Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  It consisted of a handful of officers collected mainly from Burma Army Headquarters, a few clerks, and a small, very small, detachment of Burma Signals with four wireless sets. Altogether not more than about sixty officers and men, sitting on their valises and kitbags. I asked about office equipment, messing arrangements, tentage, and transport. There was ludicrously little of any of these for the normal set-up of any unit let alone a corps headquarters. The only thing that really reassured me was the Chief of Staff, Brigadier ‘Taffy’ Davies, who had been with Hutton in the same capacity. I had known him for a long time, and he had commanded a battalion in my brigade at the beginning of the war. He left me to be a staff officer, in Iceland of all places, returned from there to India, and so to Burma. If I had been lucky in my divisional commanders I was equally fortunate in my B.G.S. Taffy Davies was something more than a brilliant staff officer; he was a character in his own right. His tall, bony figure grew more and more emaciated as the retreat dragged on while he gave himself no rest, either physical or mental. But he got—and kept—that scratch headquarters working. From nothing and almost with nothing, he formed, organized, and infused it with his own spirit. It never reached one-fifth the size of any other corps headquarters I have seen, or had one-tenth of its equipment but, possibly because we could not issue or keep much paper, it was I believe really efficient. We were never out of touch with our formations; we quickly knew their dispositions and movements, we never failed to feed and ammunition them to the extent possible, and we never failed to get our orders to them in time. We were, of course, a tactical battle headquarters only—the whole of our ‘G’ branch, for instance, moved on two jeeps, one truck, and a couple of motor-cycles—and orders were more often than not verbal. We issued, I think, only four written directives. All things considered, that headquarters was a surprisingly good effort, but it could not have continued for more than a few months at the pressure under which it worked; officers and men could not have stood the strain indefinitely. I had got with Davies a small group of key officers who rivalled even him in energy, unselfishness, ability, and devotion. Simpson, who as ‘A.Q.’, was responsible for a nightmare of improvised administration, Patterson-Knight his right-hand man, whom nothing ever flurried or dismayed, Montgomery the G.2 who never seemed to need sleep, Wilson the Engineer who achieved miracles and died of sheer exhaustion as we reached India. One of the greatest attributes a commander can have is the ability to choose his staff and commanders wisely, but I can claim no credit for the staff I got at Burcorps; that I suspect should belong to Hutton. Whoever was responsible, I am grateful to him.

  As I left with Punch Cowan to visit his division, Taffy Davies was shepherding my headquarters into the Prome Law Courts, while the redoubtable Patterson-Knight proceeded to rustle up an officers’ mess by the simple expedient of collecting cooking-pots, crockery, and cutlery from abandoned European bungalows, and a mess staff from the roadside. A ceaseless stream of Indian refugees of all types and classes was pouring into the town. When a man passed who looked as if he might have been a servant, he was grabbed, interrogated, and, if suitable, installed as cook, waiter, washer-up, or sweeper. Most of these poor creatures were only too glad to become once more part of some organization that would look after them, protect them, and give them someone to whom they could turn. Incidentally, it was thus that Anthony, our mess butler, was procured. I doubt if the British forces would have got out of Burma at all without Anthony. Corps H.Q. certainly could not have kept going. He ran a reasonably decent senior officers’ mess in circumstances of incredible difficulty, and we owed him a great deal. I think he made sure we paid him, but who would grudge him that?

  The 17th Division was moving into an area just south of Okpo, and Cowan drove with me there in his armoured wheeled carrier. As we travelled down the main Rangoon road he told me something of what had befallen his division in the campaign up to then. The fact that he had anything left that could be recognized as a division at all was a great tribute to his troops and above all to him. When we arrived at Divisional Headquarters, in the stilt-raised houses of a Burmese village, almost the first man I met was Brigadier Welchman. I had said good-bye to him in the hospital at Khartoum where we had both been taken from Eritrea, after being shot up in the same truck. He had commanded the artillery regiment in my brigade group in East Africa and been my second-in-command, adviser, and chief support. Here he was, cheerful as ever, and still carrying the spear that had always accompanied him in Africa. ‘Welcher’ was, next to Punch Cowan himself, the greatest morale-raiser I had ever met. I thought it wrong that one divisional headquarters should have both of them, and as I lacked a commander for the corps artillery, of which incidentally there was extremely little, and Welcher was a superb gunner, I deprived Cowan of him.

