Burma 1942 E-Book

R E S Tanner

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 242

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In December 1941 a Japanese battalion of 143rd Regiment of 55th Division crossed the Burma-Siam border and seized Victoria Point, heralding the invasion of Burma. The first air raids on Rangoon were opposed by only two fighter squadrons - 16 P40s of the American Volunteer Group (AVG) and 16 Buffaloes of the RAF. What followed was a fighting retreat as the British forces struggled to the Indian border, harried by an experienced Japanese force which was supported by at least 200 aircraft against the Allies' meagre fifty. Burma 1942 is a unique assessment of this disastrous episode in British military history, taken in part from the diary and maps kept by Ralph Tanner, who served with 2nd Battalion The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry during the retreat, and from the official Battalion war diary by Major Chadwick. It includes background to the mobilisation of the Battalion in 1941, who they were, their equipment and what they were trained for, and considers the series of disasters at Moulmein, Sittang, Toksan and Yenangyaung which left them increasingly unable to fight as a unit. It also addresses the factors which prevented optimum military performance, includes discussions with the author's one-time enemies, and serves as a tribute to the strength of the men of the battalion - most of whom were conscripts - and of whom a fifth were killed and have no known grave.

Leseprobe

Dedicated to the memory of Corporal James Hart 4688955, who stayed behind at Bilin on 19th February 1942 to care for a wounded friend, and was never seen again.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their thanks to the Regimental Museum of the 2nd Battalion The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry at Doncaster for their permission to publish photograph numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. All other photographs are from the authors’ private collection or from the History Press archives. Maps shown as Appendix C and C1 are reproduced from the abridged Japanese regimental history of the 214 and 215 Regiments covering the actions in 1942. It has not been possible to locate the copyright holders of this privately published material. The Authors and Publishers would be most grateful for any information and will undertake to credit any parties identified on reprint.

The authors would also like to thank Kazuo Sawa for his research that located the officers of the Japanese 33 Division, Meredith Harte and Todd Londagin for their help in sourcing aircraft photographs, Reiko Fukushima for her help with some of the Japanese translations, and The Royal Geographical Society for the provision of maps to which the authors did not have access. (It is impossible to reproduce old maps with perfect clarity in a book of this size – though Ralph Tanner’s own sketch maps are perfectly understandable – but the others reproduced here are artefacts that act in themselves as conduits of memory, at least to those who fought and marched across their pages; for this reason if no other they have been included. Annotations of the movements of KOYLI and other details have been added to them.)

A great debt of thanks is owed to John Heald and the Regimental Museum for Appendix D.

Lastly, thanks are due to Malcolm Johnson, the unofficial historian of the 2nd Battalion The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry for his encouragement and suggestions after reading the first draft of this work.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

An Overview

The British political and military position in Burma 1941

A military biography of Capt. R.E.S. Tanner. 223473

Chapter 1 The Past is a Foreign Country

The availability of war records

The workings of memory

Leaving the dead (and the living) in peace

Chapter 2 The Combatants

Training

The battalion as a closed society

Women and children

British equipment

Racism

Chapter 3 Into Action

The Salween at Takaw

The Japanese crossing of the Salween

The Bilin fiasco

The Sittang Bridge disaster

The failure to withdraw at Toksan

The oilfield inferno at Yenangyaung

Taungtha and crossing the Irrawaddy River to Monywa

The cut across country

Chapter 4 A Reckoning

Japanese behaviour

The misbehaviour of British soldiers

Accidental losses

The process of attrition

Missing in Action?

