Tell Them of Us - The British in Burma, 1941-5

[Flying Pig]

Tell Them of Us - The British Army in Burma 1941-5 ​

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Flying Pig​

As far as dedications go, this article must be given to the hundreds of thousands of men who fought and gave their lives for King and Country in Burma during the Second World War. Its title comes from the epitaph laid for those who fell defending Kohima against the Japanese; perhaps an ironic one for men who were part of what became known as 'the forgotten army'. Yet however much they may have featured in the news reports back home, the actions of the British and Indian troops who defended a jungle-covered colony of an antiquated empire miles from home deserve never to be forgotten.

The Empire of Japan had joined the Second World War in December 1941 with the goal of acquiring land and resources to put it on a par with the great colonial powers. Its strikes into the European colonies of Asia - under the name of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere - had been both unexpected and thunderously successful, and it had dealt a severe blow to the United States Navy in its attack on Pearl Harbour. For Britain, the greatest humiliations came when the Japanese took Hong Kong, Malaya and crushingly the island fortress of Singapore from a combined force of British, Indian and Australian troops. From here the Japanese planned to march into Hindustan and conquer Britain's largest and most prosperous colony.

Japanese moves towards the invasion of Burma began among the 30,000 men of the Indian Army that they had taken captive in Singapore. It was hoped by the Japanese that once they had crossed the border into the Raj proper the already-strong local feelings towards independence would ignite and that the British would be thrown out of India by the Indians, leaving the way open for Japan to take over. They played to this anti-British sentiment by allowing a Bengali politician by the name of Chandra Bose to recruit their Prisoners of War for his Indian National Army, which would fight against the British with Japanese support. It is estimated that two-thirds of the Indian prisoners of war at Singapore chose service in his army over the brutality of Japanese captivity.

It had not been thought before the war that Burma would come under attack at all. As such, the commander of the Burma Army, Lieutenant-General Thomas Hutton, had only two divisions - the 17th Indian and the 1st Burma - available to him, and these were mostly populated by fresh recruits with new equipment. In the event of war, it was expected that the Chinese would support him, since their only source of supplies from the Allied powers came through the Burma Road running north-south across the country. The supreme commander for the theatre - General Sir Archibald Wavell, as Commander-in-Chief at GHQ India - had ordered Hutton to lay his defences in advanced positions, not appreciating the inferiority of the troops under his command and expecting reinforcements to come from his former command in the Middle East in the event of war.

The Japanese Army attacked with Thai support through Thailand and into the southern part of Burma. The British repelled some minor attacks in various places, but it soon became clear that their main objectives were the airfields at Tavoy and Mergui, both in the Tenasserim region, which were essential to the fighting over Malaya. The Burma Army had been ordered to hold these against the invaders, despite concerns that they would be almost impossible to reinforce: concerns which were vindicated on 18 January 1942 when the Japanese, having crawled over the Tenasserim ridge, attacked Tavoy with a regiment from their 55th Infantry Division. The defending force - composed of the 3rd and 6th Burma Rifles - was totally overwhelmed and evacuated Tavoy in chaos. The defenders of Mergui did likewise before they too could be attacked. For those few troops who had already seen combat elsewhere, fighting in the East was very different to what they were used to. In Europe and Africa, against the Germans or Italians, it was a given that rules of engagement would be followed and that if a medic found an enemy soldier wounded he would treat him as one of his own. The Japanese were as likely to bayonet a British casualty as they were to treat him, and there were many cases of Japanese wounded hanging onto grenades, detonating them as soon as Allied medics came near. On more than one occasion British officers were known to shoot the wounded to spare them a worse fate at the hands of the enemy.

Initially, detachments of the Royal Air Force (including a squadron of American volunteers known as the 'Flying Tigers') managed to defend the capital, Rangoon, from Japanese air raids. However, since the vast majority of the airfields that they were using were between Rangoon and the enemy, they ran rapidly short of places from which to launch aircraft as the Japanese troops advanced and seized ground, and once the Japanese began flying aircraft from the airfields on the Tenasserim it became increasingly impossible to protect the city, and before long indiscriminate bombing was a nightly terror for the local inhabitants.

The Japanese finally came towards Rangoon on 22 January, coming westward across the Kwakareik Pass. This position was held by the 16th Indian Infantry Brigade, which was totally unable to withstand the attack and dropped back at speed. Next, the Japanese division moved on Moulmein, at the mouth of the bridge-less Salween River so that the river was behind the defending brigade, in this case the 2nd Burma Infantry Brigade. They were stranded with their backs to the water, and day after day were compressed into a smaller and smaller space until the last day of the month, when, leaving all their equipment behind, they fled across the river - the lucky ones by boat, the unlucky swimming. 600 men were killed or taken captive, the wounded left for the Japanese.

The situation across the line was dire. Brigadier Jackie Smyth - a holder of the Victoria Cross from the Great War with a reputation for both extreme courage and hot-headedness - was acting Major-General in charge of the 17th Indian Division, now the only Allied formation between the Japanese and Rangoon. His men were holding the Bilin River, which was at that time of year scarcely more than a ditch with a trickle of water running through it. He sent messages to Hutton requesting that he be allowed to withdraw to the better defensive positions behind the Sittang, but - probably influenced by orders from his own superiors - Hutton ordered him to hold the line. Smyth hoped at least that the Bilin would provide a decent co-ordinating line and ensure that his forces could maintain some sort of unity in what was their first real battle, facing two very highly regarded Japanese divisions.

On 14 February shots rang out as the Japanese divisions attacked. Combat in a jungle is characterised by low visibility and is accordingly both chaotic and ferocious; troops engaged at very close quarters with their rifle rounds tearing through the dense undergrowth, often resorting to fighting with the bayonet and hand-to-hand. For two days the 17th held on, with Japanese troops constantly trying to outflank them and the British throwing in every reserve battalion available to keep themselves in the fight. Eventually, realising that the situation was hopeless, Hutton gave Smyth permission to withdraw and the division withdrew, battered and tired, under the cover of the night of the 19th back to the Sittang river. His men would have to move everything back on foot, under constant pressure and harassing attack from the enemy and falling victim to extreme heat and lack of provisions.

The British were woken on the 20th by the sound of aircraft overhead. Initially, the men believed that the RAF still had control of the skies and were startled by the whistle-blasts from their sergeants indicating an enemy air attack; diving for cover only as soon as they saw either the red circles on the aircrafts' wings or the advancing cloud of dust made by machine-gun bullets. Most of the troops were still armed with the same weapons as their division had been using since the end of the Great War, and they returned fire as best they could with the Lewis Guns, but not a single enemy aircraft was shot down. Those who could took cover in a nearby rubber plantation, but with water running low they had to move off the next day and they reached the Sittang seriously dehydrated and having come under sporadic Japanese fire for the entire thirty miles. The Japanese plagued them as they withdrew with their infamous cunning; British troops reported snipers tied into the tops of trees, and ambushes triggered by wounded men left exposed or shouts in English: the unfamiliar climate and territory, coupled with the very unfamiliar enemy, deeply unnerved the British soldiers.

There was at that time only one bridge over the Sittang, and the Japanese knew that if they could take it and disable the 17th they would have a clear route towards Rangoon. At 0500 they launched a small attack on Smyth's HQ at Kyaikto, which the British managed to repel. The British tasked a detachment of various units - including the Duke of Wellington's Regiment from Wiltshire - to protect the bridge.
Unfortunately, two brigades of Indian infantry - the 16th and the 46th - had dropped behind and were cut off to the east. Smyth had originally positioned the 1st Battalion of the 4th Gurkhas to the friendly western end of the bridge in case the Japanese landed paratroopers as his division made its way across, but they were soon rushed to the other side of the bridge when the Japanese came on foot from the east. The enemy charged, and would have taken the east side of the bridge were it not for the timely and courageous intervention of the 3rd and 5th Gurkhas, who attacked ferociously but were mauled and forced to disengage. The 17th fought the same vicious combat it had experienced at the Bilin for the best part of the day, with the two eastern brigades struggling unsuccessfully to link up with the bridge, and by nightfall on the 22nd still - just - held the bridge. Meanwhile, Smyth ordered his engineers to lay charges ready to detonate the bridge should the Japanese take it.

By the morning, with the Indian brigades still in contact and cut off from the main body of the 17th, it became clear that the Japanese had won and the bridge would fall within an hour. Smyth was faced with an agonising choice - whether to destroy the bridge leaving more than half of his battered division stranded on the other side of the six-hundred-yard river, or to leave it standing and allow the Japanese a clear route through to Rangoon. He chose the former, and the bridge exploded at 0530 hours. Fortunately for the allied troops, the Japanese did not have time to waste killing the stranded brigades and diverted immediately north, meaning that the survivors of the 17th were able to swim across the river. By the time they had consolidated, they were down to 3,500 men - not far over a third of their original strength - with 550 rifles, ten Bren guns, and twelve Thompson SMGs. Most of the men had lost their boots while crossing the river, and all the heavy equipment - artillery pieces from the Great War and Lewis machine-guns - had been lost.

The Sittang was now theoretically a fantastic defensive line, but the near-destruction of the 17th Division meant that the British had nowhere near enough troops to defend it. Wavell nevertheless gave orders that Rangoon should be held, expecting reinforcements, including an Australian infantry division, to come from the Middle East. Hutton was replaced by General Harold Alexander on the 28th February as commander of the Burma Army, and a furious Wavell sacked Brigadier Smyth the following day, replacing him with Brigadier 'Punch' Cowan. It is a fact that nobody who has not been in a situation where such high stakes hang upon a split-second decision can condemn Smyth for his actions, but other officers of the army, while reminding Wavell of how difficult the decision had been, did not feel that they could throw their weight behind the choice he had made and so nobody really spoke up for him. Smyth would not receive another command for the remainder of the war, although this was far from the end for the 17th which would see far more action in the months ahead.

Unfortunately for the British, the Australian government refused to allow its troops to be sent to Burma. Nevertheless, reinforcements did come from Britain and India, including the 7th Armoured Brigade and the 63rd Indian Infantry Brigade. The Burma Army's strategy became to give up Rangoon without a fight, but to convince the Japanese that the city would be heavily defended. To that end Alexander sent out counter-attacks at Pegu - forty miles from the capital - which were tactically successful and achieved their aim, but made it clear that Rangoon was all but lost to the Japanese. On the 7 March, the Burma Army burnt down Rangoon harbour, blew up its oil terminal, and began to pull out to the north.

The Japanese had already begun to surround the city and set up a heavily defended roadblock at Taukkyan, obstructing the Burma Army's line of retreat. The initial British attack on this position was small, made by a troop of the 7th Hussars supported by infantry, but it was beaten back having lost a tank and large numbers of foot soldiers. They tried again, sending a squadron from the Royal Tank Regiment and the 1st Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment, supported by artillery, but were again unable to break through. Finally, two companies of the 13th Frontier Force Rifles were sent in, and when they were in turn repulsed the British fell back and established a defensive perimeter. During the night the Japanese pushed hard to break the British lines, but as the sun came up they were still firmly entrenched.

Two battalions - the 1st battalions of the 11th Sikhs and the 10th Gurkha Rifles - of the British contingent were fresh, having come back from Pegu. The British decided to send these two in, along with a squadron from the 7th Hussars and artillery support, on the morning of the 8th. Their advance into position was complete chaos; the Sikhs were mauled by a Japanese air strike and the Gurkhas managed to get lost and only arrived after the scheduled start time. To make matters worse, the artillery somehow failed to carry out their fire mission, but the Sikhs and Hussars pressed ahead anyway and, thanks to a sudden bayonet charge by the Sikhs, overwhelmed the Japanese defenders.

Unbeknownst to the British, their plan had worked perfectly. The Japanese had been totally convinced that Rangoon would be defended and their commanders had instructed them to press a quick assault to destroy the Burma Army rather than surrounding the city. As such the roadblock had been strong, but it was only in place to protect the Japanese flank and, once their troops had passed through the area, the bulk of its defenders had been pulled back. At about midday the Japanese 215th Regiment entered Rangoon to find it empty, and realised with horror that the column that they had previously thought to be only a detachment of the defenders was in fact the entire British Army in Burma. They gave chase, but had no real chance of actually catching it and had missed their golden opportunity to wipe out the Burma Army.

