The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  The limbo period Wingate spent in London, in semi-despair, in the autumn and winter of 1941 is a crucial part of his biography but not really relevant to his time in Burma. The salient fact was that at the beginning of 1942, his champion Wavell remembered him from Ethiopia and asked for his services in South-East Asia. Wingate was originally told he would be training Chiang’s Chinese in guerrilla warfare, and he was unenthusiastic on two grounds. First, such an endeavour would be like teaching one’s grandmother to suck eggs. Second, what was the point of sending a Middle East expert to the China-Burma-India theatre?40 But on 27 February he found himself on a Liberator bound for Delhi, still with the rank of major. A lengthy stopover at Cairo meant that his journey took three weeks, and it was 19 March before he met Wavell for a briefing. By this time Rangoon had fallen. Wavell told him that his remit had changed, that he would now be in charge of all guerrilla operations against the Japanese in Burma. What this meant was not immediately clear, for at least four bodies of irregulars were already operating in and around Burma. There was the Special Operations Executive (SOE), with whom Wingate had declined to serve in London in his limbo period.41 There was the American forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), operating in Assam and north Burma and vainly trying to persuade Stilwell of the efficacy of irregular operations.42 There was V-force, supposedly specialising in liaison with the Kachin and Naga hill tribes and with the Muslim traders of the Arakan peninsula and mainly recruited from Anglo-Burmans and Anglo-Indians.43 Finally there was the British-run Bush Warfare School, designed to train Chinese guerrillas for sabotage operations inside Burma. At the head of the Bush Warfare School was a colourful roistering character named Michael (‘Mad Mike’) Calvert.44 Wavell suggested that Wingate should begin by assuming command of the Bush outfit, and accordingly he flew down to Maymyo, east of Mandalay. On paper this should have been a disastrous move, for the fire-eating Calvert was just then returning from an embarrassing fiasco that nearly precipitated ‘friendly fire’. Determined to drown his sorrows once back at Maymyo, he was astounded to see a stranger sitting at his desk. Calvert takes up the story: ‘I glared at him and said, “Who are you?” He was quite calm and composed. “Wingate,” he replied. In spite of my unpleasant mood I was impressed. He showed no resentment at this somewhat disrespectful treatment by a major. He began talking quietly, asking questions about the showboat raid. And to my surprise they were the right sort of questions. Tired as I was I soon realised this was a man I could work for and follow.’45

  Soon Wingate and Calvert were close friends. They decided their first task should be to go down to see Slim at Prome, 250 miles away. Calvert openly deferred to his new friend by suggesting that, with his mandate from Wavell, he should be the one to be closeted with Slim. This was April 1942, just before the retreat from Burma, at the point where Slim was trying to see whether anything could be salvaged at the eleventh hour. Slim had already met Wingate once, in East Africa in 1940, when both were serving under Wavell and fighting the Italians. The talks went well, with ‘several lively discussions on the organisation and practice of guerrilla warfare’. While agreeing with some of Wingate’s theories, Slim doubted if his Ethiopian experience was strictly relevant, since there the indigenous population had been actively hostile to the enemy, unlike the situation in Burma, and jungle warfare was a much tougher proposition than campaigning in mountains or deserts. Nevertheless he paid the newcomer a handsome compliment: ‘Wingate was a strange, excitable, moody creature but he had fire in him. He could ignite other men. When he so fiercely advocated some project of his own, you might catch his enthusiasm or you might see palpable flaws in his arguments; you might be angry at his arrogance or outraged at so obvious a belief in the end, his end, justifying any means; but you could not be indifferent. You could not fail to be stimulated either to thought, protest or action by his sombre vehemence and his unrelenting persistence.’46 Wingate too was impressed and told Calvert that Slim was the best man, bar Wavell, east of Suez. Later he amplified: ‘There is only one soldier worthy of the name East of Suez. He is a bad-tempered little terrier by the name of Slim.’47 What particularly impressed him was Slim’s coolness and aplomb, his failure to react with irritation or indeed any strong emotion to Wingate’s outlandishness. Slim was concerned solely with how effective an officer would be in Burma; he was uninterested in Wingate’s colourful past or his suicide bid. He was capable of differentiating between a man’s character and his military talent, and was prepared to give Wingate the chance to see what he could do. This was, however, the high-water mark of the Wingate–Slim accord; each was gradually to become disenchanted with the other.

