The Daring Dozen

by Gavin Mortimer

  Not long after the appointment of Merrill, the unit was ordered to move to Ledo in Assam by 7 February.* Hunter grumbled that the unit was ‘not completely equipped or, by any stretch of the imagination, fully organized and trained’.

  To compensate for the curtailment of their training in India, Hunter hatched a plan that he executed once Galahad reached their staging area of Margherita in Assam. Ahead of them lay a 150-mile route along the Ledo Road to Shingbwiyang, the airstrip and supply base from where they would embark on their first Long Range Penetration. The route, as Ogburn remembered, was ‘a wilderness of mountains rising from near sea level to two 4,000ft passes’. Hunter had the three battalions of Galahad march the route in ten days. ‘More than any other single part of Galahad’s training, the hike down the Ledo Road, in my professional judgment, paid the highest dividends,’16 Hunter later wrote.

  Once they had arrived at Shingbwiyang the men and the mules were hardened and the few weaklings had been rooted out and returned to their unit. Fifteen miles south of Shingbwiyang was Ningam Sakan, where General Stilwell had established his HQ following the successful early advance of his Chinese force into Burma. Hunter and Merrill marched Galahad through Ningam Sakan the day after reaching Shingbwiyang in the expectation of being warmly greeted by their commander, but ‘the occasion proved, unfortunately, to be one of those on which Stilwell missed the chance of an inexpensive gesture that could have repaid him in days to come’.

  Stilwell did appear a couple of days later, however, to issue instructions about the forthcoming operation. Stretched out to the south was the Hukawng Valley in which were an estimated 7,000 Japanese troops of the 18th Division; Stilwell ordered Galahad to penetrate into the valley and outflank and destroy the enemy in order to leave the way open for the continued advance south of his two Chinese divisions. Outnumbered by more than two to one, the American troops also had inferior firepower, relying on light assault weapons such as bazookas and 60mm mortars.

  Hunter and Merrill led the 2,750-strong Galahad out of their camp in the early hours of 24 February. Ahead of them lay an eight-day march east to allow them to then wheel around and attack the right flank of the Japanese defenders. A reconnaissance platoon was despatched first from each of the three battalions, and when they rendezvoused with the main force a few days later Hunter exuded ‘paternal pride’ as he listened to their reports on the dispositions of the Japanese forces.

  Galahad received supply drops as they marched east, the most prized item being the 3,000-calorie one-a-day K-ration, which while better than the Chindits rations was 1,000 calories short of what Hunter had requested the previous September. For the first fortnight Galahad saw hardly any trace of the enemy but reconnaissance patrols, aided by Kachin scouts, reported that a large force of Japanese was stationed at Walawbum, a village that lay on the Kamaing Road, down which Stilwell’s army intended to advance. In the approach to Walawbum in early March there were a number of brief skirmishes. In one such incident Hunter and a small unit encountered a body of Japanese soldiers as they made for a rendezvous point with the 1st Provisional Tank Group (which was unable to penetrate the jungle). In the ensuing firefight Hunter and his men accounted for two of the enemy and caused the others to flee.

  The main fight for Walawbum began on 5 March with the 2nd Battalion taking the brunt of the six Japanese infantry attacks, interspersed with artillery bombardments, during a 36-hour period. Nonetheless, the battalion suffered just one fatality and five wounded while killing more than 100 of the enemy. The Japanese withdrew and Merrill assumed the fight for Walawbum was finished, but the enemy came again a few hours later, this time launching themselves against the positions held by the 3rd Battalion a little to the south-west of the 2nd Battalion. Ogburn recalled how the Japanese soldiers ‘spurred on by their cries of Susume! Susume! [Advance!] and Banzai! by their leaders, had come fanning out over the grassy clearing on the other side in successive waves’.17

  Yet despite the brave ferocity of the Japanese, they were repelled by the disciplined defence of the 3rd Battalion over three days. By 7 March Walawbum was firmly under the control of Galahad, and the failed attack had cost the enemy 800 dead.

  Though only eight Americans had been killed and 37 wounded during the battle for Walawbum, the 11-day operation had diminished the unit’s total strength in other ways: 136 men had been evacuated suffering from malaria, dysentery and other illnesses; 33 had suffered various injuries and ten soldiers had been removed owing to ‘psychoneurosis’.

