The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  A chastened Stilwell duly appeared in Delhi with a cable from Marshall stating that whether or not he kept his job was a decision for the Supreme Commander. Sheepishly he showed the cable to Mountbatten and one of his old cronies, General Wildman-Lushington, his chief of staff during the Dieppe debacle.56 Mountbatten takes up the story:

  On this I came forward in as friendly a fashion as I could and fully accepted his apology and said that my chief regret at the various actions he had recently been taking behind my back was that they made the outside world think that we did not trust each other or work in close harmony. He was kind enough to say, ‘I must have been mad not to take you into my confidence in the same way as you have always done to me, and I want you to know that I have always trusted you completely and I shall continue to trust you in the future.’ After that we metaphorically kissed each other and went ahead and ironed out all the difficulties which had been cropping up since his departure.57

  Soon Stilwell was free to return to his real love: jungle fighting. But the successes of January had meant heavy casualties and a drop in morale. A series of incidents convinced him that his commanders must still be receiving secret orders from Chiang to pull their punches. The most serious of these involved the 66th Regiment, which inexplicably ‘went missing’ for a few days and, when found, failed to execute the next orders Stilwell gave them, to block the Japanese retreat. Stilwell responded by sacking the regiment’s commander.58 Yet in general he revelled in the hardships of life at the front, as a letter to his wife makes clear: ‘We eat straight rations or Chinese chow and we live where we have to and the trails are tough, but we sleep soundly and the food tastes good because we are hungry … the jungle is everywhere and very nearly impenetrable. Yesterday on a cut trail I took three and a half hours to do three miles, tripping and cursing at every step.’59

  Mountbatten, meanwhile, initially elated by having put Stilwell in his place, soon experienced a boomerang effect that made him realise how heavily he depended on the Americans to make his Supreme Command meaningful. Mountbatten had made the fundamental error of supposing that US policy in the China-Burma-India theatre was simply rubber-stamping Stilwell’s ideas, not appreciating that all Roosevelt’s policies preceded Stilwell’s appointment to China.60 Although for the sake of amity and the alliance Marshall had ordered Stilwell to ‘eat crow’, he was greatly disillusioned with both Churchill and Mountbatten. To Mountbatten he sent an apparently friendly cable, which showered Stilwell with praise. He had diluted his order to Stilwell to come to heel with a terse minute to Dill, pointing out both that Stilwell had enormous merits as a fighting general and that Mountbatten had been unacceptably stirring things with Churchill out of his own megalomania. To distract attention from the British neglect of northern Burma in favour of the Prime Minister’s quixotic Operation CULVERIN, Mountbatten had evidently decided to pick on Vinegar Joe. Dill passed these comments on to Churchill, who replied blithely that northern Burma would not miss out one iota because of CULVERIN.61 This was true enough: Churchill was not doing anything for the northern Burma campaign anyway. Despite the apparent entente secured by Stilwell’s eating crow on 6 March, Mountbatten brooded on the ‘insult’ both implicit and explicit in Vinegar Joe’s independent ways and thereafter intrigued for his replacement. Stilwell now had two powerful enemies trying to oust him, Chiang in the north and ‘Dicky’ in the south. Much of Marshall’s correspondence with the CBI theatre concerned diplomatic and subtle ways to detach Stilwell from SEAC and Mountbatten’s orbit, possibly by making him commander-in-chief in China (if Chiang would allow that), with General Wheeler replacing him as Mountbatten’s deputy and General Sultan as ground commander of US forces in Burma, so that ‘Dicky’ and Vinegar Joe would never have to come in contact. Marshall began by suggesting that Stilwell appoint Sultan to deal with Mountbatten on a day-to-day basis, and Stilwell, keen to be with his troops in the jungle, readily agreed.62 Yet if Mountbatten thought he could intrigue to remove an American hero without the secret getting out, he was badly mistaken. Two articles in Time magazine in March 1944 revealed the scope of the Supreme Commander’s machiavellianism and referred glowingly to Vinegar Joe, ‘who probably knows China better than any brass hat in New Delhi’.63 Within a matter of weeks Mountbatten, who prided himself on his rapport with the American cousins, became the most hated man in America. The situation became so embarrassing that Marshall had to write to ‘Dicky’ at the end of March 1944 like a Dutch uncle, gently suggesting that he be more diplomatic.64

