Unroll the map of this eastern half of the world. Without it you will find it hard to understand the war that nobody knows.
  We do not tell the whole story here, it would be beyond our purpose. For that would have to recount how Japan seized in a hundred days the widest dominion on earth. It would have to record the folly and failure of many people, the heroism and fortitude of so many more.
  Our tale begins long after the disasters of Hong Kong, Singapore and Rangoon. It leaves out the glory of Guadalcanal, New Guinea and Guam. These last were one hinge of the struggle to halt the march of Japan. Burma, the subject of this tale, was the other.
  Sometimes to the folks at home, these two have seemed to be totally separate affairs. To the Japanese they have always been a single, terrible war. The conquest of Australia was Japan's objective in South West Pacific. The Invasion of India was the task she set herself in South East Asia. Both these designs have been smashed, with a completeness which toppled down General Tojo, Japan's Man of the Victories, and destroying not only the springs of further Japanese aggression but the bases of her military survival.
  We, in South East Asia, know that enemy aircraft which were desperately needed to defend Saipan and Guam, vital links in Japan's Pacific island chain, had been shot down in combat over the jungles and paddy-fields of Burma. And we appreciate that crack Infantry divisions which might have reinforced the "March on Delhi" were trapped and are starving in the Pacific islands.
  We cannot tell it all here, and in any case there are chapters yet to write. In these pages we tell simply WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR ON OUR SIDE OF THE HILL. In the Burma Campaign, 1944, the Fourteenth Army and Eastern Air Command held and broke the enemy's advance on India, inflicting on him the greatest land defeat suffered by the Imperial arms since Japan entered the modern age ninety years ago.
  Some future Churchill, as historian viewing in the perspective of a world convulsion this merciless grapple in the jungle shadows, may find in it one of the turning points of the campaign in the Far East.
  None will ever write of these long marches, lonely patrols, and bloody battles save with profound admiration for the courage, endurance and supreme devotion to duty of the troops who fought and fell here in such numbers at the far-off post of honor.

Though China's frontier with India stretches for 1,500 miles, the Himalaya Mountains bar all land passage; the only road is through Burma. The reconquest of Burma is essential both to build up bases and a solid front with China's armies for the final assault on Japan.

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ADMIRAL LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN, GCVO, CB, DSO, ADC. Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia

  Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten's
  Address to the Press,  August 1944

 SEVEN MONTHS' BATTLE

  My object in this Press conference is to try to put before the Press of the world that every effort has been and is continuing to be put into the South East Asia campaign; that the Burma battle front is a single unified front; that my plans are made in close consultation with my deputy, General Joseph Stilwell, and we carry them out with a common end in view.
  Please therefore look upon Burma as one big Allied effort, British, American and Chinese, with the help of the Dutch and the other nations that are with us. It is going extraordinarily well as an Allied effort. We do not want a lot of limelight, in fact we don't want any, but I go round and talk to the men in the Command and what worries them is that their wives, their mothers, their daughters, their sweethearts and their sisters don't seem to know that the war they are fighting is important and worth while, which it most assuredly is.
  The South East Asia Command is a long way off; it is apt to be overshadowed in Europe by the climax of the war against Germany, and in the Pacific by the advances of Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur. Therefore, a major effort by Allied forces, doing their duty in inhospitable places, has been somewhat crowded out and the forces have not received their proportion of credit. My purpose this afternoon is to put their achievements before you.
  Enemy-held territory in the South East Asia theater extends 2,500 miles southwards from the north of Burma. The front on which we are at present fighting in Burma alone extends some 700 miles and is second only in length to the Russian Front. It is the hard land crust which protects the Japanese conquests in China and Indo-China. It is Japan's land route to India and, more important, the Allies' land route to China. Both offensively and defensively Japan has strained and is straining every nerve to hold Burma.
  In my appreciation of the achievements of the forces of South East Asia Command it must be borne in mind that the Japanese are fighting from interior lines. They control Burma's rivers, railways and roads and since they are a rice-eating army they live off the fat of the land. We on the other hand, are fighting from the most difficult lines of communication imaginable.
  Before 1943 there were no roads into Burma from the north, while the lower reaches of the Brahmaputra River are unbridgeable. Assam is, in fact, a logistical nightmare. Moreover, advancing as we are from the west, we are fighting against the grain of the country, for its steep jungle-clad mountains and swift flowing rivers, all running north-south, constitute a barrier instead of a route between India and China.
  In 1943 the imagination of the world was captured by a small force of British and Indian troops, under Brigadier Wingate, which made the first experiment in long range penetration and proved that we could outfight the Japanese in a kind of war which he had made his own, and under conditions which were to his advantage. It was a harbinger of bigger things, but in itself, of course, the experiment was on a small scale.
  At Quebec, the British and American Governments decided that the time had come to form an Allied operational command to take over the British Command from GHQ, India, and include the American Command in Burma and India, and be responsible for land, sea and air operations against Japan in South East Asia.
  In view of my original association with Combined Operations, a lot of people, myself included, jumped to the conclusion that large scale amphibious operations in South East Asia would at once be the order of the day. It need now be no secret that all the landing ships and craft originally allotted had to be withdrawn for more urgent operations in the west, and, in fact, carried the troops that assaulted the Anzio beaches and have subsequently been taking part in the invasion of France. The order to us in Burma was to "carry on with what we had left."
  Our plans had to be recast on a less ambitious scale but there was one thing we could do and that was to drive the Japanese out of the northeast corner of Burma, to improve our communications with China, and thus increase the supplies which are so badly needed to keep our Chinese Allies in the war, and to enable General Chennault to continue his effective operations with the U.S. 14th Air Force from China.
  A concerted plan was therefore made for the whole of the Burma Front to enable the forces in the northeast to advance. General Stilwell, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander and the Commanding General of the American forces in the China, Burma and India Theater, with great gallantry himself commanded the forces on the Ledo front.
  General Stilwell had under his command those Chinese forces which he had originally withdrawn from Burma into India and which had since been augmented. These forces are a good example of Allied collaboration, being equipped and trained by the U.S. and paid and fed by the British. "Merrill's Marauders," of the American Rangers, contributed valiantly to the successful advance of this force down the Hukawng Valley to Myitkyina and Mogaung.
  An advance in Burma is a different affair from an advance in France or Russia, since it has largely to be carried out along the single axis of your supply line and a relatively small force can thus stop the advance of a much larger force, however resolutely led. It thus became of the utmost importance that the overall plans for Burma should prevent Japanese reinforcements being able to bar the progress of the Chinese-American forces.
  There were two ways in which the Fourteenth Army could most materially help the advance of the Ledo forces. Firstly by cutting the communications of the veteran Japanese 18 Division who were facing the Ledo front, and secondly, by engaging the greater number of other Japanese divisions elsewhere in Burma.
  The first task, that of cutting the Japanese 18 Division's Line of Communication, was given to General Wingate's Long Range Penetration forces, which included a West African Brigade, and were flown into Burma by Colonel Cochran's Air Commandos, aided by British and American transport squadrons. The second task would have proved a more serious problem if it had not been that the Japanese plan was no less than an advance into India through Chittagong on the Arakan front and through Dimapur on the Imphal front.
  This began when the advance of 15 Indian Corps was held by a Japanese encircling movement which cut off their Administrative troops and also the Headquarters of the 7 Indian Division. On February 23rd, after a heroic 17 days' battle, the encircled troops of 7 Division, aided by the rest of 15 Corps, inflicted our first medium scale land defeat on the Japanese.
  The importance of the battle of the 7 Division Administrative "Box" was twofold. First it was a victory of morale by men who refused to withdraw when their Lines of Communication were cut; the hitherto successful tactics of outflanking and infiltration were thus defeated. The second factor was the exploitation of air supply by American and British transport aircraft which enabled our forces in the Admin Box to be fully supplied throughout the siege.
  On the 16th of March three complete Japanese divisions advanced across the river Chindwin and attacked all along the Manipur front with the avowed object of capturing the Imphal Plain and cutting the main rail Line of Communication to General Stilwell's forces, and the Chinese Command, and subsequently of invading India. Their radio and propaganda never ceased to boast that they were :Marching on Delhi." Further Japanese forces were moved up in support, but British and Indian forces were rushed to the defense of air, rail, and road communications.
  Although the enemy cut the main supply road from Dimapur to Imphal, British and American air transport aircraft continued to supply the beleaguered garrisons by air, 33 Indian Corps was moved in from reserve and the British 2 Division led the spearhead of the attack to clear the road. This Corps so severely battered the Japanese 31 Division that the remnants were forced to retire in disorder. Meanwhile, 4 Indian Corps from Imphal were attacking to the south and eventually a major victory was secured over the whole Japanese force.
  In point of numbers engaged this must have been one of the greatest land battles fought between the Japanese and British forces and I am glad to say the Japanese have now been flung out of India.
  The Fourteenth Army's exploits under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Sir William Slim and the overall command of General Sir George Giffard, were deservedly praised by Mr. Churchill in Parliament.
  Meanwhile, American and Chinese forces, by a great feat of arms, crossed the Naun Hykit Pass and descended with complete surprise on the airfield at Myitkyina, thus enabling American and Chinese reinforcements to be flown in. In addition, Long Range Penetration forces, of whom Maj. Gen. Lentaigne assumed command when Wingate met his death in an air crash in the jungle, entered Mogaung from the south and were soon joined by the Chinese forces from the north.
  It will thus be seen that the capture of Myitkyina and Mogaung was the result of a series of closely coordinated operations on the part of British, American, Chinese and West African troops. The 3 Indian Division, as Long Range Penetration groups came to be known, now came under General Stilwell's command on this section of the front. The death of Wingate was a great disaster. He was killed at the moment of triumph and fulfillment.
  All these impressive results have not been secured without heavy casualties. Allied forces in 1944 have suffered 10,000 killed; 2,000 missing, and 27,000 wounded, but these have been amply avenged by the killing of no fewer than 50,000 Japanese.
  Even more deadly and persistent in inflicting casualties is the mosquito. Malaria has conquered empires and can cripple armies. In the British campaign in the Arakan in 1943 it inflicted a particularly heavy toll. The zeal and skill of American and British medical services have succeeded this year in reducing the ravages of malaria by no less than 40 percent; particularly effective has been the development of advance treatment centers which have virtually perfected a lightning cure. More than 90 percent of the patients report fit for duty after three weeks. All the same, since the beginning of the year, Allied forces have suffered close on a quarter of a million casualties in Burma from sickness, mostly malaria and dysentery.
  Parallel with the developments on land we have gained a major victory in the air. In December, special measures were taken to co-ordinate the Allied air operations under Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peirse through Eastern Air Command, which is under the direction of Maj. Gen. Stratemeyer, USAAF, who is also second-in-command of all Allied Air Forces in South East Asia. We have practically swept the Japanese air force from the Burma skies. Between the formation of South East Asia Command in November, 1943, and the middle of August, 1944, American and British forces operating in Burma destroyed or damaged more than 700 Japanese aircraft with a further 100 "probables." These simple statistics mean that the Japanese air force in Burma is greatly depleted and rarely ventures out either for attack or defense.
  I mentioned air supply earlier. Since May alone we have carried by air just on 70,000 tons and 93,000 men, including 25,500 casualties. These figures exclude the great air supply with China and have been accomplished under the worst flying conditions possible.
  By sea also we have not been idle. The Eastern Fleet under Admiral Sir James Somerville, now succeeded by Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, had been increasing their pressure to see whether they could entice the Japanese fleet into action or else to contain part of them in the Malacca Straits and thus keep them from interfering with the American operations in the Pacific. Our fleet's first move was an air strike from the sea in April on Sabang which proved highly successful and left the Allied Eastern Fleet unscathed. Their next move took them further afield and with the aid of a U.S. aircraft carrier, which had also been in the first Sabang operations, they made a very successful strike on Sourabaya, followed by a strike against the Andaman Islands.
  In the knowledge that we had complete command of the Indian Ocean and the Japanese had reduced their air defenses to a low level we decided not only to strike from the air but to ride in and bombard with all types of surface craft from battleships to cruisers and destroyers. Sabang was again selected as a target of strategic importance to the Japanese.
  The Royal Navy has received valuable help from the Royal Indian Navy and various American and Dutch naval units. The RIN has helped to maintain the bases for the Eastern Fleet to operate from and provided a very valuable addition to convoy escorts.
  I should like to take this opportunity of paying a tribute to the Government of India and the India Command. The importance of India as a base from which operations are launched in South East Asia cannot be over-emphasized.
  I would like to stress in particular the personal help and support I have received from Lord Wavell and General Auchinleck, also from my deputy, General Stilwell, whose long experience of the east has been of signal assistance to me in our common task.
  I am glad to have had this opportunity of endeavoring to explain the significance of the 1944 Burma campaign. I am proud of the gallant fighting which has taken place on all fronts and I hope that my statement may make the people who read it proud of the achievements of their own countrymen and grateful to their Allies who helped them in these achievements.

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  Southward, from the towering mountain mass of Central Asia that men have called the Roof of the World sprawl the ranges of Burma. For 50 centuries they have been part of the defense of India, guarding the eastern frontier. Invasion across these tangled jungle hills is an operation brimful with peril. India's conquerors have nearly always come in by the narrow gateways of the North West Passes from Afghanistan.
  The Japs poured into Burma from the south, and flooding up to the head of the valleys, established their forward units on the eastern bank of the Upper Chindwin. Thus they came to within striking distance of the last great mountain barrier of the frontier itself. Running laterally across their rear they had river and road communication and Burma's one big railway. In this they were much better served than the British on the other side of these ranges.
  The British also had a railway which ran roughly parallel with the front, but so far away from it that it could only be tapped effectively at one point, Dimapur, itself a hundred miles distant from the combat zone. From this point to its advance outposts on the India-Burma border the British had to construct metalled roads through virgin forest, around precipices, winding 8,000 feet into the clouds, and continuing along the full length of the Central Front. These solid roads, built largely by hand, remain marvels of military engineering.
  No roads, however, run back towards India from this front. Between the army on the Assam-Burma border and their main bases in Bengal (and lying exactly athwart the direct line of communication) are scores more ridges and streams. If the Supreme Commander had not been already versed in the three-dimensional operations, and only too eager to seize on all its possibilities, the development of air transport to supply this far-off front would have been forced upon him as military necessity. For shorter haul were 50,000 motor vehicles, the mule, the ox-wagon, the elephant, hordes of coolies and the eternal, indomitable infantryman humping his own pack.
  The Japs had also threaded their way from Rangoon up the coastal belt to Arakan, where they had set up a line north of Akyab. From the Allied point of view communications on this Southern Front were rather better. From the north there were both rail and road links with Chittagong, which also had its port. But the

General Sir William Slim Commander, Fourteenth Army

General Sir George Giffard Commander, Eleventh Army Group

railway died 18 miles south, at Dohazari, and the road shortly afterwards. The last hundred miles to the front via Bawli Bazar was mere track. The sappers were summoned again.
  Arakan itself is a country of mountain, jungle and paddy fields with a few scrubby foothills and a network of tidal chaungs. There are few places where artillery can be easily deployed, and fewer still where tanks can maneuver.
  Between the Central Front and the Southern Front lies the huge mountain jungle area of the Chin Hills, Lushai Hills and Arakan Tracts (see maps below). No formal line has ever been drawn across this wilderness. For close on two hundred miles long, and about as deep it has remained No Man's Land, where roving groups of both armies patrol, ambush and vanish again.
  The third sector of the Burma Front is the Northern, which is based on Ledo. Here was the chief concentration of the American power. Even in the worst days the Japs never tried to climb into India over the wall of the Ledo mountains. The Allies, however, proposed to climb back into Burma over this wall. For two years the Americans steadily built up along the Upper Brahmaputra a chain of airfields to service their Flying Bridge over the Hump to China. In the face of every obstacle they hacked their famous Ledo Road out of the mountain, and by the end of 1943 General "Uncle Joe" Stilwell, with his U.S.-trained Chinese divisions, was already embattled on the Burma side and preparing to march up the Hukawng Valley on his drive to Myitkyina and the old Burma Road.
  With the exception of the comparatively low-lying Arakan sector most of the Burma fighting took place on mountains or in valleys nearly as high. The guns duels on 9,000-foot Kennedy Peak, between Tiddim and Fort White, were for long one of the most famous "front line noises." Nine-tenths of the face of the entire land is covered with the matted beard of the jungle. Such is the Burma Front. From the corner of the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal it measures 700 miles of the wildest and most impenetrate tracts in the world.
  The Supreme Commander's directives to the Fourteenth Army for the 1944 Campaign were to hold the Central and Southern Fronts, and on the Northern Front to advance to the line Mogaung-Myitkyina. These orders were fulfilled to the letter. Two major Japanese attempts to invade India were smashed. Five Japanese divisions were annihilated in the process, and our own objectives were reached ahead of schedule.
  The advance continues.

