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TWO
The Longest Road
They were walking through elephant grass near the Sittang river, some 66 miles from Rangoon and the last great natural barrier before the Burmese capital. Private Bill Norman of 2nd battalion, Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, heard planes approaching and thought it was Hurricanes or Tomahawks, until he heard the sergeant blow his whistle. After that, the air erupted with noise. Machine-gun bullets, the kind that could take a man’s arm off, smashed into the ground beside Private Norman. He ran into a rubber plantation and dived under some trees. Looking up, he saw an Indian soldier, with thin legs resembling ‘worn army leather bootlaces’, standing in the open and aiming his rifle at the Japanese planes. ‘I shouted at him in my very best barrack-room Hindustani to stop firing and take cover. With the greatest of smiles, with his beautiful white teeth, he held out his handspan and in the best of his barrack-room English said, “Twenty-one degrees, Sahib.” Telling him how well he was doing I let him get on with a fine bit of soldiering.’
The Japanese invasion had started three weeks before and, advancing from the east, had pushed the British and Indian forces back to the bridge over the Sittang. The heat, the lack of water, and the relentless movement took a heavy toll. Men began to fall out exhausted, unable to move another yard. Norman saw a sergeant go to one man and kick him as he lay on the ground. ‘Get on your feet and march or we will leave you to die,’ he said. The man did not get up, and was left to his fate. As the British retreated, the Japanese would emerge to attack from the surrounding jungle and then disappear.
In a few short days Private Norman became accustomed to the sight of dead bodies, many of them his comrades. By night the troops shivered in shirts that had been soaked by the day’s perspiration, hiding up in the jungle and hoping that the Japanese would not discover their position. Then, in the depths of the night, the calling would start, high-pitched Japanese voices that made Norman wish he could get even closer to the man beside him. Many soldiers found themselves torn between the fear of discovery by the probing Japanese and the urge to respond by firing off a few rounds. An official narrative of the battle described how the Japanese, ‘using coloured tracer ammunition, uttering war cries … succeeded in creating confusion in the darkness … [which] led to indiscriminate firing by certain units … the uncontrolled fire caused some casualties amongst our own troops’. Some of the troops retreating in the direction of the bridge were machine-gunned in error by the RAF. In the early hours of 23 February Private Norman heard a huge explosion in the distance. The bridge over the Sittang had been blown in order to stall the Japanese advance, but the result was that the bulk of a division, including Norman and his comrades, were trapped on the wrong side of the river. For years afterwards the timing of the demolition would be the source of bitter debate and recrimination. The troops left on the Japanese side, many of them Indian and Burmese, were both scared and furious, convinced their British commanders had abandoned them.
Silence descended over the area after the explosion, followed after a few minutes by the sound of the encircling Japanese chattering and screaming. Some of the stranded men worked frantically to make rafts from timber huts and bamboo, while hundreds threw away their guns, equipment and clothes, and plunged into the water. ‘As we crossed, the river was a mass of bobbing heads. We were attacked from the air, sniped at from the opposite bank.’ Many men drowned in the treacherous currents as they struggled to cross the mile-wide river. Lance Corporal Frost, 2nd battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (2/KOYLI), hurled himself into the water even though he could not swim. It was a measure of the terror the Japanese inspired. Strong swimmers went to the aid of men in difficulty, some even making two or three trips to drag across the wounded. A major and two corporals went to the broken span of the bridge and looped ropes across to create a lifeline which enabled around four hundred troops, mostly Gurkhas, to reach safety.
The Japanese harried the retreating army. Private Yoshizo Abe, a sapper with 33rd Engineer Regiment, was advancing through a town near the river when British armoured vehicles came racing through. ‘The houses in the town were all burning and British armoured cars came bursting through the flames,’ he remembered. ‘We threw grenades and mines into the cars passing through the town. I did not take note of how long it lasted. I was euphoric and did not remember what I had done.’ Six or so British vehicles had stalled in the road, their occupants blown apart and burned as they tried to escape. Outside the town, Abe saw Indian soldiers advancing and firing from the waist. Each time the Japanese tried to advance they were beaten back by a hail of fire. Eventually Japanese firepower drove the Indians back. The Indians could only flee into the jungle and hope to avoid being caught.