Chapter 5 The Other Enemies

Malnutrition

Dehydration

Dark thoughts and false optimism

Illness

Lost to the forest

The failure of communications

The civilian population

Chapter 6 Conclusions

The re-establishment of the Battalion

The lessons of war

Appendix A: The Diary of 2/Lieut. R. Tanner, 223473

Appendix C: Japanese Map of the actions between 9–21 April 1942

Appendix C/1: Japanese Map of the actions between 16–21 April 1942

Appendix D: Corporal John Heald’s Roll

Appendix E: Reliability of memory and the experience of warfare

Bibliography

Copyright

Foreword

This is a study of a tragedy. It does not seek to accuse but to investigate, and to highlight the extraordinary bravery of those who survived and those who did not. It is an assessment of the work undertaken by the Second Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry from the time of their mobilisation in August 1941 until they reached India at the end of May 1942 as an exhausted remainder after 164 days of fighting, disasters and deprivation. It is not simply a personal memoir, although Ralph Tanner, in the second half of the campaign, as a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant, wrote a diary within twelve months after his arrival in India, which forms the basis of this book, together with maps that he kept on his person throughout the retreat, shown in Appendix A. The diary has been supported by maps from other sources and diagrams, along with photographs which he had taken.

Burma 1942 addresses the shortcomings of memory within the context of oral history and the available records. It examines the background to the mobilization of the Battalion in December 1941; who they were and for what they were trained, their equipment and the Battalion as a family with its own spirit. It relates the Battalion’s series of disasters at Moulmein, Sittang and Bilin involving the crossings of the Salween, Sittang and Bilin rivers, Hmawbwi, Toksan and Yenangyaung – which left them increasingly less able to fight as a unit, with diminishing numbers and equipment – and finally, the exhausting march from Monywa to the crossing of the Chindwin River and over the last mountains to Tamu on the Indian border and relative safety. The book ends by detailing the factors that prevented optimum military performance and those other factors that made the cohesion of this Battalion from start to finish – and individual survival – possible.

This work is above all an appreciation of the extraordinary powers of recovery which the men of the Battalion, most of whom were not professional soldiers, showed again and again. The fact that the Battalion survived as a unit after so many days of the gruelling 1942 Burma campaign – surely the longest exposure of infantry to warfare in retreat in the history of the British Army – is simply remarkable. About a fifth of the men were killed and left with no known grave.

The details of the Battalion’s involvement have already been published as the fifth volume of the history of the regiment (Kingston,1950) from the recent memories of those who took part. This gave the necessary details of many individual acts of heroism and fortitude and no purpose would be served by repetition, but the citations of two of the three non-commissioned officers who received the Military Medal – Howson, Steerment and Butler – are given in Appendix B.

Ralph and David Tanner

Padworth Common and London

An Overview

The British political and military position in Burma 1941

The position of the 2/KOYLI in Burma at the start of the war with Japan in December 1941 is defined by the German war centred on the defence of the United Kingdom. Burma was on the very fringe of British strategic concerns. This can be demonstrated by the fact that the Burma Army headquarters in Rangoon in 1941 ‘was very small and in fact no larger than a normal second class district headquarters in India. It had neither the know-how nor the staff capacities to effect the changes to put Burma onto a war footing’ (Grant and Tamayama 1999: 39). There were just two British infantry battalions in Burma and a number of military police and Burma Rifle battalions, which had not been trained to confront a professionally trained and organised enemy.

On mobilisation, the 2/KOYLI became part of the 1st Burma Brigade in the 1st Burma Division, which had been created with two other Brigades using the eight Burma Rifle battalions together with the 13th Indian Infantry Brigade of three regular Indian infantry battalions, which arrived in March 1941. This meagre force was added to before Rangoon fell by the creation of the 17th Division with the arrival of the experienced 7th Armoured Brigade (less one regiment) from the Middle East – with Stuart tanks better armed than any Japanese tanks – and the 63rd Infantry brigade with three further Indian infantry battalions. Following a visit to 17th Division at Kyaiktko on February 6, General Wavell had noted on a train journey from Pegu to the Sittang that the flat, open topography was good tank country. The 7th Armoured was duly despatched, ‘… for which everyone who served in Burma in 1942 had cause to be grateful to Wavell’ (James Lunt, A Hell of a Licking 1986). Additionally, also in March, the Inniskilling Battalion was flown into Magwe in American aircraft. While this total looks impressive enough on paper, their experience of modern warfare – with the exception of the 7th Armoured Brigade – was limited to internal security and guerrilla warfare on the arid North-West Frontier of India.

