The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (42 page)

When the Japanese onslaught came, it was as if a sudden storm after long days of blue skies had made it difficult to imagine anything other than a light rain. At dawn on 7 December the American Navy at Pearl Harbor was destroyed. Then one by one the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya fell in rapid succession in a sort of reflection of the German conquests in Europe two years before. In Hong Kong twelve thousand British Empire troops were taken prisoner on Christmas Day. The same week Japanese troops entered Siam.

The British in Rangoon now finally saw the writing on the wall and urgently appealed for help. The nearest source of help was China, and
Chiang Kai-shek offered and sent two of his armies then in Yunnan down into the eastern hills. London also promised troops, including the Seventeenth Indian Division from Iraq and two brigades of African troops. But time was short.

On the morning of 23 December, as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s
The Road to Zanzibar
was about to play at the New Excelsior Cinema, Rangoon was bombed for the first time. The city had no antiaircraft guns, only Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, an American volunteer squadron with a reputation for throwing good parties. They were based out at Mingaladon airport and were paid a handsome bonus by Chiang Kai-shek for every Japanese plane they shot down. They now engaged the Nippon fliers but were unable to stop them from attacking the city. The streets that day were packed as usual, and all along the Strand Road and up and around Fraser and Merchant Streets thousands stopped to stare skyward and watch the dogfights overhead just as the first explosives careered down. Within minutes downtown Rangoon was littered with blown-apart and horribly maimed bodies. Nearly three thousand people lost their lives (out of four hundred thousand altogether in Rangoon). Uncontrolled fires broke out. People panicked, as no one had been prepared for this at all. The medical and other emergency services collapsed, and by the time a second attack came on Christmas Day, the road north out of Rangoon was crammed with refugees. Those who could, especially in the Indian population, scrambled onto every available ship bound for Calcutta or Madras.

The man at the center of the unfolding tragedy was Burma’s governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith. A former agriculture minister, he was, like so many British officials in Burma, from an Anglo-Irish family. Particularly proud of his Irish background, he had once happily startled his cabinet colleagues during a discussion of the possible internment of Irish citizens by revealing that he had remained a citizen of Eire. He was also a staunch proponent of traditional farming as opposed to “scientific farming” and had once helped lead a group best known for its passionate opposition to pasteurized milk. Harroweducated and with slicked-back hair, Dorman-Smith also liked to present himself as someone who understood the anticolonial position. One day while he was enjoying a cup of tea in the badly lit cabinet office’s basement canteen, he was asked whether he would consider becoming governor of Burma. “Irishmen should always take up challenges
of this sort even though they seldom lead anywhere,” he thought, and then accepted.
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When the first Japanese air raids were taking place, Dorman-Smith had been governor for barely six months. Neither he nor the army in Burma had much intelligence of what was going on, where the Japanese were, and what was likely to happen next. The extra troops that had been promised were now sent instead to Malaya, where a Japanese force had landed and was fast moving south toward Singapore. London thought that Singapore had to be defended to the end, come what may. Everyone knew that if Singapore fell to the Japanese, their navy would dominate the entire Indian Ocean from Australia to the Red Sea; Burma would have to accept that it was a lower priority. In the middle of January the coastal towns of Mergui and Tavoy were lost as Japanese forces scurried over the hills from Siam. The deputy commissioner in Mergui managed to escape but told Dorman-Smith: “I would rather have stayed and been taken prisoner … We will never be able to hold up our heads again.” Dorman-Smith also wanted to do the right thing. He wired the Burma Office in London: “I hate the idea of deserting the local population. I would welcome your views, my own view is that we all should stay.” Within a few weeks the mood had changed from cool optimism to acceptance of all-out defeat.

