Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

To deal briefly with the events on each spoke of the wheel is probably the clearest way to give a picture of this battle, but it should be remembered that encounters on all the spokes were going on simultaneously. At no time and in no place was the situation, either to commanders or troops, as clear even as I can make it now. Into Scoones’s headquarters, from every point of the compass, day and night, streamed signals, messages, and reports, announcing successes, set-backs, appealing for reinforcements, demanding more ammunition, asking urgently for wounded to be evacuated, begging for air support. His was the task of meeting or withstanding these appeals, of deciding which at the moment was the place to which his by no means over-generous reserves should be allotted. It was impossible for him to satisfy all his commanders. It needed a tough, cool, and well-balanced commander to meet, week after week, this strain. Luckily Scoones was tough, cool, and well balanced.

  To take first the actions on the Iril Valley and Ukhrul road spokes. By the beginning of April, the leading troops of the 5th Division, who had gone into action on the Ukhrul road almost straight from their aircraft, had with the remaining brigade of the 23rd Division pushed back the imminent threat to Imphal until the Japanese were held just west of Litan. But the enemy were now round Imphal on the north, and our troops on the Ukhrul road were menaced in the rear by a Japanese force which on the 6th April attacked Nungshigum, a great hill which dominated the Imphal plain and gave direct observation over the main airstrip at a range of five or six miles. The fighting for this hill was typical of a hundred actions that went on at this stage round the edges of the plain.

  Nungshigum has two peaks, a north and a south. The Japanese attack drove our men off the northern, but we clung to the southern. On the 11th April, after several attempts, the enemy gained that too. On the 12th we retook the southern summit, but ost it again. On the 13 th, while Hurribombers, their guns blazing, dived almost into the tree-tops, and tanks, winched up incredible slopes, fired point-blank into bunker loopholes, our infantry stormed both peaks—and held them. The Japanese grimly defended their positions until the last men still fighting were bombed or bayoneted in their last foxholes.

  In this fight, so difficult was the country and so dense the jungle that the tanks of the Carbineers had to go into action with turrets open if their commanders were to see enough to help the infantry. The young officer and N.C.O. tank commanders unhesitatingly took this risk of almost certain death and, alas, a high proportion of them were killed.

  When the 5th Division had secured Nungshigum, it was relieved by the 23rd Division of all responsibility for the Ukhrul road and proceeded to clear the Iril Valley. Between the 16th April and the 7th May there was heavy fighting to eject the Japanese from their positions on the big Mapao Spur which divides the Iril Valley from the Imphal-Kohima road and gives observation over the north-western portion of the plain. Our attacks, which met fierce Japanese counter-attacks, were only partially successful. We drove the enemy from the southern parts of his position but he still held to the northern, though he no longer presented a serious threat to Imphal.

  1 Brigade of the 23rd Division, having combed the hills to the south of the Ukhrul road and chased the headquarters of the 15th Japanese Division through the jungle, turned north and cleared the road to within fifteen miles of Ukhrul. The enemy headquarters escaped, but to say the least its operational efficiency was not increased. 37 Brigade of the 23rd Division soon afterwards moved up the road and made contact with 1 Brigade. The division then, during the first half of May, kept up pressure on the enemy over the whole Ukhrul road front. By the middle of the month the situation both in the Iril Valley and on the Ukhrul road could be considered stabilized.

  On the Palel road spoke of the wheel at the beginning of April, the 20th Division, having lost one brigade taken for Corps Reserve, was with the two remaining brigades, 80 and 100, holding a twenty-five-mile front running from Tengoupal, ten miles south-east of Palel, through Shenam to Shuganu, fifteen miles south-west of Palel. The country is a criss-cross of steep ridges and deep nullahs, all tree-covered, with in parts dense jungle. Gracey’s troops could not, of course, maintain a continuous line; they had to content themselves by holding the most important heights and the passes by which the main road and the most usable tracks approached Palel and the Imphal plain. Between these tactical points they strove to dominate the country and prevent Japanese infiltration by constant and aggressive patrolling. In this, luckily, they had already obtained something of a mastery over the enemy, but it was a long and vulnerable front which, throughout this phase of the battle, was a source of anxiety to Scoones.

  The Japanese commander here, Major-General Yamamoto, was under great pressure from his superiors to break into the Imphal plain. The tanks and artillery which constituted a large part of his force were urgently wanted by Mutaguchi, the Army Commander, to reduce our defences around Imphal. So Yamamoto launched attack after attack to crash through the 20th Division defences on the Shenam Pass. These assaults, supported more heavily than usual for the Japanese by armour and artillery, were constant throughout April.