  The 2,300 men who were fit to continue enjoyed a couple of days’ rest and recuperation at Shikau Ga, five miles north of Walawbum, before Galahad continued south on 12 March with instructions to harass the Japanese at Jambu Bum. ‘This low range of hills, with its barbaric name, formed the southern end of the Hukawng Valley,’ recalled Ogburn. Contrary to the wishes of Merrill and Hunter, Stilwell had ordered that Galahad be split in two with the 1st Battalion making for the village of Shaduzup, and the 2nd and 3rd battalions tasked with seizing Nhpum Ga, 15 miles to the south-east.

  The 1st Battalion set off first and 20 miles were accomplished in two days but the next 30 took two weeks as the terrain and the enemy hindered their progress. The battalion diary for 20 March was typical of the daily difficulties which Galahad had to confront:

  The first battalion marched over difficult trails to Nprawa Ga where our lead platoon hit a Jap machine gun blocking the trail. We had one man killed and two wounded before the gun and crew were wiped out by mortar fire on their block.18

  More and more men began succumbing to disease, with an outbreak of amoebic dysentery decimating the force, and there were also the hateful leeches, which Ogburn described as ‘rubbery monsters, black worms with suction cups at both ends … with the capacity of clamping on and opening a lesion without your feeling anything’.19 Nonetheless 1st Battalion had achieved their objectives, clearing a trail through the Jambu Bum to the village of Shaduzup where a fierce engagement ended with 300 Japanese and eight Americans dead.

  The other force, meanwhile, had split with 3rd Battalion securing an airstrip in the valley of Hsamsingyang and the 2nd Battalion four miles south at Nhpum Ga. Both came under sustained attack from the Japanese, with the latter besieged for 11 days. Medics, signalmen and cooks took up arms as wave after wave of Japanese assaults were beaten back. Only the dropping of fresh supplies from the air enabled the 2nd Battalion to continue its defence of Nhpum Ga, while at Galahad’s command post at Hsamsingyang Hunter kept a cool head. More Japanese were rumoured to be approaching from the east, threatening an encirclement of the three battalions and alarming Captain John George of the 3rd Battalion. ‘Don’t you ever get scared?’ he asked Hunter, whose philosophy was that it was beholden on an officer to keep his fear in a foxhole. ‘Wait till you’ve had twins,’ Hunter replied to George.20

  The Japanese never appeared from the east and finally on 9 April, Easter Sunday, the 3rd Battalion fought its way through to reinforce their comrades and drive the enemy from Nhpum Ga. The two battalions had lost 50 men and had another 314 wounded (the Japanese lost 400 killed) in the fighting for Nhpum Ga. Also evacuated from the area was General Merrill, who had suffered a heart attack on March 28.* Hunter took over command and wrote later: ‘I had no warning of Merrill’s approaching illness. He had not undergone any violent exercise in the last few days to have placed a strain on his heart. I knew he was using some kind of thick purplish medicine taken with water which he told me was for dysentery.’21

  One of the first instructions issued by Hunter in the hours following the seizure of Nhpum Ga was for 500lb of chloride of lime to be dropped by air. With this he ordered his men to burn the carcasses of all the mules killed in the fighting so as to disperse the huge black cloud of flies feeding on the animals’ bloated bodies.

  By now the fighting strength of Galahad was approximately 1,500 and many of those men were exhausted and undernourished, desperate for the Chinese 38th Division to arrive so that they could b
e withdrawn to India. Then, what Ogburn remembered as a ‘grotesque rumour’ began to be heard among the men, to the effect that Stilwell had ordered them to capture the airfield at Myitkyina, approximately 90 miles south-east. The rumours gained credence when Hunter sent a reconnaissance patrol led by Captain William Laffin to explore the trail leading east over the 6,100ft Kumon mountain range.

