Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  The most likely Japanese approaches were a landing at the mouth of the Hoogly with a direct thrust at Calcutta, or infiltration through the Sunderbans, which if successful would cut off our forces in Assam and threaten Calcutta from the rear. The Sunderbans, a complicated delta of waterways through which the combined Ganges and Brahmaputra, on a front of two hundred miles, reach the sea, was an invitation to amphibious penetration. The 26th Division had neither troops enough to hold even the main channels nor road or water transport enough to make mobile a useful striking force. In addition, our intelligence system here was extremely weak. We depended on civilian coast watchers, who, however willing, were most inadequately trained to identify either ships or aircraft. There were no telephones in most of the area, and reports, hurriedly written in imperfect English, went by boat or runner to the nearest civil telegraph office. There, the local telegraph clerks transmitted them to Calcutta and they were eventually delivered to my headquarters. No wonder that delays and mutilations were common. The last straw was when a sweating messenger arrived at the telegraph office with a report of alleged hostile shipping, only to be told that, as it was Sunday, and he had not the extra fee with him, the signal could not be sent. With our shortages of signalling equipment and lack of trained personnel, what was surprising was not that these things happened, but that we had a watching organization that worked at all. As its strength grew, we relied more and more for warning on the R.A.F., and the chance of any large collection of ships approaching unreported steadily lessened. But the risk of the Japanese coming, observed or unobserved, remained.

  There were two answers to the problem of the Sunderbans—an overwhelming air force or a flotilla of river craft. The first was, at this stage, out of the question, so we fell back on the second. We turned to the Navy. Our requests followed a descending scale. We asked first for a force of light naval craft. It was regretted they were not available. A few coastal motor-boats? The same answer. All right, we would provide the ships; but could we have some naval officers and ratings to man them? Alas, not one. Finally, with memories of the gallant detachment I had in the Retreat, we asked for a few Royal Marines. None could be spared. So we settled down to raise our own navy.

  We based its organization on three functions:

  (i) Reconnaissance—fast, light motor-boats.

  (ii) Fighting—small steamers as heavily armed and protected as we could make them.

  (iii) Support—several larger steamers, enough to carry up to a brigade group to land and form road and river blocks.

  Few, if any, of the river craft we obtained were really fitted for their roles. Most were old, worn out, and generally ill-found. It often seemed a toss-up which would happen first—their cardboard-thick boilers blow up or rock loose on their seatings and go through the fragile sides of the ships. Nevertheless, based on the existing Army Inland Water Transport Service, which carried supplies on the rivers, we formed our fleet of over a hundred vessels.

  We manned it by enrolling the civilian crews of the ships in the I.W.T.; a process that only partially turned them into disciplined Servicemen. Our officers were volunteers, merchant seamen, amateur yachtsmen, marine engineers of sorts. These, with the stalwarts already in the I.W.T., formed the navigational crews. For manning the armament and for signalling, we fell back on the medieval expedient of drafting soldiers on board. We found an ideal commander for our flotilla, Lieut.-Colonel Feather-stonhaugh, a Regular soldier, who had sailed before the mast, got a coastal mate’s certificate, and had his wings as an airman. He had led commandos in Norway and was just the man to handle such a military-nautical set-up and, it must be confessed, the sometimes queer types that gravitated towards it. The main armament of our fighting ships was the two-pounder anti-tank gun; for anti-aircraft defence we relied on Bren guns. Dockyard maintenance, a big item in so decrepit a fleet, was undertaken by workshop companies of the I.W.T. which we established at various river ports. They did noble work, but lacked much essential machinery. For major repairs, we had, therefore, to rely on civil firms in Calcutta.

