Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  Meanwhile, the 38th Division, still intact and now operating without any superior command, followed V Army to Naba, fifty miles north of Wuntho, on the Myitkyina railway. There, learning that it would be impossible to reach Myitkyina ahead of the Japanese, Sun turned south again back to Wuntho, where he met the Japanese now in occupation and had a skirmish. With his 113 Regiment as rearguard he then struck across the hills to the Chindwin at Paungbyin where on the 14th May he collided with a Japanese force coming up the river in the attempt to cut off Burma Corps. He held them off, crossed the river, and reached Imphal on the 24th May. Unfortunately, 113 Regiment of his division was cut off and almost destroyed. Nevertheless Sun’s withdrawal was a bold and skilful one and he was the only Chinese commander who brought his troops out, starving and in rags, it is true, but still a fighting formation.

  We had already had one or two heavy showers to give us a foretaste of what the monsoon would do to us, when, on the 12th May, it burst in full fury. On that day our rearguard was leaving Kalewa and our main body toiling up into the hills. From then onwards the retreat was sheer misery. Ploughing their way up slopes, over a track inches deep in slippery mud, soaked to the skin, rotten with fever, ill-fed and shivering as the air grew cooler, the troops went on, hour after hour, day after day. Their only rest at night was to He on the sodden ground under the dripping trees, without even a blanket to cover them. Yet the monsoon which so nearly destroyed us and whose rain beat so mercilessly on our bodies did us one good turn—it stopped dead the Japanese pursuit. As the clouds closed down over the hills, even their air attacks became rare.

  A couple of marches south of Tamu we received our first helping hand from India. An Indian mechanical transport company met us, but its recruit drivers had been so scared by the stories fugitives from Burma had told them and by the perils of the half-made road, that many of them would not drive any farther south. When ordered to do so they took their lorries into the jungle and hid. This difficulty was overcome by putting beside each driver a man from 7 Armoured Brigade who saw to it that they went where they were told—a last service of this magnificent formation. Then the company was of inestimable value in ferrying wounded and sick and sometimes whole units forward.

  On the last day of that nine-hundred-mile retreat I stood on a bank beside the road and watched the rearguard march into India. All of them, British, Indian, and Gurkha, were gaunt and ragged as scarecrows. Yet, as they trudged behind their surviving officers in groups pitifully small, they still carried their arms and kept their ranks, they were still recognizable as fighting units. They might look like scarecrows, but they looked like soldiers too.

  CHAPTER VI

  AFTERMATH

  THE men of Burma Corps, when they reached Imphal, were physically and mentally very near the end of their strength. They had endured casualties, hardships, hunger, sickness, and, above all, the heart-breaking frustration of retreat to a degree that few armies have suffered and yet held together as armies. They were, even at the last, as I had proved^ ready if called upon to turn and fight again, but they had been buoyed up by the thought that once over the border into India, not only would other troops interpose between them and the enemy to give them relief from the strain they had supported so long, but that welcome and rest would await them.

  Instead, they found that the only forces India had been able to provide on this threatened frontier were a single infantry brigade of raw troops, with a promise of the gradual arrival of the remainder of a division. Instead of rest behind covering troops, they were harshly told to do the covering themselves. They did not expect to be treated as heroes, but they did expect to be met as soldiers, who, even if defeated, were by no means disgraced. Yet the attitude adopted towards them by certain commanders and their staffs was that they were only to be dragooned into some show of soldierly spirit by hectoring and sarcasm. Apart from its lack of comradely feeling, this was profoundly had psychology. How much wiser was the treatment of the troops who escaped from Dunkirk. Their hardihood in the face of great material odds was generously recognized, their courage in retreat and defeat acclaimed; at once they were received as if they had won a great victory, not suffered a disaster. My men had endured a longer ordeal with at least equal courage; they deserved an equal welcome. The one they got, intensely resented by commanders and troops, would have had more serious consequences had it not been for the efforts of Scott and Cowan, the divisional commanders, on one side, and of Major-General Savory commanding the 23rd Indian Division, which provided the troops from India, on the other. Savory was a tough, war-experienced, and successful leader, proved in the Middle East, who understood the handling of men. Although he had troubles enough of his own with his raw division, he was always ready to help the less fortunate troops of Burma Corps, and to his soldierly understanding they owed a great deal.

  Savory recognized at once that the fighting troops of Burma Corps, who came out in their disciplined ranks, every man with his weapons but little else, were very different from the hotchpotch of improvised units, rear organizations, non-combatants, civil and military deserters, officerless men, refugees, and riff-raff that had swarmed out ahead of them. Others did not, and my soldiers suffered for the sins of those who had preceded them; nothing could have been more galling to tired, exasperated fighting men, who knew they had done their duty.

