The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  As July began, the monsoon continued to howl and there was still no sign of any crack in Myitkyina’s defences, both Lentaigne and Mountbatten became ever more agitated. Worried about the knock-on effect on the morale of the Marauders and the Chinese, Stilwell simply would not agree to send the Chindits on furlough. Early in July he sent 14 Brigade and the West Africans to take Taugni, which they accomplished brilliantly, a fourth Special Force Victoria Cross being won in the engagement.132 Lentaigne then told Stilwell that his men had had enough and that 111 Brigade must be flown home at once. Stilwell objected that this meant his agreement with Slim was being broken, and both sides appealed to Mountbatten. The Supreme Commander sent up what Stilwell scathingly referred to as ‘another circus from Kandy’, this time a deputation consisting of Wedemeyer, Frank Merrill and Major General I.O.S. Playfair. Another face-saving agreement was patched up: 111 Brigade was allowed to leave but 14 Brigade had to stay for mopping-up operations around Taugni.133 Mountbatten was furious about Stilwell’s attitude, but as Pownall pointed out, he had to balance the exhaustion of the Chindits against the attitude of the ‘cousins’: ‘Whatever happens, we are in danger of this affair embittering Anglo–US relations. If we pull them out, the Americans (especially Stilwell) will say we ratted on them. If we leave them in, the British commanders will know why and will say so.’134 Finally Mountbatten’s patience snapped. He told Stilwell that in the interests of humanity, all the medically unfit must leave at once. Stilwell flatly refused to concede. Mountbatten tried to force his hand by ordering a medical inspection of the remaining Chindits. The inspection of Masters’s brigade on 17 July found only 118 fit for active service out of 2,200 officially rostered in four and a half battalions. Many had lost up to 45 pounds in weight, suffered at least three bouts of malaria, foot rot, septic sores, prickly heat or typhus. Masters sarcastically minuted Stilwell to enquire what their duties were, and Stilwell rewarded the sarcasm by sending them to guard a Chinese artillery battery, to the fury of the Chinese gunners, who construed this as loss of face.135 It was 1 August before Stilwell allowed Masters’s brigade and the other Chindits to leave, and probably only then because on this date he was promoted to four-star general. Whatever debate there may be over the initial merit of Special Force, by the end it was little short of a disaster. The last time a Chindit unit fired a shot in anger was 7 August, when 36 Division – the one originally spurned by Stilwell – took over the duties of Special Force.136 As a distinct entity the Chindits ceased to exist in February 1945. Operation THURSDAY had seen 1,034 Chindits killed and 2,572 wounded, but it inflicted 10,000 Japanese casualties, including an estimated 5,764 killed. In other words, Special Force lost one fifth of its total strength and most of those who survived never fought again; poor rations and a high sickness rate – themselves consequences of Wingate’s fanatical voluntarism – were largely to blame.137 Yet because Wingate vanished from the scene early and the Chindits came under Stilwell’s command, he was the one who attracted their censure and hatred. Tulloch, lamenting that Stilwell had ‘his evil way with us’, thought he should have been exterminated like a mad dog.138

  Stilwell’s bruising encounters with the British over Lentaigne and the Chindits both increased his anti-Limey censoriousness and convinced Mountbatten that his so-called deputy commander would have to go. It is hard to overstate how deeply feelings ran on both sides, and there is circumstantial evidence that the Slim–Stilwell rapport was never the same again. Even those who were accustomed to treat Stilwell’s Anglophobe rants with detached and ironical amusement began to come round to the view that he had gone too far; perhaps it was not just a Stilwell trope, Vinegar Joe rhetoric; perhaps he really did in some pathological way hate the British. Others thought that what in Stilwell himself was a rather tiresome running joke was with his acolytes and close aides a genuine and deadly animus. Boatner and Brigadier General Benjamin Ferris, chief of staff of Stilwell’s rear echelon in Delhi, were considered the prime exponents of an irrational Anglophobia.139 On 22 June, the ever-loyal Frank Merrill radioed Stilwell to tell him that Mountbatten, together with Stilwell’s deadly enemy Wedemeyer, was intriguing to have him replaced as his deputy commander by either Wedemeyer himself or General Daniel Sultan. The slippery Wedemeyer was playing a double game, determined to bring Stilwell down but secretly disloyal to Mountbatten and briefing against him in Washington, as he did during a trip there in June when he was supposed to be promoting the Supreme Commander’s interests.140 Mountbatten’s main hopes for ousting Stilwell were focused on Alanbrooke in London. Alanbrooke agreed, as did many, that Stilwell wore too many hats, and when General Marshall visited London in mid-June, suggested that the Americans ‘rationalise’ the situation. Marshall correctly read this as part of a devious intrigue against his favourite, and reacted angrily: ‘Brooke, you have three C-in-Cs in India; none of them want to fight. We have one man who will fight and you want him taken out. What the hell kind of business is this?’141 A sadder and wiser man, Alanbrooke later reflected:

