There was, however, one bright gleam on the otherwise murky scene—the Chinese. At Christmas 1941, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had generously offered the Chinese V and VI Armies to co-operate in the defence of Burma. General Wavell had accepted at once the 93rd Division of VI Army, the most readily available, and moved it into the Shan States; the 49th Division of the same army was to be brought through Lashio to the Salween at Takaw. The third division, the 55th, which was scattered and not as ready as the others, was to concentrate at Wanting, there to equip and train. At the end of January, when arrangements for their maintenance had been hurriedly made, the Generalissimo, at Hutton’s request, agreed that V Army should take over the Toungoo area. This army consisted of the 22nd, 96th, and 200th Divisions, and was considered the best-equipped and trained force in China. During February, the Chinese troops, much hampered by lack of transport, moved forward into Burma.
A great deal of criticism has been directed against the British command for not at once accepting the whole of the Chinese forces offered, but it was then decided, with a great deal of justification, that as these armies expected to subsist entirely on the country and had practically no supply or transport services, it would be impossible to move or maintain very large numbers until some organization to do so had been improvised. With transport for their move so short and only one road available, it is very doubtful, even if all the Chinese divisions had been accepted at once, whether they would have arrived in Burma any quicker than they did. Their maintenance would certainly have been most precarious. In any case, the move of the 22nd and 96th Divisions was delayed on the orders of the Generalissimo, while he changed his mind over the command of Chinese troops in Burma. By mid-March 1942, only one division of V Army, the 200th, had reached Toungoo in the Sittang Valley, the rest of the army was slowly following up, with VI Army behind it. This would in due course allow General Alexander to transfer the 1st Burma Division from Toungoo across to the Irrawaddy Valley to join 17th Indian Division. He would then have two groups, a Chinese and a British, separated by the tangled, jungle-covered hills of the Pegu Yomas.
To add to General Alexander’s difficulties, command in the Chinese group was somewhat uncertain. In mid-March, the American commander, Lieut.-General Stilwell, arrived, in the double capacity of commander of all Chinese forces in Burma and Chief of Staff to the Generalissimo. In the first, he was subordinate to General Alexander, but not, of course, in the second. Stilwell was much hampered by inadequate staff and signals. Moreover, there was a Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, General Lo Cho Ying, through whom all his orders had to go to the Army Commanders. These officers evinced considerable independence in selecting which of the orders they would accept, and even divisional commanders at times showed a tendency to pick and choose. They were able to back up their refusals with some show of legality as Chiang Kai-shek had not actually given Stilwell his official seal as Commander-in-Chief. And, if this were not enough, there was, seated at Lashio with a Chinese mission, a General Lin Wei, who as the Generalissimo’s direct representative blandly disclaimed all operational responsibility, but, as he modestly put it, ‘exerted influence’. Such was this ‘influence’ that no Chinese Army Commander would carry out an Alexander-Stilwell-Lo order unless it had been passed by him.
A Chinese ‘army’ corresponded to a European corps and consisted usually of two or three divisions. The division itself was not only much smaller than its British or American equivalent, having a strength of from seven to nine thousand, but only two-thirds of the men were armed; the other third replaced the absent animal or motor transport and acted as carriers. As a result the rifle-power of a Chinese division at full strength rarely exceeded three thousand, with a couple of hundred light machine-guns, thirty or forty medium machine-guns, and a few three-inch mortars. There were no artillery units except a very occasional anti-tank gun of small calibre, no medical services, meagre signals, a staff car or two, half a dozen trucks, and a couple of hundred shaggy, ill-kept ponies. Nevertheless, the Chinese soldier was tough, brave, and experienced—after all, he had already been fighting on his own without help for years. He was the veteran among the Allies, and could claim up to this time that he had held back the Japanese more successfully than any of the others. Indeed, he registered his arrival in the forward areas by several minor but marked successes against enemy detachments.
In Maymyo, I had talks with many staff officers, often old friends with whom I had served in years gone by, and attended several conferences, including one with a Chinese general who had played a great part in the only real victory the Chinese had won against the Japanese up to that time—Changsha. I drew him on one side and listened very carefully, through an interpreter, to his account of the tactics of that battle. His experience was that the Japanese, confident in their own prowess, frequently attacked on a very small administrative margin of safety. He estimated that a Japanese force would usually not have more than nine days’ supplies available. If you could hold the Japanese for that time, prevent them capturing your supplies, and then counter-attack them, you would destroy them. I listened to him with interest—after all he was the only Allied commander I had heard of who had defeated the Japanese in even one battle. There were, of course, certain snags in the application of this theory, but I thought its main principles sound. I remembered it and, later, acted on it.
I was still quite ignorant as to why I had been brought to Burma, and again no one seemed willing to enlighten me. My secret fear was that I was going to be told to take over Chief of Staff to General Alexander in place of Hutton, who was going back to India. General Alexander would have been a charming and unselfish master to work for, but, apart from the fact that I could never be in the same class as Hutton as a staff officer—he was outstanding in that capacity—I had never fancied myself in that line at all. I had been a second-grade general staff officer in India ten years before, and for a short time in early 1941 I had been a Brigadier, General Staff. I had had enough experience, anyway, to convince me, and I think others, that whatever I was like as a commander I was certainly worse as a staff officer.
