Some of the first bombs to fall on Mandalay wrecked the colonists’ Upper Burma Club. A guest at a lunch party there said, ‘We didn’t know what hit us. One minute we were seated at table, the next the roof caved in, tables, chairs, food and ourselves were scattered all over the room.’ The attacks started fires which burned down much of the city. Bodies lay unburied for days, intensifying popular contempt for British incompetence. With a symbolism that did not go unnoticed, flowers in the colonists’ gardens began to die, because the servants who watered them had abandoned their posts. The British bosses of the Burma Corporation washed their hands of their local staff, shrugging that they could do nothing for them.
In reply to a plea for reinforcements for Burma, Wavell in Java signalled Rangoon on 22 January: ‘I have no resources with which I can assist you…Cannot understand why with troops at your disposal you should be unable to hold Moulmein and trust you will do so. Nature of country and resources must limit Japanese effort.’ When the modest Japanese invasion force of two divisions launched its attack from Siam in the last days of January, some Indian units mounted a stalwart defence, but the locally recruited Burma Rifles crumbled quickly. The British had no significant air or artillery support, and John Smyth was furious that his superiors insisted on an attempt to hold exposed Moulmein. The first crisis of the campaign came in the early hours of 23 February, at a bridge across the Sittang eighty miles north of the town. As the Japanese approached, in darkness British engineers fired demolition charges. Two of Smyth’s brigades were cut off east of the river. All but a handful of men were obliged to surrender, a crippling moral and strategic blow.
Lt. John Randle of the Baluch Regiment was holding a position west of the Salween river when he realised Japanese troops were behind him. ‘I sent my runner, the company bugler, with a message to my CO to tell him there were a lot of Japs about. They cut in behind us and we could hear the runner screaming as they killed him with swords and bayonets…The Japs butchered all our wounded.’ His battalion lost 289 men killed and 229 taken prisoner in its first engagement. Randle said: ‘We were arrogant about the Japs, we regarded them as coolies. We thought of them as third rate. My goodness me, we soon changed our tune. The Japs fought with great ferocity and courage. We had no idea about jungle fighting, no pamphlets, doctrine etc. Not only were we raw troops, we were trying to do something entirely new.’
By early March Rangoon was a ghost city, where the remaining policemen and a small British garrison skirmished with mobs of looters. Fighter pilots of Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, transferred to Burma from China, sustained the only significant resistance to Japanese air attacks. The defence was collapsing. British liaison officer W.E. Abraham reported from Rangoon: ‘The general atmosphere of gloom was almost impossible to describe. GHQ at Athens when getting out of Greece was almost light-hearted by comparison.’ Wavell, raging against the alleged defeatism of his subordinates, sacked both his Burma C-in-C and Smyth, a sick man struggling to direct the remains of his division in a battle he never thought winnable. The British government pleaded with Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, to allow two Australian formations then in transit between the Middle East and their threatened homeland to be diverted to Burma. Curtin refused, and was surely right: the Australians, fine and experienced soldiers though they were, could not have turned the tide in a doomed campaign.
Wavell was haunted by memories of the allegations of pessimism and defeatism thrown at him by Churchill before his 1941 sacking as Middle East C-in-C. In South-East Asia, he strove to show himself a man of steel, to put spine into his subordinates. ‘Our troops in Burma are not fighting with proper spirit,’ he signalled London. ‘I have not the least doubt that this is in great part due to lack of drive and inspiration from the top.’ In truth, so much was wrong with Britain’s Far East forces that the rot was unstoppable in the midst of a Japanese offensive. Wavell seemed to acknowledge this in another signal to London: ‘I am very disturbed at lack of real fighting spirit in our troops shown in Malaya and so far in Burma. Neither British, Australians or Indians have shown real toughness of mind or body…Causes go deep, softness of last twenty years, lack of vigour in peace training, effects of climate and atmosphere of East.’ Wavell became a regular visitor to Rangoon, likened by one historian to ‘a Harley Street specialist, complete with a black bag, coming to see a very sick patient’.
On 5 March Lt. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander arrived to take command. The impeccable ‘Alex’, Churchill’s favourite general, could only contribute his unfailing personal grace and serenity to what now became a rout. Initially he ordered a halt to the British retreat, then within twenty-four hours accepted that Rangoon could not be held and endorsed its evacuation. The invaders missed a priceless opportunity to trap the entire British army in Burma when a local Japanese commander withdrew a strong roadblock closing the road north. Misinterpreting his orders, he supposed that all the attacking forces were intended to close on Rangoon for a big battle. This fumbled pass allowed Alexander’s force to retreat northwards – and the general himself to escape captivity.
In desperation, Wavell accepted Chiang Kai-shek’s offer of two Chinese Nationalist divisions with their supporting elements. Chinese willingness to join the campaign was not altruistic. The Japanese advance in the north had closed the ‘Burma Road’, by which American supplies reached China. Reopening it was a vital Chinese interest. Wavell’s caution about acceptance of assistance from Chiang’s troops was prompted by knowledge that they lacked their own supply system and aspired to live off the land. There were also doubts about who gave their orders: US Gen. Joseph Stilwell claimed that he did, only to be contradicted by Chinese Gen. Tu Lu Ming, who told Burma’s governor, Dorman-Smith: ‘The American general only thinks he is commanding. In fact he is doing no such thing. You see, we Chinese think that the only way to keep the Americans in the war is to give them a few commands on paper. They will not do much harm as long as we do the work!’
Stilwell, an inveterate anglophobe, was underwhelmed by his first meeting with Alexander on 13 March. He wrote in his diary with accustomed sourness: ‘Astonished to find me – mere me, a goddam American – in command of Chinese troops. “Extrawdinery!” Looked me over as if I had just crawled out from under a rock!’ Stilwell was given the assistance of a British-led Frontier Force mounted unit, for reconnaissance duties. Its leader, Captain Arthur Sandeman of the Central India Horse, achieved the doubtful distinction of becoming the last British officer to die leading a cavalry charge. Blundering into the path of Japanese machine-gunners, he drew his sabre, ordered his bugler to signal the attack, and advanced on the enemy until he and his companions met their inevitable fate.
The Chinese intervention provoked the Japanese to reinforce their two-division invasion army, sending two more formations to Rangoon by sea. The British were reorganised into a corps commanded by William Slim, a shrewd, rugged Gurkha officer who would eventually show himself Britain’s ablest general of the war. On 24 March the Japanese struck hard at the Chinese in the north. The British counter-attacked to relieve pressure on their allies, but the enemy prevailed on both fronts. Slim’s Burcorps, struggling to avert complete collapse on the east bank of the Irrawaddy, called for Chinese assistance. Stilwell was predictably contemptuous, writing on 28 March: ‘Riot among British soldiers at Yenangyaung. British destroying the oil fields. GOOD GOD. What are we fighting for?’ Yet to the astonishment of Stilwell as well as the British, a Chinese division, led by one of Chiang’s ablest officers, Gen. Sun Li-Jen, pushed back the Japanese and achieved a notable little victory. Although an imperial formation was almost wiped out in the fighting around the Irrawaddy, Slim emerged from the battle full of respect for Gen. Sun’s men, whose intervention was decisive in enabling the British to avert the annihilation of Burcorps.
But the Allied position in Burma had become untenable. The Japanese considered that the Chinese formations fought more bravely and energetically than the Commonwealth forces, but within days they were falling back northwards, eventually into China. The pursuing Japanese were content to halt at the border. Stilwell, who bore substantial personal responsibility for mishandling the Nationalists under his command, abandoned them and set off westwards with a motley party of Americans, press