The Burma Campaign Read online

  THE YALE LIBRARY OF MILITARY HISTORY

  Donald Kagan and Dennis Showalter,

  Series Editors

  ALSO BY FRANK MCLYNN

  France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745

  The Jacobite Army in England

  The Jacobites

  Invasion: From the Armada to Hitler

  Charles Edward Stuart

  Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England

  Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer

  Snow Upon the Desert: The Life of Sir Richard Burton

  From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in

  the Americas 1860–69

  Stanley: Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa

  Fitzroy McLean

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  C. G. Jung

  Napoleaon

  1066: The Year of the Three Battles

  Villa and Zapata

  Wagon’s West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails

  1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World

  Lionheart and Lackland: King Richard, King John and the

  Wars of Conquest

  Heroes & Villains

  Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor

  The Burma Campaign

  FRANK McLYNN

  Disaster into Triumph 1942–45

  First published in the United States in 2011

  by Yale University Press.

  First published in hardcover in Great Britain in 2010

  by The Bodley Head. First published in paperback by

  Vintage Books in 2011.

  Copyright © 2010 by Frank McLynn.

  All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930214

  ISBN 978-0-300-17162-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  Printed in the United States of America.

  A catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

  Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Pauline

  Contents

  Illustrations and maps

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  Illustrations and maps

  Illustrations

  1. Burning camp © Keystone, Hulton Archive, Getty Images 2. Archibald Wavell and Joseph W. Stilwell © William Vandivert, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 3. W.J. Slim © Keystone, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 4. Burma campaign © William Vandivert, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 5. Strategy meeting on the Burmese border © William Vandivert, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 6. Chindits in Burma © Hulton Archive, Getty Images 7. Military briefing © Keystone, Hulton Archive, Getty Images 8. Joseph W. Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang © Fred L. Eldridge, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 9. General Stilwell pictured with a group in the Burmese jungle © Haynes Archive, Popperfoto, Getty Images 10. British forces behind Japanese lines © William Vandivert, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 11. Cairo Conference © Keystone, Hulton Archive, Getty Images 12. Louis Mountbatten © Central Press, Hulton Archive, Getty Images 13. Wounded at casualty clearing station © William Vandivert, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 14. Chinese infantry during Burma campaign © William Vandivert, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 15. Dead Japanese soldiers lying next to road © William Vandivert, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images 16. General Slim in London © Keystone, Hulton Archive, Getty Images 17. William Joseph Slim and Bernard Montgomery © Hulton Archive, Getty Images

  Maps

  1. Physical map of Burma; 2. Political map of Burma; 3. Japanese invasion of Burma 1942; 4. Chindit operations 1943 & 1944; 5. Battle of Kohima-Imphal 1944; 6. ‘Capital’ & ‘Extended Capital’ 1944–1945

  Preface

  Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by

  That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

  The famous words of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae have been brilliantly used as the inspiration for the equally moving motto of the 14th Army in Burma in 1942–45:

  When you go home, tell them of us and say

  For your tomorrow we gave our today.

  The story of the British and Indian soldiers who died in the Burma campaign has been told, partially at least, by many authors, but in my view it would take the combined talents of a Zola, a Dostoevsky and a Céline to do justice to the epic. It is certainly beyond my poor powers adequately to convey the pity and terror of this particular war. Nor is it my intention to provide a blow-by-blow, hour-by-hour slog through the warfare in jungles, mountains and rivers, a military history properly so called. My aim has been more modest: in an example of ‘history from above’ to tell the story of the campaign through the biography of four larger-than-life personalities: William Slim, Louis Mountbatten, Orde Wingate and Joseph Stilwell. In my more fanciful moments, remembering a childhood love of Alexandre Dumas, I think of them as Burma’s ‘Four Musketeers’. Mountbatten, the boastful royalist and self-publicist, is certainly the d’Artagnan of the piece; Slim, the soldier and man of integrity, is Athos; Wingate, with his Machiavellianism and vaulting ambition, is an Aramis redivus. Stilwell as Porthos, then? Certainly the match does not work in physical terms, the one cadaverous, the other portly, but there is something about the dogged and ingenuous professional soldier that makes the pairing not entirely inappropriate. Readers may notice that my ultimate estimate of the four warriors in Burma accurately reflects what I imagine would be the consensus view on Dumas’s quartet.

  As always, I must thank my long-standing and dedicated collaborators, Will Sulkin, publisher at Bodley Head, Tony Whittome, editor at Random House, Paul Taylor, mapmaker, and my wife Pauline, the best critic and in-house editor an author could wish for.