Another Japanese private, Shiro Tokita, an infantryman with 33rd Division, remembered looking down on the Sittang bridge after it had been blown. ‘There were many fish floating in the water, killed by the explosion. On the river bank I saw a lot of shoes, and clothing scattered here and there.’ Tokita witnessed the surrender of a small British unit at a pagoda that was being used as a field hospital. The doctor of his battalion had the extraordinary experience of meeting a British doctor with whom he had studied in Germany. They tended the wounded together. At Shwedaung, later in the retreat, a Japanese officer, Major Misao Sato, encountered a dying British soldier lying under a tree. He was young, perhaps eighteen years old, and had been sniping at the Japanese from behind a bush. ‘I asked him in my broken English, “Where are your father and mother?” He said just a word, but clearly, “England”, and as I asked, “Painful?”, he again said a word, “No.” I knew that he must be suffering great pain.’ A stream of tears ran down the dying soldier’s face. Sato held his hand and found himself crying. The soldier died a few minutes later.
Such moments of chivalry were rare. In the 2/KOYLI missing personnel file there are many heart-rending accounts from soldiers who saw their comrades killed at Sittang. In the middle of one close-quarter fight, Lance Corporal W. Smith saw a wounded private pick up a Tommy gun and stand up, shouting at the Japanese to come out in the open and fight. He was shot in the head. Men struggled desperately to help one another under fire. Smith and a comrade tried to rescue a Lance Corporal McDonald who was wounded in the legs: ‘he told us to go and get out of it for he said there was no hope for him getting out of hear [sic] alive. And I told [him] that when we could get to the hospital we would send somebody for him, and then I felt somebody pull on my shirt and it was L/Cpl Rowley, and he said he was [dead], so with not having any spades with [us] we put him in a hole and covered him over with some wood.’
Corporal E. Rylah, despite being fully fit himself, volunteered to stay with a wounded comrade, although this meant trusting his fate to the Japanese. Private W. Hewitt was seen going in the opposite direction to his retreating company, because ‘the sound of the machine guns had temporarily unhinged his mind and he did not know where he was going’. One party of men ‘flatly refused to attempt the crossing and collected Tommy guns and disappeared in the direction of the Japanese lines’.
Private Bill Norman reached the river after the main crossing had taken place, finding only a handful of men still trying to get away. Like the others making the crossing, he abandoned his weapon. With a friend, he grabbed a thick bamboo pole for buoyancy, and the two of them set off across the river. With physical exhaustion setting in and the pole waterlogged, out of nowhere, it seemed, another figure joined the struggling pair, a big man and a strong swimmer who grabbed the pole and pulled them across.
The Cabinet papers for February 1942 described how ‘our troops have fought well and inflicted heavy casualties’, but acknowledged that the ‘Japanese attack has been remarkable for the excellence of its ground to air communications and for the coordination of air with land forces’. The RAF and pilots of the American Volunteer Group challenged the Japanese but were eventually overwhelmed by superior numbers.*
Rangoon was abandoned on 7 March 1942 and occupied by the Japanese the following day. The British managed to evacuate sufficient supplies of food and petrol to maintain their forces on the retreat, saving the army from starvation as it trudged towards India. Units fought through Japanese roadblocks, battered and demoralised by the enemy’s constant outflanking movements and encirclements; men with no aim but escape.
Almost a fortnight after the fall of Rangoon, General Alexander appointed a new commander to lead the forces in the field. Major General William Slim, a former officer of a Gurkha regiment, was serving in the Middle East when he was appointed to take command of the newly constituted Burma Corps on 19 March. He would become arguably the finest British general of the Second World War and a man loved by his multi-racial army. But with Rangoon gone and Japanese forces attempting the encirclement of the British and Indian forces retreating north, it was too late for Alexander or Slim to do much but try to save as many men as possible to fight another day from the two divisions and armoured brigade of Burma Corps.
Watching the rout of an army is always a salutary lesson, but Slim’s gift was to be able to watch and learn. He was a rare kind of soldier: quick-witted and daring; loved by his men because they knew he would not spend their lives cheaply; and possessed of a moral courage that allowed him to acknowledge his own errors. The lessons Slim learned in those terrible months from March to June 1942 would be embedded in his consciousness forever and would be used to weld troops from the British and Indian armies into one of the finest fighting units of the war, 14th Army.
