The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  The four-month battle of Kohima-Imphal was a conflict of intricate complexity. Even so experienced a commander as Wavell, when he inspected the battlefields later, commented that it seemed to have been fought ‘in penny packets’.44 Unlike a conventional battle such as Alamein, it consisted of hundreds of chance encounters, dozens of disparate setpiece clashes and hand-to-hand conflicts, frontal attacks, desperate defences, ambushes and bombing raids, all of which have been minutely chronicled but whose details nevertheless will probably forever be mysterious. Slim described it as an epic that ran ‘across great stretches of wild country; one day its focal point was a hill named on no map, next a miserable unpronounceable village a hundred miles away. Columns, brigades, divisions, marched and counter-marched, met in bloody clashes and reeled apart, weaving a confused pattern hard to unravel.’45 Slim himself tried to elucidate the confusion by using the analogy of the spokes of a wheel, with Imphal as the hub, and reduced the battle to six spokes. Accordingly, the first spoke was the road north from Imphal to Kohima, the second followed the line of the Iril river valley, the third was the track north-east to Ukhrul, the fourth the road to Tamu, the fifth the Tiddim road and the sixth the track running from Bishenpur to Silchar.46 An even simpler way to view the battle is to see it as a fourfold affair. Spokes two and three form what one might call the central battlefield of Imphal itself; spokes five and six form the southern front and spoke four the southeastern; while the key event of the entire battle, the struggle around Kohima, represents Slim’s spoke one. The only way to present the events of March–June 1944 lucidly is to deal with each theatre in turn, though naturally all these events were going on simultaneously and had mutual influences and impacts; cross-cutting between them merely increases the inherent confusion. Another advantage of viewing the battle as a quartet is that it also aligns with Slim’s progressive tetralogy of Kohima-Imphal, when he divided the long battle into four phases: concentration, attrition, counteroffensive and pursuit.47

  The central front, the one nearest Imphal itself, featured Japanese 15 Division commanded by Lieutenant General Yamauchi Masafumi. The division had performed brilliantly in cutting across near-impossible jungle country from the Chindwin to Kangpokpi and Kanglatongbi and severing the Kohima–Imphal road on 30 March. Yamauchi was a surprising choice of commander, as he was a sophisticate who had lived abroad and served as military attaché in Washington, and was thus yet another who did not see eye to eye with the xenophobic Mutaguchi. Even more bizarrely, he was already mortally ill with tuberculosis. Mutaguchi compounded his problems by assigning to him as his chief of staff another rabid ‘Imperial Way’ devotee.48 Aiming directly for Imphal, Yamauchi collided with 5 Indian Division, which had just been flown in from the Arakan and put on front-line duty without a break. Behind them were 17, 20 and 23 Indian Divisions and the 254th Indian Tank Regiment. For the first half of April, Japanese 15 Division fought a titanic struggle with 5 Indian Division for the key position of the 4,000-foot-high peak of Nungshigum, which dominated the northern end of the Imphal plain. Disconcerted to find that the enemy outnumbered them and had tanks and flame-throwers, the Japanese prepared for a grim experience. Scoones directed that 23 Division move up to the support of the Indian 5th, confident that he would break the enemy and then pursue northeast in the direction of Litan and Ukhrul. The gathering crisis at Kohima meant that reinforcements had to be diverted there, which partly accounted for the more evenly matched encounter that ensued. Nungshigum was an uneven ridge three miles long, with two peaks jutting 1,500 feet above the plain, and only five miles from 4 Corps’s headquarters in Imphal.49 The Japanese easily secured the northern peak, but had a hard time with the southern one. First the Indian Brigade secured it but were attacked before they could dig in; forced off the top, they came back next day and recaptured it; but were finally driven back conclusively on 11 April, when Yamauchi attacked it with all his strength. On the 12th, the British retook the southern summit and then lost it again. Finally, on 13 April, they were able to bring to bear their overwhelming superiority in planes and tanks. Bombers dropped their loads almost at treetop level, while all Japanese plans were thrown into disarray when the British scaled both peaks with tanks – something Yamauchi had considered impossible.50