  While Mountbatten and Stilwell clashed and reclashed, Slim continued the patient process of building up the morale of the new 14th Army. As a man of some literary background he had an approach to morale very different from Mountbatten’s. Where the Supreme Commander employed swagger, showmanship, dynamism and energy, Slim believed in spreading the gospel by word of mouth, patiently explaining his intentions to every unit in the army, platoon by platoon, almost man by man, adopting an approach that was both cell-like and holistic, in effect making every officer and NCO a public relations consultant.65 Where Mountbatten was able to convey the feeling that the British Establishment and the royal family had Burma in their sights as the priority – necessarily an elitist approach – Slim aimed at a ‘just folks’ persona, stressing the simplicity, humour and credibility that would eventually make him ‘Uncle Bill’ in the eyes of his troops. He had a quasi-Biblical gift of evoking the faith that moves mountains, and often preached a kind of sermon based on the text ‘From mud through blood to the green fields beyond’ – the motto of the Royal Tank Regiment.66 This worked well with the British-born troops, with whom he could communicate through shared language, culture, humour and general attitudes. The problem with 14th Army was that it was only one third British, with two thirds of the regiments consisting of Indians and Gurkhas in racially unmixed units, with their own NCOs but officered by Britons. To get through to the non-English-speaking troops, Slim took the trouble to learn a smattering of Urdu, Pushtu, Hindi and Nepali. He had the common touch: ‘when speaking in English, Gurkhali, Urdu or Pushtu it was always as one man to another – never the great commander to his troops.’67 The Mountbatten–Slim twin-track approach worked peculiarly well, for the caste-bound Indian troops were proud to be serving under a scion of the royal family as well as appreciative of Slim’s humanity. Between them the two men raised the profile, prestige and reputation of the Indian army. There had always been a peculiar snobbery, and worse, evinced towards this body in Establishment circles. Churchill particularly disliked Indian troops, viewing them as intrinsically treacherous and disloyal. He hated to hear good things said about them, as he suspected they were merely awaiting a chance to rerun the events of the 1857 mutiny; for this reason he considered the Indian army in possession of modern weapons to be a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.68 The Indians decisively proved him wrong in Burma. Of the 27 Victoria Crosses awarded there, the Indian army won 20. Since they were intensely loyal to their officers, who in turn were imbued with Slim’s ‘can do’ attitude, an ethos of success pervaded the entire 14th Army.

  The one remaining psychological hurdle was the myth of Japanese invincibility in the jungle. To lay this to rest, Slim planned a campaign where he would enjoy such numerical superiority that he was bound to win; a single victory of this sort would prick the ‘Japanese complex’. This was why he returned to the scenes of British humiliation in early 1943 and ordered another offensive in the Arakan. Stilwell and other American commentators thought this pointless, at least if there was no simultaneous amphibious operation farther south, but they missed the point, which was that Slim was seeking out an easy victory. The one obvious card the Allies had in Burma was numerical superiority. In 1943 the Japanese had five divisions there, which would increase to seven in early 1944 and later to eight, plus four divisions of their Thai allies. Thus far Slim was amply fulfilling one aim of Allied policy, which was to draw enemy manpower away from the Pacific theatre. Against this, even leaving Chiang’s im
mobile Y-force out of the picture, the Allies could pit the three Chinese divisions Stilwell had trained at Ramgarh – 35,000 men in all – plus six British divisions and auxiliaries, not counting the Chindits and their auxiliaries. In the Arakan Slim was aiming at a two-to-one local superiority, which he hoped would be buttressed by a similar discrepancy in heavy armour and airpower.69 His 15 Corps would attack the so-called ‘Golden Fortress’ across the Mayu range – a system of defences consisting of interlocking bunkers and built around three distinct bastions: a western approach at Razabil, an eastern approach at Letwedet, and the strongest position of all, the centre, based on the labyrinth of tunnels the British had encountered the year before and which had hitherto been considered impregnable.70 Slim’s plan was that 15 Corps would advance to the Maungdaw–Buthidaung road and would then bifurcate, with 5 Indian Division attacking Razabil while 7 Indian Division took Buthidaung and assailed the Letwedet bastion from the rear; both divisions would then unite for the attack on the tunnels in the centre. Careful preparations were laid. A road was built over the Ngakyedauk pass in the Mayu range, and where the pass entered the valley at Sinzweya, in a flat area of dried-up paddy fields some 1,200 yards square, corps headquarters was set up – a farrago of buildings, arsenals, petrol dumps, a mule station, an officers’ shop, even a military hospital and soon dubbed the ‘Admin Box’.71