  When Alexander replaced Hutton at the end of March, Chiang flew down from Chungking to meet him (see p. 60). When they returned to China, Wingate wangled a seat on the plane alongside the generalissimo, hoping to learn about warfare in Burma from the horse’s mouth. But the flight turned into a nightmare: first the aircraft was chased by Japanese fighters and had to take evasive action, and then it ran into severe turbulence, which ended with Madame Chiang throwing up violently.48 With consummate naivety, Wingate had imagined Chiang as a second Hailie Selassie, and was presumably quickly disillusioned. He was certainly taken with the feminine charms of Madame Chiang, but failed to make much headway with her husband. Stilwell scathingly remarked (for Chiang had at one time converted to Methodism and studied the Good Book) that the meeting between Wingate and the generalissimo was ‘the clash of two Bible thumpers’.49 In any case, when he reached Chungking, General J.G. Bruce, head of the British military mission there, told him that for a twofold political reason it would not be possible to transfer the Chinese Bush Warfare troops to his command: Burma was on the point of being lost, and the Chinese irregulars had already been assigned to Stilwell and the American allies.50 Frustrated, Wingate returned to Maymyo on 15 April to find the chaos principle reigning supreme. Calvert told him that over 100 of his Bush Warfare people had just been ambushed on the Irrawaddy and only 11 had survived. Perhaps even more seriously, it was clear that Wingate’s advent was bitterly resented not just by senior officers in the Indian army but by the irregulars of the Bush school themselves, who understandably regarded him as an unproved Johnny-come-lately. Wingate decided to take Calvert with him on a week-long car tour of the Burmese frontier. Calvert claimed that his new friend enabled him to see Burma with fresh eyes and to point out details that had previously escaped him. In his obsessive, quasi-scholarly way, Wingate made a careful note of animals, insects and reptiles and even details like the sogginess of the ground and the space between the trees.51

  In Delhi from 24 April, Wingate announced that he had clarified his ideas to the point that he now made a clear distinction between guerrilla warfare, which was a reactive matter, and the more pro-active notion of long-range penetration (LRP); he no longer had any interest in the former but only in the latter. He had not yet developed the extreme or radical theory of LRP he was later to propound, but at conferences in May–June 1942 he hammered away at three main motifs: that Japanese troops behind the lines must perforce be inferior to those at the front; that a British force should get behind them, communicate with base by radio and be supplied from the air; and that cutting supply lines and destroying arms dumps would tie up a disproportionate number of enemy troops.52 He spent eight weeks in a long battle of attrition with army authorities, particularly the Director of Staff Studies, who allotted troops to various theatres. Against Wingate’s urgent pleas, the army hierarchy made many telling points: it was foolish to think that men could be trained for jungle warfare in just eight weeks, as Wingate seemed to think; the Ethiopian analogy, which he was fond of pushing, was misleading as the Burmese population was very far from being uniformly pro-British; LRP groups should be formed solely from volunteers, not secondments from regular regiments as Wingate was suggesting; and the numbers Wingate was proposing were unrealistic given general shortages – he wanted a minimum of 3,000 men but the army wou
ld be stretched to provide a maximum of 1,300. These were powerful arguments, especially that relating to manpower shortage, but Wingate tried to counter them by talking up the role of the hill tribes and talking optimistically about recruiting Pathans to his standard. He tried to obfuscate by introducing a somewhat otiose distinction between tactical and strategic penetration,53 but what it came down to was that his special units would have to be supplied by airdrops. The idea of supplying irregulars from the air was not a new one, although Wingate’s more gung-ho supporters later claimed that no one had thought of it before.54

