Codebreakers Victory (41 page)

The codebreakers enabled the Allied generals to direct their forces with certainty and efficiency. In just two weeks' time they had driven the Germans out of southern France. The Riviera invasion ended up not unlike the Battle of the Falaise Gap. Many Nazi troops succeeded in making it through to help firm up the home defenses. Thousands of others, however, were killed, thousands more captured and tons of materiel were left behind in the rout.

With both the northern and southern invasions now rapidly contracting the Germans' defenses and in the process destroying legions of soldiers and masses of equipment, the situation in Europe bred relief for the Allies. But it also fed a spirit of inflated hope and cocksure confidence that presaged trouble ahead.

 

 

 

16

 

CBI: Winning the "Forgotten War"

 

 

In the broad sweep of World War II history, the battles of the China-Burma-India theater can seem in retrospect to be an aside, a series of viciously lethal struggles that were only a back eddy to the main conflict. Those who fought there ruefully regarded it as "the forgotten war," the front with the lowest priorities, the arena whose demands of men and materiel were most begrudged.

Yet it seemed inarguable at the time that the Japanese had to be stopped there. The Allies could not assume, early on in the Pacific war, that either Nimitz's island-hopping or MacArthur's climb from New Guinea would succeed. The CBI theater offered an alternative: it could serve as a launching base for the aerial bombardment and ultimate invasion of the Japanese homeland. It was even more essential to deny the Japanese their continuing exploitation of Southeast Asia's boundless natural resources and endless ranks of manpower that could have built them into an unbeatable foe. The farther reaches of the Indian subcontinent must not be opened to them. The glimmering vision of an Asia-Middle East linkup that would put the Axis powers on their way to ruling the world could not be allowed to come to pass. Allied leaders would have seemed irresponsible if they had not believed the CBI war had to be fought—and won.

Nor can the role of CBI's codebreakers* vital in turning defeat into victory, be overlooked. Their contributions, though, were late in coming. Before the war and during its early stages, the British had established an extensive network of intercept stations, direction-finding units and cryptanalytic teams to keep tabs on Japan. But the onslaught of Japanese advances kept the Sigint forces on the run. Some hopped from Hong Kong to Singapore to Ceylon and even to eastern Africa. Others fled to Australia. The British, Australian and Indian intercept and cryptographic teams tried valiantly to regroup in their new locations and did reestablish linkages with Bletchley Park, Cast, Hypo and Op-20-G. However, months passed before Sigint could begin to have much of an impact.

In the meantime, the entire Southeast Asia theater had been a sequence of disasters for the Allies. Before the war, the Japanese had begun their expansion by conquest with the annexing of Manchuria in 1931, the capture of eastern China's major cities and the occupation of the Chinese coast. When the war came, and the Allies wished to support Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army, the only supply line was through China's western back door. Chiang's needs were met by landing supplies at Rangoon, Burma's capital and major seaport, transporting them by rail through Burma and completing the journey to his Kunming wartime capital by truck on the Burma Road, built in 1936-37.

Chiang looked primarily to the U.S. for aid. In 1937 he enlisted Clare Chennault, a flamboyant Great War pilot, to develop an effective Chinese air force. Chennault did so by retraining Chinese fliers, hiring mercenaries wherever he could find them and welding his polyglot band into what was officially called the American Volunteer Group (AVG). The group became far better known as the Flying Tigers from the fact that its U.S.-built planes had winged tigers painted on their tails. Toothy shark faces on the aircrafts' noses also contributed to their lethal appearance. For the first seven months in 1942, at a time when the American public hungered for success stories, Chennault's Tigers racked up impressive headline-grabbing scores against Japan's planes. Because the AVG was a private air force functioning outside official channels, the U.S. reorganized it in July 1942 as the Chinese Air Task Force, still under General Chennault. With an influx of regular U.S. Air Force fliers who volunteered for duty and the arrival of a U.S. bomber squadron, Chennault's Tigers continued to harass the Japanese throughout the war. Eric Sevareid, transferring to China for his CBS reports, wrote that Chennault became "the great American hero to the Chinese" and that his "very face in its grim, scarred belligerence had come to be a symbol of China's resistance."

To help Chiang develop a more professional army, the U.S. sent him an able field commander and trainer who had spent fifteen years in China and spoke the language fluently, General Joseph W. Stilwell. His nickname was "Vinegar Joe," an appropriate label for his no-nonsense, to-hell-with-tact personality. General William Slim, Stilwell's British counterpart in the Burmese command, said of him that "he could be as obstinate as a whole team of mules," but Slim added that when Stilwell "said he would do a thing, he did it," and while others found him impossibly abrasive, "I liked him."

Stilwell faced a tough task in trying to shape an effective Chinese army. Chiang's understrength divisions were ridden with corruption and incompetent leadership. The soldiers were low paid, malnourished and ill equipped. American supplies meant for them often ended up on the black market and were likely to be traded to the Japanese. In addition, Chiang himself was never sure which war took precedence, the one against Japan or that against the Chinese Communist armies under Mao Tse-tung, which Chiang's forces had driven into a comer in China's northern mountains. Despite signing an agreement with Mao to fight together against the Japanese, Chiang kept a quarter of his army standing guard against a possible move by the Communists. Stilwell quickly came to have a low regard for the devious Chiang, referring to him privately, and too often publicly, as "Peanut."

In the triumphant takeover of Southeast Asia, the Japanese viewed the capture of Burma as the means to shut off aid to China. Neighboring Siam put up only a five-hour fight before allowing passage to Japanese troops and becoming Japan's ally. The invasion of Burma began on January 31, 1942. Thousands of British, Australian, Dutch and Asian prisoners the Japanese had captured in their conquest of Southeast Asia were condemned to slave labor building the Siam-to-Burma railroad, which was to be Japan's invasion route into India. When the Japanese attacked Rangoon, the British, knowing the port's importance, fought them off for the first two and a half months of 1942. Then the sheer numbers of the Japanese and their dominance in the air forced the British-led troops to retreat northward.

At this point Slim was called in from his previous post in Iraq to take charge of the defense of Burma. Commanding the British, Burmese and Indian divisions of the Fourteenth Army, he joined with Stilwell and his Chinese troops to form a defensive line in central Burma 150 miles north of Rangoon. The Allies' numbers were too few, the Japanese attackers were too well versed in jungle fighting, and their air superiority was too overpowering for the line to hold. In what CBI veteran Louis Allen, in his comprehensive history
Burma: The Longest War,
has called "the longest retreat in the history of the British Army," Slim's forces withdrew for 900 miles, all the way back into India. The whole of Burma fell under Japanese control. Stilwell, too, escaped to India, arriving with the remains of his command only after a harrowing 140-mile jungle trek. The Burma Road was no longer usable. Supplies to China had to be transported from India by indomitable American fliers ferrying cargo planes over the southern spurs of the Himalayas, which they called "the Hump." So many of their planes went down that the pilots claimed they could plot their course to China by the line of smoking wrecks on the mountainsides.

Before leaving their post at Colombo on the island of Ceylon, the code-breaking crew had tried to avert a naval disaster. On March 28, 1942, they had broken a Japanese naval code foretelling a carrier-based air raid on the harbor at Colombo. Accordingly, Admiral James Somerville, commanding the Royal Navy's Eastern Fleet, heeded the warning and withdrew his ships to their Indian Ocean hideaway in the Maldive Islands. Merchant ships left for a port in India. When two days passed and the raid had not come, however, the admiral decided the codebreakers were wrong and returned his fleet to Colombo. What no one on the Allied side knew was that the Japanese admiral had merely delayed his attack until Easter Sunday, believing he would find the British less alert then. Subsequently Colombo intercepts of plain-language air-to-ground messages warned that enemy aircraft were less than five hundred miles away. Somerville tried to scatter his ships, but there was not time. In this and a further raid the next day, the Japanese sank three cruisers, an aircraft carrier and two destroyers.

At this lowest point in the CBI war, a self-appointed messiah stirred hope. Orde C. Wingate had led irregular forces in North Africa, once bluffing fifteen thousand Italians into surrendering to his own force of less than two thousand. Now he arrived to apply the same audacious tactics in Burma. Wingate was a deliberate eccentric who gloried in wearing grimy uniforms, an ever-present pith helmet and a great bushy beard. He was given to such bizarre behavior as straining his tea, and that of his guests, through his dirty socks. He proposed beating the Japanese by what he called "long-range penetration." He would lead a specially trained infantry brigade far behind enemy lines, where, supplied by air and communicating via radio, his troops would wreak guerrilla-type havoc on the Japanese. The world press fastened onto a new word:
Chindits,
the name Wingate's outfit acquired. Wingate coined it when he misheard the Burmese word
chinthe
—the name of the mythical beast that guarded Burmese temples.

During the outfit's first weeks in the jungles the Chindits fulfilled Wingate's expectations and gave newspaper readers throughout the Allied nations a small feast of excitement amid otherwise dreary gruel. They destroyed bridges, sabotaged the Japanese army's supply railroad, attacked outposts and set up ambushes. The raid proved that penetration forces could be supplied by airborne drops. But the toll on the men was too great: the Japanese were too powerful. Wracked by disease more than by bullets, only remnants of Wingate's guerrillas made it out of the jungles and back to safety.

Summing up this first try by the Chindits, Slim wrote in his memoir, "As a military operation the raid had been an expensive failure." Yet he added, "There was a dramatic quality about this raid, which, with the undoubted fact that it had penetrated far behind the Japanese lines and returned, lent itself to presentation as a triumph of British jungle fighting over the Japanese." It gave a lift to the people of Britain and to all the Allies. For the troops in the CBI "it seemed the first ripple in the turning of the tide." Slim judged Wingate's adventure "worth all the hardship and sacrifice his men endured."

It remained for Vinegar Joe, however, to render the final verdict on the first Burma campaign. "I claim we got a hell of a beating," he told a press conference. "We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it."

 

 

Stilwell's Drive to "Mitch"

 

Winston Churchill was not convinced that the tremendous costs of retaking Burma were worth the effort. He foresaw that the replacement for the Burma Road that Stilwell pressed the Allies to undertake was "unlikely to be finished until the need for it had passed." Strategically, Burma was too remote to be of use in the conquest of Japan. As for conducting war there, "one could not choose a worse place for fighting the Japanese."

The Americans, nevertheless, persisted. The Pacific campaigns were proving slow and costly. U.S. leaders thought they still might have to strike at Japan through China. Besides, Chiang's clever, Wellesley-educated wife, Madame Soong Mei-ling, traveled to Washington and charmed FDR into maintaining full support for Chiang and Chennault, and even for Stilwell.

After sixteen months of reorganizing and strategizing by the Allies, the second Burma campaign was ready to begin in October 1943. It would be under the overall command of a new leader, Lord Louis Mountbatten.

By now the cryptologic resources of the Allies were in full interplay. The East African contingent had returned to Colombo for closer surveillance of Japanese naval traffic. Outside New Delhi the British had established "Bletchley Park East," another operation officially identified by a misleadlingly low-key name: the Wireless Experimental Centre. WEC had two Indian intercept and cryptologic outposts, one in Bangalore, in southern India, and the other in Barrackpore, near Calcutta. The latter was specifically assigned to meet the signals intelligence needs of Slim's Fourteenth Army and to operate mobile stations that stayed close to the fighting fronts. Special Liaison Units served Mountbatten, Slim, Stilwell and the U.S. bomber command in China.

In addition, a Tactical Air Intelligence Section at Slim's headquarters intercepted and broke the signals of Japanese aircraft flying into and out of airfields in Burma. The section directed a squadron of U.S. long-range fighters in successes that decimated Japanese planes and gave the Allies air superiority for the coming offensives. The voices of Japan's militarists were, all unbeknownst to them, being overheard and understood by an untiring legion of eavesdroppers.

Forced back to India's eastern border by their earlier defeats, the Allies planned for three main forces to carry out their offensive to retake Burma. One would be Stilwell's American-trained Chinese divisions. The second: Wingate's Chindits, expanded to twenty thousand troops. Third would be Slim's British and Indian armies.