Military Economics, Culture and Logistics in the Burma Campaign, 1942-1945

Graham Dunlop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317316237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Following the fall of Burma to the Japanese in May 1942, reopening and expanding the link from India to China through Burma became the allied force's principal war aim in South-East Asia. This book argues that the campaign's development was driven more by what was logistictically possible than by pure strategic intent.

Part I

1 The Loss of Burma, January—May 1942

Following the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 the loss of Burma presented India with economic and strategic crises that she was ill-equipped to address. It also threw into stark relief the economic, operational and logistical challenges which had to be overcome before the war could be taken back to the enemy. Some of these emerged from the lessons of defeat in Malaya and Burma and some from India’s own economic and strategic position in May 1942, when the Japanese arrived on her eastern frontier. The following two chapters explore the logistic contribution to, and implications of, the loss of Burma, and then the state of India’s preparedness for war against Japan, in which she was to be the front line and strategic base. From these examinations emerge the main logistic problems that had to be solved at the strategic, operational and tactical levels of warfare before the allies could go back onto the offensive.

Burma covers an area of some 240,000 square miles (see Map 2). If overlaid on Europe, Burma would extend south to north from Sicily to Hamburg, and, at its widest part, from east to west, across France from Normandy to the Ruhr. Burma’s land borders with India to the west and China, Laos (French Indo-China in the 1940s) and Thailand to the east are mountainous and widely covered, even today, in dense jungle. During the south-west monsoon, which blows from May to October each year, the coastal areas and the mountainous periphery of the country are subject to exceptionally heavy rain and stormy conditions, which, in the 1940s, rendered both ground and air movement difficult and dangerous at best, and well nigh impossible for much of the time. The central part of Burma comprises the basins of the Irrawaddy and Sittang Rivers. These plains are (and were in the 1940s) extensively cultivated, especially in their southern areas, around Rangoon, mainly for rice production. That part of the country is also subject to very wet conditions during the south-west monsoon. However, the area bounded roughly by Meiktila, Yenangyaung, Kalewa and Shwebo, around the confluence of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin Rivers, is known as the ‘dry zone’. Lying in the rain shadow of the Arakan Hills, it is more arid and was then less cultivated than the rest of the central basin. The southern part of the country is a long, narrow, largely jungle-covered strip known as the Tenasserim coast, lying between Thailand to the east and the Andaman Sea to the west.

The main LofC in the central part of the country tend to run roughly north–south along the lines of the Irrawaddy, Chindwin and Sittang Rivers, which, themselves, carry a good deal of traffic, as they did in the 1940s. The Salween, further east, was used less for transport purposes as it flows swiftly through the mountains of the Shan States, did not pass through particularly productive country and was remote from the rest of the transport infrastructure. Beside the Irrawaddy and Sittang lay a limited network of reasonably good, two-way, all-weather roads as far north as Shwebo, and a road of similar standard ran from Mandalay, through Lashio to Kunming, in China. Otherwise the road system was generally poor and of fair-weather standard only, carrying little, if any, motor traffic. A metre gauge railway system, centred on Rangoon, had lines running south-east along the Tenasserim coast; north-west to Prome, on the Irrawaddy; and north to Mandalay. There, the northbound line divided, one branch going on further north to Myitkyina and another going north-east to Lashio, running alongside the Kunming road. The Arakan coast and the Tenasserim coast, south of Martaban, were served also by coastal shipping. Cross-border communications were not good. The only high-capacity overland link with any neighbour was the road from Mandalay to Kunming. Elsewhere a few tracks crossed the mountains to Thailand and India but they were passable only to people and animals on foot in fair weather. Most external trade was carried by sea, the principal port being the capital, Rangoon, which was also the nodal point of internal communications and the peacetime logistic base for the Burma garrison. There were several good airfields in the country, the main ones in the northern and central part being at Myitkyina, Mandalay, Magwe and Rangoon. Three other fields, Tavoy, Mergui and Victoria Point, on the Tenasserim coast, formed part of the vital air reinforcement route southward to Singapore.¹