Slim had grown up in a lower-middle-class family in Birmingham, the son of a failed small businessman and a devoutly Catholic mother, whose strong personality seems to have been inherited by her son. After leaving school he went to work as a teacher among some of the poorest and toughest boys in Birmingham, an experience that later gave him an invaluable insight into the minds of the men he would lead into battle. There were other jobs, including a periodic recourse to writing stories for magazines, but a childhood passion for military history found an outlet in the Officer Training Corps at his brother’s university. At the outbreak of the First World War, Slim was commissioned as a second lieutenant and was wounded at Gallipoli. During the early stages of the Second World War he was wounded again, while fighting the Italians in Eritrea. To his men he would always be ‘Uncle Bill’, a man of imposing physical build, with a protruding jaw that emphasised an air of resolution and command.
Slim conducted a skilful fighting retreat, buying time to allow the bulk of his army, and tens of thousands of their Chinese allies, to escape destruction or capture. When the monsoon broke in early May the principal routes of retreat became mires in which men slipped and fell as they trudged towards India. Slim watched troops shiver with fever as they lay on ‘the sodden ground under the dripping trees, without even a blanket to cover them’. In May, Lance Corporal W. Long of 2/KOYLI was retreating north from the town of Kalewa when his group was joined by a private suffering from cholera. The man had been in hospital but had decided to try to escape with his comrades rather than trust his life to the advancing Japanese. The seriously ill soldier lasted for eight miles of marching and then fell out. Lance Corporal Long reported, ‘We carried on marching. Two days later another party who set off marching after us caught us up and told us that they had passed Pte Powell lying dead on the side of the road.’
In one instance rough justice was meted out to a soldier accused of abandoning his post. Sergeant W. Butcher, 2/KOYLI, described how a private in his platoon deserted in the early hours. Private Ramsden was arrested three hours later and brought before the commanding officer, Major Mike Calvert. Calvert would go on to become the most successful of the Chindit commanders and one of the founders of the SAS. In the case of Private Ramsden he showed no mercy and ordered him to be shot.* Sergeant Butcher was given the job of carrying out the execution. ‘I tied him to a tree with his back to me. I placed a pistol between his shoulders and shot him at point-blank range. He was definitely dead before I left him.’ Private Ramsden had fallen in love with and married a Burmese woman.† The statement by his executioner refers to her as a suspected fifth columnist who was later arrested.
Burmese found aiding the Japanese could also be subjected to summary justice. Lieutenant Colonel C. E. K. Bagot of the 1st Glosters described an encounter on 3 May 1942: ‘At 1930 hrs signalling was observed on our right front and a patrol stalked 3 Burmans who were caught in the act. One man carried weapons and Japanese money. He was shot, the remainder were taken back 25 miles under escort of the Burma Frontier Force and dispersed, after they had been made to witness the execution.’
The final stage of the journey brought the troops through the Kabaw Valley. Captain Gerald Fitzpatrick and the survivors of 2/KOYLI encountered a scene of horror there that spurred them onwards. The rotting bodies of numerous refugees lay in the sun being devoured by vultures, while countless flies swarmed around the troops. ‘The impact of witnessing the vulturine disposal of the unfortunates, on our sick and wounded men, was quite miraculous. It was like a Lourdes cure; the pace quickened, backs straightened, men simply dare not fall back and die in this place.’ The jungle was endlessly strange. Ralph Tanner was ill with dysentery and had to briefly drop out of the column near the top of a hill. While he squatted, he saw ‘swallow tail butterflies drinking the salt on someone’s knees when there was a halt near the summit’. Volunteers from the Society of Friends (Quakers) were operating ambulances caring for wounded soldiers and civilians.* Doctor Handley Laycock was attached to the British forces and recalled a strange combination of cheerfulness and horror along the route to the border. ‘During these days we saw many scenes of intense horror. A man dying on this path usually remains until the rapid assaults of ants and other insects have reduced him to a skeleton. In the process he blocks the path and his presence there is exceedingly unpleasant. In some camps we found the dead and dying together, the latter too feeble to crawl away from the former. On the whole the morale of the men we met was high and they usually returned our greeting with a broad grin, and expressed embarrassingly profuse gratitude for anything that we could do to help them …’
As he tramped the last yards into India, Captain Fitzpatrick of 2/KOYLI looked up and saw two figures in uniform standing on a mound of earth just above him. One of them was General Sir Harold Alexander, GOC Burma, and the other was ‘a less flashy officer’, General William ‘Bill’ Slim.
