Fifty miles behind them across the plain, Rangoon, though reinforced by another Indian brigade, was emptying in panic. The Indian population, which accounted for half the inhabitants of Rangoon and made up the minor civil service and merchant and urban labor force, were streaming out without adequate food or transport in a desperate trek for home. There were altogether a million Indians in Burma, imported to occupy the ranks between British executive and Burmese peasant, and hated by the native population. Shops and public services were closing, food was short, government bureaus were evacuating to the summer capital at Maymyo in upper Burma, cholera was reported among the refugees. As authority disintegrated, the complex hostilities of various Burmese groups, against the Indians, the British and each other, were breaking out.
The British were anxiously waiting for the two Chinese armies who had not yet begun to move. On February 2 the British commander, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Hutton, flew to Lashio to meet Chiang Kai-shek who was on his way to India to urge him to hasten the despatch of his armies. The G–mo promised to oblige. On February 5 Wavell flew to Rangoon from his headquarters 2,000 miles away in Java to see what might be done to bolster one more sinking position. The 7th Armored Brigade on its way from the Middle East to reinforce Singapore was now diverted to try to save Rangoon, for more troops could not help Singapore. British forces had evacuated the Malay peninsula and were now collected on Singapore Island where they amounted to four divisions. Morale was low and arrangements muddled and Wavell reported an “inferiority complex which bold and skilful Japanese tactics and their command of the air have caused.” He himself while returning from Singapore had fallen from a quay in the dark and injured his back.
On every front the enemy held the initiative. The only pebble of retaliation America could lay hands on, as Stilwell learned before he left, was a daring plan to bomb Tokyo as a means of demonstrating, in this most humiliating hour of Western history, intention and capacity to fight. The President had suggested a raid from Outer Mongolia if it could be done without involving the Russians but General Arnold had another plan in progress.
Stilwell and his staff flew to Miami on February 11 and after two false starts finally succeeded in leaving the United States on the third attempt on Friday the 13th. He was somewhat taken aback to find his plane host to a female civilian, Clare Boothe Luce, on assignment for Life. She proved a good sport on the uncomfortable trip and not long afterwards was to write one of the first major articles making Stilwell a character to the American public. “1942 will be a mess,” Joe wrote to his wife just before the plane took off for its third start, “but if we can keep it rolling for a year, we’ll begin to hand it back.”
The journey by Pan American seaplane and DC-3 transport took twelve days in a series of short flights via the Caribbean to South America, across to Africa, north to Cairo (“compared with Peking—phooey”) and east over Palestine, Iraq and Persia to New Delhi in the center of India. During this period, February 13–25, one disaster after another in appalling torrent struck the Far Eastern front. On February 15 when a failing water supply climaxed a disheartened and mismanaged campaign, Singapore yielded in unconditional surrender. Eighty thousand troops, about half of them English and Australians, and the rest Indians, went into Japanese prison camps. It was the “worst disaster and largest capitulation of British history” in the words of Churchill’s somber acknowledgment. “Christ, what the hell is the matter?” Stilwell asked in angry puzzlement on hearing the news in the middle of Africa.
The dreaded prospect of a joining of Germans and Japanese, if the one should break through the Middle East and the other through India, now appeared possible. Burma was crucial. On February 20 Churchill tried to divert toward Rangoon two Australian divisions which were en route from the Middle East to defend their homeland. “There is nothing else in the world,” he wired Prime Minister Curtin of Australia, “that can fill the gap.” Curtin, who saw his own country’s outer defenses “gone or going,” and one Australian division already lost at Singapore and another involved in the British military disaster in Greece, and who had little cause to feel confidence in British conduct of the war, refused to permit the diversion.
On February 23 the British Indian brigades in Burma were defeated in a shambles in front of the Sittang River. To enable retreat, they blew up the bridge, leaving one of their brigades still on the far side. Nothing but a broken army now remained between the Japanese and Rangoon. (“The world is crashing,” wrote Stilwell in Cairo.) In Java, in view of Japanese air and sea power dominating the Indies, the ABDA command was dissolved on the same day as the loss of the Sittang, and Wavell returned to India, arriving within a day of Stilwell. From February 26 to 28 the Battle of the Java Sea was fought, ending in defeat for the ABDA naval forces. The loss of Java was now inevitable and the coast of Australia exposed.
“They are very jumpy here,” Stilwell wrote home from India in understatement designed for the censor; “there may be trouble ahead.”
* * *
*1 A Chinese army, analogous to but smaller than the American Army corps, consisted of three divisions, each with a nominal strength of 9,000 but in practice averaging from 6,000 to 7,000.
*2 Later he claimed to have accepted two but this was not what was understood by those present.
*3 At this stage, staff, technicians and air force.
11
“A Hell of a Beating” March–May 1942
WHETHER BURMA COULD BE HELD to keep open the door to China or whether it would go the way of Singapore was now the crucial question. Events were offering Stilwell a second chance at combat command. Although this was not the original or even primary purpose of his mission, and his command of the two Chinese armies in Burma was intended by Chiang Kai-shek to be no more than a complimentary gesture, the opportunity was one Stilwell was anxious to seize. He knew the Chinese would not take the necessary offensive action in Burma if left to themselves. He did not yet know if his command would be verified.
