Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  Meanwhile a brigade of the 25th Division, pushing north-east from the Myebon Peninsula, gained touch with the leading brigade of the 82nd Division, pressing on for Kangaw. Caught between these and our troops already at Kangaw, the Japanese scattered and, in the first half of February, took to the hills to the east, leaving behind them over a thousand dead, sixteen guns, many vehicles, and great quantities of equipment. This series of actions, so aggressively and skilfully conducted by Christison, was a first-rate example of combined operations by all three Services. The Royal and the Royal Indian Navies had performed wonders of navigation, covered all landings, and, perhaps most marvellous of all, kept their scrap-iron landing craft at work. Their last service, which strained their resources to the utmost, was to maintain the force at Kangaw until the 11th February, when the Army was able to take over this task. The air forces, British and American, had been tireless in providing accurate and continuous covering fire. At Kangaw they dropped seven hundred and fifty tons of bombs in a successful attempt to silence and mask the enemy’s artillery.

  Less spectacular than the capture of Kangaw, but from my point of view even more valuable, was the seizure of the islands of Ramree and Cheduba, for these would provide the sea-supplied airfields that could nourish my army in a dash for Rangoon. Ramree is an island of considerable size, being fifty miles long by twenty at its widest part—a large area in which to play hide and seek with a small, but typically stubborn, Japanese garrison. A brigade of the 26th Division assaulted Kyaukpu at its northern end on the 21st January, but it was not until six weeks later that the last enemy fugitives fell victims to the naval patrols—and the sharks—as they attempted in small craft or oh rafts to reach the mainland. Cheduba, a smaller island to the south of Ramree, was occupied by Marines without opposition on the 26th January.

  About this time, General Leese ordered Christison to:

  (i) Develop Akyab and Ramree as air-supply bases for the Fourteenth Army.

  (ii) Clear North and Central Arakan.

  (iii) Seize a bridgehead at Taungup, over fifty miles south of Akyab.

  (iv) Open the Taungup-Prome road, if possible, before the monsoon.

  The first of these tasks was to take precedence over the other three. This was all, and perhaps more, than I could expect, and I was grateful, but I did not rely on the opening of the Taungup road to provide my army with another line of supply, certainly not before the monsoon. To do diat would require considerable engineering resources and time, but I did hope that a determined push up the road from the coast would detain Japanese forces that would otherwise be used against me. I urged that Christison should also press hard against the An Pass, as well as up the Taungup road.

  By the end of January, the badly battered Japanese 54th Division was in two widely separated groups—one about An, blocking the road east over the pass, the other at Taungup, covering the road to Prome. The Japanese 55th Division, which had taken little part in these operations, had already moved east and now had its main body in the Prome-Henzada area with some detachments in South Burma. The only hope of preventing that division being used against me was such pressure on the Taungup road that it would be compelled to face west again.

  The maintenance of 15 Corps, in spite of all Christison’s ingenuity, was now becoming increasingly difficult. To ease it, the 81st Division and the bulk of 50 Tank Brigade were withdrawn from the corps, to be followed by other formations later, but this did not deter Christison. He planned to deal with the enemy at An first, then, moving down the coast road to Taungup, to destroy the Japanese there, and finally to advance towards Prome. I applauded his resolution and urged speed—nothing would embarrass Kimura more than to have 15 Corps’ spearhead pricking him in the posterior while I punched his nose.

  For the An operations, Christison’s first step was, on the 4th February, to send the 82nd West African Division, less a brigade, up the water-course of the Dalet Chaung to approach the pass from the north-west. His second, on the 16th February, to land a brigade of the 25th Division near Ru-ywa, thirty miles south of Kangaw and twelve west of An. Naval and air support was on this occasion supplemented by a medium battery secretly landed on a small island off shore. Next day, the village of Ru-wya was captured, but on the 19th the enemy put in the usual savage counter-attack, at the same time heavily shelling the beach-head. This attack was thrown back with difficulty, but further brigades were landed and preparations begun to encircle the enemy at An. In the first week of March, these moves were in full swing and going well when, as so often happened in Burma, they had to be called off for reasons beyond the immediate commander’s control.

  Around An, the country was the worst jungle hill type, and the supply of our encircling columns, hacking their way forward, could only be by air drop. At this moment the Meiktila-Mandalay battle was approaching its highest intensity, and its success, too, depended on air supply. My difficulties, as I brought more formations into the field in Central Burma, increased; so did my clamour for more aircraft. General Leese decided, therefore, that it was necessary drastically to reduce the allotment of air supply to 15 Corps and to transfer its aircraft to the main front. There was no doubt as to the wisdom of this decision, but it meant the abandonment of the An operations at once and of others later. All brigades of the 82nd Division were ordered back to the coast and the 25th Division to Akyab.

