All Hell Let Loose (39 page)

The Japanese had advanced across Burma for 127 days, covering 1,500 miles at an average speed of almost thirty miles a day, while fighting thirty-four actions. The British had lost 13,000 men killed, wounded and captured, while the Japanese suffered only 4,000 casualties. This was not a disaster of the same magnitude as Malaya, and Slim conducted his retreat with some skill. But the Japanese now occupied Britain’s entire South-East Asian empire, to the gates of India. An Asian wrote of the spectacle of Western PoWs driven to hard labour alongside the native peoples: ‘We always felt that they were superior to us. The Japanese opened our eyes; because [the white men] were sweeping the floor with me … walking without shoes.’ This proved an enduring revelation. Meanwhile, the Burma Road to China would remain closed for almost three years.

Enforced civilian migrations were a major feature of the war almost everywhere around the globe that armies struggled for mastery. Few Burmese attempted to flee before the Japanese, because they believed they had nothing to fear from their victory, and much to hope for. When members of the newly mobilised Burma Defence Army marched through Rangoon for the first time under the eyes of its Japanese sponsors, an enthusiastic citizen wrote: ‘How thrilling it was to see Burmese soldiers and officers wearing assorted uniforms, bearing assorted arms, tricolour armbands on the shirtsleeve, seriousness on the face.’

But almost a million Indians also lived in the country, some dominating commercial life and others performing menial functions indispensable to the welfare of sahibs, but disdained by their Burmese subjects. The Indians were unloved, and fearful of local nationalism. As the invasion tide swept forward, the British did nothing to assist the flight of some 600,000 of these, their dependants. It was argued that the rulers had trouble enough saving themselves. But here, once again, British conduct highlighted the breakdown of the supposed imperial compact, whereby native peoples received protection as the price of accepting subjection. Rich fugitives bought airline tickets or cabins aboard ships bound for India. Indians bitterly dubbed the ferry up the Chindwin ‘the white route’, because access was almost the exclusive privilege of the British and Eurasians. As paddle steamers thrashed upriver, they passed corpses floating down, victims of hapless Indians’ overland ‘black route’.

Throngs of people too poor to purchase tickets to salvation were obliged to take to the roads and tracks north and westwards, towards Assam. The monsoon broke in May; thereafter, rain and mud clogged the passage alike of the fortunate in cars and the impoverished afoot. They were robbed and sometimes raped; they paid exorbitantly for scraps of food; succumbed to dysentery, malaria and fever. At ferries and roadblocks, their last rupees were extracted by avaricious policemen and villagers. No one knows exactly how many Indians died in the spring and summer of 1942 on the road to Assam, but it was at least 50,000, and perhaps more. Their skeletons littered the roadside for years, to shame British passers-by when they later went that way again. An officer searching for stragglers at Tagun Hill on the way to Ledo came upon a village of the dead:

Among the fugitives were many mixed-raced Catholics, who had originated in Portuguese Goa. Customs officer Jose Saldhana walked for days through the jungle with his seventeen-year-old son George, having dispatched the rest of his family on a ship overladen with panic-stricken people. The walkers endured ghastly privations, relieved by a surreal moment in a camp in the jungle where a girl named Emily D’Cruz serenaded them: ‘Her voice soared clear and beautiful in the still of the night,’ singing ‘Alice Blue Gown’. Then George succumbed to dysentery. He persuaded his father to leave him, sitting against a tree deep in the jungle. After some hours, the teenager saw a Naga woman, from a tribe of notorious headhunters. Terror overcame his weakness, and he began to walk again. For days he stumbled north-westwards, living off berries which he saw monkeys eating, and thus assumed must be safe for humans. One day he came upon a flock of butterflies, of fabulous beauty. Fascinated, he approached them – only to recoil when he found them feasting off juices oozing from a decaying corpse. He fled onwards, and at last reached safety and a family reunion. Others were less fortunate. In the Hukawng valley, boys from a Catholic school in Tavoy came upon the body of their headmaster, Leo Menenzes. His weak heart had collapsed under the strain of the trek.