In New Delhi, India’s grandly spacious, tree-shaded new capital built in the 1920s as an imposing setting for the British Raj, he attended a conference at GHQ, “an enormous affair, big enough to run our War Department.” The room was full of lieutenant generals, major generals and brigadiers in abundance that seemed disproportionate to the three brigades at the front. He suspected, not without reason, that the meeting was assembled to put him on the spot, for the British were amused at the mission of a high-ranking American general with no troops to command. He began asking questions about the situation in Burma and found that “nobody but the quartermaster knew anything at all.” The staff appeared to have no plan of campaign, no coordinate strategy with the Chinese and no intelligence of the enemy’s strength or intentions. “The British haven’t taken a single prisoner yet.”
Stilwell continued east to Calcutta, the teeming, squalid former capital and the takeoff point for Burma on India’s east coast. Here he waited for Wavell who flew in from fallen Java on February 28, “a tired depressed man pretty well beaten down.” Over dinner in the gloomy dining hall of Calcutta’s old Government House he gave Stilwell the story of the three months of defeat. Accompanying him was Major General Lewis Brereton of the American Air Force who had served in Java and was now scheduled to lead the Tenth Air Force based in India under Stilwell’s command. He wore an important air and carried a riding crop. “Why the hell does an Air Corps officer need a riding crop?” Stilwell muttered to Dorn; “to beat off the birds maybe?” Some months later on entering General Brereton’s plane he stared in unbelief to see it carpeted with a fine Persian rug cut down to fit.
Across the Bay of Bengal in Burma, on the day Wavell and Stilwell met, the civil government was evacuating Rangoon. It had become urgent to move north before the Japanese, advancing from the Sittang, should reach and cut the railroad, isolating the city. The military, who had never prepared for serious defense of the country in which they were stationed, gave little hope of stopping the enemy. We
arily in London, three days after the fall of Singapore, Alan Brooke had acknowledged, “Burma news bad. If the Army cannot fight better than it is doing at present we shall deserve to lose our Empire.” Five days later that process had been advanced by the debacle at the Sittang Bridge. The 17th Indian Division had staggered back with one brigade virtually amputated and with survivors, now weaponless, who had forded the river after the bridge was blown.
The Empire was organized to serve the metropolis, not vice versa. Indian troops, like the two brigades hastily sent back to Burma from the Middle East, were trained and used for the desert war against Germany, rather than for service in their own area where they might become contaminated by dangerous ideas of Asian nationalism. Training in jungle warfare was not undertaken because British military planning did not expect a land attack on Malaya or Burma. The troops, like the Americans in the Louisiana maneuvers who could not “de-truck,” were tied to their transport and to roads, and helpless against the Japanese tactic of roadblocks. They could not be reinforced or supplied by land because no motor roads existed connecting Burma with India. Roadlessness served the purpose both of the powerful Burma-India Steam Navigation Company which was interested in preserving its monopoly of the carrying trade between Calcutta and Rangoon, and of the British Army in India, which conceived of Burma as a buffer. The Army’s view was that “the disease-ridden, jungle-covered mountain ranges of Burma formed an impenetrable barrier, and that an offensive campaign across them was a military impossibility.”
In Rangoon the murky smell of burning rubber marked the destruction of Lend-Lease stores including 972 unassembled trucks and 5,000 tires. AMMISCA personnel had moved out as much matériel as possible after the battle of the Sittang, but to the agony of the Chinese more than 900 trucks and jeeps and 1,000 machine guns and other arms had been transferred to the British forces. Government bureaus had departed for upper Burma, Indians of the police and clerical staffs were fleeing, Burmese employees melted into the population. Fires and looting, fifth-column groups and night-roaming marauders took over. All that remained of the civil administration were demolition squads awaiting the Governor-General’s last-minute order to blow up the docks.
On the last night at Government House, the Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, and a residue of his staff dined in lonely finality with only the cook and butler left out of 110 servants. The halls were emptied of the tall Chaprassis, Indian attendants in long white coats and scarlet and gold waistcoats whose only duty was to stand and wait as silent statues of imperial rule. After dinner the Governor and his aide and one or two others played billiards under the portraits of past Governors of Burma. The portraits’ calm, indifferent gaze seemed to irritate the aide, who took up a billiard ball saying, “Don’t you think, Sir, that we ought to deny them also to the Japs?” and let fly. The others joined in, hurling balls wildly into ripping canvas, perhaps in frustration, perhaps in some dim recognition that their rule was passing. “It was a massacre,” the Governor said afterwards, meaning the portraits, but the Empire too, which had ruled by prestige, was in tatters.
