Private Bill Norman reached the river after the main crossing had taken place, finding only a handful of men still trying to get away. Like the others making the crossing, he abandoned his weapon. With a friend, he grabbed a thick bamboo pole for buoyancy, and the two of them set off across the river. With physical exhaustion setting in and the pole waterlogged, out of nowhere, it seemed, another figure joined the struggling pair, a big man and a strong swimmer who grabbed the pole and pulled them across.
The Cabinet papers for February 1942 described how ‘our troops have fought well and inflicted heavy casualties’, but acknowledged that the ‘Japanese attack has been remarkable for the excellence of its ground to air communications and for the coordination of air with land forces’. The RAF and pilots of the American Volunteer Group challenged the Japanese but were eventually overwhelmed by superior numbers.*
Rangoon was abandoned on 7 March 1942 and occupied by the Japanese the following day. The British managed to evacuate sufficient supplies of food and petrol to maintain their forces on the retreat, saving the army from starvation as it trudged towards India. Units fought through Japanese roadblocks, battered and demoralised by the enemy’s constant outflanking movements and encirclements; men with no aim but escape.
Almost a fortnight after the fall of Rangoon, General Alexander appointed a new commander to lead the forces in the field. Major General William Slim, a former officer of a Gurkha regiment, was serving in the Middle East when he was appointed to take command of the newly constituted Burma Corps on 19 March. He would become arguably the finest British general of the Second World War and a man loved by his multi-racial army. But with Rangoon gone and Japanese forces attempting the encirclement of the British and Indian forces retreating north, it was too late for Alexander or Slim to do much but try to save as many men as possible to fight another day from the two divisions and armoured brigade of Burma Corps.
Watching the rout of an army is always a salutary lesson, but Slim’s gift was to be able to watch and learn. He was a rare kind of soldier: quick-witted and daring; loved by his men because they knew he would not spend their lives cheaply; and possessed of a moral courage that allowed him to acknowledge his own errors. The lessons Slim learned in those terrible months from March to June 1942 would be embedded in his consciousness forever and would be used to weld troops from the British and Indian armies into one of the finest fighting units of the war, 14th Army.
Slim had grown up in a lower-middle-class family in Birmingham, the son of a failed small businessman and a devoutly Catholic mother, whose strong personality seems to have been inherited by her son. After leaving school he went to work as a teacher among some of the poorest and toughest boys in Birmingham, an experience that later gave him an invaluable insight into the minds of the men he would lead into battle. There were other jobs, including a periodic recourse to writing stories for magazines, but a childhood passion for military history found an outlet in the Officer Training Corps at his brother’s university. At the outbreak of the First World War, Slim was commissioned as a second lieutenant and was wounded at Gallipoli. During the early stages of the Second World War he was wounded again, while fighting the Italians in Eritrea. To his men he would always be ‘Uncle Bill’, a man of imposing physical build, with a protruding jaw that emphasised an air of resolution and command.
Slim conducted a skilful fighting retreat, buying time to allow the bulk of his army, and tens of thousands of their Chinese allies, to escape destruction or capture. When the monsoon broke in early May the principal routes of retreat became mires in which men slipped and fell as they trudged towards India. Slim watched troops shiver with fever as they lay on ‘the sodden ground under the dripping trees, without even a blanket to cover them’. In May, Lance Corporal W. Long of 2/KOYLI was retreating north from the town of Kalewa when his group was joined by a private suffering from cholera. The man had been in hospital but had decided to try to escape with his comrades rather than trust his life to the advancing Japanese. The seriously ill soldier lasted for eight miles of marching and then fell out. Lance Corporal Long reported, ‘We carried on marching. Two days later another party who set off marching after us caught us up and told us that they had passed Pte Powell lying dead on the side of the road.’
In one instance rough justice was meted out to a soldier accused of abandoning his post. Sergeant W. Butcher, 2/KOYLI, described how a private in his platoon deserted in the early hours. Private Ramsden was arrested three hours later and brought before the commanding officer, Major Mike Calvert. Calvert would go on to become the most successful of the Chindit commanders and one of the founders of the SAS. In the case of Private Ramsden he showed no mercy and ordered him to be shot.* Sergeant Butcher was given the job of carrying out the execution. ‘I tied him to a tree with his back to me. I placed a pistol between his shoulders and shot him at point-blank range. He was definitely dead before I left him.’ Private Ramsden had fallen in love with and married a Burmese woman.† The statement by his executioner refers to her as a suspected fifth columnist who was later arrested.
Burmese found aiding the Japanese could also be subjected to summary justice. Lieutenant Colonel C. E. K. Bagot of the 1st Glosters described an encounter on 3 May 1942: ‘At 1930 hrs signalling was observed on our right front and a patrol stalked 3 Burmans who were caught in the act. One man carried weapons and Japanese money. He was shot, the remainder were taken back 25 miles under escort of the Burma Frontier Force and dispersed, after they had been made to witness the execution.’
The final stage of the journey brought the troops through the Kabaw Valley. Captain Gerald Fitzpatrick and the survivors of 2/KOYLI encountered a scene of horror there that spurred them onwards. The rotting bodies of numerous refugees lay in the sun being devoured by vultures, while countless flies swarmed around the troops. ‘The impact of witnessing the vulturine disposal of the unfortunates, on our sick and wounded men, was quite miraculous. It was like a Lourdes cure; the pace quickened, backs straightened, men simply dare not fall back and die in this place.’ The jungle was endlessly strange. Ralph Tanner was ill with dysentery and had to briefly drop out of the column near the top of a hill. While he squatted, he saw ‘swallow tail butterflies drinking the salt on someone’s knees when there was a halt near the summit’. Volunteers from the Society of Friends (Quakers) were operating ambulances caring for wounded soldiers and civilians.* Doctor Handley Laycock was attached to the British forces and recalled a strange combination of cheerfulness and horror along the route to the border. ‘During these days we saw many scenes of intense horror. A man dying on this path usually remains until the rapid assaults of ants and other insects have reduced him to a skeleton. In the process he blocks the path and his presence there is exceedingly unpleasant. In some camps we found the dead and dying together, the latter too feeble to crawl away from the former. On the whole the morale of the men we met was high and they usually returned our greeting with a broad grin, and expressed embarrassingly profuse gratitude for anything that we could do to help them …’
As he tramped the last yards into India, Captain Fitzpatrick of 2/KOYLI looked up and saw two figures in uniform standing on a mound of earth just above him. One of them was General Sir Harold Alexander, GOC Burma, and the other was ‘a less flashy officer’, General William ‘Bill’ Slim.
Watching the retreating army, Slim felt a mixture of pride and anger. They looked like scarecrows dragging themselves across the border. But Slim noted that they still carried their weapons and looked like fighting units. ‘They might look like scarecrows but they looked like soldiers too.’ His anger arose from the reception accorded to his men by the military in India, where commanders and staff