  In spite of all difficulties, we were able, in July 1942, to stage a grand combined exercise with the flotilla and the R.A.F. Our fleet, steaming down the winding channels to the sea, was an impressive sight—especially its smoke. At the conclusion of the exercise we felt that, combined with the fighters of the R.A.F., our flotilla gave us a reasonable hope, not only of discovering Japanese infiltration, but of seriously delaying and even checking it. The spirit of its men was that of the young soldier ship commander who sent the signal, ‘Large Japanese submarine reported off mouth of Meghna River. Am proceeding to sea to engage.’ His heaviest armament was a two-pounder, his speed, with the safety valve screwed down, eight knots, and his rickety river steamer was never meant to venture to sea, least of all in the monsoon. The submarine would do eighteen knots on the surface and have a four-inch gun. But he went to look for it! Later the officers and men of the flotilla gave many examples of high courage and initiative in Arakan. When the time came for serious landings on that coast, however, more orthodox forces were available. All the same, we were proud of our flotilla; anyway it was ours—no one had helped us much in the making of it.

  To prepare for invasion there was a great deal to be done besides raise our flotilla. The rather primitive coastal batteries defending the Hoogly had to be made and kept as ready as chronic shortages of equipment would allow. There was a vast amount to be done in co-operation and liaison with the civil authorities and provincial governments. Above all, we had to press on with the training of the troops, especially with that of the 26th Division, and with improving its mobility. We passed full days and some anxious nights when scares of invasion called us from our beds. We know now that the Japanese never seriously contemplated a seaborne invasion of India, but at the time it loomed constantly over us. Other British commanders have devoted energy and resources, badly needed for what would have been more profitable enterprises, to preparations against invasions that never came, yet who knows to what extent rumours of those preparations, exaggerated probably, caused the enemy to hesitate? There can be no doubt that the preparations themselves, and the determination they bred, did much to raise our morale. It is a simple rule that the worse the situation the more the troops should be kept fully and actively employed.

  A first step was to get my headquarters out of Calcutta to Barrackpore, a suburb a few miles farther up the Hoogly. Here we installed ourselves in Government House, Lord Wellesley’s country residence. The site itself, with a spacious Georgian house, supplemented by huts and bungalows in the park, was a good one, although its approach from Calcutta was through some of the most sordid slums it has been my misfortune to see or smell. Indeed, the horrible thing about Calcutta was the contrast of the blatant wealth of some of its citizens with the squalid misery, beyond mere poverty, at their very doors.

  My headquarters was the successor to the old Presidency and Assam District Headquarters, which in various forms had functioned in Calcutta Fort since the days of Clive. As I watched the loads of files, books, and papers being moved, I could well believe it. When I looked at some of the staff, too, I realized that it had indeed been a static headquarters. It is hard to ask men, whose lives had for years been a matter of routine, to change not only the tempo of their work but their whole scale of values in it. Some can and do. Then their experience and their sense of duty are invaluable. Some cannot. The only thing then is to find some niche where they can still be useful; a mobile, live, fighting headquarters is no place for them. Once again, through no merit of my own, I was fortunate in the Chief of Staff I inherited. Brigadier Tony Scott, with his judgment, energy, and dash of the dramatic, was just the man to act as yeast in a rather lumpy headquarters and get it moving, physically and mentally.

  We shared Government House, Barrackpore, with Air Headquarters for Bengal and Burma. The A.O.C. was responsible for the whole of Burma and Eastern India; I dealt only with Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and the Arakan front. H
e should therefore, by rights, have been with Eastern Army who were responsible for the same areas as he was, not with 15 Corps. However, the arrangement suited us admirably, and we began at once to build up the close and friendly co-operation that was a marked feature of later operations. Soon after our arrival, Air Vice-Marshal Bill Williams was appointed A.O.C. He was an inspiring commander for his own Service and an understanding and unselfish colleague to us. I never quite shared his belief that, owing to the success of air action, every Japanese soldier was already starving, but there is no doubt Bill Williams was the man who laid the foundations of the air supremacy we later gained, and on which everything else was built.

  Although we had moved our headquarters from Calcutta, the city remained for us a fourfold problem. We had to:

  (i) Ensure its tranquillity.

  (ii) Defend it from land, sea, and air attack.

  (iii) Organize it as the main base of the Burma war.

  (iv) Clean it up and make it a proper leave centre for British, American, and Indian troops.

