No Boffins in Burma
HISTORY, a relentless type-caster, reminds us that in war every British Army makes its debut in the role of Cinderella. Though an extraordinarily nice girl, Cinderella lacked initiative; she relied on external aid to trans- form the pumpkin into a coach and the mice into ponies. But no wands could be waved over the British—or for that matter over the Japanese—forces in Burma. From the heads of their commanders no bubbles were extruded enclosing the legend : 'Thinks: I owe it all to the Chiefs of Staff.' The pump- kin remained a pumpkin; the mice, mice. Both Cinderellas were stuck in Act I, doomed to perpetual bullying at the hands of those Ugly Sisters, the climate and the terrain. The result, as far as our side was concerned, was 'a kind of warfare more modern in essence than that fought by other British forces.'
The words are taken from Defeat into Victory, by Field- Marshal Sir William Slim, published this week by Cassell at 25s. They sound like a paradox. 'In Burma we fought on a lower scale of transport, supplies, equipment, supporting arms and amenities than was accepted in any other British theatre.' What then was so 'modern' about the campaigns?
The answer lies in a comparison between the form at the beginning and the form at the end. In 1942 the British forces in Burma resembled nothing so much as Little Lord Fauntleroy playing hide and seek in the dark with a band of gate-crashing gipsies. Clad in topis, spine-pads and shorts and very largely road-bound, they were an anachronism on the new battlefields of Asia. 'In preparation, in execution, in strategy and in tactics we had been worsted,' admits the Field-Marshal, who during the retreat commanded I Burma Corps (two weak, tired divi- sions plus 7th Armoured Brigade). as resourcefully as circum- stances allowed; and although there were excuses for all or most of this, excuses are not things which seem to have much appeal for the author of this book.
Asia had collapsed on the white man like a marquee in a thunderstorm. I remember, outside a rest-house in Central Burma during the retreat, talking to two District Commis- sioners from areas farther south. A month ago or less they had been powers in the land to which they had dedicated their careers and which they loved and understood. Then, when the air-raids began, not merely their authority but their very means of existence had begun to fall away from them. The Burmese in charge of the power station ran away. so the fans stopped working and the refrigerators packed up. Their clerks, their cooks and finally their sweepers vanished. The whole elaborate, taken-for-granted apparatus of life in the tropics disintegrated about them, reducing them not (as would have been the case in Europe) to the level of ordinary refugees but to a condition even more bereft and precarious; for they had lost the cocoon which insulated them against the realities of Asia, and were thus fundamentally in worse case than the Asians themselves.
A similar cocoon cumbered in those days both the British soldier and the British officer serving with Indians or Gurkhas, and in particular the staffs of field formations. As commander first of XV Corps and then of Fourteenth Army, Slim gradually got rid of it. 'We had,' he writes, 'not only to devise new tactics but to delye deeply into the motive forces of human conduct and to change our traditional outlook on many things.' This was done, in the end, so successfully that first the moral, then the tactical and finally the strategical tables were turned, and in a bold, swift, imaginative campaign Fourteenth Army and its supporting air forces broke the main Japanese forces and hunted them out of Burma. It was a soldier's, not a planner's, war, a war of disciplined individualists fighting local actions, with or without orders. in subservience to a grand but often rather imprecise purpose.
`The greatest number of divisions I ever had under my com- mand in action at one time was eighteen. They fought on a front of 700 miles, in four groups, with no lateral communica- tions between them and beyond tactical support of one another. . . . Companies, even platoons, under junior leaders became the basic units of the jungle.' There were no fine cities to liberate, no loot, no civic welcomes, no kisses on both cheeks from mayors or from anybody else; if you took your objective, you were left with nothing more desirable than a charnel house on your hands. But Burma, which offered so few of the ordinary compensations and rewards, was the only theatre in which one infantry platoon could win (or sometimes lose) quite an important battle.
Slim calls the Japanese soldier 'the most formidable fighting insect in history.' In 1942 this insect enjoyed a complete moral ascendancy, and in the following year little could be done, with the limited resources in the theatre, to wrest it from him. But by 1944 his air force had almost ceased to exist and Allied sea-power had reduced the supplies reaching Burma to a trickle. It was then that his overweening conceit and the rigidity of his mind began to prove mortal afflictions.
All the heterogeneous land forces confronting the Japanese in Burma had taken steps to improve their fighting capacity.
their equipment and their knowledge of their enemy; the Japanese had marked time in all three departments, and par- ticularly in the last. They were content to despise their opponents and made no effort to understand them. 'The funda- mental fault of their generalship.' Slim found, 'was a lack of moral, as distinct from physical, courage. They were not pre- pared to admit that they had made a mistake, that their plans had misfired and needed recasting.' He might have illustrated his point by reference to the frequency with which, when they were forced to carry out a withdrawal, orders were captured in which Japanese commanders enjoined their units `to con- tinue their advance towards the rear.' The same crass refusal to admit the fact, let alone the possibility, of discomfiture explains why demolitions were virtually never carried out on a line of retreat; a senior Japanese engineer officer would have committed hara-kiri sooner than ask at a conference for guidance as to the scope of his demolition plan.
Several qualities distinguish the Field-Marshal's account of a remarkable feat of arms; high among them stand generosity and self-effacement. His narrative is detailed, selective and thoughtful; the difficulties of enlisting the reader's interest in a number of quite separate campaigns, only tenuously related to each other and all except the last abortive, are overcome with the sort of skill which Wavell, but no other commander of the last war, might have shown. As he traces the fortunes ' of his small army, it is almost as though the author had set out to describe the career of a child, naturally handicapped. badly bullied during its first term at school, consistently neglected by its guardians, frequently cheated of the legacies it had a right to expect, and yet ultimately successful. The child's school reports, the reasons why it so often made a duck or failed in maths, and the complicated relations between its far too numerous headmasters are not in themselves always fascinating; but it is quite impossible, under the Field- Marshal's parental but objective guidance, not to take. an interest in the child.
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