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1 ‘I SUPPOSE YOU’LL SHOVE THE LITTLE MEN OFF’

Many Japanese welcomed the war, which they believed offered their country its only honourable escape from beleaguerment. Novelist Dazai Osamu, for instance, was ‘itching to beat the bestial, insensitive Americans to a pulp’. But it would be mistaken to imagine Osamu’s society as a monolith. Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi Tadimichi, who had spent two years in the United States, wrote to his wife asserting his strong opposition to challenging so mighty a foe on the battlefield: ‘Its industrial potential is huge, and its people are energetic and versatile. One must never underestimate the Americans’ fighting ability.’ Eighteen-year-old Sasaki Hachiro mused to his diary: ‘How many really die “tragic deaths” in this war? I am sure there are more comical deaths under the disguise of tragic deaths…Comical deaths involve no joy of life, but are filled with agony without any meaning or value.’ Hachiro at an early stage resigned himself to his own extinction, and volunteered as a pilot with an almost explicit determination to satisfy fate, as indeed he did – shikata ga nai. His disdain for Japan’s militarists never faded: he persuaded his younger brother to become a science student with immunity from conscription, so that he, at least, might survive.

Hachiro’s contemporary Hayashi Tadao was another fatalist, strongly opposed to the war. His diary repeatedly expressed disgust towards his own country. He asked himself: ‘Japan, why don’t I love and respect you?…I feel that I have to accept the fate of my generation to fight in the war and die…We have to go to the battlefield without being able to express our opinions, criticise and argue pros and cons of issues…it is a great tragedy.’ Japan’s 1941–42 successes against feeble Western resistance caused both sides to overrate the power of Hirohito’s nation. Just as Germany was not strong enough to defeat the Soviet Union, Japan was too weak to sustain its Asian conquests unless the West chose to acquiesce in early defeats. But this, like so much else, is more readily apparent today than it was seventy years ago, in the midst of Japanese triumphs.

Until December 1941, the sluggish, humid, pampered rhythm of colonial life in Asia was scarcely interrupted by events in Europe. In America’s Philippines dependency, army nurse Lt. Earlyn Black was one of thousands of expatriates who revelled in a life of comfort and elegance, cushioned by submissive servants: ‘Each evening we dressed for dinner in long dresses, the men in tuxedos, dinner jackets with cummerbunds. It was very formal-type living. Even to go to the movies, we’d put on a long dress.’ Another nurse, twenty-five-year-old Lt. Hattie Brantly from Jefferson, Texas, found the notion of war with Japan inconceivable: ‘It was a joke and our Chief Nurse would say in the mess, “Have another biscuit, girls. You’re going to need this when the Japs get us”…We just sort of rocked along and were happy, and didn’t give it too much thought.’

Likewise in British Singapore, a Czech engineer, Val Kabouky, described the white residents as ‘modern Pompeians’. Even after more than two years of war, 31,000 Europeans among a population of five million Malays and Chinese kept up a parody of imperial privilege. New Western arrivals wishing to learn as much as was necessary of the local language could purchase a phrasebook entitled Malay for Mems – short for ‘Memsahibs’. It was couched in the language of command: ‘Put up the tennis net,’ ‘You must follow the Mem,’ ‘Shoot that man.’ In 1941 arriving troops, especially Australians, were disgusted to find themselves excluded from the colonists’ social bastions. Indians were not permitted to ride in the same rail carriages as the British, nor to enter their clubs. There was a mutiny in the Hyderabad Regiment when an Indian officer was ordered home for having sexual relations with a white woman; he was reinstated and the affair hushed up, but bitterness persisted. Lady Diana, wife of British minister Duff Cooper, wrote with aristocratic scorn for the pretensions of the British expatriates, ‘most frail, tarty and peasant-pompous’. Her own enthusiasm for Singapore’s tourist charms struck a bizarre note as catastrophe unfolded further north: ‘There is the working life of the Chinks going on before your eyes down every street – coffin-making, lantern-painting, and a tremendous lot of shaving. I never tire of strolling and savouring.’

In Malaya, Britain’s military commanders and rulers alike reflected paucity of talent. The Empire seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of unwarlike warrior chieftains. Air Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief Far East until the end of 1941, was a sixty-three-year-old former governor of Kenya. Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, the army commander, was a long-serving staff officer whose meagre operational experience had been gained against the Sinn Féin insurgency in Ireland. Sir Shenton Thomas, the colony’s governor, said to the generals as the Japanese began to land in the north early on 8 December: ‘I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’ His contempt might have been enhanced by reading the orders issued to Japan’s soldiers committed to the assault on Malaya, which included homely injunctions to avoid constipation and heartburn, and to employ deep-breathing exercises to escape sea-sickness: ‘Remember that in the dark and steaming lowest decks of the ship, with no murmur of complaint of their treatment, the Army horses are suffering patiently.’ Men were urged: ‘When you encounter the enemy after landing, regard yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father’s murderer.’

Although British and imperial troops were deployed in northern Malaya in expectation of a Japanese amphibious assault from Siam, the onset of war inflicted as devastating a cultural shock as it did upon Pearl Harbor. Each society around the world which found itself overtaken by the contagion of violence responded with initial disbelief, even if logic had been proclaiming its inevitability from the rooftops. When the first Japanese bombs fell on Singapore in the early hours of 8 December, Australian engine-room artificer Bill Reeve was asleep in his bunk in the harbour aboard the destroyer Vendetta, fresh from months of heavy action in the Mediterranean. On hearing explosions, Reeve thought he was having a bad dream of battles past: ‘I said to myself, “You silly bastard, roll over.”’ A heavy concussion close at hand caused him to acknowledge reality, yet even as successive sticks of bombs fell, the city’s street lights blazed on.

Churchill had made a brutal and probably inescapable decision to concentrate the best of the Empire’s forces in the Middle East. The air defence of Malaya mustered just 145 aircraft, of which sixty-six were Buffaloes, fifty-seven Blenheims and twenty-two Hudsons. The obsolescence of most of these aircraft was less significant than the overwhelming superiority of Japanese pilots in experience and proficiency to those of the Allies. When the Japanese began to land at Kota Baharu, the defenders’ response was pitifully limp. It was some hours before local RAF commanders bestirred themselves to launch strikes against the invasion fleet. When they did so, British and Australian planes, along with the shoreline defenders, inflicted over a thousand casualties. Not all the invading troops showed themselves heroes: a Japanese officer described how ‘one section of non-commissioned officers of the Independent Engineers had…become panic-stricken at the enemy’s bombing. Without orders from the troop leader, they boarded the large motor boats…and retreated to the open sea off Saigon.’