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The Enemy Strikes from the Arakan 
  In Burma, by January 1944, the Japs had consolidated their grip up to the perimeter of their '42 and '43 conquests. The war in Europe had not at that time turned in flood against Germany, for the main Allied forces had still to make their landing on the continent. But while they were not yet in that battle they might safely be counted out of this one. This year, therefore, was for Japan, the Now or Never. The Jap High Command decided to carry the war into India and to break up the base where powerful armies and air and sea fleets were building up for the coming Allied general assault on Japan.
  The Allies, meanwhile, suffered a change of plans. Before Teheran these had included immediate amphibious operations somewhere in South East Asia, but at that conference, South East Asia Command's landing craft were allocated to European waters, and as the Supreme Commander has disclosed, were actually employed to force the Anzio bridgehead. Accepting this service deprivation, Lord Louis Mountbatten still resolved to place the most aggressive interpretation on the instruction to "defend the frontiers." The Fourteenth Army Commander, Lieutenant General Sir William Slim, KCB, CB, DSO, MC, was ordered to clear the Akyab peninsula as far south as possible so as to command the mouth of the River Naff for sea supply and secure the Maingdaw-Buthidaung road. The available troops were 15 Indian Corps., commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Philip Christison, KEE, CB, MC.
  A glance at the map below shows how the Arakan campaign of '44 was dominated by the outstanding feature known as the Mayu Range. This range physically split the front: the plan of the enemy was to use it tactically to split the army which occupied it. A captured enemy Order of the Day signed by Colonel Tanahashi says of it:  "The Mayu Range is a fortress given us by Heaven, to furnish use with defenses, obstructions and concealments, with water, with quarters, with supplies of building materials unlimited. Indeed a thing of immense value. Its mountains and rivers will shortly become an unforgettable new battleground."
  East of the Mayu Range lies the Kalapanzin Valley. Bearing in mind the lesson of the Arakan campaign of 1943 (when the Japs struck up this valley, crossed the Range and fell upon the Line of Communication of our troops attacking Akyab along the coastal belt), General Slim proposed to advance not only down the Kalapanzin as well as the coast, bit also to throw out a further, flank screen in the distant valley beyond the next mass of hills, namely the Kaladin Valley. The 81 West African Division were assigned this important task. They not only guarded the Kaladin but their presence there compelled the enemy to divert troops towards it which he urgently needed for his plan to "Invade India." The first appearance of these magnificent-looking warriors in the Arakan had an unexpected and most uplifting effect upon their British comrades in the line. There is evidence that it had a correspondingly depressing effect upon the enemy.
  To link the two main forces in the coastal belt and Kalapanzin Valley it was necessary to make something more than the trails which ran through the passes of the Mayu Range. There were two, the Goppe Pass, a mule track, and the other more famous Ngakyedauk Pass, then unfit even for mules. Ngakyedauk has since entered into the immortality of soldiers' language as the "Okeydoke." As it threads its way from Wensleydale to Swaledale,

Lt. Gen. Sir Philip Christison Commander, 15 Indian Corps.

to a Scot from Inverness with the KOSB's it resembled his beloved Glen Shiel. Gunners who ranged on "Okeydoke" and infantrymen who slogged it out there with rifle and bayonet and grenade, found something homely of their own there. It was an illusion, for the Arakan bears no likeness to Britain, but it comforted men in lonely and desperate hours.
  The sappers and miners of 7 Indian Division, equipped with bulldozers and pneumatic drills, graded its slopes, widened its rock ledges and smoothed out its elbow bends, making the pack road capable of bearing the armor, guns, and supply columns of an invading army.
  As the engineers and road-builders reached the banks of the Kalapanzin river the dusty battalions of British and Indian infantry, followed by long columns of motor transport, begun threading their way up the steep slopes at the western entrance. Corps Commander Christison was building up his two-fisted attack.
  His plan was to force the enemy to fight on as broad a front as possible. He had 5 Indian Division west of the Range and 7 Indian Division east of it. They shared the crest, which, running parallel as it does to the British main Line of Communication from north to south, was the axis of advance. Pressing equally all along the front, 15 Corps now began their steady forward movement. They had to fight hard and learned to match their cunning against the enemy's before they came up against his main positions. These covered the 15-mile Maungdaw-Buthidaung road which tunnels the Mayu Ridge and provides the third great artery between one side of the mountain and the other. The tunnel area was especially strongly fortified.
  Maundaw fell to the British on 8 January, but Razabil was a harder nut. This is a natural fortress in the foothills between the Mayu Range and the sea, commanding the road. Bombers of the Strategic Air Force from the newly-created and integrated Eastern Air Command (Maj. Gen. George E. Stratemeyer) pounded this bastion with concentrated weight, medium artillery shelled it and "General Lee" tanks, deployed for the first time in Arakan, lent their support. Much of the fortress area fell and Jap casualties were considerable, but the central position held. The Corps Commander decided to switch the main weight of his assault to Buthidaung in the Kalapanzin sector, while maintaining strong local attacks on Razabil. He was able to do this with comparative ease because his foresight had provided him with that invaluable lateral communication, "Okeydoke Pass."
  But somebody else had plans. Enter Lt. Gen. Hanaya, Jap Commander in the Arakan. He proposed to invade India, and had a meticulously worked-out timetable for that design. The British pressure on his front now compelled him to accelerate his movements. In charge of his striking force he placed Colonel Tanahashi, victor of the Arakan, 1943. The Jap plan was both to break up the British-Indian advance and to split the entire front, sealing off the eastern half not only from its western partner but from its own Lines of Communication. The seizure of "Okeydoke" would achieve both these objects. On the night of 3-4 February Tarahashi struck.
  So confident was he that his blitzkrieg would succeed that he threw in almost all his available forces, leaving only one battalion in reserve. When heavy losses fell upon him, therefore, he had no replacements at his command. He even brought up gunners, without their guns, reckoning to capture ours. The Jap troops had orders not to destroy our vehicles, which would be required for the march on India.
  A few days before the enemy struck, seaborne patrols had captured documents in a raid behind the enemy's lines, which warned us of recently arrived reinforcements from the Solomons. From this and other signs Christison sensed trouble. The tanks (25 Dragoons) had been withdrawn from Razabil for maintenance. That same afternoon Christison ordered them over the "Okeydoke." To deceive the Japs into believing that our armor was still concentrated west of Mayu the Corps Commander sent up a squadron of reserve tanks to continue operations at Razabil. At the same time one brigade of 7 Division was placed in reserve for the coming offensive. Both next day went into action to meet the new threat. The tanks came as a complete surprise to the Japs who did not know they were even in the valley.
  Flooding over Taung Bazar by a 30-mile forced march, the Japs swept on to the heights of the Mayu Range north of the so-call 7 Division Admin Box at Sinzweya. This had a few days earlier become a Corps Administrative area supporting 7 Division, a brigade of 5 Division (who were the link between the two sectors of the front) and a large number of Corps troops, including a couple of artillery regiments, ack-ack and anti-tank batteries and the tank unit. There were thus encamped there nearly 8,000 administrative troops, pioneers, sappers, signalers, ordnance and medical units, mule companies, and native road builders, together with a considerable amount of equipment. Protection was organized to resist any interference up to a large scale raid. What now struck the Admin area, however, was a tornado of six thousand men. A further four thousand formed an outer ring.
  A few hours before dawn on 6 February the Japs attacked 7 Division H.Q. Division Commander Maj. Gen. F. W. Messervy, CB, DSO, with his staff, narrowly escaped capture - or, more probable, massacre. Grenade in hand he led a party along the bed of a chaung to the Admin area, where he re-formed his H.Q. Fresh parties kept coming in for several days, and throughout this period a Soldiers' Battle raged. Signalers, sappers, cooks, clerks, all seized the rifle and fought like veteran infantry. Gradually the enemy was halted, though not before he had practiced appalling atrocities against our wounded.
  Tanahashi pressed on round the flank and rear, towards the Goppe Pass. He did not in fact reach Goppe; a little short of it he ran into 18 Mule Company, who stood their ground resolutely and engaged him. Tanahashi, believing that Goppe Pass must be strongly held, and urgent to capture Bawli Bazar (15 Corps HQ) and cut the Bawli-Maungdaw road, decided to storm straight over the 2,000-foot Range between Goppe and "Okeydoke." He burst through a large concentration of British rear echelons on the western slopes of the Mayu where he was again fiercely challenged. But driving on with barbaric energy, he reached the road where he blew up bridges, set fire to dumps, way-laid convoys, and finally dug-in in the nearby jungle from where he kept traffic under continual fire. In the end his raiders had to be liquidated to the last man. The Japs success in interfering with our Lines of Communication was less than they had hoped, for much of the supply of the troops on the western side of the Mayu continued to pour in by sea.
  However Tanahashi scored when he detached a force to double back along the crest of the Range to cut "Okeydoke" Pass, linking up with another Jap column which had pushed through from the southeast. The wedge had been driven between 5 Division and 7 Division, and the latter's supply route severed.
  Tokyo went to town on the news. The giant presses roared, showering the East with their headlined triumphs. Victory! Victory! Annihilation! The British Are Trapped! The British In Full Flight! Night and day the Jap radio blared "The March On Delhi Has Begun," "Tanahashi, Victor of Arakan, will be at Chittagong within a Week," "New British 14th Army Destroyed in One Thrust," Traitors drew up proclamations for parades under the walls of the Red Fort and Tokyo Rose crooned persuasively to the Allied troops in the Pacific "why not go home? It's all over in Burma." It really appeared to the Japanese that everything was in the bag, and so it was. Unfortunately for Tanahashi the neck of the bag was still open.
  He had forgotten the AIR.
  Through the air would pour the stores and supplies which were denied land passage. The troops thus "trapped" instead of yielding their ground, ditching their equipment and seeking to escape across the hills, would hold fast and hold on with sheer guts, certain that within measurable time the power would be brought them to drive the enemy from his encircling lines. Meantime, on General Slim's orders, both the supplies to sustain such "encircled" troops and the aircraft and air crews to carry them had been assembled and were ready to go in. Ten days' rations for 40,000 men had already been packed and dumped against exactly such an emergency by Fourteenth Army's "grocer," Maj. Gen. Alf Snelling; the first of the series of similar services which this remarkable organizer was able to do the army in this year of continuous fighting.
  Nor on the combat side was the Army Commander caught napping by Tanahashi's violent recoil to his initial offensive. General Slim had placed 26 Indian Division (Maj. Gen. C. E. N. Lomax, CB, DSO, MC) at Chittagong to cover the road to India. This officer in particular had deserved well of the army for his conspicuous work in building up the morale of his division unit by unit in patrol work during the long, disheartening period after the Arakan failure of '43. Still further back, in Calcutta, another division was brigaded and ready to move forward on requirement. Such dispositions are not completed overnight, and they are a sufficient answer to the ignorant jibe that Arakan 1944 was one more example of "waiting for something to hit us."
  Meantime in the Admin area none sat down to wring his hands over his fate but all set to work like men to shape it. Maj. Gen. Messervy brought in the West Yorks, who were later reinforced by a company of KOSB's and a battalion of 2 Punjabs. With tanks and artillery a formidable protected "box" was very rapidly built up. Tanks and guns formed a protection for HQ, hospitals and soft vehicles. Later the "box" was ringed with barbed wire. Every man was told bluntly what the situation was and of the further steps being taken by the Corps Commander to meet it. From Supreme Commander Lord Louis Mountbatten came a heartening message telling them that he had directed powerful reinforcements towards them.

In their attempt to invade India from the south in February '44, the Japs made a forced march of 30 miles from their bases around Bathidaung and succeeded in capturing Taung Bazar and the Ngakyedauk Pass.  In one bold stroke they drove a wedge between 5 Div and 7 Div, situated on separate sides of the Mayu Range, and also encircled 8,000 Administrative troops at Sinzweya.  Drawing by Booker Cooke.

  Immediate evidence of his resources was what the garrison saw with their own eyes in the sky above them. Jap Zeros had at one time been a fairly common sight in Arakan. The recent arrival of the Spitfires over the front had changed that. These Spitfires were the first startling innovation in Burma produced by the new South East Asia Command. But on the eve of Tanahashi's thrust the Zeros returned to the scene. Jap documents revealed that the Jap air command believed that if the RAF fighters could be "drawn" into combat they could be wiped out. Though the Japs did not give close air support to their ground troops they appeared over the battle area many squadrons at a time, looking for trouble with our fighters.
  They did not return home disappointed. The Allied fighters of Third Tactical Air Force, then commanded by Air marshal Sir John Baldwin, KBE, CB, DSO, rushed at them. The air was filled with dogfights. Ten days after their first challenge the Jap fighters broke it off. Three Spitfires had been lost. Third TAF claimed 65 Jap fighters destroyed, probably destroyed, or damaged. Thereafter the Allied fighters flew in close support, solitary strafing, or recce as they pleased and practically unimpeded. During the height of the aerial battle the huge, and mostly defenseless aircraft of Troop Carrier Command flew between the sky fights and the roof of the jungle to deliver vital stores of war to the troops fighting it out in the salvage hand-to-hand battles on the ground.
  These supply operations were under the direct command of U.S. Brig. Gen. William D. Old, pioneer of the China "Hump" route, and none could have desired or chosen a more energetic and intrepid leader. When the first flight of heavily laden Dakotas was driven back, General Old stepped up to the pilot's seat of the next flight and led them in himself. The planes were attacked, gunned, and some of the crews hit, but the goods got through.
  The job grew. By night as well as by day the supply aircraft rose from the Allied airfields. The crews simply turned their aircraft around and flew again. They slept barely 5 hours in 24. The ground crews serviced them, the

Not every time can supplies be gathered into the 'Box' as easily as here.  An unfavorable wind will carry the parachutes nearer to the enemy lines and a fight then follows for possession of the precious parcels.

