Source: WWII CAMPAIGNS: India-Burma
  IntroductionBrigadier General, USA Chief of Military History At the beginning of 1945, less than eight months remained before the final surrender of Japan. Those eight months, however, were to see some of the bitterest fighting of the war. Although the final outcome was no longer in doubt, when and how the conflict would end remained unclear. The American naval blockade of Japan, combined with a growing air offensive, was placing a serious strain on Japan's economy. Yet any invasion of the Japanese home islands would most likely be drawn out and extremely costly in lives. There was also the danger that even with the capture of the home islands the war might not end, but continue interminably on the Asian mainland, where large numbers of Japanese troops occupied Korea, Manchuria, and the richest and most populous areas of China. While American forces in the Pacific had been making dramatic progress since early 1942, the Allied effort in the China-Burma-India theater had bogged down in a morass of conflicting national objectives. The hope Americans held in the early stages of the war, that Chinese manpower and bases would play a vital role in the defeat of Japan, was unrealized. Americans sought to achieve great aims on the Asian mainland at small cost, looking to the British in India and the Chinese, with their vast reservoirs of manpower, to carry the main burden of the ground conflict. Neither proved capable of exerting the effort the Americans had hoped. Strategic Setting |
Anticipating the Allied offensive, the Japanese Burma Area Army commander, Lt. Gen. Masakazu Kawabe, struck first. In March 1944 he launched a major offensive into India with his 15th Army of about 100,000 veteran troops, while a newly organized 33d Army attempted to check both Stilwell's advance and that of the Chinese Y Force, which had begun moving forward astride the Burma Road toward the Burmese border. The Japanese attacks initially met with great success, forcing Lt. Gen. William J. Slim to postpone his own plans in a desperate defense of the Indian frontier. However, by July Kawabe's forces were severely overextended and generally exhausted, allowing the Allies to retake the initiative on all fronts.
Slim's offensive now began in earnest, and it continued throughout the rainy season, ultimately resulting in the destruction of the Japanese 15th Army and the reconquest of central Burma. But even before his forces had begun driving east, Stilwell's attack produced results. Spearheading his attack was a recently formed American unit led by Brig. Gen. Frank A. Merrill and known as Merrill's Marauders. Moving in advance of the cautious X Force Chinese divisions, Merrill's Marauders, code-named GALAHAD, had managed to seize their main objective, the airfield at Myitkyina in northern Burma. However, Japanese troops clung to portions of the town itself, and the American troops, their effectiveness worn away by battle casualties, disease, and fatigue, were unable to root them out until August.
By the time Myitkyina in northern Burma was secured and the British advance through central Burma well advanced, Allied success in the Pacific had greatly diminished the importance of both the Burma and the China theaters of operations. The subsequent successful invasion of the Philippines promised a surer and faster route to Japan than through the Asian mainland. Although American hopes for at least a major air campaign against Japan from the Chinese mainland never completely faded, the continued difficulties in supplying such an effort, and the series of Japanese ground offensives in 1944 that overran most of the newly constructed American airfields in central China, made such projections extremely unlikely. In fact, the last U.S. heavy bombers left China in January 1945, eventually ending up on Saipan, about 1,500 miles south of Tokyo, where the major American strategic bombing offensive against the Japanese home islands was being mounted.
Meanwhile, throughout the summer of 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been urging Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to place all of his U.S.-supported armies under the command of General Stilwell. Chiang, not unexpectedly, refused and asked for Stilwell's recall, a request that the president honored. In October 1944, Maj. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer replaced Stilwell as chief of staff to Chiang and commander of American forces in the China theater. At the same time, a separate theater in India and Burma was created with Lt. Gen. Daniel I. Sultan, formerly Stilwell's deputy, as its commanding general. In China the command issue was dropped, and the American strategy became simply one of trying to realize at least something from previous investments without additional commitments. In Burma, however, the Allied counteroffensive continued, despite the greatly diminished strategic importance of this remote subtheater.