The Pacific Theatre

Yet by the end of the first day, British air strength in northern Malaya had been halved, to around fifty serviceable planes. Many senior officers and ground crews failed to act effectively: the pilots of a section of Buffalo fighters which took off to intercept attacking Japanese were disgusted to discover that armourers had failed to load their guns. At Kuantan airfield, hundreds of ground personnel fled in panic. ‘How is this possible? They are all sahibs,’ a bemused Indian driver of the Royal Garwhal Rifles asked his officer as the two contemplated a chaos of equipment, personal baggage, tennis rackets and debris strewn around airfield buildings. The young lieutenant snapped back crossly: ‘They are not sahibs, they’re Australians.’ But British soldiers and airmen were also fleeing. Some Indian units collapsed in panic; the British CO of a Sikh battalion was believed to have been shot by his own men before they bolted. ‘We now understood the capacity of the enemy,’ wrote a Japanese officer contemptuously. ‘The only things we had to fear were the quantity of munitions he had and the thoroughness of his demolitions.’

The first of countless atrocities took place. Three British airmen who crash-landed in Siam were arrested by its gendarmerie, who handed them over to the Japanese. Tokyo’s local vice-consul told a Siamese judge that they were ‘guilty of taking Japanese lives and destroying Japanese property’, and the men were beheaded on a nearby beach. Historically, and especially in the 1905 Russo–Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo ‘control group’ changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as ‘the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.’ The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands.

Before the battlecruiser Repulse left Singapore with the battleship Prince of Wales, to seek Japanese amphibious shipping, there was a dance on the great ship’s after-deck. This roused in Diana Cooper’s breast ghosts of the Duchess of Richmond’s legendary soirée before the Battle of Waterloo: ‘Brussels ball once again.’ Off eastern Malaya, Captain William Tennant told his crew: ‘We are going to carry out a sweep to the northwards to see what we can pick up and what we can roar up. We must all be on our toes…I know the old ship will give a good account of itself…Life-saving gear is to be worn or carried…not because I think anything is going to happen to the ship – she is much too lucky.’ Yet just before midday on 10 December, Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft, a devastating blow to British prestige throughout Asia. Consolation could be sought only in the heroism of some doomed men such as Wilfred Parker, the New Zealand chaplain of Prince of Wales who stayed with the dying rather than save himself. A British fighter pilot who flew over the scene as hundreds of sailors clung to wreckage in the oil-soaked water wrote admiringly: ‘Every man waved and put his thumb up to me…as if they were holidaymakers at Brighton…I saw the spirit which wins wars.’ Yet survivors later asserted that, in truth, they were shaking their fists at the airmen overhead and shouting derisive catcalls: ‘RAF – Rare As Fucking Fairies!’

In the northern jungle, again and again British units were confounded by fast-moving Japanese. The 1/14th Punjabis were surprised by enemy tanks while sheltering from torrential rain in their vehicles; their accompanying anti-tank guns had no time to unlimber. ‘Suddenly I saw some of my trucks and a carrier screaming down the flooded road and heard the hell of a battle,’ wrote their commander, Lt. Peter Greer. ‘The din was terrific…almost immediately a medium tank roared past me. I dived for cover…within the next two minutes a dozen medium tanks…passed me…They had crashed right through our forward companies…I saw one of my carriers; its tail was on fire and the Number Two was facing back firing his light machine-gun at a tank twenty yards behind me. Poor beggar.’

The Punjabis’ survivors scattered and never reassembled. The same fate befell a green Gurkha battalion: thirty of its men were killed in their first action, while only two hundred escaped with their weapons, leaving most to be captured. An officer recorded ‘scenes of indescribable confusion, with small leaderless parties of Indian and Gurkha troops firing in every direction…no one appeared to know what was happening…their own artillery was falling short among the British troops’. Some units, notably including a battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, acquitted themselves well. But isolated stands were of little value when Japanese who met resistance repeatedly outflanked the defenders by infiltration through jungle the British had deemed impassable.

Duff Cooper, British resident minister in the Far East, wrote to Churchill about Britain’s military commander in Malaya, Arthur Percival: ‘a nice, good man…calm, clear-headed and even clever. But he cannot take a large view; it is all a field day at Aldershot to him. He knows the rules so well and follows them so closely and is always waiting for the umpire’s whistle to signal ceasefire and hopes that when the moment comes his military dispositions will be such as to receive approval.’ The British defence of Malaya was hampered by Percival’s limitations, poor communications, and the familiar institutional weakness of the British Army. Some units resorted to communication by bugle call when radio failed and field telephone lines were cut. The Japanese could exploit almost absolute command of sea and air. When Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita’s forces met stubborn resistance at Kampar in central Malaya, he simply launched a new amphibious landing to outflank the defenders. The British were confounded by bold Japanese use of tanks, against which the defenders lacked even Molotov cocktails. Yamashita’s three divisions, though heavily outnumbered, displayed an aggression and energy of which their opponents were bereft. Their commander penned a poem:

On the day the sun shines with the moon

The arrow leaves the bow

It carries my spirit towards the enemy

With me are a hundred million souls

My people of the East

On this day when the moon shines

And the sun also shines.

Churchill asserted that the Japanese army was expert in jungle warfare. Yamashita’s three divisions had indeed gained combat experience in China, but their men entered jungle for the first time when they landed in Malaya. In China, they had used horses for transport, but now bicycles were substituted – 6,000 were issued to each division, in addition to five hundred motor vehicles. In the intense heat the bikes suffered frequent punctures, and two-man repair teams attached to each company mended an average of twenty tyres a day. Infantrymen meeting resistance on roads merely sought a bypass, humping their machines across rivers and through jungle, pedalling up to twenty hours a day, carrying a sixty-pound pack behind their saddles. Even old Lt. Col. Yosuke Yokoyama, commanding an engineer regiment, rode a bicycle. Short, chunky, dripping with sweat, he followed close behind the leading infantry inspecting British demolitions and directing bridge repairs, effected by raiding local sawmills for lumber. The Japanese referred to the huge ration dumps they captured, and exploited for their own units, as ‘Churchill supplies’.

‘The Jitra line was penetrated in about fifteen hours by barely five hundred men,’ Col. Masanobu Tsuji wrote contemptuously. In that action, he reported Japanese casualties of only twenty-seven killed and eighty-three wounded. ‘The enemy retreated leaving behind as souvenirs about fifty field guns, fifty heavy machine-guns, three hundred trucks and armoured cars, and provisions for a division for three months. Over 3,000 men surrendered having thrown away their arms in panic and taken refuge in the jungle…The majority of these were Indian soldiers.’

