The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [123]
Of the 42,000 British, Indian and Burmese troops involved in the campaign, no fewer than 29,000 were casualties by the end of May. Nonetheless, Alexander and Slim had managed to get 13,000 unwounded men back to Imphal in Assam province in India, after a 600-mile retreat from Sittang, the longest in British history. ‘They looked like scarecrows,’ Slim said of his troops. ‘But they looked like soldiers, too.’ He also recalled the heart-rending sight of a four-year-old child in Imphal trying to spoon-feed her dead mother from a tin of evaporated milk.
It had been a momentous series of rearguard actions and last-minute escapes, but four-fifths of Burma had fallen to the Japanese, whose casualties numbered only 4,597. This had the effect of further isolating China, which could now be supplied only by the USAAF pilots undertaking most of the 550-mile flights over 16,000-foot Himalayan mountain ranges to Yunnan province, nicknamed the Hump. It was a gruelling mission also known as the Aluminium Trail because of all the planes that had crashed along the way. Nonetheless, by 1945 no fewer than 650,000 tons of supplies had been delivered by that route.
Service in Burma, believed George MacDonald Fraser, who fought in the 17th (Black Cat) Indian Division during the siege of Meiktila and the battle of Pyawbwe, was, with the sole exception of Bomber Command, ‘generally believed to be the worst ticket you could draw in the lottery of active service’.67 Nor was this just because of the nature of the enemy; there were also 15-inch poisonous centipedes, malaria, spiders the size of plates, typhus, jungle sores on wrists and ankles, dysentery and leeches with which to contend. And of course the weather; the 1941–2 Burma Campaign only ended with the monsoon breaking in May. Fraser described a Burmese monsoon in his war memoirs Quartered Safe Out Here:
There are the first huge drops, growing heavier and heavier, and then God opens the sluices and the jets of a million high-pressure hoses are being directed straight down, and the deluge comes with a great roar… after that the earth is under a skin of water which looks as though it’s being churned up by buckshot. Before you know it you are sodden and streaming, the fire’s out, the level in the brew tin is rising visibly, and the whole clearing is a welter of blaspheming men trying to snatch arms and equipment from the streams coursing underfoot.68
Just as the Russians had been saved by the weather outside Moscow in autumn 1941, so were the British by the weather on the Indian–Burmese border the following spring.
‘It’s a horrible World at present,’ Clementine Churchill wrote to her husband on 19 December 1941. ‘Europe over-run by the Nazi hogs, and the Far East by yellow Japanese lice.’69 Once one has discounted the terminology that was typical of her generation, it was true that the Germans and Japanese seemed totally in the ascendant. The Japanese had captured a vast area of approximately 32 million square miles. In six months Japan had acquired 70 per cent of the world’s tin supply and almost all its natural rubber, forcing the Americans to develop synthetic rubber for their vehicles’ tyres.70 Conquest had delivered to the Japanese a higher annual oil production from the Dutch East Indies (7.9 million tonnes) than California and Iran combined; they also took 1.4 million tonnes of coal per annum from Sumatra and Borneo; 1.1 million troy ounces of gold from the Philippines – more than Alaska or any other state except California – as well as manganese and chromium and iron estimated at half a billion tonnes; tin from Thailand, and oil, silver, lead, nickel and copper from Burma, all of which they started exploiting without delay, using slave labour for its extraction. Less tangibly but just as importantly, Japanese morale had soared. The military triumphs since Pearl Harbor had been, in the words of a biographer of MacArthur, ‘as spectacular as any in the history of warfare’.71 But if the