Defeat Into Victory
Page 3
Much of this we heard that evening, sitting over our drinks at Akyab. We learnt, too, that with the fall of Rangoon the Air Force had had to be withdrawn into Central Burma. What was left of it had been split into two mixed Wings, one at Magwe, one at Akyab. The split was forced upon us largely for administrative reasons—my first acquaintance with the overriding force of supply and maintenance factors in Burma. With Rangoon gone, the Air Force, like the Army, must live almost wholly on its hump. No supplies or reinforcements could reach Central Burma overland or by sea; only a tiny trickle might come by air. The whole of the Air Force maintenance resources and reserves in Burma were surveyed and calculation of what these could maintain was made. That decided the strength of the force at Magwe. The remainder went to Akyab, where it was hoped to maintain them by sea from India. As a result the Wing at Magwe was composed of:
Improvised Wing H.Q.
One Hurricane Squadron, R.A.F.
One Bomber Squadron, R.A.F.
A detachment Army Co-operation Flight, R.A.F.
Pursuit Squadron, A.V.G.
R.D.F. Station.
The A.V.G. Squadron was by now very weak and our one ewe lamb of an R.D.F. station on its last legs.
There were left for Akyab:
An improvised H.Q.
One Hurricane Squadron (obsolete Mk. I).
A General Reconnaissance Flight.
A detachment Communication Flight.
Magwe had been chosen for the Burma Wing, known as ‘Burwing’, for the following reasons:
(i) It was covered by two lines of telephone, one down the Sittang, the other down the Irrawaddy Valley, along which the Burma Observer Corps could be stationed. Some warning might thus be obtained.
(ii) There was no airstrip south of Magwe big enough for modern bombers or fighters to operate from.
(iii) It was the only airfield from which the army retreating up the Irrawaddy could be covered.
With all its faults, Magwe was, therefore, the best, and in fact the only, choice.
We also learnt that, in addition to the Air Marshal’s responsibilities in Burma, he had been ordered by the Air Officer Commanding, India, under whose command he was, to organize the air defence of Calcutta, of the industrial centres of Bengal and Bihar, and of the oil installations at Digboi in Assam. He was to continue offensive bombing from India in support of the Burma Army and to reconnoitre and attack enemy vessels in the Bay of Bengal. This new directive would compel him to set up his H.Q. in Calcutta, and he proposed to move there in a few days.
Sixteen months before, in the Sudan, I had learnt a sharp lesson on the necessity for the headquarters of the land forces and of the air forces supporting them to be together. I was, therefore, rather dismayed to find that for the Burma campaign Air Headquarters at Calcutta and Army Headquarters at Maymyo, near Mandalay, were to be five hundred miles apart by air and unconnected by land. Even the Burwing at Magwe was about two hundred miles from Army Headquarters, and until 1945 this pull between the defence of Calcutta and the Burma campaign continued. It was, with the paucity of resources, unavoidable, but it hampered the free movement of air support in the theatre, and air commanders were compelled to keep looking over their shoulders.
Next day we went on from Akyab to Magwe, now our main air base in Burma. We flew over the Arakan Yomas, and I had my first sight of the jungle-clad hills of Burma. Flying over them you can realize what an obstacle they are to vision, but you cannot really appreciate what an obstacle they are to movement. To do that you must hack and push your way through the clinging, tight-packed greenery, scramble up the precipitous slopes and slide down the other side, endlessly, as if you were walking along the teeth of a saw. I often wished afterwards that some of my visitors, who measured distances on small-scale maps, and were politely astonished at the slowness with which I proposed to advance, had walked to my headquarters instead of flown. But all that was to come later. Now, as we roared over these endless, razor-edged ridges, covered to their very summits with the densest jungle, they gave the impression of a thick-piled, dull green carpet, rucked up into fold after fold. It was a relief to me, my eyes for the past year attuned to the bare desert, to come out suddenly on to the Irrawaddy with its narrow strip of comparatively open country on each side of the river.