  Wingate endured a tense few months. As time went on, he began once more to slip into depression. The long game was not really his style and patience was not one of his virtues. Only the influence of Wavell stood between him and the outright rejection of his ideas. However, his spirits were boosted by the support he received from a cadre of like-minded officers, initially just Calvert but soon to include men like Bernard Fergusson, on the Joint Planning Staff at GHQ. Fergusson was just the sort of British officer Stilwell detested, a monocled Old Etonian with a patrician drawl who had served in the Black Watch, but he was a genuine man of action who welcomed the excuse to escape the secretariat for battleground bravado. He describes the impact of the ‘broad-shouldered, uncouth simian officer’, who ‘used to drift gloomily into the office for two or three days at a time, audibly dream dreams, and drift out again … As we became aware that he took no notice of us … but that without our patronage he had the ear of the highest, we paid more attention to his themes. Soon we had fallen under the spell of his almost hypnotic talk; and by and by we – some of us – had lost the power of distinguishing between the feasible and the fantastic.’55 With Calvert, Fergusson and Captain George Dunlop, another veteran of the recent retreat from Burma, on his side, Wingate had the credibility to press his commander-in-chief harder. Wavell responded by agreeing to the numbers requested and redesignating the various LRP groups as the 77th Indian Brigade.

  The new brigade was a motley collection. The elite troops were the volunteers from the infantry regiments and the Royal Engineers who had been in the original Bush Warfare School. The other main British component was the 13th Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, raised in Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool in 1941. These were mainly older, married men with no dreams of martial glory, previously employed in the coastal defence of Britain and suddenly shipped to India after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Assigned to Wingate in June, they not surprisingly displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm for his schemes, and in any case most of them were too old and too unfit for jungle warfare.56 Wingate rejected 250 of them at first sight, including the colonel, and got Wavell’s permission to fill the gaps by ad hoc drafts from other units. The rest of the new LRP force was made up from two Oriental units. With the first of these, the 2nd Battalion, Burma Rifles, Wingate always enjoyed good relations. They were mainly warriors from the anti-Japanese hill tribes – the Karens, Kachins and Chins – who seem to have been affected by the Wingate magnetism. They imbibed his ideas eagerly and he learned much from them about jungle warfare.57

  Yet with the other Asian component of 77th Indian Brigade, 2nd and 3rd Battalion, Burma Rifles, Wingate always had the most antagonistic and unsatisfactory relationship. Although the Gurkhas were universally held in high regard, Wingate thought they were arrogant, ill-disciplined and overrated. Quite why he thought that is a mystery, but it may be that at root he shared Noel Irwin’s pride in the British army in India and a corresponding disdain for the Indian army, which he once described as ‘the largest unemployed relief organisation in the world’. Certainly he was ‘pathologically opposed’ to the close and almost mystical family relationship that existed between officers and men in most Indian regiments, and above all in the Gurkha Rifle regiments.58 The Gurkhas in turn found Wingate arrogant and domineering, a know-all who would not listen to men who had actually fought in Burma. Reasonably enough, they thought they knew far more about jungle warfare than a man whose previous experience had been entirely in deserts and mountains. They had their own traditions and tactics and viewed Wingate as an amateur who had nothing to teach them. Moreover, they disliked him personally, for his rude and autocratic treatment of their officers led to loss of ‘face’ for the entire regiment.59 He was also too impatient to recruit liaison officers with a proper mastery of the Gurkhali tongue. Needless to say, Wingate and his close associates like Calvert believed as an article of faith that any resistance or opposition to a Wingate ukase was fomented or engineered among the Gurkhas by senior officers in the Delhi hierarchy. But the Gurkhas needed no goading from the Indian army to loathe Wingate cordially. As one Indian army general who had been a Gurkha officer put it: ‘He brought off what must be an all-time record in rotting out a Gurkha battalion, a young one withal.’60 Or, as the historian of the Gurkhas has expressed it: ‘Wingate was the only officer in 130 years of service ever to criticise the performance of Gurkha soldiers, characterising them as mentally unsuited for their role as Chindits. Of course the same might be said of Wingate.’61