The Allies tried to regroup and oppose the Japanese in central Burma, expecting reinforcement from the Chinese Expeditionary Force of three Chinese armies each about the size of a British division. These Chinese forces were to hold a front south of Mandalay, while the British defended the Irrawaddy Valley. The Burma Army's divisions were transferred to a new formation - Burma Corps - under the command of one Lieutenant-General William 'Bill' Slim.

Slim was far from a typical general of his day. For one, he was bred from very different stock to the likes of many in the officer corps; his parents were impoverished middle-class sorts from the port city of Bristol, and he came relatively late to the army having worked as both a teacher and a factory foreman. He had started his career in 1914 as a private soldier in the Territorials - probably the most lowly man in Kitchener's Army - been made lance-corporal and then demoted soon after for accepting a drink from a lady by the wayside in Yorkshire. He had been the first man on the beach at Gallipoli and was wounded there, by that time a regular officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was discharged for his wounds from the army, but somehow managed to end up fighting with them in Mesopotamia within the year. Between the wars he transferred to the 6th Gurkha Rifles and gained there a huge fondness for the Indian Army and an unswerving loyalty to the British fighting soldier.

The General inherited a situation which was growing rapidly more and more untenable for his forces. Rather than slowing down their advance, as the Allies had hoped, the Japanese seemed to be pushing on with a new speed and vigour, adding two fresh divisions from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies to their two already in country. These were supplemented by the many captured British vehicles, giving them far greater mobility than their opponents, and the RAF had all but lost its grip on the skies about Burma. Japanese bombers were pounding every major settlement in the areas controlled by the British, and the Burma Independence Army was growing ever stronger and more troublesome for the British. To make matters worse, many of the ethnically Bimar (the majority ethnic group in Burma) soldiers of the Burma Rifles were deserting.

 

[Flying Pig]

One of the major objectives that the Japanese had was to secure the oil-fields of Yenangyaung, on the banks of the Irrawaddy. On 11 April they made their first attack, hitting the 1st Burma Division hard and forcing it to gradually crawl backwards. The main body of the British troops stationed there were the Burma Frontier Force, originally an internal security force that had been pressed into combat service, composed of the 1st Burma Division, the 7th Armoured Brigade, and the 2nd Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment. These three parts were soon split up by Japanese roadblocks, and forced to operate separately. The situation soon became so bad that Slim ordered, on the 15th April, that the oilfields should be demolished. At the same time, Alexander requested that the Chinese 38th Division under General Sun Li-Jen - known as 'the Rommel of the East' - be deployed to the area to support the British.

The next day, the 7000 men of the 1st Burma Division were surrounded at the Yenangyaung oilfields by the Japanese 33rd Division. Running low on supplies, especially water, and supporting many wounded, the 1st's commanding officer telephoned Sun to ask for immediate rescue. The latter wanted to bring his entire division to the aid of the British, but his superior would not allow it and accordingly Sun led only the 1100 men of the 113th Regiment, supported by the 7th Armoured Brigade - consisting of two regiments of M3 Stuart light tanks and a battery of 25-Pounder artillery - which Slim had assigned to him owing to his complete lack of heavy support.

Conditions for the next three days were atrocious. The heat and the stink of the burning oil refineries hung about the battlefield, as the 1st clung on in the face of the heavy Japanese attacks. Sun's regiment hacked its way south towards them, while the British advanced towards the river, finally meeting their relief column on the 19th. The two allies regrouped and made an attack upon the Japanese, which killed a great number of the enemy. Unfortunately the combined force was too weak to have a chance of holding the oil-fields and they were forced to retreat north. The 1st Burma Division had been utterly mauled, having lost most of its heavy equipment and suffered from the desertion of a large number of Burmese soldiers, but the battle had been a victory for the allies and for his part in the endeavour Sun Li-Jen was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire by George VI.

Elsewhere, however, the Allied line was collapsing. The Chinese 200th Division had come under attack from the much larger Japanese 56th Motorised Division around Toungoo, and while they had managed to hold them back for some time they were eventually overwhelmed. The Japanese thrust northwards, destroying the Chinese Sixth Army in the process and totally outflanking the Allied defences. The only option now available was withdrawal; the British to India and the Chinese to Yunnan Province. Slim ordered his men to make for the region of Manipur.

For the first time that anyone could remember the British Army was in full retreat from its own territory, being pushed rapidly north towards Mandalay. The retreat was far from Dunkirk; equipment and the wounded were taken along by the exhausted troopers. It was during this retreat that Slim instilled the spirit which would become characteristic of his leadership style. Once he came across a unit resting in a jungle clearing looking battered, and was furious to discover its officers making bivouacs. "Officers are there to lead" he said to them. "I tell you, therefore, as officers, that you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you."

Burma Corps finally reached India in May, shortly before the monsoon was due to break, arriving in the town of Imphal, where they lived in the open during the terrible conditions of the monsoon season. The response from the authorities was atrocious; nobody seemed to know what to do with these thousands of soldiers and civilians and accordingly did very little. What was left of the Burmese government relocated to the north of the country, and Burma Corps HQ was disbanded and its divisions transferred to IV Corps, whose headquarters staff had recently landed in India.

From May until December it is almost impossible to wage war in that region of the world owing to the fierce and heavy monsoon rains. During this time both sides were trying to consolidate and regroup, but the Allies especially faced major problems, not least that the Burmese campaign had been given the lowest priority by their commanders, who were keen to knock Germany out of the war first; even unto the point that new formations of the Indian Army were being trained in desert warfare over jungle warfare - at least until December when it became obvious that the war in North Africa was over. To make matters worse for the British, their troops were tied down suppressing riots against the King's government, and owing to a typhoon and the Allied devastation of much of East Bengal (so as to deny it to the Japanese in the very likely event of an invasion) there was a famine that claimed upwards of 3 million lives, not helped by the incompetence of the Bengali government.

Fortunately, the Japanese were not without their own share of problems. High command asked Lieutenant-General Shojiro Iida, the army commander, whether he thought it would be wise to go back onto the offensive after the rains stopped. From consultations with his divisional commanders he found that the logistical problems plaguing his army meant that such action was out of the question, and the Japanese devoted their entire energy to consolidating in Burma. The Burma Independence Army was disbanded, as it had proved to be severely lacking in discipline and elements of it were as opposed to rule from Tokyo as they had been to rule from London. In its place they set up the Burma Defence Army, with Japanese officers to oversee the men.

Unlike the enemy, the British did not have the luxury of being able to stay passive. They re-organised their command in Eastern India, grouping the new XV Corps - which was given to Slim, and comprised the 26th Indian Infantry Division and the 14th (Light) Indian Division - together with IV Corps, all under the command of Lieutenant-General Charles Broad. General Wavell had been planning counter-attacks into Burma even as the first troopers trickled into Manipur; noting that communications into that country would take over a year to rebuild except in the Arakan area, which was so close to enemy territory that it would be possible to get them working again before the end of the monsoons.

Broad retired from the army in July, and he was replaced by Lieutenant-General Noel Irwin. He decided that the goal for the allied attack should be set rather modestly at Akyab island, which had both a port and an airfield and as such would be very important to the re-capture of Burma. If the airfield was secured, bombers could be launched from there which would be able to target Rangoon and the RAF would have a real chance of winning control over the skies again. The problem was that the only overland access to Akyab was over a range of hills - the Mayu Peninsula - along a converted railway line, which would be extremely difficult going, and the Japanese would be able to predict almost exactly how the British would move.

General Wavell accordingly planned to take the island by sending the British 29th Brigade into an amphibious attack, while the 14th Indian Division attacked down the Mayu in support. However, there was not anything like enough amphibious vessels available to transport the entire brigade, and therefore the plan was quickly revised that when the 14th reached the end of the peninsula they would send forth the British 6th Brigade which would make an attack across the narrow channel which divided Akyab from the mainland. To say that this plan was risky would be an understatement; there was little choice for the division save to attack precisely where the Japanese would want to fight.

Despite this, Major-General Wilfred Lewis Lloyd brought the 14th south from the frontier town of Cox's Bazaar on the 17th December 1942. The Japanese had two battalions of foot and one of artillery in the area, one of which had spent nearly two months digging entrenchments forward of the main Japanese position. Seeing the size of the British attack, this battalion was ordered to abandon its defences and pull back; and the British gained control of the road by the 22nd. The Japanese also recognised the strategic importance of Akyab island and brought in an entire division that had been freed up from service in the central part of Burma. With this significant reinforcement, they moved forward to firmly occupy Akyab, making their presence felt immediately by repelling an attack from the 123rd Indian Infantry Brigade. These troops defended aggressively, throwing off several British attacks centred around the town of Rathedaung.

Most of the Japanese troops were devoted to the occupation of Akyab, but one company was sent forward to establish a defensive line along a small creek that went across the narrow passage between the coast and the mountains. Using timber and earth they built hidden bunkers, interlocking their fields of fire so that their line was almost impenetrable by infantry. So heavily entrenched were they that they held off the 47th Indian Infantry Brigade for over two days: British artillery could not penetrate their bunkers and if the troops were able to take them in the assault the Japanese had their positions mapped and called down deadly accurate mortar and howitzer fire on their own bunkers.

On 10 January Wavell and Irwin both visited Lloyd at the front. Lloyd told his superiors frankly that his men had no chance of making an impact upon the well-fortified Japanese without some measure of armoured support, and as such Irwin sent to Slim and XV Corps for a troop of tanks, which would come from the 50th Indian Tank Brigade. The commander of this brigade, along with Slim himself, protested that the task would require at least a regiment - 50 or so armoured vehicles - to have a sporting chance of success, but both men were ignored and only eight of the brigade's Valentine medium-weight tanks actually arrived at Akyab. The British sent them in with the 55th Indian Infantry Brigade to break the Japanese line, but most of the vehicles got stuck in ditches or were destroyed by the fiercely accurate Japanese artillery and the attack was, predictably, a complete failure.

By this time the Japanese clearly knew that their troops in the area were vastly superior to the British, and they sent in troops to press the British left. Despite this, Irwin was determined that the 14th should not leave empty-handed and ordered yet another attack, this time by the highly regarded British 6th Brigade and planned by Irwin himself, supported by heavy artillery fire. The gunners were still utterly unable to clear out the Japanese fortifications and, despite a hugely courageous and very bloody attack on 18 February, the British could not break through. One company of Japanese troops had frustrated the best part of a British division, and Irwin - by now getting desperate - ordered his men to hold every inch of territory that they had claimed.

Irwin's enemy was feeling much less inclined to allow him to massage his ego and had begun to pour troops across the river and into the middle of the British left, into a part of the line held by the Indian 55th Brigade. They were forced into retreat, leaving the already worn-out 47th Indian Infantry Brigade cut off on the extreme flank. Against orders from Irwin, Lloyd told them to fall back to prevent their encirclement, but the former sacked him on the spot and took personal command of the 14th, telling all units to stand firm. The Japanese pushed relentlessly, forcing the British to divert in the 71st Indian Infantry Brigade to cover their withdrawal. The 6th Brigade was as good as knocked out when the Japanese, swarming over an area of mountains thought impassable by the British, captured its headquarters and commanding officer, who was killed not long after by British artillery fire. By now the 47th was in full flight, having left behind most of its equipment and practically useless as a fighting force.

At last, Slim and the XV Corps took charge of the front in Arakan, and he realised that although the 6th Brigade (being comprised entirely of British troops) was still resolute and formidable, his Indian units were starting to fall apart. He predicted that the Japanese would go to capture the main road across the Mayu range, and tasked eight battalions of his troops to encircle them when they did so. They made this attack in late April, and Slim was ready to spring his trap on 4 May when disaster struck - the British battalion on a crucial hill - Point 551 - was driven back and the Japanese cut the road, isolating several British units in the area. There was nothing for it but to retreat northwards up the valley and now, paying no heed to Irwin's calls to fight on around the major settlements, they pulled back to Cox's Bazaar. The Japanese did not follow, mindful that the open terrain and monsoon rains would have made them sitting ducks for British artillery.

The failure of the attack had been a disaster for Allied morale, but it had made clear several weaknesses in the Indian Army. For one, the average Indian soldier was not at all suitably trained for fighting in the jungle; few of the men sent in to replace casualties had even competed basic training, and many of those who had done so had been trained expecting a posting to the deserts of Persia or North Africa, not the steaming, crawling jungles of Burma. Frequent defeats had sapped morale, and HQ formations were over-stretched and struggling to cope; for example the 14th Division was over three times over the strength that its command structure was used to dealing with, Irwin tried to have Slim dismissed from his command, but he was himself replaced as commander of the Eastern Army by General George Giffard and sent home, publically due to ill-health but practically because his abrasive personality had made him no friends amongst his subordinates, and because his judgement had been severely called into question during the campaign.