Some such units crumbled swiftly, especially when their British officers fell, as many did. The reputation of the Indian Army suffered severely in Malaya, where the lack of motivation of many of its mercenaries was laid bare. The Japanese used ‘jitter’ tactics to formidable effect, panicking defenders into retreat and sometimes headlong flight by noisy demonstrations behind their front. The huge wartime expansion of the Indian Army had resulted in some British officers being deployed with only six months’ training in place of the usual thirty, and unable to speak Urdu, thus incapable of communicating with their men. The cultural chasm between foes was exposed when British troops surrendered. They expected the mercy customarily offered by European armies, even those of the Nazis; instead, they were stunned to see their captors killing casualties incapable of walking, often also unwounded men and civilians. The teenage daughter of a Chinese teacher who brought food to an Argyll officer in his jungle hiding place one day left a note in English for him about the Japanese: ‘They took my father and cut off his head. I will continue to feed you as long as I can.’ At an early stage, discipline collapsed in parts of Percival’s army, in a fashion evidenced by fleeing soldiers’ looting of Kuala Lumpur. Counterattacks, a vital element of any successful defence, were seldom pressed. Most Indian units were composed of young and poorly trained soldiers. Whatever else Percival’s subordinates lacked, they displayed considerable courage, reflected in a high loss rate among British officers striving by example to keep Indian troops fighting. In this, they were seldom successful: one entire Indian brigade simply melted away under attack.

Some British units performed no better: the 18th Division arrived at Singapore as a belated reinforcement, and suffered swift humiliation. One of its battalions, 6th Norfolks, lost six subalterns and a captain in its first seventy-two hours of action. The attacking force might be small, but Yamashita’s three divisions were among the best in the Japanese army; they moved fast, and losses seldom deterred them from mounting attacks. The code of bushido caused them to treat themselves as mercilessly as they did their foes. A Japanese fighter pilot crash-landing in Johore fired a pistol at curious Malays who surrounded him, then used his last bullet to shoot himself.

From the outset, fleeing British clung to the racial conventions of empire and shamelessly abandoned their native subjects. The commissioner in Penang refused to allow Malay firefighters to enter the European quarter after bombing raids, and rejected pleas to demolish some European houses to create a firebreak. When Penang island was evacuated, non-Europeans were denied access to shipping. A Chinese judge was evicted after boarding, though the fortress commander’s car was embarked. A woman refugee from the island said later that the manner of the British evacuation was ‘a thing which I am sure will never be forgotten or forgiven’. Sikh police in Singapore were assured by their British chief that he would stay with them to the end; instead, he fled. In the Cameron Highlands, departing settlers appealed to Asian members of the local defence force to stick with their units; unsurprisingly, they resigned en bloc. In Kuala Lumpur, British doctors abandoned hospital wards to the care of their Asian counterparts. A young actor with a Chinese theatre troupe told his audience in the mining centre of Ipoh: ‘The British are treating their empire as property and handling the whole thing as if it was a business transaction.’

The behaviour of British communities in Malaya and later Burma was rational enough: word had reached South-East Asia about the orgy of rape and massacre which accompanied the fall of Hong Kong at the end of December. But the spectacle of white rulers succumbing to panic mocked the myth of benign imperial paternalism. Racism and self-interest were almost absolutes: when Chinese stewards aboard the light cruiser Durban mutinied, Captain Peter Cazalet wrote ruefully, ‘We have not treated the Chinese well in peacetime…they have no real loyalty towards us and why should they have?’ He noted that one mutineer expressed a desire to join the Japanese army. An eyewitness at Singapore noticed that as civilian bombing victims were thrown into mass graves, in death as in life European and Asian bodies were segregated. The condescension of the rulers was exemplified by the reaction of Malaya’s governor when his manservant was killed by a Japanese bomb behind Government House. Shenton Thomas wrote in his diary: ‘Terribly sad about my boy. He was such a faithful soul.’ Other nations of the British Empire ‘family’ showed scant enthusiasm for receiving refugees from South-East Asia. Australia at first agreed to grant entry to just fifty Europeans and the same number of Chinese; Ceylon set an initial limit of five hundred, with priority for its own citizens. Immigration barriers were lifted only belatedly, in the face of catastrophe.

On 31 January, the causeway linking Malaya to Singapore Island was blown up. The British principal of Raffles College, hearing the explosion, asked what it signified. A young Chinese, Lee Kuan Yew, claims to have responded: ‘That is the end of the British Empire.’ For fifty-five days, the Japanese had maintained a daily average advance of twelve miles, fighting ninety-five engagements and repairing 250 bridges. They were now almost out of ammunition, and Percival’s remaining 70,000 combatants were more than double Yamashita’s strength. But the British general made the cardinal error of dispersing his strength to defend Singapore’s seventy-two miles of coastline. Morale was wretchedly low, and fell further as engineers began demolitions in the naval dockyard. Belated efforts were made to evacuate dependants to the Dutch East Indies. Over 5,000 people sailed amidst scenes of chaos, panic and sometimes violence at the dockside, as military deserters sought to force a passage. Barely 1,500 of the refugees eventually reached the safety of India or Australia. Almost every ship approaching or leaving Singapore faced an ordeal by Japanese air attack. A Northumberland Fusilier described the experience of running the gauntlet on a transport under fire: ‘It was as if you were locked inside a tin can which people were beating with sticks.’

Yamashita’s forces began landing on Singapore Island in darkness on 8 February, employing a makeshift armada of 150 boats which carried 4,000 men in the first wave, two divisions in all. The British mounted no searchlights, and their artillery scarcely troubled the assault troops. Shellfire quickly severed most phone communications in forward areas, and heavy rain left sodden defenders huddled in their trenches. The Japanese pushed rapidly forward, while demoralised Australian units fell back. As it became plain that Singapore would be lost, the commanding officer of the naval base, Rear-Admiral Jack Spooner, wrote bitterly: ‘The present state of affairs was started by the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] who just turned tail, became a rabble, and let the Japs walk in unopposed.’

A disconsolate Maj. Gen. Gordon Bennett, commanding 8th Australian Division, told one of his officers: ‘I don’t think the men want to fight.’ He himself anyway did not, catching a plane which took him home in twelve days. And if the Australians performed poorly, so did British units, reflecting a collapse of will throughout Percival’s command. Captain Norman Thorpe, a Derbyshire Territorial serving in the Sherwood Foresters, described his curious sense of detachment from the catastrophe unfolding around him: ‘I myself only feel mildly excited and hardly feel it concerns me.’ When Thorpe led a counterattack, he found that only a handful of his men followed him forward; the little party’s advance was soon crushed. The commanding officer of an Australian unit spoke of fugitives from the forward positions who were ‘quite out of control and stated they had had enough’. The Japanese were no more merciful to those who quit than to those who resisted. Corporal Tominosuke Tsuchikane described his bewilderment at encountering enemies who hoped to save themselves by mere inertia: ‘Having lost their nerve, some soldiers were simply cowering in terror, squatting down and avoiding hand-to-hand combat in a wait-and-see position. They, too, were bayoneted or shot without mercy.’

