Stilwell's walk out of Burma

On the morning of 6 May 1942, in a forest near Indaw, a small railway station in northern Burma, Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell gathered a group of more than a hundred people around him and briefly explained what lay ahead. India was several hundred kilometres away across jungle, rivers and mountains, the Japanese were close on their heels, and the monsoon was due in a few weeks. Anyone who wanted to survive would have to keep up the pace, carry little and obey orders. That day the 59-year-old general, chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek and nominal commander of the Chinese armies in Burma, sent his last radio message, had the radio set destroyed and led his group west. Fourteen days later, on 20 May, he reached Imphal in India without having lost a single person on the way. The march, later called the “Stilwell Walkout”, became one of the few pieces of good news from the lost Burma campaign, but also the start of a long dispute over whether the general had abandoned the troops he was supposed to command.

Burma in disarray

By the end of April 1942 the Burma campaign was lost. The Japanese 56th Division, advancing through the Shan States, had routed the Chinese 6th Army and on 29 April taken Lashio, cutting the Burma Road. On the night of 30 April/1 May the British blew up the Ava Bridge over the Irrawaddy, and on 1 May the Japanese entered Mandalay. The commander of British forces in Burma, General Harold Alexander, was withdrawing his corps towards the Chindwin and India. The Chinese divisions that Stilwell was supposed to command were scattering in different directions, often on orders from Chongqing of which he himself knew nothing.

Stilwell, sent to Asia in February as Chiang’s chief of staff, hoped to the last that at least northern Burma could be held. His plan was to make for Myitkyina, whose airfield was still operating: from there he wanted to fly out the sick and most of the Americans, while he himself stayed with the Chinese with a small staff and organised a base in the Hukawng Valley for a future counter-offensive. On 30 April, however, he noted in his diary: “Immediate danger of disintegration and collapse.” On 1 May Colonel Caleb Haynes’s aircraft landed at Shwebo and took part of the staff to Calcutta; Stilwell did not go with it. According to his biographers he also turned down an offer of evacuation by air, believing that a general could not fly out and leave his men behind. He set off north by car along the railway from Mandalay to Myitkyina, through Ziggon and Pintha.

On the evening of 3 May his column reached Wuntho. There, as more Americans joined him, Stilwell wrote: “It is now clear that we can no longer be of any use. I have decided to take our people out.” This decision, which chronologies associate with 3 May, did not yet settle the route. The general was still thinking of Myitkyina and of the stretch of railway to Mogaung.

From Wuntho to Indaw

On 4 May everything began to fall apart. Stilwell noted: “Disintegration at Shwebo… Japs coming up the Chindwin. Civil war conditions again. Chinese out of control.” His railway officer, Captain Paul Jones, who was to find a train to go north, reported that the line was hopelessly blocked by wrecked locomotives and wagons. That day Stilwell informed the War Department that the Chinese were losing control of their own troops and collapse seemed imminent: he would try to reach Myitkyina and, if that failed, would go west to Imphal.

Some war chronologies record under 4 May that “Howell with his party of 114 people, mostly Americans” set out for India. This is a misunderstanding. The group that eventually numbered 114 was Stilwell’s own, and no commander named Howell appears in the participants’ accounts. Nor was it mostly American: fewer than half of its members were Americans. It is true, however, that some participants, such as Jones, dated “Stilwell’s retreat” from 4 May, when the last aircraft left Burma and the column began to make its own way north (other accounts date that flight to 1 May).

On 5 May the column toiled along sandy tracks and across fords towards Indaw. The lorries sank into the sand, a British car got stuck in one of the fords, and from behind came a wave of Chinese soldiers who, as Stilwell wrote, “went through us like Red Grange”, the famous American footballer. The general decided that the lorries, constantly bogged down in the ruts, were slowing the march rather than speeding it up, and ordered them abandoned. He kept only the jeeps, which coped better. Near Indaw, crowded with soldiers and refugees, he learned that the railway was blocked north and south of the station and that the Japanese were already at Bhamo (Banmaw), a step away from Myitkyina (they took it on 8 May). According to the US official history, it was on 5 May that Stilwell finally gave up the road to Myitkyina and decided to go due west, across the Chindwin, to India. The British advised him against the route through Homalin, pointing to the road through Sittaung and Tamu as easier, but Stilwell judged it too exposed to Japanese patrols and chose the northern route, harder but safer.

“Disaster quite possible”

The group that set out from near Indaw on 6 May was remarkably mixed. It consisted of 26 US Army soldiers, mostly staff officers, 15 Britons and 14 Chinese soldiers of the general’s personal guard. The largest contingent was the field hospital of the American medical missionary Gordon Seagrave, the “Burma Surgeon”, who had for years run a Baptist hospital at Namhkam near the Chinese border, together with 19 young nurses from various peoples of Burma. There was also a small Quaker ambulance unit, cooks, mechanics and a few civilians, among them the Time and Life correspondent Jack Belden and the Baptist missionary Breedom Case, who knew the languages of the hill peoples and negotiated with the villages for porters.

