This news was a bombshell that shattered all the plans we had been making. The number of men affected was very large; one-third of the British officers and men in S.E.A.C., and those the most experienced with a high proportion of N.C.O.s, would have to be returned to the United Kingdom before the 1st October. Admiral Mountbatten and Generals Auchinleck and Leese at once cabled protests, pointing out that, unless they were authorized to carry out this crippling reduction gradually and in accordance with operational necessity, all Malayan operations would have to be postponed indefinitely. Nevertheless, the Secretary of State duly made his statement without any of the suggested qualifications, and it was broadcast throughout South-East Asia. Every man in the army now knew when he was due for repatriation, and thousands were already overdue. The Secretary of State considered that in his statement there was provision for retaining men on the grounds of ‘operational necessity’, but certainly no soldier so detained would think other than that a clear promise had been broken. It would have been not only unfair to land such men on the Malayan beaches, but unwise. Supported by all his senior commanders, Admiral Mountbatten refused to do this. The only alternatives then were to postpone indefinitely, that is until reinforcements were received from Europe, the Malayan invasion, or to take the grave risk of carrying it out with much reduced and less experienced forces. There were many advantages in holding to the September date for the landing; delay would certainly mean increased Japanese preparation and resistance. Both General Leese and I were in favour of taking the risk and Admiral Mountbatten agreed. So the resorting of units began all over again as the long-service men were sent to India to await passage home. Some key men, mostly officers, had to be retained under the operational necessity clause, and they took their fate philosophically. Others, with more thought for their regiments and their men than for themselves, volunteered to stay. We pressed on, both in India and in Burma, in greater urgency than ever with our preparations.
Meanwhile a considerable reorganization of the higher army command in South-East Asia had been going on and was completed in the next few weeks. I had moved my Fourteenth Army Headquarters to Rangoon. It was now sent to India to plan the Malayan campaign, and the Fourteenth Army ended its long and not uneventful connection with Burma.
I had been chosen to succeed General Leese as Allied Land Forces Commander, and my place at Fourteenth Army in India was temporarily taken by Christison until Lieut.-General Sir Miles Dempsey, who had brilliantly commanded the Second Army in Europe, could come out to replace him. There was no one to whom I would more willingly have entrusted my Fourteenth Army than Dempsey. A new army, the Twelfth, was formed under Stopford to control all land operations in Burma. He had under his command 4 Corps, with the 5th, 17th, and 19th Indian Divisions, 268 Brigade and 255 Tank Brigade. He had also under his operational control the 7th and 20th Indian, 82nd West African Divisions, 22 East African Brigade, and Aung San’s Burma National Army. Of these, the 5th Division was to be returned almost at once to India and the 7th and 20th mounted, with numerous other troops, from Rangoon for the Malayan invasion. Headquarters 33 Corps now brought to an end its most distinguished career, and was disbanded to form the basis of the new Twelfth Army Headquarters.
I had not seen England for over seven years, and I seized this opportunity to ask for leave for a short visit home, before embarking on new campaigns which I thought might be long and arduous. My leave was granted perhaps the more readily because, outside a narrow military circle, I was quite unknown to the authorities in England. I had never met the Prime Minister, and I suspect he may have wanted to see what I was like before confirming me in so important an appointment. I saw planning well under way at Delhi, and then, with my wife, flew home. There we had a hectic, but happy month.
While I was on leave, the last battle of the Burma Campaign, the Battle of the Break-Out, was fought. It was obvious that, unless they were reconciled to dying of exposure, disease, and starvation in the Pegu Yomas, Sakurai’s Twenty-eighth Army must sooner or later break out from the hills, cross the Mandalay–Rangoon road and make a desperate attempt to rejoin the rest of Kimura’s forces east of the Sittang River. Sakurai’s men were in a bad way. They had been very roughly handled by 33 Corps, for transport they were reduced to a few pack animals and such bullock carts as they could seize from the villagers. Their remaining supplies were meagre in the extreme, and they subsisted mainly by foraging from the wretched Burmese. Of artillery they had only a few light guns and of armour none. The monsoon was in full blast, every chaung was in spate, the rain was ceaseless, and they had little shelter. The sick received scant medical attention; they could only be left to die. Few armies in their situation would have thought of anything but surrender. Yet, when our aircraft showered the areas in which they were with leaflets inviting surrender and promising good treatment, there was no response. Instead, Sakurai collected his men and prepared to break out.