  At the moment, the swarming city was peaceful enough, but, apart from the eternal communal tension between Hindus and Mohammedans, the activities of the Congress Party were almost certain to lead to disturbances. All this meant constant vigilance and the tying down of troops that were needed to get on with the war. The only defence, apart from a few anti-aircraft and coastal guns, against sea or air attack was the R.A.F., whose fighters used die wide roads of the Calcutta Maidan, or Park, as their runways. If invasion occurred, the city would be one of the enemy’s first objectives. Our plan was to hold the Japanese advance with the 26th Division and the flotilla, until the Eastern Army reserve from Ranchi, and anything else that could be raked up, came to fight the decisive battle. Movement would be complicated by hordes of refugees, estimated to number three millions, and plans had to be made to deal with them.

  There had been one incursion of Japanese naval forces into the Bay of Bengal, when we had lost a large number of merchant ships. Alarms were frequent, usually at night, and we had our anxious moments. So thin was our defence at this time that full arrangements were made to destroy, if necessary, the many installations in Calcutta that would have been invaluable to an invader had they fallen intact into his hands.

  The organization of Calcutta as a base was the responsibility of G.H.Q. India, but, as the local formation, much of the actual work fell on us. A first essential was to keep the docks working. Not so easy, when the smallest Japanese raid sent the dock labour streaming back to its villages. Almost equally urgent was the need to expand and convert to war purposes the industrial resources of Eastern India. From Tatas, the largest and at this time the most modern steel works in the British Empire, to the smallest Bengal workshop, the hum of industry was rising to a crescendo. It was the ‘Box Wallahs’, the commercial community, who in those hot, anxious months by their energy, efficiency, and above all by their calmness, turned Eastern India into a base and workshop not only for Burma but for the Allies in every theatre of South-East Asia and the Middle East. They deserved well of their country and of India; if they made a profit, they earned it.

  The modern British or American Serviceman is a townsman, and, especially after a spell in the jungle, he yearns for the once familiar distractions of the city. Calcutta alone in Eastern India could offer these. It had cinemas, restaurants, and clubs equal to those of the great cities of Europe, but it offered also less reputable relaxations, running down the whole scale of vice from doubtful dance halls to disease-ridden dens of perversity. The problem was to provide wholesome amusements in such abundance that the soldier would not be lured into these darker by-ways. In this we got no help from home; we were thrown back on our own ingenuity and on what the civilian community could do to help us—and that, considering their limited resources, was a great deal. To them we owed our first theatrical companies, who performed for us when the stars of Ensa were as distant and aloof as their celestial counterparts. They ran, too, leave hostels—the one at the race-course was a model—supper bars, clubs, lectures, dances.

  Parallel with these activities, we conducted an energetic campaign to clear up the worst of the plague spots. British and American Military Police—there was a rapidly increasing influx of American Air Force and administrative units—co-operated closely with the Calcutta Police. The work of the joint Anglo-American police patrols was effective and not without a humorous aspect. During a fracas, involving both British and American soldiers, one such patrol sailed into the mêlée and sorted out each its own nationals. One American G.I., however, proved particularly truculent. A burly American policeman drew his nightstick, removed the soldier’s cap, and slugged him hard on his bare head. As the man subsided unconscious to the floor, the policeman carefully replaced the cap. ‘Why,’ asked an admiring British colleague, ‘did you take off his cap? The way you hit him it wouldn’t have mattered if you’d left it on!’ ‘Say,’ was the reply, ‘that hat is the property of Uncle Sam. Don’t you respect Government property in the Royal British Army?’

  For some time the statistics of venereal disease and of absence without leave were high in Calcutta, but, with increasing speed, the tightening of our discipline and the close alliance of the Army with all decent elements in the city brought about improvement. It was not so very long before Calcutta was reasonably satisfactory as a leave centre.

  The training of the formations in Bengal and of their staffs was pushed on at high pressure, under conditions more suitable to ducks than to men. Mobile columns were formed and exercised, some of them in boats, and tactical schemes carried out. Many of the Indian units were newly raised, several from races that had no tradition of military service and could not, therefore, provide their own N.C.O.s or Indian officers. For the bulk of the British troops this was their first experience of India, and there are better introductions to the glamorous East than being marooned in mildewed Bengali towns and dumped in sodden paddy fields. They took it all very well, and I wish I could have been easier with them, but they had to be trained. I am afraid, also, that a number of commanders and staff officers for various reasons failed to make the grade, and were removed. They took that very well too.

