by Max Hastings
Operational commanders felt severely hampered by shortage of intelligence, and above all sigint. Esler Dening, Mountbatten’s influential political adviser, wrote to the JIC in London on 29 September 1944: ‘Do we know, or am I just not being told, what the Japanese intentions are in Burma, bearing in mind that they upset the whole of our offensive-defensive plans earlier this year and that a good deal of their movement passed unnoticed?’ – Dening here referred to the ferocious Japanese thrusts against Kohima and Imphal. ‘If we do not know, then if I were the Army Group commander I should be very unhappy to go into battle with an enemy disposed I know not how, and of whose full intentions I am equally ignorant. No doubt there is a limit to what the Japanese can do today with the land forces available to them in Burma, but past experience has shown that it is both inconvenient and decidedly unpleasant when they do the unexpected. You will remember my saying the other day that it was never wise to assume that the Japanese will not do a thing because it seems stupid to us.’
Maj. Gen. Lamplough, Mountbatten’s director of intelligence, summarised his own view in a signal to the JIC in London on 1 October 1944: ‘What we know and what we don’t know: We know the total strength of the Japanese Army, Air Force and Navy in SEAC. We also know the composition of these forces in sufficient detail. We also know the location of the more important H.Q.’s … We can usually tell if and when reinforcements are likely to come into SEAC. All the above is from SIGINT. We do not know Japanese intentions.’ Bill Slim, commanding Fourteenth Army, complained about the shortage of battlefield information at the end of 1943, and renewed his protests in November 1944. He said that OSS seemed to be doing a better job than MI6 in securing information about the enemy. He urged ending the interminable wrangling among clandestine organisations by merging them – a proposal that prompted a closing of ranks among them all, for rejection. Gen. Sir Oliver Leese delivered a similar broadside a month later, messaging Mountbatten’s headquarters: ‘As you know I am most disturbed by the lack of intelligence.’ He told his own senior intelligence officer that he was ‘exceedingly dissatisfied with [Intelligence] … very dissatisfied with the Sigint side, which compares most unfavourably with the situation in Europe’. He also complained that the various intelligence organisations refused to accept briefs from the army about what it needed to know.
Some of the problems derived from the fact that the Japanese used wireless much less than the Germans; their forward elements communicated sparingly with rear headquarters. Moreover, even in Europe the Germans did not always oblige Bletchley Park by telling the Allies through Enigma or Tunny what they intended to do next. Beyond this, the Americans led the codebreaking campaign against the Japanese, and thus the Pacific was inevitably the focus of their interest, while the British struggled to read relevant South-East Asian traffic. The British and Americans each ran an industrial-scale intercept station outside Delhi, and the Royal Navy had a Colombo facility, HMS Anderson, where by March 1944 1,300 staff handled two hundred enemy messages a day. The Japanese Water Transport Code yielded a steady flow of order-of-battle intelligence. But the British codebreakers’ labours were hampered by a chronic shortage of language specialists, and Royal Navy intelligence officers suffered the same problem as their American counterparts: cryptanalysis was a career dead-end. Colombo received only grudging cooperation from the US Navy’s Cmdr Rudy Fabian in Melbourne, and never really recovered its balance after successive 1942 evacuations first from Singapore to Ceylon, then briefly to East Africa, and back to Ceylon again.
Leese’s denunciation of the shortage of sigint prompted a response from Bletchley Park on 22 December 1944 which frankly acknowledged the difficulties the British faced in reading Japanese wireless traffic. Edward Travis, GC&CS’s chief, said that nothing like the same number of staff, and especially linguists, were available to address Japanese signals as German ones. While Britain was well endowed with fluent German-speakers, there were precious few familiar with Japanese. Although cooperation with the Americans was excellent, ‘there is no question that it is not so rapid and effective to deal with problems between parties 3,000 miles apart, with a front which stretches half across the globe, as it has been with the compact European theatre, which has been an all-British effort, at least in the vital early stages’.