Our troops were, like the Japanese, hampered by the waterlogged ground, especially in the flatter country between the Mandalay–Rangoon road and the Sittang. This would not have been so great a handicap had not air transport been greatly reduced by the withdrawal of all American aircraft from South-East Asia by the 1st June. At the same time, several squadrons of our own left Burma to prepare for the Malayan operations. 4 Corps, under Lieut.-General F. I. S. Tuker, who was temporarily replacing Messervy on leave, had its two divisions, the 19th and 17th, strung out in a thin line from Pyinmana to Pegu. Patrols from these divisions and from ‘V’ Force thrust into the hills, but the Japanese were too far west for more than minor contacts with enemy reconnaissance parties. A few prisoners were, however, taken and from these we began gradually to trace out the pattern of enemy concentrations. Sakurai had managed, deep in the Yomas hills, to collect his army in five groups:
(i) The 54th Japanese Division farthest north.
(ii) 72 Independent Mixed Brigade.
(iii) Twenty-eighth Army Headquarters, with various other units and line of communication troops.
(iv) The 55th Division, less about one regiment.
(v) 105 Independent Mixed Brigade.
Our surmises as to his intentions were confirmed when, on the 2nd July, a long-distance patrol from our 17th Division captured an order of the Japanese 55th Division giving full details of the enemy’s plan. All that was lacking was the date of its proposed execution. Sakurai proposed, in several columns, to break out across the Rangoon road on a front of one hundred and fifty miles between Toungoo and Nyaunglebin. The state of the ground would limit his exits from the hills to certain major tracks; these with the forces allotted to them were all given in the captured order. The bulk of the enemy escape routes led through the 17th Division sector, and it was clear that our cordon must be strengthened.
With this intention, Stopford, commanding the Twelfth Army, transferred considerable reinforcements, mainly from the Irrawaddy front, to Tuker’s 4 Corps. The 7th Division, which had already replaced the 5th, received a brigade headquarters and four battalions from the 20th Division, and the 17th Division a brigade headquarters and four battalions from the 19th Division and three battalions from the 20th. Five battalions, each about four hundred strong, of Aung San’s army, now called the Patriot Burmese Forces, also joined 4 Corps. These reinforcements enabled Tuker and his divisional commanders to thicken their lines and to arrange their troops in depth. First came patrols pushed into the hills on tracks that the Japanese were expected to use. Then strong-points, with artillery and armour, blocking the routes as they debouched from the hills to cross the road. Farther east, in the plain between the road and the Sittang, were columns to intercept such enemy as managed to cross the road. On the west bank of the river were located some regular units and the battalions of the P.B.F., to catch the Japanese as they tried to get over the river. Finally, even beyond this on the east bank, were lurking patrols of Force 136 and parties of the P.B.F. to ambush any survivors who did contrive to cross. It was a severe gauntlet Sakurai woul
d have to run.
The first main moves in the Battle of the Break-Out came from the Japanese Thirty-third Army, with its main force of some six to seven thousand men on the east of the Sittang and about three thousand holding three bridgeheads on the west bank. The enemy’s object was, by counter-attack aimed at Waw which would threaten, if not cut, our rail and road communications north from Rangoon, so to distract our attention and draw off our troops that their Twenty-eighth Army would be able to break through between Toungoo and Nyaunglebin. To meet this expected attack, the 7th Division had one brigade forward, facing east covering the Japanese bridgeheads from Mokpalin to Myitkyo, a front of twelve miles. The remaining two brigades were stretched out on a fifty-mile line, facing west, watching the exits from the Pegu Yomas. Units were much below strength as, in the British, repatriation had taken heavy toll and, in Indian, men had been sent on leave.