In contrast, the Japanese Army used four divisions with appropriate support staff, with the majority of men having already experienced combat in China. The Japanese air force had at least 200 aircraft with additions from Malaya and the Philippines after the campaigns there finished, against which the Royal Air Force and the American Volunteer Group probably never have had more than fifty. With this inequality in numbers, equipment and professionalism, it may seem surprising that the campaign lasted so long, particularly as the Japanese planned to march off-road and used only light equipment while the British and Indian units were ‘road-bound’ in attitude and experience. In short, the Japanese army invaded Burma well equipped and trained for what they intended to do, but out-of-date in terms of Western (to that date, largely apolitical) planning and industrial might. The British and Indian units were about to learn their trade behind the mountain barriers along the Indian-Burma border which the Japanese had learnt several years earlier in China. The British-Indian army was unprepared for a war which they had hoped to avoid and which they could not afford to fight. The fact that so many survived and their subsequent success is a tribute to their quality and that of their supporting staff.

A military biography of Capt. R.E.S. Tanner. 223473

In order to ensure as much accuracy as possible in this history, Ralph Tanner asked for his personal details from the Army Records, expecting a page giving some dates and general information. Three months later he received some two hundred pages of documents relating to his military career from 4 September 1939 until leaving the regular army reserve of officers on 5 October 1971. It is a salutary reminder to those who write about their experiences half a century before that he could not remember many of the details recorded in these documents and had inaccurate memories of other parts. In such a comprehensive coverage largely dealing with his ill-health after the 1942 Burma campaign – on account of which he was repatriated in 1943 – it was strange that there was no note of his being Mentioned in Despatches in the London Gazette on 30 December 1941, in connection with the Layforce (Commando) operations in Crete following the German airborne invasion of the island. The formal citation hangs on his study wall.

On enlisting at the Artist Rifles depot in Dukes Road London on the Monday after war was declared, he was classed as an officer cadet as he had passed Certificate A at Rugby. Nothing, however, materialised from this enlistment. He then re-enlisted in North London on 25 May 1940 and was posted as a private to a battalion of the Queens Regiment in Aldershot. After an apparent mistaken posting to the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment in Bedford, he ended up as part of a Special Tank Hunting platoon in the Brock barracks depot of the Royal Berkshire Regiment in Reading on 28 September 1940, where he was put through an anti-tank course.

On volunteering for No. 3 Commando he was posted to Largs on 25 October 1940 and went through a Combined Operations course and later volunteered for foreign service with 8 Commando, leaving Britain on 31 December on HMS Glenroy. As batman to Evelyn Waugh – the novelist, then a Royal Marine captain acting as the Intelligence officer for the Commando Brigade – he took part in the Commando raid on Bardia on 15 March 1941. His military records show that he embarked on HMS Isis for Crete at Alexandria on 15 May 1941, which appears to be incorrect, as No. 8 Commando were sent to Crete after the German invasion had started on 20 May. He left Crete on HMS Abdiel on 1 June, the last Allied ship to leave the island. His Mention in Despatches was awarded for his action in delivering a message from Colonel Laycock, Commander Layforce, to the rearguard on the night of 31 May/1 June. As a result of the loss of so many men as POWs, the Middle East Commandos were disbanded and rather than going into a pool of infantry replacements for the Western Desert on 15 October 1941, Ralph Tanner volunteered to join a small party going to Burma. This party became part of Military Mission 204 destined for China, and were trained in demolitions at Maymyo, a north-eastern Burma hill station known as the Bush Warfare School.