  Welding such heterogeneous elements into a cohesive fighting force was a Herculean task, but the energetic Wingate began his tough training programme in July 1942. He divided his force into eight columns, each commanded by a major and each with 15 horses and 100 mules. Since the columns would be sustained by airdrops, there was also an RAF signalling section attached to each unit. The columns trained in the Central Provinces of India, in the Saugur jungle south of Gwalior, where Major General Wilcox of Central India Command was, fortunately, a Wingate supporter and gave him every assistance. The idea was to simulate every contingency the columns might encounter, short of contact with the enemy himself. Wingate believed that human beings underrated the horrors and trials they could endure, and his spartan training programme was accordingly designed to push his men to the limit and beyond. As Calvert put it: ‘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 realised that they could do the things they did, and hardly believe it now. One advantage of exceptionally hard 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.’62 Every conceivable privation was visited on the men of the LRP. They endured encounters with snakes, mosquitoes and leeches, learned to deal with exhaustion as a daily fact of life and were deliberately kept on half-rations in preparation for the ordeals to come. If men collapsed under the heat of long marches with full pack, they were simply put under the shade of trees and received no further comforts. When the monsoon broke they slogged through mud, rivers and teeming rain. The training day began at 6 a.m. with half an hour’s bayonet drill, and then unarmed combat. Breakfast was followed by woodcraft lectures and exercises, map-reading, use of the compass, instruction in distinguishing useful plants from poisonous ones. The daily exercises would include route marches, blowing bridges, laying ambushes or simulating attacks on airfields. After a rest during the noonday heat there would be fatigues, such as digging latrines, mule-tending and jungle-clearing, from 3 to 5 p.m. Then there would be further strenuous tasks until dusk.63

  It seems quite clear from contemporary accounts that at Gwalior Wingate was widely disliked by his men and popular only with an inner circle, especially Calvert, Fergusson and Dunlop. It must be said that the mental processes of this trio were uncannily like Wingate’s own. Calvert was a ferocious disciplinarian, though he could maintain order by personal magnetism and authority, whereas Wingate usually needed to mete out punishments. Fergusson was obsessed with the view that in the Middle East he and Wingate had been living in a golden age among elite personnel and that now they had somehow been relegated to a second XI.64 Some said that ‘Mad Mike’ was as crazy as his boss, and the idea gained ground when he and Wingate ordained that everything was to be done at the double, with even his officers having to run everywhere to keep up with him, expected to
hear every word he said as he jogged furiously.65 Fergusson had been repeatedly warned by his colleagues at GHQ Joint Planning to have nothing to do with Wingate, including this gem from a departing major at Saugur: ‘My advice to you is to turn round and go straight back to Delhi. Wingate’s crackers and I’m off.’66 The issue of reporting sick became especially contentious. At the beginning of the training programme there were sickness levels as high as 70 per cent. Wingate dealt with this in typically ruthless fashion, decreeing that attending sick parade without very good reason was a punishable offence. In the case of those claiming to be suffering from dysentery, he ordered his officers into the latrines to inspect the men’s stools to see if they were lying.67 Like H.M. Stanley, whom he resembled in so many ways, Wingate accepted that he could be genuinely sick himself but did not really believe in anyone else’s illnesses, which he regarded as hypochondria or malingering. Among the multitude of enemies he made by his attitudes was the Medical Corps, who largely regarded him as a barbarian. He also had a positive mania about the so-called Tactical Exercises Without Troops. A massive sandpit, some 40 yards square, was used to simulate the relief conditions in a stretch of territory, complete with rivers, hills, gun emplacements etc., done on a scale of 100 yards to a foot. Wingate then had his officers lie prone in the sandpit to visualise the terrain – literally the lie of the land. Because the men were tired from their normal duties, they did not always build the model with the precision their martinet commander required, but he brooked no excuses.68 And he came close to public explosion when he held the first full-scale manoeuvre at the end of September, witnessed by Wavell and other top brass, and it fell far short of his expectations; there were particular problems about handling the mules. Nevertheless, Wavell’s continuing favour meant that Wingate was promoted to the rank of brigadier during the training of the LRP groups.