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By Root 1031 0

“Tubby” Lethbridge, wrote a stunned letter to his wife: “The most incredible thing621 has happened—Bill has been sacked! Just at the moment when this masterpiece of his was being finished…There has been, I suppose, a clash of personalities. Bill is I think the finest man I have ever met, and every one of us would quite literally die for him—he is that sort of chap. The whole thing has sickened me and shaken my faith in my fellow man. He of course took it magnificently, being the magnificent gentleman that he is. I don’t know what he will do—I think he will retire. The thing just doesn’t make sense…For my own part of course, it means that as his chief of staff I go too. That is the custom of the service, so I fear darling I shall not get that division after all.”

This was an extraordinary episode, which sent shock waves through the British and Indian armies, and permanently blighted Leese’s reputation. “We were infuriated,” said Captain Ronnie McAllister of 3/1st Gurkhas. “Slim’s sacking impinged on everyone.” Within a few days, both Brooke in London and Mountbatten in Kandy understood that a blunder had been made. Leese’s decision was reversed. Slim stayed. Leese himself was relieved shortly afterwards. Yet the commander of Fourteenth Army never received from either Brooke or Winston Churchill the laurels which were his due for his triumph in Burma. It is a measure of British priorities that in the whole of Brooke’s voluminous wartime diaries there are only fifty-four references to Japan, amid countless concerning Germany. Montgomery is mentioned 175 times, Slim just 5. On 6 April 1945, Churchill wrote to his wife from Yalta: “Dicky [Mountbatten], reinforced by622 Gen. Oliver Leese, has done wonders in Burma.” This seems akin to paying tribute for the triumphs of a football team to its owners rather than the manager. Slim received only three perfunctory, albeit respectful, mentions in Churchill’s war memoirs. His name is unnoticed in Martin Gilbert’s multivolume biography of the prime minister. Whether or not Fourteenth Army was “forgotten,” Britain’s leaders seemed content that its commander should be. It is unlikely that either Churchill or Brooke harboured any personal animus towards Slim. More plausibly, their attitude reflected disdain for the whole Burma commitment.

REMNANTS of Japan’s broken armies trickled south-eastwards into Siam across the Sittang and Salween rivers through the early summer of 1945. Col. John Masters, senior staff officer of 19th Indian Division, described how he and his commander deployed their men along the Sittang in blocking positions to receive Kimura’s broken forces:

Pete and I drove up and down [the line], making dispositions as though for a rabbit shoot. We were ready to give mercy, but no one felt pity. This was the pay-off of three bitter years…Machine guns covered each path, infantry and barbed-wire protected the machine guns. Behind, field guns stood ready to rain high explosive shells on every approach…Tanks stood at road junctions. Fighters and bombers waited on the few all-weather airfields…The Japanese came on…The machine guns got them, the Brens and rifles got them, the tanks got them, the guns got them. They drowned by hundreds in the Sittang, and their corpses floated in the fields and among the reeds.

Lt. Hayashi Inoue of the 18th Division led ten men and two oxcarts on an epic march south from Meiktila to the sea. They reached the bridge at Sittang, the path to safety, after two months, having lost two men killed by guerrillas of the Burma National Army. “The Burmans were very friendly to us when we were victorious,” said Inoue bitterly, “but when we started losing, they turned on us.” In the last weeks of the campaign, the so-called Burma National Army raised by the Japanese changed sides and fell on its former sponsors. Captain Renichi Sugano was managing a railway supply depot at Moulmein, troubled only by British bombing which killed ten of his men, until in June 1945 soldiers of Japan’s defeated forces began to trickle through his area. “They looked like beggars623,