Operations |
| Accompanied by press and public relations personnel, engineers, and military police, the first convoy pushed off for China from Ledo on 12 January 1945. After being delayed by fighting en route, the vehicles rolled triumphantly into Kunming on 4 February. The opening of the Ledo-Burma Road, soon to be redesignated the "Stilwell Road" by Chiang Kai-shek, forged the last link in the chain of land communications between Calcutta and Kunming, a distance of more than 2,000 miles. By July, gasoline also would be pumped through a pipeline constructed from Ledo to Kunming, 928 miles away, paralleling the Stilwell Road. Sultan next considered how to deal with the Japanese forces in north central Burma, who were still near enough to disrupt road traffic moving into China, as well as to threaten the flank and rear of British forces now driving into central Burma. Believing that a threat to the Japanese supply line, the old Burma Road which ran from the Chinese border south to Lashio and Mandalay, would result in Japanese withdrawal, Sultan ordered Brig. Gen. John P. Willey, the MARS Task Force commander, into action. He wanted the MARS force, less the 1st Chinese Regiment, which was held in reserve, to move overland around the Japanese defenses and cut the road near the village of Ho-si, about thirty miles south of Wanting. Willey's projected route was suitable for resupply by air, long recognized as the key to success while operating behind enemy lines, but the overall plan had disadvantages. In the objective area, the Burma Road was not easily severed, since it was beyond machine gun range from the ridge paralleling the road on the west and secondary roads existed in the hills to the east, providing the enemy with an alternative line of communication. Nevertheless, Willey's troops executed their part of the operation, reaching the vicinity of the Burma Road on 17 January. While Willey's MARS soldiers took up position, Sultan pushed the battle-hardened Chinese against the Japanese 33d Army's 56th Division, which was holding defensive positions south of Wanting. The Chinese 38th Division moved southeast, astride the old Burma road, while the Chinese 30th Division struck out across country, swinging south and east toward the road about ten miles north of Ho-si. Farther south and west, the Chinese 50th and the British 36th Divisions continued moving south toward the road between Lashio and Mandalay, an area held by the 33d Army's 18th Division. The 56th Division's commander, Lt. Gen. Yuzo Matsuyama, recognized his perilous situation. Obviously the immediate threat came from the north and northwest. But should Sultan's command, which Matsuyama placed at 6 divisions, be seconded by the entire Chinese Expeditionary Force of 14 divisions crossing into Burma from the east, his 20,000 men would be vastly outnumbered. When a large air drop of supplies came in for the MARS Force, the Japanese mistakenly thought that an airborne force was being landed. Convinced that he would soon be cut off, Matsuyama informed the 33d Army's commander, Lt. Gen. Masaki Honda, that his situation was critical and that he planned to destroy the bulk of his ammunition and abandon his present positions. |
| Honda, however, viewed Matsuyama's situation differently. He instructed Matsuyama to defend in place until casualties and ammunition could be evacuated. Then he sent two motor transport companies, about forty vehicles loaded with gasoline, to join the 56th Division and assist in its final withdrawal. Encouraged by additional supplies, Matsuyama evacuated most of his casualties and several tons of ammunition before parts of the Chinese 30th and 38th Divisions blocked passage on the road north of Ho-si on 29 January. That night a sudden and violent banzai charge against the roadblock quickly overran the Chinese position. When the Chinese made no move to reestablish the block, Matsuyama began a retreat after dark on the 31st, almost in front of Chinese and American forces massed west of that section of the Burma Road. The move was both delicate and risky, but Japanese troops successfully completed their withdrawal by 4 February. At this juncture, Allied inaction was puzzling. Willey had positioned his two largely untried American regiments near Ho-si. There, rather than occupy a blocking position squarely astride the Burma Road and risk taking heavy casualties, he limited his effort mainly to interdicting the road with artillery and mortar fire. His infantrymen had dug in along a ridge about a mile and a half west of the road, with the 124th Cavalry Regiment to the north and the 475th Infantry Regiment to the south. Since arriving in the area on 17 January, they had experienced several small engagements with enemy forces and had managed to disrupt traffic on the road to their east, although the Japanese fuel convoy had managed to reach Matsuyama's troops to the north. In fact, Willey's men remained unaware that Japanese forces were withdrawing from the area using the trails and roads east of the main highway. On 2 February, the 124th Cavalry attacked what was thought to be a Japanese battalion entrenched on the high ground near the village of Hpa-pen, about a mile and a quarter northeast of the regiment's foxholes. Willey believed that the capture of this position would make it easier for the 124th to stop Japanese traffic along the Burma Road. Unknown to the Americans, however, the Japanese eastern bypass around the Burma Road in front of the position of the MARS Task Force began near Hpa-pen and was strongly defended. |
