Wu Guoqing, a twenty-one-year-old interpreter from Chongqing, was thrilled to find that in India he had enough to eat, as he had never done in China. Indeed, he was translated overnight from a poor student into a privileged person with Indian ‘bearers’ to clean his shoes and make his bed, like all Americans in the theatre. Wu recoiled from the poverty, however, which seemed to him worse than that of China, and from British behaviour towards Indians: ‘Some British people even hit them,’ he said wonderingly. ‘They treated them like animals.’ A British tank crewman from London’s east end, John Leyin, was disgusted by the spectacle of two tommies dangling strips of bacon fat from a train window, to taunt starving Indian passers-by. If such behaviour did not represent the entire reality of the Raj, it reflected the impression which it made upon many outsiders, especially American and Chinese, who saw India for the first time in those days.
For months following the expulsion of British forces from Burma in May 1942, they were merely deployed in north-east India to meet the threat of a Japanese invasion. As this peril receded, however, it was replaced by a dilemma about future strategy. Winston Churchill admitted to the British cabinet in April 1943: ‘It could not be said that the [re]conquest of Burma [is] an essential step in the defeat of Japan.’ Yet if this was acknowledged, what were British and Indian forces to do for the rest of the war? After the humiliations inflicted on them in 1941-42, the London government was stubbornly determined to restore by force of arms the prestige of white men in general, and of themselves in particular. If the Asian empire was not to be restored to its former glory, why should British soldiers sacrifice their lives to regain it? Herein lay uncertainties which afflicted strategy throughout the second half of the war, once the initial Japanese tide began to recede. What was Britain’s Far East campaign for? And what would follow victory? No more convincingly than the French or Dutch—the other major colonial powers in Asia, though they contributed nothing significant to the war effort—did the British answer these questions.
In the latter part of 1942 and throughout 1943, Britain’s operations against the Japanese were desultory, even pathetic. Led by feeble commanders against an unflaggingly effective enemy, and with scant support from the government at home, troops failed in a thrust into the Burman coastal region of the Arakan, and were obliged merely to hold their ground in north-east India. Embarrassingly, in the winter of 1943 the operations of six and a half British and Indian divisions were frustrated by just one Japanese formation. Americans like Lt-Gen. Joseph Stilwell, senior US officer in China, became persuaded that the British were no more willing energetically to grapple with the Japanese than were the Chinese armies of Chiang Kai-Shek.
The only marginal success that year owed more to propaganda than substance: Orde Wingate’s ‘Chindit’ guerrilla columns, operating behind the Japanese lines and supplied by air, caught the imagination of the British public and especially of the prime minister, at the cost of losing a third of their number. At one rash moment, Churchill considered making the messianic, unbalanced Wingate C-in-C of Britain’s entire eastern army. Deflected from this notion, instead he promoted the Chindit leader to major-general and authorised resources for him to mount large-scale operations behind the Japanese front in north Burma.
Wingate was killed in a crash during the March 1944 fly-in. The Chindits’ subsequent operations, like those of so many World War II special forces, cost much blood and produced notable feats of heroism, but achieved little. Wingate’s death came as a relief to many senior officers, not least Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, who regarded the Chindits as a distraction. Beyond such theatricals, more than two years were allowed to elapse between the ejection of the British from Burma in 1942, and their return across the Chindwin river. Stilwell’s scorn for British pusillanimity was justified, insofar as Churchill opposed an overland campaign to regain Burma. The prime minister had seen British and Indian forces worsted in jungle fighting in 1942. He dreaded another torrid slogging match on terrain that seemed unfavourable to Western armies.
Against the implacable opposition of his chiefs of staff, who were prepared to resign on the issue, Churchill pressed for an amphibious assault on the great Dutch island of Sumatra, a concept which he rashly compared with his disastrous 1915 Dardanelles campaign ‘in its promise of decisive consequences’. As late as March 1944 he revived the Sumatran scheme, causing the exasperated Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial general staff, to write: ‘I began to wonder whether I was in Alice in Wonderland.’ If a Sumatran operation was not feasible, the prime minister urged landing troops from the sea below Rangoon.
Churchill’s lobbying for a grand South-East Asian amphibious adventure was futile, because Americans owned all the relevant shipping. They would commit their assets only to objectives favoured in Washington, which emphatically did not include Sumatra or Rangoon. Churchill fumed, on 5 May 1944: ‘The American method of trying to force particular policies, of the withholding or giving of certain weapons, such as carrying airplanes or LSTs [Landing Ships, Tank], in theatres where the command belongs by right of overwhelming numbers to us, must be…strongly protested against.’ By this stage of the war, however, Washington’s control of Western Allied strategy had become almost absolute. ‘The hard fact is that the Americans have got us by the short hairs,’ wrote a senior British officer. ‘We can’t do anything in this theatre, amphibious or otherwise, without material assistance from them…So if they don’t approve, they don’t provide.’
Washington dismissed a British request for two US divisions to join operations in Burma. The Canberra government likewise rejected a proposal that two Australian divisions in New Guinea should be transferred to British command in South-East Asia. If the British wanted to recapture Burma, they must do so with their own resources. ‘If our operations formed merely a part of the great American advance,’ cabinet minister Oliver Lyttelton warned the British chiefs of staff in March 1944, ‘we should be swamped. It [is] essential that we should be able to say to our own possessions in the Far East that we had liberated them by our own efforts.’
Thus, the British government knew that a campaign to retake Burma would be difficult, and would not bring the defeat of Japan a day closer. But an army must march, British and Indian soldiers must die, so that Churchill’s people were seen to pay their share of the price for victory in the Far East. Burma would be attacked overland from the north, because only the north interested Washington. Through its jungles and mountains ran a long, tenuous thread, the only land route by which American supplies could be shipped to China from India. Japanese troops occupied a vital section of this ‘Burma Road’. If they could be dispossessed, northern Burma liberated, then the US could pursue its fantastically ambitious plans to provide Chiang Kai-Shek’s armies with the means to become major participants in the war. At huge cost and despite chronic British scepticism, the road was being driven seven hundred miles north from India and south from China by 17,000 American engineers led by the brilliant US Maj.-Gen. Lewis Pike.
From Churchill downwards, the British rejected the notion that China could ever play a part in the war remotely commensurate with the resources which the US lavished upon her. When Roosevelt urged that a nation of 425 million people could not be ignored, the prime minister snorted famously and contemptuously: ‘Four hundred and twenty-five million pigtails!’ Slim, commanding Britain’s Fourteenth Army deployed in north-east India, had some respect for Stilwell, but never shared the American’s belief that the Chinese could decisively influence the war against Japan. ‘I did not hold two articles of his faith,’ the British general wrote later. ‘I doubted the overwhelming war-winning value of this road and…I believed the American amphibious strategy in the Pacific…would bring much quicker results than an overland advance across Asia with a Chinese army yet to be formed.’
If Britain could withhold respect for China, however, it could not deny this to the US. Some 240,000 American engineer and air force personnel were labouring in northern India and southern China to create and sustain the air and land links to which the US government attached such importance. Washington indulged Britain’s commitment to retake Burma only in pursuit of its own China ambitions. A million Indian labourers were deployed to create road, rail and airfield facilities to support a full-scale British offensive.