Burma campaign

Burma campaign (see Map 19). Waged between the Japanese and the Allies, this was the longest campaign in which the British Army participated during the Second World War, lasting from December 1941 to August 1945. However, ‘British’ is a totally inappropriate description as Indian troops predominated within Slim's victorious Fourteenth Army and a wide variety of races, including Burmese, Chinese, Chins, Gurkhas, Kachins, Karens, Nagas, and black troops from British East Africa and British West Africa also took part. Ultimate victory was therefore principally won not by the Americans and the British, but by the Indian Army, albeit under British leadership. It was fought over equally diverse terrain which included not only jungle but mountains, open plains, coastal waters, and wide rivers, too. On the plains, during the Imphal campaign, tanks played an essential role, while air transport and supply gave the campaign a vital additional dimension.

Japan's initial purpose in invading Burma was to protect the flank of its troops fighting in the Malayan campaign and the capture of Singapore. Later the occupation of the country, which effectively closed the only remaining supply route to China of any consequence (see Burma Road), provided the westernmost bastion of the newly extended Japanese empire. Even in the days of utter defeat in 1945, the Japanese Army held on to a corner of Tenasserim to block any Allied overland advance on Bangkok. Burma was also a shop-window. The granting of a form of independence to it in August 1943, however inadequate, gave some substance to Japanese claims to be liberators of South-East Asia from the colonial powers (see Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere). Finally, in the view of the Japanese prime minister General Tōjō, as well as in that of Lt-General Mutaguchi who launched the Imphal offensive into Manipur State, Burma was the stepping-stone to India.

The British wanted to retake a country lost by military defeat and to avenge that defeat, but the means to that end were not always clear. During most of the campaign, higher command in London and Washington envisaged by-passing the rigours of an overland battle in order to capture Rangoon by sea. The British wanted Rangoon as a staging post to Singapore; the Americans wanted it, at least until the Ledo Road was completed, in order to clear the road from Rangoon north into China. Churchill also favoured such ventures as a landing on the northern tip of Sumatra (CULVERIN), and the appointment of Admiral Mountbatten, former Chief of Combined Operations, to command South-East Asia Command (SEAC) in September 1943 clearly fore-shadowed amphibious warfare playing the main role. This never happened, largely because the necessary landing craft were not made available from other theatres. In the end, although Rangoon was taken from the sea by an amphibious hook, the fact that the city was deserted when the British entered it was due to their victorious advance overland. And this advance was, in turn, created by Slim's decisive defeat of Mutaguchi's Imphal offensive which was launched in March 1944.

The USA saw in Burma the last means available to feed supplies to Chiang Kai-shek and thus keep China in the war against Japan (see also China incident). This in turn would draw off large Japanese forces which might otherwise intervene in the Pacific war and would also provide air bases in China from which long-range bombers could bomb industrial centres in Japan (see also strategic air offensives, 3). The USA was therefore concerned chiefly with the campaign in North Burma to permit a road and an oil pipeline to be opened from Ledo in Assam to Kunming in Yunnan, and soon after this was achieved in January 1945 the American contribution to the Burma campaign effectively ceased (see China–Burma–India theatre). Under Chiang Kai-shek, China saw the training and equipping of its forces in India as a contribution to the solving of post-war internal disputes rather than as a full participation in Allied offensives. The British found US support for Nationalist China misplaced. Neither India, which provided the bulk of the fighting power for the Allied forces, nor Burma, which was their battleground, was consulted by the Americans or the British in the planning of the campaign.

The first Japanese move into Burma was when Victoria Point and its airfield, at the southernmost tip of Burma adjacent to Thailand, were occupied by Uno Force (143rd Infantry Regiment, 55th Division) on 14 December 1941. This prevented air reinforcements reaching Malaya from India. Then, on 19 January 1942, two divisions (33rd and 55th) of Lt-General Iida Shojiro's Fifteenth Army, supported by the 10th Air Brigade and guided by rebels of the Burma Independence Army, took Tavoy and attacked Kawkareik and Moulmein from Thailand across the Dawna Range. The 17th Indian Division, commanded by Maj-General John Smyth, planned to fight behind a succession of river barriers—the Salween, Bilin, and Sittang—but the blowing of the Sittang Bridge on 23 February ended in disaster and Smyth's dismissal. Rangoon was taken by the 33rd Japanese Division on 8 March; and the Burma Army under Lt-General Alexander, who had recently superseded Lt-General Tom Hutton, narrowly evaded capture when a Japanese roadblock on the Prome road prevented their escape northwards. They attacked it several times without success but the local Japanese commander, sticking rigidly to his divisional commander's plan, then withdrew it in order to enter Rangoon, as ordered, from the west.

Chinese reinforcements, reluctantly accepted by the head of ABDA Command, Lt-General Wavell, came south as far as Toungoo, but were pushed back by the advance of the 56th Division which, with the 18th Division, had reinforced Iida's Fifteenth Army by advancing through the Shan States from Thailand. The 38th Chinese Division helped extricate the 1st Burma Division from defeat at Yenangyaung before marching out through Imphal to be re-formed in India. In March Slim took command of the newly constituted Burcorps, which comprised most of what remained of the British Forces in Burma, and led it back to India in a fighting retreat, the longest in the history of the British Army, which was completed by May 1942.

