Britain’s Forgotten Disaster of World War II

Attacking through neutral Thailand and jungle pathways, which the British thought impenetrable, Japan’s 15th Army, commanded by General Shojiro Iida and consisting of the 33rd and 55th divisions. Supported by up to 600 fighter planes and the Burmese Independence Army, they attacked British Burma beginning in January 1942.

In Blitzkrieg-like tactics the 35,000 men of the 15th Army managed to simply “walk around” British forces, according to the then-governor of Burma Reginald Dorman-Smith, eventually taking Rangoon on March 8 and cutting off the Burma Road – a route used by the Allied powers to send Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese government supplies very much needed to resist the Japanese onslaught in China. 

The British military commander, General William Slim later admitted: “Our ignorance of Japanese movements was profound.” The entire First Burma Corps only had one intelligence officer who could read and speak Japanese reasonably well, according to Slim.

However, the British were not only ignorant of Japanese movements, but also displayed a willful ignorance about the Imperial Japanese Army’s fighting capability, which the American war correspondent Jack Belden traced back to “a Kipling like belief in the ability of a British square to lick any fuzzy-wuzzies who might come along.” One British officer told a soldier: “The little yellow bastards shouldn’t give you chaps too much trouble, they’re only little runts.”

The campaign ended in May 1942 with a shameful 900-mile retreat of British, Burmese, Indian, Chinese, and Gurkha troops back to India, “an undisciplined mob of fugitives intent only on escape,” in the words of Slim. This retreat – dubbed “the Dunkirk of the East” – cost the lives of up to 80,000 civilians and around 13,000 troops. It is one of the most shameful episodes of British colonial history and has today been largely forgotten, overshadowed by the Bengal famine of 1943, the Burmese civil war, and the upheaval caused by the partition of India, according to the historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper in Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & The War With Japan.

Nevertheless, here is the story in brief.

Refugees

By December 1941, after the Japanese had bombed Rangoon, Burma’s population of Indians, Anglo-Indians (people who had mixed Indian and British ancestry or British born and living in India), and Anglo-Burmese had started fleeing from the war and heading to India via land or sea. By January 1942, that refugee population would reach around 600,000.

Many of the refugees first streamed toward the three port cities of Rangoon (Yangon), Akyab (Sittwe), and Taungyup (Toungup), at the latter destination around 64,000 people were able to embark on ships to India. Once there were no more boats at Akyab, 10,000 refugees went north to Akyab with 5,000 of them succumbing to diseases on the way. The British Commissioner responsible for Akyab had fled the city on one of the first available ships.

Institutionalized racism was omnipresent during these episodes. For example, the colonial government first prohibited the sale of deck-class tickets to male Indian laborers, an order that also condemned their wives and children to stay since an Indian woman was not allowed to travel on her own. Anglo-Indians could often not get on the boats because they were neither accepted on the decks with Indians, nor in the ship saloons since they were not “proper whites.” In addition, the space reserved on ships for British and Anglo-Indians, as well as Anglo-Burmese, was in comparison to Indians disproportionately skewed towards the former groups, although the latter constituted the vast majority of refugees. 

By March 1942, there were no more boats – the rapid Japanese advance meant that the only escape routes remaining were overland and in the north, either through Manipur, or the Hukawng Valley, an isolated valley in the northernmost part of Burma. The British forces were incapable of mounting a proper defense, no matter where they tried to make a stand. Not even the elite Gurkha units fared particularly well against the Japanese army, which toward the end of the campaign also enjoyed unchallenged air-superiority.

While the beaten British troops, “utterly exhausted, riddled with malaria and dysentery,” according to General Slim, ingloriously exited Burma via the high mountain passes adjacent to Assam in India, in the town of Mandalay, the native employees of the British-run Burma Corporation were told “that they would have to do their best to save themselves because the corporation could do nothing for them,” as Bayly and Harper recount in Forgotten Armies. Tens of thousands of Indian refugees were left behind in Mandalay as the British civil and military administration pulled out. The 900-mile (some accounts say 1,000 miles) trek has been called the “longest retreat in the history of the British Army.”