  Some of the bitterest fighting was around Tengoupal which directly covered the main road up which Yamamoto was trying to blast his way. Between the 4th and the 11th April the Japanese attacks were continuous and made some progress. On the 11th April, a counter-attack in which the Devons distinguished themselves retook lost ground, but on the 15th and 16th fanatical enemy assaults on a young Indian battalion which had relieved the Devons regained portions of the position and were continued during the two succeeding nights. On the night of the 19th/20th April, three separate attacks with medium tanks were beaten off, but our men, never very thick on the ground, were becoming exhausted from want of rest. On the 22nd April, after very heavy fighting, parts of our position were overrun; but the enemy had suffered too heavily to be able to continue and the attacks died down. Shenam, on the other side of the road, had not been heavily attacked, which was lucky, as part of the brigade here had to be sent to reinforce Shuganu, threatened by the reported approach of Japanese forces.

  The Indian National Army’s Gandhi Brigade was on this front, and, towards the end of April, parties of Japanese, accompanied by Jiffs disguised as local inhabitants and as our sepoys, infiltrated towards Palel. There were numerous patrol clashes and we staged several successful ambushes, but it was impossible in such wild country to intercept every hostile group, and on the night of the 29th/30th April a small Japanese party actually attacked the Palel Keep. No damage was done and the signal reporting the occurrence ended, ‘enemy now being slain’. This attempt was a stout-hearted effort in contrast to the abortive ‘attack’ made on one of our positions by the Gandhi Brigade on the night of the 2nd/3rd May, in which a large party of Jiffs was ambushed and scattered as it approached. After this, considerable numbers of these unfortunate Jiffs appeared to be wandering about the country without object or cohesion. They had suffered a good many other casualties at the hands of our patrols and during May were surrendering in large numbers, but our Indian and Gurkha soldiers were at times not too ready to let them surrender, and orders had to be issued to give them a kinder welcome. The Gandhi Brigade took no further appreciable part in operations and what was left of it the Japanese in disgust used mainly as porters.

  However, Japanese patrols were in the hills north and east of Palel, and their presence might interfere with the regular use of the airfield. This could not be risked, and Scoones sent 48 Brigade of the 17th Division between the 6th and 8th May to comb that part of die country. When this brigade moved on to other tasks, he replaced it by 1 Brigade of the 23rd Division which completed the comb-out and chased the headquarters of the Japanese 15th Division to the north over the Ukhrul road as already described.

  This infiltration of Japanese parties into the area north-east of Palel coincided with a final effort by Yamamoto to break through on the main road. On the nights of the 6th/7th and the 7th/8th May fierce Japanese attacks on the Tengoupal front were repulsed,
but on the 8th May they broke into our positions. Counterattacks, most gallantly supported by the R.A.F’s fighter bombers, failed to recover lost ground and we made a partial withdrawal There were further Japanese attacks on the nights of the 9th/10th and the 10th/11th May during which we again lost some of our positions. A rather anxious situation was restored on the 12th by a most gallant counter-attack, and for the moment both sides were too exhausted to undertake further attacks or counterattacks. The 20th Division had successfully withstood very heavy assaults and continuous pressure for over two months, and to ease the strain on it Scoones now relieved it on the Palel front by Roberts’s 23rd Division at its full strength of three brigades. On this spoke of the wheel, too, by mid-May we could consider the situation stabilized.

  It was along the Tiddim road and the Silchar–Bishenpur track, the southern and western spokes of the wheel, that some of the heaviest fighting of this Battle of Attrition took place. When the 17th Division reached Imphal after its withdrawal along the Tiddim road, Scoones left behind it, to hold off the Japanese 33rd Division which was pressing towards Imphal, two brigades, 37 and 49, of Roberts’s 23rd Division. 37 Brigade was quickly recalled to join its division, and 49 Brigade on the 9th April was attacked in its positions south of Bishenpur at Milestones 30 and 35 on the Tiddim road. These attacks were repulsed and a Japanese detachment that had audaciously inserted itself between the forward battalion and the rest of the brigade was completely destroyed. In the short lull which followed, Scoones pulled out 49 Brigade so as to complete the 23rd Division and replaced it by his Corps Reserve, 32 Brigade of the 20th Division. The brigadier of 32 Brigade realizing the danger of encirclement from the west that threatened the old 49 Brigade position, decided to pull back to Bishenpur, where he commanded both the Tiddim road from the south and the Silchar track from the west.