Churchill dispatched a histrionic signal to Wavell, newly appointed Allied Supreme Commander, urging a last-ditch resistance in Singapore: ‘There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs…Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no weakness or mercy in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.’

Churchill’s message is important, in emphasising the contrast between rival combatants’ conduct of the war. He demanded from Singapore’s garrison no more and no less grit and will for sacrifice than Germans, Japanese and Russians routinely displayed, albeit under threat of draconian sanctions. Even if Malaya was lost, the prime minister sought to salvage some redeeming legend of its defenders resisting to the last. But the concept of self-immolation was beyond the bounds of Western democratic culture. On the evening of 9 February an Australian brigade commander told Percival, ‘In civil life I am a doctor. If the patient’s arm is bad I cut it off, but if the whole body goes bad then no operation can save the patient – he must die. So it is with Singapore – there is no use fighting to prolong its life.’ A small number of British, Indian and Australian soldiers displayed courage during the defence of Malaya, but this was futile amid a general collapse. Few Allied officers appealed to their men for sacrifices they knew would be denied.

At Singapore more than on any other British battlefield, a chasm was revealed between the prime minister’s heroic vision of the Empire at war and the response of its fighting men. Percival’s soldiers had lost confidence in their leaders and in themselves. If confronted face to face by Churchill, they might have told him that if he wanted Malaya staunchly defended, he should have given them competent officers, better weapons, and some of the hundreds of modern fighters idling at English airfields. They lacked any appetite for the fight to the death he wanted. There was a matching unwillingness among their superiors to use extreme measures to enforce discipline. Some Australian deserters forced their way at gunpoint aboard a refugee ship. When these men were arrested and imprisoned on Batavia, British officers wished to shoot them. Australian prime minister John Curtin signalled Wavell, insisting that any death sentence imposed on his citizens must be authorised by Canberra, as of course it would not be. Even at this dire moment of the Empire’s fortunes, a squeamishness persisted which reflected ‘civilised’ Western values, but did scant service to the Allied cause.

In Singapore, emotional British civilians queued outside veterinary surgeries to have their pets humanely destroyed. A pall of smoke from burning oil tanks hung over the city, while military police used their rifles as clubs to drive back panic-stricken men, often drunk, from the last departing ships. A subsequent British report lambasted the Australians: ‘Their conduct was bestial.’ By that stage, such remarks merely reflected a search for scapegoats. At Wavell’s last meeting with Malaya’s governor before flying out to Batavia, he said again and again, thumping his knee with his fist, ‘It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have happened.’ As the Japanese drove forward into the city, atrocities became commonplace. At the Alexandra hospital, a twenty-three-year-old patient hearing the Japanese approach his ward, shooting and bayoneting as they came, thought sadly, ‘I’ll never be twenty-four. Poor Mum.’ In the event, he proved one of only four survivors in the ward, because his blood-soaked body persuaded the Japanese he was dead. At the Alexandra, 320 men and one woman were killed, and many nurses raped. One group of twenty-two Australian nurses escaped from the city, only to fall into Japanese hands on a Dutch island. As they were driven into the sea to be machine-gunned, the last words of their matron Irene Drummond were recorded by the sole survivor: ‘Chin up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.’

Percival surrendered Singapore to Yamashita on 15 February. The photograph of a British officer named Major Wylde, in baggy shorts and helmet askew beside his general as they carried the Union flag to the Japanese lines, became one of the most memorable images of the war. It seemed to symbolise the bungling, blimpish ineffectuality of the men who had been entrusted with the defence of Britain’s eastern Empire. Along with Singapore, Percival signed away a significant portion of the honour of the British and Indian armies, as Churchill and his people well understood. The Japanese had gained their victory in barely seventy days, at a cost of only 3,506 dead, half of those in the battle for Singapore. Imperial forces lost around 7,500 killed, while the victors counted 138,000 prisoners, half of them Indians. One such officer, Captain Prem K. Saghal, saw his unit’s British second-in-command beheaded before his eyes and said later: ‘The fall of Singapore finally convinced me of the degeneration of the British people.’ Saghal concluded that by their conduct the imperial rulers had forfeited their claim upon the loyalty of Indians. Likewise another officer, Shahnawaz Khan, who felt he and his men ‘had been handed over like cattle by the British to the Japs’. The Japanese began immediately to recruit among POWs for their ‘Indian National Army’ to fight against the British, and achieved some success. The prestige of the Raj hinged upon the myth of its invincibility, which was now shattered.

Another prisoner, Lt. Stephen Abbott, recorded the scene as he and his companions began the long trek through Singapore to improvised prison camps: ‘The area presented a picture of appalling destruction. Overturned lorries, bicycles, prams, furniture lay in huge bomb craters, or were scattered over roads and pavements. Buildings with gaping holes displayed their pathetic interiors to the world. Naked bodies and grotesque human limbs rested where they had been flung. A repulsive stench rose in the humid atmosphere. The local population – Chinese, Malay and Indian – stood by the wreckage of their former homes in stunned misery, tiny children clinging in fear to their mothers’ clothing. From every building which remained standing in any shape or form, the red ball of the Japanese flag was hung…I stared at the Japanese soldiers in the streets as we passed. Were these the men we had been fighting, and who were now to be our masters? They were like unkempt children in their ragged uniforms, but children triumphant, and more than ready to mock their victims.’

For Singaporeans, after more than a century of colonial rule the revelation of its frailty changed everything. Lim Kean Siew, eighteen-year-old son of a Chinese notable, wrote: ‘The heavens had indeed opened for us. From a languid, lazy and lackadaisical world, we were catapulted into a world of somersaults and frenzy from which we would never recover.’ Likewise Lee Kuan Yew, who as an eighteen-year-old student at Raffles College watched the British enter captivity: ‘I saw them tramping along the road in front of my house for three solid days, an endless stream of bewildered men who did not know what had happened, why it had happened or what they were doing here in Singapore in any case.’

Savouring Japanese victory, Maj. Gen Imai, chief of staff of the Imperial Guards Division, said to captive Indian Army Maj. Gen. Billy Key: ‘We Japanese have captured Malaya and Singapore. Soon we will have Sumatra, Java and the Philippines. We do not want Australia. I think it is time for your British Empire to compromise. What else can you do?’ Key replied defiantly, ‘We can drive you back. We will eventually occupy your country. This is what we can do.’ The Japanese seemed unconvinced, because the battlefield performance of Britain’s forces in Malaya had been so pitiful. Yamashita and his officers celebrated victory with dried cuttlefish, chestnuts and wine, gifts of the Emperor, set out upon a white tablecloth.

