success.’

  Of the 3,000 officers and men who crossed the Chindwin on 13 February, 2,182 were safely back in India by the first week in June. Nearly all the mules were dead, and most of the equipment had been lost or destroyed. The Japanese had killed 450 Chindits; 120 Burmese had been permitted to remain in the jungle, and most of the rest were taken prisoner. The 17th Battalion the King’s Liverpool Regiment lost more than one-third of its complement. Fergusson’s own estimation was that they had achieved:

  not much that was tangible. Wh
at there was became distorted in the glare of publicity soon after our return. We blew up bits of railway, which did not take long to repair; we gathered some useful Intelligence; we distracted the Japanese from some minor operations, and possibly from some bigger ones; we killed a few hundreds of an enemy which numbers eighty millions; we proved that it was feasible to maintain a force by supply dropping alone.28

  Yet the three-month expedition also proved that Allied troops could survive in the jungle just as well as could the Japanese, an important psychological factor. The first expedition therefore helped to dissolve the myth of the invincible Japanese superman, a necessary precursor to building up the morale necessary for eventual victory. The raid had nonetheless been very costly, and several regular soldiers questioned the value of the Chindits’ incursions into the Japanese strongholds of Pinbon, Mongmit and Mianyang. Wingate was taken by Churchill as a prize exhibit (along with the leader of the daredevil Dambusters bombing raid Wing Commander Guy Gibson) to the Quebec Conference in August 1943, where he persuaded both Churchill and Roosevelt that light infantry brigades properly supplied from the air could fight hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, cutting lines of communication, creating mayhem, drawing off troops from the front line and generally, in his words, ‘stirring up a hornets’ nest’. It was therefore decided that the Chindits should be launched on a second expedition in the spring, only this time with treble the forces.