On the night of the 3rd July, the Japanese counter-attack began with fierce assaults on three of our positions in the eastern brigade area. All held, and, as more Japanese crossed the Sittang an extraordinary battle, which might in more senses than one have been called fluid, began. The whole battlefield was a swamp, in which the only comparatively solid pieces of ground were the railway embankment and the sites of the miserable villages that rose as islands in a waste of water which, averaging two to three feet, was in places, the 7th Division reported, ‘too deep for Gurkhas to operate’. Having failed with heavy casualties to take our positions, the Japanese settled down to siege tactics, cut off our posts, and shelled them heavily. The R.A.F. came to the rescue and gave the closest and most valiant support under which our men counter-attacked, but the weather—rain reduced visibility to one hundred yards by day—often made flying impossible. Our casualties mounted and, on the 7th July, our forward troops were ordered to withdraw. This they did by night, wading in a hollow square across the water. They took with them many wounded, and through the long hours of the night the bearers, in the centre of the square, stumbling through mud and water, could never put down a stretcher to rest themselves. Had they done so, the man on it would have drowned. Oddly enough, the Japanese, too, had had enough, and they withdrew at the same time, although later they tried to follow up, and were repulsed decisively. There was one more inconclusive fight, when both sides simultaneously advanced into the ‘island’ in the loop of the Sittang Old Channel. Then, the Japanese having abandoned all hope of taking Waw, fighting died down, and interest moved farther north, where the long-expected break-out of the Twenty-eighth Army had begun.
Very wisely, Tuker had not allowed the Japanese counterattack by their Thirty-third Army to distract him from preparations to receive the Twenty-eighth when it broke east. The captured order enabled every escape track to have its standing piquet, and ‘V’ Force patrols pushed farther west into the hills. There would thus be ample warning of the break-out, which was expected on the 20th July. Actually it began the day before, with an attack by about one hundred Japanese on a platoon post of the 17th Division. This was followed almost daily by enemy parties, of from two to five or six hundred strong, emerging from the Yomas and trying to force their way across the road. Luckily, they did not arrive simultaneously, and they could be dealt with piecemeal. With typical Japanese tenacity—and stupidity—they followed one another by the same routes, and the numerous encounters that took place followed a uniform pattern. First, the Japanese party would strike our detachment blocking their exit to the road. After suffering heavily in the attempt to destroy it, the enemy would split into several smaller bodies and get past on each side. Pursued by our columns and harried by the planes of 221 Group, the Japanese would take refuge in villages to await darkness. Our men would cut the few tracks, still above water, that led east. Then artillery concentrations would shell the villages, inflicting heavy loss as the water made it impossible to dig trenches. After a day or two’s siege, the wretched Japanese in small groups would try to escape under cover of darkness, only to meet our troops on the west bank of the Sittang, and to be stalked and ambushed by the Burmese Patriot Forces and the armed resistance parties we had by now organized in many of the villages. Crossing the Sittang itself was the worst of the enemy’s ordeals, and few succeeded. They were surprised as they launched their rafts, shot as they swam and drifted across on logs, or swept away by the rapid current to drown. In a few days, a post of our troops on the river bank counted over six hundred bodies floating down from the slaughter at one of the main Japanese crossing places upstream.
The last Japanese to attempt the break out were 12 and 13 Naval Guard Forces, formed from the Port and Shore Establishments of the Imperial Navy in Burma. They amounted to about twelve hundred men in all and, strangely enough, chose to make their attempt last and alone, on the 31st July. As they struggled across the road, losing heavily in the process, all our forces within reach were turned on them. Rapidly growing fewer, as our troops and artillery took toll, they approached the Sittang, only to find their way blocked by one of our battalions and to be caught between it and another pursuing one. The country was flooded and numerous chaungs near the river were in spate. It took nearly a week for an Indian and a Gurkha battalion to close in on the sailors, but of the four hundred to which they were now reduced, as the Japanese themselves afterwards told us, only three escaped. By the 4th August, such Japanese fugitives as had run the gauntlet were over the Sittang, and the last battle in Burma had ended.