  It was well that he did so. Repulsed on the Tiddim road, the enemy, reverting to his favourite tactics, concentrated in the jungle west of the road, and made for the Bishenpur–Silchar track, hoping to break into the Imphal plain from the west. In the second week of April, Japanese patrols reached the track and encountered ours, but by then our 32 Brigade was in position covering Bishenpur. On the night of the 14th/15th April the Japanese 33rd Division, which had now received reinforcements, attacked towards Bishenpur, but was again repulsed. While this attack was developing the enemy succeeded in blowing up the bridge at Milestone 51 on the Silchar track. This was a three-hundred-foot suspension bridge over an eighty-foot deep gorge and its destruction made a complete break in the track. The demolition was a typical Japanese suicide operation. While skirmishing was going on in darkness near the bridge, three Japanese eluded the engineer platoon guarding it and placed the explosive charges. One Japanese jumped to his death in the gorge; the other two went up with the bridge. Having failed to dislodge our troops covering Bishenpur, the enemy then attempted to pass a strong column into the plain round the north-west of the village. Heavy fighting lasting several days resulted, and there were alarms and excursions throughout the area as Japanese detachments probed forward towards Imphal.

  The threat from the west had caused Scoones to pull back the 17th Division, which had been operating north of Imphal, and give it the task of securing this line of approach. He also left under Cowan’s Command 32 Brigade, now fully engaged and under heavy pressure. On the 19th April, just in time, the leading troops of the 17th Division began to arrive and went straight into action north-west of Bishenpur. To the south of that village the enemy occupied the straggling hamlet of Ninthoukhong in force. A first attempt by 33 Brigade to eject them failed on the 23rd April and so did a second by troops of the 17th Division two days later. In these attacks we suffered heavily and lost seven medium tanks. The valour of our troops had been equalled by the tenacity of the Japanese. Very bitter fighting continued and cost both sides many casualties; the Japanese advance into the plain was halted, but they held the village and remained a dangerous threat.

  Again the fighting on the Silchar track west of Bishenpur flared up. The Japanese were under orders to break through at all costs and 32 Brigade from the 20th Division were under equally emphatic orders to prevent them. The savage struggle surged backwards and forwards along the track and across it. Our casualties were alarmingly heavy, especially in British officers of the Indian Army who could not fail to be picked out in such close fighting. These officers, many of them in their early twenties, made me proud to belong to the same army. One young lieutenant-colonel, commanding a battalion that had already lost three-quarters of its officers and who had himself been severely wounded in the stomach by grenade fragments, was again hit while leading his men. When asked why at this second wound he had not gone back at least as far as the Field Ambulance to have his wounds properly dressed, he admitted that the grenade in the stomach was a nuisance as it made getting about rather difficult, but he could still keep up with his men so there was no need to go back. As to the second wound, ‘The bullet’, he explained, ‘has passed straight through my shoulder so it causes me no inconvenience!’ No wonder the Japanese never broke through. When, a little time afterwards, I wished to promote this very gallant officer to command of a brigade, I found to my grief that he had been killed later in the battle.

  Heavy attacks on the 26th April were thrown back, although our forward troops remained cut off from Bishenpur for some time until the track was reopened. Fighting continued, and, having failed in direct assaults, the enemy resorted to large-scale infiltration. In the first half of May, too, the Japanese Air Force made some of its rare appearances in strength. Besides bombing and strafing our airfields, about twenty-five Zeros attacked Bishenpur on the 6th and again on the 10th May. On the latter day our anti-aircraft guns took heavy toll and the visits were not repeated. The Japanese had managed to get into Potsangbam—the ‘Pots and Pans’ of the British soldier—only two miles south of Bishenpur. Potsangbam, like many villages in the plain, was intersected by high banks and belts of trees, which hampered tank movement and provided admirable positions for defence. Heavy fighting by 32 and 63 Brigade was needed, with lavish air support from the fighters of 221 Group and the bombers of Strategic Air Force, before our men were able on the 15th May to winkle the enemy out. We lost twelve tanks and it was here for the first time the Japanese used their ten-inch mortars, one of which we captured. The situation around Bishenpur was still confused. The Japanese 33rd Division was living up to its reputation for being always dangerous, but it had suffered heavily. Deserters who came in reported that at the end of April one of its regiments was reduced from some three thousand to a strength of only eight hundred. The fact that even two or three deserters had appeared was a new and encouraging sign. We believed, however, that the division had since received further reinforcements and would again attempt something. It was not possible to say here, as we could on other sectors of the Imphal front, that the situation was stabilized.