  Farnham, Surrey, 2010

  1

  In the terrible war in Burma in 1942–45, some 27,000 Anglo-Indian soldiers died out of a total British Commonwealth force of 606,000. Of these, 14,326 (fewer than 5,000 of whom were Britons) fell in battle and the rest succumbed to tropical disease. In all, the casualty roster amounted to 73,909. Japanese casualties (144,000 dead and at least another 56,000 wounded) were proportionately far, far greater, but perhaps the greatest toll of all was sustained by the Burmese civilian population, which may have lost one million dead to warfare, forced labour, Japanese war crimes and, above all, the famine and disease unleashed by the warfare.1 One owes it to the fallen to try to understand how such a dreadful conflict took place, even within the greater horror of
the Second World War. The older atlases, well known to schoolchildren in the 1940s and 1950s, used to divide countries into what they called ‘political’, with the emphasis on cities and national boundaries, and ‘physical’, with the emphasis on rivers, mountains, forests and plains. Any overall analysis of Burma is best conducted along such bifurcated lines. Why did the British and their Commonwealth allies – from all parts of India and Nepal, from West Africa and East Africa – plus their allies the Chinese and the Americans, fight the Japanese in Burma? What were the root causes of the conflict? What were the British doing there in the first place? Why did the Commonwealth provide over 600,000 troops to a total Allied force of 690,000 while the Americans contributed just 12,000 and the vastly more populous China only 72,000? What conditions did they fight in? This is an important issue, for many histories of the Burma campaign read almost as though the conflict was going on in Europe, with no appreciation or sensitivity to environment, habitat or milieu. Accordingly, in our ‘physical’ section some attempt will be made to point up the uniqueness or ‘otherness’ of Burma.

  The war in Burma was part of a wider conflict waged in Asia and the Pacific by the empire of Japan against the Western democracies, principally Britain and the United States. Some historians go so far as to say that this was a geopolitical conflict inevitable once the great voyages of Cook, La Perouse, Vancouver and others opened up the Pacific in the eighteenth century, for such expansion was bound to bring Europe into collision with the mightiest powers in Asia. Others see the opening up of Japan in 1853–54 at gunpoint by the US Commodore Perry as the key event.2 There had been commercial, political and even religious relations with the West for about one hundred years from the 1540s, but after 1637 Japan withdrew into isolation, with virtually no contact with the outside world for more than two centuries. Humiliated by the ‘barbarians’ in the 1850s, the Japanese quickly learned from them, overthrew the Shogunate, forged a modern state with modern armies and within 50 years of the end of its two centuries of isolationism had defeated both China and Russia in major wars; the latter victory in particular caused a worldwide sensation. For 20 years from 1902, Japan had a warm relationship with Great Britain and even fought on her side against the Germans in World War I.3 All this came to an end with the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which attempted to rationalise the conflicting goals of US global hegemony with the powerful mood of isolationism following American rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. The USA scored a great diplomatic triumph, but at a price. The treaty laid down that the ratio of capital warships possessed by the great navies of the world should be in the ratio of 5:5:3 – the United States, Britain and Japan respectively. Moreover, the British were bound by the terms of the treaty to abandon their existing alliance with Japan. The British agreed reluctantly to these steep terms, under the mistaken impression that as a quid pro quo Washington would cancel its war debts. This did not happen, and it occasioned such bitterness that by 1928 both nations were seriously considering the ‘impossible’ scenario of a war between the two English-speaking democracies. Resentment in Japan was even more grievous. Tokyo felt that it had been humiliated, not just by the inferior ratio of capital ships, but because the British had jettisoned its friendship in order to curry favour with their American cousin. Some historians see the 1922 Washington treaty as the decisive moment when Japan clearly began to perceive the United States as its mortal enemy.4

  Japan was also increasingly outraged by what it considered the humbug of US foreign policy. As early as 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt thought that the way forward in the Far East might be for Japan to have its own Monroe doctrine. Just as the original Monroe doctrine laid down that the Americas were an exclusive sphere of influence for the United States, with the corollary that the USA would not interfere in other continents, so Roosevelt felt it would make sense if Asia was designated an exclusively Japanese sphere of influence.5 Events in China destroyed this prospect. In 1911, following Japan out of the epoch of backwardness, China overthrew the Manchu dynasty and, under Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shi-kai, aimed to become a modern state. Instead it became a bearpit of factionalism between warlords. Since 1898 and its intervention in the Philippines, the USA had abandoned the Monroe doctrine’s corollary of non-intervention in other hemispheres while still keeping the Americas as its special preserve. The many American economic interests, not to mention their proliferating missionary societies, led Washington to become more and more involved in Chinese affairs. From this would develop the notorious US ‘China complex’, whereby, against all reason and empirical observation, a friendly China was perceived to be essential to the national security of the United States. The Japanese refused to accept that Washington could intervene massively in Asia, Nippon’s own doorstep, while barring all other nations from the Americas. Still less could they accept the duality (which they read as hypocrisy) of economic protectionism, or the ‘closed door’, in US markets coupled with an insistence on ‘open doors’ everywhere else. Rocked by economic failure – there was a particularly bad bank collapse in 1926, followed by the nightmare of the Great Depression in 1929 – the Japanese considered their own form of customs union, with a tariff wall to match those introduced in the early 1930s by the USA (the Smoot-Hawley) and the British Empire (Imperial Preference). This was the genesis of the proposed economic autarky of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was economic warfare, at root, that led to Pearl Harbor.6

