CHAPTER XXX  

MOPPING UP IN BURMA  

MAY—AUGUST 1945

THE situation on May 5 was as follows: Messervy’s Four Corps, comprising the Fifth, 17th and 19th Indian Divisions, held the corridor of the main road and railway between Mandalay and Rangoon . To the west Stopford’s Thirty-Three Corps, formed of the Seventh and 20th Indian Divisions, was advancing astride the Irrawaddy towards the Burmese capital by way of Prome.

The Japanese Army was now doing it’s best to escape from Burma in two main parties. The first - some 10,000 men - was still in the Irrawaddy Valley and could only get away over the Pegu Yomas and across the Sittang River . Most of the second and larger party was making its way slowly southwards through the Shan Hills, hoping to reach the Bilin road via the Salween River .

To withdraw eastwards across the Sittang River was difficult, for the enemy troops had to cross the axis of first one corps and then the other before reaching the river. They had to traverse country that is thick jungle, sparsely populated, without roads and with few good tracks. Then they were faced, between the Mandalay_Rangoon road and the Sittang, with flat, open paddy fields, devoid of cover save in the elongated villages with their clumps of trees. Here, too, the roads were few and bad.

The Division was ordered to pursue the enemy in the direction of Waw, a station on the railway between Pegu and Moulmein , and also to the east bank of the Sittang, towards Bilin, a place farther down the line to Moulmein . Moulmein seemed an obvious rallying point for the disorganized bands of Japanese making their way through the gaps between our two corps. Our object was to intercept as many of these Japanese as could be, and to prevent their reaching Moulmein or crossing the Sittang River .

Nine Brigade (Brigadier H. G. L. Brain) was flown south from

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Lewe to Pegu and at once started operations towards Waw and the Sittang. At the same time, 123 and 161 Brigades began to engage the enemy forces who were seeking to escape across the main road south of Pegu. Every report of Japanese troops had to be investigated. Many small parties were encountered, casualties inflicted, prisoners taken, and all at very light cost to ourselves. Nine Brigade met heavy opposition east of Waw, and in several battles caused severe loss to the Japanese.. It was planned for the Brigade to cross the Sittang to Mokpalin, but when patrols of the 3/9th Jats reconnoitred on the east bank, they reported communi­cations to be so bad that the plan had for the time being to be abandoned.  

Once the monsoon had broken in earnest, the whole district east of the main road became flooded to a depth of two feet or so, and patrolling was well-nigh impossible except   along the paddy bunds between the villages. The Divisional Engineers organized a jeep railway which pulled some of the old metre-gauge coaches, and this was the sole means of supplying our battalions forward of Waw.

On May 10 the 2nd West Yorkshires (Lieutenant-Colonel P. W. P. Green), supported by tanks, attacked the enemy at Nyauiigkashe, killed some two hundred Japanese soldiers, and captured the village, which had for some days been a collecting point for parties of Japanese moving towards the river. It was when the enemy, driven from strongly defended positions, broke cover that they were mortared, shelled and machine-gunned by the infantry and 7th Cavalry, who had two troops of tanks in support of the battalion. Our total casualties for this successful operation were twenty-four. On the previous day the stores had been brought up on seventy bullock-carts, collected locally, and on an assortment of railway trucks, including seven captured Japanese bogies, that were pushed by fifty villagers. This strange party was met by a solitary Japanese sniper on the railway line. He was soon disposed of.

If the West Yorkshires met with success on this occasion, they ran into trouble five days later, in a village named Letpanthonbin, where a local villager had reported the presence of a score of Japanese. Two platoons under Captain H. Evans approached across the flooded paddy fields, and when fifty yards from the

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edge of this village were received with heavy fire. Evans was killed early in the engagement, and a serious number of other casualties were incurred. There was no cover and the range was short. Another platoon sent out to reinforce the forward troops was unable to approach nearer than six hundred yards, because of accurate fire that pinned them to the ,ground. Six hours passed. Then ‘B’ Company managed to join this second platoon, with a F.O.O. from the 4th Field Regiment. All day the rain poured down, all day the men wounded in the first brush near the village lay in the water or across the muddy bunds, waiting for darkness and the cover of night. Artillery fire was brought down on Letpanthonbin, in order to assist these wounded men. It was early next day that survivors trickled back to battalion head­quarters in ones and twos. Corporal Venables, who had been wounded, reported that all bodies lying round him had been bayoneted by the Japanese during the night. He himself had feigned death, but was taken prisoner. A Japanese officer addressed him in English, and told him to wait until he had finished his meal. But a fierce downpour of rain provided Venables with a chance of escape. He took it and reached safety.

