The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  It was Slim and Mountbatten rather than Stilwell that Wingate had in his sights during January–February 1944. The essential problem was that the Cairo conference had undone many of the decisions taken at Quebec, Wingate’s high point of triumph. The encouragement and special powers Wingate had been granted then were contingent on an expected course of events, which did not materialise, but Wingate, absurdly, thought he had been given the green light for Chindit 2, unconditionally, whatever happened thereafter. It followed that any opposition or demurral to his plans had to be because of malice, envy, spite, incompetence, sabotage or Indian army amour-propre, not because Giffard, Slim or Auchinleck genuinely thought that LRP was an irrelevance in the changed circumstances. Many in the Indian army honestly thought that Operation THURSDAY was a chimera and would be suicidal.26 Moreover, even some of those who suported Wingate had doubts about his leadership qualities. Major General Symes wrote in his diary: ‘Wingate, although possessing boundless self-confidence, is lacking in administrative and organisation knowledge, and knowing it, has an inferiority complex on the matter.’27 With Chiang refusing to move Y-force southwards because BUCCANEER had been cancelled, Wingate’s LRP operations were now pointless. It was this that led Fergusson finally to snap and tender his resignation. He told Wingate that without the Yunnan offensive from Chiang, the second Chindit expedition would simply be a disastrous replay of the first. A shaken and angry Wingate remonstrated with him vociferously and finally prevailed on Fergusson to withdraw his resignation. Wingate saw clearly enough that if one of his own devoted lieutenants publicly expressed doubts about THURSDAY, its credibility would be irretrievably destroyed.28

  Yet because the orders given him at Quebec had not been formally cancelled (doubtless through an administrative oversight), the self-centred Wingate, in defiance of all logic, continued to persist with them. At the same time, sensing the changed circumstances, the army and RAF bureaucracy, which had always loathed Wingate, revived its previous obstructiveness – hardly surprisingly since Wingate had virtually declared open war on them.29 Suddenly Wingate found that the proposed Operation THURSDAY lacked most of the essentials for credible implementation: mules, supply-dropping aircraft, paratroops, transports and much else. His one chance was that Mountbatten, whatever his private feelings, was still on his side, as indeed he was obliged to be, since both were overpromoted Churchillian protégés and to an extent would sink or swim together. This did not stop Mountbatten complaining about Wingate and saying that he was the last thing he needed with all the other problems he had on his plate.30 Moreover, Wingate as a ‘can do’ fighting general was the one clear point of agreement between Mountbatten and the Americans and a putative ‘ace in the hole’ in Allied attempts to get Chiang to resurrect Yoke force, whereas to disband the Chindits would appear to endorse the generalissimo’s defeatism. In his attempts to patch up a peace between Wingate and the powerful bureaucratic forces opposing him, Mountbatten was helped by a foolish attempt by the RAF at overt obstructionism. At one conference RAF representatives opposed THURSDAY on the grounds that there were no radio sets in India capable of exchanging Very High Frequency messages with their planes. Tulloch broke in passionately to say that this was nonsense and that such sets did exist. At this the normally unflappable Mountbatten lost his temper and banged on the table: ‘Someone here is talking nonsense.’ He called in his signals officer, who confirmed Tulloch’s version of the state of affairs. Angrily Mountbatten then faced down the RAF contingent: ‘General Wingate has been promised certain things and while I am here I will see that he gets them. I want no more argument on the subject.’31