The British now needed something of a miracle to rebuild their shattered morale. Fortunately for them, a certain officer by the name of Orde Wingate had flown himself to Delhi while the army had been retreating on foot from Burma, and he presented to Wavell a very interesting proposal. Wingate was something of a military maverick who had created, organised and lead an irregular force against the Italian occupation of Abyssinia - now Ethiopia - while working for none other than General Wavell, who was at that time running the Middle East Command. The general had seen the utility that such forces might have in Burma and requested Wingate's help as soon as his troops in Abyssinia had been disbanded, but his subordinate had spent the campaign so far travelling the country and writing down his theories on irregular warfare rather than actually conducting them.

With the spur of military necessity behind him, Wingate picked this moment to earn his reputation and asked permission to form a brigade - nominally the 77th Indian Infantry, but known universally as the Chindits after a mythological Burmese mountain lion - to put his ideas into practice once more. Throughout the summer of 1942 Wingate gathered volunteers for the brigade around the town of Jhansi, and trained them in the central Indian jungle during the heaviest months of the monsoon. Half of his men were British - drawn from the 13th Battalion of the King's Liverpool Regiment and about a company from what was the Bush Warfare School - and the other half Indian, recruited from the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Gurkha Rifles and from the 2nd Burma Rifles - a battalion formed from survivors of the retreat from Burma.

The training that he put his troops through was gruelling, especially considering that many of them were fairly raw recruits. They were trained to make heavy use of the fairly new doctrine of air support; penetrating far into the jungle and receiving their supplies from the sky, as well as using air support where other units would have relied upon artillery. Their tactical doctrine was in many respects similar to their Japanese enemies; working on foot and destroying the enemy's lines of communication through superior mobility and the element of surprise. They were organised into eight columns, each containing a full infantry company, a support group with heavy weapons, a reconnaissance platoon from the Burma Rifles and a sabotage group from the Bush Warfare School company, known as 142 Commando. The HQ of each column had the support of signallers, medics and vital forward air controllers to liaise with the RAF for supplies and fire support. Heavy equipment was not transported by vehicle, but by mule - 57 to a column. From the beginning it was clear to those who found themselves with Wingate that he was a very different Commanding Officer to what they were used to right from his opening speech to them. “You will be making history” he said, “it will be a tale that will be told, but remember, most of you may not be at the telling of it”.

Wavell was delighted that his confidence in Wingate had yielded fruit and made plans for the men of the Chindits to accompany a planned offensive, under the name of Operation Longcloth. This large offensive was cancelled, but Wingate persuaded his boss to let him carry out the operation with just his own brigade, and so it was that the brigadier himself led 3000 of his troops across the border to disrupt the Japanese and destroy their communications. One column of the brigade had been disbanded and its troops spread across the remainder, giving his force a strength of seven full columns - one of which was led by Mike Calvert, a hugely courageous and daring officer who would later command British troops in putting down the insurgency in Malaya. A single squadron - 6 aircraft - from the RAF provided all of the air support for this force.

Wingate's plan was typical of the daring British deceptions of the war. Two columns, led by a white soldier dressed as a British general, crossed the Chindwin River on the 13th February. These men went south and were re-supplied by air in broad daylight, hoping to convince the Japanese that they were the main attack. One was ambushed and forced to withdraw to India, but the other managed to cause some damage to a key Japanese railway. In reality, the British main effort was carried out by five Chindit columns coming in from the west. Two of these - one of which was Calvert's - went to finish the job on the railway. Between 4 and the 6 of March, these columns laid demolitions and put 70 miles of vital Japanese supply route out of commission. Their operating conditions were tough - tracks and paths are so rare in the jungle that no unit can expect to use them without being discovered, and so Wingate's men had to hack through the dense forest with machete, kukri and on at least one occasion a 'borrowed' elephant. Wingate had ordered that all the wounded be left behind in villages, since transporting them risked the lives of the others serving with them, but this order was not stringently observed.

With the railway destroyed the Chindits crossed over the Irrawaddy. Wingate needed to ensure that the Japanese had no idea what he was planning, but to the exasperation of his column commanders this meant changing his plans so often that his own men rarely had any idea what he was doing. They were supposedly trying to further hamper Japanese communications, but it became apparent that the terrain on the other side of the river - with very scarce amounts of water and strongly co-ordinated enemy formations - was not conducive to their style of operations and, forced into a smaller and smaller space by the Japanese, and in late March Wingate pulled six of his columns back to India, telling the remaining one to continue moving to the East, however since they were now at the very limit of friendly airpower their ability to cause havoc was severely limited.

The retreat was conducted in more difficult circumstances than the march out. When the columns reached the Irrawaddy, they found that the Japanese had pickets, sentries and machine-gunners at nearly every crossing-point, meaning that a fight was inevitable. A combination of this, the Chindits' naturally loose command structure, and the dense terrain meant that formations quickly broke up and individual companies and platoons reached India independently; Wingate's HQ reached India some months before the last few troops trickled in, while some troops evacuated to China and a few to the northern part of Burma. By the end of April, Operation Longcloth was practically over and there were 2200 Chindits back in India, although about 600 of these were unfit for active duty owing to wounds or disease. Wingate selected a few men to keep with his brigade, and sent the rest back to their old regiments.

 

[Flying Pig]

The British officer corps was not entirely re-assured by the manifestation of Wingate's ideas; for a huge amount of investment the Chindits had only managed to temporarily hinder Japanese logistics, which were working again within three months, and many officers felt that the resources could be better allocated elsewhere. Slim in particular was very critical of the entire philosophy behind the brigade, believing that taking the best men from the regular battalions had too great an adverse effect on those units who were left in the conventional line, and saying that "this cult of special forces [was] as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier, who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree". However, above these objections the officers knew that the Eastern Army urgently needed a boost to its shattered morale, and they painted the Chindit raid as a great victory. This was not entirely unfounded; Wingate's men had stung the Japanese enough to provoke them to start going on the offensive in 1944 and critically had destroyed the myth that they were invincible in the jungles. Burma was now a battle, which meant that the British now had a chance to win.

Propaganda however does not win a war on its own. The Americans, who had only a very small presence on the ground but huge interests vested in Chiang Kai-Shek and his struggle against Japan, were insisting that the Allies make it a major strategic aim to keep China supplied, and the Americans started to step up their presence with a view of achieving this goal. They flew aircraft over the Himalayas in what was known as the 'hump', losing a great many pilots to natural hazards and Japanese fighter planes operating out of northern Burma. Furthermore, Chiang's Chief of Staff was the determined and popular but hugely anti-British American Joseph Stilwell, who insisted that the Allies construct another road from India to China, which would have to go through northern Burma. To defend this road Stilwell trained two divisions of Chinese troops in India - paid for by the British - aware that having some infantry under his command would give him a far greater voice in the overall strategy of the theatre, much to the dislike of both the British who feared that the well-trained Chinese soldiers would set an example to Indian insurgents that Asian troops could be just as good as European, and Chiang Kai-Shek who was very nervous about having ethnic Chinese troops outside of his direct command. The Americans also formed the brigade known as Merrill's Marauders, based on Wingate's ideas, which Stilwell predictably snapped up for his command.

The US Army's main goal was to keep the Republic of China in the war, which meant that their definitions of success were slightly different to those of their British allies. What they considered most important was keeping Chiang in the war at all; America's own interests of convincing him to keep his strategy in line with their own policies for the area and building an effective Chinese army - the dream was for thirty well-equipped and well-trained divisions - were secondary to this. As such the most part of their effort was dedicated to supplying China with resources; accordingly Stilwell's scheme of road-building and airlifts was far more heavily backed by their government and high commanders than the assistance he could give to the British - besides, it was felt by many in the American command structure that the British were only interested in protecting their colonial possessions, and the Americans felt very much that they did not want to play a part in that sort of thing.

In mid-1942 the Allies had another great propaganda victory. A small reconnaissance team that had been parachuted into the far north of Burma had gone to investigate the old outpost of Fort Hertz and found it to still be in Allied hands, manned by a group of Indian Army soldiers who had been cut off from their superiors and holding out for months against the Japanese on their own. Support was quickly parachuted in, including communications specialists and engineers, and the British raised a small militia of local people known as the Kachin Levies, trained by the elite troops of the British V Force, to protect the fort. The small airstrip at the fort was overhauled and improved, and it became an emergency landing strip for those aircraft flying the 'Hump' to China. They also set up a radio navigation beacon there, enabling pilots to more easily tell where they were.

In August 1943 the Allies re-organised the command structure in Burma once again. GHQ India, which had been co-ordinating operations in Iraq and Persia as well as the Burmese campaign and internal strife in India, was split up and Burma became the responsibility of South-East Asia Command, which was commanded by Admiral Louis Mountbatten, with the ever-acerbic Stilwell as his deputy to help co-ordination with the increasing number of USAAF and American logistical units in the area working alongside the Chinese in what the US called the China-Burma-India theatre, of which Stilwell was Commander-in-Chief. Wavell became Viceroy of India, and moved quickly to address the horrible famine there, although it was impossible to fully solve it until aid ships began arriving from the UK, and his position as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army was taken by Claude Auchinleck, who focused on improving the supporting assets and training establishments for the Burma theatre. Finally, the Eastern Army was divided into Eastern Command, which took charge of internal security and lines of communication, and Fourteenth Army, under Slim, which was concerned with actually fighting the war.

Slim was now the first general since the Duke of Wellington to have the opportunity to build up an army from scratch in his own mould, Having learnt much from the successes of both the Chindits and his Japanese enemy, Slim placed great emphasis on the ability to operate off-road and using only vehicles that could cope with what was perhaps the most difficult campaigning terrain on Earth. Most of the 14th's heavy equipment was sent to other units and replaced with mule- and air-transported equipment. Tactically, he made use of the observation that in cutting the lines of communication in Burma the Japanese had laid themselves open to surrounding and encirclement, and had his units form defensive 'boxes' with heavy support from the air and from armour, which would make life very difficult for enemy troops practicing infiltration tactics. Individual health was heavily emphasised and anti-malarial drugs - often rejected by soldiers for their considerable side-effects - became mandatory. Finally, he sent out a huge number of offensive patrols, in order to get his men used to the jungle conditions and to convince his men that the Japanese were no longer the better jungle fighters - something which after several small-scale, easy victories, the British slowly began to believe.

Eastern Command was also doing its new job with gusto. The railways of northern India were transporting four times as many supplies in 1944 as they had been at the start of the war, and the Allied Eastern Air Command - composed mostly of RAF squadrons, but supported by the Indian Air Force and an increasing number of USAAF bomber and transport aircraft - had finally gained control of the skies, allowing Slim's tactics of aerial resupply to be given a fighting chance and his troops to lose some of their earlier fear of the constant Japanese aerial attacks. Now the allies had to decide what to do from the mire of competing ideas coming from all their different commanders.

XV Corps had been reviewing the Arakan front, the scene of a major British defeat the previous year, and was keen to recapture Akyab island - from which Japanese bombers were pounding on Calcutta and other cities of India - supported by an amphibious attack. The Commander-in-Chief, Mountbatten, was keen on attacks from the sea owing to his own background in the Royal Navy, and wanted to pair this with a similar attack on the Andaman Islands. However, the latter plan completely fell through and the former had to be majorly re-planned: all the landing craft that had originally been assigned to Mountbatten were commandeered for the D-Day landings in France and Fourteenth Army was therefore unable to mount any operation of this sort. This cancellation also led to the cancellation of Chiang Kai-Shek's planned advance into eastern Burma, although later on he did reconsider and carried out the attack.

Despite raised concerns from British officers that the Ledo road was of limited value and a serious waste of resources, Stilwell had finally managed to get the road over the Patkai mountains between India and Burma through what became known as 'Hell Pass', and now needed to launch attacks on the towns of Kamaing and Myitkyina in northern Burma, which would link his route up with the old Burma Road. It was agreed that an attack would come out from Ledo to take these positions, but that the responsibility for it would have to be upon Stilwell's own Chinese divisions.