RIASC supplied them, all round-the-clock. Many boarded the loaded planes then and flew, sometimes unescorted, over the Jap lines to help the supply droppers heave out their vital cargo onto the narrow target areas of the besieged "boxes." It was magnificent "Combined Ops." The pilots of the supply crews were themselves "combined." British, American, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, South African and Indian.
  Five hundred sorties carried 1,500 tons into battle. With food, ammunition, and weapon replacements, came cigarettes, kit, oil, petrol and "Jane" floating down in SEAC daily newspaper from the skies, even beer (and one thrice-blessed unit got a whole formation's ration). Tanks, waiting for fuel, watched drums of it cascading down on parachutes. Before the aircraft left the tanks were moving into action.
  The huge twin-engined aircraft were sitting birds for enemy fighters and ground fire. But only one was lost, and she, too, delivered her goods. In such circumstances "encirclement" became a technical phrase.
  Arakan, indeed, carried forward logically, and demonstrated in the fire of battle, the soundness of that revolutionary technique of land-air war which so seized Wingate's audacious mind. Casting about always to find a means to overcome the advantage the Jap held in his jungle mobility. Wingate had said "the vulnerable artery is the Line of Communication winding through the jungle. Have no Line of Communication on the jungle floor. Bring in the goods, like Father Christmas, down the chimney." Many considered this crazy but not the men at the head of the South East Asia Command, who shared with him these ideas concerning the mobility not merely of raiding columns but of entire jungle army corps. The RAF had never once failed during Wingate's first footslogging march into Burma in 1943 to find their supply drop site and to deliver their loads. Upon this basis Fourteenth Army were now building a completely new concept of jungle logistics. Arakan was its first vindication.
  But meantime, down in the bowl of the Admin Box, under the guns of the enemy on the surrounding hills, men were only conscious of the fact that a most desperate battle called for every ounce of guts and endurance that the British and Indian soldier could pull out. All day long thick clouds of smoke rose from the "box" and the sound of explosions reverberated round the hills as first one then another ammunition or petrol dump blew up. Three times stocks of ammunition were reduced to a dangerously low level. Luckily, the Japs did not realize it and the tireless airmen quickly replaced each loss. But the enemy continued also to pour in an increasing torrent of mortar bombs, grenades and shells of every caliber. Snipers roped to trees and even "built" into tree trunks, took pot-shots at regular intervals, but each shot brought forth such a volley of fire from the "box" that very few enemy snipers lived long enough to do much harm.
  The casualty stations overflowed while a depleted medical staff labored like demons - or shall we say like angels with demoniac energy - to cope with the growing number of dysentery and malaria patients, as well as the wounded.
  The devotion of the doctors and their orderlies was truly moving. Some of them paid the final, terrible price of duty. It was impossible to hold every point in strength, and one night in pitch darkness, the enemy overran the medical dressing station on the edge of the "box." They burst in upon the place, shouting and howling like dervishes. But their savagery was not that engendered by battle. Forty-eight hours after occupying the dressing station a senior Jap officer entered and ordered all wounded to be massacred. Orderlies and patients tried to escape by crawling out on their bellies in the darkness through a deep nullah. Some of the patients were too weak, and others too severely wounded even to stir on their stretchers. The Japs went from bed to bed bayoneting every man that showed the least sign of life. Their heartrending cries and groans were heard by their comrades beyond the nullah, helpless to rescue them.
  The doctors fared no better. The Japs lined up six and in cold blood shot every one dead with a bullet through his ear. One Medical Officer, who was carrying out an operation in a dug-out at the time, owes his life and that of his patient to the fact that he had so efficiently "blacked-out" his underground surgery that Tanahashi's tribesmen passed by without noticing it. Another had the presence of mind to fake death when he saw what was happening, by falling flat on his face and daubing himself with blood. In the "box," whenever the account of these horrors was repeated, a hush would fall over the company. Among those who listened were men whose best pals had been with the 80-odd wounded whom Tanahashi butchered.
  Night was the cover the Japs sought to work under, darkness their chief ally. Regularly as the sun fell over the Range these sub-humans donned yet more hideous face-masks and came slithering through the rank grass, whining weird animal calls to keep touch with each other. Then, the bravest defender had to steel himself at his post and remember the Night of the Massacre. Spirits sank with the sun, and rose again as it rose. Men who had never seen the inside of a church since their choir days invoked God's mercy and His strength. Many scribbled their home addresses on scraps of paper for their mates to drop a line home to the "missus" or "My girl" or "the old folk just in case anything should happen."
  In the "box" everything was shared. One officer, handy with a needle and thread, gave all his spare time to stitching buttons on shirts and slacks for anyone that asked the service from Lieutenant Colonels to Lance Corporals. Many shared more - their thoughts with lonely comrades. Some would get to thinking that folks at home might miss their letters and imagine the worst, and they would begin worrying. They had to be cheered up, and they were. Then there was sometimes the thought that though the air supply had not failed yet, perhaps . . . ? Men sick to death of biscuits and bully would put a bit aside in their kit as though it were manna. Sleep was safest at the bottom of a slit trench with the rats.
  By day the Japs were less formidable. One suicide squad came in against a post in traditional Imperial sacrifice style. Within two minutes only one remained alive, and he was too terror-stricken to move. They displayed the usual Japanese lack of resilience. They tried to use a chaung as a rendezvous simply because it was marked as such in their Operation orders. A British infantry unit had captured it but as this was NOT in the orders, the Jap NCO's still came to use it for their rendezvous. Not a single one lived to pass on his instructions.
  But the time for the counter-stroke was now at hand, and Tanahashi's troops were tiring. Ten days had been set for their task, and ten days' rations issued for it. They had carried out the plan - and the British had not fled, had not even withdrawn anywhere, from the Admin Box, from their forward positions in Kalapanzin Valley or from their line on the western side of the Range.
  On the contrary, the British were fighting back with growing violence, and had re-occupied Taung Bazar; what was worse, fresh troops were coming up from the north. This was not in Honorable Operations Orders, either.
  The forward brigades of 7 Division had stood firm the whole of the time and inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy as well as denied him opportunity to supply his assault troops or return southwards with casualties.
  Like the troops in the Admin Box these front-line forces were also supplied entirely by air. One brigade constructed an airstrip on the banks of the Kalapanzin from which the wounded were flown out of the battle area by light Allied aircraft under the protection of riflemen and machine-gunners who kept the enemy at bay.
  General Christison's plan to complete the destruction of Tanahashi's enterprise fell into two parts. Phase I was to clear the main Allied Line of Communication (the Bawli-Maungdaw road). Phase II was to clear "Okeydoke" and crush the now thoroughly mauled Jap striking force to pieces against the anvil of the intact British positions in the Kalapanzin Valley. The hammer was Maj. Gen. Lomax's "Tiger-heads" (26 Division) now advancing from Chittagong. It included those Arakan veterans, the Lincolns and the Wiltshires. Indeed, within a very short time of the original "encirclement" the advance elements of this force were already at grips with the most northerly force of the enemy.
  The Japs fought it out resolutely but the "Tiger-heads" broke all resistance along the road, destroying or driving the invaders back over the crest of Mayu Range into the Kalapanzin Valley. A battalion of the 18 Royal Garhwal Rifles were the first to arrive, and they took post at the western end of "Okeydoke" to block any further Jap irruption on to 5 Division's positions. They played a notable part in the final clearing of the Pass in the last battle at Point 1070. Meanwhile, the 8 Gurkhas and a battalion of 16 Punjabs steadily swept the spine of the Range clean of Japs, killing scores and herding the remainder down into the Kalapanzin for dispatch there by troops defending the Admin Box.
  For this purpose General Lomax had been laboriously building up his forces in the valley. His only Line of Communication was the Goppe mule track. But in due course both his own 26 Division and also 36 Indian Division (Maj. Gen. F. W. Festing, DSO) were fully mustered for the final settlement. The Japs generally were in a wretched state by this time. The defenders of the Admin Box had taken savage toll of them - a preliminary count revealed that more than 1,100 had been buried in this area alone. Two forward brigades of 7 Division, which, with a brigade of 5 Division, had never relinquished their positions and had also already exacted their price, now blocked the retreat of the enemy.
  Trapped themselves now, and with no transport planes to feed and munition them the Japanese began to suffer the full pains of siege. Heavy bombers dived on their bunkers and fighters gunned their foxholes. When the planes went home for fresh bomb-loads the artillerymen relived them, and when they in turn paused, the tank gunners opened up. The diary of a Japanese Intelligence Officer which fell into our hands recorded that Tanahashi's Brigade Group had gone seven days without rations and had existed on wild yams and water. Another entry noted that the owner himself had gone 10 days without food, though even at the end of that time he had reported himself as able to dig bunkers. The enemy, of course, looted what he could from the villages, but he was elsewhere described as being so short of food that he was eating monkeys.
  The British attack was pressed home relentlessly by a pincer movement from both sides of the Range. Between them, they left very little of the "March on Delhi," or on Chittagong either. The Admin Box battle ended when Major Ferguson Hoey led the assault of the Lincolns on Point 315 overlooking it. He fell as it was captured, gaining the VC.
  The three weeks' siege was raised. The breaking of the enemy's strangle-hold on "Okeydoke" followed shortly after the capture of Hill 1070. It required 10 days' fighting with tank and artillery support to liquidate the deep Jap bunkers in this knife-edge feature with its conical peak. Even after it was thought cleared a landslide caused by the bombing and shelling unearthed another score of the enemy.
  Then at last the convoys loaded with food rolled once more down the slopes of "Okeydoke" to the relieved army. At the head rode Maj. Gen. H. R. Briggs, DSO, OBE, Commander of 5 Division, coming to congratulate his fellow divisional commander Maj. Gen. Messervy on his magnificent stand. The Battle of Arakan was virtually over, and the Fourteenth Army stood triumphant on its first great battlefield.
  They had smashed No. I Japanese invasion of India, scored the first major British-Indian victory over the arrogant enemy, killed 4,500 of his finest troops (the figure later rose to nearly 7,000). Even more vital the British and Indian soldier had set up a man to man superiority over the Japanese soldier in the field.
  The strategy of the Jap High Command had been completely frustrated. Our troops on the Southern Front had been neither driven out nor annihilated, the road to India had not been forced; the reserve divisions covering the Central Front had not been sucked into the struggle and used-up. They remained intact ready to deal with Part II of the Japanese Invasion for which strong enemy forces were already massing along the Chindwin.
  Above all the Allies had demonstrated their mastery of a new way of jungle warfare - the land-air technique of combat and supply. In the coming battles on the Central Front entire divisions (5 Division and 7 Division) would be transported by air from Arakan to Assam to reinforce the troops already meeting and breaking the new Japanese offensive. Thus Arakan, itself a great defensive victory, directly paved the way towards another and far greater defensive operation which developed into a triumphant Allied offensive along all three fronts.
  The enemy was not allowed to rest in Arakan. No victory is complete without pursuit, and Christison pressed fiercely upon the beaten enemy. To Messervy went orders to destroy the remnants of the invading forces. With what grim satisfaction did the commander and troops of the "encircled and annihilated 7 Division" execute this order.
  By the time the monsoons broke on the Southern Front in June we had taken the fortress of Razabil as well as the commanding heights around Buthidaung and the strategic tunnels linking either side of Mayu Range. Our ships sailed unimpeded up the Naff River. Lt. Gen. Christison this established a forward line which could be held with a minimum of troops throughout the malarial season while the RAF, operating from all-weather airstrips, continually harried the Jap monsoon quarters.
  "The enemy has been challenged and beaten in jungle warfare," said the Prime Minister in a special message to Supreme Commander Lord Louis Mountbatten and the Fourteenth Army on the morrow of this great victory "His boastfulness has received a most salutary exposure."

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Slim's armor and infantry move into battle.  The nature of the terrain compels tanks to keep to road or track and attack frontally; infantry may thrust out to the flanks.

Mahratta troops attack through a dense bamboo forest.  It's Nature's "wire." Mules can go places where even jeeps get stuck.  They carry two hundred weight apiece.

"Signals" are half the jungle battle.

Heavy artillery play a key part.  It has to be man-handled.

Camouflaged Chinese troops ford mountain torrent on Salween Front.

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Wingate's Skytroops Land in Burma
  The late Major General Charles Orde Wingate was an unusual man. He commanded the confidence of unusual men, too. Wavell believed in him, and gave him his head on two occasions, in Abyssinia, 1940, and in Burma, 1943.