Col. Masanobu Tsuji, one of the Japanese army’s foremost and most brutal militarists, gazed with contempt upon British and Australian prisoners, who had so easily allowed themselves to be defeated: ‘Groups of them were squatting on the road smoking, talking and shouting in rather loud voices. Strangely enough, however, there was no sign whatever of hostility in their faces. Rather was there an expression of resignation such as is shown by the losers in fierce sporting contests…The British soldiers looked like men who had finished their work by contract at a suitable salary, and were now taking a rest free from the anxiety of the battlefield.’

MP Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that Singapore’s surrender ‘has been a terrific blow to all of us. It is not only the immediate dangers…It is dread that we are only half-hearted in fighting the whole-hearted.’ Churchill agreed. He was disgusted by the poor British showing in Malaya not merely because defeat was bitter, but because the Japanese won so much at such small cost. In a 20 December 1941 strategy paper for the Anglo-American leaderships, he had asserted: ‘It is of the utmost importance that the enemy should not acquire large gains cheaply; that he should be compelled to nourish his conquests and be kept extended – and kept burning his resources.’ British forces’ conspicuous failure to fulfil this objective was gall and wormwood to the prime minister. ‘We had cause on many previous occasions to be uneasy about the fighting qualities of our men,’ wrote Gen. Sir John Kennedy, director of military operations at the War Office. ‘They had not fought as toughly as the Germans or Russians, and now they were being outclassed by the Japanese…We were undoubtedly softer, as a nation, than any of our enemies, except the Italians…Modern civilization on the democratic model does not produce a hardy race, and our civilization…was a little further removed from the stage of barbarity than were the civilizations of Germany, Russia and Japan.’

Masanobu Tsuji, who later wrote several books celebrating the Japanese army’s achievements, was a prime mover in its Malayan atrocities. It was sometimes asserted that Yamashita’s post-war execution for war crimes was unjustified, but the general was never even indicted for the systematic massacres of Chinese which took place at Singapore under his command. Yamashita once delivered a speech in which he asserted that, while his own people were descended from gods, Europeans were descended from monkeys. British racism in South-East Asia was now eclipsed by that of the Japanese. Tokyo’s new regime was characterised by a brutality such as the evicted imperialists, whatever their shortcomings, had never displayed.

The Japanese began their treatment of Allied prisoners as they intended to continue. After the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941, the invaders launched an orgy of rape and massacre which embraced nuns and nurses, and hospital patients bayoneted in their beds. Similar scenes took place on Java and Sumatra, largest islands of the Dutch East Indies, which were easily overrun after the fall of Singapore. The Japanese army in its new conquests sustained the tradition of savagery it had established in China, a perversion of virility and warrior spirit which was the more shocking for being institutionalised. Soldiers of all nations, in all wars, are sometimes guilty of atrocities. An important distinction can be made, however, between armies in which acts of barbarism represent a break with regulations and the norm, and those in which they are indulged or even incited by commanders. The Japanese were prominent among the latter.

On Java, Lt. Col. Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, an Australian surgeon, dismissed a parade of his men after they had been inspected and addressed by a certain Lt. Sumiya on 19 April:

I moved to the Nipponese officer, saluting. To my astonishment, he swung a ‘haymaker’ which hit me heavily on the jaw. I narrowly avoided being felled by moving my head back a little…Lt. Sumiya ripped out his sword and lunged at my throat with a deadly tigerish thrust. I avoided the point with a boxer’s reflexes, but the haft hit my larynx with a sickening thud and I could not temporarily breathe or speak.

The troops muttered angrily and began moving forward. The guards levelled their rifles and thrust their bayonets menacingly towards them. The scene was tense with the impending massacre. I put my left hand towards my troops, motioning ‘Don’t move!’, and then turned to the officer, gave a coldly formal bow…I stood to attention too coldly furious to flinch, whilst he swung the sword about my head, fanning my ears and bellowing loudly.

In the years that followed, Dunlop and his comrades suffered many worse beatings, and thousands died of disease and starvation. The Australian surgeon became an acknowledged hero of the terrible experience of Japanese captivity, a secular saint. The battle for Malaya might have taken a different course had its defenders foreseen the price they would pay for their ready submission to defeat.

Within days of the fall of Singapore, the Japanese struck out for the East Indies and its precious oil, their foremost strategic objective. From the Palau islands, invasion convoys sailed for Sarawak, Borneo and Java, supported by overwhelmingly powerful naval forces. The Allied defenders were weak, demoralised and ill-coordinated. In a series of dogfights over Java on 19 February, Japanese aircraft destroyed fifteen fighters. On the 27th an Allied squadron commanded by the Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman, composed of two heavy and three light cruisers escorted by nine destroyers, attempted to attack the amphibious convoy approaching Java, covered by two Japanese heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and fourteen destroyers. The rival fleets sighted each other at 1600, and opened fire. The first exchanges did little damage, for both sides’ shooting was poor: of ninety-two Japanese torpedoes fired, only one achieved a hit, sinking a Dutch destroyer. The cruiser Exeter suffered serious damage from a shell which struck in its boiler room, and limped towards the safety of Surabaya. At 1800, the American destroyer contingent quit the squadron on its own initiative, having expended all its torpedoes.

The next encounter, after darkness fell, proved disastrous for the Allies: the Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java were sunk by torpedoes, and Admiral Doorman perished with many of his sailors. Perth and Houston escaped, only to meet the main Japanese invasion fleet next night in the Sunda Strait, where both were sunk. On 1 March, Exeter and two escorting destroyers were caught and sunk attempting to make a break for Ceylon, while one Dutch and two more American destroyers were lost on passage to Australia. Ten ships and more than 2,000 men had thus vanished to the bottom in less than a week, almost eliminating the Allied naval presence in the East Indies. Dutch and residual British forces ashore kept up a desultory resistance for a week, before the Japanese secured mastery of the East Indies. No other outcome of the campaign was plausible, given the overwhelming Japanese strength deployed in the region.

2 THE ‘WHITE ROUTE’ FROM BURMA

The conquerors, emboldened by their Malayan triumph, seized the opportunity also to occupy British Burma, partly to secure its oil and natural resources, partly to close the ‘Burma Road’ to China. The first bombs fell on its capital, Rangoon, on 23 December. In a little house on Sparks Street, one of Indian railway engine-driver Casmir Rego’s sons was practising ‘Silent Night’ on his violin. Lena, his little sister, was making paperchains, while their parents were out Christmas shopping. Suddenly, the sounds of aircraft and machine-gun fire burst upon the seasonal idyll. Bombs exploded, fires broke out, wholesale panic spread.

