The Sittang Bridge disaster

In February 1942 the fate of the whole colony of Burma was decided in the south of the country. After the loss of Moulmein, the British 17th Indian Division tried to stop the Japanese first on the line of the Salween, then on the Bilin river, and finally fell back towards the only bridge over the Sittang river, beyond which lay the road to Rangoon. On the morning of 23 February, fearing that the bridge would fall into enemy hands intact, the divisional commander had it blown, although two of his three brigades were still on the eastern bank. The men who escaped swam the river or crossed on makeshift rafts, abandoning almost all their weapons. The division, the only substantial force between the Japanese and the capital, ceased for several weeks to exist as a fighting formation. General William Slim, who soon afterwards took command of the corps in Burma, later called the Battle of the Sittang the decisive battle of the first Burma campaign.

Chronologies record under 17 February that orders were issued to evacuate Rangoon in the face of the approaching Japanese, and under 20 February that the Japanese crossed the important Salween river. Both entries need to be made more precise. The Japanese had crossed the Salween much earlier: at Martaban, at the river’s mouth, around 10 February, and upstream near Pa-an on the night of 11–12 February. By around 20 February the fight for the road to the Sittang bridge was already under way, and the defeat was sealed when the bridge was blown on 23 February. The evacuation of Rangoon was a process: people had been fleeing the city since the air raids in December, and on 17 February the last crowded trains were still leaving for India, while the authorities announced the decision to send away the entire civilian population not needed for the city’s defence, according to most sources, on 20 February. The army itself did not leave Rangoon until 7 March.

The Salween line

The last units of the Moulmein garrison crossed the wide mouth of the Salween to Martaban on 31 January. The 17th Indian Division of Major General John Smyth, who had won the Victoria Cross in the First World War, was now to defend the western bank of the river along a stretch of several dozen kilometres. Smyth believed that his under-trained and incomplete brigades should withdraw behind the Sittang as quickly as possible, where the front would be short and the river wide, and give battle there. The commander of the forces in Burma, Lieutenant General Thomas Hutton, and his superior, the Supreme Commander of ABDA, General Archibald Wavell, saw things differently. Wavell, who had a low opinion of the Japanese army, demanded that every inch of ground be defended and whatever had been lost be regained. Visiting the troops on 6 February, he ordered the commanders to retake the lost ground. Smyth, moreover, was seriously ill, and the doctor who on 11 February recommended two months’ sick leave for him was soon taken prisoner; his superiors never learnt of the recommendation.

Lieutenant General Shōjirō Iida’s Japanese Fifteenth Army had two divisions: the 55th, which had taken Moulmein, and the 33rd, which was advancing through the hills further north. Once again the Japanese chose to outflank. Units of the 55th Division attacked Martaban, and its garrison, cut off from the road to its rear, withdrew around 10 February. On the night of 11–12 February the 215th Infantry Regiment of the 33rd Division crossed the Salween near Pa-an and attacked the village of Kuzeik on the western bank, held by three companies of the 7th Battalion, 10th Baluch Regiment. The young recruits from the Punjab and the North-West Frontier held out for several hours, largely in hand-to-hand fighting, but against odds of five to one they were overwhelmed; fewer than a third survived. The Salween line had ceased to exist, and Smyth’s division fell back through Thaton towards the next river.

The Battle of the Bilin

The Bilin, as Smyth later wrote, was at that time of year “only a ditch, but a good line of coordination”. The division took up positions along it around 14 February, reinforced by the newly arrived 48th Indian Brigade, made up of Gurkha battalions. For five days there was fierce close-quarter fighting in the jungle and on the rubber plantations. The Japanese, as in Malaya, did not attack frontally but infiltrated through the gaps between the overstretched battalions and emerged in their rear, while British counter-attacks regained ground only briefly. When the division was threatened with encirclement, Hutton came up from Rangoon and on 19 February allowed Smyth to withdraw behind the Sittang. On the night of 19–20 February the division broke contact and set off for the bridge, some 50 kilometres away.

The permission came too late. Smyth had long been asking to withdraw behind the Sittang, and the British official history later acknowledged that, given the importance of getting the division safely across the river, Hutton would have acted more wisely had he given him freedom of decision as soon as the Battle of the Bilin began. Meanwhile the Japanese, knowing that the bridge was the only crossing, sent two regiments of the 33rd Division, the 214th and 215th, straight through the jungle to reach it before the British.

Rangoon empties

At the same time life in Rangoon was breaking down. Since the December air raids tens of thousands of people had fled the city, above all Indians, who made up the majority of its inhabitants, ran its trade and worked in the port. Crowds waiting for ships to India thronged the quays, tickets were sold at extortionate prices, and those who could not afford them set off north on foot. Much of the police had abandoned their posts, and gangs of looters roamed the city. On 17 February the governor, Reginald Dorman-Smith, sent his daughters to Calcutta on one of the last trains; at every station the train was besieged by crowds of refugees trying to get into the carriages.

In view of the news from the Bilin, the civil and military authorities concluded that the city could not be held without fresh reinforcements. On 20 February it was announced that all inhabitants not needed for the defence and operation of the port were to leave Rangoon; martial law was declared, and vehicles essential for the defence were marked with a large letter “E”, while the rest were to be immobilised. The same day the governor sent his wife away. The release of more than a thousand prisoners and inmates of lunatic asylums who could no longer be fed caused outrage and served Dorman-Smith’s critics as proof of the administration’s incompetence. Soldiers of the Gloucestershire Regiment patrolled the streets with orders to shoot looters. On 23 February the last merchant ship for India left the port.