  Myitkyina airfield was considered vital to the Allied cause in Burma. With it in their possession they could considerably increase the supplies being ferried by air from India over the eastern end of the Himalayas to China (what was colloquially known by pilots as ‘The Hump’). Yet for Stilwell and his ‘stuffed baboons’22 (Galahad’s nickname for his staff officers) to task their three depleted battalions with the mission was beyond the comprehension of most of Hunter’s men. They had been in the field for two months, the same length of time that the Chindits had endured during Operation Longcloth in 1943, and the unit was in urgent need of a lengthy rest. But there was to be none. Stilwell wrote in his diary: ‘Galahad is OK. Hard fight at Nhpum. Cleaned out Japs and hooked up. No worry there.’ Then he ordered them to take Myitkyina airfield.

  They set out on 1 May in three columns. Hunter’s was the first to depart, composed of the 1st Battalion and the Chinese 150th Infantry Regiment. Colonel Henry Kinnison commanded the second column (3rd Battalion and Chinese 88th Infantry Regiment) and the third was led by Colonel George McGee and comprised the thin ranks of the 2nd Battalion and 300 Kachin troops.

  Hunter’s march towards Myitkyina was subsequently described in the New York Times in its edition of 21 May. ‘Often they followed paths known only to the Kachin tribes of the region and often climbed mountains that were so steep they were only able to make a few miles a day,’ wrote Tillman Durdin, a Texan reporter who had broken the news of the Japanese massacre at Nanking in 1937. ‘At times they picked their way along precipices through a rolling cloudbank where pack mules weakened and tottered and went over the side to pile up in the misty valley 1,000 feet below.’

  During the agonizing march towards the target, 149 men dropped out, most through exhaustion and sickness, and one or two to snake bites. Hunter pushed on regardless until, in the late afternoon of 16 May, they were within striking distance of the airfield. Hunter decided to attack the following morning to exploit the Japanese habit of withdrawing into the surrounding woods during daylight to shelter from Allied air attack.

  When the assault took place on 17 May it was executed with perfect timing, the Chinese 150th Infantry Regiment attacking the Japanese positions in the east while the 1st Battalion eliminated the airfield defences. At 1030hrs Hunter sent a message to Stilwell, saying: ‘In the ring’ – code for the successful seizure of the airfield.

  Stilwell was ecstatic at the news, yelling ‘This will burn up the Limeys’.23 In six months his forces had advanced 500 miles into Burma and now had the key prize of Myitkyina airfield. But what he did not have was Myitkyina itself, two miles to the east. Two battalions of Chinese infantry were repulsed later on the afternoon of 17 May, and a further Chinese attack the following day also ended in failure. A third assault was ordered by Stilwell, which again was unsuccessful, and by now the Chinese had suffered 671 casualties in three attempts to oust the Japanese from Myitkyina.

  Meanwhile, at his temporary command post at the airfield, Hunter was becoming increasingly exasperated with the failure to resupply his men with food and ammunition. Instead the first aircraft that touched down brought an engineer aviation company and a unit of anti-aircraft troops. Hunter soon realized that Stilwell and his ‘stuffed baboons’ had no plan to consolidate Galahad’s position after their stunning capture of the airfield. As Ogburn reflected of Hunter’s position: ‘He did not know whether he was to attack the town, cross the river, or what. Indeed, he was never ordered to take Myitkyina, and when on the 18th Stilwell visited the airstrip and Hunter told him he was going to take the town, Stilwell only grunted.’24

  General Merrill suddenly appeared on the scene but proved ineffective in stating Galahad’s case; he was still poorly and Merrill wasn’t a man who liked to rock the boat. Then on 19 May Merrill suffered another heart attack and was evacuated. This time Stilwell, instead of instructing Hunter to take over command, appointed Colonel John McCammon to lead Galahad. ‘Why Colonel Hunter was not put in command we could never understand,’ said Ogburn. ‘Hunter had as much commissioned service behind him as Merrill himself, had had far more experience than Merrill with tactical units, knew intimately the tools he would be working with, and was an outstanding soldier.’ The reason was simple: Stilwell didn’t like Hunter and viewed his strength of character as a threat.