A Burman midwife, Daw Sein, recalled later that though she had heard vaguely about a war, at first she was uncertain who was fighting who. Now, her husband burst into the kitchen and yelled: ‘Out! Quick! We must get away!’ They fled their house and were halfway to the railway station when she realised that she was half-naked. Her husband tore his own longyi in half and gave her the rent cloth to cover her breasts. Thus clad, they tumbled aboard the first departing train, for Moulmein. Packed to the doors with fugitives like themselves, after some miles it halted, then stood immobile for hours with its cargo of foetid, hungry, thirsty, desperate humanity. Finally a man walked along the track beside the coaches shouting, ‘Moulmein has been destroyed! Bombs are falling everywhere! The train isn’t going any further!’ After fevered consultation, Daw Sein and her husband set off on foot towards Mandalay, far to the north.

In the days that followed, as air raids continued, food distribution broke down. Many Rangoon inhabitants became scavengers, breaking into abandoned homes in search of anything edible. After one raid, to the horror of the Rego family their youngest son Patrick vanished. As his brothers scoured the streets for him, they came upon a van laden with corpses and severed limbs. They glimpsed a woman who cried out from under the heap of bodies, ‘I’m not dead! Please take me out!’ Then more dead were thrown on top of her, and the van was driven away. Patrick reappeared unharmed, but the children never forgot the woman trapped among corpses.

Colonial mastery crumbled as swiftly and ignominiously in Burma as in Malaya. A host of Indian fugitives took to the jungle or set out westwards, including the low-caste ‘sweepers’ who emptied their rulers’ ‘thunderboxes’ and cleaned the streets. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the governor, reflected ruefully on the revelation that such people were indispensable to sahibs’ lives: ‘Life begins with the sweeper. That lowest of all human beings, who holds in his hands the difference between health and disease, cleanliness and filth.’ The civilian administration rapidly collapsed, and so too did the defence: through February and March, the Japanese swept across the country. When soldier Robert Morris of the 7th Hussars landed at Rangoon, he found chaos: ‘All we saw were blazing fires and oil dumps set alight. Mounds of equipment such as aircraft marked “Lease-Lend to China from USA” lay in crates awaiting assembly. The number of lorries lined up ready for shipment to China amazed us. The port had been deserted and ransacked.’

Dorman-Smith was yet another poor specimen of proconsulship. He professed himself baffled as to why, after a century of British rule, there was no Burmese loyalty to the Empire such as appeared to exist ‘among other subject nations’. Civil servant John Clague provided an easy answer: ‘We Europeans lived in a world where very often the people hardly counted in our human or intimate thoughts. No Burman belonged to the Moulmein Gymkhana. No Burman came to dinner and breakfast.’ Now, orders were issued that no Burmese or Indian should be accommodated on refugee transports.

Far East C-in-C Sir Robert Brooke-Popham matched Dorman-Smith’s gloom. He reported, accurately enough, that many local people openly favoured a Japanese victory: ‘It is rather disheartening, after all the years we have been in Burma and the apparent progress that has taken place under our rule, to find that the majority of the population want to be rid of us…I can only suggest the three things that are, at any rate, worthy of investigation. First a tendancy [sic] among Englishmen to regard themselves as naturally superior in every way to any coloured race, without taking steps to ensure that this is always a fact. Secondly, a failure to develop a sympathetic understanding with the Burmese…Thirdly, the fact that the majority of non-official Englishmen in Burma were more concerned with making money…than benefiting the native population.’

A Burmese could not have expressed the matter better. Two out of three national prime ministers since separation from India had been detained by the British for making advances to Tokyo, as was a group of student nationalists receiving Japanese training in preparation for collaboration. In the unlikely event that a referendum had been held in Burma, offering the population a choice of wartime allegiances, pro-Japanese sentiment would assuredly have prevailed. Maj. Gen. Sir John Smyth, newly appointed commander of 17th Indian Division deployed in the south beyond Moulmein, wrote later that the Burmese provided the invaders with eager assistance: ‘[The Japanese] not only got information of our every movement, but they got guides, rafts, ponies, elephants and all the things which we could not get for love, and only with great difficulty for money.’

Mi Mi Khaing, a twenty-five-year-old Burmese woman who had studied at Rangoon University, wrote bitterly about the fashion in which her people were thrust into the war with no pretence of popular consultation. Hers was, she said, ‘a country which had lost proud sovereignty fifty-years before, which had not yet gained a modern replacement for it, and which felt itself to be only incidentally in the path of the war monster’s appetite’. By chance Burmese prime minister U Saw was passing through the United States at the moment of Pearl Harbor. Impressions of American disarray and hysteria enhanced his contempt for the white races. Back in Burma shortly afterwards, Ultra decrypts revealed U Saw making overtures to the Japanese, which caused him to be exiled to East Africa. In such circumstances, British claims to be upholding the cause of democratic freedom by fighting in Burma seemed less than wholly convincing.

The invaders, meanwhile, were astonished by the warmth of the welcome they received, especially from Burmese youths. One of their liaison officers wrote: ‘It came to us how strong was their passion for independence.’ Burmese villagers crowded around Japanese soldiers, offering them water and saybawleit cheroots. Soldiers were bewildered to be questioned in English, the only foreign language local people spoke. The commonest question was: ‘Has Singapore fallen?’ Lt. Izumiya Tatsuro said: ‘I answered proudly, “Yes, Singapore has fallen.”’

Some of the first bombs to fall on Mandalay wrecked the colonists’ Upper Burma Club. A guest at a lunch party there said, ‘We didn’t know what hit us. One minute we were seated at table, the next the roof caved in, tables, chairs, food and ourselves were scattered all over the room.’ The attacks started fires which burned down much of the city. Bodies lay unburied for days, intensifying popular contempt for British incompetence. With a symbolism that did not go unnoticed, flowers in the colonists’ gardens began to die, because the servants who watered them had abandoned their posts. The British bosses of the Burma Corporation washed their hands of their local staff, shrugging that they could do nothing for them.

In reply to a plea for reinforcements for Burma, Wavell in Java signalled Rangoon on 22 January: ‘I have no resources with which I can assist you…Cannot understand why with troops at your disposal you should be unable to hold Moulmein and trust you will do so. Nature of country and resources must limit Japanese effort.’ When the modest Japanese invasion force of two divisions launched its attack from Siam in the last days of January, some Indian units mounted a stalwart defence, but the locally recruited Burma Rifles crumbled quickly. The British had no significant air or artillery support, and John Smyth was furious that his superiors insisted on an attempt to hold exposed Moulmein. The first crisis of the campaign came in the early hours of 23 February, at a bridge across the Sittang eighty miles north of the town. As the Japanese approached, in darkness British engineers fired demolition charges. Two of Smyth’s brigades were cut off east of the river. All but a handful of men were obliged to surrender, a crippling moral and strategic blow.