Travis then addressed the technical problems, which, he said, were entirely different from those posed by the German systems: ‘The Japanese do not at present use machines for ciphering military or air force signals. They use code books and then extremely tough enciphering methods to conceal the coded text … The upshot is that the work of producing a Japanese text is long and laborious, that only a percentage of messages ever become readable.’ He admitted that only fragments of a small proportion of traffic became available in real time: ‘Even their divisional systems are very difficult and such as can never be handled in the field as we have handled German field ciphers. On the Army side nothing is intercepted below division for nothing is audible [by the Y Service], even to units pushed right up into the line.’ Finally, and significantly, he said that the taciturn Japanese were nothing like as accommodating as the Germans, who frequently transmitted comprehensive situation reports: ‘The Japanese do not as a rule pass high-level appreciations and future intentions by signal. Their intentions strategically have to be assessed therefore from indirect evidence.’ Here was an authoritative statement of the weakness of Allied sigint operations against the Japanese. The British were receiving even less Ultra than the Americans of a kind which provided direct assistance to their troops on the battlefield. Both Allied armies were usually well-informed about overall Japanese strengths. But – given that prisoner interrogation was usually an unprofitable activity – by comparison with the European theatre commanders depended for much of their intelligence on pre-sigint methods: patrolling, air reconnaissance, and painful experience in contact with the enemy.
The British in Burma, when their Fourteenth Army began its 1944–45 campaign to recapture the colony, expended considerable efforts on deception, run by Col. Peter Fleming, brother of journalist Ian and himself at that time much more famous, as a pre-war adventurer and travel writer, and husband of the hugely popular actress Celia Johnson. Fleming wrote gleefully on 9 October 1944, reflecting on the exaggerated notions of Japanese army headquarters in Burma about Allied strengths: ‘Their margin of error, until recently slightly in excess of 100 per cent, is likely to increase during the coming months.’ He reported that his own team had a large imaginary British army, ready for deployment: ‘Experience has shown that the mere existence of these forces in our back areas has little influence on [the Japanese].’ He suggested moving these fictional forces onto the battlefield, to intimidate the enemy into a belief that they faced overwhelming odds.
Such games as these gave pleasure to the officers involved, but there is little evidence that they influenced the battlefield, save at one important moment when Slim successfully deceived the Japanese about his February 1945 crossing of the Irrawaddy, feinting in the north while making his big move in the south. It was almost impossible to run useful deceptions against an enemy high command which conducted military operations with almost no heed for its own intelligence department, and which deemed it an affront to the Japanese warrior code to allow its own strategic decisions to be influenced by what the Allies might or might not be doing.
2 FIGHTING EACH OTHER
Throughout the Asian war, a parallel internecine struggle took place between officers of the rival secret services of Britain and America. Much British intelligence material was marked ‘Guard’ – not to be shown to Americans – and many US documents were stamped ‘Control’ – to be hidden from British eyes. Esler Dening, Mountbatten’s political adviser, wrote in June 1944: ‘It is a melancholy and disquieting fact that the brotherhood in arms of the United States and ourselves in the Far Eastern war has been accompanied by a steady deterioration in … collaboration … which is adversely affecting the prosecution of the war.�
� In February 1945 Lt. Gen. Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, wrote savagely: ‘I have yet to meet the senior officer who can bear with equanimity the trials and tribulations inflicted on a suffering world by the clandestine organisations.’
Unpalatable local realities made SOE’s task almost impossibly difficult. Whereas in the countries of occupied Europe Allied agents could expect assistance from at least enthusiastic minorities among local populations, this was not the case in South-East Asia. British defeats in 1941–42 had shattered imperial prestige, a centuries-old myth of Western invincibility. Attempts to conduct covert operations in Japanese-occupied Burma and Malaya laid bare the colonial rulers’ unpopularity: many inhabitants betrayed the British agents and special operations teams thrust into their midst. Thoughtful officers understood that it was a mockery to talk of ‘liberating’ South-East Asia when its peoples might have learned to hate and fear the Japanese for their brutality, yet wanted no resumption of British, French or Dutch rule. Freddy Spencer Chapman of SOE, who survived for three years in occupied Malaya, vividly described the embarrassment of living among, and relying for his survival upon, people who had lost all confidence in Britain.
