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By Root 978 0

” he said in wonderment. He was even more shocked when immaculately uniformed commanders and headquarters staff officers, refugees from Rangoon, arrived at Moulmein. “When those men began to come, for the first time I realised that our army was in very serious trouble,” said Sugano. “It was a terrible shock. We all wondered: ‘What happens to us now?’” There was disgust within the Japanese army that whereas its commanders in the Pacific island battles chose to perish with their men, during the retreat from Burma many senior officers scuttled ignominiously to safety.

Japanese soldiers became as angered as their Western counterparts by the comfortable lives sustained by base units. In hospital in Bangkok, Hayashi Inoue requested the use of a vehicle to take six wounded men for an outing. He was turned down. “Petrol is as precious as blood624 here,” shrugged a transport officer. Yet the same night, Inoue saw a staff car disgorge a laughing cluster of junior officers at a local restaurant. “It made me sick,” he said, “to watch our people in places like Singapore and Saigon, taking out girls and living it up, while in Burma our soldiers were starving and fighting to the death.”

THAT THE JAPANESE had suffered a massive defeat was not in doubt. But what had the British won? Although some Indian units fought with distinction in Iraq and Italy as well as with Fourteenth Army, Churchill was surely correct that the reconquest of Burma represented a slender return for the mobilisation of an Indian army of two and a half million men. A former British district officer who returned to the country in 1945 wrote: “The old unquestioning confidence625 had gone—on both sides. We had been driven out of Burma. The Burmans had seen this happen. In the trite phrase, things could never be the same again.”

Although the renegades of the Indian National Army had fought poorly against the British, in captivity their interrogators were dismayed by the recalcitrance sustained by some. A report to the War Office on 5,000 INA taken in Rangoon warned that if these men were sent back to their old regimental depots, they would be obedient on parade, but “in their leisure time they will talk626 among themselves and to their comrades about Netaji Subash Chandra Bose, the Dream of Independence, the hardships they bore to make that dream a reality, and of the glory of an Indian Army officered solely by Indians…Source considers that no form of rehabilitation for the men of the INA can be successful unless it is based on the fostering of a national rather than a religious or provincial spirit.” Though such men were vastly outnumbered by the Indian soldiers who fought loyally for the British, the renegades’ spirit reflected the fact that the sands were fast running out for the Raj.

A British ranker, Brian Aldiss, wrote afterwards of the Burma campaign: “Exactly what purposes it served627, except for the political one of convincing the Americans that their enemies were our enemies, is hard to say.” He himself, a signaller who had seen only corpses, never watched a man die, ended the campaign with an odd regret: “I realised that I had longed628 to kill a Jap, just one Jap, riddle him with bullets and see him fall.” Few of those who did the killing would suggest that Aldiss missed a rewarding experience. Without great enthusiasm, British forces in Burma and India prepared for their next operation, a huge amphibious landing to restore to Malaya, also, the tarnished glories of imperial rule.

FOURTEEN

Australians: “Bludging” and “Mopping Up”

ONE DAY in January 1945 an Australian company commander on the island of Bougainville, where his battalion had relieved an American unit two months earlier, telephoned his colonel. The men, he said, were “too tired” to carry out an attack which had been ordered. The colonel, named Matthews, insisted that the assault must be made. Half an hour later, the company commander telephoned again, to say that his men had refused to leave their positions: “They said they were all too tired629, they were cut off from the world and