  We saw a good many of the troops of the 17th Division, British, Indian, and Gurkha. They looked tired, as well they might, and I was shocked at their shortages of equipment and the state of their boots and clothing, but considering all they had gone through recently their spirit was surprisingly good. The strengths of units, while they had been made up to some extent after the Sittang battle by calling up our last reinforcements, were still disturbingly low, and it was a disquieting thought that, with Rangoon gone, there was no hope of further reinforcements.

  Brigadier Anstice’s 7 Armoured Brigade was also under Cowan’s command, and I was delighted to see it and note its condition. Its two regiments of light tanks, American Stuarts or Honeys, mounting as they did only a two-pounder gun and having very thin armour which any anti-tank weapon would pierce, were by no means ideal for the sort of close fighting the terrain required. Any weakness in the tanks, however, was made up by their crews. The 7th Hussars and 2nd Royal Tank Regiment were as good British troops as I had seen anywhere. They had had plenty of fighting in the Western Desert before coming to Burma and they looked what they were—confident, experienced, tough soldiers. Their supporting units, 414 Battery R.H.A., ‘A’ Battery 95 Anti-tank Regiment and the 1st Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment were up to their standard. After seeing as many troops and meeting as many officers, some of them old friends, as I could, I returned to my headquarters.

  This was not the first, nor was it to be the last, time that I had taken over a situation that was not going too well. I knew the feeling of unease that comes first at such times, a sinking of the heart as the gloomy facts crowd in; then the glow of exhilaration as the brain grapples with problem after problem; lastly the tingling of the nerves and the lightening of the spirit, as the urge to get out and tackle the job takes hold. Experience had taught me, however, that before rushing into action it is advisable to get quite clearly fixed in mind what the object of it all is. So now I sat down to think out what our object should be. We had our immediate task—the formation of two groups, Chinese on the Sittang, British on the Irrawaddy, and the stabilization of a front across Burma from Prome to Toungoo—but what was the object behind that, the overall aim? Were we going somewhere to stage a last-ditch stand to hold part of Burma? Or were we, now that Rangoon was lost, going to concentrate on getting the army, by a series of planned withdrawals, back to India intact? Were we hoping that the Chinese, added to the resources we had left, would give us strength enough to counter-attack successfully? On the answers to these questions would depend very much how we carried out any intermediate operation; all would be conditioned by the overriding object of the campaign. What that was we did not know. Indeed, it was never, until the last stages, clear, and I think we suffered increasingly in all our actions from this.

  Still, whatever our eventual purpose, delay, holding, or advance, from all points of view it was necessary, somehow or other, to wrest the initiative from the Japanese. That meant we must hit him, and hit him hard enough to throw him off balance. Could we do it? I thought so. As far as we could make out, our 17th was opposed by die Japanese 33rd Division with possibly some attached units, and an unknown number of hostile Burmese. When the 1st Burma Division joined us
we should, therefore, for the first time be in at least equal, perhaps superior, strength on our front. The Japanese, judging by their form up to date, were bound to attack, and almost certainly at the same time to make a turning movement round our left through the Yomas. If we could collect a mobile reserve, let them commit themselves to the attack, and then strike back in real strength, either at the turning movement as it issued from the jungle or straight down the road at their vitals, we might give them a considerable jar. I made up my mind, therefore, that our object in Burma Corps should be to concentrate our two divisions with a view to counter-attacking at the earliest possible opportunity.