Even when surviving refugees reached British-controlled Imphal, there were no better facilities and medical aid for Indian civilians than for Indian soldiers. With all the resources of the subcontinent at its disposal, the Raj proved incapable of organising basic humanitarian support for the flotsam of its war. Kachin and Naga villagers gave more help to refugees than did the British. An Anglo-Indian manager of the Irrawaddy Steamship Company who reached a rescue station in Assam after a struggle across the mountains was met by a British officer who insisted that he could be fed only at the Indian canteen. Conditions were appalling in hospitals receiving stricken fugitives. A British woman wrote bitterly to a friend in England, the wife of government minister R.A. Butler, describing what she had seen in Ranchi: ‘The medical wards are like
Gone with the Wind
– pallets touching each other, people moaning for water and sicking up and so on everywhere. It’s all a shocking crime and may God forever damn the Eastern Command staff.’ Cholera broke out in some refugee camps.

Alexander’s beaten army was rebuilt only sluggishly and unconvincingly: two long years would elapse before it was able to meet the Japanese with success. In August 1942, the general himself was transferred to command Britain’s forces in the Middle East. The memory of that terrible Burma spring, and of its victims, remained imprinted upon the minds of all who witnessed it. Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, from the Indian prison cell to which he had been consigned by the British, commented with disdain on the collapse of government in Burma and the flight of colonial officials, who abandoned hundreds of thousands of his compatriots to their fate: ‘It is the misfortune of India at this crisis in her history not only to have a foreign government, but a government which is incompetent and incapable of organising her defence properly or of providing for the safety and essential needs of her people.’ This was just. The loss of Britain’s empire in South-East Asia brought disgrace as well as defeat upon its rulers, as Winston Churchill readily recognised.

1
BATAAN

‘We cannot win this war until it … becomes a national crusade for America and the American Dream,’ wrote
New York Times
reporter James Reston in his 1942 book
Prelude to Victory
, which attained best-sellerdom. This was now, indeed, a global conflict. The American people’s initial response to finding themselves engaged in it was as muddled and well-meaning as had been that of the British in September 1939. There was a surge of enthusiasm for first-aid instruction – the most popular handbook sold eight million copies; thousands of high school students carved and glued wooden models of enemy aircraft for military trainers. Millions of citizens donated blood and collected scrap metal; resort hotels in Miami Beach and Atlantic City were turned over to army recruits. Bowing to the gravity of the new national circumstances, sport hunting and fishing, together with manufacture of golf and tennis balls, were temporarily banned. There was a boom in fortune-telling, checkers, sales of world maps and cookery books. Movies attained extraordinary popularity, partly because many people found more cash in their pockets: 1942 cinema audiences were double those of 1940. Prisoners in San Quentin volunteered for war-production duty, and began making anti-submarine nets.

From the outset, and aided by the fact that some big industrial commitments had already been made, America’s economic mobilisation awed visitors from poorer and less ambitious societies. Even intelligent and informed British people failed to recognise the almost limitless scale of the nation’s resources: ‘The Army … are aiming at a vast programme,’ British Air Marshal John Slessor wrote to the Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal from Washington back in April 1941, assessing the build-up of the US armed forces, ‘their present target being two million men, and they are now considering another 2 million on top of that. Who they are going to fight with an army of this size or how they are going to transport it overseas I do not know and very much doubt whether they would have aimed at anything like this if they had a really thorough joint strategic examination of their defence commitments and requirements.’

Such scepticism was dramatically confounded between 1942 and 1945. ‘After Pearl Harbor,’ Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan, British chief planner for D-Day, said of the Americans, ‘they decided to make the biggest and best war ever seen.’ The secretary of the American Asiatic Association wrote to a friend in the State Department, ‘It will be a long, hard war, but after it is over Uncle Sam will do the talking in the world.’ The federal budget soared from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945, and in the same period America’s GNP grew from $91 to $166 billion. The index of industrial production rose 96 per cent, and seventeen million new jobs were created. Some 6.5 million additional women entered the US labour force between 1942 and 1945, and their wages grew by over 50 per cent; sales of women’s clothing doubled. The imperatives of America’s vast industrial mobilisation favoured tycoons and conglomerates, which flourished mightily. Anti-trust legislation was thrust aside by the pressures of war demand: America’s hundred largest companies, which in 1941 were responsible for 30 per cent of national manufacturing output, generated 70 per cent by 1943. The administration overcame its scruples about monopolists who could deliver tanks, planes, ships.