  If our welcome into India was not what we expected, the comfort provided was even less. As the wasted units marched wearily into Imphal, through the sheets of monsoon rain, they were directed into areas of jungle on the steep hill-sides and told to bivouac there. It seemed to them that no preparations at all had been made for their reception. They had arrived with nothing but the soaked, worn, and filthy clothing they stood up in; they had no blankets, no waterproof sheets, no tentage. Nor did they find any awaiting them. On those dripping, gloomy hill-sides there was no shelter but the trees, little if any clothing or blankets, no adequate water or medical arrangements. As Taffy Davies, indefatigable in labouring to ease the sufferings of our troops, wryly said, ‘The slogan in India seems to be, “Isn’t that Burma Army annihilated yet?” ’

  The men were bitter, and who could wonder at it, but it was not fair to criticize too fiercely the material failure of India to be ready to receive us. Imphal was a thousand miles from Calcutta at the extreme end of a most rickety line of communication, stretched to breaking-point. India itself was deficient of everything, and it was impossible to get forward over that distance at short notice what a destitute corps required. The fault was a lack of foresight, months before, when preparation should have begun. Yet here, as everywhere, the frequent changes and divisions in the higher responsibility for the Burma campaign had prevented any smooth, long-term development of Assam as a base for an army. The administrative and medical staffs on the spot made superhuman efforts to cope with the tragedy, but they had not a tenth of the resources required. If we had come out of Burma a fully equipped corps, with our proper complement of transport, tentage, and medical supplies, we might have managed, but we had not. We had practically nothing—even if that, as was pointed out to us, was our own fault. Still, the effect of such a reception on tired men, keyed up by the expectation of something very different, can be imagined. Many lost the will to fight longer against the malaria, dysentery, and exhaustion that attacked them. I should estimate that eighty per cent of the fighting men who came out of Burma fell sick, and many died.

  Obviously the whole Burma Army should have been sent on leave or to hospital in India as fast as the transportation system would allow. Unfortunately, the slow arrival of reinforcements from India and the possibility of a Japanese advance against Imphal, compelled the retention of the whole of the 17th and of some units of the 1st Burma Division. Actually, although one would not have gambled on it at the time, the monsoon effectively put a stop to any further Japanese follow-up, and the two armies settled down for some months out of touch with one another.

  The 17th Division, while very reduced in nu
mbers, was still capable of functioning as a division. The 1st Burma Division had at various stages toward the end of the retreat sent to their homes most of its Burmese. Each man was given his rifle, fifty rounds, and three months’ pay, told to go to his village, wait for our return, and be ready to join any organization we should start to fight the Japanese in Burma. These men, mainly Kachins, Chins, Karens, and other hillmen, almost without exception did so, and in due course formed the backbone of the resistance movements that grew in strength as the Japanese occupation continued. Their loss and the casualties its British and Indian units had suffered made it no longer possible for the 1st Burma Division to continue as a division. Its headquarters and the bulk of its remaining units were gradually returned to India and absorbed into the 39th Indian Division, which became a training formation.

  Of the 150 guns of all kinds that Burma Corps had possessed at one time, 74 had reached the Chindwin, but of these only 28 had crossed into India. The total mechanical transport of the corps on arrival at Imphal was 50 lorries and 30 jeeps. Our casualties had been some 13,000 men killed, wounded, and missing, besides, of course, those evacuated sick. The Japanese losses had been only a third of this—4,600 killed and wounded. I kept a record of all we had lost in men, guns, tanks, and vehicles. Some day I hoped to balance the account with perhaps a little interest added.

  On 20th May, I handed over all my troops to 4 Corps, and Burma Corps ceased to exist. There was then nothing more for me to do in Imphal. I said good-bye to Scott and Cowan and to as many units as I could reach. I had a horrible feeling I was deserting them, and the friendship and loyalty that officers and men showed me when I bade them farewell only made it worse. To be cheered by troops whom you have led to victory is grand and exhilarating. To be cheered by the gaunt remnants of those whom you have led only in defeat, withdrawal, and disaster, is infinitely moving—and humbling.

  Burma Corps Headquarters left for India a few days ahead of me. We had handed in all transport, including my own jeep, so I tried to make the journey to railhead at Manipur Road in a civilian refugee car found derelict on the roadside and tinkered into some sort of mobility by my faithful Cameronian bodyguard. By luck and with nursing we got it to Kohima, but there its tired engine gave out. We coasted down the hill to within a few miles of the railway where a rise finally stopped us, and we finished the journey ignominiously in a passing lorry. Even then we had a day to wait for a train, as the railway had been bombed and most of the staff had vanished. At last some military railway operating officials arrived with a train which had to stop at the points outside the small junction. A colonel and a major of Engineers, with a couple of senior railway officials, assembled in the signal cabin and an earnest debate took place as to which lever should be pulled to allow the train to enter the station. At last the fateful decision was made. We watched the colonel seize the lever and fling it over with a professional crash. No signal moved, no point shifted. The wires had been cut, and so we never discovered if it was the right lever after all.

  I slept sitting up nearly all the long crowded journey to Calcutta, and on to Ranchi in Bihar where Burma Corps Headquarters had preceded me. I found it pathetically reduced. Malaria had taken a heavy toll, starting with Taffy Davies, and running right through the party. It was a particularly virulent type of cerebral malaria which struck a man down, sent his temperature rocketing into delirium, and often killed him in three or four days. It was noticeable that the older men, the forty-fives and upwards, seemed to suffer less from disease and exhaustion than the younger ones. In fact, almost the only members of my staff to escape hospital were these presumably well-salted veterans. We tried to pretend it was because we were a tougher generation, but it was actually due, I think, to the greater care we took of ourselves, and the greater docility with which we obeyed medical instructions.

