No men in this war can have been reduced to such a terrible condition. I saw two prisoners who were revived with hot tea. They were tiny men with matted hair which stood up like a golliwog’s. One of them put his head in his hands and cried like a child. It was a disgrace for him to be alive. [Some Japanese] killed themselves where they stood with their own grenades…lousy, half-mad from hunger and explosions, and deserted by their officers. This is a picture of a shattered army…These small men with the savage hearts and the hands that can paint exquisite water-colours in the diaries which they leave lying in the red mud.
Lethbridge, Slim’s chief of staff, wrote home:
The Jap retreat must have been worse than Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The whole jungle stinks of corruption. I counted twenty-five dead Japs on the side of the road, between two successive milestones. There must have been hundreds more who had crawled away into the jungle to die. In some places there are Jap lorries, with skeletons sitting in the drivers’ seats, and a staff car with four skeletons in it. All these Japs had simply died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. I have never seen troops in such good heart as our people…I’m so delighted that the British Army has at last come into its own again, and shown the world how we can wage war. I really don’t see how the old Hun can last much longer. Once we’ve finished him, we’ll simply knock the hide off these little yellow swine.
On the Japanese line of retreat, correspondent Masanori Ito approached Renya Mutaguchi, architect of his army’s disaster. ‘He seemed tired out,’ wrote Ito, who noticed that the general was shamelessly sipping rice gruel, even as starving survivors of his army stumbled past. ‘You want a statement?’ Mutaguchi growled. ‘I have killed thousands of my men. I should not go back across the Chindwin alive.’ Mutaguchi did not kill himself, however, and lived to be sacked a few months later. Of all the Imperial Army’s commanders, he had become the most detested and scorned by his own officers and men.
‘Sometimes it is impossible to carry out very difficult orders, but even though the command recognise this, they will not admit their mistake until every man has died trying to carry them out,’ a Japanese officer prisoner told his British captors. ‘The unreasoning obedience of men in carrying out idiotic orders is pitiful to behold. It was often impossible for me to give the actual orders—sometimes I only passed on half of them. “We get all the fighting but none of the food—why?” No one dared say this, but everybody thought it.’
In the autumn of 1944, as Fourteenth Army began its own advance towards the Chindwin river and Burma, at first the Japanese could deploy only four very weak divisions, totalling some 20,000 men, against Slim’s six, plus two independent brigades—a British ration strength of 260,000 men. In the north, Chinese divisions under Stilwell were making sluggish progress towards the clearance of the Burma Road between India and China. The only significant achievement of the second Chindit expedition was to assist the capture of Myitkyina, a vital link on the route, which finally fell on 3 August. It required the efforts of three Chinese divisions, aided by the American ‘Merrill’s Marauders’, together with several thousand Chindits, to achieve this success against the weak, poorly-equipped Japanese 18th Division. But the prospect now beckoned of opening the China passage.
Slim’s invaders were supported by forty-eight fighter and bomber squadrons and a total of 4,600 aircraft in the theatre, many of them American transports. The Japanese had just sixty-six planes. Though they were able to reinforce their ground forces before spring, the scene was set for Fourteenth Army to commence its recapture of Burma. Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Gen. Henry Pownall, perceived an urgency about this task. Like others of his time, place and nation, he saw Britain engaged in a race between the recapture of her Asian colonies and American victory in the Pacific. If the British lost the contest, if they failed to secure physical possession before the Japanese flag came down, the Union flag might never again fly over this great region: ‘There’s not much time to lose. The Yanks are going to have Japan beat by Xmas 1945. We have got a lot of cleaning-up to do by then. The Yanks are not going to wait for us (no reason why they should) but we really don’t want our Far Eastern Empire…handed back to us entirely by American single-handed victory. So we aim at all Burma by next summer and Malaya not too long afterwards.’
The twin battles of Imphal and Kohima had been essential, to halt the Japanese advance westwards. British victory had crippled the fighting power of the enemy on the Burman front, where Japan no longer possessed resources to frustrate any significant Allied purpose. Slim’s chief foes were now terrain, disease, weather, logistics. Mountbatten supported an important decision: to keep fighting through the monsoon, when in the past all significant operations were halted. Thereafter, Slim was called upon to move a modern Western army across hundreds of miles of the most inhospitable country in the world, devoid of road communications, to redeem the humiliations which Britain had suffered in 1941-42, and to keep alive a dream of empire which thoughtful men knew to be doomed. Churchill badly wanted to retrieve Burma and Malaya, but was determined, he told the chiefs of staff in September 1944, ‘that the minimum of effort should be employed in this disease-ridden country’. Here was a prospect rich in pathos, tragedy or absurdity according to viewpoint. As so often in wars, brave men were to do fine and hard things in pursuit of a national illusion.
2 ‘THE FORGOTTEN ARMY’
A British officer returning from home leave recorded gloomily: ‘In the UK…I found everywhere a dreadful ignorance about Fourteenth Army and also generally about Burma.’ But Slim’s men had learned to take a defiant pride in their status as ‘the forgotten army’. In the autumn of 1944 they advanced with spirits infinitely buoyed by victory at Imphal and Kohima. Some of the men who now began hacking a path towards the Chindwin river, sweating up the soaring hills and scrambling down the steep valleys towards its bank, had been fighting thereabouts since 1942. A young British signaller who joined 2nd Division was awed by the veterans with whom he found himself: ‘I was a pale white thing; they were tanned the colour of a mule’s backside. I knew nothing; they knew everything and could say nothing.’ The same soldier, Brian Aldiss, wrote home as the advance to the Chindwin began: ‘The grand scenery here produces a great calm, and seems to reduce war to the useless squabble it really is.’ He was as moved as many other participants by the spectacle of Fourteenth Army negotiating the hills of Assam:
When our lorry was labouring to the top of a crest, we could see the thread of vehicles far away behind us, below clouds; conversely, when we were in a valley, we could look up through clouds and see that thread continuing far ahead of us, climbing the next series of heights…To be part of this inset of war was most thrilling after dark. Dim headlights scarcely penetrated the muck we threw up. We could scarcely see the tail lights of the vehicle ahead. Speed was almost down to walking pace. The impression of an animal bent on traversing a strange planet was at its strongest. On either side, unknowable, thrilling, fearsome, stood the jungle, pale as a ghost jungle in its layers of dust.
The 1944-45 battle for Burma was the last great adventure of Britain’s imperial army. It brought together under Slim’s command British soldiers and Gurkhas, East and West Africans, above all Indians: Sikhs and Baluchis, Madrassis, Dogras and Rajputs, pride of the Raj. Only a fraction of those who fought for the Allied cause in Burma were British—two divisions—and just one in thirteen of all ground troops under Mountbatten’s command in South-East Asia.
To a man, Britain’s Indian troops were volunteers, many from the north, where soldiering was a traditional career. The dramatic expansion of the Indian Army between 1939 and 1945—from 189,000 to 2.5 million men—caused a dilution of quality, and especially a shortage of suitable leaders, which significantly affected its performance. Yet the