Everything grew in scale to match the largest war in history: in 1939 America had only 4,900 supermarkets, but by 1944 there were 16,000. Between December 1941 and the end of 1944, the average American’s liquid personal assets almost doubled. With luxuries scarce, consumers were desperate to find goods on which to spend their rising earnings: ‘People are crazy with money,’ said a Philadelphia jeweller. ‘They don’t care what they buy. They purchase things just for the fun of spending.’ By 1944, while British domestic production of consumer goods had fallen by 45 per cent from its pre-war levels, that of the United States had risen by 15 per cent. Many regions experienced severe housing shortages and rents soared, as millions of people sought temporary accommodation to fit their wartime job relocations. ‘The Good War myth,’ wrote Arthur Schlesinger, who then worked for the Office of War Information,

Among the worst rackets uncovered was that of a primary war contractor, National Bronze and Aluminum Foundry Company of Cleveland, which knowingly sold scrap metal as parts for fighter engines; four of its executives were jailed. The US Cartridge Company of St Louis issued millions of rounds of defective ammunition, though such chicanery could cost lives. Citizens sought otherwise unavailable commodities through the black market, and many businesses evaded price controls. An American observed ruefully that Europe had been occupied, Russia and China invaded, Britain bombed; but the US among the great powers was ‘fighting this war on imagination alone’. Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler’s reported persecution of the Jews. Combat historian Forrest Pogue later observed wonderingly of Bradley’s army in France: ‘The men have no great interest in the war. You can’t work them up unless the Germans hit some of their friends.’ A behaviourist noted for his work with rats, Professor Norman Maier of Michigan University, suggested that Americans could be more effectively galvanised into a fighting mood by cutting off their gasoline, tyres and civil liberties than by appealing to their ideals. This was an overly cynical view, for some people displayed real patriotism, and on the battlefield many Americans would display much courage. But it was true that the remoteness of the United States from the fighting fronts, its security from direct attack or even serious hardship, militated against the passion that moved civilians of nations suffering occupation or bombardment.

After Pearl Harbor, America’s political and military leaders knew that they, like the British, must suffer defeats and humiliations before forces could be mobilised to roll back the advancing Japanese. There was much ignorance and innocence about the enemy, even among those who would have to fight them. ‘Suddenly we realized that nobody knew anything about the Japs,’ said carrier pilot Fred Mears. ‘We had never heard of a Zero then. What was the caliber of Jap planes and airmen? What was the strength of the Japanese Navy? What kind of battles would be fought and where? We were woefully unprepared.’ Many Americans had acknowledged for months the logic of their nation’s belligerence. Yet it is characteristic of all conflicts that until enemies begin to shoot, ships to sink and loved ones – or at least comrades – to die, even professional warriors often lack urgency and ruthlessness. ‘It was amazing how long it took to get the hang of it and to react instantly in the right way,’ American sailor Alvin Kiernan observed. ‘War, we gradually learned, is a state of mind before it can be anything else.’ Ernie Pyle wrote: ‘Apparently it takes a country like America about two years to become wholly at war. We had to go through that transition period of letting loose of life as it was, and then live the new war life so long that it finally became the normal life to us.’

All this makes it remarkable that, within six months of Pearl Harbor, American fleets gained victories which turned the tide of the Asian war. Germany dominated western Europe for four years, but by autumn 1942 the Japanese perimeter was already beginning to shrink. The speed of the American resurgence in the Pacific reflected the fundamental weakness of the Asian enemy. First, however, came the pain. In the weeks following 7 December 1941, the Japanese seized Wake after a fierce defence in which the first wave of attackers were repulsed with heavy loss. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commanding the defence of the Philippines, rejected his air commander’s plea to strike back during ten hours which elapsed between news of Pearl Harbor and a devastating Japanese air assault that destroyed almost eighty US aircraft undispersed on the ground.

Next day, MacArthur began to make belated preparations to withdraw his Filipino and American troops to Luzon’s Bataan peninsula, which alone might be defensible. But it was a huge task quickly to shift supplies there: the general had dismissed proposals to do so before war came, scorning ‘passivity’. The army hastily bought rice from Chinese merchants and all the beef, meat and fruit it could get from local canneries. On 12 December, MacArthur belatedly informed President Quezon of the mooted withdrawal, which he began to implement on the 22nd. Doctors warned that Bataan was notoriously malaria-ridden, because of the prevalence there of the anopheles mosquito, but little was done to secure stocks of prophylactics. Meanwhile, Manila was bombed every day between noon and 1300, causing American officers to advance their lunch to 1100.