SOE’s headquarters in the subcontinent was located in a rambling cluster of bungalows outside Colombo known as Mount Lavinia, guarded by New Zealand Maoris. A report on the prospects for stay-behind operations in India, compiled in the dark days of March 1942 when enemy invasion seemed imminent, asserted gloomily: ‘The effect of Japanese successes has been enormous in this country. Any operations carried out by the Army, or by ourselves [SOE] in the great bulk of Bengal, will be carried out in an essentially hostile country … There is no conviction so strongly fixed in the Oriental mind as that he must choose the winning side, and if he can choose it slightly earlier than his fellow-man, so much the better for him.’ Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell, as commander-in-chief, took a bleak view of SOE. He said that he had thought little of its performance in the Middle East, and was even less impressed in Asia: ‘Insofar as SOE is known out here, its reputation does not stand high. It is considered to have been an expensive and substantial failure.’
Matters looked no more promising in August, when Baker Street’s formidable local chieftain Colin Mackenzie, who commanded useful backing through his friendship with the viceroy Lord Linlithgow, set about training 150 Indian communist students as stay-behind agents. The police insisted that the loyalty of these young men should be tested, by briefing them on the whereabouts of secret British arms dumps, with instructions not to go near these unless or until the Japanese were at hand. The students responded by staging an immediate rush for the weapons, which caused the programme to be shut down. This was only the beginning, however. The historian Richard Aldrich has written: ‘The ambitions of Mackenzie and SOE in the Far East were without limit.’ Once the British and American secret services realised that they could contribute little to the defeat of Japan, both focused their energies on the advancement of rival post-war commercial, political and strategic interests. Aldrich suggests, on good evidence, that SOE’s men saw themselves as ‘shock troops for reasserting control of the empire’.
So did OSS. Its Research & Analysis division contained a British Empire section which was virulently anti-colonialist. William Donovan wrote scathingly on 27 October 1944 that Britain’s strategy was to recover South-East Asia ‘making the fullest possible use of American resources, but foreclosing the Americans from any voice in policy matters’. Many of Donovan’s men, together with some senior officers of the US Army, strove to prevent the British, French or Dutch from regaining control of their Asian empires. Less moralistically, and as the British were keenly aware, the Americans sought to use their resources and clout to carve out post-war commercial advantage for the US, and wherever possible to diminish that of Britain.
The two allies incessantly lied to each other. Colonel John Coughlin, Donovan’s chieftain first in India then at SEAC, told his boss that its operations were ‘not only important in defeating the Japs but may also be considered in part as cover for an opportunity to serve as a listening post for American interests in Asia’ – and to monitor the activities of British secret organisations, which Coughlin did with a will. Meanwhile the British ambassador in China blandly assured his US counterpart that Britain had no interest in the future of Thailand, when of course it did – with an especially keen appetite for appropriating the Kra isthmus. Donovan sought to use his own officers to secure an opening in Thailand for US post-war commercial penetration. The supposedly neutral Thais arrested both OSS and SOE officers indiscriminately and collected them in jails until June 1944, when Bangkok deemed it politic to allow them to make contact with their respective headquarters.
With fourteen British and American clandestine organisations represented in South-East Asia, competition to recruit agents in Japanese-occupied territory resulted in what one officer deplored fastidiously as ‘an undignified scramble for indigenous personnel’. In the Dutch East Indies there were allegations that some locals had been enlisted at gunpoint. After the Japanese occupied Malaya, during 1942 they rounded up and executed several thousand real or supposed British stay-behind agents and sympathisers. Thereafter Allied covert operations in the country became overwhelmingly dependent on Chinese communists, including Lai Tek, their pre-war party secretary general, who was almost certainly a double agent serving Tokyo.
