In Reporting the Retreat: War Correspondents in Burma, Philip Woods has taken on the experiences of the twenty-six international correspondents who wrote about the Burma Retreat (the First Burma Campaign), which occurred in the first five months of 1942 as Japanese armies crossed the southeastern borders of Burma and pushed British and Commonwealth forces north all the way to India. By contrast to the humiliating defeat of Singapore that February, in which 100,000 Allied troops were surrendered to a much smaller Japanese force, the retreat in Burma was militarily more of a Dunkirk in an Asian setting. Admittedly, for the civilians involved it was one of the great human tragedies of the war.
The prolonged nature of the retreat, both in terms of time and geographical space, provided significant room for correspondents to shape the narrative about what had occurred. Nevertheless, most historiography on the campaign has fixated on military memoirs by some of the legends who emerged from the war, including British Field Marshal William Slim, whose Defeat into Victory (1956) has probably played the biggest role in shaping public opinion on the war in Burma, or on the official histories produced in Britain in the 1950s and by the US Army (whose officers were also involved in this campaign, aiding China, and led by “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell) shortly afterwards. The depiction of the civilian experience was largely the reserve of personal accounts that had little impact on the main historiography until a recent book by Michael Leigh, The Evacuation of Civilians from Burma (2014), redirected attention to the role of the civilian evacuation officers and evacuees. Both military and civil administrative personnel involved in Burma at the time were highly critical of journalistic accounts, which were generally dismissed as sensationalist, inaccurate, or self-serving. Woods, who mobilizes Wilfred Burchett's characterization of the journalistic accounts as the “first draft of history” (xvii–xx), insists on the value of this archive. He demonstrates that journalists struggled with a great range of obstacles that hindered their ability to report events accurately, including everything from being prevented access to the front to receiving pressure from editors to get their story out as quickly as possible, before their competitors—all this in addition to the inevitable practical problems of knowing what was happening in the midst of a fast-moving retreat over a great area. Newsreel cameramen (chapter 6) faced special constraints in this regard, given the technical necessities of their coverage, which sometimes required them to film reenactments of actions or training activities they then passed off as real battle coverage (89).
Woods's introduction, conclusion, and nine chapters exhaustively reveal the nuances of journalistic reporting during the campaign. The topics he covers weave together points on which journalistic accounts intersect, such as depictions of the role played by the governor of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, in the retreat, and the context in which the journalists themselves arrived and worked. One of the more important topics that other researchers will want to note was the role of the Services Public Relations Organisation in January and February 1942 (Rangoon, the colonial capital, fell in the first week of March). This office played a significant role in censoring reporting on the campaign. Also of special interest will be the discussion of the publication of the account of one journalist, Alfred Wagg, as it was sympathetic to the civilian government's role. The present volume is also one of the only studies of the retreat to focus attention on the role of women in any capacity. What may prove controversial is Woods's assertion that journalistic claims of Burmese fifth column activities during the campaign were not exaggerated as claimed by the colonial government (109–11). The evidence is somewhat more debatable than Woods suggests, whether or not most Burmese were in fact unwilling to support the British defense.
Woods convincingly shows that once the context in which the journalists reported the retreat is properly considered, their accounts do have significant value for historical research. This value might have been increased had most journalists accompanied the refugees on the trek out of Burma, although a small number (six) did so and have left extremely valuable accounts. As Woods observes in his conclusion, these “correspondents were not just onlookers but participants” in this campaign (146). Their accounts should thus be treated as primary source materials like others, and while caution should be exerted and context considered, this is no more the case with these accounts than with any other kind of source material.
We are in the midst of a major turn in the historiography on the experience of World War II in South and Southeast Asia, as attention shifts increasingly from military accounts of the battlefield to the civil administrative and civilian experiences of the fighting. Some of this work has been done on Singapore's fall, including Ronald McCrum's recent book on the civilian administration's role in Singapore's defense (The Men Who Lost Singapore, 2017). Burma has been particularly important, however, in demonstrating the role that civilians played in the period and in shaping the global perceptions of events in this “forgotten” sector of World War II. The present volume has made an important contribution to this shift and will find a large audience not only in academia, but in the popular military history audience as well.