| After a twenty minute artillery and mortar preparation, the 2d Squadron of the 124th Cavalry moved out at 0620 toward Hpa-pen with Troops E and F abreast and Troop G in the rear. As Troop F moved up a rough trail, its commander, 1st Lt. Jack L. Knight, was well out in front. When two Japanese suddenly appeared, Knight killed them both. Crossing the hill to the reverse slope, the troop commander found a cluster of Japanese emplacements. Calling up his men, he led them in a successful grenade attack on the enemy fortifications. When the Japanese, who seemed to have been surprised, steadied and began inflicting heavy casualties, Knight kept his attack organized and under control. Although half blinded by grenade fragments, bleeding heavily, and having seen his brother Curtis shot down while running to his aid, Knight fought on until he was killed leading an attack on a Japanese emplacement. For this action, Lieutenant Knight received the Medal of Honor posthumously, the only Medal of Honor awarded in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II. With resistance heavy on Troop F's front and with Troop E fighting off strong counterattacks, the squadron commander committed his reserve, Troop G. in midmorning. Advancing through the first line of Japanese bunkers, the reserve troop momentarily paused to direct artillery fire on a second enemy defense line to its front and then charged forward to carry the final Japanese position on the hill. When the fighting ended, the Americans held the high ground close to the road and reported killing over two hundred of the enemy. The 2d Squadron also had incurred many losses. Twenty-two of its soldiers were dead and another eighty-eight had to be evacuated on litters because of wounds. The next day, the 475th Infantry, still positioned south of the cavalry regiment, attacked a Japanese position on a ridge near the village of Loi-kang about a mile west of the Burma Road. While the 2d Battalion moved north to fix the Japanese in position, the 1st Battalion, preceded by an extensive artillery and mortar barrage, struck from the south, eventually clearing that portion of the ridge of all enemy defenders at a cost of 2 killed and 15 wounded. But by this time, most of the Japanese had escaped to the south. During the next few days, patrol actions and artillery exchanges with the Japanese rear guard and stragglers grew fewer. By 10 February when Chinese forces arrived in the MARS area in strength, seeking to regain contact with the Japanese 56th Division, the enemy had long since passed through and was fifty miles away regrouping at Lashio. To the west, General Sultan's 50th Chinese and 36th British Divisions continued moving south toward the Burma Road between Lashio and Mandalay. In early February, the British came up against strong resistance from the Japanese 33d Army's 18th Division. Fighting continued until 25 February when the 18th Division was ordered to move south to reinforce the 15th Army defending against General Slim's Fourteenth Army, which was closing in on Mandalay to the west. By the end of March, both the 50th Chinese and 36th British Divisions had reached the Burma Road east of Mandalay, where the 36th Division came under Slim's Fourteenth Army control. While Sultan was clearing the Japanese from the northern stretch of the Burma Road, Slim's Fourteenth Army had continued to push the Japanese back in the center. The British 33 Corps advanced southeastward until meeting stubborn resistance north of Mandalay in late January. Meanwhile, the British 4 Corps had slipped south undetected, and by 19 February had established a bridgehead on the Irrawaddy River about one hundred miles south of Mandalay. From there an armored column, completely supplied by air, smashed its way sixty miles eastward to capture the critical town of Meiktila and its cluster of eight airstrips. The drive to the east continued another twenty miles to the town of Thazi on the Mandalay-Rangoon railway, thereby cutting off some 30,000 Japanese troops to the north from their supplies and their best route of escape. The fighting around Meiktila and Thazi grew more severe as the Japanese Burma Area Army shifted troops from the Mandalay front southward and also rushed up reinforcements from southern Burma in an effort to reopen