Iida's 18th and 56th Divisions reached the Chinese frontier at the end of April and the northernmost point reached by the Japanese, Sumprabum, was captured on 17 June. Akyab, with its airfields on the Bay of Bengal, was in Japanese hands on 4 May. Taking over as C-in-C, India, after the collapse of his ABDA command, Wavell had already begun to plan the recapture of Burma in April, but the 14th Indian Division's attempt to re-take Akyab in December 1942 ended in failure. There was a brief pause before it tried to take Akyab again, and failed again, and an attempt to reach Donbaik was repulsed in March 1943. After months of fighting, the British in Arakan were back where they had been in October 1942. In the meantime in northern Burma Brigadier Wingate launched his Chindits on 13 February 1943 in an operation (LONGCLOTH) which penetrated behind Japanese lines, using air supply. He lost one third of his 3,000 men, but the subsequent publicity boosted British morale and valuable lessons were learned on the use of air supply.

Burma campaign: Casualties

Operations, with dates	British and Commonwealth casualtiesa	Japanese casualtiesa
Source: Allen, L., Burma: The Longest War, (London, 1984).
1st Burma ( 25 December 1941– 12 May 1942)	13,463 (1,499)	2,431 (1,999)
1st Arakan ( 23 October 1942– 15 May 1943)	5,057 (916)	1,100 (estimated) (400)
1st Wingate ( February– June 1943)	1,138 (28)	205 (68)
2nd Arakan ( February– July 1944)	7,951	5,335 (3,106)
2nd Wingate ( March– August 1944)	3,786 (1,034)	5,311 (4,716)
Imphal Kohima ( March– December 1944)
Preliminaries (Assam)	920
Kohima	4,064	5,764
Imphal	12,603	54,879 (13,376)
Irrawaddy Crossings; Mandalay ( January– March 1945)	10,096 (1,472)	Combined Japanese losses in these two battles for Fifteenth Army and Thirty-third Army 12,912 (6,513)
Meiktila ( February– March 1945)	8,099 (835)
Pyawbwe to Rangoon	2,166 (446)	7,015 (6,742)
Rangoon to Surrender (Breakout & Sittang Bend)
May– August 1945	1,901 (435)	11,192 (9,791)
totals	71,244	106,144
aKilled in brackets

In March 1943 the Japanese reorganized their higher command, creating the Burma Area Army under Lt-General Kawabe Masakazu and placing Mutaguchi, the commander of 18th Division, in command of the Fifteenth Army in succession to Iida. Burma's independence, under Japanese aegis, was proclaimed in August 1943. The Allies also reorganized their higher command by forming SEAC in September and the Fourteenth Army—previously India's Eastern Army—under Slim in October; it came under SEAC's newly formed 11th Army Group, not under C-in-C India. A counter-offensive was now planned, to take three forms. In Arakan, Slim's 15th Corps, commanded by Lt-General Christison, would advance southwards and take Akyab. Secondly, a combined force of American-trained Chinese and US infantry (see GALAHAD) under Lt-General Stilwell's Northern Combat Area Command would co-operate with Chiang Kai-shek's forces from Yunnan to take the Hukawng Valley and occupy Myitkyina. This would permit the completion of the Ledo Road from Assam to take supplies to Kunming in China, thus replacing the old Burma Road, now in Japanese hands. The advance was to be supported by a second Wingate Chindit expedition, six brigades strong, most of which would be air-transported across the Japanese lines of communication facing Stilwell. Thirdly, on the central (Assam) front, the 17th and 20th Indian Divisions of Slim's 4th Corps, commanded by Lt-General Scoones, would push forward stocks and reconnaissance patrols into Burma via Tiddim and Tamu respectively. To oppose this counter-offensive further Japanese armies were created—the Twenty-eighth Army, commanded by Lt-General Sakurai Shōzō, in the Arakan, and Thirty-third Army, commanded by Lt-General Honda Masaki, in North Burma—and two Japanese operations were planned to anticipate it. HA-GŌ was designed to surround, trap, and annihilate two of Christison's divisions (5th and 7th) in the Arakan (see Admin Box). This would prevent reinforcements being sent from there to the Central Front, and would also serve to distract Allied attention from U-GŌ, the Imphal offensive, which was a much more ambitious plan for the invasion of India across the Chindwin into Manipur State. When both these operations failed Kawabe and Mutaguchi were sacked and the entire staff of the Fifteenth Army, save one, were dismissed. The failure of the Imphal offensive was the biggest defeat the Japanese Army had known in its entire history. The Allied divisions pursued the Japanese to the Chindwin, and then began to cross it back into Burma in December 1944.

North of the Central Front, where Stilwell was opposed by Honda, a combined force of two Chinese divisions and GALAHAD had, by March 1944, taken the whole of the Hukawng Valley. After putting pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to produce reinforcements from Yunnan, Stilwell had five Chinese divisions in North Burma, with Wingate's Special Force of Chindits (9,000-strong, flown in on 5 March) operating against Japanese communications to the south of him. By 17 May, GALAHAD and the Chinese had taken the Myitkyina airfield, a valuable prize from which 40,000 tons of supplies were flown into China by October, though the Japanese held on to the town until 3 August.