Sakurai, lacking transport and communications, and with his troops in the state they were, had indeed done well to stage any sort of organized break-out at all, but his losses were devastating. At the time it was difficult to estimate accurately the Japanese casualties, but over six thousand bodies were recovered by our troops, hundreds were claimed by the Burmese irregulars, and many more lay undiscovered in water and long grass. Of the seventeen or eighteen thousand men of the Twenty-eighth Army who debouched from the Pegu Yomas, the Japanese themselves later stated that less than six thousand, and these starved, exhausted, and diseased, reached the east bank of the Sittang. In addition, between one and two thousand sick, too weak to march, had been abandoned to die in the Yomas.
Throughout this battle, there were two startlingly noticeable features. First, the scale of Japanese surrenders. For the six thousand bodies they had picked up, 4 Corps had taken seven hundred and forty prisoners—an unheard of ratio, at least ten times as high as ever before. Then there was the astonishing smallness of our own casualties. Against the admitted Japanese twelve thousand killed and missing, we had suffered only ninety-five killed and three hundred and twenty-two wounded. We were killing Japanese at a rate of over a hundred to one. The fact was that this final disaster had not only destroyed the Twenty-eighth Army, but had struck a mortal blow at the fighting spirit of the whole Japanese army in Burma.
While I was on leave in England, I had been told of atomic bombs, of their devastating power, and of the intention to drop them on Japan. Opinions differed widely as to whether, even after this, Japanese fanaticism would hold in desperate resistance to the brink of mass national suicide in Japan itself and elsewhere. On the 6th August, the first atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima and, on the 9th, the second fell at Nagasaki, so that I was not altogether surprised when my wife and I, flying back to my command, heard in Rome on the 14th that Japan had surrendered unconditionally.
Two days later, I arrived at Headquarters Allied Land Forces, South-East Asia, which were comfortably installed near Supreme Headquarters in Kandy, Ceylon, and there I took over my new and extended command. The staff with the exception of Walsh, who had been General Leese’s Chief of Staff and who had left with him and been replaced by Major-General Pyman, was unchanged. Unchanged, but, remembering how they had displaced General Giffard’s officers, a little apprehensive that the new broom would in turn brush them away to make room for its own favourites from Fourteenth Army, and a number of sweepstakes were being run on which officers would be dismissed first. However, as I brought with me only my Militar
y Secretary, my aides-de-camp and my Gurkha orderly, Bajbir, who would displace no one, anxiety soon subsided and, although I did make some reductions without replacement, we all got on very well together.
It would have been my fault if we had not, for I found a first-class staff, in excellent running order under Pyman and Bastyan, the Principal Administrative Officer. We soon had our hands full. The area of South-East Asia Land Forces had suddenly expanded to include Malaya, Singapore, Siam, Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies, Hongkong, Borneo, and the Andaman Islands. Each confronted us with special and urgent problems. In two of them, Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies, nationalist movements, armed from Japanese sources, had already seized power in the vacuum left by the surrender, and were resisting the restoration of French or Dutch sovereignty—fighting had already begun or seemed inevitable. In all areas were intact Japanese forces amounting to about half a million men, whose acceptance of the surrender was not certain, and many thousands of British, Australians, Indians, Americans, Dutch, and French, starving and dying of disease in the brutal and barbaric Japanese prison camps. It was obviously vital that we should occupy all Japanese-held territory at the earliest possible moment, not only to enforce the surrender, but to succour these unfortunates.
Appeals from our French and Dutch Allies, cries for help, demands for troops, threats of continued Japanese resistance, apprehensions of wholesale massacre, forebodings of economic collapse, warnings of the starvation of whole populations, poured into our headquarters from every quarter. There were excellent reasons why we should rush to respond to each one. We should have liked to do so, but our shortage of air transport—we had lost over half our former allotment—and the fact that almost all available shipping had already been loaded for the Malayan invasion, hampered and delayed our attempts to move forces rapidly to so many different points. Our first decision, in this welter of conflicting claims, was immediately to carry out the Malayan landing as planned—that is, as if the war were continuing. It would have meant immense confusion had we unloaded and redistributed the troops and stores; besides, at this time, Itagaki, the Japanese commander in Malaya, was breathing defiance, and it was quite possible that resistance would be encountered. In any case, to treat the landing as an operation of war was the quickest way to disembark the force, and, should that go peaceably, we could then direct its later echelons elsewhere.
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