  Devastated by the defeat at Nungshigum and reluctantly concluding he had no answer to the enemy’s tanks, Yamauchi ordered his men to dig in around Sengmai and Kanglatongbi so as to hang on to the Kohima–Imphal road. In April the RAF flew 6,000 sorties and dropped 1,000 bombs in this sector but without making much impression on Japanese bunkers.51 Meanwhile 23 Indian Division advanced from Nunshigum along the Ukhrul and Iril valley ‘spokes’, cleaning out pockets of resistance and setting up roadblocks in their rear. Between 16 April and 7 May there was heavy fighting to eject the Japanese from a position on the Mapao spur dividing the Iril valley from the Imphal–Kohima road. Anglo-Indian attacks were met with fierce Japanese counterattacks; 23 Division cleared the enemy from the southern parts of their position, but could not deliver the coup de grâce. On 20 May the Japanese evacuated their forward positions after another tremendous struggle, and on the 21st Kanglatongbi, taken by the Japanese on 9 April, was recovered. Still Yamauchi refused to give up. Nevertheless, the Japanese were now beleaguered, Imphal was no longer threatened on its doorstep and the situation on the central front could be regarded as contained and stabilised.52 Japanese 15 Division had been almost wiped out. Under strength to begin with, Yamauchi’s men had then lost heavily at Nungshigum, while the survivors faced starvation as Mutaguchi’s promised rations failed to arrive. To cap it all, as Yamauchi admitted, his men simply had no answer to the British attacks, for travelling through the jungle lightly to strike at Imphal had precluded the taking of effective anti-tank weapons. Yamauchi’s division was always the Japanese weak spot, but he valiantly refused to lift the roadblock at Kanglatongbi, and it took Ouvry Roberts and 23 Indian Division until early July to open the Kohima–Imphal road. As a last desperate throw, Yamauchi ordered the use of poison gas – a sad end for a man who was always a realist and hence, in this theatre, a pessimist. Despising xenophobic ignoramuses like Tojo and Mutaguchi, Yamauchi knew from his time in the USA how strong the American eagle was; furthermore, without anti-tank weapons he could do little against the British tanks. While the crazed Mutaguchi kept sending him impossible orders to take Imphal, as if he could accomplish it by waving a magic wand, the dying Mutaguchi had to watch forlornly while his brave warriors starved to death or eked a living from bamboo shoots, parsley and lizards.53

  Since every one of the four fronts saw brutal, vicious and even fanatical fighting, historians and memorialists have long disputed which of the sectors experienced the worst slaughter. Despite the huge loss of life at Kohima, there are those who contend that the battles in the south-eastern theatre, around the Shennam ridge, were the most dreadful of all. Here Gracey with 20 Indian Division (minus one brigade) faced Major General Yamamoto Tsunoru, and the battles raged over a succession of hills on the ridge. With about 25 miles of front to cover, Gracey had taken the decision to defend a number of fortified bastions or ‘boxes’ and to keep the Tamu road open, rather than try to control the entire theatre (several hundred square miles of broken hill country) – the only rational decision, given that he had just two brigades.54 The disputed Shennam ridge was a long, uneven ridge running east–west, with a number of hills rising from it, and it was for possession of these hills that both sides fought with tigerish fury. When the Japanese seized Nippon Hill on 1 April, it took nearly three weeks to dislodge them; Gracey needed massive air support to do this, but even so took heavy casualties.55 He therefore decided to retire into an even tighter defensive perimeter, deeming that possession of the Tamu road was an irrelevance until the struggle for the ridge was resolved. He contented himself with holding the most important heights and all the passes that led to Palel and the Imphal plain. The war in this sector bogged down into a kind of rerun of the Western Front in World War I,
with both sides dug in behind bunkers and trenches, fierce attacks taking place every night, and the stench of death everywhere as the corpses piled up in such a restricted area. Every single knoll, eminence or hill was fought over as if the entire campaign hinged on its possession. After Nippon Hill, the next disputed summit was Crete West, the battle for which occupied the 10 days between 21 April and 1 May.56