  Slim had gathered around him a cadre of trusted officers who knew his methods and had listened carefully to his lessons about concentration of force so as to have overwhelming local superiority, the crucial role of tanks, the importance of never attacking on a narrow front and the need constantly to be on the lookout for Japanese outflanking movements. A key part of his doctrine was the ‘hammer and anvil’. Adopting the basic idea of the bunker, he aimed to construct defensive positions in places the enemy had to attack to keep their lines of communication open. Heavily defended, such positions would form the anvil against which the enemy would waste their forces in vain, until the time came for Slim to send in the reserves as the hammer that would deliver the coup de grâce.72 Three additional factors made Slim confident of success: the Japanese habit of committing all their troops and not retaining a reserve; their reluctance to admit a mistake and cut their losses; and their appallingly idiotic habit of carrying their battle plans and marked maps into combat, so that when the British captured these documents they knew enemy intentions in detail. All these ideas Slim had often communicated to his inner circle, essentially ‘Punch’ Cowan, Philip Christison, Geoffrey Scoones, Frank Messervy, H.R. Briggs, C.E.N. Lomax, Douglas Gracey, Ouvry Roberts, Steve Irwin and Alfred Snelling, his supply and commissariat officer.73 It was all the more amazing, then, that when the campaign opened in January 1944, Christison, commanding 5 Indian Division, launched exactly the kind of frontal assault on Razabil that had proved so disastrous the year before. Perhaps overconfident after a massive USAAF air assault and a huge tank and artillery barrage, he sent in the infantry, who made no progress against the bunkers. Barbed wire, bamboo stakes and withering fire from pillboxes halted the tanks and heavy artillery in their tracks. From their nests, Japanese machine-gunners doled out fearful damage.74 Inwardly cursing Christison, Slim was in a difficult position, for if he intervened he would come across as a micromanager in the mould of Noel Irwin; he would be doing to Christison what Irwin had done to him in 1943. It was, he concluded, Christison’s battle, and he just hoped and prayed he would see sense. Fortunately Christison and Briggs recovered from their mistake and on the second assault moved to the Slim orthodoxy of guile, hooks and encirclement, forcing the Japanese to counterattack. But after five days (26–31 January), the Japanese bunkers still stood firm.75 At the end of January Christison switched his attentions from Razabil to Buthidaung and Letwedet.

  Slim, who used to post photographs above his desk of the Japanese commanders he faced so that he might gain insight into their psychology by studying their faces, had always expected a counterattack against 15 Corps. Indeed, he had worked out that the blow was almost certain to fall on the flank of 7 Indian Division on the left. But when the Japanese did launch their counterattack, he was taken aback by its size and the sheer speed of the enemy.76 Where Slim had been tempting his foe to battle for his own short-term purposes, the Japanese counterpunch was part of a long-term, almost geopolitical objective. As some of Wingate’s critics had feared, the main consequence of Operation LONGCLOTH was that it gave the Japanese ideas of their own and specifically raised the idea of an attack on India. Lieutenant General Mutaguchi Renya, victor of the Singapore campaign in 1942 and now commander in Burma, wargamed the possibility of an attack on India and won the support of his superiors in Tokyo. His thinking was that if he could brush past the British in Assam and thus reach the gateway into the subcontinent, all India would rise up to greet their deliverers, led by the pro-Japanese Subhas Chandra Bose and his so-called Indian National Army. The fall of India would mean the definitive end of the British Empire in Asia and would even allow the Japanese to link up with the Russians in Persia.77 It must be said in passing that the Japanese geopolitical perspective was chimerical, for what was feasible in 1942 was, by 1944, after Stalingrad and Kursk, no longer so; by now the Germans were fighting for survival. Nonetheless, at the very moment Churchill was assuring Wavell that the Japanese would never invade India, Mutaguchi intended to achieve exactly that. Lieutenant General Hanaya Tadashi, commanding in the Arakan, was the stereotypical brutal Japanese officer of legend. His task was to make the British think that the counterattack in the Arakan was the appearance of the main army earmarked for the conquest of India, thus leading Slim to send up his reserves from Imphal. The operation in the Arakan was codenamed HA-GO and was intended as a feint to mask the real attack on Imphal, designated Operation U-GO. To mask U-GO convincingly, the assault in the Arakan had to be massive, and it was this that initially wrongfooted Slim.78