For all their dislike of Stilwell, the British were unwilling to see him defeated just as their self-respect was starting to grow back, and Brigadier Wingate saw a chance to have his own scope for operations expanded, proposing that his Chindits go in and disrupt the Japanese lines of supply to the north. Slim and many others continued their opposition of his methods, but he had an ally in the adventure-loving Prime Minister, Winston Churchill - himself a former cavalry officer who had been part of Kitchener's army as it chased the Mahdi back to Khartoum - and so the plan went ahead, although Wingate's idea of capturing a Japanese airfield to use as his forward base was rejected as too great a commitment to maintain after the fact. The Chinese soldiers and the Chindit brigade began their advance in October 1943.

Wingate's men had undergone significant changes since the last Chindit raid. Most significantly, Wavell had - without consulting or even telling Wingate, who was deeply distrustful of the Indian Army, mostly due to his disregard of its British officers and worries about the complication of feeding Indian troops of different races, religions and castes- raised another brigade of Indian troops and grouped it with the original Chindits into what he called the Long-Range Penetration Force. It was Wavell's original intention to be able to rotate the two brigades, so one could be resting in India while the other was in combat, but as soon as Wingate heard about it he announced his own plan which involved raising the Chindits to a strength of six brigades - and, although he acknowledged that he was stuck with the one, insisted that none of these be drawn from Indian troops. An entire division - the veteran 70th - was broken up and its three brigades assigned to Wingate; much to the exasperation of Slim and other line officers, who had wanted to be able to deploy that formation in a conventional role. His final brigade was brought from the 81st (West Africa) Division, giving him three battalions of Nigerian troops - although it is worth noting that African regiments contained a far higher proportion of white soldiers than Indian units, and generally had far fewer problems with feeding.

Even better for the Chindits, while away at the Quebec conference Wingate had managed to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt that much more could be achieved in Burma with more air support, and the President had assigned a group of the USAAF, known as the 1st Air Commando Group, under Colonel Philip Cochran. Having American support was welcome: the RAF had been so uncooperative that one of Wingate's Brigade-Majors was later driven write in his memoirs that "whatever we asked them to do they declared to be difficult, impossible or against Air Force policy. Whatever they offered to do, we didn't need". By contrast, the Americans allowed the Chindits to call directly upon them for anything and seemed willing to go beyond the impossible - during one training exercise, a Chindit was injured in a field barely 400 yards wide. Where the RAF would certainly have pointed out that 600 yards was the minimum safe length for a landing zone, the Air Commandos managed to land a small aircraft and evacuate the soldier. The Americans also brought with them the welcome K-Ration Packs; less nutritious than the British equivalent, but far better tasting.
Chindit training, organised mostly by brigadiers Calvert and Fergusson, was altered to reflect the experience of the previous expedition. The men were given special training in crossing rivers, in demolitions, and in building improvised shelters. All units were trained in air insertion; the forward units would be dropped in one-way glider flights (even later on in the war, when technology to recover the wooden gliders was available, far more were destroyed after landing than were recovered) to clear the area for larger parachute drops or landings from the Air Commandos' Dakotas. This method would be used to establish small but well-fortified bases behind the Japanese lines, from which the Chindits would be able to launch raiding operations at will.

Stilwell's troops consisted of his Indian-trained Chinese divisions - designated as X Force - now numbering three: the 30th, the 22nd and the 38th, which had been given to the command of the brilliant Sun Li-Jen. Sun's division headed the attack, with American and Indian engineers and labourers working behind them to extend the Ledo road. Whenever X Force was contacted by a strong Japanese formation, the Americans - using methods they had learned from their Japanese enemies - sent Merrill's Marauders in to attack them from the flank or behind. The enemy were shocked by the skill and the power of Stilwell's Chinese; previously they had only dealt with Chiang's troops who often had exasperated British and American command through their Generalissimo's over-centralisation and the fickleness of their officers, as well as their poor standards of training - Sun's men were disciplined, tough and unafraid to work in line with American interests. The Japanese 18th Division was forced backwards - it would have been encircled had Stilwell's men moved faster during one engagement at Walwbum - and the engineers used the track that had been used as a supply line for them to speed up construction of the Ledo Road.

Meanwhile, XV Corps, under the able command of Lieutenant-General Philip Christison, had been given the task of trying again in Arakan. Its men initially made a cautious advance down the coast and two of the Mayu Peninsula's river valleys, but quickly sped up, capturing its first objective - the small port town of Maungdaw - on 9 January. While the Corps fought and wore down Japanese forces south of their position, it became apparent that their next move had to be the part of the Mayu range where two disused railway tunnels provided a link between many of the peninsula's villages. As such they built a narrow track across the Ngakyedauk Pass and set up the HQ of the 7th Indian Division on its eastern side.

The Japanese thought that they could defeat this British incursion with the same tactics that they had used previously, and use their success to take XV Corps' vital base of operations at Chittagong, in doing so diverting British troops from elsewhere on the front, where the Japanese planned to launch major attacks later that year. As such, on 5 February they infiltrated five elite battalions, known as Sakurai Force (after, as with most Japanese formations, its commander), through the widely-spaced lines of the relatively inexperienced 7th Indian Division, attacking its HQ the next day. The fighting was fierce, but the signalmen and clerks that made up the HQ had little choice but to destroy everything of use to the enemy and retreat - the division's radio operators heard 'put a pick through that radio', then silence.

In what seemed to be a depressing repeat of earlier attacks, Sakurai force swung round to attack the 7th from behind, while one Japanese battalion, known as Kobo Force, crossed over the Mayu hills - using a route that the British had dismissed as impassable - and set ambushes on the coastal road; the main supply route to the 5th Indian Division. Those Japanese who were still holding the tunnel area came out, and launched attacks in a bid to link up with Sakurai, while the skies were filled with Japanese aircraft launched from Akyab Island. However, unlike during previous offensives, the British ordered their three forward divisions to dig in and hold on, while the two divisions in the rear were sent forward to give support.

The British worked out that their enemy's next move would be towards the 7th Indian Division's administrative area - or Admin Box - in the town of Sinzweya. The division commander - Major-General Frank Messervy, later the first Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army - could not be reached by radio since he was out in the jungle, and so it fell to Christison as the Corps commander to dispatch Brigadier Geoffrey Evans, commander of the 9th Indian Infantry Brigade as part of the 7th Indian Division, to take charge of the Admin Box and to protect it from the Japanese. The defenders of the box now consisted of the 2nd Battalion, the West Yorkshire Regiment - from Evans' own brigade - one regiment of Indian and one of British artillery, and crucially two squadrons of M3 Lee light tanks of the 25th Dragoons. Soon, the 4th Battalion of the 8th Gurkha Rifles came to support the defenders, along with two more regiments of artillery.

Brigadier Evans converted the originally almost civilian box into a firm defensive emplacement. His troops concentrated their defence around a clearing about 1200 yards wide, with ammunition piled up at the bottom of a small hillock in the middle. Supplies were dropped in by Allied Dakotas, meaning that as the Japanese ran short of vital stores the Indian troops were able to fight on. Three squadrons of Spitfires from the RAF secured the airspace over the box, bringing down 65 Japanese fighters in the process. In contrast to this, Japanese resupply missions were by mule and Arakanese porters along the same route that their men had used to get there, and these were easily ambushed and their supplies taken.

Fighting continued around the box for weeks, more often than not hand-to-hand. On the night of 7 February, the Japanese captured the Main Dressing Station of the 7th, and promptly butchered 35 unarmed medical staff and patients. Now understanding what would happen to them if they gave in, and furious at this blatant war crime, the British and Indian troops fought with even greater resolve and ferocity. In the cramped conditions Japanese heavy fire from their few mountain guns caused a huge amount of damage; twice setting ammunition dumps ablaze, but ironically in doing so they wasted ammunition which would have been put to far greater use stopping the defenders' greatest asset: the Dragoons' tanks, which thwarted any attempt by the enemy to overrun the Admin Box. Even when the Japanese managed to capture one hill on the perimeter following their huge attack on the night of St Valentine's Day, the Yorkshiremen were able to quickly retake it with support from the Dragoons.

The Japanese were getting desperate. On 22 February, having been starving for several days, the Colonel in charge of the main body of Sakurai Force radioed to his superiors that he had only 400 men of his original 2200 left, and that he would not make any more attacks. Two days later, without authorisation from his commanders, he retreated, and the Japanese operation was declared over on the 26th. The 5th Indian Division, now relieved, sent out a brigade to link up with the 7th and destroy all remaining Japanese troops in the area. The enemy had been forced to leave behind all their wounded, and when the fighting was over the British counted five thousand Japanese troops dead on the battlefield. For the first time, British troops had met a major Japanese offensive, held the line and turned them back, and it was a huge boost to Allied morale.

British and Indian troops moved quickly to take the few remaining key points that the Japanese held in Arakan, spending the spring taking numerous hills and the key railway tunnels. However, they soon had to stop operations and even drew back from the valleys in order to spare losses to malaria - something far more important was going on to the north which demanded the Allies' attention. The Japanese, in the guise of their Fifteenth Army, were finally trying to invade India.

IV Corps had been expecting the Japanese to try something for a while, and as such they had two divisions pressed against the Chindwin river, with another in reserve at Imphal. However, when the attack came they did not intend to try to defend the river line, but to draw back to the Imphal plain, forcing the Japanese to fight beyond their own supply lines where the British would be able to manage logistics comparatively easily, well within range of air supply. The Japanese plan, meanwhile, was to cut off and destroy the two forward divisions of IV Corps, then isolate Imphal by taking the city of Kohima and then capture the town. With this achieved, they would be able to take the vital strategic city of Dimapur, which would mean the supply lines to Stilwell's X Force would be cut and the 'Hump' would be unable to function.

The British troops at Imphal reported contact with the enemy on 8 March. Unfortunately, the British command structure had misjudged the date of the main Japanese offensive, and did not realise that this was their main attack until the 13th, when the order to withdraw hastily went out. The 20th Indian Division, based at Tamu, managed to withdraw without a problem, but the much smaller 17th - still under "Punch" Cowan - at Tiddim had to fight its way out, meaning that the Corps commander - Lieutenant-General Geoffrey Scoones - had to commit most of his reserves to dig them out. However, even once the divisions consolidated at Imphal, there were problems; Slim was deeply troubled by the fact that an entire Japanese division, not just a regiment as thought, was blocking the road to Kohima; the only troops stationed in that town were the 50th Indian Parachute Brigade. This Japanese division surrounded Kohima instead of pressing on to the undefended Dimapur. A further Indian brigade was rushed in to try to break the encirclement, but was hugely outnumbered and soon forced into camp outside Kohima.

For both Kohima and Imphal the situation was desperate. Imphal itself was now completely surrounded, meaning that the only supplies available were by air. Luckily, with Allied success in the Arakan region, it was possible to airlift the 5th Indian Division to Imphal in time to stop the Japanese from overrunning the town. At the same time, the 2nd Indian Division arrived, also by air, at Dimapur. Fighting on the plain was vicious, with both sides taking heavy casualties exactly as Slim had intended. Throughout April the battle moved about without any clear direction; the Japanese, supported by Chandra Bose's Indian National Army, attacked from all sides but were beaten back by British artillery, infantry and tanks.

By May the Japanese had all but run out of momentum, and it was the turn of the British to counter-attack. They were going for the Japanese 15th Division - their weakest formation - but the monsoon had begun and movement was painfully slow. Between Imphal and Kohima, the troops focused on taking the ridge-lines held by the Japanese, but the going was tough; Allied artillery could not damage the well dug-in Japanese, and whenever the infantry managed to reach the tops of the ridges mortar fire and grenades from Japanese troops on the reverse faces. Meanwhile, to the south, the 17th Division was once again back in the line, facing the Japanese 33rd Division. Cowan's men had been involved in heavy fighting, in which they had lost 12 tanks from the 3rd Carabineers; enough that the rest of that regiment later had to be flown back to India to be reformed. The 17th made a rather uninspiring attack, saved only by the sheer stubbornness of the 48th Indian Infantry, which fought through the Japanese lines from behind to rejoin the division. In light of this, the new Japanese commander launched attack after attack, putting severe pressure on the British but reducing his manpower to critical levels, which coupled with the effects of British artillery meant that the 33rd Division was as good as out of action by the end of June.

The Japanese had realised that things were going wrong long before that point, however. On the 25 May, the commander of the Japanese Burma Area Army had visited the front, and despite insisting that they were not yet beaten his officers made it clear that without significant reinforcement they would be unable to achieve their objectives; a fact which the commander himself implied to a meeting with his subordinate in charge of the offensive. On the same day, the 31st Division at Kohima told its superiors that unless it received resupply it would have no choice but to retreat on 1 June. No supplies came, and on 31 May the 31st became the first Japanese division ever to retreat without orders or even permission from higher up. However, the Japanese Fifteenth Army refused to accept defeat and ordered the starving 31st and 15th Divisions to make another attack on Imphal from the north. Neither formation obeyed.

