Burma 1942: Memoirs of a Retreat: The Diary of Ralph Tanner, KOYLI

By R E S Tanner and D A Tanner

In December 1941, a Japanese battalion of 143rd Regiment of 55th Division crossed the Burma-Siam border and siezed Victoria Point, heralding the invasion of Burma. The first air raids on Rangoon were opposed by only two fighter squadrons - 16 P40s of the American Volunteer Group (AVG) and 16 Buffaloes of the RAF. What followed was a fighting retreat as the British forces struggled to the Indian border, harried by an experienced Japanese force which was supported by at least 200 aircraft against the Allies' meagure fifty. 'Burma 1942' is a unique assessment of this disastrous episode in British military history, taken in part from the diary and maps kept by Ralph Tanner, who served with 2nd Battalion The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry during the retreat, and from the official Battalion war diary by Major Chadwick. It includes background to the mobilisation of the Battalion in 1941, who they were, their equipment and what they were trained for, and considers the series of disasters at Moulmein, Sittang, Toksan and Yenangyaung which left them increasingly unable to fight as a unit. It also addresses the factors which prevented optimum military performance, includes discussions with the author's one-time enemies, and serves as a tribute to the strength of the men of the battalion - most of whom were conscripts - and of whom a fifth were killed and have no grave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9780752475509

Book preview

Dedicated to the memory of Corporal James Hart 4688955, who stayed behind at Bilin on 19th February 1942 to care for a wounded friend, and was never seen again.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their thanks to the Regimental Museum of the 2nd Battalion The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry at Doncaster for their permission to publish photograph numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. All other photographs are from the authors’ private collection or from the History Press archives. Maps shown as Appendix C and C1 are reproduced from the abridged Japanese regimental history of the 214 and 215 Regiments covering the actions in 1942. It has not been possible to locate the copyright holders of this privately published material. The Authors and Publishers would be most grateful for any information and will undertake to credit any parties identified on reprint.

The authors would also like to thank Kazuo Sawa for his research that located the officers of the Japanese 33 Division, Meredith Harte and Todd Londagin for their help in sourcing aircraft photographs, Reiko Fukushima for her help with some of the Japanese translations, and The Royal Geographical Society for the provision of maps to which the authors did not have access. (It is impossible to reproduce old maps with perfect clarity in a book of this size – though Ralph Tanner’s own sketch maps are perfectly understandable – but the others reproduced here are artefacts that act in themselves as conduits of memory, at least to those who fought and marched across their pages; for this reason if no other they have been included. Annotations of the movements of KOYLI and other details have been added to them.)

A great debt of thanks is owed to John Heald and the Regimental Museum for Appendix D.

Lastly, thanks are due to Malcolm Johnson, the unofficial historian of the 2nd Battalion The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry for his encouragement and suggestions after reading the first draft of this work.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

An Overview

The British political and military position in Burma 1941

A military biography of Capt. R.E.S. Tanner. 223473

Chapter 1 The Past is a Foreign Country

The availability of war records

The workings of memory

Leaving the dead (and the living) in peace

Chapter 2 The Combatants

Training

The battalion as a closed society

Women and children

British equipment

Racism

Chapter 3 Into Action

The Salween at Takaw

The Japanese crossing of the Salween

The Bilin fiasco

The Sittang Bridge disaster

The failure to withdraw at Toksan

The oilfield inferno at Yenangyaung

Taungtha and crossing the Irrawaddy River to Monywa

The cut across country

Chapter 4 A Reckoning

Japanese behaviour

The misbehaviour of British soldiers

Accidental losses

The process of attrition

Missing in Action?