  Meanwhile Yamamoto, better equipped with tanks and artillery than all other sector commanders, tried to blast his way up the road to Palel around Tengnoupal, and made some slow progress from 4–11 April. When the British retook the lost ground, Yamamoto ordered his elite squads into action and pushed them back to the starting point. On the night of 19–20 April, three separate attacks by the Japanese with medium tanks were beaten off, and on the 22nd, parts of the British position were overrun. Gracey sensed that his men were becoming exhausted and weary and a further Japanese assault might have led to breakthrough, but by this time they too were exhausted and depleted in numbers. A final ferocious combat on 22 April ended inconclusively.57 Gracey consoled himself that Bose’s Indian National Army had also been in action against his Indians and Gurkhas but had been roughly treated and almost annihilated; when the survivors tried to surrender, they tended to fall foul of the Gurkhas’ dreaded kukri. Yamamoto’s next move was to send a commando squad against Palel airfield, using 300 members of the INA, on the grounds that they could approach unnoticed. They achieved surprise but failed at the last moment, as did a second INA group, who complained that the Japanese had provided them with no back-up.58 Desperately seeking to break through somewhere, Yamamoto next launched a massive attack on ‘Scraggy’ (another hill on the saddle) on 10 May. As with its predecessor, Crete West, the battle for Scraggy went on for 10 days. Simultaneously, Yamamoto once more attacked the Tengnoupal positions on two successive nights (6–8 May) and made a partial breakthrough. A counterattack by 20 Division on 12 May regained some of the ground, but by now Yamamoto’s men were once more exhausted. No reinforcements or supplies were reaching them, but meanwhile 20 Indian Division was withdrawn for rest and recuperation and Ouvry Roberts’s 23 Division moved into the breach in full strength.59 This was almost the last straw for the Japanese, who regrouped to focus their attention once more on the Shennam ridge. On 23–24 May there was yet more hard fighting for a new hill, Gibraltar, and the Japanese managed to gain a precarious toehold there. There followed a ferocious struggle for Lone Tree Hill on 24 May, followed by a bloodbath over ‘Ben Nevis’. The final, futile Japanese attempt on the Shennam ridge took place on 9 June, when Yamamoto made an all-out bid to regain Scraggy. Making a frontal attack on the Gurkhas on that hill, the Japanese took staggering losses from their triple nemeses: heavy artillery, tanks and airpower. Unwilling and, it seemed, incapable of admitting defeat, they kept plugging away until 25 June.60 But numbers, equipment and morale were telling. Roberts’s 23 Division advanced to the point where Palel airfield was no longer within range of Japanese medium artillery, as it had been throughout May, with what Slim in his inimitable way called ‘considerable inconvenience’. As a Parthian shot Yamamoto did manage to score one final minor triumph. An eight-strong Japanese commando party raided the airfield on the night of 3–4 July and managed to destroy eight aircraft with torpedoes and magnetic mines – what Slim called ‘a very fine effort’.61

  On the southern sector – Slim’s ‘Tiddim spoke’ – there was ferocious fighting throughout April and May for possession of the track to the west of Bishenpur and for the town itself, 18 miles south of Imphal. Here the Japanese commander was Lieutenant General Yanakida Motozo, another trenchant critic of Mutaguchi. A realist who was sceptical of success given the exiguous resources the Japanese high command was devoting to Mutaguchi’s venture, Yanakida inevitably attracted the epithets ‘defeatist’ and ‘cowardly’ from Mutaguchi and his fellow fanatics, among whom was the chief of staff (Colonel Tanaka), specially embedded to make sure that Yanakida followed his superior’s instructions. Needless to say, his caution was totally justified, but there are even some British commentators prepared to take Mutaguchi’s side, on the grounds that, once committed, whatever his reservations, Yanakida should have provided more dynamic leadership.62 He certainly began well, sending a commando group on a triumphant trek to blow up the bridge over the Iland river in India. Setting out on 29 March, the commandos achieved their objective on 14 April, sending sky-high a 300-foot suspension bridge poised over an 80-foot gorge.63 Yanakida then concentrated on securing the Bishenpur–Silchar track, hoping to break into the Imphal plain from the west. The threat from the west led Scoones to pull back the 17th Division, which had been operating north of Imphal, and switch it to this front. There ensued a ferocious struggle for the villages northwest of Bishenpur, with a terrible battle waged in mid-April at the so-called Point 5846.64 No sooner was this concluded than the two hosts clashed again, this time at the village of Ninthoukgong, south of Bishenpur. The Japanese were in possession, and a first attempt by Cowan’s 33 Brigade to eject them on 23 April failed badly, as did a follow-up effort by 17 Division two days later. Very bitter fighting at Ninthoukgong and on the Silchar track west of Bishenpur continued into May. Both sides sustained alarmingly high casualties in gruesome hand-to-hand fighting, with the toll among the British officers of the Indian regiments notably high.65