On the Arakan flank 15th Corps' 82nd West African Division took Buthidaung and then, in conjunction with the 81st West African Division, occupied the Japanese communications centre of Myohaung on 25 January 1945. The 25th Indian Division reached Foul Point on 26 December 1944 and landed on Akyab in January to find it had been abandoned by most of Sakurai's forces, including his 55th Division, which had withdrawn to meet the pressure from the Africans. Its transfer to the Irrawaddy valley left only Sakurai's 54th Division to face the Allied advance in Arakan. A British Royal Marine unit, the 3rd Commando Brigade, took Myebon, and then, with 26th Division took the islands of Ramree and Cheduba at the end of the month. These operations cut off a Japanese escape route to the south and made possible the construction of air strips to support Slim's main axis of advance to Rangoon.

Slim's pursuit of the Japanese into central Burma, and the capture of Rangoon (CAPITAL followed by EXTENDED CAPITAL), involved a deception plan on the grand scale. The 19th Indian Division, part of Slim's 33rd Corps commanded by Lt-General Stopford, was across the Irrawaddy by mid-January 1945, making for Mandalay from the north, while the Corps' 2nd British and 20th Indian Divisions, and 7th Indian Division, now part of 4th Corps, crossed at various points west of Sagaing in February, the longest opposed river crossing of the Second World War (the Irrawaddy in that area was between 900 m. and 4,100 m. wide (1,000–4,500 yd.). The 20th Division pushed south to cut the road and rail communications to Rangoon, while 2nd Division moved east to come upon Mandalay from the south, though, in fact, the 19th Division took it from the north on 20 March. The prestige of its name made Mandalay a symbolic victory, but Lt-General Kimura Hyōtarō, the new Japanese C-in-C of the Burma Area Army, did not intend to fight to the death for it. Slim had at first assumed Kimura would meet him for an encounter battle in the Shwebo plain, with the Irrawaddy at his back, but Kimura had no intention of offering Slim an easy victory in conditions which would have permitted Allied deployment of armour. So Slim devised another strategy. He would fight the decisive battle south of Mandalay, at Meiktila in Central Burma.

Once this had been won—it was Slim's greatest strategic triumph of the campaign—the way to Rangoon was open, although the Japanese put up a stiff resistance at Pyawbwe. While Stopford's 33rd Corps advanced down the Irrawaddy valley, through the oilfields and Prome towards the capital, the 5th and 17th Divisions of 4th Corps, now commanded by Lt-General Messervy, leapfrogged through Pyinmana and Toungoo. Messervy covered 400 km. (250 mi.) in nineteen days, his hillward flank protected by Aung San's Burma Independence Army (now renamed Patriotic Burmese Forces) and by 29 April his 17th Division was on the edge of Pegu, 80 km. (50 mi.) from Rangoon. That day, and the following one, torrential rains swept the town, hampering air support and the movement of trucks and tanks. It would have been poetic justice for Maj-General D. T. Cowan, who had succeeded Smyth as commander of the 17th Indian Division in the dark days of 1942, to have led 4th Corps back into Rangoon, but Slim could not afford gestures. Rangoon had to be taken before the monsoon set in, and it was finally captured by a sea-borne amphibious landing (DRACULA) by Christison's 26th Indian Division from Akyab and Ramree. The landings were an anticlimax as the Japanese had already fled the city, Kimura and his Burma Area Army HQ having escaped to Moulmein on 23 April. The following month Slim left the Fourteenth Army, whose HQ moved to India, and a new command, Twelfth Army, was formed under Stopford to control British Forces in Burma.

At the end of July, Sakurai's Twenty-eighth Army moved eastwards out of Arakan into the Pegu Yomas range north of Rangoon. Sakurai then tried, with the help of a diversionary attack on Waw by the remains of Honda's shattered Thirty-third Army, which struck from the Sittang estuary, to break through the cordon of British divisions stretched along the Mandalay–Rangoon road. But his battle plan had been captured weeks beforehand, and within ten days he suffered 17,000 casualties. The British lost 95, perhaps the greatest disproportion of casualties during any battle in the war. Sporadic fighting east of the Sittang came to an end with the signing of the preliminary surrender arrangements in Rangoon by Field Marshal Terauchi's chief of staff on 28 August.

The Japanese took Burma in 1942 at a cost of 2,000 dead (see Table). Added to their 3,500 dead in the Malayan campaign, they destroyed the British Empire in the Far East for roughly 5,000 men.

Louis Allen

Bibliography

Allen, L. , Burma: the Longest War 1941–1945 (London, 1984).
Callahan, R. , Burma 1942–1945 (London, 1978).
Calvert, M. , Prisoners of Hope (new edn. London, 1971).
Fergusson, B. , The Wild Green Earth (London, 1946).
Slim, Viscount , Defeat into Victory (London, 1956).