Long Hike

RETREAT WITH STILWELL--Jack Belden --Knopf ($3).

For 33-year-old TIME Correspondent Jack Belden, Burma was not just a politico-military tragedy. It was also a fantastic personal adventure, a dream, a series of violent, sick, hot, ruinous and sensuous images. He crowds them into a dynamic account of the Burmese ordeal.

Under the Lorry. On the road retreating from Magwe, Belden listened to General Bruce Scott speaking pensively between sips of soup: "What is war? Who is the enemy? What is he? We can only grasp at the shape of the antagonist before us, and then when you think you've solved the mystery of his personality, he vanishes into thin air like a jinni. . . . What makes me cross is that by evening he knows exactly where we are, but we don't know where he is 'or what he's up to."

At a stream called the Pin Chaung, Belden was trapped with Imperial troops by a road block and then encirclement.

Fear, exhaustion and thirst sickened him. His ankles were swollen to twice normal size, his legs suffered cramps. "I shamelessly got down on my belly and wiggled my way under a lorry, not caring that I was lying in a mess of dirt and oil and blood. A wounded and emaciated Indian soldier, more exhausted than I, crawled under beside me and with the eyes of a stricken animal gazed at me, crying softly: Tani, pani.' But of course I had not a drop of water to offer him." The troops attacked for three whole days until they broke the encirclement.

Soon began the famous retreat with Stilwell (TIME, June 1). It was a strange group--26 Americans, 13 British, 16 Chinese, two doctors, seven Quaker ambulance drivers, 19 Kachin, Karen and Burmese nurses, and an assortment of some 30 servants and refugees. They went first by motor transport into a jungle. Their path crossed elephant trails until they came to a chasm bridged only by a rope suspension which could carry nothing heavier than jeeps. (Belden had one.) General Stilwell ordered everyone to strip unnecessary paraphernalia so as to be able to walk. In the weeds a pile of elegant rubbish grew--steel helmets, pink brassieres, whiskey bottles, tins of powder, notebooks, overcoats, rich Mandalay silks.

Under the Ferns. Near Homalin the party left their rafts and began the hike which was to take them to the Chindwin River and over the harsh border mountains to India. The homespun, bowlegged general slogged along with his eye obstinately on his watch, counting out 105 steps to the minute. Cases of malaria cropped out. Faces grew thin. Pus-filled jungle sores broke out on legs and feet. Men stopped joking. They were in the jungle: "Festooned with giant green ferns, decorated with palms such as we had thought grew only in hotel lobbies, and laced and hung with thick lianas that dangled to the ground from heights of 50 feet, braided like Medusa's locks. . . ."

They climbed and climbed. Fourteen days after they had left Shwebo, they reached a mountain village of thatched huts. There they were met by a white man sent by the general commanding supply and transport in the Assam-Bengal area. They were safe, but somehow depressed. Rain fell. In one of the thatched huts the girls sat around an open fire. A voice called: "Jack, Jack, come to sleep."

The first step in the defeat of Japan may well be the recapture of Burma, for there lie the natural supply lines to China. Burma will not be a pushover. Belden's book proves that.

Burma fell, says Belden, for three reasons, which had their bases in three states of mind:

Thin Spots. The first reason was partly military, partly political. "At the start of the war," says Belden, "the Burma defense forces consisted of the First Burma Division and the 17th Division. . . . With such a small force, concentration was indicated. . . . The British were not drawn together as an army, but were scattered about the country like gendarme forces, waiting to be struck one by one and beaten." The civil servants of Empire could not get out of their heads 1) the necessity of defending every town, 2) the idea of an army as a force to quell local disturbances.

Short Lines. The second reason for the fall of Burma was purely military. The British thought of defense in terms of short lines defending successive cities. They set up such a line at Moulmein. The Japanese outflanked it. The same thing happened at Thaton, at Bilin, at Mokpalin, at the Sittang River, at Waw, Pegu, Rangoon.

Blind Men. The third and most important reason was political. The British did not ask for Chinese help until it was too late, never commanded Burmese loyalty.

Early in the war, Chiang Kai-shek had graciously accepted an "appointment" as commander in chief of the China-Indo-China-Thailand theater. As soon as war broke out, the Generalissimo offered Wavell Chinese troops. For some reason his two armies (about 27,000 men) were delayed on Chinese soil until Rangoon was just about captured. Chinese troops were never able to get into effective positions.

But the real British vulnerability was blindness to Burmese feelings. "To the heart-stirring Japanese slogans of: 'Free Burma,' 'Strike for your independence,' 'Down with the British,' 'Asia for the Asiatics,' the colony of Burma opposed mouse-stirring appeals for Loyalty and Law and Order. ... By adopting a negative policy of repression and anti-fifth-column work instead of adopting a positive policy for the unleashing of the energies of the people against the invader, the British authorities, and in fact all members of the United Nations responsible for fixing policies, sealed the doom of the Allied Armies in Burma'."

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