British defence planning for Burma in the 1920s and early 1930s had been developed under an assumption that the country was not subject to any external threat and was not, therefore, strategically important. The mountain barriers separating Burma from her neighbours to the east were believed to be impassable to an invading army accompanied by the impedimenta of modern warfare. Moreover, all the countries with which she shared borders were friendly, providing yet further protection from Japan, which was, at that time, the only anticipated source of aggression. The fleet due to be operating out of Singapore, which was the keystone of British defence policy in the Far East, would protect Burma from any seaborne attack. As we now know, with the wisdom of hindsight, the power of that fleet, along with the impenetrability of the mountain barriers and the friendly disposition of Burma’s eastward neighbours, turned out to be illusory. From the late 1930s onward, with the possibility of war in the Far East looming, the strategic significance of Burma became increasingly apparent, and it was very largely of an economic and logistic nature. Burma provided the British Empire, and especially India, with essential supplies of oil, rice, timber and minerals, which had to be protected. Moreover the link she provided in the air reinforcement route to Singapore was becoming ever more important. Plans for the defence of the Far East and the sustainment of Singapore depended increasingly on air power as it became ever clearer that the anticipated time delay before the arrival of the fleet from home waters would have to be extended due to the gathering storm of war in Europe. Following the Japanese occupation of northern French Indo-China in September 1940 an overland threat from the east suddenly became a distinct possibility and Burma, with her mountainous borders and great river obstacles, provided the outer layer of air and ground defence for the Indian industrial heartland around Calcutta. From that time also, with the port of Haiphong denied to the Chinese, the route from Rangoon to Kunming provided the only remaining practical overland supply line to China, which had already been at war with Japan for three years. Maintaining that link would become more and more significant once the Americans entered the war. By the end of 1941 up to 15,000 tons of supplies per month passed through Burma en route to China and a peak of over 20,000 tons was reached in March 1942 due to a last-minute surge just ahead of the anticipated Japanese capture of Rangoon.²

In all these new strategic roles, however, Burma was to prove vulnerable. The three Tenasserim airfields on the Singapore air reinforcement route lay very close to the Thai border. It had been assumed that they would be secure while that country remained friendly to Britain but the fields were seized by the Japanese as soon as they invaded Thailand and Malaya in December 1941, beginning the ever-tightening stranglehold on Singapore. The port of Rangoon, the nearby oil refinery at Syriam (the only one in the country) and the southern part of the supply route to China then lay directly in the path of the unforeseen Japanese invasion route from Thailand. After the fall of Singapore in February 1942 these vital places were also vulnerable to attack from the sea. They were to be lost early in the campaign, isolating both the withdrawing British and Chinese combined Burma Army and China itself. Finally, once the Japanese had proved that they could cross the mountains on Burma’s eastern border and seize the country, they posed a serious ground and air threat to eastern India, which Indian defence arrangements were ill-equipped to counter.

Like Singapore and Malaya, Burma had been severely under-resourced in peacetime to cope with war; indeed she was considerably worse prepared because of her apparent lack of strategic importance until it was too late to correct the resultant shortcomings. To make matters worse, in the run up to war and even after it had started, responsibilities for Burma’s defence fell between the four stools of the War Office in London; India Command; Far East Command in Singapore and the combined American, British, Dutch and Australian Command (ABDACOM), which was established in the Netherlands East Indies in January 1942. Following the administrative and political separation of Burma from India in 1937 operational command of the Burma garrison was retained by the CinC India while the War Office handled its administration. In 1940 operational responsibility was transferred to the CinC Far East to reflect the importance of the role Burma played in the air reinforcement plans for Singapore. Administrative control, however, was still held by the War Office, although India Command was made responsible for the actual provision of logistic supplies and administrative services. Operational responsibility for Burma reverted to the CinC India on 11 December 1941 when the possibility of Singapore’s being isolated became apparent. One month later, however, on 12 January 1942, it was transferred again, this time to the newly formed ABDACOM, in view of Burma’s importance to the sustainment of China. The CinC India was then given full administrative command. ABDACOM was dissolved on 25 February 1942, after Singapore had fallen and the Japanese invasion of the Netherlands East Indies was virtually complete. At that stage both operational and administrative responsibility for Burma reverted to the CinC India but by then southern Burma had already been lost and Rangoon was close to falling. Such turbulence in, and separation of, administrative and operational responsibilities was virtually guaranteed to disrupt and delay Burma’s preparation for war. A commander responsible only for the administration of a force and not its operational effectiveness has little incentive to meet its requirements, especially when he has other pressing commitments of apparently higher priority.³ Such was the case with regard to Burma. Consequently the country has been described as ‘practically without means of defending herself ’ by the start of the war in South-East Asia.⁴

The peacetime garrison of Burma comprised two British infantry battalions, four battalions of the indigenous Burma Rifles and nine battalions of Burma Military Police. The latter were essentially a gendarmerie, six battalions of which were converted to border control duties, with the title of Burma Frontier Force, in 1939. These forces, all of whose primary role was border and internal security rather than conventional military operations, were supported by one mountain artillery battery, one field engineer company and engineer works services. Administrative arrangements were designed for static, peacetime operations, with almost all supply, transport and maintenance services being provided directly from civil sources under contract. Arms and equipment were generally in short supply and were inadequate for anything more intensive than the policing duties of the garrison. By the outbreak of the Far East war in December 1941 the garrison had been increased to two British and six Indian infantry battalions, fourteen battalions of the Burma Rifles, nine battalions of the Burma Frontier Force, one battalion of auxiliaries, four artillery batteries and two field engineer companies. Most of these units had been grouped into the newly formed 1st Burma Division, which comprised four brigades and was deployed mainly in the Shan States for defence against any Japanese incursion from French Indo-China. That division was desperately short of administrative staff and services. In early January 1942 the 17th Indian Division arrived from India. The 17th Division had been preparing for deployment to the Middle East when it was split up, two of its brigades going to Malaya and the remainder going to Burma, where it was reinforced by two other brigades, with which it had not trained at all. The division was deployed to the northern end of the Tenasserim coast to counter the new threat from Japanese-occupied Thailand. At that time, the air force in Burma was meant to have been equipped with 280 front-line aircraft. It actually comprised 16 RAF Buffalo fighters, an obsolete American-made aeroplane, along with a squadron of 21 modern American P40 fighters flown by Colonel Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, who worked for Chiang Kai Shek, defending the supply route to China.⁵ The order of battle of the army in Burma at the time of the Japanese invasion is in Appendix 2.

