Road of Bones

Another foreigner to arouse suspicion was a Mr G. R. Powell of the Watchtower Society of Australia. This representative of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was placed under surveillance by the Burma police in a classic case of mistaken priorities. Mr Powell represented a religious faith that customarily excited the suspicion of colonial officials, yet the Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the groups enthusiastically persecuted by Hitler’s Reich and would have offered little threat to the security of Burma.*

The captain made detailed notes on roads and beaches that would make suitable invasion points. But for all the impressive detail on local military dispositions and possible enemy spies, Pardoe’s report did not contain a single line about possible evacuation routes for a retreating army or for tens of thousands of refugees. In those becalmed days before Japan entered the war, he could hardly have foreseen such a necessity. At the end of the report an unnamed intelligence officer wrote, ‘A very good report – may be very useful if fighting breaks out in Burma’. If – the conditional that masked a vast failure of intelligence, planning and, perhaps above all, imagination. The defence of Burma was left to a small garrison consisting of two British battalions and the eight battalions of local troops and military police that comprised the Burma Rifles and the Burma Frontier Force, as well as the part-timers of the Burma Auxiliary Force, all dispersed throughout the country’s three military regions – upper, middle and lower Burma. It was a force useful for colonial missions of chastisement but utterly unfit for defending a country larger than France against invasion by a modern army supported by armour and aircraft.

From Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff in London to the GOC Burma, Major General D. K. McLeod, and the Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman Smith, nobody had allocated the resources needed to defend Burma against an invasion from Thailand. They simply had not visualised Japan occupying Thailand and then sweeping Britain aside. Forget the evidence of Japan’s victory over the Russians four decades before, the abundant intelligence on Tokyo’s new ships, aircraft and artillery, or the defeats inflicted on the Chinese over the past decade. The Japanese were still little yellow men, myopic and bandy-legged, and could never pose a mortal threat to the greatest empire the world had ever seen. As Corporal Fred Millem of the Burma Auxiliary Force, the local equivalent of the Territorial Army, ruefully put it after the disaster: ‘China had exhausted Japan – she could not last more than three months. Japan’s air force was no good, her pilots all had bad eyesight and could not fly by night … Etc, etc, etc, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah!’ When war came, the Japanese 15th Army would deploy four divisions against one and a half divisions of British, Burmese and Indians.

The overall responsibility for the defence of Burma was given to the Commander-in-Chief Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, who spent a year pleading in vain for more resources. Four days before Pearl Harbor, the prime minister described the threat of Japanese action as a ‘remote contingency’. Fighting alone in the years before America joined the war, he had understandably avoided confrontation with the Japanese. At one point the great enemy of appeasement was forced to kowtow in the face of Japanese insistence that he close the Burma Road, along which America shipped its war materiel north from Rangoon to the Chinese Nationalists. Shutting this lifeline would strangle the Chinese war effort and allow Japan to redeploy thousands of troops for use against America in the event of war. The closure of the road in July 1940 amounted, according to the old Burma hand George Orwell, to ‘a semi-surrender to Japan’. From July to October 1940 Churchill closed the road, until American pressure forced him to change his mind. However limited Churchill’s choices, the episode should have illustrated to the British just how much Burma mattered to the Japanese.

It is not known what ultimately happened to the report submitted by Captain Pardoe. It was certainly seen by the intelligence department in Rangoon, but whether it went higher than that we will never know. As for Pardoe, he would not survive the war. He was killed eight months later, fighting the Japanese in Hong Kong.