At Magwe, after a talk with a very confident local air force commander, Morris and I flew, in a smaller plane, to Mandalay, landing, after some hesitation, on a very rough strip cleared among rice fields, a few miles from the town. Here we sat, rather forlorn, until eventually a station wagon appeared, and we drove up the winding road to Maymyo, the summer capital of Burma. It was a delightful spot, with English houses in the best Surrey stockbroker style, each in its own spacious garden.
Army Headquarters, Burma, was moving in, after its hazardous escape from Rangoon, and it was quite evident that some of it had been considerably shaken by that experience. To begin with, Army Headquarters, Burma, was neither organized, manned, nor trained as a mobile headquarters to command fighting formations in the field. It was, in fact, a miniature peacetime War Office on the Delhi-Whitehall model. Hurried additions and expansions had been made to meet the sudden onset of invasion, but it was very far from being a suitable instrument for the direct control of a campaign. The unfortunate Lieut.-General Hutton, who took over command in Burma just as the Japanese attack started, was, as commander in the field, terribly hampered by having to work through a cumbersome headquarters designed for quite different purposes. Given a little time, I have no doubt that Hutton, with his great organizational powers, would have evolved a more suitable instrument, but he was plunged at once into a critical tactical situation when such reforms became wellnigh impossible. One need not be unduly surprised or indignant that we entered the war with no superior field headquarters in this theatre. Burma had seemed less likely to be attacked than Britain, and Britain had only a War Office until crisis forced the appointment of a Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, with an adequate headquarters. However, an unsuitable headquarters was only one of several crippling handicaps under which Hutton and his forces started their war.
In Burma our unpreparedness when the blow fell was extreme, and we paid for it. The basic error was that not only did few people in Burma, and no one outside it, expect that it would be attacked, but there was no clear or continuous decision as to who would be responsible for defence preparations or for its actual defence if it were attacked. Burma, while politically separated from India in 1937, was in every way physically linked to it for defence. Burma was, in fact, a defensive outwork of India; it would depend on India for the bulk of its troops and India would be its base. It was essential that the closest ties should be kept without interruption between the two countries. Up to 1937 Burma had been part of India, and its defence, as all its other activities, had been a matter for the Indian Government. Then with political separation from India, Burma was made fully responsible for its own military forces. A change came with the outbreak of war with Germany. In September 1939, Burma’s forces were placed for operational purposes under the British Chiefs of Staff, but remained for finance and administration under their own Government. Suddenly, in November 1940, operational control was transferred to the recently formed Far Eastern Command in Singapore, while administrative responsibility was divided between the Burma Government and the War Office in London, which now contributed substantially to the defence budget of Burma. Both Singapore and London had more urgent matters on their doorsteps than the needs of distant Burma, and to separate operational from administrative responsibility is to break a rule that I have never seen violated without someone paying a heavy penalty. Indeed, it had been quite obvious, and very understandable, that neither of its new masters was taking much interest in Burma, and local commanders and successive Commanders-in-Chief in India pressed for its return to India. Just over a year later, on 12th December 1941, when a Japanese attack was seen to be imminent, it was at last passed back to India, but not for long. On the 30th of
the same month, just as the Japanese attack really started, it was, in spite of protests locally and in India, tossed to yet another rather reluctant master—this time to the new A.B.D.A., as with our passion for initials the South-West Pacific Command was called. Under this organization, the Burma front was to be operationally controlled from Java and administered from Delhi. With the rapid break-up of A.B.D.A. following the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, back Burma came again to India. Thus in the space of about sixteen vital months there had been five separate superior headquarters in turn responsible for the defence of Burma, and for practically the whole of that time administrative had been separated from operational control. These changes alone would have ensured delay, neglect, confusion, and a lack of understanding of local difficulties. They led also to little or no progress being made in linking up India and Burma by road, so that when war came there was no overland communication between them.