  Marshall had originally asked us to accept this Stilwell-made set up to do him a favour, apparently as he had no one else suitable to fill the gaps. I was therefore quite justified in asking him to terminate a set up which had proved itself as quite unsound. I had certainly not expected him to flare up in the way he did and to start accusing our commanders of a lack of fighting qualities, and especially as he could not have had any opportunities of judging for himself and was basing his opinions on reports he had received from Stilwell. I was so enraged by his attitude that I had to break off the conversation to save myself from rounding on him and irreparably damaging our relationship.142

  For the moment, then, Mountbatten was stymied. The incandescent state of Anglo-American relations in Burma in summer 1944 was hardly the right context in which he should have been asking favours of the ‘optional extra’ kind, but tact was never his strong point. At some stage he had got it into his head that a touring concert party by his old friend Noel Coward would be a great morale-booster for Allied troops and cabled Coward, then in South Africa, to come on to Ceylon. Perhaps Mountbatten was misled by the signal successes scored by very different kinds of entertainers, such as Vera Lynn, and the Cockney gossiping duo ‘Gert and Daisy’, who had made a great hit with 14th Army.143 Coward duly sailed in the destroyer Rapid and arrived in Ceylon on 28 May. There was an inauspicious start to his tour when among the guests at a reception Mountbatten held for him was Admiral Sir James Somerville, the navy commander-in-chief and the Supremo’s old foe. Somerville, who had a wonderful gift for repartee, spent the evening sparring waspishly with Coward and, in the opinion of some, emerged the victor in the verbal duel.144 Clearly this was some form of transmogrified aggression towards Mountbatten, for three weeks later Somerville wrote formally to the Admiralty to protest about the Supreme Commander’s use of his planning staff, accusing him of seeking ‘a form of absolute control usually exercised by dictators’.145 Mountbatten next asked Stilwell to provide transport for Coward and his troupe at the very moment the American was close to nervous breakdown because of the stalemate at Myitkyina. Vinegar Joe abruptly refused, ‘either from simple prejudice or perhaps on the theory that Coward’s talents would not be appreciated by Chinese and American GIs’.146 Feeling insulted and humiliated, Mountbatten complained both to Lieutenant General Raymond Wheeler, a trusted American aide, and to Stilwell himself. Wheeler suggested that Stilwell send a message of regret, which he did, and the Coward tour headed for Ledo. Coward’s first performance, in front of the black troops building the Ledo road, was a total disaster. They had never heard of the ‘Limey piano-tinkler’, thought his would-be sophisticated cabaret both patronising and boring, and gave him the slow handclap. Coward himself blamed his poor reception on having to belt out his songs from a platform high above the Ledo road, along which lorries and heavy transports continued to thunder. He added that only the RAF were sophisticated enough to enjoy his shows.147 The first performance was so embarrassing that M
ountbatten was soon contacting Stilwell again, trying to save his friend’s face. When a second performance was given at Ledo’s general hospital, Stilwell had to order his men to show approval, whatever their real feelings. Coward, disappointed by his reception on a long tour of Delhi, Bombay and Madras, returned to Ceylon and collapsed. He got his revenge later – and created an international incident – by referring in his Middle East Diary to ‘mournful little Brooklyn boys, lying there in tears amidst the alien corn’ – which was, rightly, read as an insult to American servicemen.148 Stilwell was thoroughly disgusted by the entire fiasco and radioed his friend General Daniel Sultan: ‘If any more piano players start this way, you know what to do with the piano.’149 The entire episode was a suitable black-comedy summation of the lamentable state of Stilwell–Mountbatten relations in the summer of 1944.