For Emile Charles Foucar, barrister-at-law, Saturday, 6 December 1941, was one of the most important days in the social calendar. He was not alone in waking with great excitement. That afternoon the finest ponies in Burma would race for the Governor’s Cup at the Rangoon Turf Club. It was an event that would draw virtually the entire European population and, as the only club that allowed non-white members, it would also attract Burmese and Indians of good social standing. Sadly for Foucar, he would be without his wife Mollie. She and the couple’s two children, a boy and a girl, had been shipped to England as a precautionary measure a few weeks before. Official Burma might play down the danger of invasion, but to Foucar the evacuation made good sense in view of the threatening noises coming from Japan. Emile Foucar was, above all, a man of common sense. He had been born in Burma, the son of a businessman who had come out from Britain in the late nineteenth century, a man swept eastward by the imperial dream at the very moment it was approaching its zenith. In the language of the colonial guide-books, the Burma he found was wreathed in the exotic: ‘Should Burma be visited after a tour in India, the traveller cannot fail to be struck with the great difference in the people and the scenery of the two countries. The merry, indolent, brightly-clothed Burmese have no counterpart in Hindustan, and the richness of the soil and exuberance of the vegetation will be at once remarked.’

Emile Foucar’s father and uncle began a timber business, exporting Burmese teak all over the world from their mills in the coastal city of Moulmein. Here Foucar senior did his patriotic duty by joining the Moulmein Volunteer Artillery. Like most of the white community, he sent his son Emile to England to be educated. There the young Foucar left school just in time to fight as an officer in Flanders. After the war he studied law in London but, finding the pickings slim, decided to return home and set up in practice in the country of his birth. Foucar gathered a substantial clientele from across the country’s racial mix. He could find himself representing a monk demanding the right to succeed to a monastery, investigating an insurance fraud by Chinese businessmen, or acting as counsel for a British plantation owner involved in a legal wrangle with the government.

When Emile Foucar arrived at the races on that humid December day he heard the band of 1st battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment (the 1st Glosters), playing and saw green lawns ‘ablaze with flowers and brilliant costumes’. The Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman Smith, made a grand entrance, driven down the course to the members’ enclosure, acknowledging the applause of the crowd with a gracious wave. It was, Foucar remembered, a golden afternoon.

He moved easily among the crowds, European and Asian, nodding to clients as he went. As an observer of his own society Foucar was sharp-witted and fair-minded, pushing at the limitations of his age and background. In a memoir published a decade after the war, he recalled how the Burmese were systematically excluded from British, and therefore influential, social circles, denied control over their country’s resources, and encouraged in subservience and servility. They were barred from European strongholds such as the Pegu Club and the Rangoon Gymkhana Club, where much of the real business of money and politics was conducted. On the trains European passengers like Foucar’s friend Bellows could make a scene if asked to share a carriage with a non-white. Bellows, who had been forty years in Burma, ‘insisted to the stationmaster that his fellow traveller be removed … so the merchant was put elsewhere’. Foucar also had an eye for the hypocrisies of late imperial life. It was well known, he wrote, that Bellows had a Burmese wife.

On the journey back east from England after the First World War, Foucar heard his travelling companions agree that the old days were gone. ‘Things aren’t what they were,’ an anonymous passenger told him. ‘The young Burman considers himself as good as his master.’ But this was still the colonial Burma of George Orwell’s Burmese Days, torpid, self-satisfied, a haven for mediocrities who would have struggled in a more dynamic or egalitarian setting. Although Burmese politicians sat in a legislative assembly and there was a Burmese prime minister, real power remained in the hands of the Governor, who controlled foreign affairs and security.

The C-in-C Far East, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, offered an acerbic view of the colonial Englishman in Burma, all the more surprising because Brooke-Popham had been a stout defender of the rights of white settlers in Kenya when he was Governor there in the late 1930s. There was, he wrote, ‘a tendency 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 … a failure to develop a sympathetic understanding with the Burmese … the majority of non-official Englishmen in Burma were more concerned making money and getting high dividends from their investments than of benefiting the native population.’