  The three months December 1943–February 1944 saw Wingate locked in almost continual conflict with both Slim and Mountbatten. Slim met Wingate privately on eight separate occasions to discuss strategy, first at Delhi and later at Comilla and other locations. Wingate obviously chafed under the inconvenient circumstance that Slim was his immediate superior but acted with all the old arrogance, contumacity and contempt for hierarchy. Faced with myriad problems on all sides, Slim also had to contend with the most troublesome subordinate of his entire career.32 The pattern was clear at a meeting at Comilla on 3 December, when Wingate demanded the use of Lomax’s 26th Indian Division for his coming operations. When Slim flatly refused, Wingate replied that that could not be the end of the matter, since he owed loyalty to a higher commander. Slim queried who that might be. ‘The Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States,’ Wingate shot back. He told Slim that Churchill had given him secret instructions, if ever he was thwarted in his plans by a military superior, to go over their head and appeal straight to him; accordingly, he very much regretted that he must now report Slim’s lack of cooperation to the Prime Minister. Slim then pushed a signal pad across the desk and said: ‘Go ahead.’ Wingate got up and took the pad with him, leaving Slim uncertain of his intentions.33 It appears that Wingate decided not to contact Churchill on this occasion but stored up the refusal as ammunition for a future showdown in which he intended to involve the Prime Minister. For the rest of December Wingate was involved in work for Mountbatten, including the visit to Chiang in Chungking and, later, the conference with Stilwell. The next real contact with Slim came at an army commanders’ conference on 4 January, when Chindit 2 was officially shelved as a result of the changed circumstances after the Cairo conference. Enraged, next day Wingate sent out two blistering memos, one addressed to Mountbatten, the other to 11 Army Group. The memo to 11 Army Group was a masterpiece of machiavellianism. It began by appearing to accept that the orders he had been given at Quebec could no longer be carried out, then changed tack and accused 11 Army Group of bad faith, obstructionism and withholding supplies. In both this and the intemperate memo to Mountbatten he threatened resignation if his force was disbanded.34

  Slim’s next encounter with Wingate was at Ranchi on 14 January. Again there was disagreement. Slim thought that Wingate’s aerial needs should be supplied by the Americans and the planes detached from the Hump, but Wingate wanted them delivered by the Indian Parachute Regiment. Trying to lighten the tone, Slim explained that 4 Corps used a ‘floater model’ system by which every garrisoned base was served by a satellite mobile column trained to operate against the enemy’s rear when he attacked.35 Wingate accepted the idea with alacrity and soon passed it off as an original contribution of his own. In the course of the talks Slim was alarmed to find that Wingate’s conception of LRP activities had undergone a massive change. Instead of envisaging the Chindits as a mobile super-guerrilla force, he was now arguing for seizing and defending enclaves or strongholds. His thesis was that if an offensive could not be launched across a broad front – and Slim explained why he did not have the resources for a trans-Chindwin thrust into Burma – the British could nonetheless create a series of battlefields deep within enemy territory by establishing impregnable strongholds, backed by airpower and ‘floater columns’.36 He summed up his credo as follows: ‘If we look upon the stronghold perimeter as the kid tied up to attract the enemy tiger, then we find the ambuscaded hunter in the shape of the floater columns on the grand scale and the floater companies on the minor scale. The floater columns are a strategical, the floater companies a tactical, ambuscade.’37 In Wingate’s mind the idea of strongholds came to have an almost mystical significance, and the messianic fervour he once expended on Zionism was now transferred to the holy grail of enclaves. Not without many mental reservations, Slim agreed that on second thoughts he might be able to squeeze four battalions from 26 Division to garrison these strongholds, but all this would have to be on a contingency basis, with Slim reserving the right to dispose of the garrison battalions and Slim deciding when they were to be flown in – or even if they were to be flown in at all. Wingate, as usual, heard only what he wanted to hear and did not take note of these provisos and caveats. Sensing the mood of compromise in Slim, he tried to press his advantage by insisting that the four battalions train with him at Chittagong. At this Slim p
ut his foot down and said they would stay where they were.38

  Throughout January Wingate refined his ideas. His initial plan was for a three-brigade advance from the Central Provinces as the first wave of his assault. Calvert’s 77 Brigade would proceed to the Kaukwe valley, where it would set up a stronghold blocking the Indaw–Myitkyina railway and the Bhamo–Lashio road. Lentaigne’s 111 Brigade would strike out from Imphal to the country south of Pinlebu to set up a fortress that would dominate the valleys of the Wuntho and Mu. Fergusson’s 16 Brigade would march from Ledo, establish a stronghold north of Indaw, from where they would attack the Bongyaung gorge and Meza bridge and seize the airfield at Indaw.39 The idea was to establish three mutually assisting fastnesses right in the middle of enemy territory that would take the Japanese forces massive efforts to overcome. Wingate’s ideas on strongholds became ever more fanatical, and he even managed to combine the language of the Old Testament with modern military phraseology. In his training notes he prefaced a mantra about the quasi-Platonic notion of enclaves with a quote from Zachariah 9:12: ‘Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope.’ There followed a chant-like inventory:

  The Stronghold is a machan overlooking a kid tied up to entice the Japanese tiger. The Stronghold is an asylum for Long Range Penetration Group wounded. The Stronghold is a magazine of stores. The Stronghold is a defended air-strip. The Stronghold is an administration centre for loyal inhabitants. The Stronghold is an orbit round which columns of the Brigade circulate. It is suitably placed with reference to the main objective of the Brigade. The Stronghold is a base for light planes operating with columns on the main objective.40

  Gradually Wingate’s ideas became more and more ambitious, quixotic and chimerical. He saw no reason why eventually he should not have 100,000 men under his command. Having worn down the Japanese, who would have made repeated but futile assaults on the impregnable strongholds, his huge army would then march across Burma, into Indochina and reach the sea at Hanoi, whence it would turn north to pursue the enemy into China, possibly combining with Stilwell in a pincer movement to eliminate all Japanese forces on the Chinese mainland.41

  It can be readily appreciated why both Slim and Mountbatten became alarmed by Wingate’s progressive retreat into cloud cuckoo land. Slim’s attitude to Wingate is difficult to pin down, but it is a theme that is worth pursuing, if only because too many historians have taken at face value his bland nil de mortuis nisi bunkum assessment in his autobiography:

  On the whole Wingate and I agreed better than most people expected, perhaps because we had known each other before, or perhaps we had each in our own way arrived at the same conclusions on certain major issues, the potentialities of air supply, the possibility of taking Burma from the north, and in our estimates of the strength and weakness of the Japanese. Of course we differed on many things. It was impossible not to differ from a man who so fanatically pursued his own purposes without regard to any other consideration or person.42

  The true situation was rather more complex. The first thing to note is that Slim was not the normal hidebound British officer in ‘Inja’ who would have been troubled by eccentricity or unconventionality. Nor would he have been thrown off balance by Wingate’s rudeness, for anyone who had endured Noel Irwin was well inured to that trait. Nor again did he have any objection per se to Long Range Penetration, provided it made sense in a given strategic context; Slim was, one might say, a ‘horses for courses’ man. And he did have a genuine appreciation of Wingate’s talents, especially his ability to meld other people’s ideas with his own so as to come up with a new ‘emergent’ synthesis (as in the synoptic vision of airpower and LRP). Part of it was that Wingate was that rare bird – a man both of thought and of action. Where Slim’s theoretical mentor Liddell Hart was a pure theorist, while Mike Calvert was an unthinking man of action, Wingate was both.43 Nonetheless, there were aspects of Wingate’s thought that seriously perturbed Slim. He was bitter that Churchill had accorded the younger man such blatant favouritism, thus allowing Wingate to go outside the chain of command and appeal over the heads of his military superiors. He resented the break-up of the elite 70th Division at Wingate’s whim. And he was stupefied that Wingate had been given two divisions to play with, to say nothing of the most massive air support in the form of fighters, bombers, transports, gliders and spotter planes; in other words, most of the Allied air strength in the Burma-India theatre had been allocated to him.44 At root Slim disliked all that Wingate stood for, for he always despised the entire gallimaufry of private armies and maverick forces outside the normal military structure. As he said: ‘We are always inclined in the British Army to devise private armies and scratch forces for jobs which our ordinary formations with proper training could do and do better.’45