  At the beginning of May, 33 Japanese Division and 17 Division remained locked in combat around Bishenpur, with each trying its best to annihilate the other. To Allied surprise, for the first time in the entire Imphal campaign the Japanese air force entered the fray in a significant way, bombing and strafing the Anglo-Indian airfields. Additionally, 25 Zeros raided Bishenpur on 6 May and again on the 10th. While the colossal struggle around Ninthoukgong continued throughout May, the Japanese pushed forward to another village just two miles south of Bishenpur called Potsangbam (inevitably nicknamed ‘Pots and Pans’ by the British soldiers). The Japanese chose their position well, for they dug in with anti-tank guns in paddy fields and deep water-filled ditches, which made British tanks ineffective. Once again the Anglo-Indian brigades (32 and 63) took heavy punishment and needed truly massive support from fighters and bombers of both the RAF and the USAAF before they were able to winkle the enemy out on 15 May. The dying echoes of the battle were still being heard when the monsoon burst over the combatants, adding another layer of illness, especially foot rot, to the agonies endured by the soldiers, and underlining once again the similarities between the battle of Imphal and the encounters on the Western Front in the Great War.66 The Japanese 33 Division had fully justified its reputation of being the toughest in the China-Burma-India theatre, but cracks in morale were beginning to show. By the end of April the strength of one of its regiments was down from 3,000 to 800, and even more ominously, a handful of deserters was starting to drift over to the British lines. This was the precise juncture that Mutaguchi chose to put in a personal appearance at the front. A notorious womaniser, he arrived at Yanakida’s headquarters on 22 April with 20 geisha girls whom he confidently intended to instal at Imphal once he had won his ‘easy’ victory. When he reprimanded Yanakida for defeatism and lacking the instincts of a samurai, Yanakida retired hurt, sulking in his tent. The absurd Mutaguchi, genuinely unable to see the force of Yanakida’s complaints, promptly sacked him and replaced him with the more biddable Major General Tanaka Nobuo.67

  Early in May, Cowan tried to seize the initiative with an ambitious and elaborate flanking movement aimed at cutting the Japanese supply line to the south and then encircling 33 Division. The idea was that 48 Brigade of 17 Division would work round to the south and provide the anvil on which the hammer of the other two brigades of 17 Division would strike. Once again there was ferocious but inconclusive fighting, in which Japanese tanks made a rare appearance, but Cowan’s manoeuvre essentially foundered because the would-be ‘hammer’ brigades were themselves swept up in another battle, when Tanaka tried to penetrate Bishenpur and drive a stake right through 17 Division
’s heart. Between 16 and 20 May he ordered simultaneous assaults on Bishenpur and the gateway to the Imphal plain.68 Essentially both sides were attempting to go for the jugular at the very same time, and the result was chaos, confusion, slaughter and massacre, with no clear result. Cowan’s Gurkhas in 48 Brigade had to fight their way back northward, with some especially bloody clashes around Torbung (20–24 May), while Cowan, taken by surprise at Bishenpur, had to call in 20 Division to extricate himself from a parlous situation.69 Heavily outnumbered, Tanaka’s attacking force was then virtually annihilated. Both sides had failed, but the British could better afford the failure. The Japanese had done all, and more, that valour alone could attain, but they simply lacked the numbers, artillery, tanks and air support for the job. After ten of the most slaughterous days anywhere on the Imphal–Kohima battlegrounds, they withdrew on 30 May.70 Even Slim, normally a vehement Jap-hater, conceded his admiration for the enemy: ‘There can have been few examples in history of a force as reduced, battered, and exhausted as the 33rd Japanese Division delivering such furious assaults, not with the object of extricating itself, but to achieve its original offensive intention.’71 Yanakida had been proved right, and the mindless dedication to voluntarism by Tanaka and Mutaguchi revealed as the nonsense it was.

  Yet the fanatical Tanaka simply would not give up, and ordered his men to hold firm all along the front, even though most of them were starving and morale had plummeted almost to zero point. Cowan slightly played into his hands by trying to recoup the failed attempt to retake Ninthoukgong on 7 April with yet another bid. Bitter fighting in this sector went on from 18 to 29 May. The result was that the Japanese were left in possession but at the cost of a further 1,000 casualties.72 Bit by bit Tanaka came to appreciate the wisdom of Yanakida’s stance and the truth of his words when he handed over to him: ‘It’s all hopeless.’73 He was now prepared to give tacit agreement to the proposition that Mutaguchi’s orders to take Bishenpur at all costs simply meant massive casualties for Japan, but unless he was prepared to resign, he had no choice but to obey Mutaguchi’s suicidal orders. On 2 June he therefore issued a general order, exhorting his troops to make a last effort to break through to Imphal. The ruthless attitude to human life evinced by the bushido code is well in evidence in Tanaka’s alarming words: