Mountbatten takes command in South-East Asia

At the beginning of October 1943 Lord Louis Mountbatten, until then Chief of Combined Operations and now an acting admiral, left England to take up the post of Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia in India. The new command, known by the abbreviation SEAC (South East Asia Command), was to take over the direction of the war against Japan in the area stretching from India to Malaya and Sumatra – on a front that, since the defeat in Burma in 1942, had been regarded as the most neglected and least successful theatre of the British Empire’s war.

Some chronologies record under 3 October that Winston Churchill appointed Mountbatten commander of SEAC on that day. The date needs explaining. The decision to create the command and on who should lead it was taken in August at the Quebec Conference, and the appointment was announced publicly on 25 August 1943. By the beginning of October Mountbatten was already on his way: according to some sources he flew out of Northolt airfield near London on 2 October and reached Delhi on 6 or 7 October (sources differ by a day). For several more weeks the command existed mainly on paper – it formally assumed operational control in Delhi at midnight on 15–16 November 1943. The date of 3 October thus corresponds to the moment when the new commander was travelling to his post, not to the act of appointment.

Why a new command

Until 1943 the war on the India–Burma border came under the Commander-in-Chief in India. After the break-up of ABDA command in February 1942 and the loss of Burma, the whole responsibility fell on General Archibald Wavell, who as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army had at the same time to defend the frontier, keep order in a country shaken by the “Quit India” movement and train new divisions. The first offensives brought no success. The advance in Arakan in the winter of 1942–1943 ended in the spring with a retreat to the starting positions, and the first Chindit expedition of Brigadier Orde Wingate, though it raised morale and attracted publicity, cost heavy losses and did not change the strategic situation.

The Americans judged British efforts in Burma harshly. For Washington the priority was to keep Chiang Kai-shek’s China in the war and to open an overland supply route from India through northern Burma. The British, committed above all in Europe and the Mediterranean, saw no point in a costly jungle campaign and thought rather of seaborne landings on Sumatra or in Malaya. At the Trident Conference in May 1943, and finally at Quebec in August, a compromise was agreed: the war against Japan in the region was removed from the remit of the command in India and entrusted to a new, inter-Allied command on the model of the one Dwight Eisenhower led in the Mediterranean. The supreme commander was to be British and his deputy American. In June 1943 Wavell was appointed Viceroy of India, and General Claude Auchinleck became Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army for the second time; from then on his role was to run the rear base: training, supply and the expansion of bases for the forces under SEAC.

Why Mountbatten

The search for a commander went on for weeks. Several senior British commanders were considered, but no candidate won the approval of both sides – according to some accounts the Americans objected, among others, to Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas. In the end Churchill proposed the 43-year-old Mountbatten at Quebec, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the American Chiefs of Staff agreed. With the appointment Mountbatten received the temporary rank of full admiral, although his substantive naval rank was only that of captain.

Several things spoke in his favour. Mountbatten, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and a cousin of the King, was a favourite of the Prime Minister, and as head of Combined Operations Headquarters since October 1941 he had sat on the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and worked with the Americans on planning landings. His staff had prepared the successful Bruneval raid in February 1942 and the St Nazaire raid in March of that year. Mountbatten also had a reputation as an energetic man, open to technical innovation and good at winning people over – and Churchill wanted the war in Asia to gain fresh momentum and hoped that a commander who specialised in amphibious operations would take up his favourite plans for strikes from the sea.

Against him counted above all his past as a planner of the Dieppe Raid of August 1942, which ended in a bloody defeat, chiefly for the Canadians. Mountbatten later maintained that the lessons of Dieppe saved thousands of lives in Normandy; many historians, among them Major General Julian Thompson, have replied that such a catastrophe was not needed to draw those conclusions, and in Canada his part in the affair remained a source of lasting resentment. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, doubted whether this 43-year-old naval officer could cope with commanding an entire theatre of war, and the new commander was given a highly experienced chief of staff: General Henry Pownall, a seasoned staff officer who in 1940 had been chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force in France.

Stilwell and the command structure

The deputy supreme commander was General Joseph Stilwell. That single appointment alone showed how complicated the new arrangement was. Stilwell was at the same time chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek as supreme commander of the Allied China theatre, commander of all American forces in China, Burma and India (the CBI theatre) and administrator of American Lend-Lease aid to China. He was thus answerable to three superiors at once – Mountbatten, the Generalissimo and Washington. The Chinese divisions under his command, trained at Ramgarh and intended to advance into northern Burma, came directly under Mountbatten, because Stilwell refused to serve under a British land forces commander.

Under Mountbatten were the commanders of the individual services: Admiral James Somerville as commander of the Eastern Fleet, Air Chief Marshal Richard Peirse as Allied air commander-in-chief, and General George Giffard, commander of 11th Army Group, to whom the British and Indian troops were subordinate. In October 1943 the troops on the Burmese frontier were formed into the Fourteenth Army, under the command of General William Slim – it was this army that would bear the main burden of the fighting over the next two years. SEAC’s area of operations covered Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, Siam and Sumatra. India was its base, but the administration, the rear services and the Indian Army remained in the hands of the Viceroy and Auchinleck, which led to numerous demarcation disputes, although both generals co-operated loyally with Mountbatten.