In the morning Stilwell gave them a short talk. Everyone was to understand that from now on the group would move together, that nobody would be left behind and that there was food for a few days. Everyone except the drivers of the eleven jeeps carrying supplies and the sick went on foot through the villages of Mansi and Magyigan, away from the crowded refugee road. That same day the last message went out over the heavy radio set, which could only be carried by vehicle, to General Lewis Brereton, commander of American air forces in India. Stilwell reported that he was heading for Homalin and Imphal with a party of a hundred and hoped to reach Homalin on 10 May; he asked, if possible, for porters to bring five hundred pounds of food from Imphal to meet them at Homalin; the Government of India, he said, must be warned that rice, police and doctors were urgently needed by refugees on all the roads from Burma to India, where great numbers were on the move. The signal ended: “All control lost. Disaster quite possible. End.” Then the radio was destroyed. From that moment nobody in the world knew where Stilwell was; reports even appeared in the American press that he was missing.

By a stroke of luck the group had come across a Chinese mule train returning empty from India the previous day and had simply requisitioned it. The British forestry officers guiding the column also recruited some sixty local porters.

The Stilwell step

The jeeps went as far as the tracks allowed and then had to be abandoned; chronologies record that this happened on 7 May. From then on everyone walked. Stilwell, then 59, led the column himself in an old campaign hat. He decided that the best course was to impose the US Army’s regulation pace of 105 steps a minute, which both the fit and the weaker could manage; they marched for 50 minutes, with a ten-minute rest every hour. Participants later called it the “Stilwell step”. The general calculated that to beat the monsoon and the Japanese the group had to cover at least 14 miles, about 22 kilometres, a day.

The first day of real marching was the worst. The column walked down the middle of the shallow Chaunggyi stream, because the banks were overgrown with impenetrable vegetation. In the midday heat men collapsed from exhaustion and heatstroke. Colonel William Holcombe was revived with smelling salts, and Major Frank Merrill, Stilwell’s liaison officer, fell face down in the undergrowth on the bank; unconscious, he was towed on downstream on an air mattress. Stilwell wrote that evening: “Christ, but we’re a sorry lot.” He ordered that nobody should carry more than ten pounds, about four and a half kilograms, of baggage, and at the request of his doctor, Colonel Robert Williams, agreed not to march in the hottest hours of the day. Rations consisted of porridge, rice, corned beef and tea.

On 8 May Japanese bombers flew over the column and the men scattered to take cover. That same day the Japanese took Myitkyina, closing the last road north, which Stilwell had still been considering a few days earlier. On 9 May the general noted that the group was “gradually getting disciplined”. Anyone who dropped from exhaustion was picked up by the doctors, put on a mule and brought to the others at the next halt. Seagrave’s nurses, who despite everything sang hymns on the march, such as “Onward, Christian Soldiers”, and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, were later remembered as the toughest part of the group.

By raft down the Uyu and across the Chindwin

Late in the afternoon of 9 May the column reached the village of Maingkaing on the Uyu River, a tributary of the Chindwin. Stilwell hoped to continue by raft as far as the neighbourhood of Homalin and give the men a rest from marching. The village headman, forewarned by men sent ahead, had however prepared only a few rafts; according to some accounts there were at first only four small ones, which is why the preparations and the passage took the better part of two days. On the morning of 10 May the group set off downstream in five parties, on rafts of bamboo and creepers lashed together in threes and roofed with leaves. The trip proved hard work: the rafts had to be poled along the sluggish river in the heat, and every so often the men had to jump into the water to push them off sandbanks, and in time they began to fall apart. The mules and porters went along the bank under the Chinese guard and Lieutenant Eugene Laybourn.

On 11 May it began to rain, the first herald of the monsoon. On the river a British aircraft flew low over the group, turned back and dropped packages of food on a sandbank. It was the first sign that someone in India had received Stilwell’s messages. On 12 May the group reached Homalin on the Chindwin and found the town abandoned by the British officials and most of its inhabitants; there was neither the promised food nor any news of the Japanese. That day General George Marshall cabled Stilwell that the President, the Secretary of War and the whole War Department were “full of admiration” for the courage with which he was facing the dangers; the message reached him only on 20 May in Imphal.

On 13 May the group crossed the Chindwin, the last great water obstacle on the way to India. The river was wide and swollen, and there were no boats. According to the account of Stilwell’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Dorn, as the general stood on the bank five dugout canoes and a cargo boat came round the bend, and a guide of the Kachin (Jingpo) people called the boatmen over. The people were ferried across to the west bank in batches, and the mules swam. It was just in time: according to Dorn a Japanese cavalry detachment entered Homalin less than a day and a half after the group left, according to other accounts the day after the crossing.