  15

  After the great victory of Kohima-Imphal, Slim had two main tasks: to pursue the enemy and to decide his future strategy. Although utterly defeated on all four fronts, the retreating Japanese fought tenacious rearguard actions and they were assisted by a variety of factors. At first Slim and his generals did not realise the scale of the enemy’s defeat and even in late June they could not be entirely certain that the Japanese were not regrouping for a counterattack. Part of this was sheer bad intelligence. Slim was later to complain that he never received the help from ULTRA intercepts that other generals (he was particularly thinking of Montgomery) did.1 Additionally, the intelligence he could garner in the battle theatre itself was limited not only by the paucity of prisoners taken (at least until 1945) but by an acute shortage of Japanese-speaking linguists who could read and interpret captured enemy documents.2 As late as 24 June 1944, when the battle of Kohima-Imphal was in its terminal stages, with a badly beaten Japanese army on the run, Scoones still thought they had the capability to launch a major attack from both Tamu and Bishenpur.3 In the immediate aftermath of the Imphal battle, Slim was not in the director’s chair, having been laid up with malaria; he broke his own rules, took a bath after sunset and was bitten by a mosquito.4 Overwhelmingly, though, the factor that inhibited close pursuit of the beaten enemy was the weather. Torrential rain slowed operations on all fronts in Assam and Manipur, while the exhausted heroes of Kohima-Imphal needed rest and recreation in India before they could play any further part in hostilities. Slim described the terrible conditions in mud and rain the pursuers had to endure: ‘Hill tracks in a terrible state, either so slippery that men can hardly walk or knee-deep in mud. Administrative difficulties considerable. Half a company took ten hours to carry two stretcher cases four miles. A party of men without packs took seven hours to cover five miles.’5

  Beset by the monsoon and malaria – 9 Brigade of 5 Division lost only nine killed and 85 wounded in fighting in July, but 507 to sickness and disease – Slim’s army dogged the enemy’s heels from July to November but always cautiously, for the Japanese were expert at holding up their progress with well-placed snipers and booby traps. Although victorious, the men of 14th Army found the pursuit demoralising work, feeling particular anticlimax when they finally entered some strategic objective that had been fought over for months. ‘There was for the victors none of the thrill of marching through streets which, even if battered, were those of a great, perhaps historic, city – a Paris or a Rome. There were no liberated crowds to greet the troops.’6 When 11 East African Division entered Tamu, the effect was profoundly depressing: ‘The place was a charnel house, of a macabre eeriness hard to describe. 550 Japanese corpses lay unburied in its streets and houses, many grouped grotesquely around stone Buddhas which looked blandly out over the sacrifices huddled at their feet. Dozens more, over a hundred, lay in indescribable filth, dying of disease and starvation, among the corpses.’7 Everywhere they went, the Anglo-Indian troops found evidence that the Japanese had suffered the most colossal defeat, far greater than Slim at first realised. Yet Slim had to proceed with circumspection. His men were suffering badly from malnutrition, not just from the shortage of food but because of its very nature, with no fruit or fresh vegetables. Also, medical research was beginning to throw up the alarming discovery that because of the stress of combat, food passed rapidly through the body without the extraction of the necessary vitamins and minerals – one of the by-products of a metabolism traumatised by battle. After clearing the enemy presence from Dimapur and Kohima and then the Imphal plain farther south in mopping-up operations in July, Slim made an important decision. Once the Japanese were completely cleared out of the Tamu and Tiddim areas, he would get his pioneers and engineers to concentrate on building roads in the Kabaw valley in preference to the Tiddim road, and would introduce the East African division there on the grounds that, though it was a hotbed of malaria, the East Africans should be more resistant to it; they were, though they still took losses from the disease. In many ways it was a more deadly enemy than the Japanese. In the first six months of 1944, the entire South-East Asia Command lost 40,000 killed and wounded in battle but 282,000 to various tropical diseases, and in October, 14th Army had a malaria rate of 84 per cent. The snag about abandoning the Tiddim road was that henceforth casualties would either have to accompany the columns or be dumped in the villages they passed through; they could no longer be evacuated by air.8