At the start of the 1930s an uprising led by the rustic monk and necromancer, Saya San, shook British rule. But it was the Indian minority rather than the British who suffered most. A colonial report noted that the Indians had ‘driven the more apathetic Burman out of the more profitable means of employment’. When violence erupted the Indians were the first to be attacked. A prominent nationalist leader denounced them as ‘birds of passage who have come to this land to exploit by fair means or foul in the fields of labour, industry or commerce’. Despite superior British firepower it took eighteen months to subdue a revolt that shook the British and inspired young nationalists to escalate their agitation against colonial rule. As Emile Foucar noted, ‘The indications were plain to those who would read them; yet when manifested amongst students and the educated classes they were brushed aside as the complaints of disappointed office-seekers envious of the white man. This attitude of self-complacency was comforting to those of us who saw a long continuance of British domination.’

At the same time, Burmese intellectuals were absorbing ideas and theories spreading from Britain. One Rangoon writer observed that ‘in the 1930s, so many of our students read the books which came out to us from Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in London. The ideas of Marx reached Burma not from Russia but by way of England.’ The generation of urban Burmese that came of age in the 1930s was educated and politically aware, and some of its leading figures were already in contact with the intelligence officers of a new imperial force.

The Japanese dressed their intervention in the clothes of Asian brotherhood. By the late 1930s Japanese spies were busy recruiting agents and attempting to create a pro-Tokyo army which would act as a fifth column on the outbreak of war. Several of the nationalist leaders went to Japan for military training, among them Aung San, the father of future pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. This was the simmering Burma that lay beyond the European clubs and garden parties of Rangoon on the eve of war with Japan, and which thousands of British, Indian and Burmese troops would be asked to give their lives to defend.

The weekend of the Governor’s Cup race meeting in December 1941 was the last great gala of imperial Burma, although few, if any, of those who were there would have sensed the imminence of its demise. The dancers who packed into the ballroom of the Strand Hotel on race night were confident that Britannia still ruled the East and would continue to do so for a long time to come. For Emile Foucar the highlight of the evening was when a ‘stout lady, popular with local audiences … sang a comic song, concluding it by throwing up her skirt to show us the seat of her panties emblazoned with the Union Jack. How we cheered!’ The only irritant was the absence of fresh air, brought about by a practice blackout ordered by the military authorities. Not that most people in that cheery crowd believed a blackout was necessary. As the racegoers made their way home in the muggy early hours, the Japanese seemed a very long way away.

Twenty-four hours later, on 8 December 1941, Emile Foucar woke up to the news of the Japanese attack on the Americans at Pearl Harbor and the landings in Malaya, some five hundred kilometres from Burma. More worrying still, Japanese troops were also moving into Thailand. An agreement had been reached with the Thai government to allow Japanese forces free passage to the Burmese border. There was fierce fighting with some Thai troops, unaware of the agreement, who opposed the Japanese landings in the south. Yet Rangoon was quiet that morning. To Corporal Fred Millem the news came as a relief. Rumours of war had been incessant. ‘The suspense had been snapped and we knew where we stood. To me it was no surprise … when it came we were almost joyful, for it seemed certain suicide for Japan – her last desperate throw … Singapore, utterly and completely impregnable, still stood between the Japs and Burma.’

Emile Foucar immediately joined up to do his bit for the defence of the empire. As a former officer he was given the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, working on intelligence and propaganda. On 10 December he went into the radio room at headquarters and found an operator anxiously trying to restore a connection. The man had heard something about the ships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, which had been dispatched east the previous autumn to deter the Japanese, but he could gather no details apart from the fact that the voice on the wireless was referring to them in the past tense. It was only the following day that Foucar learned that more than eight hundred men had been killed, and British naval power humbled, when Japanese bombers sank the ships off the coast of Malaya.

By the middle of December a Japanese force had crossed from Thailand and seized the strategically important Victoria Point airfield, vital to the RAF if it was to bring in reinforcements. Two days before Christmas 1941, with Hong Kong about to fall and Singapore threatened, Foucar was entering his office when somebody shouted out to look in the direction of Mingaladon airfield, to the north of the city. He saw bombers approaching, flying in a V-shaped formation – twenty-seven of them, pursued by a few British fighters.

