Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  On how fine a margin the success or failure of these decisions depended can be seen from the history of the Japanese thrust at Imphal from the east. On the 19th March part of the enemy 31st Division surged against the Indian Parachute Brigade and one battalion of the 23rd Division, dug-in to cover Ukhrul. For two desperate days the fight went on, then the brigade was pushed back and Ukhrul fell to the enemy. The three battalions, now considerably weakened, stood again at Sangshak, nine miles to the south. There, from the 21st to the 25th, they resisted desperate night attacks, which were closely supported by the Japanese artillery, while by day snipers and shelling took their toll. With the Japanese came the Jiffs, as we called members of the Indian National Army, who were employed not in direct attacks but in unavailing attempts to confuse and suborn our Indian troops. On the morning of the 26th March the enemy put in an all-out daylight assault. Our losses and theirs were heavy in hand-to-hand fighting. The main positions held, but unfortunately one of the two meagre water-supply points was lost. Throughout the action the R.A.F. had kept up the closest support, and they now attempted, in spite of heavy fire from the ground, to deliver water, but the area held by our troops was so restricted that most of the drops were lost. Almost without water, it was impossible to hold on any longer, and, after dark on the 26th March, what was left of the brigade was ordered to break out and make for Imphal. The ten days’ delay and the heavy casualties this small force and the R.A.F. who supported them had inflicted on the enemy were of inestimable value at this critical stage of the battle.

  While this savage fighting was going on around Ukhrul and Sangshak, an equally severe action was developing at Litan on the Ukhrul road, about ten miles to the south-west. Here, small detachments from the Parachute Brigade, hurriedly reinforced by a newly landed battalion of the 5th Division, had dug in to block the road to the Japanese advance. Our positions were attacked by superior forces on the night of 24th/25th March and in spite of several counter-attacks the battalion, having suffered heavily, lost its forward localities. Next day the Japanese attempted to cut the road to Imphal in its rear. But now, in the nick of time, the troops of the 5th Division flown from Arakan were coming into action, practically straight from their aircraft. 123 Brigade moved up the road, clearing it to six miles from Litan. The detachment at Litan was withdrawn on 28th, and 9 Brigade of the 5th Division brought up. The Japanese advance from Ukhrul direct on Imphal now met strong resistance, was roughly handled, and, in a week of clashes and ambushes, was held.

  While the direct blow was thus parried, the Japanese thrust from Ukhrul against the Kohima-Imphal road broke through, and on the 30th March the enemy blew up a bridge thirty miles north of Imphal and established strong road-blocks. Except for the Silchar track to the west, Imphal was thus cut off by land.

  While all this was going on, the 23rd Indian Division, less one brigade, left for the defence of Imphal, had begun its fight on the Tiddim road towards the 17th Division. Major-General Ouvry Roberts, who commanded the 23rd Division, was a good man for such a job. Years before, when I had taught him at the Staff College, he had been marked as likely to become not only a first-class staff officer but a successful commander. He had been my chief staff officer in the 10th Indian Division in Iraq in 1941. There he had done what I have always considered to be one of die best single-handed jobs any officer of his then rank had performed in the war. The Iraq Army was besieging the Royal Air Force base at Habbaniyeh, and, in spite of the gallantry of the pilots of the Flying School, in their obsolete machines, and of Assyrian Levies and airmen on the ground, it looked as if it might fall. At the most critical moment of the siege we flew in Roberts. By his energy, by the direction he imparted to the operations, and by the confidence he inspired, he transformed a somewhat bewildered defence into a successfully aggressive one. Had Habbaniyeh fallen, the results would have been disastrous to the whole Middle East. Now he had transferred those qualities to the command of a division.

  The leading units of Roberts’s 37 Brigade, with a few light tanks, moving rapidly, drove off a Japanese force which was besieging a small detachment of ours at Milestone 100 on the Tiddim road. Before our troops could push on to the relief of the camp at Milestone 109, the enemy, infiltrating through the jungle, had established a series of road-blocks behind them. They were thus forced to turn and clear the road towards Imphal while the second brigade of the 23rd Division fought south towards them. The situation on the Tiddim road was now for a time as it had once been on the Arakan coast—a Neapolitan ice of layers of our troops alternating with Japanese—but in both training and morale our men were much better fitted to deal with such a confused and harassing business than they had been in 1943.