 

[Flying Pig]

With almost a mutiny facing him, the Japanese commander ordered the operation to come to an end on 3 July, but by that time his subordinates had long stopped listening to him. Japan's Fifteenth Army was by now more a rabble than a military force, and leaving behind artillery, vehicles and any soldier unable to walk they routed back across the Chindwin river. In total they left behind 13,500 soldiers dead on the battlefield in what was the greatest defeat in the entire history of the Japanese Army. Later that year, in December, Lord Wavell came to Imphal as Viceroy of India and knighted both Slim, as commander of Fourteenth Army, and three commanders of his subordinate formations: Scoones of IV Corps, Christison of XV Corps, and Stopford of XII Corps. At Kohima a memorial was raised, which says in a manner reminiscent of Simondes' epitaph for the Spartans at Thermopylae: 'When you go home, tell them of us and say: for your Tomorrow, we gave our Today'.

As the fighting raged around Imphal, the Chindits were carrying out their own operation to the north. 16th Brigade, under Fergusson, had been selected as a reconnaissance element and had advanced from Ledo into Burma, using terrain impassable to ordinary troops in the same way as the Japanese had against the British. They identified three possible landing zones, codenamed Piccadilly, Broadway, and Chowringhee. Calvert's men were ready to board the gliders that would take them to Piccadilly when a last-minute reconnaissance patrol saw logs there and informed Calvert that the landing was impossible. Wingate was terrified that these were placed there by the Japanese (they weren't; in fact they had been placed there to dry by Burmese loggers - the real problem had been inadequate air reconnaissance), which would mean that all the drop zones were known and ready to be ambushed, but at Calvert's own insistence Slim allowed the operation to proceed at Broadway. Unfortunately, the only reconnaissance that had been done of this drop zone was by air, and it was actually very difficult to land in; many soldiers were wounded as the gliders came in.

Despite this, over the next few weeks 9000 Chindits were airlifted to the drop zones. Broadway was fortified with a sizeable garrison: field artillery, anti-aircraft guns and even for a period of time Spitfires. Fergusson's 16th Brigade set up another base, Aberdeen, north of the town of Indaw - the Chindits' main objective - and the troops of 14th Brigade flew in and landed there. Another, White City, was set up by Calvert next to the main Japanese supply route to their forces fighting against Stilwell in the north, and ambushes were laid both north and south of Indaw.

The Japanese had no intention of giving the Chindits an easy time. There was almost constant fighting going on at both Broadway and White City. As so often in the campaign, much of the combat was hand-to-hand; British bayonets and Gurkha kukris meeting with Japanese bayonet and katana. On 24 March, Fergusson's brigade tried to capture Indaw - having already postponed the attack by more than a week after reconnaissance had described it as 'impossible'- but with the Japanese having effective control over the only water sources Fergusson's men were thrown back. The largest enemy attack came on 27 March, after days of air strikes, when the Japanese came several nights in a row, but British artillery and sheer bloody-mindedness won the day.

Disaster may have evaded the Chindits at the front, but it found them by other means. On the same day as the attack on Indaw, Wingate had flown to Imphal for a meeting with other officers, mostly from the Allied air forces. Coming back that same afternoon in a B-25, his pilot flew into a thunderstorm, lost control, and crashed the aircraft with the loss of all hands. Slim selected Brigadier Lentaigne, commander of the Indian Army brigade that had been so unpopular with Wingate, as the next commander of the Chindits; despite opposition from other officers on the grounds that he was different in working practices to the former General he was the only truly proven Brigadier in the Division, and besides trying to emulate Wingate, who had kept the force together predominantly through political connections and self-publicity, was not a policy likely to lead to success for his successor.

Things were seriously changing for the Chindits in Burma. Most of their air support was taken away, transferred to help bring supplies and men to the besieged towns of Kohima and Imphal - men which included the Chindit 23rd Brigade. The remaining Chindits in Burma were placed under the command of Stilwell, who proceeded to order them to abandon their work around Indaw and to divert their entire energy into assisting his own operations. Responding to this, Lentaigne brought his former 111 Brigade north - now under the former Brigade-Major, acting-Brigadier John Masters, to a new stronghold which would be called Blackpool. This position would be on top of the Japanese main supply route, and as such Calvert's brigade was ordered to move from Broadway and White Cityto support him. Calvert was uneasy about this; he had held those positions for months, and moving off White City would allow the Japanese to move troops north. However, Lentaigne was adamant - the Chindit brigades were too spaced-out to give each other effective support, and besides there was little merit in the argument that Broadway and White City were suitable for aircraft when no aircraft could fly during the monsoon.

The 111th set up camp at Blackpool on 8 May, and hit contact almost straight away. The strategic situation was far more difficult here; White City had been far behind the Japanese lines, its attackers generally a motley group of different units and its defenders able to spend time digging in, but Blackpool was very close to the Japanese northern front and its attackers had the support of heavy artillery. Calvert's fears were also realised in that the Japanese were able to move an entire division north from Indaw, straight past where White City used to stand. A heavy attack against Blackpool was repulsed on 17 May, but a second attack on 24 May captured vital positions inside its perimeter. Masters needed help, but due to the monsoons there was no chance that any other Chindit brigade could reach him in time and on 25 May - his troops now having been fighting for nearly 17 days without a break - Masters abandoned the position.

Masters would write later in his memoirs of how the medics had come to him, explaining how they didn't have enough men to carry all the wounded, and of how they showed him nine men on stretchers, pumped full of morphine but carrying unquestionably fatal wounds - one man 'seemed to have been torn in pieces by a mad giant', another ' had no left arm, shoulder, or breast, all torn away in one piece'. Morphine was running short and the medics needed direction. Masters told them to give the remaining morphine to those casualties whose eyes were still open, and to leave those nine behind - but said firmly "I don’t want them to see any Japanese". Rather than being left to face an extremely drawn-out and painful death at the hands of the enemythe medics shot them, hiding the bodies in tall, heavy stacks of bamboo by the sides of the road.

Mountbatten's men were, after the monsoon lifted in December, in a position to make major offensives into occupied Burma. On three fronts - Arakan, northern Burma along the newly-finished Ledo Road, and from Yunnan Province in China along the Burma Road - the British would be extending the progress they had already made, but their main attack was going to be on the Central Front; out of Manipur from Imphal where the ground would be suitable for motorised and armoured troops. Furthermore, the landing craft on loan to the D-Day operations were back in India and ready to be used to support amphibious landings, Making things better for the British was the changing mood of the ever-fickle Burmese population; the same people who had welcomed the Japanese as liberators in 1942 had now realised that their rule, with its characteristic brutality and oppression, was actually far worse than British colonialism.

The Japanese-established Burma National Army, under one Aung San, was growing increasingly dissatisfied and its leader had intended to revolt against the Japanese, however his ally Thakin Soe, who was leading a Communist insurgency, had convinced him to wait until the British had regained footholds in Burma. The Allies actually had a task force, known as Force 136, dedicated to supporting anti-Japanese groups, which was already active amongst the minority Karen population. Aung San sought help from this force, and despite major debate amongst Allied officers as to whether he was genuine Mountbatten personally decided that he should be supported, and the Burma National Army defected to the British. The other auxiliary force under Japanese command, Chandra Bose's Indian National Army, was also experiencing problems - the Japanese had been using them for menial tasks, rarely trusting them with combat, and keeping them in very poor supply. The main body of the INA - former soldiers of the British Indian Army captured at Singapore - had only signed up to escape captivity and was more than ready to surrender when the British came. Around Arakan, Lieutenant-General Christison's XV Corps was going on the offensive. They were joined on 29 December 1944 by one of Mountbatten's special requests- 3 Commando Brigade, cast from the same mould as the new-formed Special Air Service and among the United Kingdom's premier fighting forces. The Commandos were drawn from volunteers from both the Army and the Royal Marines, sent on gruelling training, then thrust into combat often behind enemy lines. They had already proven their worth against the Germans during raids on Dieppe and St Nazaire, and Mountbatten had asked that they be sent to him almost as soon as he took command of South-East Asia. Immediately they made their presence felt; landing unopposed on Akyab Island then carrying out reconnaissance of the surrounding area. At least one beachhead they made was a poor choice and what had been designated as 'firm mud' by the intelligence men turned out to be closer to thick water; some of the men had to form rugby scrums in a bid to get out. One man was seen going in again and again to pull out men and equipment from the mud; it was only after he washed in a crater that his comrades recognised him as a new subaltern.

The Brigade was given the task of making an attack down the Arakan peninsula towards the town of Myebon, where they would take and hold the valuable strategic ground of the southern Chin Hills. This would cut off Japanese supply routes, including the vital one supplying Rangoon, and mean that the British beachhead was secure. On 12 January 1945 the Commandos were again on the water, landing on the peninsula with 42 Royal Marine Commando leading. However, first contact was reported by 5 Commando, in the second wave, which came under machine-gun fire from a hill nicknamed 'Rose' by the planners. They duly called in air support and brought up tanks, supplied by the 19th Lancers, and the next day launched an attack upon the hill. The Japanese fought hard and to the death, but the Commandos had no real difficulty in taking the position.
For the next few days, 5 Commando sent patrols across the area playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Japanese. The British would sent out patrols, and the Japanese put tricks in place; spiked bamboo sticks in the middle of rivers, invisible in the dark but able to seriously injure anyone unlucky enough to walk into them. Despite this their patrols were generally successful, and they were soon withdrawn to the beach to take some rest. A few days of whatever relaxation they could get later, they were told that their next objective was the town of Kangaw. The ground would be tough - it consisted of mangrove swamps and rice paddies with no roads, so heavy equipment such as armour and artillery would be utterly unable to function. The most important landmark in the entire area was a small wooded ridge that the Commandos codenamed Hill 170.

At 1300 hours, on 22 January 1945, 3 Commando Brigade made landfall about 2 miles south of Kangaw, forgoing the usual shore bombardment in a bid to maintain the element of surprise. Each battalion knew its job - 1 and 5 Commandos took the lead and were to assault Hill 170, while No.42 (RM) Commando kept the beachhead - between two small tidal creeks - secure, and No.44 (RM) Commando was to take two valleys to the east of Hill 170 - Milford and Pinner - which it achieved on 23 January, with only minimal resistance from the enemy. However, that night the largest artillery barrage ever heard in Burma sounded forth, and the Japanese began an attack on Pinner which would last for four days. No.44 (RM) Commando was relieved on the 26th by the 51st Indian Infantry Brigade, bringing with it a troop of Sherman tanks from the 19th Lancers. This brigade had a somewhat difficult start, but did manage to capture Kangaw.

Originally, the plan had been that 3 Commando Brigade would withdraw on 30 January. This was however made impossible by the refusal of the Japanese to cooperate; instead they launched an attack at 0545 preceded by heavy fire from both artillery and machine-guns on Hill 270 itself. The brunt of their attack fell upon the northern end of the hill, and the 24 men of No.4 Troop, No.1 Commando. 300 Japanese charged their position, hurling grenades in front of them to get the Commandos' heads down. The troop's commander was one Lieutenant Knowland, who despite the ferocious enemy fire moved about the various trenches his men occupied keeping spirits up and giving out ammunition. At one point, the two-man team on one of his vital Bren Guns was hit by an enemy grenade, and they were both too severely wounded to continue the battle. The officer sent back to troop HQ for more men, and rushed up to operate the gun himself. The Bren may have been a firm favourite of the British soldier in battle, but merely to be firing the very heavy weapon made the operator a favourite target for the enemy - of which Knowland was well aware, but he still displayed no hesitation.