This fight cost us twenty-six men killed and six wounded. It was but characteristic of similar engagements fought out among the villages and across the swamped fields by the other battalions of Brain’s brigade-—the 3/2nd Punjab , 3/9th Jats and 1st Burma Regiment. Operations were extremely difficult, the weather grew worse, the floods expanded and deepened, and Japanese bands kept on coming from the west. They seemed to occupy villages at intervals and for short periods, trying thereby to protect their scattered remnants. Jitter parties, long and short range brushes, intermittent firing, patrolling as a result of some local report, men squelching their way yard by yard, the rain soaking their already damp uniforms, feet that were wet all day long;. mud and slime, and chill discomfort—these were but some of the features of this mopping-up end to a campaign. Only in Waw, with its few wooden buildings raised on stilts, was there any good cover.

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During May Appleby’s 2/1st Punjab spent a fortnight in the neighbourhood of Mokshitwa in the Pegu Yomas. Here the battalion

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fought against the remnants of the Japanese Army retreating in disorganization from Prome. It was an area of small hillocks covered with thick clumps of bamboo, and some five thousand enemy troops were said to be trying to escape across the road. Each day patrols of a company strength hounded the Japanese. Airstrikes and artillery concentrations were called down upon places where the Japanese were known to be. Ambushes were laid on likely escape routes. Most nights the battalion perimeter was jittered by enemy parties, and on one occasion a heavy attack was made by some Japanese. This was repulsed with severe loss to the assailants. Indeed, the enemy suffered heavily during this period of hunting and skirmishing in the jungle.

The enemy soldiers were running extremely short of ammuni­tion and food, though in many of the villages they were able to find stocks of rice, their staple diet. It was, of course, impossible to deny the enemy access to every village. Not only were they too numerous to guard, but also the problems of maintaining soldiers in inaccessible places would have been insurmountable in monsoon conditions, when all vehicles were bound to the road. Our troops would secure a firm base, and then send out very strong fighting patrols with a Gunner observation officer. They would tour all the villages in a certain area, seeking out the Japanese, who were seldom to be found in villages during daylight. They came in by night, and in the daytime might occupy a small hillock in the jungle, covering the approaches to a village. If the enemy was present in strength, he would be shelled by our Gunners, who harassed at night on targets that they registered whenever possible in daylight. Sometimes the enemy would make a stand, but this only brought him heavier casualties.  

During the night of May 29/30 the 1/17th Dogras, now commanded once again by Lieutenant-Colonel F. I. Wallace, who had just returned from leave in Britain, started a full-scale operation up the road to Paunggyi, away to the west of the Pegu - Rangoon road. In support was a troop of the 7th Cavalry. A village named Uwinwa was occupied, and when an armoured car patrol reported that Paunggyi was deserted two companies entered the place next day. Local habitants said that the ‘Japanese had left just before the arrival of our armoured cars. They had first set fire to the village.

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The Dogras found here forty derelict enemy vehicles, and many tons of burning grain.

At the end of May and early in June it became increasingly obvious that the Japanese were planning a mass break-out from the jungle west of the main road, with the object of crossing the Sittang. To prevent this, our patrolling grew more vigorous still, and the activities of the Japanese were closely watched. Then, in the middle of June the Japanese east of the Sittang, by applying strong pressure against Nine Brigade on the Waw front and occupying several villages on the west bank of the river, proved that they were working to a plan, in order to help their comrades still in the jungle west of the road. It was, however, considered unlikely that this enemy break-out would come within the Divisional area. The pressure against Nine Brigade was thought to be a cover plan aimed at relieving pressure on the Japanese elsewhere. This supposition proved to be correct.