The late Maj. Gen. Charles O. Wingate Leader of Chindit Forces

Churchill was fascinated by his daring and powerful mind, so well attuned to his own sense of challenge. Mountbatten took him to his heart, encouraged him, and backed him to the limit, even when Wingate was being temperamentally awkward.
  Wingate, it must be allowed, was one who did not joyfully suffer opposition. He drew down the lightning on his own head, alas, in the final, tragic scene, for he was killed in his hour of triumph, flying with characteristic defiance through an electric storm. When he fell, his friend and commanding officer, Lt. Gen. Bill Slim, Commander of Fourteenth Army, wrote a penetrating tribute to him in which he analyzed his quality as a leader. "Wingate had clear vision" wrote Slim, "He could also impart his belief to others. Above all, he could adapt to his own purpose the ideas, practices, and techniques of others once he was satisfied of their soundness." Wingate himself considered that "the chief difference between a good and bad commander is an accurate imagination."
  Was his 1943 Expedition a success or not? Some critics held that it achieved very little at high cost. Others pointed out that when the Chindit columns had been withdrawn again across the Chindwin River the Japs took toll of all who had disclosed themselves as our friends in Burma. If this latter argument is pushed to its logical end, however, it means that we must never abandon a Burmese village, though its strategic value has become nil. Surely the proper way to assess Wingate's achievements in 1943 is to ask: Did it make possible his achievements in 1944? For the Chindit operations in 1944, with their vital bearing upon the general campaign were of unquestioned value. Judge by this test Wingate's pioneer venture was completely justified.
  He had marched then minus a landward Line of Communication, moving without trace upon the enemy's rear. He now improved on this idea: He proposed not even to march most of his fighting columns in, but to travel by air. The objective was as before - to cut the enemy's Lines of Communication. Wingate acted on General Sherman's classic dictum, "The enemy's rear is there to play hell with."
  In Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, he found a chief of like ideas who had already for two years led Britain's commandos in Europe. At Quebec on the day of his appointment, Mountbatten had pressed the project of the Air Commando for jungle warfare.
  The plan now on hand was to put five brigades 150 miles behind the Jap lines, roughly in the triangle Katha-Mogaung-Bhamo (see map), there they would be within striking range of the Mandalay-Myitkyina railway and the road system which served the entire rear of the Jap armies operating against General Stilwell's American-trained Chinese divisions. These were now advancing steadily from the north through the Hukawng Valley, hauling their Ledo Road along with them.
  To carry through the audacious operation it was decided that one force under Brigadier Ferguson, DSO, should march down from the north, parallel with Stilwell's advance but through the mountains to the west of it. It involved these Chindits marching by a hundred-mile trek, to pass across the Upper Chindwin River, their rubber dinghies for the ferrying being dropped by aircraft. Four other brigades were to be flown in by gliders and set down on clearings which aerial recce photographs had revealed might bear an initial landing.
  Most of these clearings had been earmarked by Wingate during his '43 Expedition. They had not, however, been closely reconnoitered on foot since then. They were marked on a map as open spaces. That was all.
  Three landing grounds were selected for this initial hazardous "Operation Thursday." They were named "Broadway," "Chowringhee," and "Piccadilly." But on the evening of the fly-in a last recce revealed that logs had been felled and laid across the runway of "Piccadilly," and this station was thereupon abandoned fifteen minutes before take-off. Later, a fourth strip, "Aberdeen," named after the home of Wingate's wife, was built.
  The plan was that the first wave of troop-carrying gliders should go in, firing a red flare if the enemy were found to be in unexpected possession (except that the man who has that flare has put it in a very deep pocket and doesn't think he'll ever find it). Once the gliders had cast off their nylon silk tow-ropes of course, they had to go in - and once in they had to stay in. The tow-ships, stripped bare to haul the heavy loads, had hardly petrol enough after release to get themselves back over the hostile jungle. The first wave would land, seize the clearing, fan-out and screen it while the second wave arrived. This would comprise more troops, bulldozers, graders, jeeps, mules and ponies, also, combat engineers to build an airport between dawn and dusk, so that the next night the giant C-47 troop carrier aircraft could bring in an army with its guns and wagons.
  The initial fly-in was entrusted to a special U.S. Air Commando, provided at the direct instance of General Arnold, Commanding General of the USAAF, on request of Lord Louis Mountbatten. The plan for this had been worked out by 33-year-old Colonel Philip Cochran and his deputy Colonel Robert Alison, and concerted with Wingate. Cochran had trained, and now commanded the Air Commando. His fighter-bombers had already cleared a wide aerial "fire-belt" round his landing grounds, driving back the Jap aircraft bases by continuous attack. Cochran's P-51's loaded 1,000-lb rockets under each wing. Totally, in these initial strafes, and in their constant close support of the Chindits after the Air Invasion had gone in, they discharged 1,590,000 lbs of explosives on the enemy and destroyed a hundred Jap aircraft.
  "The night of the Party" had come. On the strip to see the most audacious air armada yet created depart on its high adventure were gathered some of the most famous leaders in South East Asia, Stratemeyer, Slim, Baldwin, Old, Davidson, Cochran and Wingate himself. More indeed, even than the success of this mission was at stake. The Burma Air Invasion was the test (and became the model) of the great airborne assault on Fortress Europe three months later.
  It was the night of Sunday, 5 March and the moon rose bright and clear as the troops piled into the gliders. They wore green battledress and full field kit, and were armed to the teeth with rifles, tommy guns, pistols, knives and grenades. Many were bearded.
  Now the gliders towed in pairs, were harnessed. The tow-ships engines roared up and cast loose, and then bouncing, swaying and straining, the aerial train rushed down the strip in a cloud of dust, hauled itself up over the trees, and headed for the heart of enemy Burma 150 miles beyond the 7,000-foot mountains. Many of the troops had never even flown before. No fighters escorted the Air Invasion, which traveled without lights and had been ordered to land by no other illumination than the moon. All depended on surprise.
  Over the target, the gliders circled once to pick out the dark strip between the trees, cast off and went in. Fifty-four flew. Unluckily, the Control Glider made a forced landing along the Chindwin River, and so no guiding power directed the ordered procession of arrival on the strip. Many of the gliders crashed on landing, some disastrously, and of course, as they piled up others coming in with no control, except gravity, smashed into them. On the ground men heaved frantically and tore their muscles, dragging the wrecks clear. Then the cry would rise, terrible in its urgency, "Gliders!" The next wave were already diving in.
  One hurtled straight into its immediate predecessor, welding two machines into one ball of fiery scrap. Another, loaded with a bulldozer and other heavy machinery, whipped over sharply to avoid a wreck and plowed into the wall of the jungle at 60 mph. On either side the trees tore off its wings, the fuselage rushed on with its load now wrenched loose from its moorings. When the fuselage halted at last, the machinery continued - at 60 mph. By some miracle it flung the pilot and co=pilot up into the air while it flew out beneath them. They landed back unhurt. "I planned it just that way," said the Yank pilot.
  But there were grim scenes, too, where the surgeons amputated by light of the moon, and there were gliders that crashed far beyond in the dark jungle with a frightful cry - and then silence fell while men hunted frantically for their dying comrades.
  But the enemy kept off. And considering the risks the casualties were small. Of the 54 gliders which set forth, 37 arrived in "Broadway." Eight landed west of the Chindwin in friendly territory. Another nine came down in the enemy zone, two within a hundred yards of a Japanese HQ, though the crews got away with it. Several flew safely through Jap ack-ack fire. The sappers began at first light to build the strip. Thirteen hours later the troop transports were landing safely, bringing reinforcements and evacuating the injured. Two days later, 3,000 men of Brigadier "Mad Mike" Calvert's brigade had disembarked in "Broadway."
  Three nights after the first fly-in there was a second landing at "Chowringhee." Again, a couple of days, and four columns of Brigadier Lentaigne's brigade with their HQ were safely landed. Totally 12,000 men and about 1,200 animals were brought in at a casualty cost of 121 men. Four days after the landings the columns were marching off into the jungle to start business on Jap communications. "Operation Thursday" was over, the Chindits had written a dazzling new page of military history. Nor as yet had the Japs even located them, firmly planted as they were, in Wingate's phrase "in the very guts of the enemy.
  It was his last, as it was his finest exploit. Flying towards India after a tour of his forward positions his plane was lost in a storm. That night, 24 March, an American pilot reported a fire blazing on a mountainside. With Wingate perished the entire crew and two British war correspondents, Stuart Emeny of the News-Chronicle and Stanley Wills of the Daily Herald. Wingate's Command was taken over by Maj. Gen. W. D. A. Lentaigne, DSO, one of the column commander in the 1943 thousand-mile march into Burma.
  Where the Chindits marched and what they did is a story not yet fully disclosed. In broad outline, Calvert's brigade went westward to cut the roads and railway immediately behind the Japanese who were opposing General Stilwell's advance towards Mogaung-Myitkyina. Lentaigne's brigade operated further south, also attacking communications. Ferguson's brigade came marching all the way in a wide flanking drive from Ledo towards "Aberdeen." At the same time a mixed British and Kachin force struck eastward to the Chinese frontier to cut the Bhamo-Myitkyina road. They actually entered China at one point, later closing in to complete the encirclement of Myitkyina.
  Some British place-names will be forever associated with these exploits. There was the road-rail block of "White City," which perhaps had been better named "Red City" from the blood that flowed there. It was imperative for the Japs to remove this block, which was throttling the life out of their troops in the Mogaung Valley. They brought up tanks to support their infantry. Our gunners replied with 25-pounders and Bofors. A ferocious hand-to-hand battle followed. Men of the South Staffs and Lancashire Fusiliers waded in with bayonet and rifle butt. The Gurkhas and West Africans engaged with their native knives, the Japs with their two handed swords. An incessant rain of grenades burst over the heads of the fighters and among the groups inextricably mixed-up in personal combat. Calvert, with fixed bayonet, led his men forward a dozen times. The battle continued through the night, while overhead the air transports went on steadily delivering supplies.
  At dawn in was seen that the Japs were digging themselves in on a hill overlooking "White City." Immediately an assault was launched to dislodge them. The cost was high. When the general Allied counter-attack was unleashed the enemy fled, leaving his wounded, equipment and weapons on the ground.
  But he came back, time and again, striving furiously to break our grip on his Line of Communication. An eyewitness describes how the Japs rushed blindly into our minefields and over our booby-traps, and were blown to pieces or else mown down like autumn corn by our riflemen and machine-gunners. Wave after wave of them came on, howling like hyenas. They piled up on to our wire, which by morning was festooned with bodies, many of them stripped naked by the explosions from mortars and grenades. Scores were killed by their own Bangalore Torpedoes, which they carried to blow gaps in our barricades. At a crisis of the battle, Cochran's Air Commandos planted a huge load of high explosives on Jap concentrations preparing to move up. The pilots had been reluctant; so short was the distance separating the forces that they feared to hit our own men. But urged by the ground troops, they unloaded on the enemy everything they had, bombing with deadly precision and destroying hundreds. "White City" was never taken by the Japs, though we abandoned it later.
  "Blackpool" was another jungle Tobruk. This was the most famous stomping ground of Lentaigne's old brigade: the "Ghost Force." They included men of two Gurkha units, the Cameronians, the King's Own Royal Regiment and the RA. This brigade had been flown in to "Chowringhee," but the Japs had discovered the strip and concentrated against it a few days later. They bombed and finally occupied it, but by that time Lentaigne's brigade were blocking the Jap Line of Communications northward. They saw to it that no reinforcements got up from the south. Then they turned their attention to the enemy branch lines from Indaw to Homalin. With road block and ambush they stopped all traffic.
  It was now decided to move nearer to Stilwell, who was already investing Kamaing. By an 80-mile march over the mountain jungle the brigade descended on Hopin, 30 miles southwest of Mogaung, and on the Myitkyina-Mandalay railway. It was here "Blackpool" came into being.
  The Japs reacted violently against this new challenge. For two weeks they flung strong forces continuously against the post. In the final assault, which began on May 23, they brought up 105mm and 75mm artillery. During one bombardment 300 shells fell inside the perimeter within an hour.
  The garrison gave up its airstrip and prepared to fight it out. It meant sacrificing the service most valued of all by the troops (and most uplifting to them) - the flying-out of their wounded in Cochran's light L-5 recce planes. The hard decision had to be made. As it was, with superior strength, both in men and arms the Japanese broke through the perimeter of the fortified position and contested the possession of the commanding hill features. But fighting prolonged engagements is not Long Range Penetration troops' role. They fight with the equipment they carry on their backs, and so, with their ammunition low, and the foul weather precluding further airborne supplies, the brigade walked out of "Blackpool." They bore their wounded on their shoulders, slashing a path through the undergrowth and man-high elephant grass, hacking footholds up and down precipices of mud.
  Their line of march lay up the valley of the Indaw Chaung, towards the hills around Mogaung. The valley had become a morass and it was hard going for men dog-tired with 20 days and nights almost unceasing fighting. It was now, indeed, that they proved that they were indeed among the "toughest of the tough."
  They attacked and drove in the enemy outpost positions in the hills west and southwest of Mogaung. They fought another bitter battle for the possession of Point 2171, and they held this feature against night-and-day artillery bombardment by the Japs until relieved by fresh troops. This flanking thrust considerably expedited the final withdrawal of the Japanese from these hills, and the subsequent capture of Taungni.
  Most important of all, they demonstrated once more that British and Indian troops can fight back long after the Jap considers that they have had enough. It is then, in fact, that our men have shown themselves at their finest in this unrelenting warfare.
  But by this time the whole campaign on the Northern Front was moving towards its climax. Stilwell's flying column of Marauders had seized the airstrip at Myitkyina, and were half-way into the town. His main forces were moving on Mogaung, Japan's great base in North Burma.

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CLICK ON MAP TO VIEW ENLARGED IN A NEW WINDOW   Contour map above shows what the Fourteenth Army's 700-mile front of forests, mountains, swamps and jungle looks like from the air. The areas where the main fighting took place are picked out by white lines. Calcutta, main Allied base for the whole front, is 200 miles west of Comilla - quite off this map.   Note how each battle area, though separated by huge ranges, remains an integral part of a vast, unified front. Enemy documents captured in the Arakan reveal that the Japanese High Command confidently expected their offensive on the Southern Front to suck-in Allied reserves from the Central Front.   Similarly, one of the main aims of the enemy offensive on the Central Front was to cut the life-line feeding General Stilwell's troops advancing towards Myitkyina along the Northern Front. This life-line is the Bengal-Assam railway which runs in a wide arc from Calcutta and up the Brahmaputra Valley to Dimapur (Fourteenth Army railhead) then along to Ledo where Stilwell began his Road.   The Allies also linked the Central and Northern Fronts in one plan - flying in Wingate's Invasion forces from behind the Imphal mountains into the land between the main Jap bases for both fronts.   The advantages enjoyed by the enemy on these two fronts in having superior road, rail and river communications between the forward areas and their main bases at Shwebo, Mandalay and their southern port at Rangoon, are obvious. Compare them with the solitary overland over-worked route serving the Allied front from Dimapur. This handicap was overcome by development of air transport on a scale which, at the time, was greater than had ever previously been attempted on any of the world's battlefronts and served as a pattern for many of the major air operations in Europe.

NORTHERN FRONT

CENTRAL FRONT

SOUTHERN FRONT

CLICK ON INDIVIDUAL MAP TO VIEW ENLARGED IN A NEW WINDOW WITH ADDITIONAL DETAILS

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Stilwell Advances from Ledo  
  Now we must turn to the primary objective of all these operations, the Supreme Allied Commander's directive to the Fourteenth Army - to clear North Burma and advance to the line Mogaung-Myitkyina. This brings us to the remarkable soldier, U.S. General Joseph W. Stilwell, Deputy Supreme Commander under Lord Louis Mountbatten, who bore the main part in this enterprise.
  General Stilwell is a West Pointer who fought in World War I, and thereafter spent many years