In Burma the British could count on no general support from the population. Although the actively pro-Japanese group was not more than 10 percent, there was an undercurrent of admiration for the Japanese as an Asiatic race who were standing up to the Westerners at last. As the Burmese Premier, U Saw, said, “We Asiatics have had a bad time since Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape.” As distinct from the hill tribes—Chins, Kachins and Karens—who were friendly and good fighters, the Burmese of lower Burma were on the whole apathetic, wishing only to keep out of the way of the guns. The nationalist movement had forced some concessions toward Burmese participation in government but the British had refused to promise independence or even Dominion status after the war. As they saw it there was no point in fighting Japan if they had to give up the Empire to do it.
In India agitation for independence, taking advantage of the Japanese menace, was rising to one of its peaks. Roosevelt was so concerned by the idea of the populace opening the door to the Japanese that, despite Churchill’s angry reaction in December, he again urged some concession to Indian demands. At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek, eager to play an international role, visited India in February, just before Stilwell’s arrival, to rally the Indians against Japan. Results were not altogether as planned. India’s Congress Party, instead of being persuaded by Chiang, used him to bring pressure on Britain, and Gandhi pointedly suggested that Chiang’s own treatment by Allies did not favor his argument. “They will never voluntarily treat us Indians as equals,” he said; “why, they do not even admit your country to their talks.” Chiang was stung because he was particularly concerned at this time by China’s nonadmission to the Munitions Control Board in Washington which allocated arms and supplies. He promptly quoted Gandhi in a letter to Soong for the benefit of the President, adding, “If we are thus treated during the stress of war, what becomes of our position at the peace conference?” The question was not persuasive for the President’s philosophical desire to treat Chiang as an equal stopped short of the Munitions Control Board.
As regards India, Chiang instructed his Ambassador in London to inform Churchill that “I am personally shocked by the Indian military and political situation,” and that if it was not “immediately and urgently solved,” the danger of a Japanese invasion would daily increase. This might be prevented, he advised, by voluntary concession of real power to the Indians. The advice was not welcomed by Mr. Churchill.
—
Stilwell and his party left Calcutta on March 3 to complete the last stage of the journey to Chungking where he would establish headquarters, report to Chiang Kai-shek and, he hoped, clarify the question of his command of the Chinese Fifth and Sixth Armies in Burma. The Sixth, a second-rate unit of understrength divisions, had been slowly moving down and on March 1 was not yet fully in position in the Shan states when the 1st Burma Division, which it was to relieve, moved out. The Chinese Fifth Army was a much stronger unit with one full-strength motorized division plus artillery which Chiang was reluctant to let go no matter how urgent was China’s interest in holding Burma. He had stalled throughout February and not until March 1 did he order one division of the Fifth to move while holding back the other two.
The first stage of Stilwell’s trip took him in a four-and-a-half-hour flight over the wide dun-colored water-streaked Brahmaputra delta and the green hills of Assam and up over the dark mountain ridges of Burma into Lashio. At Porter House, the ample missionary establishment which served for foreign gatherings, he encountered Chiang Kai-shek, accompanied by Madame, who had come down to give directions for the campaign in Burma. The Generalissimo was cordial and welcoming but talked only briefly with Stilwell on this occasion. He looked the same as when Stilwell had last seen him with the same hard, smooth exterior like polished stone, showing no visible evidence of trials or anxieties, and the same forced half-smile that belied his eyes. He wore the neat high-buttoned khaki uniform which he only varied at home with a plain black Chinese gown and his head was shaved close to conceal gray hair. Stilwell watched while Chiang, with a dictator’s instinct for balconies, made a speech from the upper porch of Porter House to the commanders and staffs of the Fifth and Sixth Armies who stood in hushed quiet below, listening with strained attention to the sharp, clipped staccato voice of their chief.
In the Generalissimo’s entourage Stilwell found his old friend General Shang Chen who, as Director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the General Staff, was now in charge of military liaison with China’s allies. This was an asset for Shang was a direct and likable man whom Stilwell could talk to without circumlocution. He was not, however, one of the Generalissimo’s intimates; in fact they had no love for each other or background in common. Shang, who came from an old official family, had not joined the regime until after the march to the north in 1927 and remained sufficiently detached to label the Generalissimo to Stilwell as T’ai tzu hsin, “too self-interested.” He owed
what influence he had to his being the only one of the upper rank of generals who was fluent in English. All the others used interpreters. Another old acquaintance in the company was Hollington Tong, Vice-Minister of Information and a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, who conducted relations with the press, authored China’s Munchausen-style communiqués and was detested by Stilwell. “Oily and false,” he noted, “mouthing delight at my arrival.”
After an hour’s stopover he continued on to China via CNAC (China National Aviation Corporation), the well-established commercial line flying DC-3 transports and operated by Americans with only one qualified Chinese pilot among the personnel. The first leg was a two-hour flight over the route of the Burma Road to Kunming where Stilwell stayed overnight in Chennault’s quarters. He tackled his first command problem when Chennault flew in next morning. “Had a long talk with him and got him calmed down. He agreed to induction [of the AVG into the American Air Force] and said he’d be glad to serve under me. That’s a big relief….He’ll be okay.” It was not to work out that easily, for the pilots rather than their commander proved to be the first source of trouble when they rebelled against induction.