In the Naga Hills

Beyond the Chindwin the group was probably safe from the Japanese, but ahead lay the hardest part of the journey: steep, forested mountains on the border of Burma and India, inhabited by the Nagas, with passes more than two thousand metres high. Seagrave claimed that only six people had reached India by that path before them.

On the afternoon of 14 May, after a long climb, the column reached the village of Kawlum. There a relief expedition was waiting for it, led from Imphal by the British colonial official Tim Sharpe. Stilwell wrote gratefully: “Food, doctor, ponies and everything. Quite a relief, though we could have made it on our own.” From then on the sick and the weakest could ride ponies. Village headmen came out to meet the general with rice beer, and in one village they presented him with a goat; Stilwell, normally a non-drinker, took a liking to the drink and praised the Naga porters as “handsome and tough, cheerful and friendly”.

On 15 May the group crossed the Indian border into the princely state of Manipur. On 18 May, in the large village of Ukhrul, which Stilwell compared to the Philippine resort of Baguio, a detachment of the Assam Rifles, the paramilitary force guarding the north-eastern frontier of India, ceremonially rendered the general military honours. The soldiers, however, had no motor transport at all: the nearest road that lorries could use was still a day’s march further on, and there were as yet no jeeps in that part of India. On 19 May, after a march of about 21 miles (more than 30 kilometres), the group reached the roadhead at Litan. Two American officers were waiting there with news of the war, chocolate, cigarettes and whisky. The monsoon rains had already broken.

Imphal

The last stretch, from Litan to Imphal, the group covered by lorry, but the first dozen or so miles meant pushing and hauling the vehicles out of deep mud. On the afternoon of 20 May Stilwell drove into Imphal, full of craters from recent Japanese air raids. There he disbanded his group. All 114 people reached their destination (some studies give 117), though several had to be taken straight to hospital. Stilwell himself had lost at least 11 kilograms, had a cold and, as it later turned out, was suffering from jaundice. Major Merrill, who after collapsing on 7 May had carried on with the others, is said in some accounts to have suffered a mild heart attack during the march; his biographers, however, date his first documented heart attack to March 1944, during the fighting in northern Burma.

That same day the last units of the British Burma Corps reached Imphal and the Manipur plain, and command over them passed to IV Corps in India. The Japanese, halted by the monsoon and by their own orders, did not pursue beyond the Chindwin area.

According to the most commonly cited estimates, Stilwell’s group covered about 140 miles on foot in all, not counting the raft journey and the stretches travelled by vehicle. In the same period thousands of Chinese soldiers and thousands of refugees, by some estimates tens of thousands, were dying on other roads out of Burma from hunger, malaria and dysentery. Against that background, bringing out a group of a hundred, with nurses, sick men and civilians, without loss was a feat owed above all to the general’s iron will, to the reserves of cash with which food and services were bought, and to the doctors in the group.

Place in the war

From Imphal Stilwell went to Tinsukia in Assam, where he met Brereton, Alexander and the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Archibald Wavell, and from there flew to New Delhi. At a press conference, which according to some sources he called on the evening of 24 May and according to others on 25 May, he said words that went round the world: “I claim we got a hell of a beating.” They had been run out of Burma, he went on, it was humiliating, and they ought to find out why it had happened, go back and retake it. Americans, used to communiqués about “planned withdrawals”, welcomed this frankness, and the march through the jungle made Stilwell one of the first popular heroes of the war.

In Chongqing it was seen differently. The War Department approved Stilwell’s walk out to India, regarding it as part of his plan to train Chinese troops, but Chiang Kai-shek considered that his chief of staff had left the army when it needed him most. Stilwell, for his part, blamed the defeat on the Chinese generals, who obeyed him only when Chiang confirmed the order, and on the Generalissimo himself. This rift poisoned their cooperation until Stilwell’s recall in 1944. Of the Chinese forces in Burma, only Sun Liren’s 38th Division reached India intact; the 22nd Division and the remnants of others, which went through the Hukawng Valley, lost thousands of men on the way.

From these soldiers Stilwell created a centre at Ramgarh in India, where the Americans trained and equipped Chinese divisions. They were to retake northern Burma and open a new land route to China, from Ledo in Assam to the old Burma Road. Until then China was supplied solely by air over the Himalayas, along the route known as “the Hump”. In 1944 Frank Merrill commanded an American long-range unit known as Merrill’s Marauders, which in May of that year, together with the Chinese, seized the airfield at Myitkyina, the town Stilwell had failed to reach in 1942. The 1942 march itself remained in memory as a symbol of the character of “Vinegar Joe”: stubborn, hard on himself and others, and at the same time a commander who refused to fly out and leave his men behind.