A day at Mandalay while we waited for an aircraft gave us an opportunity to look around. We saw a number of units and details that had been withdrawn for various reasons from the fighting to reform or be used as reinforcements. Gunners who had lost their guns—the most pathetic people in the world—staffs of broken-up formations and evacuated camps, a hotchpotch of bits and pieces, odd groups and individuals. The British looked worried, the Indians puzzled, and the Burmese sulky. I had a suspicion that, unless someone very quickly took hold pretty tightly, a rot might set in behind the front.
We started on our return journey to India still without my future being revealed, and I began to fear an even worse fate—I might be destined for some staff job in India. However, it was no good worrying. I should have to be told soon. I got no farther than Calcutta. There, immediately after breakfast on the day of my arrival, in the gloomy and, I suspect, insanitary Government House, I was sent for by General Wavell. He was standing in one of the visitors’ sitting-rooms, in his usual firmly planted attitude. He had seen swept away, in overwhelming disaster, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and Allied sea and air power in the Far East. He held at that moment the most difficult command in the world—India and Burma. Yet it gave one confidence to look at him. I had seen him at the height of dazzling success, and he had stood and looked calmly and thoughtfully at me in the same way as he looked at me now. He asked some questions on what I had seen in Burma. When I had answered, he said, ‘I see’, and we lapsed into silence. He broke it by saying without any preliminaries, ‘I want you to go back to Burma to take command of the corps that is to be formed there.’
My heart gave a thump. This was better than a staff job! But I knew enough now to realize that a command in Burma was more likely to be a test, and a tough one, than a triumph.
As if he knew my thoughts, he went on, ‘Alexande
r has a most difficult task. You won’t find yours easy.’ Another pause, and then, ‘The sooner you get there the better.’
‘I’ll start tomorrow morning,’ I assured him.
‘I see.’
A pause.
Emboldened, I asked him why Singapore had fallen as it did. He looked steadily at me for a moment and then told me. He wished me luck. We shook hands and I left.
Back in my room, I sat under a slow-moving electric fan, and thought. There was a good deal to think about—what I had heard and seen in Burma and what General Wavell had told me about Singapore. With a map on my knees I reflected how little I knew about Burma. I did what I always do in such circumstances—reduced the map to a rough diagram with the distances between the main places marked. When you have got such a diagram into your head you have a skeleton of the terrain and can cover it with the flesh and features of further knowledge without distortion. I reflected also how very ignorant I was of the Japanese, their methods and their commanders. In 1938, when I was commanding the 2/7th Gurkhas, I had taken the Japanese as enemy in my annual battalion training in the hills round Shillong. I had also used some officers and men of the Assam Rifles, a military police force who controlled the tribes of the Eastern Frontier, to give us instruction in jungle fighting. Sitting in Government House, I thought with a little spasm of conceit that my unit had been one of the very few in the British Empire that had done some jungle training, and I smiled, wryly, when I thought of it now in the desert with my old 10th Indian Division. It is a bit hard always to train British forces for the next war as so many voluble advisers urge us! I tried to recall the Japanese organization as I had learnt it for that battalion training, but my knowledge had only been sketchy and my recollection was hazy. I really did know very little.
Then more immediate personal details forced themselves to my attention. I had been travelling light, with not more than twenty or thirty pounds of kit. My baggage with all my camp equipment and the rest was somewhere between Baghdad and Bombay. I got hold of an A.D.C. and asked him to produce me an Indian tailor. Within half an hour the darzi had run the tape over me, noted my measurements on the edge of a newspaper, and departed with an order to produce three khaki drill bush shirts, three pairs of slacks and shirts by five o’clock the next morning. He swore he would—and he did, by dint of sitting up stitching all night.
That evening, after dinner in the great dining-room of Government House, we went in a party to an air-conditioned cinema. Watching the usual inane picture seemed rather a stupid way of spending one’s last evening in civilization, but the resources of the city for intelligent recreation were limited, and I did not feel that more thinking in my room would get me anywhere.
I rose early, packed the fruits of the tailor’s labour in my valise, and prepared to set out. However, as so often happened, an inquiry by telephone made it clear that my aircraft would not be ready at the time originally given. I spent a couple of hours, therefore, in shopping for a few extras, accompanied by the helpful A.D.C. This young man worked hard on me, using all his charm—and he had a lot—to persuade me to take him to Burma. Apart from a reluctance to rob my kind host, the Governor, of an A.D.C., I discovered that the boy had by no means recovered from a serious wound got in North Africa. But his heart was all right.