Lt. John Randle of the Baluch Regiment was holding a position west of the Salween river when he realised Japanese troops were behind him. ‘I sent my runner, the company bugler, with a message to my CO to tell him there were a lot of Japs about. They cut in behind us and we could hear the runner screaming as they killed him with swords and bayonets…The Japs butchered all our wounded.’ His battalion lost 289 men killed and 229 taken prisoner in its first engagement. Randle said: ‘We were arrogant about the Japs, we regarded them as coolies. We thought of them as third rate. My goodness me, we soon changed our tune. The Japs fought with great ferocity and courage. We had no idea about jungle fighting, no pamphlets, doctrine etc. Not only were we raw troops, we were trying to do something entirely new.’

By early March Rangoon was a ghost city, where the remaining policemen and a small British garrison skirmished with mobs of looters. Fighter pilots of Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, transferred to Burma from China, sustained the only significant resistance to Japanese air attacks. The defence was collapsing. British liaison officer W.E. Abraham reported from Rangoon: ‘The general atmosphere of gloom was almost impossible to describe. GHQ at Athens when getting out of Greece was almost light-hearted by comparison.’ Wavell, raging against the alleged defeatism of his subordinates, sacked both his Burma C-in-C and Smyth, a sick man struggling to direct the remains of his division in a battle he never thought winnable. The British government pleaded with Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, to allow two Australian formations then in transit between the Middle East and their threatened homeland to be diverted to Burma. Curtin refused, and was surely right: the Australians, fine and experienced soldiers though they were, could not have turned the tide in a doomed campaign.

Wavell was haunted by memories of the allegations of pessimism and defeatism thrown at him by Churchill before his 1941 sacking as Middle East C-in-C. In South-East Asia, he strove to show himself a man of steel, to put spine into his subordinates. ‘Our troops in Burma are not fighting with proper spirit,’ he signalled London. ‘I have not the least doubt that this is in great part due to lack of drive and inspiration from the top.’ In truth, so much was wrong with Britain’s Far East forces that the rot was unstoppable in the midst of a Japanese offensive. Wavell seemed to acknowledge this in another signal to London: ‘I am very disturbed at lack of real fighting spirit in our troops shown in Malaya and so far in Burma. Neither British, Australians or Indians have shown real toughness of mind or body…Causes go deep, softness of last twenty years, lack of vigour in peace training, effects of climate and atmosphere of East.’ Wavell became a regular visitor to Rangoon, likened by one historian to ‘a Harley Street specialist, complete with a black bag, coming to see a very sick patient’.

On 5 March Lt. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander arrived to take command. The impeccable ‘Alex’, Churchill’s favourite general, could only contribute his unfailing personal grace and serenity to what now became a rout. Initially he ordered a halt to the British retreat, then within twenty-four hours accepted that Rangoon could not be held and endorsed its evacuation. The invaders missed a priceless opportunity to trap the entire British army in Burma when a local Japanese commander withdrew a strong roadblock closing the road north. Misinterpreting his orders, he supposed that all the attacking forces were intended to close on Rangoon for a big battle. This fumbled pass allowed Alexander’s force to retreat northwards – and the general himself to escape captivity.

In desperation, Wavell accepted Chiang Kai-shek’s offer of two Chinese Nationalist divisions with their supporting elements. Chinese willingness to join the campaign was not altruistic. The Japanese advance in the north had closed the ‘Burma Road’, by which American supplies reached China. Reopening it was a vital Chinese interest. Wavell’s caution about acceptance of assistance from Chiang’s troops was prompted by knowledge that they lacked their own supply system and aspired to live off the land. There were also doubts about who gave their orders: US Gen. Joseph Stilwell claimed that he did, only to be contradicted by Chinese Gen. Tu Lu Ming, who told Burma’s governor, Dorman-Smith: ‘The American general only thinks he is commanding. In fact he is doing no such thing. You see, we Chinese think that the only way to keep the Americans in the war is to give them a few commands on paper. They will not do much harm as long as we do the work!’

Stilwell, an inveterate anglophobe, was underwhelmed by his first meeting with Alexander on 13 March. He wrote in his diary with accustomed sourness: ‘Astonished to find me – mere me, a goddam American – in command of Chinese troops. “Extrawdinery!” Looked me over as if I had just crawled out from under a rock!’ Stilwell was given the assistance of a British-led Frontier Force mounted unit, for reconnaissance duties. Its leader, Captain Arthur Sandeman of the Central India Horse, achieved the doubtful distinction of becoming the last British officer to die leading a cavalry charge. Blundering into the path of Japanese machine-gunners, he drew his sabre, ordered his bugler to signal the attack, and advanced on the enemy until he and his companions met their inevitable fate.

The Chinese intervention provoked the Japanese to reinforce their two-division invasion army, sending two more formations to Rangoon by sea. The British were reorganised into a corps commanded by William Slim, a shrewd, rugged Gurkha officer who would eventually show himself Britain’s ablest general of the war. On 24 March the Japanese struck hard at the Chinese in the north. The British counter-attacked to relieve pressure on their allies, but the enemy prevailed on both fronts. Slim’s Burcorps, struggling to avert complete collapse on the east bank of the Irrawaddy, called for Chinese assistance. Stilwell was predictably contemptuous, writing on 28 March: ‘Riot among British soldiers at Yenangyaung. British destroying the oil fields. GOOD GOD. What are we fighting for?’ Yet to the astonishment of Stilwell as well as the British, a Chinese division, led by one of Chiang’s ablest officers, Gen. Sun Li-Jen, pushed back the Japanese and achieved a notable little victory. Although an imperial formation was almost wiped out in the fighting around the Irrawaddy, Slim emerged from the battle full of respect for Gen. Sun’s men, whose intervention was decisive in enabling the British to avert the annihilation of Burcorps.

But the Allied position in Burma had become untenable. The Japanese considered that the Chinese formations fought more bravely and energetically than the Commonwealth forces, but within days they were falling back northwards, eventually into China. The pursuing Japanese were content to halt at the border. Stilwell, who bore substantial personal responsibility for mishandling the Nationalists under his command, abandoned them and set off westwards with a motley party of Americans, press correspondents and just two Chinese. He walked through the jungle for two weeks before reaching the safety of Imphal, in British-ruled Assam, on 20 May. Stilwell wrote: ‘We got a hell of a beating. It was as humiliating as hell. We ought to find out why it happened and go back!’ By 30 April, Slim’s men were safely across the Irrawaddy. They then retreated westward preceded by a rabble of deserters and looters, who behaved with predictable savagery towards the civilian population. On 3 May, Burcorps began its withdrawal across the Chindwin river boundary between Burma and India under Japanese fire. The Burma Rifles platoon defending Slim’s headquarters melted away into the night. Most of his men made good their escape, but almost all transport and heavy equipment – some 2,000 vehicles, 110 tanks and forty guns – had to be abandoned on the east bank of the river. Even when the fugitives reached safety, they found no warm welcome. ‘The attitude of the army [in India] to those of us back from Burma was appalling,’ said Corporal William Norman. ‘They blamed us for the defeat.’