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It was at Pegu that the 56th A.A./A.Tk. Regiment said farewell to the Division. An officer has recorded an impression of that occasion. “The General, who must have been as dearly loved by every individual man as any Divisional Commander could ever be, told us that he wished to see as many men as possible. We all stood there in the rain, the water ankle-deep in the field where we had been living for three days. He was at his most charming, and if, instead of telling us that our time was now due for home, he had asked us to follow him for another year, I am pretty certain ‘that we would have gone. I know that I would.”

Owing to releases, repatriation, and the shortage of British troops in Burma, the Division lost all but one of its British units: the 4th and 28th Field Regiments, whose guns had supported the infantry during every campaign in which the Division had fought; the 4th Royal West Kents, who had defended Kohima; the 7th York ‘and Lancaster; and 56th Anti-tank Regiment. Their places were taken by the 4th and 5th Indian Field Regiments, the 5th Anti­Tank Regiment, the 3/4th and 3/9th Gurkha Regiments. Of the British battalions, only the veteran 2nd West Yorkshires remained.

The Division was eventually released from active operations against the Japanese at the end of June, and its positions near Pegu

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and Waw were taken over by the Seventh Indian Division, still commanded by ‘Major-General Geoffrey Evans. Some fifteen miles north of Rangoon among the rubber plantations of Mingaladon was the new area in which the various units pitched their tents and settled down, not to rest from their battles, but to train in a, for them, new type of warfare: combined operations. The Division was to form part of the force preparing to invade Malaya (Operation

‘Zipper’).

The programme of training to be got through was extremely heavy. Every officer and man in the Division was put through a normal six weeks’ dryshod course’ in half that length of time by a most efficient combined operations training team. The local cinema was kept working for six weeks day after day from seven o’clock in the morning till eleven at night showing instructional films. In three days the Sappers bulldozed’ a magnificent cutting lined with bit-hess,’ floored with pierced steel planking, and filled with water by pumps from a leak in the Rangoon water pipe-line which ran near by. Drivers of proofed vehicles were given practice in underwater driving through this trough.

The troops practised swimming in full equipment, and the Royal Lake in Rangoon was used for pontoon bridging and out­board motor-boat training. Units and brigade groups rehearsed beach landings, while the staff made final adjustments to convoy-loading and assault-landing tables. Scrambling nets and sliding ropes were used, scaling towers built by the Sappers and put to good purposes, and the troops rehearsed with landing craft.

The A/Q, Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Roe, who was very soon to say good-bye to the Division after serving on its headquarters for three years, made some interesting comments on the prepara­tions for Operation ‘Zipper.’  

“I always feel to give people in Europe an idea of the difficulty of mounting the Malayan invasion it is necessary to give them this parallel. A number of troops for the invasion of France were two months before D-Day in action in Italy. Their commanders and staff were summoned to Moscow (fitting in on such air services as existed with no special aircraft available) for planning their part in the invasion. The troops to receive new equipment from America and reinforcements from Egypt. The invasion to be embarked at ports ranging from Marseilles and Gibraltar to Glasgow .

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The whole force to rendezvous off a spot on the Malayan coast some days later.”

On August 8 news was received of a possibility of Japan sur­rendering. If this occurred, the Division would sail at once for Singapore . Then on the 15th Japan did surrender, and the troops displayed their joy and relief with firing, dancing, Very lights, concert parties, free drinks, and a round of celebrations of all kinds.

But meanwhile the staff officers were working in shifts through­out the twenty-four hours to keep abreast with the latest whim and alteration of the authorities in the allocation of shipping for ‘Zipper.’ Changes were frequent; some ships already loading had to be unloaded; but in good time all the many problems were resolved in one way or another, and the Division was ready to embark for Malaya and Singapore . Until the last moment the staff had to plan both for the invasion of Malaya and for the re­occupation of Singapore . Which plan would be implemented depended upon the Japanese.

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