  Although Slim’s attitude was full of nuance, fundamentally he was contemptuous of Wingate’s abilities as theoretician, fighter, tactician and strategist. As he put it: ‘I found Wingate stimulating when he talked strategy or grand tactics, but strangely naive when it came to the business of actually fighting the Japanese. He had never experienced a real fight against them, still less a battle.’46 As General Symes pointed out, Wingate also lacked administrative experience or skill in logistical planning. Consequently he had not properly thought through the scale of provisions the strongholds would need to obtain by airdrop nor the heavy armament they would have to take in if they were to fight conventional battles. Slim thought that if Wingate’s larger conceptions were given the nod and his brigades allowed to fight pitched battles, his Chindits would soon grow exhausted. By breaking up divisions and regiments for his own ends, he showed a lamentable lack of knowledge of human nature and the soldier’s mentality, for everyone knew that regimental loyalty was primary. Slim also thought that Wingate did not learn from experience and was instead a devotee of the a priori or the idée fixe: ‘In spite of his outstanding gifts of imagination, invention, exposition and leadership, Wingate, who had no staff training, was unsure in his control of forces in the field and too liable, having made his own picture, to read a tactical or strategical situation in its light.’47 Worst of all, though, was the overall strategic thinking. Slim thought that the original LRP quasi-guerrilla notion of 1943 had had a certain validity in a context of low morale and Allied inactivity. But events had moved on since then, and the British army in India in early 1944 was quite unlike that of a year earlier. Auchinleck, Mountbatten and Slim himself had all contributed to the immense increase in morale and resources. Where the ideas of Chindit 1 would have been dubious in the changed situation, those of Chindit 2 were utterly fantastic.48 Wingate justified his conceptions by claiming boastfully that he was the only Allied commander who could carry the fight to the Japanese, since Stilwell was stymied by Chiang and Slim lacked the resouces to get the 14th Army across the Chindwin. He overlooked a number of things. Slim’s idea was to entice the enemy to come to him so that he could fight them on the Imphal plain, where he had the clear advantage. Instead of exploiting enemy weakness, Wingate proposed to attack the Japanese at their strongest, where communications, supply and reinforcements all favoured them rather than the Chindits. His new idea, that his Special Force should be primary and 14th Army secondary, was literally preposterous. As for the larger ambitions about extending the war to Indochina and China, Slim thought them almost self-evidently nonsensical.49

  Beyond all this, Slim had severe reservations about Wingate as a decent moral human being. One can sense ambivalence, at least, in the following observation: ‘To see Wingate in action on some hesitant commander was to realise how a medieval baron felt when Peter the Hermit got after him to go crusading.’50 For Slim, Wingate was a bully, and he hated bullies, prima donnas, exhibitionists and those who deliberately went out of their way to give offence. That Wingate was such a man was admitted even by his friends and admirers: ‘He seemed almost to rejoice in making enemies,’ is how Bernard Fergusson remembered him.51 Slim may not have gone all the way with those of his brother offic
ers who considered Wingate an unspeakable specimen of humanity or thought him barely sane,52 but he intensely disliked his love of confrontation, his arrogance and his assumption that only Special Force mattered, that LRP should be primary in strategy and that everything else should be subsidiary. He also considered him shifty, two-faced and unreliable, so pathologically secretive that he never confided his intentions or ambitions to anyone, including his commanders and chiefs of staff.53 The two-facedness manifested itself in his compulsion to go behind Slim’s back to Mountbatten and to go above both of them to Churchill, often taking their name in vain as he did so and claiming that they endorsed something when they plainly did not. Most of all, Slim loathed Wingate’s almost reflex mendacity, which was noticed by others, including Wingate supporters. Fergusson said that often with Wingate the truth was whatever he wanted it to be at a given moment. Like Marcus Aurelius, Slim himself had a rare commitment to truth-telling, and his biographer has remarked: ‘Slim was incapable of telling a lie, whether in his own defence or to harm another.’54 As a corollary, Slim felt that all the valued items in his own moral code – trust, integrity and loyalty – were set at naught by Wingate, and after the war he said: ‘In my opinion Wingate was deliberately untruthful in some of his statements, and most disloyal in the method he frequently pursued of passing such statements behind the backs of some commanders to others.’55 Faced with this devastating appraisal, Wingate’s many supporters have tried several tacks: Slim too went behind Wingate’s back (Tulloch claimed he was approached in this way); Slim was devious and often illustrated the adage that the best way to tell a lie is to tell the truth (but not the whole truth); and the image of Slim the simple, ingenuous, straightbacked soldier without an ounce of guile is an obvious fraud.56