  As anger mounted against the perceived selfishness of the Western democracies, right-wing factions in business and the army came to the fore. While it would not be correct to characterise Japan in the 1930s as ‘fascist’, since the army itself contained a moderate faction and the navy was always dovish, it is undoubtedly true that after 1931 the militaristic hotheads made all the running. Most Western histories begin their account of the origins of the Pacific War with a sudden, unexplained act of aggression when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, as if the militarists in Japan had appeared out of nowhere and for no reason; the triggers and precipitants, sadly, were all too obvious, and not helped by an uncompromising and myopic Asian policy pursued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt after 1933.7 FDR decided at a very early stage that China was vital to the self-interest of the United States and that the emerging strongman in China, Chiang Kai-shek, represented the way of the future. By the 1930s, China was being torn apart by a three-way split: by the Kuomintang (KMT) party, founded by Chiang, allegedly representing liberalism and capitalism; by the plethora of old-style warlords with their private armies; and by the burgeoning Chinese Communist movement led by Mao Tse-tung. Roosevelt, partly out of sentimentality (his grandfather had made a fortune in China) and partly from faulty analysis, always backed Chiang uncritically.8 In fact Chiang was very far from being the great hope of Western democracy. His true character may be gauged from his treatment of women. He abandoned his first wife, gave the second venereal disease on her wedding night and then discarded her in favour of a match with Soong Mei-ling, the youngest of the fabulously wealthy Soong sisters. Venal, corrupt, cruel and egomaniacal, he had far less control over the warlords than he always boasted of to his American contacts. The warlord Lung Yun of Yunnan, who had made a fortune from opium and ran his own mini-state, complete with a private army and a local currency, always insisted that Chiang’s wife come to his headquarters as a hostage before he would consent to meet Chiang.9

  With FDR so fanatically wedded to China, the Japanese move into Manchuria in 1931 was bound to mean eventual conflict with the USA. The sanest voices in Tokyo all counselled against an unwinnable war with the American colossus, with Admiral Yamamoto and the navy unceasingly vociferous in this regard. Even in the army, strategists divided into ‘northerners’ and ‘southerners’. Northerners tended to be the fanatics of the ‘Imperial Way’ faction and advocated expanding into Manchuria and beyond, where they would inevitably come into conflict with both the United States and the Soviet Union. The moderates in the �
�Control’ faction thought this policy was dangerous folly, and advised concentration on South-East Asia.10 If Japan had been prepared to swallow its anger about US policy in China and simply let it go, it is unlikely that there would ever have been a Pearl Harbor or a need for one. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, however, inevitably meant conflict with Britain. To achieve autarky and self-sufficiency, Japan needed not only a viable internal market, but also the oil of the Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia) and the rubber and tin of Malaya. That meant war with the British Empire and the powerful Royal Navy. With no other enemies, it would have been well within Tokyo’s capability. The United States would never have intervened simply to help the British Empire; it did not do so even when Britain itself seemed likely to surrender to Hitler in 1940. Only when China was brought into the equation did war with the United States loom as a certainty.11 Simply to safeguard their naval moves against Malaysia and the East Indies, the Japanese would be compelled to attack the USA in the Philippines, in order to pre-empt any US naval intervention. That in turn meant general war with the USA, and the only conceivable theoretical way that even a holding action could be waged was if the US Pacific fleet no longer existed; hence the eventual decision for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet instead of abandoning all ambitions in China and concentrating purely on South-East Asia, the ‘northerners’, in a classic exhibition of fanaticism, doubled their bets by expanding their military adventurism into China. A cause for war was trumped up, and Japanese armies rapidly overran eastern China, capturing Nanking and Shanghai and besmirching their reputation forever in a holocaust of slaughter, rape and genocide. Chiang simply withdrew his government to Chungking in western China, where he sustained himself with massive American aid. Between 1938 and 1941, the war in China quickly became bogged down in a stalemate.12