The War in Burma

Roy McKelvie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032078786
• eBook ISBN: 9781000460230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book, first published in 1948, is an in-depth examination of the campaigns in Burma following the Japanese invasion in 1942 until after the surrender in 1945. The author, a military observer under Admiral Mountbatten, offers here impartial judgements and an objective narrative. He analyses the initial British failures, the straining of Anglo-American relations, the overcoming of military difficulties and the final victory of the combined British, Indian, American and Chinese forces. The book gives a clear and comprehensive look at the Burma war, puts it into perspective, and does not shy away from controversy over the management of the Allied campaign.

1 THE LAST TRAGEDY

The Hazards of Geography, Climate, and Disease—the Psychology of Jungle Warfare—The Mind of the Soldier

THOUGH it was unknown at the time, the loss of Burma in 1942 was the last great tragedy suffered by the Allies in the unpredictable course of the Far Eastern war. There were further retreats and setbacks as the Japanese sought to increase the size of their new Empire. They threatened Australia, India, and cut farther into Nationalist China, but never again did they wholly conquer any one single country.

Almost immediately the Americans set course for the reconquest of the Philippines and the invasion of Japan itself while the Australians doggedly held back the Japanese advance on Port Moresby in New Guinea. But the British, during the next two years, were destined by circumstances and policy to fight grim battles on the lonely frontier separating India from Burma, and to wait patiently—heart-breakingly patiently at times—before the unexpected opportunity came for the reinvasion of Burma by land and sea.

Burma’s place in the scheme of the Far Eastern war was twofold. First, it was the last Allied land link with China through the Burma road which had been completed only in 1939. Secondly, it was considered the eastern land shield of India by virtue of its geographical lay-out. The mountains, the Chin, Naga, and Lushai, which lined the Indo-Burma frontier, were inhabited only by hill tribes and were devoid of any but narrow winding tracks. They were considered sufficient barrier to any modern army that had designs on India.

Even when the fall of Burma had exposed a new flank it was considered by some less likely that the Japanese would invade India by way of Assam than by the capture of Ceylon and the invasion of South India. Since the days when the Mohammedan invasions of India from the north had ceased, India’s most vulnerable flank had always been her long uncovered seaboard.

As with India, so with Burma. The attenuated broken coastline of Burma stretching two thousand miles from past Akyab Island to Victoria Point, the mouths of three large rivers, the Irrawaddy at Rangoon, the Sittang at Mokpalin, and the Salween at Moulmein, and the thousands of little coves and bays, all these afforded shelter for ships and stepping-off grounds for troops, making the possibilities of sea invasion far greater than by land from Malaya or Siam.

Burma is so formed that, apart from its seaboard, it is encased in a horseshoe of mountains which only such a lightly equipped army as that of Genghis Khan had previously penetrated. Indeed the Japanese would have found much greater difficulty than they did in overrunning the country had they been forced to rely only on Siam and Malaya as debouching points for their troops. As it was, their acquisition of Singapore gave them command of the Malacca and Sunda Straits and open access, tantamount to command also, of the Bengal Sea and the Indian Ocean. They were able to use Rangoon, after its loss by the British, to place as many troops in Burma as they required or could spare.

Burma and the Federated Shan States, a wild and mountainous bulwark against the land masses of China, Indo-China, and Siam, is a country larger than Germany without any of the man-made geographical advantages found in Western Europe. Over fifty per cent of its 250,000 square miles are covered by forests of a great many varieties of timber, including the most valuable teak.

From north to south the country is twice as long as Great Britain. It is nearly as wide in the centre as France from Strasbourg to Brest. Its figure representation is a diamond, the north-west side of which is shut off from India by the Naga, Chin, and Lushai Hills. The north-east and south-east are separated from Tibet, China, Indo-China, and Siam by a great mass of parallel ridges which run down from the north to form the watersheds of the Salween and Mekong Rivers and eventually divide that long coastal strip of Burma, known as the Tennasserim strip, from Siam.

