While field-craft comes naturally to the Asian, he can learn as well as the white man how to handle new weapons, even complicated ones. The European, on the other hand, can at present more readily design and produce such equipment and find the vitally important skilled men to maintain it. He is superior, not so much in natural intelligence, as in education, and thus is able to find a higher proportion of potential officers. He should be able to understand better what he is fighting for, be capable of higher training, and, if it is properly developed, of more sustained morale. Yet with all these advantages, it is foolish to pit white men against Asians and expect them to win just because they are white; to win they must be better trained, better disciplined, and, better led. If they are not, even superior armament will not overcome the numerical and natural advantages of the Asian. We began by despising our Japanese enemy; the pendulum then swung wildly to the other extreme. We built up our enemy into something terrifying, as soldiers always will to excuse their defeats, and frightened ourselves with the bogy of the superman of the jungle. Both attitudes were calamitous to us. It was not until we taught ourselves to take a balanced view of our enemy as a formidable fighting man, who nevertheless had certain weaknesses, and of ourselves as being able with training to beat him at his own, or any other game, that we won.
In an army such as ours, drawn from many nationalities, administration and supply were complicated, In Indian Army formations we began with a proportion of British units among the Indian—about one-third to two-thirds. For a variety of reasons, I came to the conclusion that it was preferable, certainly in infantry brigades, to have either all British or all Indian. Then, each race fought better, supply was greatly simplified, and we could more easily suit divisions to their tasks. My Indian divisions after 1943 were among the best in the world. They would go anywhere, do anything, go on doing it, and do it on very little.
Material
At the beginning of the war there was the greatest contrast between the Japanese and the British logistical outlook, between what they required to operate and what we thought we required. They launched their troops into the boldest offensives on the slenderest administrative margins; our training was all against this. The British Army, ever since the terrible lesson of the Crimea, had tended to stress supply at the expense of mobility. The static conditions of the First World War, followed by fast rising standards of living, inevitably increased this bias. In many theatres of the Second World War, the complexity of equipment, the growth of specialized organizations, the expansion of staffs, and the elaboration of communications still further increased the ratio of administrative to fighting strengths and swelled the amount of transport required. In Africa and Europe the decline of the enemy’s air power from 1941 onwards and the relative abundance of motorable routes concealed what, in other circumstances, would have been the tactical impossibility of manoeuvre with such tail-heavy formations. With us in Burma, from its complete dominance in 1942, the Japanese Air Force became, from 1944, less and less of a danger to movement until it practically disappeared even as a threat. Yet the difficulty of the country with its lack of roads remained and still forced us to limit transport on the ground, while shortage of aircraft compelled the same economy in the air. We discovered that, instead of the four hundred tons a day not considered excessive to keep a division fighting in more generous theatres, we could maintain our Indian divisions in action for long periods, without loss of battle efficiency or morale, on one hundred and twenty. As we removed vehicles from units and formations which joined us on European establishments, they found to their surprise that they could move farther and faster without them. The fewer vehicles on the roads or tracks, the quicker they travelled, and an enforced ingenuity in combining ferrying by lorry with marching covered long distances in remarkably short time. This relation between tactical mobility and numbers of vehicles, between the size of staffs and effective control, will increase in importance in any future war. Unless they are constantly watched and ruthlessly cut down, vehicles and staffs will multiply until they bog down movement.
With us, necessity was truly the mother of invention. We lacked so much in equipment and supplies that, if we were not to give up offensive operations altogether, we had either to manage without or improvise for ourselves. We learnt that if the spirit could be made willing the flesh would do without many things and that quick brains and willing hands could, from meagre resources, produce astonishing results. Our mass production river shipyards, our methods of building roads and airfields, our ‘parajutes’, our huge market gardens almost in the battle line, our duck farms, our fish saltings, and a hundred other things were gallant and successful efforts by the army in the field to live up to its motto, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ My soldiers forced the opposed crossings of great riven using ludicrously inadequate equipment, stretched brittle communication links to fantastic lengths, marched over the most heartbreaking country on reduced rations, fought disease with discipline and beat it. The Japanese first demonstrated painfully on us that it is not so much numbers and elaborate equipment that count in the tough places, but training and morale. We had to learn this lesson in a hard school before we could turn the tables on them.
New Techniques
In Burma we fought on a lower scale of transport, supplies, equipment, supporting arms, and amenities than was accepted in any other British theatre. Yet, largely because of this lack of material resources, we learned to use those we had in fresh ways to achieve more than would have been possible had we clung to conventional methods. We had not only to devise new tactics but to delve deeply into the motive forces of human conduct and to change our traditional outlook on many things. The result was, I think it true to say, a kind of warfare more modern in essence than that fought by other British forces. Indeed, by any Allied force, with the exception of the Americans in the Pacific. There, their problem, the opposite of ours, was to use the immense resources that became increasingly available to them most effectively in the peculiar circumstances of an ocean war. They solved it brilliantly and evolved a new material technique. We, also in strange conditions, evolved our technique of war, not so much material as human.