the route. With the battered Japanese 15th Army fully occupied with the threat to its rear, the British 33 Corps resumed its advance on Mandalay, which it reached late on 7 March. However, because of stubborn Japanese resistance, the city was not cleared for two more weeks. The 33 Corps then continued its push southward until encountering enemy resistance from the hastily summoned Japanese 33d Army, about eighteen miles north of Thazi. Despite substantial losses, the enemy was able to hold open an escape gap until the end of March. Even so, a considerable number of Japanese troops were trapped when the corridor finally closed. By the time that Mandalay fell, combat in Burma for the MARS Task Force, the Chinese Expeditionary Army, and the X Force had come to an end. In March the Chinese in Burma began to return to their homeland, and the MARS Task Force soon followed. General Wedemeyer, who had replaced Stilwell as the American commander in China, hoped to rebuild the Chinese armies using the Chinese divisions from Burma as a nucleus and the Marsmen as trainers and advisers. Using the revitalized Chinese units, he planned to fight his way to the coast by the fall of 1945. As for General Sultan in Burma, with all his regular combat units gone by June, he became concerned primarily with logistical support for the China theater. His only ground combat force available to continue the fight against the Japanese was Detachment 101 of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Formed in 1942, Detachment 101 supported Stilwell's, and later Sultan's, Northern Combat Area Command as an intelligence-gathering unit and as an organization for assisting in the return of downed Allied airmen to friendly lines. By the spring of 1945, however, Detachment 101, commanded by Col. William R. Peers, had organized a large partisan force behind enemy lines in northern and central Burma. Reaching a peak strength of over 10,000 native Burmese Kachin tribesmen and American volunteers, the detachment operated as mobile battalions screening the advance of British and Chinese forces moving on Mandalay and Lashio. Completely supported by air, they employed mainly hit-and-run tactics and avoided pitched battles against better trained troops. |
| Detachment 101 operations were scheduled to end after regular troops secured the Burma Road south of Lashio. Although the Kachin guerrillas, many hundreds of miles from home, were told that their work would be finished then and that they could return to their homes, when the time actually arrived, the situation had changed. The movement to China of the Chinese and American ground forces in Burma left the guerrillas as the only effective fighting force available to Sultan. Fifteen hundred Kachins volunteered to remain, and Peers was able to recruit an additional 1,500 Karen, Ghurka, Shan, Chinese, and a few Burmese volunteers. Dividing his 3,000-man partisan force into four battalions, he assigned operational sectors that extended from the Burma Road into southeast Burma for roughly 100 miles. Starting in April and extending into July 1945, Peers' guerrilla units drove about 10,000 Japanese troops from this region. During that period all of the battalions saw heavy fighting. While most of the Japanese encountered were tired and poorly equipped, they habitually fought to the last man when pinned down. The partisans killed over 1,200 of the enemy at a cost of 300 of their own. Overall, during Detachment 101's tenure in Burma, its forces eliminated over 5,000 Japanese troops, assisted in rescuing over 300 downed Allied airmen, derailed 9 trains, blew up 56 bridges, destroyed 252 vehicles, and eliminated numerous dumps and other enemy installations. For Detachment 101's superb performance, it was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation. However, it played only a minor supporting role in the final, but decisive battle between the British Fourteenth Army and the bulk of the Japanese Burma Area Army. |
The battle for Burma entered its final stage on 9 April 1945 when the Fourteenth Army launched a two-pronged drive south down the Irrawaddy River, and the Sittang River, which flows parallel to the Irrawaddy about one hundred miles to the east. Led by armored columns that punched through thin crusts of resistance and bypassed more strongly held areas, the swift advance was convincing evidence that the enemy had spent himself in the Mandalay-Meiktila area and was incapable of defending lower Burma.
Allied tanks, trucks, and guns poured south along the highway to Rangoon, covering 124 miles in a week. In the valley of the Irrawaddy River, strong resistance near Prome, about 150 miles north of Rangoon, temporarily delayed the advance as the enemy battled desperately to hold open an escape route for its troops west of the river. The evacuation of Rangoon had already begun, and by the end of April, no appreciable enemy force remained in that city.
