Forgotten Armies by Tim Harper

Author:Tim Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141927190
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

5

1943: Valleys of the Shadow of Death

As the New Year of 1943 dawned, the British and the Americans looked to the future with restored confidence. In Britain the sound of the November church bells celebrating the victory over the Germans at El Alamein in North Africa was still ringing in people's ears. Stalingrad had held against the Nazi onslaught. The German army was beginning to taste the bitterness of the greatest defeat in its history. In the Pacific, the US fleet seemed once again to have the upper hand. Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, began to feel that the Allies might be ‘beginning to stop losing this war’. He confided to his diary: ‘We start 1943 under conditions I never would have dared to hope.’1

There were patches of failure amidst the emerging pattern of Allied success. The eastern land front against the Japanese was one area of continuing gloom and worry. Somewhere at the back of Brooke's mind lurked the fear that a British collapse in India might come at the same time as a renewed German eastward push, this time against the Allied oil resources in Persia at Abadan. If this were to happen, the whole grand strategy might unravel again before the end of the year. Of course, even in mainland Asia things could have been worse. At least India had held the Japanese advance as the monsoon and civil disobedience movement of 1942 petered out. The first Chindit expedition, which penetrated far behind enemy lines in north Burma, was about to give morale a significant upward blip. Kachin, Shan and Nagas were already fighting heroic guerrilla wars to protect their homelands. Yet India Command and Whitehall knew very well that the real reason the Japanese advance had stopped was that they simply did not have the resources to fight the Chinese, the US and British India at the same time. The British still did not really understand what they were up against. It required a further comprehensive ‘licking’ in 1943 for them to realize how much effort they would have to put into defeating this brave, desperate and ruthless enemy.

The faint stirrings of optimism in Southeast Asia were soon stilled by series of crises as corrosive and deadly as the collapsing house of cards of 1942. In an ascending order of danger, the threats were, first, local British and American disagreements about strategy and aims on the north Burma front; secondly, the dismal failure of the first British push forward in Arakan in the spring of 1943; thirdly, and most insidiously, India began to starve. The crisis was so severe that it became touch-and-go as to whether the subcontinent could ever again be the base for a military campaign. By the end of 1943 a few visionary individuals were even urging that the whole British effort should be moved to Australia. India, Britain's ‘barrack in an oriental sea’, had become her oriental charnel house.

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