  I had now an opportunity for a few days to sit down and think out what had happened during the last crowded months and why it had happened. The outstanding and incontrovertible fact was that we had taken a thorough beating. We, the Allies, had been outmanoeuvred, outfought, and outgeneralled. It was easy, of course, as it always is, to find excuses for our failure, but excuses are no use for next time; what is wanted are causes and remedies.

  There were certain basic causes for our defeat. The first and overriding one was lack of preparation. Until a few weeks before it happened, no higher authority, civil or military, had expected an invasion of Burma. They were all grievously pressed in other quarters, and what was held to be the comparatively minor responsibility of the defence of Burma was tossed from one to another, so that no one held it long enough to plan and provide over an adequate period. The two great errors that grew from this were the military separation of Burma from India and the division of operational from administrative control. An army whose plan of campaign is founded on fundamental errors in organization cannot hope for success unless it has vast superiority over the enemy in numbers and material. Another fatal omission, springing from the same cause, was that until too late no serious attempt was made to connect India and Burma by road, so that when Rangoon fell the army in Burma was for all practical purposes isolated.

  A most obvious instance of the lack of preparation was the smallness and unsuitability of the forces provided to defend Burma. Two ill-found, hurriedly collected, and inexperienced divisions, of which one had been trained and equipped for desert warfare and the other contained a large proportion of raw and unreliable Burmese troops, were tragically insufficient to meet superior Japanese forces in a country of the size and topography of Burma. The arrival of the Chinese adjusted the numerical balance in favour of the Allies, and, if they could have been got up to the front in strength before Rangoon fell, they might, in spite of their lack of almost all the necessities of a modern army, have changed the result. It is perhaps doubtful if, with the transport and supply resources available, their forward concentration could have been achieved; the pity is it was not tried. Even if it had been, the refusal of the Chinese to obey Stilwell’s orders would probably have ensured defeat.

  The completely inadequate air forces and their total elimination in the campaign were most grievous disadvantages to the Army. Had we, however, had enough well-trained and suitably-equipped divisions I do not think this handicap, serious as it was, would have been fatal; we could still have beaten the Japanese. Nor would a superior air force have enabled us to defeat the Japanese with the troops we had. It would have helped greatly and relieved the Army of a terrible strain, but we had to outfight the enemy, soldier for soldier, on the ground.

  In Burma we ought, whatever our strength, to have had one great advantage over the Japanese—we should have been fighting in a friendly country. The inhabitants should have been not only on our side, but organized and trained to help us. They were not. It is easy to say the Burmans disliked British rule and were therefore hostile to us, but I do not think that was actually so. A very small minority was actively and violently hostile. I should estimate it as certainly not more than five per cent—a figure that compares favourably with the number of collaborators in many European countries. These were drawn mainly from the intensely nationalist youth of the towns and the remnants of the old rebels of the ’twenties. Naturally, in a country like Burma, notorious always for its dacoits, they were joined by considerable numbers of bad characters as soon as our defeats and withdrawals gave opportunities for looting. A larger section of the Burmese population was actively loyal as long as it seemed we should hold their native districts, while many of the hill tribes remained faithful to the British at great cost to themselves even during the Japanese occupation. The fact was that to the main mass of the peasant population the invasion was an inexplicable and sudden calamity; their only interest was, if possible, not to become involved in it and to avoid the soldiers of both sides.

  Up to December 1941, even the military regarded the likelihood of invasion as remote, so it was not surprising that the civil government did not take comprehensi
ve measures to educate and prepare the population for it. When it became evident that war was imminent, the civil authorities were reluctant to organize evacuation schemes, refugee control, intelligence machinery, the militarization of railways, or anything in the nature of a Home Guard. There was a fear, which seems often to afflict other administrations than the Burman, that if the people were told unpleasant things about an unpleasant situation they might become depressed and panic. As a result, no one was prepared for war and the series of British reverses was a stunning surprise.

  The Burmese fighting forces themselves were affected in much the same way as their civilian brethren. They were hurriedly expanded with raw recruits who had no military tradition, and had incorporated in them civil armed corps such as the Burma Frontier Force and the Burma Military Police who were neither equipped nor trained for full-scale war. The position of their families was what really undermined the reliability of the Burmese soldiers, the police, and the lower grades of all the civil services. As we retreated their homes were left in the dangerous no-man’s-land between the lines or in the crudely and brutally administered Japanese-occupied territory. Small wonder that many Burmans deserted to protect their families. Indians in the Burmese services, and there were many, were in an even worse plight, for their families not only suffered all the dangers that the Burmese did, but in addition were liable, without British protection, to the savage hostility of Burmans, only too ready to seize an opportunity to vent their hatred. If the families of Indians, Anglo-Indians, and Anglo-Burmese in government employ could have been evacuated to India at the start of the campaign it might have caused some despondency among the local population, but it would have increased the reliability of the Burmese military and civil services very considerably.