On 2 May, within a few hours after paratroopers had been dropped, amphibious forces of the British 15 Corps landed at the mouth of the Rangoon River. Meeting only a small enemy rear guard, the troops proceeded up the river to Rangoon on the following day. On 6 May, the 15 Corps linked up with advance elements of the
Fourteenth Army twenty miles north of the city. Heavy rains, precursors of the monsoon, flooded streams and retarded the remainder of General Slim's forces advancing down the Irrawaddy corridor. Nearly another two weeks passed before the bulk of the Fourteenth Army could join with the 15 Corps, northwest of Rangoon.
By then, Japanese forces in Burma were split into three groups: one division from the 28th Army still remained west of the Irrawaddy; the rest of the 28th Army was in the hills between the Irrawaddy and Sittang Rivers; and a third group, composed of remnants of the 15th and 33d Armies, was generally east of the Sittang River. The remaining months of the war saw repeated and violent attacks by the Japanese in the two pockets west of the Sittang to open an escape route to the east. The arrival of the monsoon in Burma and the desperate attempts of the surrounded Japanese forces to break through the British cordons prevented any large-scale British advance east of the Sittang. By 18 June, the Japanese pockets had shrunk, and by August, the Japanese 28th Army had ceased to exist. During the fifteen-month period of the Japanese Imphal campaign and the Allied counteroffensive, 97,000 enemy dead had been counted. The fighting on the main front in Burma ended when Japan surrendered to the Allies in August. But for several weeks afterward, isolated groups of the enemy, unaware of the cessation of hostilities, continued to give battle. The formal capitulation of all Japanese armed forces in southeastern Asia, including those in Burma, finally took place at Singapore on 12 September 1945.
Analysis |
Regardless, within the confines of its mission and the resources available, the Stilwell Road made a valuable contribution to the war in northern and central Burma and materially improved intra-China transportation. Yet in the end, the extremely rugged terrain of both Burma and southern China made airlift more significant than land transportation. For example, during the Japanese three-month siege of Imphal in early 1944, British troops and about 40,000 noncombatants had been supplied entirely by air. Planes had brought in 61,000 reinforcements and 28,000 tons of supplies. This history-making airlift operation, much larger than any undertaken before, provided the formula for future success in Burma. Other major aviation accomplishments included delivering over 30,000 troops and 5,000 animals to Stilwell's forces in central Burma, far behind enemy lines, and maintaining them for several months; and transporting over 75,000 Allied troops, including two fresh Chinese divisions from the Y Force in China, and almost 100,000 tons of supplies, into the Allied-held airfield near Myitkyina over a five month period. Finally in the spring of 1945, aerial resupply played a decisive role in General Slim's British Fourteenth Army attack on Meikila and its follow-on advance toward Rangoon.
Whether using the Hump air corridor to supply Chennault's Fourteenth Air Force in China, or flying vital supplies to OSS Detachment 101's scattered guerrilla units, air supply was critical to the Allied campaign in Burma. Such means were the only way that logistical problems caused by the difficult terrain and the lack of good roads and navigable waterways could be solved. Without a reliable air supply system, Allied operations in Burma could not have been successful.
Despite the classic victory won by the British Fourteenth Army and the epic construction of the Stilwell Road in Burma, the successful campaigns by MacArthur and Nimitz in the Pacific relegated Burma, the link between India and China, to a position of little strategic importance for completing the triumph over Japan. Like the Aleutian Islands in the north Pacific during the early years of the war, the CBI theater initially appeared to offer a possible shortcut to Tokyo. But, like the Aleutians, the Asian mainland became a road to nowhere, and the truly decisive battles of the war against Japan were fought elsewhere. However, the resources that Japan invested in the Asian mainland, from the heavily guarded border with the Soviet Union in Manchuria to the remote frontiers of the Indian subcontinent in the far south, fully justified the relatively small American and British military resources applied here and the burden which thereby fell on a relatively few charged with keeping their foes as occupied as possible in this inhospitable region of the world.
Further ReadingsCMH Pub 72-37
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