Tasks

The directives from Quebec set SEAC several goals at once. The most urgent, from the American point of view, was to maintain and expand the airlift to China over the Himalayas, known to the airmen as “the Hump”, which since the loss of the Burma Road had carried almost all the supplies for Chiang Kai-shek and the American air force in China. The second was an offensive in northern Burma to cover the building of the Ledo Road from Assam to the old Burma Road. The third was operations behind Japanese lines: the Quebec Conference approved the expansion of Wingate’s long-range penetration units, and the Americans formed their own unit of this kind, later known as “Merrill’s Marauders”, together with an air group to supply them and evacuate the wounded. On top of this came a renewed advance in Arakan and, in the longer term, amphibious operations against the Andamans, Sumatra or the Burmese coast, in which Churchill and Mountbatten himself were particularly interested.

The problem was that there were not enough resources for any of these tasks. The “Germany first” strategy meant that landing craft, transport aircraft and crack divisions went above all to Europe and the Pacific. The troops in India suffered from malaria and tropical diseases, which put more soldiers out of action than the Japanese did, and their morale was low after a string of defeats. In the autumn of 1943 the Bengal famine was also raging behind the front; by various estimates it claimed most commonly some 2 to 3 million lives, and it strained the same transport network the army relied on.

Friction with the Americans

The joint command did not remove the divergence of interests; it merely exposed it. The Americans saw Burma as the road to China, the British as a lost territory of the Empire that had to be recovered, preferably together with Malaya and Singapore. In American military circles a spiteful reading of the abbreviation SEAC quickly spread: “Save England’s Asian Colonies”, while the State Department tried to keep its political distance from British post-war plans. Stilwell, by nature distrustful of the British, mocked Mountbatten’s lavish style in his private notes, although in the first months the two men maintained correct and at times even cordial relations.

Paradoxically, one of Mountbatten’s first tasks turned out to be defending his American deputy. When he arrived in Chongqing in mid-October he found a crisis there, caused by Chiang Kai-shek’s demand that Stilwell be recalled. Mountbatten’s statement that he did not want to take over Chinese troops whose commander was being removed just before an offensive helped bring about the Generalissimo’s withdrawal of his demand on 17 October.

The first weeks

Mountbatten began with matters that called for energy rather than great resources. He concentrated on fighting malaria and on field hospitals just behind the front line, so that the sick would not have to travel hundreds of kilometres to the rear. He rejected the previous practice of suspending operations during the monsoon, reasoning that if the Japanese fought in the rainy season, the Allies had to do so too. He pressed for better supplies for the soldiers, who bitterly called themselves the “Forgotten Army”, launched a newspaper of their own, SEAC, and toured the units, addressing the troops from an ammunition box. His style – personal charm, flair and a keen eye for publicity – won some over and irritated others.

His wife, Edwina Mountbatten, known at home as Lady Louis, played an important part. As Superintendent-in-Chief of the St John Ambulance Brigade she looked after the wounded and sick during the war, and in the following years she visited hospitals behind the Burma front. After Japan’s surrender in 1945 she toured prisoner-of-war camps in South-East Asia, organising relief and the evacuation of exhausted prisoners and internees, which earned her widespread recognition.

The new command did not have to wait long for its first strategic test. At the conferences in Cairo and Tehran in November and December 1943 the Allies promised Chiang Kai-shek a landing in the Bay of Bengal, but soon cancelled it because the landing craft were needed in Europe. Mountbatten’s and Churchill’s ambitious naval plans had to be shelved, and SEAC remained a theatre of land war, fought in jungle and mountains with modest means.

Significance

The creation of SEAC and Mountbatten’s arrival marked a turning point in organisation and morale rather than in the military situation – but a real turning point nonetheless. In 1944 the Japanese struck at India in Operation U-Go and were routed in the battles of Imphal and Kohima, which became the Japanese army’s greatest defeat on land in the war. The second Chindit expedition, during which Wingate was killed, tied down Japanese forces in the rear, and Stilwell’s troops took Myitkyina in August 1944. In April 1944 SEAC headquarters moved from Delhi to Kandy in Ceylon. In October 1944 Stilwell was recalled and his functions were divided among three generals.

In 1944–1945 Slim’s Fourteenth Army reconquered Burma, and in May 1945 the Allies took Rangoon. On 12 September 1945 in Singapore Mountbatten accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces in South-East Asia, signed by General Seishirō Itagaki. After the war SEAC’s area was enlarged to include Java, Borneo and southern Indochina, and the command, instead of fighting, had to disarm the Japanese, rescue prisoners and restore colonial rule amid growing national movements – in Indonesia and Vietnam this led to fighting. SEAC was dissolved in 1946. The experience gained in Asia and his reputation as a politician sympathetic to national movements meant that in 1947 Mountbatten returned to Delhi as the last Viceroy of India.