The British authorities proved both unwilling and incapable of helping the mass of refugees streaming north. One British “last ditcher” wrote in a letter to the editor of the Indian daily The Statesman: “Those dumb masses who plodded day and night along the roads leading out of Rangoon were leaderless. They trailed like herds of animals before a forest fire.”

Eruptions of Violence

While there were many individual acts of compassion and support by Burmese peasants, Anglo-Indians, and British administrators, the breakdown of the colonial order lead to eruptions of violence as some Burmese tried so settle scores with Indians (some of whom were rich merchants and engaged in money lending).

Most shocking, once Indians reached the India-Burma border some of them were denied entry since only one route into Assam was supplied with “Indian food” whereas there was plenty of “European food” (e.g., tinned bully beef) available in the camps along the roads, according to the colonial administration. Thus only non-Indians were allowed to enter Indian territory in the summer of 1942. Another ostensible reason for this harsh measure was that British authorities were afraid of importing diseases that would affect the military. The result of this policy was horrendous: Thousands of Indians died in camps or on the roads close to the border and only a few miles away from safety during that year’s monsoon season.

Blatant racism only reinforced the official policy with “Indians and Anglo-Indians who looked particularly dark (…) held back and allowed to starve or die of disease in the squalid transit camps,” Bayly and Harper write. “These tales of despair and betrayal were never erased even by the striking British victories of 1944,” they add.

“Certain British officials showed themselves at their worst. One man requisitioned large numbers of Naga coolies and pack animals to bring over inessential personal belongings while Indian women and children died by the roadside,” according to the historians. Bayly and Harper also recount the story of an Anglo-Indian who was refused permission to board an airplane because his wife was wearing Indian clothes.

With the colonial order and all social services breaking down, many private initiatives tried to help the best way they could. For example, the Assam Tea Planters Association along with Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese nurses set up a makeshift organization to receive incoming civilian refugees and also set up provisional stations for wounded British, Indian, and Chinese soldiers.

On the other side of the border, the camps, filled with sick and desperate refugees, many incapable of moving any further unassisted, were only sporadically supplied by the Royal Air Force from the air and porters by land. The monsoon made even this effort extremely difficult. Thousands succumbed to exhaustion, disease and malnourishment. The last emaciated survivors would only reach India by September 1942. Overall, the retreat claimed the lives of approximately 80,000 civilians, the majority of whom were Indian.

At the end, the Japanese advance was not stopped by the British-Indian Army but by the monsoon rains, which in 1942 had already started in April, as well as the precarious defense of the border by tribal levies recruited by Indian authorities. “An intricate hierarchy of race and status gave a false sense of permanence,” Bayly and Harper succinctly summarize toward the end of their book as the essential flaw of British colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and why it unraveled so quickly.

The story of the retreat is interesting for two reasons. First, it illustrated that the antiquated 19th century colonial political and military organization of the British Raj and British rule in Burma (and as such British colonialism, in general) was incapable of organizing for modern war in the 20th century. Since the notion of European military superiority and the threat of organized, unstoppable violence lay at the foundation of all European empires in Asia, this organizational inability would eventually undo colonialism as a whole.

Second, as a corollary, the shameful and disastrous retreat upended for once and all any idea of awe and admiration for the White Man. The izzat (honor) of the British Empire was irrevocably damaged after Indians and other British colonial subjects saw the straggling columns of beaten and demoralized white troops struggling back to India after their humiliating defeat by Japanese forces. It was the recognition that the previously much-admired and feared British regulars would perhaps not be able to defend India from a Japanese invasion that ultimately contributed to the August 1942 eruption of the “Quit India Movement,” a campaign launched by the All-India Congress Committee that finally convinced the majority of British leaders that India would be ungovernable and lost to Great Britain in the long run.