The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  Throughout this period Wingate evinced singular insensitivity about public relations and self-image and, by his arrogance, alienated further swathes of people in the Indian army. When one senior officer came to a meeting and said that because of other commitments he could stay no longer than an hour, Wingate swept up his papers, stormed from the room and said he would return when the officer had sufficient time to take his duties seriously.69 At another conference he demanded to know why certain equipment had not been supplied and was then interrupted by a protest from another senior officer that this was the first he had heard of the request. ‘I have been told nothing about this whatsoever,’ said the officer. ‘Why should you have been?’ Wingate answered scornfully. ‘I’m telling you now.’70 He particularly antagonised Major General S. Woodburn Kirby, Wavell’s Director of Staff Studies. When Wingate was incensed that there had been a delay in sending him smoke grenades, he signalled to GHQ that ‘those responsible should be sacked for iniquitous and unpatriotic conduct’. His rudeness to Kirby was egregious and he treated him (again, his superior) ‘as if he were the inefficient manager of a rather unsatisfactory multiple store’.71 But the high point of his arrogance came in a self-assessment in 1942 where the real man is finally on full view, in a way that even his defenders cannot mitigate or attenuate. Self-pity, delusions of grandeur and paranoia manifest themselves in a singular fashion.

  I must be exceptional, even today, when an officer who has defeated and destroyed nearly 40,000 enemy troops, strongly supported by aircraft and artillery, with 2,000 troops, without either aircraft or artillery, and in complete isolation from any other operations, who, as scarcely ever happens in war, has not only been in sole command of the forces engaged, but has also planned the whole campaign, organised, trained and equipped the troops, and brought the whole to a satisfactory conclusion, that such an officer on his arrival home should not even be asked to see the men who are responsible for the army’s hitherto not highly successful campaign; that as soon as they hear he is not fit to fight the only response should be an order to join the regimental depot at Woolwich with the rank of major. Even if it were only for a day, it would be a waste of a day.’72

  Notable also in this screed are the outright lies and the failure to tell the whole truth. His description of the Ethiopian campaign is a self-regarding travesty; he was granted interviews with generals like Wavell and Ironside far beyond what his rank and achievements warranted; and so far from being consigned to obscurity, he was transferred to Burma through a notable act of favouritism. Truly in Wingate’s world no good deed went unpunished.

  Wingate’s paranoia is underlined by his curious decision to have Calvert spend much of his time not at the training camp but in Delhi as ‘brigade liaison’, or in other words, as Wingate’s spy in the corridors of power. One wonders why, instead of expending so much energy on finding out what his critics were saying about him, he did not make some attempt to humour them, conciliate them or meet them halfway. At any rate Calvert heard enough to become alarmed, and wrote to Wingate on 6 August that he was generally considered ‘not fit to command’.73 Wingate’s reply, containing not an atom of reflection or self-criticism, was entirely predictable: ‘Before I took command in Ethiopia people were saying exactly the same things they are reported as saying now. If there is any difference, I am a good deal more moderate now than I was then, having learned some valuable lessons in the interim. The personal attacks cannot be answered by argument but they can be, and are, answered by the facts. It is because I am what I am, objectionable though that appears to my critics, that I win battles.’74 That reply implied that Wingate had learned some humility, but there was little evidence of this. He misinterpreted the Burmese word for lion – chinthe – as chindit and declared that from now on the lions of the LRP would be called Chindits. His Burmese aide Sao Man Hpa told him that the word made no sense in Burmese, but Wingate replied that chinthe made no sense in English (but Chindit did?) and he would therefore continue to call his men Chindits. Wingate always had a cavalier way with local cultures, customs and languages, as his treatment of the Gurkhas reveals. He appointed two Burmans – Sao Man Hpa and Aung Thin – to be his experts on Burma even though they protested that as Western-educated oligarchs they knew little about the country and were barely literate in the language.75 Wingate overrode their objections as he always overrode inconvenient truths. Yet on certain men he made a profound impression, and indeed it would be impossible to explain his posthumous fame otherwise. His clear, carrying voice obviously helped, as did the piercing, unblinking stare usually associated with fanatics, faced with which most sensible men simply backed down. By all accounts he had the rare gift of being able to remind his men of death and the unlikelihood of their returning from missions without demoralising them. This is a faculty usually associated with men with an innate gift for leadership like Ernest Shackleton, who could make his men believe he was their brother or father, as appropriate. There was no ‘band of brothers’ quasi-kinship motif in Wingate’s brand of leadership. What seems to have riveted those he appealed to was his very quality as an Old Testament prophet, the sense that he was not quite of this planet or this dimension.76

