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By Root 927 0

American transports. The Japanese had just sixty-six planes. Though they were able to reinforce their ground forces before spring, the scene was set for Fourteenth Army to commence its recapture of Burma. Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Gen. Henry Pownall, perceived an urgency about this task. Like others of his time, place and nation, he saw Britain engaged in a race between the recapture of her Asian colonies and American victory in the Pacific. If the British lost the contest, if they failed to secure physical possession before the Japanese flag came down, the Union flag might never again fly over this great region: “There’s not much time122 to lose. The Yanks are going to have Japan beat by Xmas 1945. We have got a lot of cleaning-up to do by then. The Yanks are not going to wait for us (no reason why they should) but we really don’t want our Far Eastern Empire…handed back to us entirely by American single-handed victory. So we aim at all Burma by next summer and Malaya not too long afterwards.”

The twin battles of Imphal and Kohima had been essential to halt the Japanese advance westwards. British victory had crippled the fighting power of the enemy on the Burman front, where Japan no longer possessed resources to frustrate any significant Allied purpose. Slim’s chief foes were now terrain, disease, weather, logistics. Mountbatten supported an important decision: to keep fighting through the monsoon, when in the past all significant operations were halted. Thereafter, Slim was called upon to move a modern Western army across hundreds of miles of the most inhospitable country in the world, devoid of road communications, to redeem the humiliations which Britain had suffered in 1941–42, and to keep alive a dream of empire which thoughtful men knew to be doomed. Churchill badly wanted to retrieve Burma and Malaya, but was determined, he told the chiefs of staff in September 1944, “that the minimum of effort123 should be employed in this disease-ridden country.” Here was a prospect rich in pathos, tragedy or absurdity, according to viewpoint. As so often in wars, brave men were to do fine and hard things in pursuit of a national illusion.

2. “The Forgotten Army”

A BRITISH OFFICER returning from home leave recorded gloomily: “In the UK…I found everywhere124 a dreadful ignorance about Fourteenth Army and also generally about Burma.” But Slim’s men had learned to take a defiant pride in their status as “the forgotten army.” In the autumn of 1944 they advanced with spirits infinitely buoyed by victory at Imphal and Kohima. Some of the men who now began hacking a path towards the Chindwin River, sweating up the soaring hills and scrambling down the steep valleys towards its bank, had been fighting thereabouts since 1942. A young British signaller who joined 2nd Division was awed by the veterans with whom he found himself: “I was a pale white thing125; they were tanned the colour of a mule’s backside. I knew nothing; they knew everything and could say nothing.” The same soldier, Brian Aldiss, wrote home as the advance to the Chindwin began: “The grand scenery here produces a great calm, and seems to reduce war to the useless squabble it really is.” He was as moved as many other participants by the spectacle of Fourteenth Army negotiating the hills of Assam:

When our lorry was labouring126 to the top of a crest, we could see the thread of vehicles far away behind us, below clouds; conversely, when we were in a valley, we could look up through clouds and see that thread continuing far ahead of us, climbing the next series of heights…To be part of this inset of war was most thrilling after dark. Dim headlights scarcely penetrated the muck we threw up. We could scarcely see the tail lights of the vehicle ahead. Speed was almost down to walking pace. The impression of an animal bent on traversing a strange planet was at its strongest. On either side, unknowable, thrilling, fearsome, stood the jungle, pale as a ghost jungle in its layers of dust.

The 1944–45 battle for Burma was the last great adventure of Britain’s imperial