The selective nature of memory – particularly in extreme and stressful situations – is exemplified by the fact that Ralph Tanner has no recollection of the moment or the process of his battlefield commission from a Private to a 2/Lieut. According to a cipher telegram to London he was commissioned as a 2/Lieut into the 2/KOYLI on 1 January 1942, a rather abrupt translation from private without having gone through any officer training course, after a single interview. He recalls his first duty as an officer as having to mount the depot guard. He then joined the Battalion’s headquarters for the second part of the Burma campaign and the retreat, falling sick with dysentery at Tamu just before the Battalion left Burma for good.

Then followed a long period in the tented 17th British General Hospital in Dehra Doon, after which he was posted to take an Intelligence course at Karachi and stayed on as an Instructor in Japanese tactics at the Far Eastern School of Intelligence. This was followed by further ill-health so he was repatriated to Britain. Having been graded as unfit for foreign service he was sent on a general Intelligence course at the Intelligence Corps depot at Rotherham, and another one on Japanese Intelligence at Matlock. On 10 January 1944 he was posted to the War Office in Whitehall as an Intelligence Officer in section MI2d dealing with the Japanese Army, its equipment and order of battle, working with captured documents and wireless intercepts. He volunteered for Civil Affairs in Burma on 4 May 1945 for which he went through a course in Wimbledon and went back to Burma via India on a draft which started from London on 24 July 1945. In Burma he was posted to Lashio in the Northern Shan States, from where he was demobilised in October 1946, having been taken on as a probationer in the Burma Frontier Service.

Chapter 1

The Past is a Foreign Country1

What the Second Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry did in the first five months of the Japanese invasion of Burma was extraordinary by any standards of military performance. The men showed bravery and an impressive ability to adapt to diminishing resources; the survivors marched over a thousand miles to get back to India. It is too easy in the historical studies of warfare to concentrate on political failings and the inadequacies of senior officers, because at those levels there are always quantities of documents on public record which can be analysed and which of course leave out the personal realities of warfare. Similarly, the failure of military units to perform optimally is often assessed by well-intentioned scholars who were not there and may have had little personal experience of prolonged danger and physical deprivation; they will never have gone without water, been blown sideways by bombs, had sores on their feet from marching and watched Japanese soldiers coming near to their hiding place. Only the highly imaginative novelist can begin to express what these men experienced.

Too much of the writing about the initial shocks of Japanese aggression has involved the laying of blame and playing the ‘if’ game, suggesting that performance and outcomes could have been different. This Battalion of infantry was certainly dealt a poor hand, but it is no part of this study to discuss why this was so, except to say that defence against German attack would always have priority over Burma, which only became a war front long after most of the pieces on the strategic chess board had already been committed. This study attempts to show how these soldiers played the cards which they were given and in the words of one officer who survived, how they ‘got on with it’. This was achieved through a combination of personality, trained performance, regimental and personal backgrounds, the equipment they had and the circumstances with which they were faced, over which they had almost no control at all.

The availability of war records

We know the results of the battles of Waterloo, Kursk and El Alamein but what it meant to the hundreds of thousands of men who were present and the small combat units in which they spent their days of war is less known.

The availability of records to historians after a campaign is over takes three forms; but paper on which records are kept will not survive unless someone or some institution has an interest it preserving it. A private soldier who served in the British army for up to the five years of World War II would have left an enormous paper trail involving his pay, promotions, training courses and movements. Ralph Tanner estimated that between June 1940 and sometime in 1946 when he was demobilised in Burma, his name must have been on at least a thousand documents, and yet at the end of this period he found just six official pieces of paper that can establish that he had any military existence at all.

In more or less static warfare in which base areas are not overrun by the enemy, there is always a flow of paper from front units to the rear areas from both sets of combatants so there are both public and private records available, should those involved retain them. Enormous quantities are available from Flanders in World War I and the Middle East and India in World War II. Then there is the paper trail left behind by successful advancing armies, but this is much less in quantity, so that it has to be augmented by historians talking to those involved, as in the 1944 siege of Kohima (Colvin 1994, Edwards 2009) and for the subsequent advance into Burma (Cooper 1973, Fraser 1999), which are virtually written oral histories relying on memory and records still in existence.