  After the unsatisfactory first manoeuvre, Wingate ran his men through a fresh series of hoops. This time there were night marches as well. Gradually his ruthlessness forged a corps with self-belief and a sense of self-reliance.77 But there were significant costs. He reduced the sickness level to 3 per cent (from 70 per cent at the beginning of the training), but only by brutal methods whereby even the genuinely ill were too afraid or browbeaten to go on sick parade and behaved like the inhabitants of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, in denial even about the most palpable maladies. Such behaviour, complete with periodic tirades about the Western world’s effete reliance on physicians and doctors, further alienated the medical profession, who universally ‘thought Wingate was mentally unstable. We couldn’t write it down of course, but we all agreed amongst ourselves. We couldn’t understand why he was kept on.’78 Even sympathetic observers agreed that Wingate acted barbarously. John Masters, who later commanded a Chindit brigade and went on to become a best-selling novelist, wrote: ‘I believe Wingate lacked humanity. He thought in great terms, and worked for great ends, among great men. For that huge majority which is less than great he had little sympathy.’79

  Beneath the surface, however, even the Ahab-like Wingate had doubts. Was it not true, as everyone kept insisting, that so far he had beaten only weak and mediocre enemies (the Italians would be no one’s first choice as a warrior race) but that he was about to come up against a truly martial people, man for man easily the superior of Westerners? It is probable that this underlying tension accounted for the increasingly eccentric behaviour in the autumn of 1942. He obsessed about the necessity of wearing shorts in the rain and the branding of numbers on the mules, about the efficacy of raw onions, for whose qualities he was now proselytising througout the brigade, and about the salubrious qualities of buffalo milk; he kept four of the beasts tethered for personal milking.80 But he lacked concern for the truly relevant details: he ordered that all non-swimmers should be taught to swim, but then failed to follow this up and enforce the ruling.81 The obsessive, finical concern with unimportant details seems to have been transferred also to Fergusson, for he began complaining that his men could never keep quiet and that they were irremediable litter louts.82 This jittery period finally came to an end in November. The training ended with two full-scale exercises: the first, lasting five days, around Saugur, to sharpen up on signalling, was widely considered a success; but the second, involving streamlined handling of the mules, was less so, and the incompetent management of the animals at one point bade fair to diversify into general indiscipline and defeatism.83 Wingate’s military machine was by no means perfect, but his credibility meant that he could not turn back now, whatever his doubts. Wavell told him that he should expect to be in action by January 1943. Wingate’s personal Rubicon had already been crosse
d.

