Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign (review)

The transformation of the Indian Army from the force badly defeated in Malaya and Burma in 1941-42 into the victorious Fourteenth Army that Sir William Slim led back to Rangoon in 1944-45 is not only a dramatic story in its own right, but a fascinating case study in institutional change under wartime pressures. Slim himself told the operational side of the tale in his memoir Defeat into Victory. As an author whose short stories had supplemented his pay during the interwar years, he knew better, however, than to inflict logistics, let alone recruitment, training, and doctrine, on his readers. The Official Histories covered logistics, but the story was still incomplete. How exactly was the Indian Army rebuilt? Daniel Marston has now provided the answer in a fine monograph, massively researched and clearly written.

When the war came, the Indian Army was not only just beginning to modernize its equipment, it was also haltingly coping with the process of "Indianization," the inclusion of Indians in its officer corps, the military counterpart to the expansion of Indian participation in governance mandated by Britain's 1919 and 1935 Government of India Acts. The strategic revolution of May-June 1940 then changed everything. Rapid expansion became the order of the day as the Indian Army became crucial to the defense of the British position in the Middle East. This, in turn, brought an accelerating dilution of quality, something all too apparent when Japan attacked, forcing the Indian Army into a war for which it was very poorly prepared. The hectic growth of 1940-42 did more, however. It changed the nature of "Indianization," because only Indians could provide officer cadets in sufficient numbers for a force that grew from under 200,000 to over 2,000,000. In 1939 there were 577 Indian commissioned officers; in 1945 there were nearly 16,000. Rank and file recruitment also changed dramatically as recruiters exhausted the manpower reserves of the traditional "martial classes" on which the army had depended since its reconstruction following the 1857 Mutiny. This forced the Indian Army to recruit much more widely than it had for over a century. The huge institutional restructuring necessary to cope with all this is Marston's subject. He approaches it by examining in detail twelve units, which he christens "Phoenix units," six from the prewar regular army and six wartime expansion units. As he meticulously tracks them through the war, it becomes clear just how defeat became victory. A coherent training system in tandem with a clear doctrine for fighting the Japanese were developed and both were continually updated by systematic feedback from the battlefield. By 1945 a quarter of the officers in the combat arms in Burma were Indian, many commanding British subordinates. Groups like the Madrassis, long excluded from the Army, had been reintegrated in it. Marston's research makes clear that the amount of racial tension between British and Indian officers generated by these sweeping changes was surprisingly low. This owed much to the leadership shown and tone set by a group of remarkable British senior officers—Auchinleck, the last and perhaps the greatest of the old Indian Army's commanders in chief, Major General Reginald Savory, who presided over the reshaping of infantry training, and, of course, Slim himself. All were Indian Army officers who understood that the way to victory lay only through fundamental change, and that victory was what mattered. Marston's excellent analysis of this process will henceforth be indispensible to students of both the Burma campaign and of the last stage of British rule in India.