  On 23 May the Japanese, emboldened by the failure of the American and Chinese to seize Myitkyina, launched a counter-attack with the aim of recapturing the airfield. The assault was resisted but now on average 100 men from Galahad were being evacuated each day through wounds, exhaustion and disease. Stilwell landed on the airfield on 25 May and waiting for him was Hunter, no longer able to contain his fury at the broken promises and mismanagement of a once-proud force. He handed Stilwell a statement in which he listed his grievances and accused his commanding officer of having treated Galahad ‘as a visiting unit for which Theater Headquarters felt no responsibility’. As a consequence, continued Hunter, ‘Galahad was now practically unfit for combat with the consequence that the sense of security afforded by its presence at Myitkyina was false.’ To prove his point, Hunter brought it to Stilwell’s attention that of the 3,000 men who had arrived in India a little over six months earlier, only 200 were fit enough to fight. Even Stilwell seemed to get the message, confiding to his diary: ‘Galahad is just shot.’25

  Unfortunately for Hunter there was nothing that could be done in the short term to alleviate Galahad’s suffering. The Japanese were once again threatening to attack the airfield, so the 200 survivors remained at Myitkyina, reinforced by an assortment of American troops from south-east Asia. Even the two engineer battalions in the district were given crash courses in combat fighting in the event of a major Japanese offensive against the airfield. In charge of this disparate force – which included remnants of four Chinese regiments – was Hunter. With bitter irony he dubbed it ‘the new Galahad’, but it was nothing of the sort. The spirit of the original Galahad had been practically extinguished by a combination of sickness, Stilwell and the Japanese.

  However, the Japanese attack never materialized and instead on 3 August the Americans were able to seize Myitkyina. Allied successes elsewhere in Burma (including the capture of Mogaung by the Chindits) forced the Japanese into a retreat from Imphal over the Chin Hills, the first steps on the road to eventual victory in Burma for the Allies.

  Hunter’s reward for the capture of Myitkyina was to be relieved of his command, the day the town fell – just two days after Stilwell had been promoted from lieutenant general to full general. Two months later Stilwell suffered a similar humiliation when he was summoned back to the States at the insistence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, who had finally tired of the obnoxious American. By then, however, the 5307th Composite Unit had ceased to exist. Disbanded a week after they had taken Myitkyina, those who remained from the unit were incorporated into the 475th Infantry Regiment, albeit having been recognized by a Distinguished Unit Citation for Galahad’s operations in Burma. The citation ended by declaring that the ‘unit proved equal to its task and after a brilliant operation of 17 May 1944 seized the airfield at Myitkyina, an objective of great tactical importance in the campaign, and assisted in the capture of the town of Myitkyina on 3 August 1944’.26

  Stilwell died a little over a year after the end of war, succumbing to stomach cancer in a San Francisco hospital in October 1946. He was 63. Few who had served under him mourned his passing. Frank Merrill died nine years later, aged 52, having never fully recovered from his heart attacks suffered in Burma.

  In 1962, seven years after the death of Merrill, Hollywood released a film based on the e
xploits of the 5307th Composite Unit in Burma; it was called Merrill’s Marauders and Frank Merrill and Joseph Stilwell both featured prominently. Charles Hunter did not, although a man of his temperament probably didn’t care much for Hollywood. After the war Hunter – who was married with three daughters (two of whom he outlived) served as deputy chief of staff of the 4th Army and was the commanding officer of Fort Sam Houston in Texas. He died in Wyoming in 1978 aged 72, largely forgotten by the general public who – thanks to the entertainment industry – believed that Frank Merrill had been the driving force behind America’s Special Forces in Burma. The veterans of the 5307th Composite Unit – who never referred to themselves as ‘Merrill’s Marauders’ – knew better. As Charles Ogburn wrote in his introduction to The Marauders:

  Colonel Charles N Hunter had been with Galahad from the start as its ranking or second ranking officer, had commanded it during its times of greatest trial, and was more responsible than any other individual for its record of achievement.

  * Despite being officially designated the 5307th Composite Unit and later known in the press as ‘Merrill’s Marauders’, the men referred to themselves as ‘Galahad’.

  * The small town of Ledo gave its name to the road used by the Allies as the main supply route to China through Burma and was an alternative to the Japanese-built Burma Road although the original plan had been to connect the two routes.

  * Around this time news reached Galahad of Wingate’s death, an event that Ogburn said reinforced the view that the Burma campaign was riddled with ‘ill chance’.