Added to this was the usual chronic shortage of troops, and of equipment for even the troops we had. The 17th Indian Division, newly arrived with its brigades hurriedly collected from other formations, had been trained and equipped, like all Indian Army divisions, for desert warfare in the Middle East. Its transport was mechanical and except in open country it was incapable of operating off a road. There are few roads in Burma. The other formation, the 1st Burma Division, contained a high proportion of Burmese units, untried, many raised in a last-minute scramble and as yet without tradition. Neither division had battle experience. Their allotment of artillery was far below that of normal divisions and often of obsolete type. An anti-tank battery, for example, was equipped with Austrian 77-mm. guns, captured by the Italians in 1918 and in turn taken by us twenty-two years later from the Italians in the Western Desert. These museum pieces were, it is interesting to note, without dial sights and had one hundred and twenty rounds per gun as their total ammunition supply. Reinforcements promised from England and Africa had been diverted to Singapore in an eleventh-hour effort to save the fortress or, as in the case of the Australian divisions, diverted to hold Ceylon, itself under threat of overwhelming Japanese sea power. As a result, in the Japanese first thrust our two ill-prepared divisions, one Indian, one Burmese, supported by the tiny British-American Air Force, were pitted against superior and well-equipped veteran forces of jungle-trained troops and against a vastly preponderant air power.
Geographically, from the first clash we suffered from the fact that our main line of communication, the railway from Rangoon to Mandalay, ran from south to north, parallel and near to the Siamese frontier, liable almost everywhere to attack from the east. The original plan of defence, for this reason, tied a large portion of our scanty forces, including most of the Burma Division, to the southern Shan States, as it was expected that the main Japanese attack would come via Kengtung direct on to this vulnerable route. Another cause of dispersion was the long thin tail of Burma, Tenasserim, running four hundred miles to the south, with an average width of about forty miles. It would, from the Burma point of view, have been better to have abandoned this strip of territory, but the airfields in it had a twofold importance. First, they were needed for the air route to Singapore or the Dutch East Indies, and, second, in enemy hands they would be a most serious threat to Rangoon. An attempt was, therefore, made to hold it by small scattered garrisons.
The main Japanese thrust came, not as expected through the Shan States, but over the Kaw Kareik Pass and through Tenasserim on to Moulmein. For fear of offending the neutral susceptibilities of the Siamese, we had not been allowed to set up any intelligence organization in that country, and our ignorance of Japanese movements was profound. The attack broke through the detachment holding the Pass, and after a fight the enemy advancing from the south took Moulmein, the main body of the 17th Division falling back northward on Bilin. There it fought a gallant action against superior numbers, but under threat of encirclement was compelled again to withdraw. Meanwhile the small garrisons in Tenasserim, attacked by air and land, had been evacuated by sea. Then followed, on the 22nd and 23rd February, the disaster at the Sittang River. The 17th Division, retreating by the jungle track to the river and tied to that track by its motor transport, found that strong Japanese forces moving round the flank had cut in between the leading brigade, now across the river, and the remainder of the division. Desperately and gallantly the two brigades still east of the river fought to break through to the great Sittang railway bridge, held by their comrades, their only hope of getting their vehicles, and indeed themselves, over the six-hundred-yard-wide stream. Then came tragedy. The Divisional Commander was roused in the night to be told that the small bridgehead on the east bank could hold out no longer; that the Japanese were almost on the bridge itself. He had to decide whether to risk the bridge falling intact into the enemy’s hands, when they could sweep on to Rangoon, or to blow it up, leaving a large part of his force cut off on the other side, but with the great obstacle still between the Japanese and the capital. He gave the order to blow. The bridgehead garrison was withdrawn to the west bank and the bridge destroyed. It is easy to criticize the decision; it is not easy to make such a decision. Only those who have been faced with the immediate choice of similar grim alternatives can understand the weight of decision that presses on a commander.