General Joseph W. Stilwell Deputy Supreme Allied Commander

of service in the Philippines and China. He is 61 years old, shrewd, caustic and as craggy as they come. He can march 30 miles a day, as he very frequently has, urging his officers and troops forward with picturesque adjurations and many stratagems. As Stilwell closed his 60th year he gave up chain-smoking. He had scaled a one-in-two gradient in the Mogaung Valley, and paused for breath half-way up. Stilwell is known to the world as "Vinegar Joe," though his troops call him "Uncle Joe" and equally mean it. There are scores of stories about him, not suited to this chronicle.
  In early 1942 Stilwell was in China, charged with the mission of improving the training and combat methods of twenty Chinese divisions. An American Lt. General, he held the appointment of Chief of Staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Before he could start work his task had already changed. The Japanese had changed it. Driving westward across the mouth of the Salween River they captured Rangoon, closing the great port of the Burma Road. They streamed up the valley towards Mandalay and beyond, seizing the Road itself. General Alexander's outnumbered forces withdrew, fighting a long rearguard battle. With them went the Chinese divisions under Stilwell which had been hurried in to try and stem the invasion. "We were dammed well licked," said Stilwell, "the Japs ran us out of Burma."
  The withdrawal became a retreat, redeemed from disaster by the fortitude and courage of the Allied soldier. Most of the Chinese troops in Alexander's command pulled back across the Salween. His British forces he brought back into India. Lt. Gen. Slim commanded the Burma Corps in this long retreat. It included the 17 and 39 Indian Divisions, and, for a time, the 38 Chinese Division. They were in rags, hungry, short of weapons and ammunition, sick of malaria and dysentery, dog-tired, but still on their feet and fighting. From this indomitable rearguard arose the conquering host of the Fourteenth Army.
  Stilwell could have flown out. He marched by the soldiers' road. "Many of you will think I am a b-- before we get out," he told his party of men and women of five nationalities, "but you will all get out alive." So they did, climbing the Chin Hills as the last lap. Of those who continued northward and sought escape by the dreaded Hukawng Valley, thousands perished by the roadside.
  For Stilwell three big jobs waited: (i) to re-build into an army the Chinese troops who had been evacuated into India; (ii) to create a chain of airfields in northeast India to supply the Chinese Army in China, and keep her in the war. This called for cooperation of a high order, and it was freely given. So the soldiers of one nation were trained by the officers of a second nation, within the frontiers of a third. With the aid of the British and Indian Army and civilians, and the labor of the Assam tea-planters and the Nepalese, Naga and Kachin hillfolk, the airfields were constructed, and aerial traffic over the perilous Hump to Kunming raised until it exceeded the total military tonnage ever shipped along the Burma Road.
  Third, came the greatest project of all, the building of the Ledo Road. This is the "impossible" highway which starting from Ledo at the railhead of the Bengal-Assam railway, climbs the 5,000-foot ranges of Patkai Bum and emerges at Shingbwiyang. From there it crosses the broad bowl of the Upper Chindwin, mounts the Hukawng Valley to its watershed and descends again into the Mogaung Valley. This road was the axis of Stilwell's advance.
  No drum-beats heralded the start of the giant project of the Ledo Road. though it has not lacked recognition since, it was long before security permitted the mention of it. What existed previously was a path for mules, the historic refugee trail along which the exodus from Burma had stumbled two years earlier. The Yanks would make of it a 30-foot, standard double-tracked highway, metalled, trenched, banked, bridged and inclined. Bulldozers, power-shovels, cranes, steamrollers, trucks would roll in massive mechanized procession from the American production lines, 15,000 miles away, across two oceans and past three continents to the wild Naga Hills. Thousands of men would drive the road and bridge the fords, pushing through forests of solid bamboo, scaling cliffs, edging along precipices. Under the blazing sun, in the choking dust, in mud, mist, monsoon and blizzard, building by the moon and by searchlight's beam.
  The Road demanded much, some said it demanded all. Yet the concept of its engineering did not dictate the strategy of the campaign. They interacted, or if you prefer it, merged. In jungle war the grand campaigns, at any rate, still move along the narrow spearheads of the Lines of Communications. The adjacent wilderness is commanded by the possession of the milestones. There is, as we have seen, one variation of these logistics - unlimited air supply. We had good air supply in the northern campaign, but though it can serve emergency perfectly, it is in general the least economical method and we never had it unlimited.
  This was the method of the march. First went Stilwell's U.S. trained Chinese divisions. They drove the enemy before them. On either side, in flanking movements which swept deep into the hills, moved Chinese patrols and Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill's Marauders, which included veteran infantry assault troops from Guadalcanal. These forces deceived the Jap, distracted him, cut into his rear, threw road blocks across his retreat. On the heels of the fighters - often alongside them - came the trail-blazers, engineer recce-parties hacking a "trace" with axes across virgin jungle, working out gradients as they went. Behind them came the first bulldozer, shoving its way forward wherever it could get, scraping out the urgent "combat road" for immediate battle supply. Last came the main highway builders, blasting their track, metalling it, constructing a hundred bridges that would hold against the floods, cutting a swathe twice as wide on either side of the road to let the sun come in and dry the surface. All were armed, for the Jap never wearied of sneak flank raids. Then men would drop the pick and seize the bayonet, or perhaps fight it out with the pick.

General Stilwell's forces battled their way from Ledo up to the watershed of the Hukawng and down through the Mogaung Valley. General Wingate's skytroops landed astride the Japanese main line of communications to Mogaung and Myitkyina from the south and southeast. Drawing by Booker Cooke.

  Chinese, Chins, Indians, Nepalese, Nagas slashed, hauled and piled. Negroes drove machines. Black, brown, yellow, white men toiled shoulder deep in the rushing streams, belt deep in the mud. Stilwell moved on: The Road followed a mile a day. Down it flowed wagons, weapons carriers, guns and tanks. The maker of the road was the slow-speaking silver-haired Virginian. Brig. Gen. Lewis Pick, who designed the Missouri dam to irrigate a million acres. He had more water than he wanted on the Ledo Road.
  The aircraft supply of U.S. Tenth Air Force (Maj. Gen. Howard C. Davidson) roared in between the jungle and the ceiling of the rain clouds. Airstrips were made in 12 hours, under artillery fire. The advance of the army was often a maneuver of double encirclement. There was the Allied front. Then behind the Japs another Allied layer, more Japs, and further on still more advanced Allied units. Kamaing was encircled by a long flanking march and Mogaung, 16 miles beyond simultaneously threatened, for another Allied force was approaching from the south, where they had inserted themselves by airborne invasion. This was the brigade of Mad Mike Calvert.
  Stilwell's march began towards the end of 1943. He was over the mountains by the New Year, and building up his base at Shingbwiyang. He had to fight his way forward from this point. Held up by a road block, Uncle Joe sought to strengthen his attack with armor and accordingly signaled Colonel Rothwell Brown's Chinese tank unit, which was finishing its training at Ledo, "Will your outfit work?"
  The word came back, "Most of them can drive a bit and most can shoot a bit." The next signal was an order. "Send them down as fast as they'll travel. If they only drive behind our lines it'll be a helluva help to morale." The tanks came slithering over still unmetalled mountain road, driven by boys who three months before had never seen a train. A couple of tanks went over the khud in the storm and darkness. Others went down the steepest gradients on the road, lashed by cable to a bulldozer which dug its blade into the surface to act as a brake.
  Until they came to Shingbwiyang this unit's action had been confined to hunting water buffalo. They went into the jungle to rustle up the Jap patrols and crashed straight into the main base of a Jap division preparing for a counter-offensive. One tank went heading through it in the night and plunged into the river, where it was instantly swallowed by the muddy water. A second overturned, and the Japs swarmed over it like ants to butcher the crew. But the rest formed a defensive leaguer with the Chinese 22 Division infantry scraping fox-holes between the tanks to complete the ring. They dragged their wounded inside it, and the operators wirelessed to Stilwell their vital information. A few days later 22 Division, reinforced by Marauders and supported by these tanks, broke the front of the Japanese 18 Division, the conquerors of Singapore, at Walawbum. They collected jeeps, armored cars and trucks of U.S. origin that the Japs had won at Rangoon and Mandalay. They also acquired a purely Japanese trophy - the official seal of the Jap 18 Division.
  Stilwell shoved on up the Hukawng, his Chinese 22 Division sweeping the western slopes, 38 Division the eastern. It took him nineteen weeks of hard fighting. The Road followed him like his shadow. All was going well. To the south, a British column had passed the Chindwin after a hundred mile march. An eyewitness who reached the area by plane and alighted on the sandy bank on the east side of the Chindwin described how this LRP column emerged from the dense jungle in single-file, weary and weighted down with their full equipment. They trudged to the water's edge and as dusk fell camp fires sprang up all along the fringe of the jungle. Suddenly came the drone of a multi-engined plane and at a sharp order every fire was extinguished. The plane circled overhead, flashed a message to which a lamp from the river bank sent an answer. Then petrol fires blazed up in the form of a huge letter "L." The plane now swept low and from its dark hull dropped bundle after bundle containing bread, mail, ammunition and even spectacles and a dozen different articles for which the men had asked. Throughout the whole of the epic hundred-mile march there had been only 18 casualties in the column. After a brief rest the men crossed the Chindwin in rubber dinghies dropped by air and continued their march right across the enemy's Line of Communication. Meanwhile, far away to the east one more mixed force of Gurkhas and Kachin Levies were making steady ground from Fort Hertz towards Myitkyina.
  It was at this moment that the entire front (that is, both the Allies and the Japs) was galvanized by the news of Wingate's skytroops landing in Burma, then the greatest airborne enterprise in history.
  On 19 March, his 61st birthday, Stilwell crossed the pass from Hukawng Valley into the Mogaung Valley. The same day the Gurkha-Kachin column slashed their way in a hand-to-hand battle into Sumprabum. The HQ cook produced

"Death Valley"  Thousands of refugees died on this trail from Burma. Stilwell, marching back, made it his Ledo Road.

a chocolate-iced cake which read "Happy Birthday Uncle Joe!" and Joe himself sported a smart clean uniform and even put on his badges of rank. His troops claimed a total of 4,000 Japanese killed.
  Thunder on the right. The scene suddenly changed. The Japs were pouring over the Chindwin, heading towards Dimapur and the Bengal-Assam railway that was Stilwell's Lifeline. Joe looked over his shoulder, and he would have been crazy not to do so. He had been instructed by General Slim, under whose command at that time he still served, to occupy the Mogaung-Myitkyina area. Should he now halt and detach one of his Chinese divisions to guard his Line of Communications?
  Slim weighed the same problem and reached two bold decisions. First he ordered Stilwell to continue his advance, relying on the arrival of reinforcements from Arakan and India to hold the invaders in check. Secondly, what should be done about the Chindits, who had been airborne into Burma, with the purpose of assisting Stilwell's plans by cutting the Jap Lines of Communication? Slim ordered them to carry on with their original task, which they did, immensely facilitating operations in the Mogaung-Myitkyina area.
  So, while Imphal-Kohima's commanders parried the enemy's blows, Stilwell punched him. At Shadazup and Laban his infantry cut up the Jap garrisons; at Inkangtang he flung in heavier tanks, manned by Chinese crews, and overran their well-entrenched gun emplacements. Some of the Allied tanks got lost in the dense jungle and their crews would probably have been forced to abandon them but aircraft carrying out photographic reconnaissance took photographs of the surrounding country, which they dropped to the tank crews to show them the best way home to the main forces. Two years to the day that he had been "run out of Burma," Uncle Joe came marching back.
  The Japs bore their reverses with less fortitude. In many a fox-hole captured during the Allied advance our troops found them hanging by the neck with their own belts. Others had chosen the traditional method of hari-kiri; In one place our men unwittingly interrupted a pair of Japs about to cut their throats.
  It would not be proper to leave the Mogaung Valley campaign without a word about Stilwell's Chinese troops. They had been marching and fighting now for six months and had acquitted themselves with very great credit. The Chinese infantryman moves about his business in his own way and at his own pace. His courage and endurance are exemplary. Stilwell rates their capacity high. Colonel Brown's Chinese tank column killed more than 2,000 enemy between Maingkwan and Walawbum with less than 10 weeks training. Most of the troops are youthful by our standards; some were as young as 15 and few in the ranks are older than 25. One determined adventurer who smuggled himself over the Hump in a rice barrel was nine years old.
  The Chinese are surely the best walkers in the world. The famous Eighth Route Army walked 6,000 miles across China in twelve months fighting most of the way. And "Joe Chinese" carries all he possesses on a pole balanced on his shoulder.
  On 17 May, as Stilwell's main forces closed in on Kamaing came the unexpected electrifying news that another American-Chinese column had seized Myitkyina airfield. On reaching the watershed of Mogaung Valley, Stilwell had detached Merrill's Marauders and Chinese forces for an outflanking attack on Myitkyina, railhead of the Burma railway. They scaled the 7,000-foot Naun Hykit Pass and by a forced march of 20 days, along secret paths, appeared suddenly on the Myitkyina airstrip. The Chinese actually seized the greater part of the town by surprise assault but, in the confusion of the night, some units came under the fire of their own machine-gunners and a withdrawal was ordered. They continued to dominate the railway station, and thus isolated Myitkyina from all communication with Mogaung, the next big station down the line.
  The besiegers were, of course, themselves cut off from all land communication. But - they had the air. Five hours after the Marauders seized the airstrip, gliders loaded with airborne engineers and their equipment came sailing in. By next morning the strip had been shaped up well enough for transports to land with their vital cargoes of supplies and reinforcements. The enemy artillery, of course, had the range of the strip, and all day they played upon it. At night, their snipers crawled as near as they dared and fired into the main camp.
  In the town, which stands in a loop of the Upper Irrawaddy, the Japs had 1,500 determined fighters, deeply dug-in. They reinforced this garrison to many over its original strength before the town could be enveloped. Beyond the river, north and south, General Lentaigne's Long Range Penetration troops operated, cutting main Jap communication with the garrison. By night, however, the enemy managed to ferry fresh troops across the river. Westward, "Mad Mike" Calvert's troops stormed Mogaung, promptly effecting a junction there with the Chinese division which had taken Kamaing. Thus all Jap rail communication with the south was finally severed. So worn and battle-stained had become the uniforms of all the armies fighting in this jungle that the Chinese and Chindits tied orange strips to their hats and arms to distinguish each other from the Japs.
  The battle for Myitkyina continued. A long, grim. foot-by-foot struggle. The garrison were prepared to fight it out to the last man in the last bunker - and to give them credit for their courage, they did. The task of the besiegers was to prise them out one by one, for the depth of their bunkers defied field artillery and all except direct hits by dive-bomber. Even flame-throwers did not shift them. They lay doggo until the barrage lifted and the assault went in. Then up rose the enemy machine gunners and did their deadly work. Holding their fire until almost the last moment, the Jap machine gunners indeed behaved with very great resolution and skill. Stilwell energetically pressed the assault, throwing-in companies of U.S. combat engineers from the Ledo Road as infantry. They acquitted themselves most gallantly.
  The besiegers, however, were being rapidly reinforced while the besieged steadily diminished. The problem of supply became the main one. Throughout the entire action everything was borne in, or out by air. Artillery (the 75mm field pieces were Chinese-manned, the ack-ack batteries British-manned) ammunition, food, medical supplies, all were carried on to the strip in every kind of weather. American fliers finally crowned their previous supply efforts by transporting, in pieces, a 155mm howitzer. Transport planes landed in darkness, under fire (the enemy line was 3,000 yards away) in a cyclone of mud created by their own propellers. They evacuated both Myitkyina and Mogaung wounded, who had been flown in by light recce plane. Doc Seagrave's surgeons and nurses, stationed in a revetment just off the runway, operated on a hundred men a day.
  Enemy-held Myitkyina was dive-bombed repeatedly by Davidson's planes. In return, the Japs brought up a 150mm gun ("Pistol Pete") on the railway to shell the strip every night.
  But now the ring had closed round the doomed garrison. Lentaigne's troops (they had passed under the overall command of Stilwell on 17 May, the day the airstrip had been seized) now completely barred escape towards the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy. Parties of Japs who made the attempt by raft were spotted and wiped out.
  A fresh Chinese column arrived to reinforce the final assault on Mytikyina. Brig. Gen. T. F. Wessel's forces made no mistake; this was the pay-off and he had set his time limit. At 3:45 p.m. 3 August the last enemy post fell, and Myitkyina was ours. The siege had lasted 78 days.
  Uncle Joe took his bow before a world audience. He was given his fourth star, promoting him to the rank of full general. He had said "Myitkyina" and meant it when many considered it a pious hope. He had employed on his task some of the finest fighting material of five nations; American, British, Chinese, Indian and West African. He had been backed by all powerful Air, and an impressive park of giant mechanical road makers. But the dynamo that drove this massive apparatus forward had been the will of a man - Stilwell.
  The strategic values of Myitkyina are considerable. It was already before the Jap war a station on the old China-India air route, avoiding the more hazardous route over the higher Hump. Its airfield is capable of immense expansion. Already this capital town of North Burma is assuming the appearance of a second Croydon or Halifax, 12-ton power shovels are biting into the mountainsides, crushers and steam rollers are lengthening the runway so that even Superforts can land and take off. By the first week in September as many as 250 planes were landing and leaving daily. Secondly, Myitkyina is a further giant stride along the Ledo-Burma Road to China, though the Ledo Road has yet to be carried forward from the Mogaung Valley. Thirdly, Myitkyina stands on the broad Irrawaddy below where the river rushes out from the narrow gorges of the Kachin Hills, becoming navigable for barges and rafts. From this river port, as from Mogaung, stores can be shipped downstream to the Allied armies already marching far southward. Finally, Mogaung-Myitkyina line may be described as the fighter-bomber start line for the attack on Central Burma.
  While Wessel's men mopped-up at Myitkyina, the British 36 Division under the command of Maj. Gen. F. W. Festing, DSO, arrived by air and at once took up the pursuit of the Japs down the railway towards Mogaung. In the nearby hills the retreating enemy linked up with the remnants of the expelled garrison of that place. The first major engagement of 36 Division was at Hill 60. Its capture considerably accelerated the advance along the railway corridor towards Hopin and Katha.
  Within a few weeks of arriving on the Myitkyina front the new division had captured Pinbaw and Hopin. Five hundred Japs were found dead or dying in Hopin, convincing testimony to the accuracy of Allied bombers and artillery.
  As these words are written (10 October) the Allied armies of the north are fanning out as they advance, to weld a unified front together with General Slim's troops on the Chindwin sector to the west and the Chinese "Salween Force" moving in from Tengchung on the east.
  North Burma has been liberated, and the way is paved for the Ledo Road to link with the Burma Road.