  On the Imphal–Kohima road, the last and most important of the Imphal spokes, the Japanese 31st Division had cut the road thirty miles north of Imphal on the 30th March. While some of the enemy turned north and moved on Kohima, a strong detachment of their 15th Division came south towards Kanglatongbi, where we had a large supply depot. 63 Brigade of the 17th Division, newly arrived in Imphal, after its arduous withdrawal from Tiddim, was at once rushed up to the north to stop any further hostile advance. The depot was rather hurriedly evacuated but, on the 9th April, a fighting patrol with armour escorted lorries removing arms and ammunition; then the Japanese occupied it and large quantities of such items as clothing fell into their hands. In a series of attacks between the 11th and 15th April, in which our tanks, much to the surprise of the enemy, forced their way on to a steep narrow ridge covering Kanglatongbi, the Japanese were deprived of their forward positions. Gradually the enemy were pushed back, fighting all the time, and on the 23rd April Kanglatongbi was raided. On the 7th May the brigade was relieved by the 5th Division, as part of the re-sorting that Scoones w
as carrying out to reassemble his divisions with their original brigades, and joined its own 17th Division, to take part in the even harder fighting already described about Bishenpur.

  Briggs, as usual, wasted no time. His 5th Division now had with it 89 Brigade of 7th Division, which I had flown in to Imphal to compensate for his 161 Brigade that went so urgently to Dimapur. His original plan had been a wide right hook, with 123 Brigade from the Iril Valley to cut the main Kohima road well behind the Japanese; but the continual rain caused heavy floods which held this up, and, with his accustomed adaptability he abandoned it. Leaving 9 Brigade, on the east of the road, to hold Mapao Spur that had been such a hard nut to crack when he had attacked from the Iril Valley, he used 89 Brigade in a series of short hooks behind the enemy, while 123 Brigade, brought in by the direct route, pushed north along the main road. After brisk fighting, the supply depot, with a great deal of its original contents, was finally retaken on the 21st May and both brigades began to push north up the road. The situation on this spoke was well in hand.

  By the middle of May 1944, therefore, my worst anxieties were over. At Kohima the Japanese had been thrown definitely on the defensive; on the Imphal–Kohima road the advance had begun; around Imphal, Scoones could feel assured that, unless the enemy were greatly reinforced, danger from the north and east was unlikely. The Japanese 15th Division had been well hammered and was losing cohesion. To the south and west, where the redoubtable 33rd Japanese Division was being reinforced from both their 53rd and 54th Divisions, there was still the prospect of a last attempt by the enemy. Our command of the air over the whole battlefield was virtually unchallenged and, thanks to this and to the daring of our patrols, the enemy supply system was falling into confusion. Most significant, too, the monsoon was almost upon us.

  The more satisfactory turn that events had taken did not pass unnoticed in other circles than Fourteenth Army. The number of visitors at my headquarters notably increased. In the opening stages of the battle most of my visitors had been rather gloomy, a state of mind perhaps understandable, as India was full of rumours of disaster. Now, except that they believed Imphal was starving, they tended to optimism. They were particularly anxious that I should ‘relieve Imphal before it was too late’. Neither General Giffard nor I was as anxious as they appeared about Imphal’s power to hold out; we knew that 4 Corps would shortly take the offensive. The supply situation there, though tight—certain rations had already been reduced—would not become difficult until about the middle of June and not desperate until at least a month later. I therefore stuck to my date, the date I had consistently given for the opening of the road, the third week in June. There were not wanting suggestions from many sources as to how the relief of Imphal might be hastened. They did not all show a practical realization of the problem. One staff officer, not on my headquarters, proposed that I should push an armoured column, escorting supply lorries, rapidly along the road to replenish Imphal ‘as the Royal Navy had revictualled Malta’. I replied that to send a convoy of merchantmen, escorted by destroyers, down a canal both banks of which were held by the enemy and in which at frequent intervals there was no water—for the bridges on the road would be down—should not, I thought, appeal to naval tacticians, however gallant.