  Within the next day or two, as I moved about among the troops or sat in the judge’s gloomy room, lined with heavy law books, which was my office, several factors—none of them reassuring for the success of our plans—made themselves obvious:

  (i) Our intelligence was extremely bad

  There was no Burmese intelligence organization to give us news from behind the enemy’s lines or even from our own territory. Air reconnaissance was of necessity scanty and from the nature of the country almost always negative and therefore unreliable. We had taken no prisoners. Our only source of information was identification of enemy units by their dead and by documents found on them. Exploitation of even this source was limited because in the whole corps there was only one officer who could speak and read Japanese reasonably well. He laboured day and night, but the inevitable delay in translation often made what he discovered stale news. It is no exaggeration to say that we had practically no useful or reliable information of enemy strength, movements, or intentions. Our first intimation of a Japanese move was usually the stream of red tracer bullets and the animal yells that announced their arrival on our flank or rear. We were like a blind boxer trying to strike an unseen opponent and to parry blows we did not know were coming until they hit us. It was a nasty feeling.

  (ii) We were ill-trained and ill-equipped for jungle warfare

  The Japanese were obviously able to move for several days at a time through jungle that we had regarded as impenetrable. This was not only because they had local Burmese guides, but they travelled lighter than we did and lived much more off the country. Nearly all our transport was mechanical, and this stretched our columns for miles along a single road through the jungle, vulnerable everywhere from air and ground. Our British, Indian, and Gurkha troops were a match for the Japanese in a stand-up fight, but, invariably, this being tied to a road proved our undoing. It made us fight on a narrow front, while the enemy, moving wide through the jungle, encircled us and placed a force behind us across the only road. The Japanese ad developed the art of the road-block to perfection; we seemed to have no answer to it. If we stood and fought where we were, unless the road were reopened, we starved. So invariably we had turned back to clear the road-block, breaking through it usually at the cost of vehicles, and in any case making another withdrawal.

  (iii) Combat units were becoming much below strength in men and equipment

  Casualties, especially in the 17th Division, had been heavy; sickness was on the increase; and there was a fear that the Burmese units, if we were compelled to withdraw farther, would desert at an increasing rate. Obviously, these and future losses could not be made up. There was no communication now with India except by air, and we had a negligible number of transport aircraft. If a battalion went into action today two hundred men short and lost fifty, it would go into action tomorrow two hundred and fifty men short, and so on until it was reduced to impotence. We suffered from an incurable wasting disease.

  (iv) The local inhabitants were not being helpful

  There was nothing in the nature of a Burmese Home Guard or even an organization to provide guides or civil transport. I gathered that little had been done to prepare the people to co-operate against the invader because it had been feared to create alarm, despondency, and possibly disaffection by admitting the possibility of British withdrawal. The hill tribes were almost all actively loyal, but the Burman of the plains, where the bulk of the fighting would take place, was, generally speaking, apathetic and out to avoid getting involved on either side. A small minority was actively hostile under Japanese officers or agents. The civil administration behind our front was showing signs of collapse; although British officials, and most senior Burmese, stuck to their posts, their subordinates were melting away.

  (v) There was a wide gap between our forces in the Sittang Valley and those on the Irrawaddy

  The 1st Burma Division about Toungoo, and the Chinese who were replacing them, were separated from the 17th Division in the Prome area by the eighty-mile stretch of the Pegu Yomas. Through these broken and jungle-covered hills there were no roads, and few tracks. Transfer of forces from one to the other would be difficult and slow, yet the gap, unless held, would leave the Japanese an opportunity for their favourite tactics of encirclement.

  (vi) Morale was threatened

  This was the most serious danger of all. The troops had fought well, but they had had no success. Constant retreats, the bogy of the road-block, the loss of Singapore and Rangoon, and the stories of Japanese supermen in the jungle, combined with the obvious shortages of every kind, could not fail to depress morale. At this stage, the effects of the Sittang disaster on the fighting troops were evident but not irremediable, but morale in the administrative areas in our rear did not impress me as good. There were a lot of badly shaken people about.

  It is one thing to know what is wrong; it is another to put it right. I have no doubt whatever that Hutton, if he had been given even a few months in which to prepare, would have corrected much of this and a lot more too. But I was to find, as he had, that to retrieve the past in the midst of a fierce and relentless present is no easy matter.

