Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [54]
No men in this war can have been reduced to such a terrible condition. I saw two prisoners who were revived with hot tea. They were tiny men with matted hair which stood up like a golliwog’s. One of them put his head in his hands and cried like a child. It was a disgrace for him to be alive. [Some Japanese] killed themselves where they stood with their own grenades…lousy, half-mad from hunger and explosions, and deserted by their officers. This is a picture of a shattered army…These small men with savage hearts and hands that can paint exquisite water-colours in the diaries which they leave lying in the red mud.
Lethbridge, Slim’s chief of staff, wrote home:
The Jap retreat120 must have been worse than Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The whole jungle stinks of corruption. I counted twenty-five dead Japs on the side of the road, between two successive milestones. There must have been hundreds more who had crawled away into the jungle to die. In some places there are Jap lorries, with skeletons sitting in the drivers’ seats, and a staff car with four skeletons in it. All these Japs had simply died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. I have never seen troops in such good heart as our people…I’m so delighted that the British Army has at last come into its own again, and shown the world how we can wage war. I really don’t see how the old Hun can last much longer. Once we’ve finished him, we’ll simply knock the hide off these little yellow swine.
On the Japanese line of retreat, correspondent Masanori Ito approached Renya Mutaguchi, architect of his army’s disaster. “He seemed tired out,” wrote Ito, who noticed that the general was shamelessly sipping rice gruel, even as starving survivors of his army stumbled past. “You want a statement?” Mutaguchi growled. “I have killed thousands of my men. I should not go back across the Chindwin alive.” Mutaguchi did not kill himself, however, and lived to be sacked a few months later. Of all the Imperial Army’s commanders, he had become the most detested and scorned by his own officers and men.
“Sometimes it is impossible121 to carry out very difficult orders, but even though the command recognise this, they will not admit their mistake until every man has died trying to carry them out,” a Japanese officer prisoner told his British captors. “The unreasoning obedience of men in carrying out idiotic orders is pitiful to behold. It was often impossible for me to give the actual orders—sometimes I only passed on half of them. ‘We get all the fighting but none of the food—why?’ No one dared say this, but everybody thought it.”
In the autumn of 1944, as Fourteenth Army began its own advance towards the Chindwin River and Burma, at first the Japanese could deploy only four very weak divisions, totalling some 20,000 men, against Slim’s six, plus two independent brigades—a British ration strength of 260,000 men. In the north, Chinese divisions under Stilwell were making sluggish progress towards the clearance of the Burma Road between India and China. The only significant achievement of the second Chindit expedition was to assist the capture of Myitkyina, a vital link on the route, which finally fell on 3 August. It required the efforts of three Chinese divisions, aided by the American “Merrill’s Marauders,” together with several thousand Chindits, to achieve this success against the weak, poorly equipped Japanese 18th Division. But the prospect now beckoned of opening the China passage.
Slim’s invaders were supported by forty-eight fighter and bomber squadrons and a total of 4,600 aircraft in the theatre, many of them