THE LONGEST RETREAT

Despite all the frenzied preparation (at the expense of Burma), the “impregnable fortress” of Singapore fell on 15 February, and Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, with knobby knees and in short khaki trousers, surrendered at the Ford motor factory to the much smaller force of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the bull-necked “Tiger of Malaya.” No fewer than seventy thousand imperial troops—British, Australians, and Indians—had been defeated by thirty thousand Japanese. Contrary to myth, the problem was not that Singapore’s famous large-caliber stationary guns were unable to turn around from the sea and face the attacking force to the north. The problem was the guns had only armor-piercing shells, designed to penetrate the hulls of warships. Against foot soldiers coming down jungle roads they were of little use.

To the north the Japanese Thirty-third and Fifty-fifth Divisions seized
Moulmein, Burma’s third-largest town, on the first day of February and were soon peering over the banks of the Salween River toward Rangoon and the heartlands of Burma on the other side. All this time the American pilots, led by John Van Kuren “Scarsdale Jack” Newkirk (who cut short his honeymoon to get back to Burma), did their best to beat off the waves of bombers. Though outnumbered, the Americans, joined by British, Canadian, Australian, and Indian airmen, managed to shoot down 122 enemy planes (including 25 for Scarsdale Jack) while losing only 5 of their own Tomahawk and Hurricane fighters.

In late February, Rangoon was readied for evacuation. Hospital patients and staff were sent to Mandalay, and the lunatics in the asylum were released together with all the common criminals in the Insein jail. The police were soon pulled out, and law and order predictably broke down as the poor of the city set fires and broke into shops and warehouses. In 1824 British soldiers had emptied the cellars of Rangoon on the very first night of occupation. In a fitting bookend to nearly 120 years of occupation, some emptied the cellars again under the pretense of denying comfort to the enemy.

Around the same time, the first tanks ever seen in Burma arrived together with the Seventh Armored Brigade from Egypt, but it was not enough to stanch the Japanese juggernaut. On 22 February the British blew up the bridge over the Sittang River (less than a hundred miles east of Rangoon), only to find that two brigades of the Seventeenth Indian Division were still left on the other side.

The situation was obviously becoming desperate, and at this point Churchill asked Prime Minister John Curtin of Australia to reroute the Australian Sixth and Seventh Divisions, which were then on their way home from the Middle East. Curtin refused, and though Churchill ordered the convoys to go to Burma anyway, he finally backed down in the face of Curtin’s indignation. The Australian prime minister was worried about a Japanese landing in his own backyard. The one force that might have saved Burma now sailed by.

As the Japanese crossed the Sittang and moved west toward the Pegu road (which connects Rangoon northward to Mandalay), Dorman-Smith prepared for his last night in the capital. There was almost no one left at Government House, a great Victorian pile not far from the hilltop Shwedagon Pagoda. There was his aide-de-camp and son-in-law Eric Battersby, and his military liaison officer, Wally Richmond, and
they and the governor and two war correspondents from London ate their last meal in the cavernous teak-paneled dining room. Out of 110 staff, only the head butler and cook were left, and the cook prepared mutton, a sheep that Dorman-Smith had become attached to after seeing it for several days grazing quietly outside his window. They also decided to drink all the remaining claret and port before merrily smashing up all the large portraits of Burma’s prim and supercilious exgovernors hanging along the walls.
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Though there were few reinforcing battalions and divisions to be had, new generals were sent, like expert doctors to a dying patient. General Sir Harold Alexander, the future field marshal and the last commander off the beach at Dunkirk, flew in to take over Allied forces in the country, as did General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, President Roosevelt’s choice to head up the Chinese armies in Burma in a special arrangement with Chiang Kai-shek. But they could do little to stop the tide, only to help manage what became the longest retreat in British history.

While many ordinary Burmese feared for the future, the Indians in the country were the ones who were perhaps the most afraid of what a non-British Burma would have in store. More than a hundred thousand Indians were now fleeing in the direction of Arakan, entire families on foot or by bullock cart, their possessions piled high, and dying by the thousands of hunger, disease, and exhaustion. Another hundred thousand were camped outside Mandalay and near Amarapura. British authorities permitted only five hundred a day to proceed up the road in order not to hold up the retreating British Army. No one knows how many died, but the number is likely in the tens of thousands. About two hundred thousand finally made it over the mountains into India.

Along the middle Irrawaddy, the river town of Prome fell, and then Toungoo, as both British and Chinese armies gave way to superior Japanese confidence, tactics, and fighting ability. Then the bombs rained over Mandalay. On 3 March the railway station was blown to bits together with the firehouse and the hospital. The remains of people and horses were scattered along dusty streets or were floating among the lilies in the old royal moat. Two-thirds of the town was then engulfed by fire, with huge flames whipping across Mindon and Thibaw’s city in the intense hundred-degree Fahrenheit heat. Almost no trees or buildings were left intact. Telephone lines lay across the cratered streets, and a terrible smell blanketed what little was left of Mandalay.

More destruction would come. The oil wells that had provided fat profits over so many years to businessmen in Glasgow and London were now blown up by the retreating British, and great clouds of black smoke drifted over the nearby medieval ruins at Pagan. It was now early March, and Dorman-Smith was at Maymyo, the summer capital in the eastern hills. The Japanese had taken the entire southern half of the country and showed no signs of slowing down. General Alexander planned to take his army across the Irrawaddy westward toward India, leaving the Chinese to fend for themselves as best they could.

The Japanese would soon enter Maymyo. Everything at the governor’s residence there had already disappeared to looters. There were no carpets left, or even spoons or forks. Dorman-Smith and his aides burned his papers only to find at lunchtime there was also nothing left to eat. When an old Burmese messenger appeared and Sir Reginald politely asked him for some food, he replied that he had only his own lunch, and this he would happily share. And so the king’s representative ate a meal of rice and curry with his fingers. Not far in the distance, angry and humiliated Chinese soliders were hiking back to Yunnan, torching villages and butchering civilians along the way.

From Maymyo Dorman-Smith headed north into the Kachin hills. When he reached Myitkyina on 28 April, many of his personal staff and other officials were already there and waiting for him, as was his wife and their pet monkey, Miss Gibbs. The airfield there was the only one left in Burma that was still in British hands, and the highland town was choked with refugees, many of them Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Burmese government workers and their families, the most loyal citizens of the Raj, all of whom were now desperate to be flown out. Dorman-Smith was himself ill with dysentery but thought the noble thing would be to hide in the jungle and not to desert the Burmese entirely. At the very least he should share the hardships of the others and walk out. Calcutta said he must fly out at once, but even then he hesitated until ordered directly by Churchill. Lady Dorman-Smith and Miss Gibbs having left already, he was escorted out immediately by the Royal Air Force.
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Though that was the end of the story for now for Sir Reginald, his wife, and his monkey, for hundreds of thousands of others there were still hundreds of miles of torturous mountain tracks between the advancing Japanese and the relative safety of India, northwest through
dense rain forest and then pine-shrouded hills. Those who crossed were mainly Indians, but there were also many others, Burmese and European. At least two thousand who made the trek were already wounded. What made everything much worse was that the monsoon downpours were just beginning, thunderous sheets of water drenching the men, women, and children to the bone, dragging them down in knee-deep mud, with clouds of sandflies and mosquitoes buzzing all around and leeches dropping off the trees, with many suffering from malaria and dysentery and all hungry from a lack of proper food. Narrow, slippery paths wound their way around cliffs a thousand feet high. People usually made their way in small groups and passed through Kachin mountain villages, often deserted because of recent attacks by renegade soldiers. Everywhere along the way were dead bodies. Only once they had crossed the four-thousand-foot-high Pangsau Pass would they be in Assam and on safe ground. Many were met on the other side by the volunteers of the Indian Tea Association.

One man traveled another, more difficult way to India, over the death-defying and ice-covered Diphu Pass, fourteen thousand feet up. This was the world-renowned botanist and explorer Frank Kingdon Ward, who had gone north from Fort Hertz and then walked two months and four hundred miles alone along the Tibetan marches to Assam. But as one Indian civil servant remarked, “He had done that sort of thing all his life.”
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