Chapter 5 The Other Enemies

Malnutrition

Dehydration

Dark thoughts and false optimism

Illness

Lost to the forest

The failure of communications

The civilian population

Chapter 6 Conclusions

The re-establishment of the Battalion

The lessons of war

Appendix A: The Diary of 2/Lieut. R. Tanner, 223473

Appendix C: Japanese Map of the actions between 9–21 April 1942

Appendix C/1: Japanese Map of the actions between 16–21 April 1942

Appendix D: Corporal John Heald’s Roll

Appendix E: Reliability of memory and the experience of warfare

Bibliography

Copyright

Foreword

This is a study of a tragedy. It does not seek to accuse but to investigate, and to highlight the extraordinary bravery of those who survived and those who did not. It is an assessment of the work undertaken by the Second Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry from the time of their mobilisation in August 1941 until they reached India at the end of May 1942 as an exhausted remainder after 164 days of fighting, disasters and deprivation. It is not simply a personal memoir, although Ralph Tanner, in the second half of the campaign, as a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant, wrote a diary within twelve months after his arrival in India, which forms the basis of this book, together with maps that he kept on his person throughout the retreat, shown in Appendix A. The diary has been supported by maps from other sources and diagrams, along with photographs which he had taken.

Burma 1942 addresses the shortcomings of memory within the context of oral history and the available records. It examines the background to the mobilization of the Battalion in December 1941; who they were and for what they were trained, their equipment and the Battalion as a family with its own spirit. It relates the Battalion’s series of disasters at Moulmein, Sittang and Bilin involving the crossings of the Salween, Sittang and Bilin rivers, Hmawbwi, Toksan and Yenangyaung – which left them increasingly less able to fight as a unit, with diminishing numbers and equipment – and finally, the exhausting march from Monywa to the crossing of the Chindwin River and over the last mountains to Tamu on the Indian border and relative safety. The book ends by detailing the factors that prevented optimum military performance and those other factors that made the cohesion of this Battalion from start to finish – and individual survival – possible.

This work is above all an appreciation of the extraordinary powers of recovery which the men of the Battalion, most of whom were not professional soldiers, showed again and again. The fact that the Battalion survived as a unit after so many days of the gruelling 1942 Burma campaign – surely the longest exposure of infantry to warfare in retreat in the history of the British Army – is simply remarkable. About a fifth of the men were killed and left with no known grave.

The details of the Battalion’s involvement have already been published as the fifth volume of the history of the regiment (Kingston,1950) from the recent memories of those who took part. This gave the necessary details of many individual acts of heroism and fortitude and no purpose would be served by repetition, but the citations of two of the three non-commissioned officers who received the Military Medal – Howson, Steerment and Butler – are given in Appendix B.

Ralph and David Tanner

Padworth Common and London

An Overview

The British political and military position in Burma 1941

The position of the 2/KOYLI in Burma at the start of the war with Japan in December 1941 is defined by the German war centred on the defence of the United Kingdom. Burma was on the very fringe of British strategic concerns. This can be demonstrated by the fact that the Burma Army headquarters in Rangoon in 1941 ‘was very small and in fact no larger than a normal second class district headquarters in India. It had neither the know-how nor the staff capacities to effect the changes to put Burma onto a war footing’ (Grant and Tamayama 1999: 39). There were just two British infantry battalions in Burma and a number of military police and Burma Rifle battalions, which had not been trained to confront a professionally trained and organised enemy.

On mobilisation, the 2/KOYLI became part of the 1st Burma Brigade in the 1st Burma Division, which had been created with two other Brigades using the eight Burma Rifle battalions together with the 13th Indian Infantry Brigade of three regular Indian infantry battalions, which arrived in March 1941. This meagre force was added to before Rangoon fell by the creation of the 17th Division with the arrival of the experienced 7th Armoured Brigade (less one regiment) from the Middle East – with Stuart tanks better armed than any Japanese tanks – and the 63rd Infantry brigade with three further Indian infantry battalions. Following a visit to 17th Division at Kyaiktko on February 6, General Wavell had noted on a train journey from Pegu to the Sittang that the flat, open topography was good tank country. The 7th Armoured was duly despatched, ‘… for which everyone who served in Burma in 1942 had cause to be grateful to Wavell’ (James Lunt, A Hell of a Licking 1986). Additionally, also in March, the Inniskilling Battalion was flown into Magwe in American aircraft. While this total looks impressive enough on paper, their experience of modern warfare – with the exception of the 7th Armoured Brigade – was limited to internal security and guerrilla warfare on the arid North-West Frontier of India.