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The Japanese invader also once gazed upon "Imphal's bloody plain" - but not for long.

The soldier's best friend in the jungle.

The jeep will drive through rivers, but not under them.

Monsoon: mud on the landing grounds, storm in the sky.

Deep in Jap-held Burma Lentaigne's men made friends.

Next step perhaps their last - elephant grass is cover for the enemy too.

'Vi-Spring' Comfort athwart bamboo poles. But the rains came.

West African troops crossing a chaung. They kept their kit dry.

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Japs Invade India from the Chindwin 
  Each of those elevations you see on the contour map represents a mountain or razor-edge ridge rising perhaps to 10,000 feet, those sinuous black lines winding along the valleys are not roads, but rivers and water courses, formed by the melting snows of the Himalayas and the rains which pelt down in these parts for seven out of the twelve months.
  There are probably not more than six motorable roads in the whole of the 25,000 square miles of the Central Front to which our story now progresses, and only two railways (with variable gauges). One comes up from Calcutta in the Bay of Bengal and ends at Ledo, while the other comes up from Mandalay and serves the former Jap bases of Mogaung and Myitkyina.
  The first lay in Allied territory. The second was Japanese. The path of both roads and railways has been hacked through thorny scrub, bamboo and elephant grass. The flooded paddy fields are the only other breaks in an almost solid forest mass.
  It seems incredible that modern mechanized war could be fought out in such surroundings. Yet it was over these same towering ranges and through these very swamps that General Alexander conducted his retreating army in May, 1942, and General Bill Slim fought the rearguard actions from Rangoon to India. Now, two years later, Lord Louis Mountbatten would begin the reconquest of all that had been lost, and leading his Fourteenth Army back in triumph would go General Slim, KCB, honored by the King for his famous victories.
  But meantime the monsoons saturated the mountainous terrain with its quota of more than 100 inches and the Commands of both sides put the finishing touches to plans for securing the initiative over this forbidding battleground.
  The loss of equipment in favor of the European Fronts necessitated a reshuffle in Fourteenth Army plans. They were now thinned-down to that of engaging the Japanese Army in Burma so that these forces would be deflected from General Stilwell's front. Alternative plans had been drawn up in case the enemy attempted to bring off a surprise such as the offensive he tried in the Arakan. The duty of preparing the broad field for these land operations devolved, under the Supreme Commander, upon General Sir George Giffard, GCE, DSO, ADC, C-in-C 11 Army Group, an officer distinguished for his leadership in the East African jungle war against Germany in 1914-18. Giffard's energy and enterprise secured for the Fourteenth Army the weapons and the tools with which they did their magnificent job. To Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, KCB, DSO, AFC, Air C-in-C in South East Asia, who directed all air operations, the RAF owed a debt equally profound.
  Fourteenth Army's assessment of the enemy's next move turned out to be accurate. The Japs had planned another surprise stroke but on much bigger and bolder lines than in the Arakan. It was no less than invasion of India via Imphal and Dimapur.

Lt. Gen. Sir Montague Stopford Commander, 33 Indian Corps.

Lt. Gen. Sir Geoffry Scoones Commander, 4 Indian Corps.

  The Jap purpose was threefold (i) To climb the wall of the mountains beyond the Chindwin and fall upon the main Allied advance base at Imphal, breaking our grip on the entire frontier, (ii) Securing the line of the Imphal-Kohima supply road, to sweep on into the Assam Plain and get stride the Bengal-Assam railway. Thus they would cut the life-line of General Joe Stilwell's advance towards Myitkyina along the Mogaung Valley, and force him back on Ledo, (iii) To overrun the Assam airfields and disrupt the airborne traffic from them over the Hump to China. Thus the Japs would dry up the petrol flow which kept General Chennault's 14th Air Force bombing over occupied China and Japan, and stop all munitions supply to Chiang Kai-shek's armies. By these few bold strokes the Japs might sever all communication with China and force her out of the war. Glittering prizes, indeed, and the Japs unsheathed sharp swords to gain them. Success in this matter would offset many recent failures in the Pacific.
  Said General Mutaguchi's Order of the Day to the Japanese invasion forces on the opening of the campaign, "This operation will engage the attention of the whole world and is eagerly awaited by a hundred million of our countrymen. Its success will have a profound effect on the course of the war, and may even lead to its conclusion. We must therefore expend every ounce of energy and talent to achieve our purpose."
  Accordingly, 100,000 crack imperial troops were detailed for the task. They were well versed in jungle warfare, and rehearsed in some other matters also. One of the things impressed upon them was that an enemy remained an enemy whether he lay wounded on the ground, or on a stretcher or even in a hospital bed. In all such events the recommended method was the short thrust and twist of the bayonet: ammunition was to be conserved for battle.
  It was on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1944, that the first Jap column forded the Chindwin by way of Homalin. A second column made the crossing at Thaungdut, 30 miles southward. They marched silently and swiftly, more lightly equipped than any soldiers who had previously set forth on such a mission. Speed was its essence: they must reach Imphal and Kohima before Allied reinforcements could arrive. Ahead of the main assault forces screens of patrols had been operating across the river for several days. For a time they deceived us as to their direction.
  As the Jap columns moved through the mountains towards Imphal Plain, their planes bombed the combat area. Sir John Baldwin's Third Tactical Air Force struck back hard at the enemy bases all along the Chindwin.
  Five days after passing the Chindwin the Jap army stood on the frontier of India, gazing down from the Somra Hills into Assam (22 March). They were engaged by British and Indian troops and had to fight their way forward. But the flag of the Rising Sun had been raised on Indian soil for the first time. For the second time since the New Year, Tokyo was all lit-up with victory. In night-and-day shifts the Jap radio celebrated, boasted and threatened with more to come. Programs were broken off while excited voices in ghastly English reeled out to Indian listeners the list of Jap successes all along the frontier. Yes, sir: The March on Delhi had this time really begun. This ballyhoo was not without effect in India.
  The Supreme Allied Commander and his generals in no wise shared the widespread alarm. Later events showed why. The Japanese offensive was unfolding not only as expected but substantially as desired. The enemy banked on a quick decision. In claiming that Imphal would fall by 27 March it is probable that Tokyo radio was not ahead of High Command schedule. A third Jap column got across the Chindwin and began moving up the Kabaw Valley. By now the heat was thoroughly turned on. very soon 17 Indian Division, who manned the Allied outpost at Tiddim, 164 miles to the south, were cut off. Jubilantly, the Japs claimed that they had got them "in the bag."
  Actually, even before the first Jap platoon had crossed the river, General Slim had concerted plans with the 4 Indian Corps Commander Lt. Gen. Sir Geoffry Scoones, KBE, CSI, OBE, DSO, MC, to meet the situation. General Slim had foreseen the coming events, and the plans drawn up to meet them were those on which the battle in the Imphal area was fought. These plans, among other things, involved a withdrawal from certain areas so as to concentrate our forces and to throw the disadvantages of long and vulnerable communications on the Japanese instead of ourselves. They provided for the holding of the Imphal Plain and the denial of that area and the food it contained to the Japanese. One of the requirements was that 17 Division should be withdrawn. Orders were accordingly issued to Maj. Gen. David Cowan, DSO, MC, Commander of 17 Division to evacuate his position as early as possible. The general and his men had now been fighting the Japs for two years on end. Indeed the famous "Black Cats," as these veterans of the Burma campaign of '42 were known from their division sign, were just about the "oldest inhabitants" of the Jap war.

Five days after crossing the River Chindwin, in their second attempt to invade India, Japanese forces had scaled the mountain barrier guarding India's eastern frontier and were in sight of the main British base of Imphal.  Simultaneously another enemy force was hitting hard at our positions around Kohima and the crack Japanese 33 Division was seriously harassing the withdrawal of 17 Division from Tiddim. Drawing by Booker Cooke.

  It was 12 March when Cowan received his orders, and he proposed to move at dawn on the 4th. At 3 a.m. of the 13th, however, while lying in bed, Cowan decided to go that same day. He rooted out his brigadiers and told them to be ready to march at sunset. That evening the entire division moved off, leaving Tiddim in flames. They took with them 4,000 mules and 2,000 vehicles, and in the darkness many units covered 40 miles of the tricky mountain road which lay athwart the enemy's line of advance from the Chindwin.
  The set task of the elite Jap 33 Division was to destroy Cowan's division before it reached Imphal. They accomplished it, indeed, several times on the radio where "only the commander and 26 men escaped to tell the tale." The Japanese actually did make the most strenuous efforts to slice up 17 Division as it moved along the trail. The enemy pushed on through the jungle, emerging to erect road blocks wherever they could jump ahead of the retiring forces. These road blocks they covered with effective fire. Indeed 17 Division were under fire practically the whole of the way, their gunners blasting open the Jap road blocks ahead of them and forward echelons storming and clearing them literally as the wagons of the division lumbered up the valley at their heels.
  The delays caused to the withdrawal of 17 Division by enemy attacks enabled the Japs to penetrate deeply round the flanks of the division. To deal with this, Corps Commander General Scoones ordered 23 Indian Division (Maj. Gen. Ouvry Roberts, DSO) to assist the withdrawal of 17 Division along its 160-mile road. This placed a considerable strain on 23 Division which already had commitments in the Ukhrul area, and it left no reserve in the Imphal Plain, but the task was carried out successfully and the risk entailed was justified. To discharge his new obligations it was necessary for Roberts to eject the Jap forces which had dug themselves in astride the Imphal road and who denied passage to the withdrawing British forces. Supported by light tanks of 7 Cavalry, 23 Division attacked vigorously and after heavy fighting drove out the enemy, thus very materially assisting the continued march of 17 Division towards Imphal.
  Now also converging on Imphal from Tamu came Maj. Gen. Douglas Gracey's 20 Indian Division. They had been guarding the shortest route to India, the Tamu-Palel road which runs across the malaria-bed known as the Kabaw Valley. Gracey's men had long been trained in jungle conditions and they also had measured the Jap. They were sure that they could hold him in whatever strength he sought to pass. But it was no part of the main plan to fight in the Kabaw Valley longer than it suited us. Therefore, Gracy also had been ordered to withdraw slowly. He took his men into his confidence explaining to them the broader picture of the campaign. So 20 Division, like 17 Division, set off homeward cheerfully to fit itself into the planned framework, determined at any rate to beat the slats out of all Japs who got in their way. The Frontier Force Rifles covered the right flank of the division as it drew back towards Palel. The Japs followed closely.
  One of the enemy's main objectives in this sector was Palel airfield. They fought hard for it, and when regular attacks failed they tried tricks. One extraordinary device, apparently designed to create panic by its nature, was to march steadily forward in columns of threes. When they came within the sights of 20 Division machine guns they were scythed down in rows of threes.
  So the ordered march of the outpost divisions continued towards Imphal. They carried out a fighting retreat which, though on a smaller scale, resembles in its mastery and resolute conduct that of Kutusov before Napoleon in 1812. That is they fought the whole of the way and left nothing behind them but their dead. They killed at least twice the number of their own losses. Said Cowan as they entered Imphal after three weeks battle fore, aft and flanking: "We are the better troops, and every man in this division knows it. The moment we have the Jap on the move, we've got him."
  West of Tamu a swift enemy thrust, supported by armor, was sharply checked when tanks of the 3 Carabiniers lay in ambush and hammered the enemy in the first armored clash on the Burma frontier. Meantime, other Jap units had reached the fringe of Imphal Plain and were less than eight miles south of the town. The Siege of Imphal had begun.
  The offensive was now fully unfolding along the entire frontier. Another Jap punch, further north towards Kohima, was being driven home with extraordinary violence. Here, if one is seeking points for criticism, occurred the only under-appreciation by Fourteenth Army HQ in a campaign waged in the most opaque "fog of war" on any front. We reckoned on the Japs coming to Kohima but not in such force or so soon. An Assam Regiment who held the covering position to the east, were pressed back fighting stubbornly against this superior weight. The Japanese paid stiff

Up to the axles in mud.  Yeah, and often up to the chassis.