  Still, with relief thus delayed, the situation at Milestone 109 grew critical. Japanese pressure and shelling intensified and in such a restricted area, congested by non-combatants, effective defence became impossible. During the night of the i6th/i7th March, these non-combatants were skilfully led out by jungle paths through the enemy positions to join the 23rd Division. The handful of fighting troops held on for two more days and then they, too, broke out and escaped. The Japanese swarming in found much in the way of stores and a number of abandoned vehicles. They at once began to build powerful defences to deny passage to the 17th Division approaching from the south.

  Cowan, knowing that the camp at Milestone 109 had fallen, anticipated rightly that the road itself would be strongly held against him. He therefore sent infantry detachments along the high ridges on each side of it, while his main force pressed on up the road. The right column, in a series of hard-fought small actions, cleared the enemy from the crests, and then, during the 21st and 22nd March, closely supported by the fighter-bombers of the R.A.F., 48 Brigade, in heavy fighting, broke through the desperately defended enemy position astride the road a mile south of the camp. The Japanese withdrawing were caught by our western flank detachment and again very roughly handled. To complete their discomfiture they were effectively bombed by the R.A.F. in the area to which they had retired to lick their wounds. After another grim fight the camp was recaptured on the 25th. Much of its contents and most of the lost vehicles were recovered intact and brought out with 17th Division.

  While the head of the division was thus effectively dealing with the Japanese 215 Regiment, the rearguard on Tuitum Saddle was nightly beating off fierce attacks from a reinforced 214 Regiment with greatly increased artillery and tank support. A final all-out assault on the 24th, when several enemy tanks were knocked out, was repulsed with heavy loss. On the 26th, the Japanese block at Milestone 109 having been cleared, the rearguard withdrew from Tuitum across the Manipur River and blew up the bridge, while the division resumed its march. Japanese parties were still encountered, on and near the road, but they were easily brushed aside. On the 20th March patrols of the 17th Division and 23rd Division met at Milestone 102. Several small fights were still required to clear the road to the north, but the back of the Japanese opposition had been broken, and they were not, at the moment, capable of another major effort to intercept the 17th Division. Leaving the two brigades of the 23rd Division to hold back the enemy, the 17th Division reached Imphal on the 5th April.

  During the later stages of its withdrawal, the division had been maintained by supply dropping from the air. The Japanese Air Force made only one major attempt to attack the long, retreating column and that without serious effect. The enemy’s inactivity in the air at this critical time is a measure of what the 17th Division owed to 221 Group R.A.F. Had not our fighters maintained continuous cover and given quick support at call, the withdrawal, if it could have been carried out at all, would have been a much grimmer and more protracted affair, with serious consequences to the main battle around Imphal.

  This action on the Tiddim road was, in itself, a considerable success. The 17th Division was now in the Imphal plain, intact with all its transport and wounded. It and the air forces supporting it had inflicted heavier losses on the Japanese than it had suffered. It
had beaten them on every occasion in stand-up fights, and, as I saw for myself when I met the division just outside Imphal, its morale was correspondingly high. The 23rd Division had similarly shared in these successes and, in addition, took a slightly mischievous pride in the fact that it had had to come to the rescue of the redoubtable 17th. Yet, looked at from the overall picture of the battle, the fact that the 17th Division had been delayed, and still more that the bulk of Scoones’s reserve had of necessity been drawn away at a critical time, might have tragic consequences.

  The other forward division of 4 Corps, Gracey’s 20th, operating in the Tamu area and at the head of the Kabaw Valley had plenty of excitement in its withdrawal to the Imphal plain, but was never in so difficult a position as the 17th. By the beginning of March, patrols of the 20th Division had penetrated well down the Kabaw Valley and across the Chindwin. A brigade of the 23rd Division had been sent temporarily to the banks of the Chindwin, a few miles north of Sittaung, where it was demonstrating to distract attention from the fly-in by the Chindits then in progress.