  Faced with such huge and unexpected numbers, Messervy, commanding the British rear, withdrew into the Admin Box and 7 Indian Division dug itself in for what everyone knew would be a brutal, slugging encounter. Slim had no choice but to commit his reserves at Imphal to Arakan, but still hoped he could use them as the hammer if the Admin Box could hold out and provide the anvil. For 18 days battle ebbed and flowed around the Admin Box but the Japanese could make little impression, despite ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. They had expected that once the British saw their communications severed by the outflanking movement on their left, they would panic and flee, allowing the Japanese to pick off individual regiments at will and thus destroy the whole of 15 Corps. Instead, morale held and the British dug in and waited for a relieving force.79 And now the scale of Japanese underestimation of the enemy became clear. Their arrogance and overconfidence was truly astonishing; it was almost as though they found it inconceivable that the British army could ever change its methods or tactics or that they might be facing an entirely different kind of opponent this time. Expecting to wind up the Arakan campaign in a mere 10 days, instead for 18 days they beat like oceanic waves against a towering cliff. Attacked by infantry and from the air, the garrison in the Admin Box never wavered, although casualties were terrific; the Box was so crammed with men and materiel that it was almost impossible for attackers not to find a target.80 The Japanese came closest to success right at the beginning of the siege, when they broke into the hospital compound and shot or bayoneted many of the sick; when they were finally cleared out on 9 February, the bodies of 31 patients and four doctors were found.81 The ferocity of the Japanese is explicable, though not pardonable, by their awareness of fighting the calendar as well as the British. Too late they realised the appalling risks they had been running with their chimerical 10-day timetable. Everything had been predicated on travelling light and seizing what they needed, but when the British did not roll over as expected, starvation loomed for the poorly supplied attackers.82 Moreover, casualties began to mount exponentially. Yet as Slim had predicted, the Japanese refused to admit defeat
and instead redoubled their effort. By 13 February Slim was confident of victory and soon 26 Indian Division began to arrive to deliver the blow from the hammer. The Japanese fought desperately during the final battles for the Box on 17–24 February, but when they withdrew they left behind them 5,000 dead.83

  With the Japanese decisively defeated, Slim could proceed to his original objectives in the Arakan, to seize the Maungdaw–Buthidaung road and destroy the Golden Fortress. Serendipity played a hand, since the cancellation of all amphibious operations released 36 British Division for the final threefold assault. By 13 February Slim had definite intelligence from captured Japanese documents that HA-GO was a feint to draw resources from Imphal, so once Razabil and Letwedet were taken, he intended to withdraw 5 and 26 Indian Divisions to Imphal, leaving 25 and 26 Divisions to attempt the assault on the tunnels. Buthidaung fell to the British on 11 March, and soon they had severed the Japanese communications at the rear of Razabil by night infiltration by 161 Brigade. Now it was time to take the long-defiant Razabil.84 By this time Slim had worked out how to deal with the heavily entrenched bunkers, and his system became part of 14th Army’s normal practice. The problem essentially was that of trench warfare: how to achieve continuous fire, forcing the enemy to keep his head down, while your infantry gets within range. Slim’s solution was to have his tanks fire surface-burst high explosives to clear the jungle around the bunkers, then delayed-action high explosives to break up the façades of the bunkers thus exposed; finally, as the infantry closed in, solid armour-piercing shot was used. As a further refinement low-flying aircraft covered the advancing foot-soldiers and tanks were used as snipers against the bunkers from the rear.85 Even so, fanatical Japanese resistance had to be overcome before Razabil fell on 12 March after three days of inch-by-inch combat. The tunnels proved an even tougher nut to crack: the western one was taken by 36 British Division on 27 March and the eastern tunnel only after fierce fighting on 6 April. There remained one final Japanese stronghold, the so-called Point 551 – an 800-yard-long precipitous T-shaped ridge dominating the Maungdaw-Buthidaung road – which resisted three major assaults and was taken only on the fourth attempt on 4 May.86 All Japanese opposition on the Akyab peninsula effectively came to an end. Because of the great battle of Kohima-Imphal which was still raging, it was decided to pull back from Buthidaung and concentrate around Taung Bazaar, Maungdaw and the mouth of the Naf river, where air supply would not be needed.