Local support for British activities in occupied territory did not much increase even when Allied fortunes improved. An SOE party parachuted into the Kokang area of Burma in December 1943, and reinforced in June 1944, succeeded in staying alive and patrolling west of the Salween river, but failed absolutely to rouse the local population to participate in a resistance movement. Its report concluded: ‘Local opposition restricted the party in carrying out the original tasks of arming and training guerrillas,’ and it was evacuated in October 1944. Two British officers dropped into Karen territory in October 1943 were killed, whereupon Major Hugh Seagrim, an almost saintly figure who had stayed behind in the area since the 1942 retreat, gave himself up to the Japanese in an attempt to spare the local people from reprisals. The towering, bearded Seagrim, six feet four inches tall and dressed in the rags of the Karen costume he had worn for so long, stood erect as he addressed a Japanese court-martial at Insein, north of Rangoon. ‘I obey the orders of my country, as a British officer,’ he said, ‘and I have merely carried out my duty. I have no complaints at being sentenced to death. But the men with me merely carried out my orders, and I ask you to declare them not guilty.’ His plea failed. When he was shot on 2 September 1944, his seven Karen companions were also executed.
Even as late in the war as January 1945, when yet another team – ‘Group Burglar’ – parachuted into Burma east of Pyminama, ‘the party was hampered by the hostility of the local population and had continually to keep on the move’. The commander of SOE’s Force 136 minuted with authentic imperial condescension on 2 April 1945: ‘The local inhabitant has neither the patriotic motive nor in most cases the education and intelligence to make him an adequate secret agent … Europeans cannot mingle with the local population in the same way as infiltrated secret agents in Europe. A much larger local proportion of the population has been neutral or even hostile, so that chance of survival of secret agents is thereby made more difficult.’ MI6 reported at the same period that in Malaya locals would provide no help with intelligence-gathering, nor assist any organisation they could not themselves control. A post-war report on SOE operations in the Dutch East Indies noted: ‘No contact with resistance movements in Sumatra was made by Force 136 … Intelligence indicated that the population was collaborating with the Japanese and the prospect of successful clandestine operations was small.’ The dominant reality of British covert operations across the areas of South-East Asia occupied by the Japanese was that few local people were willing to risk ghastly reprisals to aid representatives of discredited, disliked and apparently defeated imperial pow
ers, and this changed little even in the last months of the war. SOE achieved its only important successes in paramilitary operations against the Japanese in the wild tribal regions of northern Burma, whose inhabitants were chronically alienated from their fellow-countrymen of the plains.
Even as SOE strove to justify its existence in Britain’s Japanese-occupied colonies, its officers sustained their wider struggle with the Americans. In June 1942, OSS and SOE had apportioned the globe into regions acknowledged respectively as predominantly British or American for the purpose of special operations, with equal rights for both in Spain, Portugal and Switzerland. China was defined as chiefly American, and Donovan’s men fought like tigers to make it exclusively so. SOE and OSS waged a continuous turf war there, and neither contributed much to the defeat of the Japanese, beyond rescuing some downed aircrew and escaped PoWs. In Washington, however, OSS exercised more political influence on Far East matters than on most others. For about a year from the spring of 1944, Donovan’s officers attached to the so-called ‘Dixie Mission’ in Yenan province became the Roosevelt administration’s principal source of information about Mao Zhedong’s communists, though thereafter the OSS China group lost its clout in high places. Allied intelligence activity in the Nationalist regions was not assisted by the need for obsessive caution in preventing Ultra material, and indeed anything sensitive, from reaching Chongqing, because the Japanese read almost all the Chiang regime’s cipher traffic, despite repeated warnings about its insecurity. Before D-Day in 1944 the British felt obliged to withdraw the cipher privileges of the Chinese embassy in London, even though Chiang was supposedly a formal ally, because it was well known that whenever the ambassador saw a British general or politician, within days a transcript of their conversation was on desks in Tokyo as well as Chongqing.