  I was, of course, much occupied simultaneously with current operations in Arakan, and with preparations for an advance, but what befell there I leave to the next chapter. In July, however, Lieut.-General Irwin, who had succeeded Broad as Eastern Army Commander, told me that he wished himself to exercise direct control of the forthcoming Arakan offensive, and for this and other reasons his headquarters and mine would shortly change places. He would take direct command of the 14th and 26th Divisions, and I should form and train a new 15 Corps at Ranchi. Whether it was wise to eliminate a corps headquarters in the chain of command to the Arakan I doubt, but Barrackpore was certainly a better location for Army Headquarters. It put the equivalent land and air commands together, and was an incomparably better communications centre.

  Before the date of our move arrived, internal trouble, so grave as to be in effect an organized rebellion, broke out in Bengal and Bihar. The Cripps Mission had ended in failure, and Gandhi had proclaimed civil disobedience throughout India with the avowed object of driving out the British. No government at any time, and certainly not in war, with the enemy at its gates, could ignore such a challenge. Gandhi and the Congress chiefs were arrested and imprisoned, but their subordinate leaders plunged into the struggle, translating Gandhi’s order ‘to do or die’, in the only way they understood—incitement to violence. Widespread disturbances broke out. In Calcutta, the students, joined by the large numbers of hooligans always ready to take advantage of any weakening or preoccupation of the forces of order, came into the streets and serious rioting began. One of the first symptoms was, as is usual in a Calcutta riot of any kind, the burning of trams. More annoying to us were the attacks on Government motor transport, attempts to decapitate motor-cycle despatch riders by stretching wires across roads, and the cutting of telegraph and telephone
cables. At first it looked as if we might have really serious trouble in the city, but when the rioters realized, as they quickly did, that the troops were not prepared to stand as Aunt Sallies under showers of bricks but would hit back, they revised their ideas. With practically no casualties among the troops and very few indeed among the rioters, the disturbances in Calcutta petered out.

  Those in the countryside were much more serious. Here, especially in Bihar, they took the form of concerted attacks on strategic rail communications. Large gangs, numbering often several hundreds, armed with primitive but effective weapons and some fire-arms, assaulted railway stations all over the country. Signalling instruments were destroyed, station buildings burned and looted, lines torn up over considerable distances, and European passengers dragged from trains to be hacked to pieces. The flow of supplies to the Burma front was cut off for days at a time, the large cities of Patna, capital of Bihar, and Gaya were isolated, and Calcutta itself was left little better off. Requests for troops to restore order and reopen communications flowed in from all sides. The police in many districts were besieged in their own police stations; large areas passed out of control of the civil authorities.

  The urgent need was to reopen the main railways so that we could move troops as required to deal with the disturbances and restart supply to the Burma front. Eastern Army wisely relieved 15 Corps of responsibility for most of Bihar, and the British 70th Division, scattered through the worst areas of that province, quickly began to restore the situation. We, with all Bengal and Orissa left as our responsibility, had to bear in mind the possibility that the rebellion was concerted with the Japanese and that an invasion might be attempted simultaneously, or at least some desperate airborne support given to the rebels. There was no definite indication of such a link up between Congress and the Japanese, but the public utterances of its leaders and the systematic wrecking of strategic communications lent colour to the idea. Enough, at any rate, to make us hesitate to disperse all the 26th Division in detachments to restore order. So it was with one eye on possible Japanese intervention, that we proceeded to clear up our area. Before we had finished we were reduced to any expedient to get more troops. First we emptied reinforcement camps, improvising units from the soldiers in them. Then those in convalescent depots were turned out to replace fit men in more static defence duties. When my last available battalion had been sent north of the Ganges to reopen the railway to Assam—and incidentally itself been cut off with the line both ahead and in rear of it uprooted—I was reduced to the expedient of forming my final and only reserve from the venereal patients in the Calcutta and Barrackpore hospitals. A route march or two, and guard duties, had a very good effect on them.