The streets of Rangoon filled with crowds who cheered and clapped when they saw a bomber burst into flames and fall from the sky. But then the explosions began and thick smoke floated up from the centre of the city and the docks area. Shocked silence followed and then the sounds of terror, the screams of the dying and the noise of hundreds of feet stampeding along narrow streets. When the dead were counted there were more than 1,600 bodies, while many more were badly wounded.* The city began to empty.

Seventeen-year-old Donald Mellican was manning a Burma Auxiliary Force anti-aircraft position at Mingaladon airfield when it was attacked. Not a man among his crew knew the feeling of utter vulnerability that comes with being caught in the open by air attack, the sense of being like an insect racing for protection as giant boots come down to crush it, nor did they know the blinding panic of the sudden arrival of shells. A man under shellfire for the first time learns the ruthless capriciousness of shrapnel, how the tiniest sliver of scorching metal can bring death, and will come to dread the extravagant mutilations of flesh caused by close proximity to the shock waves of a blast. Mellican’s only experience of violence up until then had been the canings meted out at his school in Moulmein when boys were caught whistling at the girls playing hockey in the neighbouring academy. When the alarm was sounded at the airfield he assumed it was an exercise. Then, as the silver shapes in the sky came closer, he heard an officer shout to him to take cover. Bombs began to fall. After a few minutes of confusion Mellican climbed on to the anti-aircraft gun to shouts of ‘Traverse right’ and ‘Traverse left’, followed by ‘Fire!’. His fear left him as he blasted at the Japanese.

The drama lasted for an hour and when the Japanese had gone Mellican looked around at a scene of carnage. There were fires and delayed explosions. Wounded men were crying out for help. One Bofors gun had taken a direct hit. Mellican was called out later that night to help remove the dead. ‘The bodies were mangled, heads, limbs sprawled all over, and even the gun was splashed with flesh and brains sticking on metal.’ They were all boys Mellican had known. An officer ordered that nobody was to leave until the mess had been cleaned up.

‘We made makeshift stretchers from bits of wood, e.g. damaged furniture and doors. “Have you got an arm or a leg?” calls were made and eventually we had six figures ready. I recognised only two of them, “F. B.” and “J. K.”’ Both were boys Mellican had known from his schooldays. As he helped carry a stretcher away it became tangled in a hedge. When he looked back he saw that the intestines of the dead boy had caught in the hedge and unravelled. With his hands he freed the spilling guts and placed them gently back under the blanket. That night he slept in a bunkhouse that was quiet with the shock of war.

The crisis was compounded by problems of command at every level. Brooke-Popham, the C-in-C Far East, whose responsibilities included Malaya, Singapore and Burma, succumbed to the pressure of events and was replaced. In late December a new commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell, was sent to establish the short-lived ABDACOM,* a unified allied command based in Java, which was described by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, as a ‘wild and half-baked’ scheme. In the space of a few months, responsibility for operations in Burma shifted first to India, then to ABDACOM, and finally back to India. In Rangoon there was similar confusion. The GOC Burma, Lieutenant General D. K. McLeod, who had spent much of his life as a staff officer, was replaced on 27 December by Lieutenant General T. J. Hutton, who was himself sacked two months later. An Associated Press report from London had welcomed Hutton’s appointment and spoke of how ‘much has been done to strengthen the land forces which Lt. Gen. Hutton now takes over’. It was the propaganda of illusion, as the defenders would soon discover.

The Japanese launched their ground offensive from Thailand on 8 January. They sent two divisions against one and half British and Indian divisions.† But it was the quality of troops and command, not the numbers, that really mattered. When General Hutton failed to stem the advance he was replaced, on 5 March, by General Harold Alexander, a favourite of Churchill’s, who acknowledged that never had he ‘taken the responsibility of sending a general on a more forlorn hope’.