The sound of the explosion was a signal for a sudden lull in battle. Both sides knew what it meant: the Japanese that however fiercely they attacked they could not capture the bridge; the British that they were in desperately hard case. With a final effort they broke through to the bank. In horror they saw the broken bridge; it was hopeless to attempt to get vehicles or guns across. These were, as far as possible, destroyed, and men and officers individually and in parties stripped themselves and took to the water. A few managed to cross with their arms on rough rafts or petrol tins; the majority had to swim for it, helped only by bamboos. It was impossible for any man, even a powerful swimmer, burdened by equipment or arms to get over. Numbers were drowned; some were shot while crossing. By the afternoon of the 24th, all that had reached the west bank out of the eight battalions that had been cut off was under two thousand officers and men, with five hundred and fifty rifles, ten Bren guns, and twelve tommy-guns between them. Almost all were without boots, and most were reduced to their underwear.
This was the decisive battle of the first campaign. After it, however gallantly our troops fought, there was little hope of holding Rangoon. And when Rangoon went, as it did on the 9th March, the whole army in Burma was cut off from the outside world almost as effectively as had been the two brigades on the east bank of the Sittang.
No wonder then that when at Maymyo I first met General Alexander, newly, and by sheer luck, arrived from Rangoon, he was, while as calm as ever, obviously worried about the situation. Hutton, his predecessor and now his Chief of Staff, struggling to bring order out of complications and difficulties that threatened chaos, looked far from fit. For the last two months he had been under tremendous strain and only a short while before he had been in a particularly nasty air crash in which his pilot had been killed and he himself knocked about to an extent that would have put a less courageous man into hospital for weeks. He was, I think, still feeling the effects of that accident. The plain fact was that first Hutton, and then General Alexander who replaced him, had each in turn found himself in the normal position of a British general at the start of a war—called upon to carry out a task impossible with the means provided.
A moment ago, I wrote that General Alexander had escaped from Rangoon by sheer luck. And it was that. The whole British force from Rangoon, and with it General Alexander and his headquarters, would have been destroyed had it not been for the typically rigid adherence to the letter of his orders by a Japanese divisional commander. Coming from the east, by paths through hills and jungle in a swoop on the city, he had been told to by-pass it to the north and, swinging round, to attack it from the west, the unexpected direction. To cover his flank as he crossed north of Rangoon, he put out
a strong block on the main Prome road. He thus completely bottled up the British force as it tried to get away. Several attacks were made on the road-block, but Japanese tenacity proved a match for British and Indian valour. The obstacle remained. All the Japanese commander had to do then was to keep his road-block in position and with the rest of his troops attack the forty-mile column strung out along the road. Nothing could have saved the British, tied as they were by their mechanical transport to the ribbon of road. Luckily for them, as soon as his main body had crossed on its march west, considering that his flank guard had served its purpose, he withdrew the roadblock. The Japanese division thus entered Rangoon from the west, according to plan; the British, finding the cork removed, flowed on, bag and baggage, to the north, also according to plan.
My interview with General Alexander did not last long. He left to attend a conference with the Governor. I doubt if it can have been a very cheerful one, for the civil picture was no brighter than the military. The people of the country were quite unprepared for invasion and, as the British suffered defeat after defeat and the Japanese swept forward, they were stunned at the collapse of a Power they had always thought, if they thought about it at all, invincible and part of nature. The vast majority had no feeling that the war was their business; they wished only to avoid it. A small minority, mostly soldiers and officials, were actively loyal; about the same number, nationalist politicians, the relics of the old rebels of 1924, students, and some political pongyis (Buddhist priests) were actively hostile. These elements were rendered more formidable by the leadership of Japanese-trained Burmans, imported with the invading army, and by the flocking to their standards of numbers of dacoits and bad characters attracted by the prospect of loot. As the Japanese advanced, desertion among the police, the subordinates of all services, and clerical staffs began to spread. The air raids on towns, with their heavy casualties and great destruction by fire, and the swarms of Indian refugees, flying not so much from the Japanese as from the Burmans among whom they lived, all helped in the breakdown of control and communications. The civil administration was crumbling ahead of the Japanese.