  5

  When Slim arrived in India ahead of his troops, he was appalled by the attitudes he encountered among his so-called colleagues. The defeated soldiers were treated not as heroes but as men who had shirked their duty, and this from officers who had been enjoying comfortable billets while the men of BURCORPS suffered and died. He himself almost immediately fell foul of Lieutenant General Noel Irwin, who commanded 4 Corps, responsible for the defence of northeast India, and was one of the most trenchant critics of the fiasco in Burma.1 Irwin was one of those overpromoted nonentities who compensate by dictatorial egocentricity. When he spoke to Slim harshly and with barbed criticism about the retreat from Burma, Slim quite rightly replied: ‘I never thought an officer whose command I was about to join could be so rude to me.’ The incomparable Irwin riposted: ‘I can’t be rude. I’m senior.’2 It seems that he was paying off an old score. Irwin had been commissioned into the Essex Regiment. During the Sudan campaign of 1940, 1st Essex Regiment broke and fled at Gallabat, and Slim subsequently sacked the commanding officer, an old friend of Irwin’s. Burma was thus payback time.3 With no understanding of what the troops had suffered on the retreat, blimpish officers complained vociferously about the lack of discipline and breakdown in morale among the new arrivals. The immaculately turned-out administrative staff at army headquarters in Delhi became known to the exhausted survivors as the ‘gabardine swine’, and the same general perception held good wherever the returnees were dispersed, whether at Imphal, Ranchi or elsewhere.4 The most intelligent observers concluded that the failure in communication between those who had seen active service at the front and those who had not was at root Alexander’s fault, and his lack of proper leadership was especially reprehensible. His sudden decision to cut and run, it was said, engendered a devil-take-the-hindmost, sauve qui peut mentality among those fleeing Burma. Wavell, too, and the viceroy must take some share of the blame, for there seemed to be no overall mind directing affairs from the top, with so many welfare efforts being carried out ad hoc or privately. The Indian Tea Association, for example, ran trucks with relief supplies as far as Imphal but not beyond, and soon ceased doing even that after complaints from Indian civil servants and journalists that the rescue efforts were racist, with Europeans and Anglo-Indians being favoured.5

  Slim, always cautious about pointing the finger at figures superior in the hierarchy, later remarked blandly and without naming names that no preparations had been made to welcome the Burma veterans back into India, as no foresight had been applied at any level. It did not help that India itself was in crisis in 1942, and that Japanese bombing raids reached as far as Imphal, with heavy aerial attacks there on 10 and 16 May. The best-case scenario was that everyone returning from Burma should either have gone on immediate leave or been taken to hospital at speed, but the woefully inadequate transport facilities in India did not permit this. Yet there was worse to come, for, as Slim said: ‘If our welcome into India was not what we expected, the comfort provided was even less.’6 Basically, there was no housing available for the wretched and tempest-tossed of Burma, and the troops were simply told to bivouac in the open. The ‘luckier’ ones were herded into makeshift camps originally designed to take one tenth of the numbers that were eventually shoehorned into them. As an eyewitness reported of one of these ‘health resorts’ north of Imphal: ‘[it was] uncomfortable, not only because it was raining hard … but because we had no shelter or unsoiled ground on which to lie, thousands of people having previously occupied it, with surprisingly primitive ideas for soldiers, on the most elementary rules of sanitation’.7 Even when trains did become available for onward transport, the suffering soldiers soon realised they had merely swapped one version of hell for another. The three-day rail journey from Dimapur to Ranchi, where there were proper camps, took three days, a wearisome ordeal by train, as the rolling stock chugged slowly across Assam and Bengal into Bihar. There were no carriages, only steel cattle trucks with no bedding; with no medical help or drugs, those already suffering from cholera, dysentery or malaria often succumbed en route, infecting others and raising the death toll exponentially. The roistering guerrilla leader Colonel Michael Calvert rememered that ‘There were no blankets and no food. We had cholera, dysentery and malaria cases on the train but there were no medical or even toilet facilities. The lavatory accommodation consisted of ropes to which the user clung while hanging over the side of his truck … We would have suffered more had it not been for the planters and their wives … As we slowed or stopped at stations they threw us food and other supplies.’8