Also running from north to south is Burma’s great system of rivers, of which the Irrawaddy is the largest. Formed in the far north by two large mountain rivers and augmented by the Chindwin below Mandalay, it is navigable by large river steamers for nearly 1,000 miles from its mouth at Rangoon. The Chindwin was once considered navigable for only 350 miles, but early in the Burma war a British officer traversed a further 200 miles north in a variety of river craft.

Rising in Tibet, the Salween runs south almost along Burma’s eastern border and enters the sea at Moulmein. For river craft it is useless only a short distance above Moulmein, as its course runs mainly through gorges. Between the two is the Sittang.

These rivers and the network of feeders not only made possible the economical extraction of teak but had an important effect on the whole transport system of the country. So cheap was travel by river that the building of a prodigious system of roads and railways was considered uneconomical and unnecessary for peacetime purposes.

Like the rivers, the main trunk roads and railways run from north to south and lateral systems are few. The Myitkyina–Mandalay–Rangoon railway line, and its attendant road, runs like a spine down Burma and it is along that spine that one finds the most inhabited, wealthy, and civilized parts of the country. But the spine has few vertebrae and the greater part of the country still remains to be opened up, even now after a war in which armies of men and transport have trampled and fought over places where previously no white man had ever been.

The coming of the bulldozer and airplane, which requires landing-strips in the most inaccessible and unlikely spots, has altered, for the moment, the facial expression of Burma. Whether this is a transitory alteration, whether the fast-growing, greedy jungle will reclaim those new-found parts of Burma, as it did those ancient centres of civilization, Pagan and Ava, is a question only history can answer. History and, perhaps, economics. In tropical countries like Burma, Ceylon, Siam, and Malaya, the jungle does not creep slowly upon its victim. It springs up in a night. And man builds only where gold is to be won.

From this it can be seen that the axis of advance or retreat in a war in Burma should, in order to make problems of supply and reinforcement easy, run directly up and down the country, and that the side holding Rangoon, the principal port, would hold Burma. For before this war, when air supply developed on a scale unknown in any other theatre, an army retreating up Burma was forced, theoretically, to back itself eventually against the Himalayan wall of the north, choose the one existing road from Burma to another country—the old Burma road to China—or disintegrate along the hill tracks bordering the Assam-Burma frontier. The possibilities of reinforcing or supplying a northwardly withdrawing army from India except by air—there was so little air in 1942—were hardly considered.

That was just one consideration in the geographically dictated strategy of Burma fighting which everyone, including the Japanese, realized but which, perhaps, Britain did not fully recognize.

There were other considerations. The construction of the country, with its mountain ranges, rivers and valleys all running north–south, would force the Allies, or any army contemplating the land invasion of Burma from India or China, to cut across the grain of the country. Once in Burma, the rivers alone would afford effective barriers against a rapid advance and would entail the bringing up, or building at hand, of suitable craft.

The climate was as great a hindrance to mobility and supply as the physical features. The monsoon, which lasts for five months of the year and gives up to 200 inches of rain in parts of Burma, transformed the countryside into a sea of mud, washed away roads, tracks, and airfields, and bogged down men and vehicles. It is a rain that chills and soaks the soldier, creating a boredom and mental depression only slightly relieved by futile attempts to keep at least something dry.

Once the idea prevailed that fighting stopped during the monsoon, but during the latter part of the Burma war soldiers fought up to their necks in water in the valleys and plains which had become lakes. One of Mountbatten’s first directions when he became Supreme Commander in 1943 was that fighting should continue throughout the monsoon.

The 14th Army had to overcome all those things in November 1944 when its chance came to reinvade Burma along the very routes by which it had retreated. By then, fortunately, the tracks of evacuation had become the roads of advance, mechanical equipment was in better supply and the air was full of Allied transport aircraft.