Finally there are military retreats such as Burma in 1942 in which the only paper records are a limited number of top-level wireless messages sent back to India. Similarly, the Imperial War Museum and the National Army Museum hold very little data about the battle for Crete in May 1941 at which Ralph Tanner was present and indeed he has been in correspondence with an Australian historian wanting to find out details of the final evacuation from Khora Sphakion and was quoted in a study of that battle (Beevor 1991). There is even less data available about Burma in 1942 relating to the Second Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. There is very little evidence on paper of the experiences of these 500 men and only their well-intentioned memories which made up subsequent reports, diaries and indeed the official War Diary for the Battalion written by Lt. Col. Chadwick, who commanded for the last half of the campaign, though he was absent for some part of the earlier months through illness.2 In the early days, letters may have been written but none are available in any known records. Censorship would have ensured that they contained little information anyway. Ralph Tanner may have received some letters but his parents received nothing from him for at least three months, and ones addressed to him circulated round a number of possible Indian addresses.

The official history of this Second Battalion in the Burma campaign (Hingston 1950) was not written by a participant and there are no references in it as to the sources from which so much detail about individual behaviour and events was obtained. It mentions over one hundred men in particular events. Presumably it was created from the War Diary and other reports and personal contacts with survivors, but very little is now available in the Light Infantry depot at Pontefract, the original home of the regiment before it was abolished as a locally recruited unit by merging into a single Light Infantry Regiment. This thorough work did not use Ralph Tanner’s diary, because its existence was not known to the regiment.

There is a printed casualty list for all battalions of the regiment which lists dates of presumed deaths in Burma with their dates of recruitment, but there appears to be only Ralph Tanner’s hand-written diary from March to May 1942 available as a primary source. Included in this book are the relevant parts of the original maps of ground covered by the battalion with, in some cases, his marking in pencil of the location of the hourly halts, the photographs which Ralph Tanner took, and some sketch maps of the various actions at which he was present. The only other primary document retained by the Battalion are hand-written details in an official alphabetical Register of Deserters, with ‘deserters’ replaced by the word ‘missing’, of all non-commissioned members of the Battalion. In some cases against ‘missing’ is the word ‘located’ in another hand.

Then there is John Heald’s hand-written roll listing some 600 names of officers and men with their army numbers giving dates for individuals missing, wounded, and killed and in some cases nicknames, short anecdotes and comments (Appendix D). This monumental hand-written work shows great personal devotion to the Battalion of which he was a member in India after this campaign. The roll was completed in 1985 relying upon the memories of men involved forty years after the events listed. He must have had some help from regimental records that existed then so as to be able to include so many army numbers. We do not know how much he got right as he lists Ralph as a captain and the transport officer for the battalion, which he was not. There is also his history of the campaign which did use his diary, so it seems likely that both these works were created after the regimental history had been written. The Fitzpatrick book of his personal memories (Fitzpatrick 2001) is an even later production and may not be classifiable as a primary source, paralleling Fraser’s account of the Border Regiment’s platoon (Fraser 1992).

The Second Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry took part in the Burma campaign of early 1942 from start to finish but neither the nominal roll for the Battalion in 1941, nor the survivor roll of those who arrived in India has survived. Thus more than five hundred men have passed into history in the service of their country with very little evidence that they were even there. What records do exist as evidence of the presence of these men as individuals rather than just as part of a corporate mass are the telegrams of the higher command to their superiors; including a telegram of congratulations from the Queen as Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment about their performance at Toksan – which they never received.

