The route began at a village called Shinbiwyang, which stood at the beginning of the Daru Pass, which in turn became the Hukawng Valley. Shinbiwyang was about 120 food-free miles west of Myitkyina, and the Kumon Range of mountains was in the way. Another option was to duck south of the Kumon Range, and go along a rough road considered motorable for the first thirty of its 130 miles; indeed, a ‘bus’ – that is, a dusty lorry with a tarpaulin over the back – travelled along this stretch as often as two or three times a year. The road became unmotorable at a spot called Pakhenbum where one track branched left towards a district of jungle scrub, friable red earth, dried-up river beds, jade mines and mosquitoes. Beyond the mines lay Tamu and the start of the aforementioned main thoroughfare for evacuees, the Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur route. The other, rightward pointing, track headed towards Shinbiwyang, the Hukawng Valley, and its mosquitoes. At this junction of Pakhenbum a rough wooden notice was put up in April indicating the latter track, and reading: ‘This route is a death trap for women and children. Women and children should turn left.’ (That is, towards Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur.) In other words, the Hukawng Valley was officially disapproved of as a route for refugees. But the alternative, the track leading leftwards, also led southwards, and the Japanese were to the south.
In his Evacuation Report, Dorman-Smith wrote, ‘Little evidence is available of the treatment of those who stayed received at the hands of the enemy’, so he makes one august example stand for many: ‘… it is known that the Ven. W. H. S Higginbotham, Archdeacon of Rangoon, while trying to prevent looting, was cut down by a Japanese officer.’ On the other hand, one of the refugee administrators would write in 1942, ‘I have kept a careful watch for stories of Jap atrocities towards refugees. I have heard of none in the Shan States or the Northern Districts of Burma. In fact, the reverse is true. There are instances of refugees who fell behind Jap lines actually being given lifts in Jap lorries.’ The whole purpose of their invasion, after all, had been to get the British out of the country.
But from the late 1930s, the Japanese had been rapidly reassessed by the British; they had graduated to the demonology. After Pearl Harbor, cartoonists were as likely to depict them as giants as midgets. Here was the Yellow Peril incarnate and the British refugees who had read the fictions of Sax Rohmer might – on a subconscious level – have been fleeing the claw-like hands of Dr Fu Manchu.
Japan had been opened up to the world – and tied into one-sided trade treaties – by the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry in 1853. Industrialization and Westernization had followed, and, at the end of the First World War, Japan was one of the big five economic powers. But the transformation was accompanied by a feeling of guilt, a nostalgia for the Togukawa period of the seventeenth century, when Japan turned its back on the Christianizing West. Japan had been seduced, violated. The Western powers had made of her an inferior version of themselves; she felt patronized, and encircled by Western imperial possessions. This triggered a militarization of society, and the doctrine of ‘line of advantage’, Japan’s own version of Lebensraum, which in turn prompted the invasion of China. The economic sanctions this brought down on her confirmed the Japanese view that international law was a conspiracy to preserve the hegemony of America and Britain, and out of this persecution complex came what John W. Dower calls in Japan in War and Peace (1993) a desire for ‘racial revenge’.
Whereas the Japanese were dwarves (when they weren’t giants) in British newspapers, there was no generic image of the enemy in the Japanese mind. In the same book, Dower writes, ‘In Japanese war films produced between 1937 and 1945 … the enemy was rarely depicted. Frequently it was not even made clear who the antagonist was.’ The enemy was beneath notice. The Japanese had signed, but had not ratified, the Geneva Convention of 1929. They did not agree with the protocols concerning prisoners of war; the Emperor had banned the use of the term. Japanese soldiers would never allow themselves to be taken as prisoners – the officers would disembowel themselves whereas the privates would do the job communally, huddling around a grenade while one of them pulled the pin – so they did not see why they in turn should be hospitable to a defeated enemy. And it appeared little distinction would be made between enemy soldiers and enemy civilians.
The Nanking Massacre of December of 1937, in which perhaps a quarter of a million Chinese civilians were murdered, many having been raped, was reported in Britain. Then the Japanese nastiness came closer to home. During their invasion of Hong Kong, Japanese soldiers had killed patients on hospital operating tables, and raped and killed civilian women. On 11 March 1942, The Times reported,
Rarely has any Minister of the Crown had to make to the House of Commons a statement more terrible than that made by Mr Eden yesterday regarding the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians by the Japanese after the capitulation of Hong Kong, when the Japanese forces were permitted and indeed encouraged to commit atrocities seldom rivalled and never surpassed in the history of international war during the last century.
Mr Eden said, ‘The military code of the Samurai did in fact have some influence upon Japanese military practice in the Russo-Japanese War [just as well, since we were allies at that point] … but the new Japan has no regard for the virtues of self-restraint, incorruptibility, courtesy towards honourable enemies which that code prescribed.’
Japanese soldiers felt entitled to their racial revenge by their own racial purity, a notion underpinned by the divinity of their emperor – all of this inculcated by the ‘spiritual training’ of the Japanese soldier. In his apparent unstoppability, there was something of the automaton about the Japanese soldier. In Quartered Safe Out Here, the novelist George MacDonald Fraser, who fought in the jungles of Burma, described Japanese soldiers circling a burning tank as looking like ‘clockwork dolls’. The Japanese soldier’s smallness was deemed to fuel his rage. In 1944, the American general Douglas MacArthur, who was five foot nine, would write, ‘Some observers claim there would have been no Pearl Harbor had the Japanese been three inches taller.’ Smallness was a particular asset in the jungle. It made the Japanese soldier nimble and silent; he required less food and drink than a big man. He was super-fit; he carried a light pack, didn’t care too much about doing up his tunic buttons, or shaving; he wore his cap at an angle that might have been called – were he not a Japanese soldier – jaunty. He would creep up and kill you before you’d even seen him, although you might be alerted to his presence when it was too late by his gratuitously alarming scream of ‘Banzai!’. There was something uncanny about his sudden manifestations; he was like a goblin or a wood sprite, or a jungle nat in human form.
The jungle might have loomed in the colonial mind as being the dark side of the country, the murky subconscious, but it was not thought of as an arena of conflict. That would be to dignify the jungle in a way it did not deserve. In The Longest Retreat, Tim Carew writes ‘in the summer of 1941 the jungle was not mentioned in polite military circles’. The Japanese could have the jungle if they wanted it, and, in early 1942, Punch magazine depicted Japanese soldiers as monkeys swinging through the trees. The Japanese had established their own jungle warfare school as early as 1934, in their colony of Formosa, where they practised on live Formosans.
When, in 1941, the inadequate British garrison in Burma was supplemented by the arrival at Fort Dufferin in Mandalay of three battalions of the Indian Infantry Brigade, the men immediately set about training for desert warfare. The main threat to India would surely come from the Middle East. It is true that, before Pearl Harbor, the British had established a so-called Bush Warfare School in the Burmese summer retreat of Maymyo; but as Colonel ‘Mad’ Mike Calvert, Chief Instructor at the School, would write in his autobiography, Fighting Mad (1964), ‘The name Bush Warfare School was in itself a deception. We were not preparing to fight in the Burma jungle; our task was to train officers and N.C.O.s to lead guerrillas in the plains of China, a very different type of warfare.’ Given what was to come in Burma, it would have been better if