Road of Bones. Fergal Keane

east the previous autumn to deter the Japanese, but he could gather no details apart from the fact that the voice on the wireless was referring to them in the past tense. It was only the following day that Foucar learned that more than eight hundred men had been killed, and British naval power humbled, when Japanese bombers sank the ships off the coast of Malaya.

      By the middle of December a Japanese force had crossed from Thailand and seized the strategically important Victoria Point airfield, vital to the RAF if it was to bring in reinforcements. Two days before Christmas 1941, with Hong Kong about to fall and Singapore threatened, Foucar was entering his office when somebody shouted out to look in the direction of Mingaladon airfield, to the north of the city. He saw bombers approaching, flying in a V-shaped formation – twenty-seven of them, pursued by a few British fighters.

The streets of Rangoon filled with crowds who cheered and clapped when they saw a bomber burst into flames and fall from the sky. But then the explosions began and thick smoke floated up from the centre of the city and the docks area. Shocked silence followed and then the sounds of terror, the screams of the dying and the noise of hundreds of feet stampeding along narrow streets. When the dead were counted there were more than 1,600 bodies, while many more were badly wounded.^* The city began to empty.

      Seventeen-year-old Donald Mellican was manning a Burma Auxiliary Force anti-aircraft position at Mingaladon airfield when it was attacked. Not a man among his crew knew the feeling of utter vulnerability that comes with being caught in the open by air attack, the sense of being like an insect racing for protection as giant boots come down to crush it, nor did they know the blinding panic of the sudden arrival of shells. A man under shellfire for the first time learns the ruthless capriciousness of shrapnel, how the tiniest sliver of scorching metal can bring death, and will come to dread the extravagant mutilations of flesh caused by close proximity to the shock waves of a blast. Mellican’s only experience of violence up until then had been the canings meted out at his school in Moulmein when boys were caught whistling at the girls playing hockey in the neighbouring academy. When the alarm was sounded at the airfield he assumed it was an exercise. Then, as the silver shapes in the sky came closer, he heard an officer shout to him to take cover. Bombs began to fall. After a few minutes of confusion Mellican climbed on to the anti-aircraft gun to shouts of ‘Traverse right’ and ‘Traverse left’, followed by ‘Fire!’. His fear left him as he blasted at the Japanese.

      The drama lasted for an hour and when the Japanese had gone Mellican looked around at a scene of carnage. There were fires and delayed explosions. Wounded men were crying out for help. One Bofors gun had taken a direct hit. Mellican was called out later that night to help remove the dead. ‘The bodies were mangled, heads, limbs sprawled all over, and even the gun was splashed with flesh and brains sticking on metal.’ They were all boys Mellican had known. An officer ordered that nobody was to leave until the mess had been cleaned up.

      ‘We made makeshift stretchers from bits of wood, e.g. damaged furniture and doors. “Have you got an arm or a leg?” calls were made and eventually we had six figures ready. I recognised only two of them, “F. B.” and “J. K.”’ Both were boys Mellican had known from his schooldays. As he helped carry a stretcher away it became tangled in a hedge. When he looked back he saw that the intestines of the dead boy had caught in the hedge and unravelled. With his hands he freed the spilling guts and placed them gently back under the blanket. That night he slept in a bunkhouse that was quiet with the shock of war.

The crisis was compounded by problems of command at every level. Brooke-Popham, the C-in-C Far East, whose responsibilities included Malaya, Singapore and Burma, succumbed to the pressure of events and was replaced. In late December a new commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell, was sent to establish the short-lived ABDACOM,^* a unified allied command based in Java, which was described by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, as a ‘wild and half-baked’ scheme. In the space of a few months, responsibility for operations in Burma shifted first to India, then to ABDACOM, and finally back to India. In Rangoon there was similar confusion. The GOC Burma, Lieutenant General D. K. McLeod, who had spent much of his life as a staff officer, was replaced on 27 December by Lieutenant General T. J. Hutton, who was himself sacked two months later. An Associated Press report from London had welcomed Hutton’s appointment and spoke of how ‘much has been done to strengthen the land forces which Lt. Gen. Hutton now takes over’. It was the propaganda of illusion, as the defenders would soon discover.

The Japanese launched their ground offensive from Thailand on 8 January. They sent two divisions against one and half British and Indian divisions.^† But it was the quality of troops and command, not the numbers, that really mattered. When General Hutton failed to stem the advance he was replaced, on 5 March, by General Harold Alexander, a favourite of Churchill’s, who acknowledged that never had he ‘taken the responsibility of sending a general on a more forlorn hope’.

      The official verdict on the failure to protect Burma would not emerge for another decade. But the conclusion was damning: ‘The effect that the loss of Rangoon would have on the British war effort was well known to the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and to all commanders in the Far East … Yet, despite the breathing space of six weeks between the outbreak of war and the start of the Japanese drive into southern Burma, no adequate steps were taken to build up the forces required … Burma still remained practically defenceless.’

      An Irish engineer, Professor W. H. Prendergast, working for the Indian Railways, was sent to Rangoon to see what help was needed by his counterparts on the Burma Railways, who were struggling to keep their locomotives running. ‘In the streets of this great thriving city nothing was to be seen but the scurrying jeeps, the criminals, the looters and the insane. No one was left except a small band of “Last Ditchers” and garrison troops who had volunteered to remain until the end.’ British troops and police shot looters. ‘Others, both soldiers and civilians, were punished by caning.’ The official history of the Indian Army described how ‘the deserted city and oil refineries and shattered storage tanks along the river presented an awe-inspiring spectacle as huge columns of flame leapt skyward beneath a vast canopy of smoke.’

      Prendergast witnessed the last train departing Rangoon steaming slowly away and noted how ‘behind it pathetically followed, the spaniels, the Airedales, the terriers, all the big and little pets with their appealing eyes saying “Surely you cannot abandon US”.’ He travelled from one bombed station to another, helping with repair work. One morning he found the bodies of eighteen people who had died from cholera during the night. The American war correspondent Clare Boothe described the destruction by fire of part of the ancient royal capital of Mandalay in a dispatch for Life magazine. ‘It was to me a smell not unfamiliar. I remember, one hot summer, when I was a child, a dog died under our veranda porch … It was that smell. But a thousand times magnified until it seemed, as we whirled through the streets, all creation stank of rotting flesh … Here and there on the side of the streets lay a charred and blackened form swaddled in bloody rags, all its human lineaments grotesquely foreshortened by that terrible etcher – fire.’

      Japanese air raids on the cities drove people into the countryside. Gripped by panic, the large Indian population of Burma, many of them labourers who worked in the mines or in the fields, headed towards the border with India. Some of the wealthier and more influential sought a passage by air or boat, but with limited space, and with priority given to whites, money was no guarantee of a seat. Nor was it always safe to attempt escape by air, as the Japanese enjoyed command of the skies. For the majority who set out on foot the journey meant navigating a mixture of terrain that exhausted even the strongest among them. The route north to safety lay over nine hundred miles of jungle, scrub, swamps and high mountain passes. It meant trying to ford raging rivers and struggling to gain a footing on liquid mud paths over mountains that rose to more than 8,000 feet.

The refugee columns were shadowed by flocks of vultures. The carrion-feeders settled in the trees over temporary camps or waited on the fringes of small groups whose members were