  The Japanese assembled in the southern Kabaw Valley a force under Major-General Yamamoto the core of which was three battalions of infantry from the 33rd Division, later, in the north of the valley increased by two more battalions. Round this nucleus they grouped considerable bodies of their auxiliaries, the Burma Traitor Army and the Jiffs. To this somewhat heterogeneous party they entrusted a large part of their available medium artillery, most of their one tank regiment, and a great deal of their mechanical transport. Their reason for this was that the Sittaung-Palel-Imphal road was not only the most direct, but by far the easiest way by which to bring heavy equipment into the Imphal plain.

  On the 12th March, the Japanese began to push up the Kabaw Valley in two columns covered by a wide, and to our men, confusing screen of Burmans and Jiffs, whom it was most difficult for our men to distinguish from the local inhabitants and our own troops. Nevertheless our patrols frequently penetrated this screen and inflicted casualties on the Japanese. On the 17th, after a severe three-day fight which momentarily halted the enemy, the forward troops on the 20th Division’s southern sector fell back slowly under orders on Tamu, holding successive positions while the ‘thinning out’ process behind them continued. The Japanese made several minor attacks and one serious one, supported by medium tanks. All these were beaten off and the withdrawal continued at our own pace. Throughout, the Japanese showed their usual fanatical courage, on one occasion attempting to rush and destroy our guns with pole charges and magnetic mines. This party was lured into an ambush, set round evacuated gun pits, and wiped out. Three Japanese, all wounded, including an officer, were the only survivors. They were the 20th Division’s first prisoners and of great value to our intelligence.

  During the 16th March, Japanese of the forces which had crossed the Chindwin a few miles north of Thaungdut began to threaten the division’s flank. As pressure increased, the order to fall back to the defended locality of Moreh, two miles north of Tamu, was given. On the 20th, one of the few tank versus tank actions of the campaign took place, between a troop of the 3rd Dragoon Guards and Japanese medium and light tanks. The enemy armour was routed, with the loss of four tanks destroyed and one captured, which, to the great satisfaction of the Dragoons, they were able to bring back. After dark on the 22nd March the Japanese heavily attacked our Moreh positions, but were repulsed and lost more tanks.

  By now the threat of the main Japanese advance on Imphal from the east was growing more menacing, and Scoones was compelled to look for a reserve to replace the brigades of the 23rd Division that had gone to the rescue of the 17th. He could only find this by drawing on the now heavily pressed 20th Division, and to provide it he had to order Gracey to evacuate Moreh and come back to Shenam and Tengoupal, about nine miles from Palel. On the 2nd April, 32 Brigade was, therefore, withdrawn into Corps Reserve, leaving only two brigades to cover Palel and hold the south-eastern approaches to the plain.

  Within a week of the start of the Japanese offensive, while the 17th Division was still fighting its way out, it became clear that the situation in the Kohima area was likely to be even more dangerous than that at Imphal. Not only were enemy columns closing in on Kohima at much greater speed than I had expected, but they were obviously in much greater strength. Indeed it was soon evident that the bulk, if not the whole, of the Japanese 31st Division was driving for Kohima and Dimapur. I had been confident that the most the enemy could bring and maintain through such country would be one regimental group, the equivalent of a British brigade group. In that, I had badly underestimated the Japanese capacity for large-scale, long-range infiltration, and for their readiness to accept odds in a gamble on supply. This misappreciation was the second great mistake I made in the Imphal battle.

  It was an error that was likely to cost us dear. We were not prepared for so heavy a thrust; Kohima with its rather scratch garrison and, what was worse, Dimapur with no garrison at all, were in deadly peril. The loss of Kohima we could endure, but that of Dimapur, our only base and railhead, would have been crippling to an almost fatal degree. It would have pushed into the far distance our hopes of relieving Imphal, laid bare to the enemy, the Brahmaputra Valley with its string of airfields, cut off Stilwell’s Ledo Chinese, and stopped all supply to China. As I contemplated the chain of disasters that I had invited, my heart sank. However, I have always believed that a motto for generals must be ‘No regrets’, no crying over split milk. The vital need was now to bring in reinforcements, not only to replace the vanished reserve in Imphal but, above all, to ensure that Dimapur was held. To achieve this I bent all my energies.