Compared with those in Europe, the combat forces used in Burma were not large. Including Stilwell’s Chinese, the greatest number of divisions I ever had under my command in action at one time was eighteen. They fought on a front of seven hundred miles, in four groups, separated by great distances, with no lateral communications between them and beyond tactical support of one another. My corps and divisions were called upon to act with at least as much freedom as armies and corps in other theatres. Commanders at all levels had to act more on their own; they were given greater latitude to work out their own plans to achieve what they knew was the Army Commander’s intention. In time they developed to a marked degree a flexibility of mind and a firmness of decision that enabled them to act swiftly to take advantage of sudden information or changing circumstances without reference to their superiors. They were encouraged, as Stopford put it when congratulating Rees’s 19th Division which had seized a chance to slip across the Irrawaddy and at the same time make a dart at Shwebo, to ‘shoot a goal when the referee wasn’t looking’. This acting without orders, in anticipation of orders, or without waiting for approval, yet always within the overall intention, must become second nature in any form of warfare where formations do not fight closely en cadre, and must go down to the smallest units. It requires in the higher command a corresponding flexibility of mind, confidence in its subordinates, and the power to make its intentions clear right through the force.
Companies, even platoons, under junior leaders became the basic units of the jungle. Out of sight of one another, often out of touch, their wireless blanketed by hills, they marched and fought on their own, often for days at a time. They frequently approached the battle in scattered columns, as they did for the crossings of the Irrawaddy, and concentrated on the battlefield. The methods by which they did this and, above al
l, the qualities they needed to make these tactics possible and successful repay study. They may be needed again.
Discipline
The more modern war becomes, the more essential appear the basic qualities that from the beginning of history have distinguished armies from mobs. The first of these is discipline. We very soon learnt in Burma that strict discipline in battle and in bivouac was vital, not only for success, but for survival. Nothing is easier in jungle or dispersed fighting than for a man to shirk. If he has no stomach for advancing, all he has to do is to flop into the undergrowth; in retreat, he can slink out of the rearguard, join up later, and swear he was the last to leave. A patrol leader can take his men a mile into the jungle, hide there, and return with any report he fancies. Only discipline—not punishment—can stop that sort of thing; the real discipline that a man holds to because it is a refusal to betray his comrades. The discipline that makes a sentry, whose whole body is tortured for sleep, rest his chin on the point of his bayonet because he knows, if he nods, he risks the lives of the men sleeping behind him. It is only discipline, too, that can enforce the precautions against disease, irksome as they are, without which an army would shrivel away. At some stage in all wars armies have let their discipline sag, but they have never won victory until they made it taut again; nor will they. We found it a great mistake to belittle the importance of smartness in turn-out, alertness of carriage, cleanliness of person, saluting, or precision of movement, and to dismiss them as naïve, unintelligent parade-ground stuff. I do not believe that troops can have unshakable battle discipline without showing those outward and formal signs, which mark the pride men take in themselves and their units and the mutual confidence and respect that exists between them and their officers. It was our experience in a tough school that the best fighting units, in the long run, were not necessarily those with the most advertised reputations, but those who, when they came out of battle at once resumed a more formal discipline and appearance.
Air Power
The fabric of our campaign was woven by the close intermeshing of land and air operations, yet we began in South-East Asia with exaggerated ideas of what air power by itself could accomplish. We discovered, both when it was overwhelmingly against us and equally when it was overwhelmingly with us, that it could not stop movement on the ground; it could only impede and delay it. Neither the Japanese air forces nor our own prevented divisions being moved or troops being supplied. They made these things more difficult.
One of the characteristics of air power is its ever-increasing flexibility, but even this has certain limitations. As long as our squadrons, fighter or bomber, could operate from bases within reasonable range of their objectives this flexibility was obvious and marked. When, however, as sometimes happened on a front as wide as ours with distances as great, we had to find another airfield, the flexibility of air power temporarily at least vanished. We built earth landing strips even with little machinery in a matter of hours, but the all-weather airfield capable of acting as a base, of which at least a certain number were required, was a much slower business. During our rapid advances we solved the problem only by making Japanese airfields the primary objectives of our foremost troops. Even then we should have been gravely embarrassed if the enemy had concentrated more thoroughly than they did on destroying runways, road-rollers, equipment, and repair materials.
As we were, compared with most Allied armies, short of artillery (and even if it had been available the country would have hampered its use) we came to rely for close support more and more on the air. We developed our own and adapted other people’s methods of calling up air support, of indicating targets and of co-ordinating movement on the ground with fire from the air. We as confidently dovetailed our fire plans with the airmen as with the gunners. Talked in by Air Force officers with the forward troops, our fighters would place their cannon shells and rockets within a hundred yards of our men, and by dummy runs keep down the enemy’s heads for the last infantry rush. Quick and accurate co-operation of this sort did not come in a day; it grew with the airmen’s and soldiers’ mutual confidence, understanding, and pride in one another’s achievements. In peace, the function of tactical air support of land operations is apt to fade, but in war its urgency will increase.