The official verdict on the failure to protect Burma would not emerge for another decade. But the conclusion was damning: ‘The effect that the loss of Rangoon would have on the British war effort was well known to the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and to all commanders in the Far East … Yet, despite the breathing space of six weeks between the outbreak of war and the start of the Japanese drive into southern Burma, no adequate steps were taken to build up the forces required … Burma still remained practically defenceless.’

An Irish engineer, Professor W. H. Prendergast, working for the Indian Railways, was sent to Rangoon to see what help was needed by his counterparts on the Burma Railways, who were struggling to keep their locomotives running. ‘In the streets of this great thriving city nothing was to be seen but the scurrying jeeps, the criminals, the looters and the insane. No one was left except a small band of “Last Ditchers” and garrison troops who had volunteered to remain until the end.’ British troops and police shot looters. ‘Others, both soldiers and civilians, were punished by caning.’ The official history of the Indian Army described how ‘the deserted city and oil refineries and shattered storage tanks along the river presented an awe-inspiring spectacle as huge columns of flame leapt skyward beneath a vast canopy of smoke.’

Prendergast witnessed the last train departing Rangoon steaming slowly away and noted how ‘behind it pathetically followed, the spaniels, the Airedales, the terriers, all the big and little pets with their appealing eyes saying “Surely you cannot abandon US”.’ He travelled from one bombed station to another, helping with repair work. One morning he found the bodies of eighteen people who had died from cholera during the night. The American war correspondent Clare Boothe described the destruction by fire of part of the ancient royal capital of Mandalay in a dispatch for Life magazine. ‘It was to me a smell not unfamiliar. I remember, one hot summer, when I was a child, a dog died under our veranda porch … It was that smell. But a thousand times magnified until it seemed, as we whirled through the streets, all creation stank of rotting flesh … Here and there on the side of the streets lay a charred and blackened form swaddled in bloody rags, all its human lineaments grotesquely foreshortened by that terrible etcher – fire.’

Japanese air raids on the cities drove people into the countryside. Gripped by panic, the large Indian population of Burma, many of them labourers who worked in the mines or in the fields, headed towards the border with India. Some of the wealthier and more influential sought a passage by air or boat, but with limited space, and with priority given to whites, money was no guarantee of a seat. Nor was it always safe to attempt escape by air, as the Japanese enjoyed command of the skies. For the majority who set out on foot the journey meant navigating a mixture of terrain that exhausted even the strongest among them. The route north to safety lay over nine hundred miles of jungle, scrub, swamps and high mountain passes. It meant trying to ford raging rivers and struggling to gain a footing on liquid mud paths over mountains that rose to more than 8,000 feet.

The refugee columns were shadowed by flocks of vultures. The carrion-feeders settled in the trees over temporary camps or waited on the fringes of small groups whose members were too exhausted to move any further. It is the sound, rather than the sight, of vultures feasting that stays in the mind, an obscene cracking and tearing, which rose from countless roadside encampments on the retreat. There were anguished scenes as the elderly, so often the first to fall sick, urged younger family members to go on without them. A British eyewitness recalled seeing children with ‘distended bellies supported on sticks of legs, and all of them moved slowly, dragging along with expressionless faces, eyes on the ground and bodies wasted to the bone’. Of the more than half a million people who fled across the border to India over five months of the retreat, an estimated 80,000 died from a catalogue of diseases – cholera, dysentery, scrub typhus and malaria – and from the effects of malnutrition and exhaustion.* The dead lay all along the routes towards India. A British army officer carrying out a reconnaissance of the route north described a clearing where a band of refugees had expired: ‘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 … A soldier had expired wearing his side cap, 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 or mould.’ The Scotsman, George Rodger, who would become a famous war cameraman, encountered a constant stream of fleeing people and was struck by ‘the incongruity of the items they had chosen to salvage from their homes … One man carried a cross-cut saw over his shoulder, another lugged along a large tom-tom, several had umbrellas, and one carried a bicycle with the back wheel missing …’