If we take the comparable situation of an infantry battalion in the Western Desert, Italy, and then in Western Europe, the amount of documents subsequently available to historians is huge. There would have been daily war diary entries kept up-to-date and sent to higher formations, casualty lists as well as Part One and Part Two orders, as well as letters home and personal data recorded in each soldier’s AB64, which he kept in his personal possession. In London after D-Day some thirty censor officers each read about three hundred letters every day for a month and a proportion of these letters would have been kept by the recipients as personal treasures, particularly if these men became casualties.

The records held by the Light Infantry Office for the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry – which no longer exists – contain no data at all which originates in Burma. There is the post facto War Diary, which under the circumstances of ‘regular’ warfare would have been written up regularly, but that was not the case with this Battalion. This War Diary is a compilation from memory of the then battalion commander Major Chadwick, with the help of other survivors who had returned or who had remained with the Battalion at Shillong in September 1942, and data from the records of I Bur Brigade and I Bur Div, which reached India by signal. The documentation available from these higher formations is perforce scant on detail regarding the Battalion.

At Pontefract there is a file containing substantial correspondence about getting compensation for the regimental silver which was buried near to Pyingaing and which was stolen during the occupation and never recovered, but there is no nominal roll of members of the Battalion available either before they were mobilised or later. There is only a final casualty list of deaths in all battalions in all theatres of war between 1939–45, including, for example, accidental deaths in a blizzard in Iceland and those who died in accidents or in hospital in the United Kingdom. This list gives the names of those killed in action, died of wounds or missing presumed dead in action or as prisoners of war, with the date of their enlistment and the date of their presumed deaths. Of those who died in Burma in action, all 122 have no known grave; nor do those who died as prisoners of war, as, in time, the wooden crosses marking graves were used as firewood for the cooking fires of the surviving POWs. There is correspondence with the reformed Battalion at Shillong in Assam, endeavouring to find out what had happened to those who were listed as missing, but the surviving letters just list names, regimental numbers and dates when they were presumed missing and the dates when they were reported as missing on Army Form AFW3014, dated May and July 1942, signed by the Colonel Commanding and addressed to the Commandant No 6 Infantry Training Depot, Berwick-on-Tweed, with copy to Commandant KOYLI Depot Party, Queen Elizabeth Barracks, Strensall. The listing of a name cannot be taken as conclusive evidence of the death of a missing man since we know of one case in which a soldier so listed married to a Burmese woman was hidden by her throughout the Japanese occupation in a village near to Mandalay.3 There is a handwritten alphabetical register in an official foolscap notebook listing the names of those involved with ‘missing’ written against a number of names and the date on which they were last seen. Against 35 names it is noted that they were subsequently located in India. Who wrote this, where and when is not known, and the notations of ‘located’ against some names are in a different handwriting. What documentation, then, is available which could be considered as hard evidence? Very little and from only one source. Ralph Tanner took some 35 mm photographs dated after Yenangyaung of officers who can be named and of the column on the move or halted north of Pyingaing, and there is his tattered map, marking with pencil lines the hourly halts. It appears that this is the sum total of evidence of the Battalion’s activities independent of a person’s interpretation of events from memory.

When the hand-written diary written up within a year of the campaign’s end is compared with the Battalion’s official history written by Lt. Col. Hingston, it is obvious – assuming that Ralph was trying to write down the truth – that he never knew about or did not remember many events that happened more or less before his eyes. A ten-page report dated 1944 on the Battalion’s activities from Yenangyaung onwards, written by Major Throckmorton and added to by Captain Anne, both of whom participated in the retreat, is in error in at least one instance: a patrol that Ralph Tanner recalled leading is recorded as being led by another officer with two men, of whom only one survived, wounded. Ralph Tanner led this patrol with two men, both of whom survived unwounded.4 The detailed regimental history with drawings and diagrams which was published in 1950 lists by name the activities of no less than 166 officers and men and the extraordinary acts of some and the deaths of others, compiled from the memories of those involved, but when these records were made is not known. But it certainly made a vivid story and nobody seems to have objected to what had been written, or wished to add information.