A most distinctive aspect of our Burma war was the great use we made of air transport. It was one of our contributions towards a new kind of warfare and I think it fair to say that, to a large extent, we discovered by trial and error the methods of air supply that later passed into general use. We were the first to maintain large formations in action by air supply and to move standard divisions long distances about the fighting front by air. The second Chindit expedition in March 1944, when we landed some thirty thousand men and five thousand animals far behind the enemy’s lines and maintained them for months, was the largest airborne operation of the war. The decisive stroke at Meiktila and the advance on Rangoon were examples of a new technique that combined mechanized and air-transported brigades in the same divisions. To us, all this was as normal as moving or maintaining troops by railway or road, and that attitude of mind was, I suppose, one of our main reformations. We had come a long way since 1928 when, as a junior staff officer, I had been concerned with other Indian Army officers in a struggle, not entirely without success, to introduce operational air transport and supply on the North-West Frontier.
Although we moved great tonnages and many thousands of troops by air, the largest number of transport aircraft we ever had was much less than would elsewhere have been considered the minimum required. It was quite easy theoretically to demonstrate that what we were doing was impossible to continue over any length of time. Yet the skill, courage, and devotion of the airmen, British and American, both in the air and on the ground, combined with the hard work and organizing ability of the soldiers, not only did it, but kept on doing it month after month. As in so many other things, we learnt to revise accepted theories and, when worth it, to risk cutting our margins.
A feature of our airborne operations and movements was that the troops employed were not of some special kind. No soldiers of the Fourteenth Army were taught to believe there was anything mystic, strange, or unusual about air movements or maintenance; to them, of whatever race, these were normal administrative methods. The only exception was parachute jumping. I would, if I had had the aircraft available for practice, have made it an ordinary part of, at least, every infantryman’s training. The incidence of serious injury is, I should think, no higher among soldier parachutists than among soldier motorcyclists. Unfortunately, the lack of training aircraft prevented our using parachutists on a large scale, but even so we were undoubtedly the most air-minded army that ever existed. We had to be.
More publicity was given to air transport than to any other feature of the Burma war and, perhaps as a result, certain fallacies about it gained currency. The first was to overlook the fact that our pattern of operations depended, almost entirely, on a very large measure of air supremacy. Until a degree of air superiority, amounting at least locally to dominance, had been secured, neither air supply, movement, nor tactical support could be carried on with the certainty and regularity our operations demanded. The fighter and the bomber between them had to sweep the skies and push back the enemy landing grounds; the air battle had to be won first—and from now on it will always have to be won first. A second fallacy was that air supply is entirely a matter to be arranged by air forces; that the only things required are the aircraft and the men to fly and maintain them. The organization of air supply is as much a job for the army as for the air force. It is as important as flying the aircraft that the immensely varied stores, properly packed, should arrive at the right airstrips for loading at the right time; that they should be sent to the right units, and that on arrival, unloading, distribution, and delivery should be swift and unerring. All these and a dozen other things are the province of the army and entail the most difficult—at least we found it so—of all requirements, a complicated mass of
signal communications. Among the most strategically dangerous ideas that half-baked thinking on air supply provoked, was that, even if surrounded, positions could be held for months provided they might be maintained from the air. In fact, troops thus cut off even if fed and maintained, eventually lose heart, and air supply is so easily interrupted; the weather or a few well sited anti-aircraft weapons can easily put a stop to it. Air supply is only half the answer. The other half is an adequate relieving force which, however good the prospect of air supply, must appear in a reasonable time and which the beleaguered garrison must know will appear.
There is one other thing about combined land and air operations—and all operations on land are that. The land and air commanders responsible at each level must not only be in close touch, they should live together as we did. Ours was a joint land and air war; its result, as much a victory for the air forces as for the army.
Special Forces
The British Army in the last war spawned a surprising number of special units and formations, that is forces of varying sizes, each trained, equipped, and prepared for some particular type of operation. We had commandos, assault brigades, amphibious divisions, mountain divisions, long-rang penetration forces, airborne formations, desert groups, and an extraordinary variety of cloak and dagger parties. The equipment of these special units was more generous than that of normal formations, and many of them went so far as to have their own bases and administrative organizations. We employed most of them in Burma, and some, notably the Chindits, gave splendid examples of courage and hardihood. Yet I came firmly to the conclusion that such formations, trained, equipped, and mentally adjusted for one kind of operation only, were wasteful. They did not give, militarily, a worth-while return for the resources in men, material and time that they absorbed.
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