gate-money for their entrance into India with 2,000 dead. But their propaganda exploited the advance to the limit as evidence that the Allies were in general retreat in India.
  Neither Scoones, nor Slim, nor Giffard nor Mountbatten himself, who was constantly on the front in these critical days, harbored any doubt as to the outcome, as was shown by certain far-reaching decisions taken at this moment. But the "flap" in areas far from the fighting line was considerable. Every town in India had its "bazar-telegraph" from the front, and with no censor operating on this line rumor flashed through without cease and ran about the streets like a mad dog.
  The situation there was tense. To an anxious Assembly in Delhi General Auchinleck, C-in-C, India, gave reassurances of his complete confidence in the Commanders and troops defending the frontiers. Reporting on the position "as made known to me by Lord Louis Mountbatten who is responsible for operations on this front," General Auchinleck said, "Imphal is still in our hands and is strongly held. Penetrations by small parties of the enemy are always possible, but are not likely to be of a major importance. Our Commanders do not intend to let Imphal fall into enemy hands." Some were sensible enough to believe him. Others preferred to listen to the undercurrent of criticism in U.S. and U.K. on the handling of this latest menace. Americans were naturally concerned over the safety of Stilwell and his forces in the Mogaung Valley. They were also wondering about Chennault in China.
  "Confusion and alarm," which the enemy Intelligence reported as raging in the Allied camp, was not apparent to observers in the various HQ's. Indeed, subsequent comment was that the Jap attack had been taken too lightly. Nothing could be further from the truth - but at that time it was not possible to tell all the truth.
  So far we have described the Japanese initiative, and the Allied counter-action. It would be cardinally wrong, however, to suppose that in the general course of the campaign the Fourteenth Army Commander conformed to the invader's idea. On the contrary, he had his own. He had decided to fight the Jap, not at the end of a long British Line of Communications, but at the end of a long Jap Line of Communications. He did not invite the enemy assault, but he made all preparation to receive and break it.
  At Imphal, the 4 Corps of Lieutenant General Scoones, already reinforced, awaited the exultant oncoming Japs. Instead of further withdrawals therefore (which the Japs confidently expected) a solid wall of resistance now rose in their path. The Army Commander had already cropped the garrison's "tail" by marching (or flying) out 50,000 non-combatants and civilians. For the remainder as tension rose with the Japs closing every land exit, 4 Corps Commander Scoones imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
  Fourteenth's "Grocer" (Maj. Gen. Alf Snelling, MGA) had received his orders, too, and they were large. He was required to stock up Imphal Plain with food, ammunition, guns and armor. The place of the departed non-combatants was filled with fighting men - some of the finest in South East Asia. The Japs had cut the land routes for the second time in two months. And, for the second time in two months Slim outwitted them by flying in his requirements and replacements over their heads. On this occasion it was a very greatly expanded business, for two entire divisions (5 Indian Division and 7 Indian Division) were brought up from Arakan where they had been in action a week before. Men, mules, guns and transport - a bold, secret, and superbly executed movement. By the time the invaders approached Imphal it was not so much a fortified base in a "state of defense" as a powerful offensive springboard. So it proved to be.
  The Japs came quite near enough. They reached positions both in the hills above the Imphal airfield and northeast of the city. But prompt action by the newly arrived 5 Division, reinforced by tanks, dislodged them and prevented their guns from doing any material damage.
  The fall of Imphal had been officially claimed by Tokyo on March 30, that of Kohima early in April. The Jap troops certainly did their utmost to realize these anticipations. They threw into the battle, as General Mutaguchi had urged, "every ounce of energy and talent" they possessed
  Not less energy or talent had been expended by the Imphal garrison to frustrate this purpose. Infantry, artillery armor and air forces had been assembled in adequate strength to meet any possible threat. The Jap assaults crashed like waves in a heavy sea against the fortress-walls of Imphal, but it was the waves that broke.
  As the invaders swept into the plain they were met by the cannonade of hundreds of artillery, tanks, machine guns, and the rifles and grenades of the inflexible infantry, As in Arakan the tanks inflicted very heavy damage, climbing right up to the top Jap hillside bunkers to blast them at point-blank range. The salvoes of the artillery rolled like thunder through the valleys.
  The war in the air was not less devastating. In the Battle of Imphal the Japs brought up fighter formations for the first time for many weeks. They lasted a rather shorter span than they had in Arakan. Third Tactical Air Force swept them out of the Burma skies, then turned completely to close and remote target support for Fourteenth Army. They shot up and bombed enemy concentrations, dumps, transport, bridges, river craft and locomotives. The monsoon in no way diminished their activity. On the contrary, Third TAF fighters and medium bombers stepped up their sorties to 24,000 sorties in its worst four months, nearly six times the figure of the previous year's record. Only those who have flown into a black monsoon know what that means. The man who survives it has looked into hell.
  All over enemy-held Burma ranged the medium bombers of Eastern Air Command. The "heavies" went as far as Bangkok. In three days USAAF sweeps over the Jap air bases notched 63 enemy planes on the ground. Already, by the time of Arakan they had closed Rangoon for ocean going supply. Now our planes swept the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin to deny the enemy his vital river traffic. The railway they never permitted to remain in full working order. The diaries of Jap prisoners are eloquent testimony to the horrors of rail travel in Burma. This systematic destruction of the enemy's Lines of Communication had decisive effects upon his campaign. Once he failed in his gigantic gamble to break into

Maj. General George E. Stratemeyer Commander, Eastern Air Command, Deputy Air Commander, South East Asia Command Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, KCB, DSO, AFC Air Commander-in-Chief, South East Asia Command

India in ten days his fate was really sealed, for his own supply could nowhere keep pace with his requirements. The final results of this collapse of his logistics are shown today as the triumphant Allied pursuit uncovers the appalling state of the retreating Japanese army.
  But while Stratemeyer's combat planes harried the enemy his transport aircraft poured in supplies to our own troops in Imphal Plain. Day after day the hungry Japs on the surrounding hills saw the stream of troop carriers bearing in food, fuel, ordnance, ammunition (Wellingtons ferried in a million pounds of bombs for the fighter-bombers), stores, men and even water. They brought out the wounded over the very gun sights of the enemy. Behind them supply units, transport men, and Line of Communications troops sweated and slogged to keep the dixies and the magazines filled for the men in the line. Unbelievable reports flamed round the world of impending grief. The men of 4 Corps on duty at Imphal serenely stuck it out.
  Kohima was in graver state. Appearing suddenly out of the Somra hills the Japs surged over Kohima Ridge, cut all the roads and completely isolated the town, for there was no airstrip. The small garrison laid under a murderous barrage from the overlooking hills, which blasted every bungalow, basha and tree in the neighborhood.
  And who were the Garrison of Kohima? Men of the Royal West Kents, Mahratta Light Infantry, Rajputs, Burma Regiment, the Assam Regiment, Assam Rifles, and the Nepalese Regiment, together with a few hundreds of convalescent soldiers and civilians. This gallant mixed force of totally 3,500 men stood up to the full fury of the Japanese 31 Division.
  For fourteen days and nights the defenders of Kohima held the bridgehead to India. They knew help was coming for brigades from both 5 Division and 7 Division Arakan veterans, also the British 2 Division had been flown up to Assam, and were advancing on Kohima. The Royal West Kents, having touched-down at Dimapur, were able to force their way in before the last entrance was barred by the investing Japs. But though they realized the role they were expected to fulfill, many of this devoted band did not survive to know this glory they were to receive.
  Smashing their way into the town itself the Japs thought that at last they had overcome the garrison only to experience, once again, the stubborn, unquenchable spirit of British and Indian troops who contested every inch of ground. Fighting was especially murderous in the residential area situated along the steep Kohima Range. But none escaped the Japanese fury. The entire garrison lay always under the dominating drum-fire of the batteries on the ridges above the town. Day and night the fighting continued with intense and mounting ferocity. So costly did the defenders make daylight assault that the Japs abandoned all the sun's hours to the guns and only put in their infantry under the cloak of night.
  But the defense of Kohima was the prelude to a still bloodier struggle - its relief. Lt. Gen. Sir Montague Stopford, KBE, CB, DSO, MC, was rushing his 33 Indian Corps from the far side of India towards the battle. Railway Movements Staff did a man-sized job in those days. "Monty" Stopford's orders were (i) raise the siege of Kohima, (ii) drive southward down the Imphal road to link with 4 Corps. By that time it was reckoned Scoones would have cleared Imphal Plain and started up the road.
  Enter a division new to the Burma front, but one which was to learn, and master all the tricks in record time, Maj. Gen. Grover's British 2 Division. With the arrival of the remainder of 7 Division and the brigades already engaged, Stopford's 33 Corps were now complete. They immediately set about breaking the siege.
  No fiercer battles have been fought on any front than those which followed. The village of Kungpi nearby changed hands five times, the hand-to-hand bayonet clashes taking place by moonlight as well as by day. Kohima's ordeal had entered its third week before the first reinforcements could reach it, crawling in by the only nullah which gave access to the garrison. Later, the relieving forces drove a wedge through the enemy wide enough to evacuate the most seriously wounded.
  Though the red crosses showed up clearly, and left no doubt as to the mission of the ambulances, the enemy kept up a steady stream of fire against them as the drivers picked their way along the broken road.
  A strange scene greeted the liberators as they entered the town. Parachutes festooned every other tree, showing how thoroughly the air supply crews had done their supply job. Indeed, they had even carried in water in a monsoon! The besiegers had cut the garrison's pipeline, and there was no means of conserving the water which poured from the skies. Yet this same rain, blinding the pilots either in storm or as it hung in clouds blanketing the hills, increased the difficulties of the supply-drop. Air transport showered down waterproof sheets to serve as catchments ponds.
  Not a building was left undamaged, most were mere rubble or ashes. The dead lay unburied. Little squads of grimy and bearded riflemen stared blankly at the relieving troops; many were too dazed to realize that they were saved, and too tired to believe their sleep-starved eyes.
  The battle was far from finished. The Japs were still in strength enough to launch a last furious all-out effort to capture the town. A final avalanche of shells and mortar bombs rained upon the ruins and behind it came the Jap infantry, resolutely seeking death and not being denied it.
  The bungalow of District Commissioner Charles Pawsey (he was one of the heroes of the siege) was only one of the most famous battlefields. The lines of his tennis court separated the fighting groups. These lines could still be traced after many days of slaughter. A Lee tank was winched up a gradient of one in three to blast a chain of deeply-dug Jap bunkers. It did the job, but its burnt-out hulk lies at the front of the far slope as a sign of the price its crew paid.
  Jail Hill, the central position of the Jap front, was linked with covering fire to both GPT Ridge and DIS Ridge on either side. Four days after the first attempt to take the principal enemy strong point failed it was stormed again by a battalion of the Queen's Royal Regiment who, though under fire frontally, rearward, and in the flank, dug-in, held on and again attacked. Jap artillery checked them, ranged on them all night. A battalion of 1 Gurkhas came up in support and again our troops went into the attack. The Japs still stayed, and a third day and night of bloody fighting followed before the bunker positions were captured.
  On GPT Ridge, in eternal garrison, lie the dead of the Royal Norfolks. They seized the place, 5,000 feet high, with bayonet and grenade assault. In the battle for Hospital Hill one platoon of the Royal West Kents was reduced to four men, all wounded. We cannot here name the individual heroes . . . but these places where they fought and fell, Jail Hill, Hospital Hill, Garrison Hill, Naga Village, Treasury Ridge, Gun Spur, Aradura Spur, will be remembered whenever men speak of valor.
  While this costly stand-up battle was raging round Kohima, equally energetic action was going forward on the flanks. To guard against an enveloping movement from the Naga Hills and to threaten the Japs' own Line of Communications the British 23 Infantry Brigade under Brigadier Perowne had been sent out to comb the surrounding land, which has since been described as the wildest and most trackless in the Himalayas, which means in the entire world. Perowne's brigade had been organized in Long Range penetration columns for just such work, and now they performed it to some purpose. Our favorite news broadcaster, Tokyo Rose, was turned on to explain to hungry Jap infantrymen at Kohima that a full British "mountain division" was operating across their Ukhrul-Imphal Line of Communication.
  The brigade were themselves supplied by the unfailing Air. They collected their rations in jungle clearings, sometimes fighting it out with the enemy for possession. They climbed cliffs, cut corridor ledges along precipices, bridged chasms by single logs, hauled their pack-animals belly deep through mud, dived into flooded rivers to retrieve precious stores swept from the mules' packs. With ambush, night march, and the Chindit version of the Indian rope trick

Air Marshal W. A. Coryton, CB, MVO, DFC Commander, 3rd Tactical Air Force, South East Asia Command (succeeded Air Marshal Baldwin) Maj. General Howard C. Davidson Commanding General U.S. 10th Air Force Formerly Commander, Strategic Air Force

they foxed the Japs, and took from them a ten-to-one toll in casualties. One column, with 80 lb. packs on their backs, scaled an 8,000-foot peak. Perowne's brigade repeated at close quarters, behind the Jap front, the equally solid destruction wrought by Lentaigne's troops further along the enemy's main Line of Communications.
  All of the enemy's efforts to regain Kohima had now been smashed, though the roads leading southward from it remained under his fire for several more days. With the exception of the enemy strongpoints still holding out in Naga Village to the left of the road and on Aradura Hill to the right the last Jap was forked out of elaborate network of bunkers on Kohima Ridge on 14 May, thus bringing to an end a 40-day-and-night, non-stop slogging match which cost the enemy 4,000 dead. It took another six weeks of heavy fighting by Punjab and Gurkha troops to clear the enemy completely. Our own losses were not light, and included a high proportion of officers. An officer who fought in the slaughter of Hill 60 in Flanders, 1914-18, said the Battle of Kohima was more terrible.
  Down in Imphal Plain 4 Corps had also completed their task. The flood of fire which they had showered on the invaders once they left the cover of the foothills had been so shattering that they quickly pulled back and entrenched themselves in hillside bunkers. Dive bombers, with Allied artillery and tanks beat a ceaseless triple tattoo on these positions until the infantry closed in for the kill. The word is true, for by the end of May not one Japanese soldier remained above ground in all the 700 square miles of the Plain. The crisis of the Battle of the Central Front was past - for us. For the enemy it was beginning.
  The break-out from Kohima was impressive. Armor and infantry advanced under the smoke and fire screen of guns and mortars, dive-bombers and fighters. One Jap target near Kohima received one thousand rounds at close range. Infantry rushed the position, to find the Jap defenders either dead, fled or dazed with the hellish battering. From the high ground camouflaged medium artillery piled on their weight to the flail of fire which beat out the path down which 33 Corps were marching to keep their date with 4 Corps. As Stopford swept down from Kohima, Scoones finally bust wide open the Jap "encirclement" at Imphal and started northward up the road.
  The enemy was now everywhere on the defensive. His greatly reduced army were strewn along the Imphal Road, though their grip at either end of it was being broken. What would happen next? A less resolute commander than Slim might have hastened to appease the public criticism (that the Japanese still occupied Indian soil) by chasing them away as fast as possible. Slim had a more thorough purpose. It was to destroy these crack Japanese divisions so that they, at any rate, would never again menace India.
  The annihilating operation was based upon a plan agreed between the two Corps Commanders. Neither had overlooked the importance of Ukhrul, the Japs great mountain base on the west side of the Chindwin. Already, indeed, Perowne's columns were moving upon Ukhrul's Line of Communication in a wide hook. But before the second great bite at the enemy could be taken the first had to be completed. At noon, 22 June, the jaws of the Fourteenth Army snapped together on the Imphal-Kohima Road when leading echelons of both Corps met at Milestone 109, a few miles north of Imphal.
  From here the two Corps Commanders set the second operation in motion. Brigades of 7 Division drove eastwards to Ukhrul, while 20 Division units (which came under the command of General Stopford for this movement) pressed on north-eastward along the Imphal-Ukhrul axis. Perowne's columns had already closed in from north, east and south. Ukhrul's fate was sealed. The success of the annihilation plan may be gauged by the somber record which Ukhrul holds today as the biggest burial ground for Japs in the length and breadth of Manipur.
  The forces which carried out these tasks, besides Perowne's columns, were regular brigades. As usual the infantry rose to the occasion. So did the gunners.
  The artillery units which took part were ordinary Indian Mountain regiments. Like the tanks the mountain guns proved a very great success. Their mule train of 460 animals carried the 3.7 in. guns and ammunition over six mountain ranges averaging 7,000 feet high, and forded at least three sizeable rivers. The Japs were astonished to receive 20-pound shells from that height.
  Here were further famous marches. Often the gradients were so steep that steps had to be cut for the mules, loaded with two hundredweight apiece. The going was the harder because in the morning the train would be climbing thousands of feet into the clouds and in the afternoon dropping down to river level. Eight miles a day in such country was a hard march.
  By mid-July the Ukhrul area was cleared. The Allied forces continued the pursuit southwards, adding considerably to the mounting Jap casualties and also collecting a rich haul of booty.
  As British forces pressed eastwards beyond Ukhrul to the Chindwin main activity shifted to the Palel front. Here 20 Division later relieved by 23 Division, were holding mountain positions, fighting most of their time in monsoon weather which blanketed the firing line like a Scotch mist. But towards the end of the month 23 Division, supported by units of 2 Division, developed a major offensive which steadily drove the enemy beyond Tamu, and down towards the River Chindwin which the invaders had crossed with such bounding hopes four months before.
  The third phase of the counter-offensive was meanwhile being fought out at Bishenpur. The Japanese High Command regarded this sector as one of the most vital on the entire front and directed there some of their most experienced formations to the task of breaking through at all costs. For many days and nights bloody battles raged with no quarter on either side. For here 17 Division were fighting once more their ancient enemies, the Japanese 33 Division. In this fighting, British and Gurkha troops of 17 Division gained three VC's.
  But now the British had assembled a pack of artillery more massive than any other so far seen in the entire campaign. Main target was the village of Ningthoutong Kha Khunog where the Japs were strongly established. The barrage stripped every leaf from the trees, chopped and scarred the timber until the wooded heights resembled the classic pictures of the grey Flanders Plain in 1918 with their mournful and mutilated stumps.
  Still the unrelenting blows fell upon the enemy. The Tiddim Road was a corridor of death. Vengeances and Mitchells strewed the length of it with blasted and burnt-out Jap convoys. But even this perilous pathway home was now to be denied them. Marching across 100 miles of trackless mountains in torrential rain the Lushai Brigade had reached the Tiddim Road well to the rear of the Jap 33 Division. This brigade now played havoc with the retreating Jap forces, depriving them of their only serviceable road and compelling them to forsake their transport and heavy weapons. Forced into the pitiless hills, hundreds died from exhaustion and starvation.
  The condition of the enemy everywhere deteriorated. Our aircraft and LRP raiding columns had so disrupted his Line of Communication that for whole regiments supply simply ceased. The Jap, that legendary soldier who was supposed to live on a handful of rice, from a little ration bag hung around his neck, began in fact to have no other ration. The effect was appalling, for even Japs cannot live by rice alone. Fourteenth Army doctors reported that many who fell alive into our hands - desertion and surrender multiplied their number tenfold - were suffering from acute beri beri. Their body cells had lost all power to absorb water. Their skins, stretched taut as drums across the bone framework, were covered with dermatitis sores. They crawled, dying, to the feet of the giant marble and gold leaf idols in the Buddhist temples to end life. And, ironically, many died of starvation with full ration bags of rice around their emaciated necks - rice which they could not eat.
  The last of the invaders staggered out of India on 25 August. Fourteenth Army advanced columns reached the Chindwin River on a broad front a few days later. Sittaung and Thaungdat were occupied on 4 September. Less than seven months after 17 Division withdrew from Tiddum troops of 5 Division, supported by 3 carabineers overcame strong enemy resistance at Chocolate Staircase and swept on to the approaches to Tiddim itself.
  In the entire Burma Campaign, 1944, the Fourteenth Army and Eastern Air Command had annihilated five Japanese divisions and inflicted fearful losses on others, besides taking more prisoners than in any previous campaign. Every task set to the Supreme Commander had been fulfilled, and ahead of schedule. India was safe, the enemy power in Burma shattered. From the air he had been banished absolutely, and at sea the Eastern Fleet rode the Indian Ocean unchallenged.
  In the House of Commons the Prime Minister paid generous public tribute to the fighting troops, the King honored them in the awards conferred upon their leaders in the field, and the Supreme Allied Council raised new and greater targets before the Command.