By now, the hordes of Japanese troops were scarcely ten yards down the hill, but in order to be able to target the enemy effectively Knowland had to stand up in the trench, firing from the hip. In doing so, he allowed both the Medical Orderly to recover the previous gun crew and a new pair to come up. Those two soldiers managed to get shot themselves, but Knowland kept firing until a third team could be brought up. Later on that day, when his troop were under attack again, he found himself picking up a 2-inch mortar and firing that from the hip; killing six Japanese with his first bomb. Soon he found himself out of ammunition, and so ran back, grenades bursting all around and bullets whizzing about his ears, to get more bombs. Once more he gave the Japanese hell, and when finally those bombs too ran out he retreated to his own trench where, finding no more ammunition for the mortar, he engaged the enemy with rifle fire. When his magazine ran out, with the enemy almost on top of him, he snatched up a dead man's Thompson SMG and sprayed the Japanese. In doing so was hit by an enemy round. Despite this he carried on fighting, killing at least ten more, before he fell back, mortally wounded, into the trench. Inspired by his heroism, the men of 4 Troop fought on for twelve hours until help arrived, even though only ten were still fit to fight. For his extreme courage and exemplary leadership under fire, Lieutenant Knowland was awarded the Victoria Cross. No. 4 Troop's courage gave the rest of the hill a fighting chance, and the Commandos needed no encouragement to take it. Despite this, the Japanese showed extreme courage as well: the Commandos' most important asset was its troop of Sherman tanks, and their commanders were horrified to see a troop of Japanese engineers carrying bamboo poles with explosives on the end charging towards them. The engineers climbed on top of the vehicles and detonated their charges, knocking out two of the three tanks. Meanwhile the fighting was fierce across the entire hill: a British counter-attack at 0930 was forced to back down after being met by heavy machine-gun firepower, as did a similar effort by X Troop of No.42 (RM) Commando supported by the remaining Sherman. Changing their tactics, the Commandos decided to bring down all available artillery and mortar fire upon the Japanese. Despite this, yet another counter-attack, this time by 6 Troop from No.1 Commando, was decimated and unable to make headway.

By this time, the men of 5 Commando over on Pinner to the east had been relieved by the 19th Hyderabad Regiment, and had come to Hill 170 to take over the positions held by the desperate 4 Troop from No.1 Commando, and by 1600 the 2nd Punjab Regiment from 51st Brigade had managed to work its way around to the left of the enemy and attacked from there. An hour later the Japanese began to slowly withdraw their forces from the hill, although an attack by the over-eager Punjabis was repulsed, as was a similar effort that night from the Japanese. The next day, when 5 Commando sent out clearance patrols, they found the enemy gone and nearly 350 Japanese dead left behind. Once a few more British units had landed in the Arakan area, the holding of Hill 170 meant that the Japanese had no way out and they withdrew completely from the region to avoid losing their entire 28th Army. The British had lost 45 dead, and just over twice that wounded. 'Kangaw' was given to the Commando regiments as a battle honour, and still flies on the colours of 42 Commando.

Mountbatten was thrilled that his special request had performed so well, and said 'if the Commandos only perform this one operation during the whole time they are under my command, it will have been worth it'. As with other heroic British victories, he made sure that news of the battle got across the entire Fourteenth Army, raising the already strengthening British spirits in Burma. The victory also enabled the Allies to focus on establishing airbases on two nearby islands: Cheduba, which was undefended, and the Japanese-held Ramree. Reconnaissance on 14 January discovered Japanese troops hastily placing guns ready to fire upon the beaches that the landing force would use, and so a strong naval escort including the considerable firepower of the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth and the light carrier HMS Ameer opened up an hour before the landing of the 26th Indian Infantry Division on 21 January. The landing was unopposed and the beachhead secured.

The Japanese fought with the same unbelievable stubbornness that so frustrated American forces in the Pacific. At one point, the Royal Marines outflanked a major Japanese stronghold containing 900 defenders, but rather than surrender they chose to march 16 kilometres across the island to join a larger battalion - which would have been unremarkable had they not been marching across a mangrove swamp. The Marines had more sense than to go in, and established a perimeter around the swamp (since they could move much faster than the Japanese), calling on the enemy repeatedly to surrender and shooting any soldier trying to cross their line. Stuck in the swamp the Japanese were plagued by the pestilences of the tropics; mosquitoes, scorpions, and even crocodiles. The British officer Bruce Wright later described ' a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on earth' as men were attacked by the reptiles; of the 900 Japanese who entered the swamp only 20 were eventually taken out alive by the British, although accounts vary wildly of how many, if indeed any, escaped.

Unfortunately, the action on Ramree was pretty much the final major act of the Arakan campaign for the Allies. XV Corps was informed that its operations were being curtailed in order to free up transport aircraft for the rest of Fourteenth Army: one division was withdrawn to India along with an armoured brigade, and flanking operations were through the enemy-held hills cancelled. The Japanese managed to hold on to the strong-points that they controlled until very late in the war. Thoughts were now turned to Central Burma and the efforts to drive the Japanese out.

 

[Flying Pig]

Throughout 1944 the Japanese in Central Burma had been massively weakened by Allied efforts. Many of their experienced troops who had learned their trade in the invasion were dead, replaced by waves of conscripts, many of whom were in poor physical condition thanks to the austere conditions at home. The paper strength of their divisions had to be reduced from 25,000 to 10,000, however most barely had half that in practice. Most of their anti-tank weapons were gone, and their suicide-bombing tactics were ineffective when the Allies supported vehicles with infantry, meaning that their only option for dealing with Allied armour was direct fire from field artillery - which meant that their guns were unavailable to give indirect fire support to the infantry. Their own tank regiments had an average of 20 vehicles; a British regiment numbered 50. The air force had also been mauled; their 5th Air Division was down to a few dozen aircraft facing 1200 of the Allies.

The main effort for the British Army was to advance into Central Burma, driving towards Mandalay and then down to Rangoon. In doing so, they would both be able to re-occupy the country and tie up Japanese forces that would otherwise be opposing the predominantly American drive up through the islands of the Pacific and towards Japan itself. The attack into Arakan was designed predominantly to distract the Japanese from this and to draw their divisions away, and for similar reasons Stilwell was given the blessing of the British to complete the Ledo Road with an attack into Northern Burma, which would have the support of a British division as well as an entire Chinese army.

On the right flank of the Northern Combat Area Command - a predominantly American corps-sized formation led by the US Army general Sultan - the British 36th Division - which had replaced the Chindits in the line - had advanced down the valley towards Indaw. In December it had linked up with the Indian 19th Division in December 1944, meaning that Sultan's command and Slim's Fourteenth Army were now fighting along one front. To the left of Sultan's forces were the Chinese troops, called the New First Army, advancing towards the town of Bhamo. The Japanese defended the town with characteristic determination for weeks, but the town finally fell on 15 December. The Ledo Road itself was finally completed on 21 January 1945, when the New First Army's troops sighted their countrymen who had advanced from Yunnan Province. However, as the British had thought, it seemed unlikely that the road would now seriously affect the military situation in China: but nevertheless it was a great morale booster, especially to the Americans. In his memoirs Admiral Mountbatten wrote of an occasion when flying over Burma he asked the name of a mighty river snaking through the hills below. An American officer with him replied proudly 'that's no river, sir, that's the Ledo Road'.

Much to the annoyance of the Allies, but especially the British, Chiang Kai-Shek ordered Sultan to stop his advance at the town of Lashio, which he duly did after capturing the town on 7 March. Chiang had achieved his own objectives in the war: his supply routes were open, and he was unwilling to allow his Chinese troops to be used supporting British interests in a British colony. For the British this meant that the NCAC was effectively out of the war, meaning the loss of thousands of men and a huge number of aircraft (although Churchill did appeal directly to the US Chief-of-Staff, General Marshall, that his aircraft should stay in Burma) and so greatly diminishing the likelihood that the Allies would be able to reach Rangoon before the monsoon came down. Most of the Japanese divisions had been withdrawn to Central Burma, to face the British, and in early April the last few Japanese troops withdrew from the north. NCAC likewise withdrew about that time, returning all its troops to China.

Fourteenth Army knew that it was not going to have an easy time. Supply by road was going to be difficult; the tracks were primitive to say the least and the distances involved were far greater than the Allies had ever experienced in Europe. The supply officers tried ingenious methods - impregnating hessian sacking with bitumen and diesel to create a covering for muddy, slippery roads - to make their job easier, but the vast majority of the supplies for the British would have to come in by air. That they would have the aircraft to achieve this was by no means a given, as shown in December 1944 when the Americans transferred 75 aircraft, without warning, to China. That time, there were enough spare aircraft in the Mediterranean that Slim was able to get enough transferred over to replace his loss, but air assets would be uncertain for most of the coming operation. At their peak, the Fourteenth Army were going to need 7000 sorties every day. In addition, the army had been operating mostly by mule to enable it to move around in the jungle, but this dramatically reduced its marching speed: as such Slim re-assigned Cowan's Indian 17th Division and the 5th as mixed motorised and airmobile formations, to allow them to better operate in the more open country of Burma proper.

As the monsoon came to a close at the end of 1944, Fourteenth Army had already established two bridgeheads over the Chindwin river, which at the time marked the front-line between the Allies and the Japanese. Although the intelligence available to him was extremely limited - Japanese radio security had been so good that Ultra intelligence from enemy signals, so valuable in Europe, had been impossible to come by - Slim believed that the Japanese would try to fight as close to the Indian border as possible, in front of the Irrawaddy. As such, IV Corps came in from the northern bridgehead, with the highly-regarded 19th Division leading, under the command of Major-General Pete Rees, perhaps the most aggressively-minded general in the army and a holder of both the Distinguished Service Order, the Military Cross, and no fewer than four Mentions in Dispatches. They were supported by the Indian XXXIII Corps from the southern bridgehead, led by the Indian 20th Division.

The Japanese did not put up a real fight; Rees was 80 miles away from his bridgehead within five days. From this Slim realised that his assumption was flawed; the Japanese were actually not giving battle to the advancing forces. Luckily, the 19th was the only division that IV Corps had actually committed, and so he still had the flexibility to make serious changes to the plan. Rees' division was transferred to XXXIII Corps, which was to continue with the original plan of attacking across the projected battlefield of the Shwebo Plain and towards Mandalay. Meanwhile, IV Corps was given Fourteenth Army's reserve divisions, and ordered to move from the army's left flank round to its right, and to advance along the Indian side of the Chindwin. From there they would cross the Irrawaddy and take the vital logistical and communications centre of Meiktila with an armoured attack. However, in order to maintain the element of surprise by convincing the Japanese that IV Corps was still going towards Mandalay, a dummy HQ was set up at their former beachhead, Sittaung. Every radio broadcast to and from the 19th Division went via here.

Unluckily for the Indian Corps, the Japanese had far from totally abandoned the Shwebo Plain. Most of the settlements and towns there had some form of Japanese rearguard, and the Indian 19th Division and British 2nd Division spent most of January flushing these out while the Indian 20th took the port town of Monywa, on the Burmese side of the Chindwin, in a very difficult battle. By the end of the month, the Japanese forces in the area were as good as destroyed, although there were still enemy positions north of the Irrawaddy in the Sagaing hills, near Mandalay. At the same time, IV Corps began its deceptive advance south; deploying light infantry formations out in front to convince the Japanese that they were not bringing heavy equipment. These units hit contact at the tow of Pauk, but air bombing soon softened up the Japanese enough to enable them to take the town. Their supply route was a logistical wonder; stretching nearly 350 miles all the way back to Kohima.


Fourteenth Army was now faced with a major obstacle, the Irrawaddy River, which would most likely be sternly defended by the enemy. Trying to cross under fire would almost certainly result in a major defeat; at its widest the river was two thousand yards from bank to bank, with shifting sand bars all around. Slim therefore planned to make more than one crossing - one north of Mandalay which would be only just strong enough to attract Japanese attention, and the main one south of that city in secret. In view of this, the 7th Division was tasked to take the town of Pakokku to establish a bridgehead over the Irrawaddy. Leading the way was the 4th Battalion, 5th Gurkha Rifles, part of 114 Indian Infantry Brigade. They reached their target on 3 February, after a company-sized attack to clear the way in, and came under heavy shelling from the Japanese guns in the vilage of Kahnla.

On 5 February, the Commanding Officer led three of his companies to encircle the village. The fighting was fierce; the surrounding Japanese refused to give in and were well supplied with machine-guns, but after a determined attack the Gurkhas managed to take the village, killing at least 30 enemy troops. One company commander, Major Brown, was awarded a bar to his Military Cross, while his Company Havildar-Major (equivalent to Sergeant-Major) was wounded and awarded the Indian Order of Merit. His men sent out reconnaissance patrols until well into the next day, which established that the Japanese were not likely to re-take the village and so on 7 February the battalion fortified Kahnla into their main forward operating base. Major Brown's company made an attack on the 8th, clearing another Japanese position, but the battalion's major attack on the remaining Japanese troops, which had been scheduled for 10 February had go ahead without air cover, as bad weather conditions had made it impossible to fly.