  I had available for the purpose under my own command the 5th Indian Division, and 3 Special Service Brigade, composed of one army and one Royal Marine commando. Both these formations were in Arakan. Plans had already been made for the move of the 5th Division, either by road and rail or by air, to Assam. As time was short I ordered it to begin to fly at once. Here I found a serious difficulty. The need for speed had increased and was desperate, but Troop Carrier Command had only eight Dakota squadrons, four British and four American, which, with the demands already on them, could not lift the division at anything like the rate I now demanded.

  At this time large numbers of transport aircraft were employed on the Hump route, carrying supplies to China from India. If we lost the Imphal-Kohima battle the Hump route would be closed. It seemed obvious therefore that it would be madness not to divert some of the China lift to the vital needs of Fourteenth Army. Unfortunately not even the Supreme Commander himself had the authority to do this—only the American Chiefs of Staff in far-off Washington could give the word. However, Baldwin and I seized the opportunity of a meeting with Admiral Mountbatten on the 13th March to press hard for such a transfer. He saw the urgency at once, and, on his own responsibility, ordered thirty Dakotas, or their equivalent in other aircraft, to join Troop Carrier Command—a decision which earned my gratitude and played a major part in the result of the battle.

  The fly-in of the 5th Indian Division began on the 17th March. By the 20th its first brigade, 123, had deplaned in Imphal. On the 24th, Divisional Headquarters was complete and by the 27th the divisional troops and a second brigade, 9, were also in. Their transport was limited to mules and jeeps, but the officers and men, fresh from their Arakan triumphs, were in fine form. The third brigade, 161, I diverted to Dimapur. I disliked breaking up a division, but the Japanese pressure on Kohima made the quick arrival of help imperative. I had warned Christison in Arakan to get the 7th Indian Division to Chittagong, ready to follow to Assam with all speed. 3 Special Service Brigade later, in early April, I sent by rail to Silchar to guard the Bishenpur–Silchar track, the western entrance to the Imphal plain, and from it to threaten the flank of any Japanese move round Imphal.

  I asked General Giffard, who was, as always, a tower of strength in emergency, to let me have Wingate’s 23 Long-Range Penetration Brigade, which was still in India. He agreed to rai
l it to Jorhat, where I could place it as a mobile force to cover the railway to Ledo, and, if necessary, use it against the flank of an attack on Dimapur. He also sent from India, as previously arranged, the new 25th Indian Division to replace the 5th Division in Arakan. This, being largely a sea move, did not increase the extreme pressure of traffic which now fell on the Bengal and Assam railway system or add to the air transport problem. I asked General Giffard also to send to my help 33 Corps Headquarters and the 2nd British Division from his reserve in India. He at once agreed. He and Auchinleck had already, before I asked, begun preparations for this move. There was still considerable anxiety as to whether, if we did receive these substantial reinforcements, we should be able to maintain them, especially in heavy fighting which would increase greatly demands for supplies and replacements of all kinds. The risk was there but I declared my willingness to accept it and my belief that it could be overcome. My experience has always been that British administrative staffs, like British engineers, work to such safety margins that there is always quite a lot in hand. We continued to evacuate non-combatants from Assam at the rate of thousands a week by air, road, and rail, so that without increasing the Imphal ration strength we could replace them by fighting men. Snelling, my Chief Administrative Officer, nobly supported me. We could, he declared, maintain the extra fighting formations, although if the Imphal road were cut, as he somewhat ruefully admitted, we should be hard put to it. On the 18th March, General Giffard ordered the 2nd Division to move to Fourteenth Army. Its original destination was to have been Arakan, as a relief for the 7th Division, but this was changed, at my request, to Dimapur, as the situation there was becoming more threatening. I sent Fourteenth Army movement staff officers to work out details with their opposite numbers in India. Lieut-General Stopford, 33 Corps Commander, reported to me at my headquarters on the 23rd.