MacArthur expected a Japanese landing at the south end of the Lingayen gulf, and deployed some troops accordingly. Yet the Japanese invasion force got ashore at Lingayen gulf after brushing aside a challenge by ill-trained and poorly equipped Filipino troops. By 22 December, 43,110 men of Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma’s Fourteenth Army had established a beachhead with few casualties. Faulty American torpedoes caused the failure of all but one submarine attack on the troopships. A further 7,000 Japanese landed unopposed at Lamon Bay, two hundred miles south-eastwards. The Philippines army crumbled quickly. Air commander Gen. Lewis Brereton, most of his planes gone, prudently decamped to Australia. MacArthur issued a bombastic communiqué: ‘My gallant divisions are holding ground and denying the foe the sacred soil of the Philippines. We have inflicted heavy casualties on his troops, and nowhere is his bridgehead secure. Tomorrow we will drive him into the sea.’

In reality, the Japanese advanced on Manila against negligible resistance. In Washington, the US chiefs of staff wisely forswore any notion of reinforcing the defence. MacArthur enjoyed just one piece of good fortune: the invaders focused on occupying the capital, and made no attempt to frustrate his retreat to Bataan.
Life
photographer Carl Mydans watched from the Bay View Hotel as the first Japanese entered Manila on 2 January: ‘They came up the boulevards in the predawn glow from the bay riding on bicycles and on tiny motorcycles. They came without talk and in good order, the ridiculous pop-popping of their one-cylinder cycles sounding loud in the silent city.’

A week later, Homma launched his first attack on the American-Filipino line across the Bataan peninsula. In the days that followed, the defenders had little difficulty in repulsing successive assaults, though they suffered steady losses from air attack. From the outset, they were also hot and hungry, with 110,000 people to be fed – 85,000 US and Filipino troops and 25,000 civilian refugees. The Corps of Engineers set about gathering and threshing rice in the fields. Fish traps operated along the coast until destroyed by enemy fighters, and farm animals were slaughtered. Malaria swiftly reached epidemic proportions. Nurse Ruth Straub wrote in her diary: ‘I guess we are all self-imposed prisoners-of-war. All we’re doing is protecting our own lives.’

But the defenders of Bataan displayed more energy and initiative than the British in Malaya: several Japanese attempts to turn the Americans’ flank by landing troops on the coast behind the front resulted in their annihilation. One unit was forced back to the sheer cliffs of Quinauan point. ‘Scores of Japs ripped off their uniforms and leaped, shrieking, to the beach below,’ wrote Captain William Dyess. ‘Machine-gun-fire raked the sand and surf for anything that moved.’ When Japanese infantry punched through the perimeter and seized two salients at Tuol and Cotar on 26 January, after bloody fighting the line was restored by counterattack. Bombing inflicted remarkably little damage on American artillery positions. When fodder ran out for the cavalry’s horses, the garrison ate them. Almost every wild animal on Bataan was hunted down and thrown into the pot, while men picked mangoes, bananas, coconuts, papayas, and fished at sea with dynamite.

Through February and March the Japanese made no headway, but the defenders were fast weakening from hunger, and anti-malarial quinine was running out. MacArthur escaped to Australia by PT-boat with his family and personal retainers, in obedience to an order from Roosevelt, leaving Gen. Jonathan Wainwright to direct the defence through its last weeks. By late March, a thousand malaria cases a week were being admitted to hospital. In civilian refugee camps behind the perimeter, according to Lt. Walter Waterous, conditions were ‘the most deplorable I have ever seen and the death rate was appalling’. Bombing wrecked almost every facility above ground on the fortress island of Corregidor; thousands of sick and wounded were crowded into its Malinta Tunnel.

Thirty-year-old Texan nurse Lt. Bertha Dworsky found that one of the worst aspects of her work was personal acquaintance with many of the terribly wounded men brought in: ‘They were usually people that we’d been with at the Officers’ Club, or they were our friends. It was a tremendously emotional experience. We just never knew who they were going to bring in next.’ The wounded often asked if they were going to survive, and doctors disputed whether it was best to tell them the truth. Dr Alfred Weinstein wrote: ‘The argument raged back and forth with nobody knowing the correct answer. Most of us followed a middle course, ducking the question … If a patient looked as if he might kick the bucket, we called in the chaplain to give him last rites, collect personal mementoes and write last messages … More often than not they didn’t have to be told.’