Armoured support from the recently converted Gordon Highlanders (normally an infantry regiment) was now available to the Gurkhas, and they began their attack in the early morning. By the afternoon, three platoons reported that they had taken their objectives, but the battalion's Commanding Officer had been killed leading his men from the front. The Japanese had fought with the fanaticism that the British had by now come to expect, of a battalion facing the Gurkhas only one man was taken prisoner. That night the Japanese attacked the Gurkhas no fewer than six times, and for the next two nights they tried to sneak into the battalion HQ, but were twice denied. The Gurkhas moved into Pakokku itself on 14 February, searched the town, and declared it clear. Their beachhead was secure and the 7th Division could now begin the crossing.

The crossings - one at the former capital of Pagan and one north of it - began badly. What was left of the Indian National Army had three battalions focused around the two landing sites of Pagan and Nyaungu, and their machine-gun fire put the 7th Divisions assault boats out of action as they tried to cross. Eventually, the Gordons' tanks, coupled with artillery fire, forced the Nyaungu battalion to surrender, but the troops at Pagan opposed the British even as they reached the riverbank, losing many of their number to the ferocious attack of the 11th Sikh Regiment before withdrawing to the high ground of Mount Popa. By 20 February, most of division was across the river, although the Gurkha battalion at Pakokku had to clear a five-by-three-mile island in the river which was inhibiting their division's movement. Mopping up of the Japanese in the area continued until 8 May, clearing the enemy out of the villages around Pagan. Unknown to the Allies, they had picked exactly the borderline between the areas of two Japanese armies to make their attack, and this dramatically slowed their enemy's reaction to their attacks, as did the increasing dissatisfaction of the INA towards Japan.

On 20 February, "Punch" Cowan's 17th Division moved out of the Nyaungu beachhead, and by 24 February he had reached the point halfway towards his Corps' objective; Meiktila. With him were two motorised Indian Infantry Brigades, as well as most of a tank brigade. In a supreme feat of irony, Meiktila had been chosen by Japanese High Command as an ideal place to hold a meeting discussing war plans the very day that Cowan's men came for it, and the officers there were totally shocked by his attack. A dispatch came back from a very worried Japanese officer standing on Mount Popa that 2000 tanks were advancing on Meiktila and the meeting, but when it got back to Fifteenth Army HQ they assumed that he had added one zero too many to the figures and that the British could only be sending a raid. This was not the first time they had refused to believe that the town could be under attack; an earlier air reconnaissance report of a huge column of vehicles moving south, west of the Irrawaddy, was dismissed.

It was not until 26 February that the Japanese really appreciated what the situation was, and began preparing themselves for a real battle. They had geography on their side: the town lies between two lakes, one to the north and one to the south, meaning that the British would have a difficult time bringing their full mass to bear. The Japanese had about 4000 troops in the town in total, which included secretaries and staff officers but also anti-aircraft gunners which could be very dangerous to the attacking tanks. While the Japanese dug in, the British sent Cowan's division to capture an airfield 20 miles to the north-west, and when this was achieved they brought in fuel supplies for the tanks and an entire air-portable brigade.

The 17th Division proceeded to get into a position to encircle Meiktila, and on 28 February made their attack supported by a huge amount of artillery and air power. In order to make sure that the Japanese could not get any reinforcements into the town, the British dispatched the 63rd Indian Brigade to put a block on the road to the south-west, sending the rest of its number in from the west while the other infantry brigade - the 48th - attacked from the north, having to contend with strong Japanese resistance around an old monastery. Meanwhile the 255th Armoured Brigade posted a roadblock of its own to the north-east, then made a hooking manoevre around the town. taking the airfields to the east before swinging into an attack from the south-east. Most of the artillery and air power supported their efforts, and accordingly they were an overwhelming success. The tanks pulled out that same night, although Cowan sent patrols out to maintain his hold over the ground they had taken.

The commander of IV Corps, Messervy, and Slim both went to Cowan's HQ, anxious that the Japanese would be able to hold out in the town for weeks. As it actually happened, the Japanese held on desperately, but in less than four days the British had control of the town. The enemy had plenty of heavy guns, but they were unable to lay down enough concentrated firepower on any on attacking brigade, and they seriously lacked anti-armour weapons which meant that they were very vulnerable to the tanks; Slim later wrote in his memoirs of watching two Gurkha platoons, supported by just a single tank, overrunning several fortified Japanese positions while taking very few casualties. Hoping to make some sort of defence against the tanks, Japanese soldiers crouched in their trenches, holding 550lb aircraft bombs, and struck the detonators when a tank came over the trench. This problem was soon solved by a British officer, who gathered a few men and went round the trenches, shooting the Japanese there.

The Japanese rushed troops in to defend the town, but by the time they got in they were greatly dismayed to find that instead of adding to the defence they were now being called upon to retake the town. Many of their regiments had taken heavy losses in the battles of the previous weeks, and were severely under strength: in all perhaps 12,000 men with 70 heavy guns. Their intelligence and communications were in a sorry state; there was no way of communicating between divisions, they lacked any information about the enemy, and were navigating from hastily-drawn sketch maps. lacked information on the enemy and even proper maps. The British troops facing them numbered some 15,000 infantry, 100 tanks and 70 heavy guns, and were expecting more to come during the battle.

As the Japanese came in, 17th Division launched mechanised attacks out of the town, trying to clear their route back to the beachhead at Nyaungu. There was hard fighting around the junctions, villages and towns, but the attacks met with distinctly limited success and the division withdrew back into Meiktila. Despite this, the Japanese could not replicate their success when attacking the town proper, and several attacks by their 18th Division were thrown back with heavy casualties. From 12 March they changed their strategy, focusing their attacks on the airfields to the east; to which the British flew a fresh brigade to act as reinforcements. The Japanese fired on the landing troops, and two aircraft were destroyed with a loss of 22 men. From then on Cowan stopped using those airstrips; dropping in supplies by parachute and having the wounded evacuated by light aircraft, using a smaller airstrip inside the town.

Meanwhile, on 12 March, the battle for Meiktila was transferred to the leadership of the Japanese General Honda. His HQ staff took control on 18 March, lacked any communications specialists and so had no ability to effectively co-ordinate the attacks, and accordingly they lacked any sense of unity. As elsewhere, the Japanese were still using artillery to provide direct fire support in the front lines, which dealt a great deal of damage to the British tanks but also cost them dearly in terms of their own guns. At one point they captured a British tank and tried to use it against the defenders, but it was destroyed and the attacking force decimated.

At the same time, IV Corps' other division - the Indian 7th - had been fighting hard to maintain and secure its own bridgehead, and subsequently to take the major river port of Myingyan and to repel along with the 28th (East African) Brigade to fend off Japanese counter-attacks. As well as conventional, partly mechanised forces, the Japanese had a regiment from the Indian National Army which had some success against the British through the use of guerrilla tactics in a bid to make up for its own lack of heavy equipment. The attack on Myingyan was soon called off, as the 7th were told to instead try to re-open the routes to Meiktila and the besieged 17th. They began this effort towards the middle of March, clearing both the Japanese and remaining troops of the INA from Mount Popa, and once the road was again open they went back to their original task of seizing Myingyan, which held out for four days until 22 March.

Elsewhere, Major-General Rees' 19th Division was having a better time of things. They had burst out of their bridgeheads in mid-February, forcing the Japanese back at speed, and on 7 March his men caught sight of the sun glistening off the golden temples and pagodas that cover Mandalay Hill. The Japanese commander, Lieutenant-General Yamamoto, thought Mandalay not worth defending, but orders from higher up instructed him that he was to defend the former royal capital to the death, as it was reckoned that abandoning the city would cause the Japanese a crippling loss of prestige - not to mention the loss of huge supply dumps just south of the city, which the Japanese had no chance of moving but were loath to see fall into Allied hands.

The attack on the night of 8 March was led by the 4th Battalion of the 4th Gurkha Rifles, whose Commanding Officer had served in Mandalay before the war and knew the city well. The Gurkhas stormed up Mandalay Hill and had to sweep the Japanese out from the tunnels and bunkers underneath the pagodas: an operation which took several days, although to the Gurkhas' credit most of the city's buildings remained intact. The major obstacle that the 19th Division faced during the attack was Mandalay Citadel, known to the British as Fort Dufferin, with its thick walls and wide moat. Artillery fire and bombing failed to make an impact on the walls, and an attack through railway tunnels into the citadel was beaten back. On 21 March the British were preparing to attack again, through the sewers this time, but found that the Japanese had themselves used the sewers to evacuate the fort. Further operations by the 20th and 2nd Divisions severely damaged the Japanese, and by the end of March the Japanese Fifteenth Army's status as a unified fighting force was seriously up for question. The Japanese broke off the siege of Meiktila on 28 March and ordered Honda to prepare to meet the British elsewhere, but by now his forces were in no shape to even respond to his orders and now that Mandalay was lost Aung San had taken his cue to lead the Burma National Army in a revolt against the Japanese.

The British advance into Central Burma had been a success, but it was still essential for them to make it to Rangoon before the monsoons began: if they failed, the monsoon rains would destroy the fragile overland routes from India and air support would become almost non-existant. To make matters worse, the Americans wanted to withdraw most of their transport aircraft by June at the latest, meaning that without Rangoon it would be almost impossible to feed and supply either the huge military force in Burma - the largest army in the world at the time - or its civilian population. As a stop-gap measure, the British sent the battered 2nd and 36th Divisions back to India to allow them to receive reinforcements and to take the pressure off the supply lines. Meanwhile, the main attack by IV Corps thrust down the Sittang river valley while the much smaller Indian XXXIII Corps attacked down the Irrawaddy.

The Japanese forces left in Burma were now mostly small rearguard formations, and on 6 April Cowan's division struck at the front one of them - at a roadblock near Pyawbwe - with support from the 255th Armoured Brigade, while a mechanised column went round the back and cut off their retreat. After bypassing a small village held by a battered party of Japanese troops, this column completed the destruction of the Japanese 53rd Division, before turning on Pyawbwe itself, firing shots at Lieutenant-General Honda's HQ but, not realising what it was, breaking off their attack with a view of capturing the settlement proper. From then on, there was almost no organised resistance to the British advance; Honda's HQ at Pyinmana was destroyed before the Japanese could even organise a defence, and although the general himself escaped under cover of darkness he now had no means to contact what remained of his army.

What was left of the Japanese Fifteenth Army had regrouped in the Shan States area of Burma, and had recently been joined by the Japanese 46th Division which had moved in from the north of the country. Orders came for them to move to Toungoo, in a bid to block the Allies' route to Rangoon, but they were delayed by a revolt by the local Karen people, helped and armed by the British Force 136. The result of this was that the Indian 5th Division reached the town before them, on 23 April, and although the Japanese reoccupied Toungoo after the Indians passed through they were soon driven back out again by Rees' Indian 19th Division, which forced the Japanese eastwards and therefore out of the way. This also enabled the Allies to use the vital airfields there, which would give air cover to their attack on Rangoon.

The Indian 17th Division resumed the lead of the advance, and met Japanese rearguards north of Pegu, 40 miles (64 km) north of Rangoon, on 25 April. The various line of communication troops, naval personnel and even Japanese civilians in Rangoon had been formed into the Japanese 105 Independent Mixed Brigade. This scratch formation used buried aircraft bombs, anti-aircraft guns and suicide attacks with pole charges to delay the British advance and then defended the road-block settlement of Pegu until 30 April, when it was forced to withdraw into the hills west of the town.

The original plan to re-take Rangoon included an amphibious assault, known as Operation Dracula, by XV Corps long before the main body of Fourteenth Army reached the city. Taking the capital was essential for the British to drive the Japanese out of Burma: it was the major seaport by which the Japanese were bringing supplies in and, since their rail links were in great peril from the British, if it were taken they would have no choice but to completely withdraw from the country. The plan was initially shelved over concerns that the resources required to undertake it would not be available, but Slim was very uneasy about the length of the supply lines behind his army and concerned that the Japanese would follow their previous form and fight to the last man, which could entail holding out for months at the height of the monsoon, and as such asked for Dracula to be re-instated.