  The first thing to get right was the intelligence organization. Until we could rely on a reasonable degree of warning and information about Japanese moves we could not hope successfully to hold off the enemy, let alone judge the moment to strike or even the direction of our blow. Cowan, in the 17th Division, had realized this, too, and had begun the formation of an intelligence screen to cover the front, which he christened the ‘Yomas Intelligence Service’. The guiding spirit in this enterprise was Bill Gunn, a senior member of one of the big Burma trading firms, whom Cowan had very early made his divisional intelligence officer. Scattered all over the forests of the area were numbers of Burmans who in happier times had been engaged in cutting and extracting timber for Gunn’s and other firms. The overseers and more senior men among these became the framework on which we built. Officers we found among the keen young British employees. We began to extend this screen across the Yomas, and we were in great hopes of having something at last that would give reliable warning of any Japanese manœuvre on our flank. To the employees of these firms we added government forest officers and rangers, but when I would have introduced certain other civilians I found I had stumbled on a hornets’ nest. X and Y refused point-blank to serve under Z! They didn’t like him, had never liked him, and he had been a blight on their otherwise idyllic peacetime life. They had some excuse for frayed nerves, but in war these squabbles were silly, unworthy, and most irritating. I am afraid I was a little brusque with one or two, but an appeal to everyone’s sense of duty prevailed and the work went on. I only refer to it as an instance of the many and varied difficulties of military-civil improvisations under pressure. Actually, I should say, as a class our best intelligence officers were not the government civilians, but the outside up-country members of the business firms who had a closer knowledge of the country and its people. It was noticeable that parliamentary government, which had progressed far in the central government and in local administration, seemed to have forced officials to become more and more office-bound. Business, too, seemed among all grades in Burma to have been a better training than government service for initiative.

  The transformation of these young civilians into officers was a simple matter. There was no time for train
ing, nor was it practicable to submit their names through the usual channels and await their publication in the Gazette of India. We needed them now. So my divisional commanders and I told them they were officers and allotted them temporary ranks, second-lieutenant, lieutenant, or even captain, as we thought suited to their age and standing. Such was our poverty of resources that we were hard put to it to provide them with rank badges. One of the young men himself solved this problem by producing his black evening socks—which he was not likely to require for some time—and cutting small squares out of them, which, sewn on his shoulder-straps, adequately indicated his new status. We adopted this as our general method. As may be imagined, there were later certain difficulties over the pay of these somewhat irregularly appointed officers, but in the end all was well.

  Our improvised intelligence screen had considerable weaknesses. First it required time to establish itself, secondly it had no means except runners, or at the best ponies, of getting its news back to a roadhead, and thirdly it had to stay put. Whether we advanced or retreated, we should lose almost all the Burmans in it because they worked from their homes. Even those who would come with us would not be anything like as useful in a new area. Still, if we had a little time and as long as we remained in the area it would be invaluable.

  We, of course, asked urgently for more Japanese-speaking officers or men. We were told that numbers were just starting to learn the language in universities and classes in England and India; as soon as they were proficient we should get them. I am afraid the Japanese got us out of Burma quicker than the brightest students got out of their universities!

  Training for jungle fighting was almost as difficult to improve as intelligence. The Japanese ability to move through jungle more freely than we could, added to our road-bound mechanical transport system, gave them every advantage—advantages which they had earned and deserved. The remedies were for us to learn how to move on a light scale, to become accustomed to the jungle, to do without so much transport, to improve our warnings of hostile movements, and above all to seize the initiative from the enemy. All our tactics up to the present had been dominated by the Japanese road-block, which had already become a nightmare to our troops. A solution to this problem I thought might be found by keeping back a reasonably strong reserve placed where it was likely the enemy would try to plant his road-block, so that he could be attacked at once before he had time to dig in. When the troops were available this proved as good an answer as we could get until we were jungle mobile, but often, with our weakening numbers, we were so pressed in front that such a reserve could not be found.