Throughout the Burma war the Japanese, once established in the country, were able to work on internal lines of communication. Even so the four attempts they made at leaving the beaten tracks and cutting away from those lines, either laterally or into the virtually trackless wastes of the north, were unsuccessful. When they attempted to penetrate the region of Fort Hertz or up past Shinbwiyang in the Huw-kawng Valley, they were beaten by the country, climate, subterfuge, and force. When twice in 1944 they attempted to invade India they were beaten again by the country and climate, superior force, and their own logistical and tactical miscalculations.

Mistakes in a country like Burma, which rises and falls from 20,000 feet to sea-level, has a diversity of climates from ice-cold to sweating tropical heat, a five-month monsoon, and a heterogeneous population whose temper is so often capricious, can prove very costly. Even when the Allies had built up an army of over a million, supported by tanks and vehicles and squadrons of aircraft, Burma was not a country in which a text-book war could be fought. More often than not it was a case of ‘God helps those who help themselves’, to use General Sir William Slim’s 14th Army motto.

If, on the material side, one factor contributed more than any other to the holding of the Japanese when they invaded India in 1944 and then facilitated the rout and defeat of the Burma armies, it was air supply. Even before the climax in 1944 it permitted a small-scale, experimental offensive in 1943, when the late Brigadier Orde Wingate marched his first Chindit expedition into the ‘guts of the enemy’, relying on the air for his food, ammunition, mail, and other necessities.

Air supply was the key to jungle warfare or, for that matter, any warfare in countries where roads were rare and difficult to build and the monsoon rains could wash away the labour of months in a few hours. In countries such as Assam, Burma, Malaya, or New Guinea, which are for the most part roadless and are covered by jungle and mountains, air supply was the only answer. Not only did it make possible the supply of isolated garrisons and give formations a freedom of movement they otherwise would not have possessed, but it had a strong psychological effect on the fighting troops of both sides.

The development of the air supply in South-East Asia was a slow process, commensurate at first with the Allies’ ability to build and spare aircraft from other and more important theatres of war. Even when the Americans had proved its effectiveness in countering the loss of the Burma road by supplying China by air from India and the British had made due experiment with air supply during 1942 and 1943 to their garrisons along the Burma frontier, the battle for more transport aircraft was a tough one. It was fought hard and successfully by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose vision went further than flying Commandos and static garrison supply. He envisaged, and carried out, the transporting of divisions from one part of the 1,000-mile Burma frontier to another. It almost seemed that the traditionally accepted picture of a high commander moving flags on a map had come true.

In the end—during and after the critical period of the Japanese incursion into Manipur in 1944—the fleet of transport aircraft available to the 14th Army and other formations comprising about 100 British and American squadrons was larger than anywhere along the world’s battle-fronts and the tonnage of stores flown to the forward troops exceeded, for the 14th Army alone, 2,000 a day. The link-lines and feeder systems for this forward air supply, operated by the Combat Cargo Task Force, not only extended back to Calcutta in India but over thousands of miles to base airfields in the U.S.A.

All this could not have been achieved without air superiority which, directly after the loss of Burma and with the obvious threat to India, became top priority with the R.A.F. and U.S.A.A.F.

Assam, Bengal with its great port of Calcutta, and other parts of Eastern India became very vulnerable to attack by air once the Japanese had completed their conquest of Burma. This became all too clear when Japanese aircraft raided Calcutta, Madras, and Colombo in Ceylon.

The remnants of the Singapore and Rangoon squadrons joined those which had begun to reach India, and the newly formed Eastern Air Command was given the wide task of covering all phases of air war in South-East Asia, including the winning and holding of air supremacy and the defence of India. It did not take the combined air forces long to reach parity with the Japanese and the evidence of the almost undisturbed supplying of Wingate’s 1943 Chindits proved that superiority followed quite soon.