Watching the retreating army, Slim felt a mixture of pride and anger. They looked like scarecrows dragging themselves across the border. But Slim noted that they still carried their weapons and looked like fighting units. ‘They might look like scarecrows but they looked like soldiers too.’ His anger arose from the reception accorded to his men by the military in India, where commanders and staff officers who had sat out the fighting in safety stood at the border hectoring the arriving troops. Sarcastic comments and parade-ground bellowing were directed at men who were on the verge of collapse. Ralph Tanner remembered being asked for his identity card by a corporal before finding his way to a train and eventually to hospital. On the way he used his penknife, sterilised with a match, to lance a wound on the arm of a soldier. ‘This let the pus out and the arm got better during the trip.’
In Slim’s view, his troops were received as if they were in disgrace. He acknowledged that to some extent they were paying the price for the ‘rabble’ of deserters, refugees and non-combatants that had crossed the border ahead of them over the previous weeks, but he could not excuse their treatment. According to official figures, 13,000 men were killed, wounded or missing on the retreat, not counting those who would die later from disease.
As the troops made their way into the main British base at Imphal, they were sent to camp on steep jungle hillsides, where there was no shelter apart from the trees and scant clothing, blankets, water or medicine. The psychological effect was devastating. Men lost the will to carry on. By Slim’s estimate, as many as 8 per cent of those he watched come out of Burma died from illness. Yet when he said goodbye to them he was cheered by the men, an experience he found ‘infinitely moving – and humbling’. Leaving Imphal he did not even have a jeep and it was left to his ‘faithful Cameronian bodyguard’ to coax back into life an abandoned refugee car that would carry them towards a small hill town called Kohima. Here the engine gave out. This town, with its small garrison of local troops and a military hospital and engineering works, was one of the furthest outposts of British power in India, an insignificant and sleepy place which had, in recent months, found itself directly in the path of a mass flow of refugees from Burma. Slim did not stay long. Together with his bodyguard he pushed the car out of Kohima until they reached a steep descent. From there they coasted downhill towards the railhead at Dimapur until a rise in the road stopped them. After that, they hitched a ride in a lorry and then found their way onto a crowded train. Slim would not see Kohima again for more than two years, but when he did it would be in vastly changed circumstances, and the little village he had passed through without fanfare would be associated forever with the fortunes of his army.
Many of the sick from Burma Corps were sent to hospitals in Ranchi in Bihar, where Slim went to visit them and argue for better conditions. He saw officers and men dying in squalor, the wounded lying on verandas and under trees waiting for admission, while overworked medical teams laboured relentlessly with the bare minimum of supplies.
But it was also at Ranchi that Slim began what was probably the most painstaking analysis of defeat undertaken by any British general of the war. In his account of the campaign Slim wrote of the despair that can descend on a defeated general. ‘In a dark hour he will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership and his manhood. And then he must stop! For, if he is ever to command in battle again, he must shake off these regrets, and stamp on them, as they claw at his will and his self-confidence. He must beat off these attacks he delivers against himself, and cast out the doubts born of failure. Forget them, and remember only the lessons to be learnt from defeat – they are more than from victory.’ Although there were many more setbacks ahead, Slim was already preparing to take the war to the Japanese.
* The American Volunteer Group, or ‘Flying Tigers’, was a clandestine unit of American pilots operating in support of the Chinese Nationalists. Established in 1941, it became part of the United States Army Air Force in July 1942.
* Calvert wrote in his autobiography of being threatened with court martial because of allegations that he had shot deserters during the retreat. He vigorously denied the claims but asserted that Slim’s intervention had saved him from court martial. ‘I thought back to Wingate’s approval of Slim and silently added mine to it.’ Michael Calvert, Fighting Mad (Pen and Sword, 2004), p. 105. The account of Sergeant Butcher appears to contradict his denial.
† The Commonwealth War Graves Commission register of men killed in action during World War Two lists a Private Benjamin Ramsden, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, as having died on 26/04/1942. He is named on the Rangoon War Memorial alongside soldiers of 2/KOYLI who died in battle.
* The Friends Ambulance Unit on the China – Burma front was staffed by Quakers from America, Britain, New Zealand, Canada and China. The FAU was originally established during the Great War as a form of service for conscientious objectors. About 170 were active on the Burma front. (Source: Anthony Reynolds, ‘Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding.)