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How Admin Troops Backed-up the Fighting Men
  "I have soldiered for more than 42 years," wrote Field-Marshal Lord Wavell, "and the more I have seen of war the more I realize how it all depends on administration and transportation (what our American allies call logistics).
  The operational area of the Fourteenth Army was about 100,000 square miles. or rather larger than Great Britain. The terrain and its roads and railway have been described. Half a million men lived and fought in this jungle; how they even lived there is one of the miracles of this war. Every day Fourteenth's famous Major-General of Administration "Alf" Snelling, had to feed 500,000 soldiers plus 300,000 coolies. He planned to have his own farms, 18,000 acres of them. sited well forward. One in Manipur was. so well forward that the Japs overran it. On these farms Snelling grew vegetables, ducks, pigs, and goats. He setup, a factory aiming to salt 20,000 lbs. of fish per day, and mobile breweries to slake the strengthened thirst. It was still necessary to bring-in by rail, road, air or water 1,800 tons of food each day. The different tastes, habits and religious customs of British, Indians, Gurkhas, Africans made the ration problem more complex.
  Snelling and his 14th Army drivers and REME and IEME engineers kept 50,0oo vehicles, moving along; the jungle and mountain roads through dust storm and monsoon mud. A daily Mileage of 77 was maintained by all trucks traveling from railhead to the forward areas during the worst weather month of the year. They averaged 13,942 miles per accident though you would never believe it as you raced around those ledge-roads above thousand-foot precipices.
  Air was a great ally of administration as it had been of operations. During the great battles of Imphal-Kohima 30,000 non-combat troops were flown out of Imphal and 30,000 casualties. Two-and-a half divisions with all their equipment were flown in, and almost as many more replacements, as well as 50.000 tons of supply. During the siege of Imphal, of course, every pound of man or material that went in to 4th Corps was airborne. though triumph crowned this remarkable development of air supply it must not be supposed that it solved the entire logistical problem. It created its own train of problems, for aircraft must be fueled, maintained and serviced.
  We had mules from India, Africa and USA. We had little South African donkeys (they had huge heads, bigger than horses and all their bridles had to be enlarged). We had elephants, though unlike the Japs we rarely used them for transport, chiefly employing them on bridging. An elephant can lay a plank with the precision of a Carpenter. He can also lay off work with the same precision. There were elephants, who would "down trunks" dead at 5 p.m., winter or summer, so that the fading light had nothing to do with their decision.
  The hospital problem was staggering. Wounded men were borne, sometime ten miles, by stretcher through jungle, over mountains, across torrents. They were carried out to forward hospitals by mule, jeep, sampan, barge, hospital ship, truck, train and aircraft. Sunderland flying boats took Chindit casualties from Indawgi Lake, in the heart of Jap-held Burma, to the Brahmaputra River. No. single accident marred those wonderful air services. In the end our forward hospitals were all re-grouped near airfields.
  The wounded had to be made fit enough to stand these arduous journeys. Field ambulances treated desperate cases close behind the forward line, and mobile surgical units operated under fire. At Kohima, a hospital unit crawled through the Jap front to succor the beleaguered wounded of the little British-Indian garrison. The miracles of blood transfusion, penicillin treatment, neuro-surgical operations belong to a fuller story. Here we record that all along this terrible, merciless front the doctors, dentists, nurses, staffs and "ladies in blue" (Indian Hospital Welfare Workers) earned the admiration of all ranks and the undying gratitude of the wounded whom they served.
  But if we had 27,000 wounded at the time of the great battles, we had ten times that number of malaria and dysentery cases during the campaign. The curse was cut in half by building up "malaria-discipline" by draining the malarial swamps, and by prompt medical treatment.
  So a great army overcame the vast spaces, the dark dense treacherous jungle that filled that space; the evil beasts, and insects; and snakes, that dwelt therein, and carried death to men; the leeches, lice, and ticks; the sun's high blaze, and the night's dew, and its lonely terror; rain, mist, and mud. They conquered all, and the foulest of all - the Japanese enemy.
  Yes, it was an Army, this Fourteenth, none more devoted or indomitable in all the chronicle of wars.

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Convoy covered by 'umbrella' of kite balloons.

ADMIRAL SIR BRUCE FRASER C-in-C, Eastern Fleet

Divine Service aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth

The Eastern Fleet Rules the Indian Ocean
  The Allied Eastern Fleet rules over five and a half million square miles of ocean.
  There are no lines of defense in this dominion, and no strongpoints other than the bases linked by the great sea roads. Once at sea, a fleet, or a convoy, or a single ship must be self-supporting until its journey's end. Today this vast area is held as securely as if it were occupied by an army on the ground. Two and a half years ago this was not so.
  Two and a half years ago the Japs came riding up out of the China Seas, mighty with victory. They had sunk the battleship Repulse and Prince of Wales, taken Singapore, Java and Sumatra, and occupied the Andamans and Nicobars as forward air bases. From here they struck at Columbo and Trincomalee, sinking the aircraft carrier Hermes and the cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire. It was considered wise to move the weakened Eastern Fleet to East Africa to prepare for the next phase. Even there no dock facilities comparable with Singapore existed. Madagascar was still in the hands of the Vichy French, prisoners of the enemy. There was a grave danger that they might let the Japanese enemy in, as they had done in Indo-China.
  Why did the Japs not advance, as they expected, at least on Ceylon and Southern India? Had they reached the perimeter of their conquest plan? Did they hesitate as Hitler did after Dunkirk, and losing impetus, lose urge? Did they see the danger signal from the East in the developing might of U.S.A., and turn to deal with this threat to their rear? We know only that they did not come.
  They attacked the Ceylon ports. Indeed, by air but their plan of surprise was forestalled and they found the fighters already in the sky awaiting them. Our pilots exacted very heavy toll for the intrusion. The situation was further stabilized in the Indian Ocean when a brilliant Combined Operation seized Madagascar, substantially securing the shipping route to the Middle East and making possible the coming victories from El Alamein to Tunis.
  But the battle of supply extended far beyond the confines of the Middle Eastern campaign, and even of that threatened invasion which still hung as a fearful thundercloud along the Burma border. The Army of India was crying out, indeed, for modern armaments of every kind. So, too, and even more was China, still fighting our common enemy, Japan, after five years and still almost with bare hands. But now mighty Russia bended before the Teutonic fury though she never broke. The tide of the barbarians rolled to the foothills of the Caucasus, and beat upon Stalingrad. Russian valor and martial skill won that day, but Britain, too, may take pride that her factories cast so many of the victors' weapons and her faithful fleets carried them to Russia through the icy Arctic and the sweltering Persian Gulf. The heaviest part of this task was borne by the Merchant Navy, but each ship required escort through Indian Ocean waters, now infested with Jap and German U-Boats. To the RN and RAF fell the duty of seeing the ships safe.
  Even now there are U-Boats in the Indian Ocean, but the same technique of air-sea co-operation which gained the Battle of the Atlantic is winning the Battle of the Indian Ocean. With the threat to the Middle East and Russia long past, and with the war in Europe marching inexorably to its close, the entire massive production strength of the Allies can be switched to South East Asia. Meanwhile, the carcasses of U-Boats are piling up on the ocean bed of these waters.
  The Japanese did not escape the liabilities of their far flung conquests. For them, too, supply became the overriding military problem - without the corresponding capacity of their opponents to meet it. In Burma this defect was, by 1944, decisive.
  In Burma, under pressure by South East Asia Command, the Japs maintained a formidable army of 10 to 12 large divisions. To keep it supplied with arms and ammunition and transport strained the capacity of the Bangkok-Rangoon railway to its limits, and beyond. The Japs had the best of the road lay-out in Burma, but even so it was inadequate, for road transport develops its own appetites. Petrol and machine parts must also be brought in. Every use, therefore, had to be made of sea routes. Since Pearl Harbor the Americans had sunk 750 cargo ships, so that by 1944 the Japs had fallen back on ferry boats, coasters, junks and sampans. Lumped together in grotesque partnership these motley armadas crept down the China coasts and through the Malacca Straits towards Burma. USN and RN submarines picked them off as they came, sometimes at the harbor gates where they had loaded.
  Above Rangoon the situation was no better. As the roads became impassable in the monsoon - and the Japs lacked mechanical road repair such as bulldozers - transport was driven back to the sea. But now it was within range both of British submarines and shore-based aircraft. From Ceylon, Sunderlands, Catalinas and Liberators ceaselessly patrolled the Bay of Bengal and far southward while bombers while fighters scoured the coasts and creeks. If now and again a ship or a junk slipped through, unloading its cargo into the smaller craft which creep under the cover of night up the Arakan shores into the rivers, another danger lurked. Operating from secret bases, light coastal forces of the Royal Navy and the Royal Indian Navy swooped on the unarmed or lightly armed craft and sank them under the nose of the Jap shore positions.
  The enemy could not replace his 700-odd sunken ocean-going cargo ships but he might hope to keep a wooden coastal fleet in being. The Andaman islands were ordered to produce the vessels. Royal Navy carrier-borne

New navy 'Seafire' flying over HMS Indomitable (left), Sabang after raid by aircraft of the Eastern Fleet (right).

planes attacked the sawmills at Port Blair and left them in blazing chaos.
  While all these troubles of supply were piling up, the Eastern Fleet which had long been missing in the Indian Ocean, moved over to the offensive. From a fleet in being it became a fleet in action. In April a powerful task force of battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines, accompanied by both British and American aircraft carriers, bombarded and bombed the Jap harbor base at Sabang. Dockyards, hangars, powerhouses and workshops were assailed: 30 aircraft were destroyed on the ground. In May another composite fleet struck Sourabaya, main Jap base on Java, steaming 1500 miles into waters nominally commanded by the Japanese Navy. The bombing of the dry dock broke up the enemy ship repair program, the demolition of the engineering works, the sinking of 35,000 tons of shipping, and the blasting of his oil supply cut short all hopes of an improved sea supply for the Burma armies. Then Sabang caught it again, the Eastern Fleet sailing straight into the harbor and smashing up its installations with 15-inch shells. When the shore batteries replied they were immediately silenced by a saucy little force of a Dutch cruiser and three British destroyers which steamed in to fire at point blank range.
  The blows continued. The Indaroeng Cement Works near Padang in Sumatra which were supplying cement for pillboxes and tank traps against the threatened Allied invasion, were laid in ruins by the Eastern Fleet. The railway repair depot at Sigli was smashed. Parallel with this physical destruction of his bases was the psychological destruction of the Jap's boast of invulnerability in the East Indies.
  Northward, things were in no happier shape for the enemy. His troops in the Burma jungle, short of supplies, and faced with armies growing in strength each day, were in retreat. Eastward, the deterioration was still more rapid as the Americans stepped with 700-league boots across the Pacific islands, marching on the Philippines. A well co-ordinated strategy of air-sea power had given Japan in record time an Empire richer and more extensive than any ever before erected in the world. A more thorough, and infinitely more powerful air-sea combination was now tearing it apart.
  And what of the men of the Eastern Fleet who through the years endured heat and hardship, separation and routine and with little public recognition? It is not possible to single out its commanders and heroes. We can name only its old leader who, in his genial and gallant person for so long reflected the magnificent spirit of the Fleet, Sir James Somerville conformed in every particular to what England expects of her admirals. He saw his little fleet of the gallant old Warspite, four other 'unrejuvenated' battleships ("my old ladies") and a few cruisers grow into a huge armada of modern battleships, aircraft carriers and what Mr. Churchill described to the House of Commons as "an immense fleet train, comprising many vessels, large and medium, fitted as repair ships, recreational ships for personnel, munitions and provision ships, and many modern variants in order that our fleet may have a degree of mobility which for several months together will make them largely independent of the main shore bases."
  To this magnificent Command Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser now succeeds, bearing the laurels of his two years' triumphs with the Home Fleet against the Germans in Arctic waters. He is here to carry the flags of South East Asia Command into Tokyo Bay.

Edited and published for the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia, by FRANK OWEN.  Printed by AMULLYA DHONE BOSE in the office of THE STATESMAN, Calcutta, who provided free facilities as a generous war gift.  Adapted for the Internet by CARL WEIDENBURNER.

Original issue shared by CBI veteran Roger Cook, Past Commander, Tampa Bay Basha, CBIVA

Copyright © 2008 Carl Warren Weidenburner   



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