With the Japanese still holding the initiative on land, their weakness and the Allies’ strength in the air became most marked as successive Burma campaigns followed. If in 1944 the Japanese had been able to cover their Manipur invasion with combat and supply aircraft and cut off our own considerable garrisons from air supply as they did from land supply, the battle for the Burma frontier and Assam would have become the battle for India which only the fateful dropping of the atomic bombs would have halted. Britain would have been left a legacy in Burma every bit as intricate and conflicting as later faced the Allies in Java and French Indo-China.

Before the last of the retreating British and Chinese armies had reached India or China it was also realized that the future course of any war in this theatre would be influenced by more factors than air supremacy or supply or Japanese strategy. Not only had a hostile geography and climate to be overcome and troops conditioned by experience to living and fighting in jungle country until they acquired full self-confidence but also the dread scourge of disease had to be controlled if not subdued.

Nowhere, except perhaps in New Guinea, did an army suffer worse from disease than in Burma. Malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery, beri-beri, jungle sores which festered and grew, were some of the evils to which the jungle armies were exposed. In ninety per cent of cases it was malaria, which can incapacitate any formation from a platoon to an army.

The retreating armies of 1942 were ravaged by malaria. Unknown thousands of refugees who sought to reach India overland died of malaria. The men who worked selflessly and unsparingly in Assam to evacuate army and refugees suffered from malaria almost to a man. The disease spread through Burma and Assam as a blight might infect an orchard in England, only on a scale unprecedented in modern times. The Japanese suffered no less than British, Indian, Chinese, or Gurkhas, but they, at least, had the advantage of the world’s quinine supply.

During the succeeding years the small group of doctors, nurses, and medical staffs who first went up into Assam with the object of alleviating the immediate distress and, if possible, isolating or neutralizing malarial areas by spraying, canalizing swamps, and oiling, swelled to an army of 50,000 with 500 medical units. But not until 1945 when the Allied formations were spreading out fanwise across the length and breath of Burma could one say the battle of disease had been won.

Even in 1944, when the taking of mepacrine tablets had become an accepted commonplace, malaria was responsible for the majority of the half a million hospital casualties. That another half-million men were treated at medical units for one reason or another is sufficient evidence of the burden that fell upon the shoulders of the men and women who tried to keep the Allied armies in the field against the Japanese. Their triumph is apparent since 80 per cent of all hospital admissions, including wounded, were back with their units within three months.

The figures for 1945 up to the Japanese capitulation show that less than one man per thousand per day was going down with sickness—a figure which was better than in any other theatre of war and was an astonishing tribute to the Australian, British, and American scientists and doctors who fought unceasingly to assist the men in the jungles.

As must already be obvious, the fighting of a jungle campaign in a country such as Burma lays stress upon other things besides the commander’s ability to supply and maintain an army in the field against the difficulties of geography, disease, and so often during the Burma war, the lack of sufficient equipment. The individual fighting man of this war was not an automaton who, given food, clothing, and ammunition, would plod on unthinkingly in retreat or advance. Whether Indian, African, or British, he reacted to conditions and environment, and jungle warfare had a strange psych...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Maps
• 1. The Last Tragedy
• 2. The Enemy
• 3. The Retreat from Burma
• 4. Ceylon’s Escape
• 5. Arakan Debacle
• 6. The Arrival of Wingate
• 7. The Formation of South-East Asia Command
• 8. The Japanese Invasion of Assam
• 9. The Siege of Imphal
• 10. The Battle of Kohima
• 11. The Relief of Imphal
• 12. With Stilwell in North Burma
• 13. Anglo-American Relations
• 14. The Relief of Stilwell
• 15. The Third Arakan Campaign
• 16. The Clearance of North Burma
• 17. From The Chindwin to the Irrawaddy
• 18. The Capture of Mandalay
• 19. The Recapture of Rangoon
• 20. Surrender and Conclusion
• 21. Burma in Focus
• Index