Despite the late operational reinforcement, however, internal administrative arrangements remained unchanged from their peacetime structure until the Japanese war had started, largely because of the separation of operational and administrative responsibilities that we have seen. Headquarters, Burma Army, under Lieutenant General T. J. Hutton, was forced to combine the functions of general headquarters, a corps headquarters and a LofC command. It was, in other words, attempting to be a government department, a tactical fighting formation and the provider of base support services all at once. Consequently, it was unable to master any of its responsibilities effectively.⁶ After visiting Burma in October 1941 the Adjutant General of India reported that the administrative staff and units were inadequate for modern, mobile warfare and he anticipated a complete breakdown of administration in the event of hostilities. In order to strengthen the weak administrative staff the two British battalions were being ‘milked’ of their most capable officers, with obvious deleterious consequences for their operational readiness.⁷ There was no army transportation organization to augment the docks, railways and inland water transport (IWT) in moving and sustaining the fighting formations.⁸ Transport and movements services, which were designed for peacetime purposes, were still under civilian control and no action had been taken to prepare them for the demands of war. To arrange the transport of freight and personnel, the already overstretched administrative staff had to deal with numerous civilian agencies, for whom the army was just another customer. A transportation director for the Burma Army was not appointed until the end of January, when the campaign was already seven weeks old.⁹ There were adequate rail and docks equipment and river craft but there was no code of discipline to keep civilians, on whom the army depended for essential administrative support, at work in the face of enemy action. Hence many found other things to do at critical times, particularly under the threat of air raids. Consequent labour problems aggravated existing congestion at Rangoon docks due to the quantity there of lend-lease equipment and supplies destined for China. That, in turn, delayed delivery of essential supplies for the garrison.¹⁰ In September 1941 Burma had orders still outstanding for over 2,600 military vehicles and, at the outbreak of war, had only 7 GPT companies, with 100 trucks each, to support the whole garrison.¹¹ Reinforcements arrived without integral transport so 620 lend-lease vehicles intended for China were requisitioned by the British and a transport company was taken off docks work to drive them in support of front-line formations. Consequently there were further delays in clearing the docks and 4,000 tons of equipment were lost there when Rangoon fell.¹² As a result of that requisition relations with China also took a battering at a time when maximum cooperation was needed. Military workshops facilities were limited to unit first-line support only and the army relied on civilian workshops in Rangoon for all second- and third-line repair and maintenance work.¹³ There were no transport aircraft for tactical supply so, as in Malaya, the Burma garrison was virtually road-bound. The garrison did have four mule companies, which could have given it some degree of tactical off-road mobility, but that does not appear to have been exploited to any extent and, in any case, many of them were destined to be lost early on in the campaign.

On 12 December 1941, on assuming operational responsibility for Burma, General Wavell, then the CinC India, sent some 60 administrative staff officers to Burma, including one Eric Goddard as the Major General, Administration (MGA). The importance of the administrative problems he had to contend with is indicated by the fact that Goddard was second in seniority only to Hutton, the General Officer Commanding Burma himself. This arrangement had been normal practice in the Army in India but not, hitherto, in Burma because there had been so little in the way of military logistic support. India also sent additional motor vehicles, along with seven and a half months’ stocks of general supplies and clothing, three months’ worth of ammunition and transport spares. Thereafter stocks of rations, ammunition and POL were considered adequate for the forthcoming battle but there was a shortage of personnel qualified to supervise the storage and handling of ammunition. Moreover the vulnerability of the only oil refinery at Syriam remained a serious cause for concern.¹⁴ Indian Army transportation troops, comprising a docks operating group and a railway construction and maintenance group, were sent to replace civilian staff, who were already beginning to desert. They were not in sufficient numbers, however, to make good the losses of civilian labour.¹⁵ In January 1942, with the rail network facing widespread breakdown due to desertions, the army took over much of the running of the railways, bringing some improvements to services until the latter stages of the withdrawal. In April 1942, however, after constant withdrawal and losses, the apparent inevitability of defeat precipitated the final breakdown of the network.¹⁶

The poor state of Burma’s logistic position at the outbreak of war was a principal factor in causing Wavell, in his new role as the CinC ABDACOM, to refuse, at first, an offer fro...