In contrast, the Japanese Army used four divisions with appropriate support staff, with the majority of men having already experienced combat in China. The Japanese air force had at least 200 aircraft with additions from Malaya and the Philippines after the campaigns there finished, against which the Royal Air Force and the American Volunteer Group probably never have had more than fifty. With this inequality in numbers, equipment and professionalism, it may seem surprising that the campaign lasted so long, particularly as the Japanese planned to march off-road and used only light equipment while the British and Indian units were ‘road-bound’ in attitude and experience. In short, the Japanese army invaded Burma well equipped and trained for what they intended to do, but out-of-date in terms of Western (to that date, largely apolitical) planning and industrial might. The British and Indian units were about to learn their trade behind the mountain barriers along the Indian-Burma border which the Japanese had learnt several years earlier in China. The British-Indian army was unprepared for a war which they had hoped to avoid and which they could not afford to fight. The fact that so many survived and their subsequent success is a tribute to their quality and that of their supporting staff.

A military biography of Capt. R.E.S. Tanner. 223473

In order to ensure as much accuracy as possible in this history, Ralph Tanner asked for his personal details from the Army Records, expecting a page giving some dates and general information. Three months later he received some two hundred pages of documents relating to his military career from 4 September 1939 until leaving the regular army reserve of officers on 5 October 1971. It is a salutary reminder to those who write about their experiences half a century before that he could not remember many of the details recorded in these documents and had inaccurate memories of other parts. In such a comprehensive coverage largely dealing with his ill-health after the 1942 Burma campaign – on account of which he was repatriated in 1943 – it was strange that there was no note of his being Mentioned in Despatches in the London Gazette on 30 December 1941, in connection with the Layforce (Commando) operations in Crete following the German airborne invasion of the island. The formal citation hangs on his study wall.

On enlisting at the Artist Rifles depot in Dukes Road London on the Monday after war was declared, he was classed as an officer cadet as he had passed Certificate A at Rugby. Nothing, however, materialised from this enlistment. He then re-enlisted in North London on 25 May 1940 and was posted as a private to a battalion of the Queens Regiment in Aldershot. After an apparent mistaken posting to the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment in Bedford, he ended up as part of a Special Tank Hunting platoon in the Brock barracks depot of the Royal Berkshire Regiment in Reading on 28 September 1940, where he was put through an anti-tank course.

On volunteering for No. 3 Commando he was posted to Largs on 25 October 1940 and went through a Combined Operations course and later volunteered for foreign service with 8 Commando, leaving Britain on 31 December on HMS Glenroy. As batman to Evelyn Waugh – the novelist, then a Royal Marine captain acting as the Intelligence officer for the Commando Brigade – he took part in the Commando raid on Bardia on 15 March 1941. His military records show that he embarked on HMS Isis for Crete at Alexandria on 15 May 1941, which appears to be incorrect, as No. 8 Commando were sent to Crete after the German invasion had started on 20 May. He left Crete on HMS Abdiel on 1 June, the last Allied ship to leave the island. His Mention in Despatches was awarded for his action in delivering a message from Colonel Laycock, Commander Layforce, to the rearguard on the night of 31 May/1 June. As a result of the loss of so many men as POWs, the Middle East Commandos were disbanded and rather than going into a pool of infantry replacements for the Western Desert on 15 October 1941, Ralph Tanner volunteered to join a small party going to Burma. This party became part of Military Mission 204 destined for China, and were trained in demolitions at Maymyo, a north-eastern Burma hill station known as the Bush Warfare School.

The selective nature of memory – particularly in extreme and stressful situations – is exemplified by the fact that Ralph Tanner has no recollection of the moment or the process of his battlefield commission from a Private to a 2/Lieut. According to a cipher telegram to London he was commissioned as a 2/Lieut into the 2/KOYLI on 1 January 1942, a rather abrupt translation from private without having gone through any officer training course, after a single interview. He recalls his first duty as an officer as having to mount the depot guard. He then joined the Battalion’s headquarters for the second part of the Burma campaign and the retreat, falling sick with dysentery at Tamu just before the Battalion left Burma for good.

Then followed a long period in the tented 17th British General Hospital in Dehra Doon, after which he was posted to take an Intelligence course at Karachi and stayed on as an Instructor in Japanese tactics at the Far Eastern School