Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [49]
From Churchill downwards, the British rejected the notion that China could ever play a part in the war remotely commensurate with the resources which the U.S. lavished upon her. When Roosevelt urged that a nation of 425 million people could not be ignored, the prime minister snorted famously and contemptuously: “Four hundred and twenty-five million pigtails!” Slim, commanding Britain’s Fourteenth Army, deployed in north-east India, had some respect for Stilwell but never shared the American’s belief that the Chinese could decisively influence the war against Japan. “I did not hold two articles105 of his faith,” the British general wrote later. “I doubted the overwhelming war-winning value of this road and…I believed the American amphibious strategy in the Pacific…would bring much quicker results than an overland advance across Asia with a Chinese army yet to be formed.”
If Britain could withhold respect for China, however, it could not deny this to the U.S. Some 240,000 American engineer and air force personnel were labouring in northern India and southern China to create and sustain the air and land links to which the U.S. government attached such importance. Washington indulged Britain’s commitment to retake Burma only in pursuit of its own China ambitions. A million Indian labourers were deployed to create road, rail and airfield facilities to support a full-scale British offensive. Churchill still railed against what he perceived as the waste of it all. How could India, with more than two million soldiers, deploy as few as ten divisions against nine Japanese on the Burma frontier? “It is indeed a disgrace106, that so feeble an army is the most that can be produced from the enormous expense entailed.” In truth, an embarrassing number of Indian Army units were deployed on internal security duties. Churchill wanted Britain’s eastern army to be profitably employed, but deplored the fact that “we are about to plunge about in the jungles of Burma, engaging the Japanese under conditions…still unfavourable to us, with the objective of building a pipeline or increasing the discharge over the ‘hump’ [the Himalayan air route to China].”
Allied operations in South East Asia were nominally subordinate to the supreme commander of South East Asia Command (SEAC), Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. “The interests in this theatre are overwhelmingly British,” growled Churchill to the combined chiefs of staff when he imposed his protégé’s appointment in September 1943. Mountbatten’s meteoric elevation, from destroyer flotilla commander in 1941 to British chief of combined operations and then to SEAC at the age of forty-two, reflected the prime minister’s enthusiasm for officers who looked the part of heroes. “A remarkable and complex character107,” Gen. Henry Pownall, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, wrote of his boss. “There are so many paradoxes…his charm of manner…is one of his greatest assets; many is the time that I have gone in to him to have a really good showdown…he would apologise, promise to mend his ways—and then soon afterwards go and do the same thing again! [He] has great drive and initiative…He is however apt to leap before he looks…His meetings are overlong because he likes talking…And he likes a good big audience to hear what he has to say.”
Mountbatten’s many critics, who included Britain’s service chiefs, regarded him as a poseur with a streak of vulgarity, promoted far beyond his talents on the strength of fluency, film-star good looks, and his relationship to the royal family. He was King George VI’s cousin, and never for long allowed anyone to be unaware of it. Famously thick-skinned save where his own interests were at stake, of boundless ambition and limited intellect, his grand title as supreme commander meant little, for he was denied executive direction of either armies or fleets. The extravagant staffing of his headquarters in the sublime setting of the botanical gardens at Kandy, Ceylon, promoted derision.
Mountbatten was prone