At the revised time I went to Dum Dum aerodrome, on the outskirts of Calcutta. It was an infuriating place for a passenger, and remained so until Air Marshal Coryton put it in order in 1945. After the usual difficulty in finding anyone who knew anything about one’s projected journey, or indeed about anything at all, I eventually located the pilot and the Lysander that were to take me to Burma. The pilot was a cheerful young Sikh of the Indian Air Force, who strangely enough had flown me once or twice in Iraq. We strapped on our parachutes and climbed into our seats. The aircraft then refused to start. It went on refusing for half an hour. At the end of that time my Sikh, cheerful as ever, started off to find another Lysander. Eventually he did, and we transferred to it and took off.
Petrol capacity compelled us to proceed by a series of hops. At Chittagong swarms of coolies had to be cleared before we could land, and I thought my light-hearted Sikh would write a few of them off and possibly us too. But I need have had no fears, he was a most skilful pilot. Time was getting on when, after a cup of tea, we took off again, and flew on over what seemed interminable jungle. The sun had set and petrol was getting a bit low when suddenly we saw the glistening Irrawaddy, and crossed it by a white pagoda that showed up in the dusk. My pilot’s navigation had been excellent; he had struck the river just opposite our destination, the airfield at Magwe. We circled, waiting for a signal from the ground, but no lamp flickered, so we landed and taxied up the runway. No one emerged to guide us, and we halted at the end of the strip. Still no one appeared. Darkness was falling rapidly, and all around us parked closely together were aircraft. I got out and walked towards some huts, which were evidently the control station. The door of the first was open. It was an office, but empty; so were the others. My pilot joined me, but, as far as we could discover, the airfield and the bulk of the British aircraft in Burma were completely deserted. The Sikh found a telephone but failed to get any response from the other end, wherever that was. While he still hopefully went on ringing, I wandered to the road that skirted the airfield, and at last a truck with some Burma Rifles in it came along. I hailed it, got the pilot, and we drove into R.A.F. Wing H.Q. in Magwe, some two or three miles away. There I found everyone in good heart and cheer. When I suggested that it was a bit rash to leave so many aeroplanes on a deserted airfield in the midst of a not too reliable population, I was told that it was the Army’s business to look after their safety. Although I knew warning had been sent from India, I never discovered whether I had really been expected or not. It was a strange arrival, and not too reassuring as to either the standard of staff work in Burma or the safety of our precious aircraft.
CHAPTER II
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
NEXT morning, the 13th March 1942, I flew south to Prome, and there met General Alexander and the two divisional commanders, who had been called in for a conference. The 1st Burma Division was under Major-General Bruce Scott; the 17th Indian Division under Major-General ‘Punch’ Cowan. By a trick of fate for which I shall always be very thankful, Scott, Cowan, and I all came from the 1st Battalion, 6th Gurkhas. We had served and lived together for twenty-odd years; we—and our wives—were the closest friends; our children had been brought up together in the happiest of regiments. I could not have found two men in whom I had more confidence or with whom I would rather have worked. The fact that we were on these terms was more than a help in the tough times ahead. It meant that we understood one another, that each knew how the others would react and that the most searching tests would still find us a team. I have never heard of any other occasion on which the corps commander and both his divisional commanders came not only from the same regiment but from the same battalion. So unique a coincidence demanded that the corps should be brilliantly successful. Alas, we were thoroughly defeated, but whatever the reasons for that, they were certainly not in the divisional commanders. Both had distinguished themselves as young officers in the First World War and they had seen much and successful active service between the two world wars. They were now veterans in fighting the Japanese, and Cowan especially, both as Second-in-Command to Smyth and later as his successor in command of the division, had, I suppose, more experience of their methods and tactics than any other British senior officer. I was fortunate in finding at the heads of my divisions such examples of the able, highly trained, and truly professional younger leaders that the British and Indian Armies had quietly produced in surprising numbers, while their countrymen were laughing at cartoons of ‘Colonel Blimp’.
General Alexander, finding it unnecessary to introduce me to my divisional commanders, began without preamble to issue his directive to i Burma Corps. I had driven straight to the conference from the airfield and had only
a very general idea of what my corps was, where it was, and of the actual situation. Most of the place-names even were unfamiliar to me, and I groped over the map for them. However, I still had the rough diagram I had made in Calcutta two days before fairly well in my head, and that helped.
The situation briefly was that the 17th Division, not yet by any means fully re-equipped or reorganized after the Sittang disaster, was re-forming some thirty miles south of Prome, and was at the moment out of touch with the enemy. The 1st Burma Division was about Toungoo, some eighty miles to the east and the other side of the jungle hills of the Yomas, holding the Sittang Valley. The Chinese V Army was moving in to relieve it, so that it could be transferred to the Irrawaddy front. As the Chinese would not go south of Toungoo, 1 Burma Corps would cover Prome. Thus the Allied army would hold a roughly level front right across Burma, while the Chinese assembled and my corps collected together.
The conference was a short one, and General Alexander left by air immediately after lunch. I had a few words with Scott, who had been completely surprised to see me, and asked him to get his division over to join the 17th as quickly as the arrival of the Chinese would let him. Then I turned to have a first look at my corps headquarters.
Defeat Into Victory Page 4