  All the surviving troop accounts tell the same story: campsites where the rain teemed down, there were no tents, and men bivouacked in the mud. There were rarely groundsheets or blankets to be had, though sometimes mosquito nets were available. In some units ingenious engineers were able to construct rude shelters out of brushwood and tarpaulins, yet even if they avoided the pitiless pelting of the monsoon, they could never get their clothes dry. It has been estimated that 90 per cent of those who trekked out of Burma suffered from malaria and 20 per cent were eventually hospitalised with serious maladies.9 It was routine to hear of men who had lost up to a third of their body weight after just a month of marching and ‘recuperating’ in India.10 Yet, incredible as it may sound, the British soldiers did better than the Indian refugees or their counterparts in the Chinese army. The British response to the Chinese troops who got through to India was especially crass and boneheaded. The 38th Division, which had fought so valiantly at Yenangyaung and won the plaudits of Slim, was treated as a pack of banditti when it began to arrive in India between 25 and 30 May. General Sun Li-jen was that rare animal, a superb Chinese general, a graduate of the Virginia Military Academy, an excellent English-speaker, a humane and sensitive man with something of Stilwell’s concern for the enlisted man, and a handsome and charismatic individual withal.11 Arriving on a more southerly itinerary than that taken by Stilwell, Sun was alarmed to find himself under suspicion and in danger of internment. The egregious General Irwin, who added racism to his other less attractive attributes, regarded Sun with contempt, and he had the backing of Alexander, who had complained publicly that the Chinese were a pack of parasites, ‘pusillanimous bastards’)12 wanting to be fed and pampered at British expense. Fortunately, for once, Wavell exerted himself and overruled Irwin, thus avoiding a public-relations catastrophe, especially given Chiang’s pre-existing Anglophobia.13 In Sun’s case this would have undone all Slim’s good work. Stilwell had warned Sun that the ‘Limeys’ would try to manipulate him and make him over, but Slim had won his trust. It was the peculiar evil genius of Irwin to be forever ignoring his good advice.

  On 20 May Slim handed over all his troops to 4 Corps and the old Burma Corps ceased to exist. He said goodbye to his close friends Scott and Cowan and then took an emotional farewell of his troops, receiving an accolade that would have heartened a Marlborough or a Wellington and induced in him the irrational feeling that he was deserting them. As he said: ‘To be cheered by troops whom you have led to victory is grand and exhilarating. To be cheered by the gaunt remnants of those whom you have led only in defeat, withdrawal, and disaster, is infinitely moving – and humbling.’14 Already Slim had won hearts and minds by his common touch, his utter simplicity and his complete lack of pretension and humbug. With a deep understanding of human nature, he possessed in abundance common sense, the soldier’s bluff humour and a down-to-earth wisdom. In many ways he was the very finest kind of Englishman, tough, blunt, unflappable, but sensitive and insightful too.15 The affection in which he was held by his troops was remarkable and bears further examination. Patrick Davis, a Gurkha officer, had this to say: ‘We trusted him not to embroil us in a major botchery. We accepted the possibility of death, and the certainty of danger, discomfort, fatigue and hunger, provided that our fighting was constructive and with a reasonable chance of success. Moreover, Slim had been weaned with the 6th Gurkhas, so we had an extra reason for liking him.’16 Slim’s salt
y humour was another reason for his popularity. Later, when the British in Burma became known as the ‘Forgotten Army’, he caused riotous laughter in the ranks when he poked fun at the sobriquet: ‘Forgotten Army. They’ve never even heard of us!’ A similar sensibility is evidenced by an anecdote from the dark days after the retreat, when Slim and Stilwell shared a joke while sitting dejectedly on a wall. Stilwell said: ‘Well, at least you and I have an ancestor in common.’ ‘Who?’ said Slim. ‘Ethelred the Unready,’ replied Stilwell.17 Slim’s laughter reinforced Stilwell’s conviction that he was the only ‘good Limey’. Given his almost monomaniacal regard for fighting generals, it is no mystery why he should have so prized Slim. This explains the rare homage Stilwell paid his British counterpart when he presented Slim with an American M11 carbine – which Slim ever afterwards carried as his personal weapon.