 

[Flying Pig]

Rangoon was home to the chief Japanese HQ for Burma; that of the Burma Area Army under Lieutenant-General Kimura. Despite this, there were no Japanese combat troops to be found inside the city: only large numbers of back-office soldiers, naval servicemen, and what was left of the Indian National Army. These troops had lost nearly all of their loyalty to Tokyo, understanding that hopes of a Japanese conquest of India were by now non-existent, and their commander did not even intend to try to mount a defence of the capital. In order to get some semblance of a fighting force into the city, rear-echelon troops and even some ethnically Japanese civilians were mobilised into what was called the 105th Independent Mixed Brigade. This force was sent to try to defend Pegu when the British attacked it, but owing to a lack of transport did not arrive in any force whatsoever, as all of the available vehicles were being used to take other troops out of the capital and south to Moulmein. Orders were conflicted: Kimura was ordering men out of the city while his superiors were ordering them to stand and fight, and this meant that while the HQ staff were fleeing in trucks, Kimura's Chief of Staff was busy converting the city into fortified gun emplacements. Most of the city's larger buildings met this fate, although at the insistence of the nominally-independent Burmese Prime Minister, Ba Maw, he did not turn the extremely sacred Shwedagon Pagoda into such a fortress.

The retreating Japanese were struck by terrible bad luck; most of their troops had left in a convoy of eleven ships at sea, but the Japanese Navy was by now a shadow of its former power and could not mount a sufficient escort for them. The Royal Navy caught sight of them in the Gulf of Martaban on 30 April, and sent in the destroyers, sinking nine of the eleven ships and killing some 800 Japanese. Important figures escaped over land; the Japanese provided transport for their own HQ staff who retreated to Moulmein in vehicles, under Allied air attack the whole way. By contrast, Ba Maw and his staff were not so lucky and had to walk or in the Prime Minister's case take his own car to get out. Ba Maw's daughter gave birth along the way, and fearing that he would be assassinated in Moulmein he changed course and fled to Tokyo. This left only 5,000 Indian National Army troops still in Rangoon, and even these were only in place to protect ethnically-Indian civilians from the disorder and would hand over control of the city the minute a British soldier appeared to claim it.

Far removed from the chaos at their goal, the British and Indian troops of Slim's army hit contact with the Japanese at Pegu on 27 April. The enemy fought a delaying action; their troops were almost all back-room staff and their sappers laid down mines improvised from air-dropped bombs to stop the British tanks. As if nature itself was on their side, on 28 April the British, led by the 17th Division, were slowed to a crawl by torrential rain, turning the dusty track into a river of mud. It took until the next day for IV Corps' leading troops to block the road between Pegu and the Sittang - and thus communications between Rangoon and Moulmein - wiping out a small enemy convoy in the process, and until 30 April for a major attack to come from several Indian battalions against Pegu. The going was slow: the attackers had to crawl over the girders of two demolished railway bridges to set up a bridgehead, and thereafter the Japanese resisted fiercely around ditches and the main road bridge. The rearguards did their job well: orders came from Moulmein to abandon Pegu and instead to hold Rangoon, as the monsoon had broken and the pace of the British advance massively reduced. The entirety of IV Corps had to be placed on half rations to allow the supply lines to cope.

Dracula itself began between 27 and 30 April as a force centred around the Indian 26th Division set out from the islands of Akyab and Ramree, escorted by two squadrons of the Royal Navy including a Free French battleship, Richelieu. The RAF covered these landings energetically, bombing the Japanese to the south of the capital with a force numbering twelve entire squadrons on 1 May. At the same time, a composite battalion of Gurkha parachutists in with a small group from Force 136 to take out enemy artillery at Elephant Point, at the mouth of the Rangoon river. The Gurkhas had been at the forefront of the Indian Army's new airborne divisions, but their transition had not been seamless; an often-recounted story in the years after the war told of a battalion whose Commanding Officer asked for volunteers to jump into battle from 1000 feet. To a man, his battalion stepped forward, but they looked decidedly gloomy about this turn of events. Eventually, a young British subaltern asked the Havildar-Major what the matter was, to which he was told that the men were wondering whether, as it was their first jump, they could jump from some lower altitude - say 100 feet? When the subaltern replied that at such a height the parachutes would have no chance to open, the battle-hardened Gurkha picked up immediately and said to his bemused officer "ah, sahib, we are to have parachutes? Then no problem!"

With this difficulty resolved, the Gurkhas embraced airborne tactics willingly and at 0230 hours on the morning of 1 May, the composite battalion's pathfinders boarded two Dakotas on Akyab island and took to the skies. Half an hour later the rest of their comrades boarded thirty-eight aircraft, and these jumped, carrying orange umbrellas and bright yellow panels to allow their air cover to recognise them, at 0545, taking very few casualties - one being a British medical officer attached to the battalion and rather surprised to see himself thrown out of a Dakota into Burma. No opposition was forthcoming, and the battalion regrouped and began its advance towards the artillery battery. Overhead came the noise of American B-24 bombers, and the battalion halted a good three kilometres from their target to allow the aircraft to carry out their mission. To the Gurkhas' great surprise, they had to dive for cover as the American bombs fell upon their own C Company, causing a fair number of casualties, although estimates vary considerably. The battalion's Forward Air Controller very hastily sent out a very indignant transmission that all further bombing runs should be cancelled.

The rain was torrential, but the Gurkhas saw it as cover from detection by the Japanese and advanced through it with determination. They eventually reached Elephant Point at 1600 hours, and engaged the enemy at close quarters using flame-throwers to clear out their bunkers. Some forty Japanese were killed, although again sources differ as to the exact number of casualties on both sides, and the battalion dug in and waited for their relief to come in. When it eventually did, they received a far from warm welcome as the Gurkhas mistook their surgeons for a Japanese counter-attack and opened fire upon them, wounding four of them in what is perhaps the most fortunate situation to find oneself shot. All night the Gurkhas held their position, although the tide did force some of them to higher ground by flooding a few trenches, and at dawn the next day the battalion watched as column after column of landing craft sailed in behind the minesweeper screen into Rangoon harbour.

The RAF flying overhead learned of the situation on the ground when they overflew the city jail, and saw that the British prisoners of war there had escaped and painted on the roof 'Japs gone, extract digit' - that is, 'pull your finger out' in RAF slang. The crew of the aircraft tried to land on a nearby airfield, but crashed their plane and walked to the jail where they found 1000 prisoners of war, from whom they quickly learned that the Japanese were, indeed, gone. From there the airmen went to the city dock and 'borrowed' a local fishing vessel, which they used to sail down the river to meet the landing craft. The occupation of Rangoon began in earnest the next day, and the local people welcomed the British warmly - if not for their affection for the King's rule, at least because they could restore order, which had fallen away fast after the Japanese had moved out: the jail used for Burmese prisoners had been destroyed, as had the hospital being housed in St Philomena's Convent which resulted in the deaths of 400 Japanese medics and patients. The city was a den of filth; infectious diseases were endemic and bandits had turned the outskirts into a lawless gang territory. On 6 May, lead elements of the landing force met up with Cowan's 17th Division as it cursed its way through the floods towards the capital.

The capture of Rangoon marked the effective end of the Burma Campaign. Those British troops which were to remain in country were assigned to the new Twelfth Army, and Slim's superior - the commander of Allied Land Forces South-East Asia, or ALFSEA, Oliver Leese - informed him that he was to be made commander of this new formation. Slim refused, and said that he would rather leave the army. This news quickly got round his men, and morale collapsed around all corners of Fourteenth Army. The matter got to the most senior officer in the army, Alan Brooke as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who was furious that Leese had not consulted him about the appointment and he raised so much pressure that Mountbatten, as Leese's immediate superior, had to order him to reverse his decision. Slim was given a long-overdue promotion to full general on 1 July 1945, and told that he would succeed Leese as Commander in Chief at ALFSEA. Slim was pleased with this appointment, but would not actually take up the job until hostilities had finished.

Japan's forces were unwilling to give in and the remainder of their Twenty-Eighth Army were planning to break out from their hiding places in the Pegu Yomas - a range of forested hills between the Irrawaddy and Sittang rivers - and join what was left of the Burma Area Army. A diversionary attack was launched on 3 July by the Japanese Thirty-Third Army, but the entire formation could scarcely muster a single regiment to fight the British and on 10 July, after a mostly pointless battle for terrain almost completely covered by water, both sides broke off the fighting. The breakout still went ahead on 17 July, but the British had ambushes and artillery kill-zones on most of their routes and a total of 10,000 Japanese were killed, many trying to cross the swollen Sittang river on improvised rafts. By contrast, the British scarcely lost a man.

Mountbatten gratified his ambition by staging a huge victory parade on 15 July, while British plans turned to re-taking the rest of South-East Asia. Fourteenth Army, now commanded by Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey and XV Corps were back in India and planning their next move. Fourteenth Army had its strength augmented by an entire Indian corps, and planned a move known as Operation Zipper to land troops on Malaya. It became unnecessary to actually launch Zipper, however, on 2 September, when, following the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender was signed on the deck of the USS Missouri.

Even at the time, people recognised that apart from tying up Japanese troops from the fighting in China and the Pacific the Burma campaign had had little effect on the overall outcome of the Second World War. The Japanese had held the country until their overall defeat was no longer in question, and the Americans' achievement in supplying China were generally fruitless - with the notable exception of the Hump airlift - owing to the great corruption and introspective view of Chiang Kai-Shek's government. Furthermore, from the overall British perspective, the destruction of the myth that European troops could not be defeated by Asian, and the significant role that the native population had played in opposing the Japanese meant that there was no chance that colonial rule could continue as normal. In 1947 Aung San went to London to discuss independence - having ably filled the administrative void between the Japanese collapse and the British re-occupation of his country - and by 1948 both India and Burma were independent, self-governing political entities.

Where Burma was truly a victory was in showing how the British Army could come back from adversity to triumph over the enemy. Slim held unprecedented control over the shape and nature of his army, and in being able to make it his own proved what his men were capable of: no other general of the war had both fought against the best his enemy had to offer and managed to so completely knock them out. After the war he was made Field Marshal, Chief of the Imperial General Staff - thereby becoming only the second man ever to work his way up from the ranks to the pinnacle of his profession - and Governor-General of Australia, where he is a national hero, and his memoirs of the campaign have become a military classic. It was his victory and rebuilding of respect for the British skill in war that enabled Britain - unlike the French, Dutch, or later on the Americans - to leave Asia with dignity and on their own terms, rather than being forced out.

 

[Cutlass]

Looking forward to this. But it'll be a few days before I have the time to give it the attention it deserves.

 

[Justo]

Very good. Currently 75% of the way through this but definately plan on finish it.

 

[Flying Pig]

I've got about two weeks' (compassionate?) leave until I'm back at work 24/7 for a bit, so any suggestions for another would be welcome: PM as usual.

 

[Ajidica]

I read it. Nice job. I knew that the Brits and Japanese fought in SEA but not to what extent.

 

[Dreadnought]

beautiful! Just started reading it, but it looks excellent!

 

[Yeekim]

Didn't get past the first paragraph before I just had to say that "defending a jungle-covered colony of an antiquated empire miles from home" is basically just asking to be forgotten.

 

[Flying Pig]

Didn't get past the first paragraph before I just had to say that "defending a jungle-covered colony of an antiquated empire miles from home" is basically just asking to be forgotten.

Quite - it would be even more forgettable if it wasn't even a colony, right? I mean, western troops defending a jungle-covered hell-hole in South-East Asia from enemy attack, who would remember anyone who did that?

 

[Ataxerxes]

Thanks, Flying Pig! I don't know much about this part of WWII so am looking foward to reading it. I'm a U.S. American and sometimes we forget about the British fighting in the Pacific Theatre.

 

[GinandTonic]

Good work old man

 

[Communisto]

Great work.

 

[vogtmurr]

Excellent work. Sorry to hear you're getting time off for compassionate leave, glad you are still working 24/7 !

 

[Flying Pig]

Excellent work. Sorry to hear you're getting time off for compassionate leave, glad you are still working 24/7 !

Sorry about that, it was a joke. I'm going to be spending five weeks on the job all day, every day - taking shooting teams out for two weeks then running an expedition in Canada - so I was joking that they gave me leave beforehand as a consolation.

 

[Communisto]

taking shooting teams out for two weeks then running an expedition in Canada -

Come say 'hi!'

Then teach me to shoot

 

[vogtmurr]

.... then running an expedition in Canada - so I was joking that they gave me leave beforehand as a consolation.

so. the consolation is for having to run the expedition in Canada ?
its not that bad in summer, though I personally know of a few hell-holes