The Japanese had advanced across Burma for 127 days, covering 1,500 miles at an average speed of almost thirty miles a day, while fighting thirty-four actions. The British had lost 13,000 men killed, wounded and captured, while the Japanese suffered only 4,000 casualties. This was not a disaster of the same magnitude as Malaya, and Slim conducted his retreat with some skill. But the Japanese now occupied Britain’s entire South-East Asian empire, to the gates of India. An Asian wrote of the spectacle of Western POWs driven to hard labour alongside the native peoples: ‘We always felt that they were superior to us. The Japanese opened our eyes; because [the white men] were sweeping the floor with me…walking without shoes.’ This proved an enduring revelation. Meanwhile, the Burma Road to China would remain closed for almost three years.

Enforced civilian migrations were a major feature of the war almost everywhere around the globe that armies struggled for mastery. Few Burmese attempted to flee before the Japanese, because they believed they had nothing to fear from their victory, and much to hope for. When members of the newly mobilised Burma Defence Army marched through Rangoon for the first time under the eyes of its Japanese sponsors, an enthusiastic citizen wrote: ‘How thrilling it was to see Burmese soldiers and officers wearing assorted uniforms, bearing assorted arms, tricolour armbands on the shirtsleeve, seriousness on the face.’

But almost a million Indians also lived in the country, some dominating commercial life and others performing menial functions indispensable to the welfare of sahibs, but disdained by their Burmese subjects. The Indians were unloved, and fearful of local nationalism. As the invasion tide swept forward, the British did nothing to assist the flight of some 600,000 of these, their dependants. It was argued that the rulers had trouble enough saving themselves. But here, once again, British conduct highlighted the breakdown of the supposed imperial compact, whereby native peoples received protection as the price of accepting subjection. Rich fugitives bought airline tickets or cabins aboard ships bound for India. Indians bitterly dubbed the ferry up the Chindwin ‘the white route’, because access was almost the exclusive privilege of the British and Eurasians. As paddle steamers thrashed upriver, they passed corpses floating down, victims of hapless Indians’ overland ‘black route’.

Throngs of people too poor to purchase tickets to salvation were obliged to take to the roads and tracks north and westwards, towards Assam. The monsoon broke in May; thereafter, rain and mud clogged the passage alike of the fortunate in cars and the impoverished afoot. They were robbed and sometimes raped; they paid exorbitantly for scraps of food; succumbed to dysentery, malaria and fever. At ferries and roadblocks, their last rupees were extracted by avaricious policemen and villagers. No one knows exactly how many Indians died in the spring and summer of 1942 on the road to Assam, but it was at least 50,000, and perhaps more. Their skeletons littered the roadside for years, to shame British passers-by when they later went that way again. An officer searching for stragglers at Tagun Hill on the way to Ledo came upon a village of the dead:

The clearing was littered with tumbledown huts, where often whole families stayed and died together. I found the bodies of a mother and child locked in each other’s arms. In another hut were the remains of another mother who had died in childbirth, with the child only half-born. In this one [clearing] more than fifty people had died. Sometimes pious Christians placed little wooden crucifixes in the ground before they died. Others had figures of the Virgin Mary still clutched in their skeleton hands. A soldier had expired wearing his sidecap, all his cotton clothing had rotted away, but the woollen cap sat smartly on the grinning skull. Already the ever-destroying jungle had overgrown some of the older huts, covering up the skeletons and reducing them to dust and mould.

Among the fugitives were many mixed-raced Catholics, who had originated in Portuguese Goa. Customs officer Jose Saldhana walked for days through the jungle with his seventeen-year-old son George, having dispatched the rest of his family on a ship overladen with panic-stricken people. The walkers endured ghastly privations, relieved by a surreal moment in a camp in the jungle where a girl named Emily D’Cruz serenaded them: ‘Her voice soared clear and beautiful in the still of the night,’ singing ‘Alice Blue Gown’. Then George succumbed to dysentery. He persuaded his father to leave him, sitting against a tree deep in the jungle. After some hours, the teenager saw a Naga woman, from a tribe of notorious headhunters. Terror overcame his weakness, and he began to walk again. For days he stumbled north-westwards, living off berries which he saw monkeys eating, and thus assumed must be safe for humans. One day he came upon a flock of butterflies, of fabulous beauty. Fascinated, he approached them – only to recoil when he found them feasting off juices oozing from a decaying corpse. He fled onwards, and at last reached safety and a family reunion. Others were less fortunate. In the Hukawng valley, boys from a Catholic school in Tavoy came upon the body of their headmaster, Leo Menenzes. His weak heart had collapsed under the strain of the trek.

Even when surviving refugees reached British-controlled Imphal, there were no better facilities and medical aid for Indian civilians than for Indian soldiers. With all the resources of the subcontinent at its disposal, the Raj proved incapable of organising basic humanitarian support for the flotsam of its war. Kachin and Naga villagers gave more help to refugees than did the British. An Anglo-Indian manager of the Irrawaddy Steamship Company who reached a rescue station in Assam after a struggle across the mountains was met by a British officer who insisted that he could be fed only at the Indian canteen. Conditions were appalling in hospitals receiving stricken fugitives. A British woman wrote bitterly to a friend in England, the wife of government minister R.A. Butler, describing what she had seen in Ranchi: ‘The medical wards are like Gone with the Wind – pallets touching each other, people moaning for water and sicking up and so on everywhere. It’s all a shocking crime and may God forever damn the Eastern Command staff.’ Cholera broke out in some refugee camps.

Alexander’s beaten army was rebuilt only sluggishly and unconvincingly: two long years would elapse before it was able to meet the Japanese with success. In August 1942, the general himself was transferred to command Britain’s forces in the Middle East. The memory of that terrible Burma spring, and of its victims, remained imprinted upon the minds of all who witnessed it. Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, from the Indian prison cell to which he had been consigned by the British, commented with disdain on the collapse of government in Burma and the flight of colonial officials, who abandoned hundreds of thousands of his compatriots to their fate: ‘It is the misfortune of India at this crisis in her history not only to have a foreign government, but a government which is incompetent and incapable of organising her defence properly or of providing for the safety and essential needs of her people.’ This was just. The loss of Britain’s empire in South-East Asia brought disgrace as well as defeat upon its rulers, as Winston Churchill readily recognised.