Huge stocks of supplies intended for China under Lend-Lease lay on the quays and in the warehouses of Rangoon, and Chiang Kai-shek’s new American chief of staff, General Joseph Stilwell, was just then on his way to Asia. Some of these supplies were moved north by lorry and rail in time, some were handed over to British troops, and the rest were destroyed before the city was abandoned. All the same, Rangoon was not yet lost: on 21 February the British 7th Armoured Brigade from the Middle East, equipped with American M3 Stuart light tanks, was unloaded in the port, and Wavell was counting on further reinforcements, including an Australian division returning from the Middle East.

The race for the bridge

The Sittang bridge was a long steel railway structure, adapted for road traffic, spanning the wide and fast-flowing river near its mouth in the Gulf of Martaban. A dusty road ran to it from Kyaikto through jungle and plantations. The division’s retreat on 20 and 21 February was a nightmare. The day was hot, the men were short of water, and columns of vehicles stood in traffic jams on the narrow road. On 21 February the columns were bombed and strafed from the air, according to British accounts also by aircraft of the RAF and the American Volunteer Group, which mistook them for the enemy. Many vehicles were destroyed and the troops suffered severe losses. On the night of 21–22 February a lorry got stuck on the bridge, blocking the crossing for several hours.

On the morning of 22 February the Japanese 215th Regiment emerged from the jungle onto the hills by the eastern end of the bridge and attacked it, overrunning a field hospital on the way. The bridgehead was held by a few hastily assembled units, among them men of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, and Smyth sent Gurkhas of the 48th Brigade there. Close-range fighting went on in the jungle all day; twice the bridge nearly fell into Japanese hands, but by evening it was still held by the British. Meanwhile the 16th and 46th Indian Brigades, at the tail of the column, were stuck a few kilometres from the river, cut off by the Japanese in the area of Mokpalin and the rubber plantation. Sappers of the Malerkotla company had already prepared the bridge for demolition.

The decision

On the night of 22–23 February the commander of the bridgehead defence, Brigadier Noel Hugh-Jones, reported that he could not guarantee to hold the bridge through the following day. Smyth faced a choice no commander would wish to make: blow the bridge and leave two of his brigades on the far side, or leave it standing and risk the Japanese crossing it straight to Rangoon. According to his later account, he concluded that, “difficult though it was, there was no doubt what was right”. At about 5.30 a.m. on 23 February the bridge was blown. One span fell into the river and the two adjacent spans were damaged.

The men fighting on the eastern bank heard the roar of the explosion and understood that they had been cut off. During the day thousands tried to get across by swimming, on planks, bamboo rafts and anything else that would float, some along ropes stretched beside the wrecked bridge. Many, especially those who could not swim, drowned in the fast current or were killed by Japanese fire. Most abandoned their weapons, and many threw off their boots to swim more easily. The Japanese did not set about finishing off the trapped units, because they were in a hurry to reach Rangoon; instead they moved north in search of another crossing.

According to British figures, after the battle the 17th Division had 3,484 men in its infantry battalions, just over 40 per cent of establishment, although it had already been seriously under strength before the battle. Most of its artillery, vehicles and heavy equipment had been lost, and so few small arms had been saved that the division had to be rearmed from scratch. The 16th and 46th Brigades had practically ceased to exist; the latter was never re-formed.

Changes in command

The disaster on the Sittang cost both generals who had argued over the withdrawal their posts. Even before the battle London and Wavell had lost confidence in Hutton, who was regarded as an excellent staff officer but not a field commander, and whose warnings about the possible loss of Rangoon were taken for defeatism. In the last days of February it was decided to send to Burma General Harold Alexander, who in 1940 had commanded the last British troops evacuated from Dunkirk; Hutton was to become his chief of staff. On 28 February Wavell dressed Hutton down in front of witnesses, and the next day he removed the sick Smyth, who was replaced by his chief of staff, Brigadier David Cowan. Smyth never again received an operational appointment and retired with the rank of colonel; for years he fought to clear his name, pointing out that he had asked to withdraw behind the Sittang ten days earlier and been refused. Alexander took command on 5 March.

Place in the war

Blowing the bridge delayed the Japanese by a few days at most, and it deprived the British of an army capable of defending Rangoon. The historian Louis Allen wrote that once the bridge was gone and the 17th Division had lost its fighting capacity, the road to Rangoon lay open and the fate of Burma was sealed. Alexander still tried to counter-attack at Pegu, but soon concluded that the city could not be held. On 7 March the British demolished the port installations and the oil terminal and abandoned burning Rangoon, and on 8 March the Japanese entered it. The British, Indian and Burmese troops, and with them the Chinese armies sent by Chiang Kai-shek to defend the Burma Road, thereafter retreated northwards until in May 1942 their remnants reached India and Yunnan.

The defeat came only eight days after the surrender of Singapore and was seen in London as further proof that the imperial army did not know how to fight the Japanese in the jungle. Lessons were learnt slowly. The 17th Indian Division, rebuilt and rearmed, went on to fight in Burma almost without a break until the summer of 1944, and under Cowan’s command, in Slim’s Fourteenth Army, it played an important part in the defence of Imphal and in the victorious campaign of 1945. On the Sittang the war came full circle: in the summer of 1945, on its banks, British and Indian units destroyed the last Japanese forces trying to break out of Burma to the east.