  While the pursuit went on, Slim turned his mind to the issue of future strategy. After nagging the combined chiefs for six months for a clear directive on priorities and strategy for SEAC, Mountbatten got a shock when it finally arrived on 3 June. There was nothing about his beloved amphibious operations and nothing relevant to Slim’s ambition for an invasion of central Burma. Instead – and clearly reflecting that by 1944 the USA easily had the whip hand in Allied decision-making – all the emphasis was on China, as the main adjunct to the war in the Pacific. SEAC was directed to increase air supplies over the Hump and to open land routes to China.9 It is interesting that this disappointing response did not even satisfy Stilwell’s aims and objectives. Mountbatten quickly took the decision to ignore the feeble response from the combined chiefs and discussed with Slim and Giffard the three main possibilities, as they saw it. One was a limited crossing of the Chindwin by 14th Army, designed to link up with Stilwell and the Chinese. The second was an amphibious assault on Rangoon, after whose fall the Allies would march to Mandalay. This was Mountbatten’s favourite, and the British chiefs of staff favoured it as an easy option; the Supreme Commander gave it the code name DRACULA.10 The third was code-named CAPITAL and was Slim’s brainchild. This was an overland invasion of central and southern Burma, crossing the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy and taking 14th Army to Mandalay and Lashio. Slim, whose strategic brain was greatly superior to his colleagues’, knew that only his overland advance would work. It must be stressed that, regardless of what was later claimed by bandwagon jumpers (Mountbatten included), this was entirely Slim’s idea and no other commander envisaged it. As the military historian Ronald Lewin has accurately remarked, Slim was an artist whose inner eye saw the aesthetic curve from Imphal though the Irrawaddy to Rangoon.11 But Mountbatten and Giffard were highly dubious, especially when Slim insisted he could achieve his goal with the existing 14th Army and without extra resources. Slim allowed himself a rare moment of bitterness about the general defeatism in Kandy and Delhi concerning his plans. Nevertheless, he was given the green light and began planning CAPITAL in July; his staff called the project to capture Rangoon overland SOB (Sea or Bust).12

  July was a difficult month for Mountbatten. Not only were there the continual wrangles with Stilwell about Lentaigne and the Chindits, but, having sacked Giffard, he was running out of patience with both Peirse and Somerville as well. On the other hand, if he sacked them too, he would be in danger of losing credibility in London. Meanwhile Slim and Giffard were insisting that 14th Army should move forward and undertake CAPITAL even if DRACULA was approved, but Mountbatten suspected that if that operation was too far advanced by the time he got the approval for his amphibious assault on Rangoon, the
combined chiefs would use that as an excuse to cancel DRACULA later. In addition, there were ominous rumblings from Churchill. Still obsessed with an attack on Sumatra – which would of itself preclude DRACULA – he was also hankering after supporting MacArthur’s left flank in the Pacific by a massive effort from Australia. The idea had been broached that Mountbatten might be reassigned to Australia as MacArthur’s deputy – not at all what the Supreme Commander wanted, even if he could overcome the hostility of the Admiralty to the idea of him as commander of the British fleet in the Pacific, which was what such a position would entail.13 For all these reasons Mountbatten decided his presence in London was essential; he needed to ‘pitch’ for DRACULA and get all rival ideas scotched. Stilwell came down to Kandy for a ‘difficult’ meeting on 1 August and to take over as acting supreme commander while Mountbatten was away.14 The Supreme Commander flew off and arrived in London on 5 August. He linked up with Wedemeyer, who, in Washington in June, had been secretly rocking the boat and backing the official US line that only China mattered, and that DRACULA and all operations of its ilk were simply about restoring the British Empire, which should form no part of US policy. Nevertheless, Mountbatten took him to the meetings with Alanbrooke and other military commanders, on the assumption that he was loyal and would back his amphibious plans. At a conference on 7 August, Alanbrooke agreed that the capture of Myitkyina had changed everything, that the British would therefore have to go on campaigning in Burma and that the best way forward was the airborne attack on Rangoon.15