  In spite of this undeserved disappointment, Christison valiantly tried to carry out his remaining tasks with the transport, mainly sea, remaining to him. He landed a brigade of his 26th Division at Letpan, some thirty-five miles north of Taungup. This brigade, followed by 22 East African Brigade, pushed south down the coast road, but was held up, five miles short of Taungup, by strong positions astride the road in difficult country. Christison knew as well as I did, the cost and futility of narrow frontal attacks on such positions, and again he had not the air-lift to supply jungle columns in outflanking marches. The Japanese, with a strong block on each, thus remained in control of both the roads from the coast to the Irrawaddy, and were free to collect, behind these detachments, what they could from the remains of their Arakan garrison and send it to join their forces opposing the Fourteenth Army.

  In actual fact, the enemy reinforcements thus set free did not amount to as much as I feared at the time and, in any case, it would not have been Christison’s fault if they had. He had skilfully and loyally done all he could to aid me; above all, he had secured the essential airfields which would enable me to go south. At Akyab, Ramree, and Cheduba he at once began to lay in the stocks my army would require and to build the airfields. All-weather strips would be required, and it was at first intended to make only this type, but it was found that, with their slower construction, they could not be ready until the first half of May. This would not allow for supply during my advance, so, while pressing on simultaneously with the all-weather fields, 15 Corps built a number of fair-weather strips. This greatly increased the work but ensured my supply up to the end of April when the all-weather landing grounds would take over for the monsoon. As may be imagined, I watched the progress of these airfields with anxiety, which changed to relief when I saw how steadily and rapidly 15 Corps was building them.

  On the Fourteenth Army’s other flank, the left, Sultan, although the return to China of all his American and Chinese formations had been demanded and two of his divisions had already gone, continued his advance. But it was necessarily at a slower pace and gave the Japanese the chance, which they took, to retire in good order and to divert troops to oppose the Fourteenth Army. As the action on the N.C.A.C. front was obviously slowing up, I asked General Leese in mid-February to let the 36th British Division revert to my command, so that I could use it in the Mandalay battle. He refused, on the sensible grounds that the loss of this active division would still further upset Sultan’s plans and there would be difficulties about bringing its American air contingent with it. However, in an Operation Instruction of the 27th February, he ordered Sultan to take the Kyaukme-L
ashio line, co-operate in the Mandalay battle, and then exploit south towards Loilem. If all that were done, I should be very satisfied.

  Meanwhile, Festing was pushing along his 36th Division. On the 9th February, in the face of determined resistance, he forced the crossing of the five-hundred-yard-wide Shweli River at Myitson, and, with the help of most efficient American fighter and light bomber cover, held his bridgehead against all assaults, including attacks by flame-throwers. After nearly a month of these attempts, and having suffered heavy casualties, the Japanese gave up the struggle and fell back south, contenting themselves with attempts to delay. The division went on to clear the Mong-mit area, to take Mogok with its famous ruby mines, and, on the 30th March, to join up with the American Mars Brigade which had reached Kyaukme.

  On the 1st April my request for the return of the 36th British Division was granted, and it bade farewell to the N.C.A.C. with whom it had served so effectively and in such good comradeship with both Chinese and Americans. Festing and his division, besides a good fighting job, had done a great deal to dispel the cloud of uninformed criticism that at one time threatened to darken Anglo-American relations. Instead of only hearing second-hand and often malicious stories, the soldiers of both nations had now seen one another fighting the enemy. The result was mutual respect. The division was given a great farewell by its American friends as it turned south-west to Maymyo to rejoin the Fourteenth Army. I ordered it to fly one brigade into Mandalay in its maintenance aircraft at once, and to concentrate the rest of the division as quickly as possible to relieve the 19th Division, in such clearing up operations as were still going on in the area Mandalay–Maymyo–Myittha–Ava. Unfortunately the 36th Division’s American transport aircraft were to be withdrawn on 1st May, and therefore the division would, before that date, have to be flown out to India. My use of this division could only be very temporary. Actually, I managed to keep one brigade in action until the 10th May.

  On the 7th March, the Chinese I Army, under my old friend Sun, captured Lashio, the Japanese falling back in good order in front of it. A few days later, the first regiment of the Mars Brigade was ordered to China, to be followed later by the rest of the brigade. The loss of the Mars Brigade, its only American formation, would greatly weaken N.C.A.C., but its maintenance by air in mobile operations required a greater effort than that needed for a much larger Chinese force, and Sultan therefore wisely let it go first. On the 16th March, Hsipaw, on the railway thirty-five miles south-west of Lashio and about a hundred from Mandalay, was occupied. The Chinese then sat down on the line they had reached, while the Japanese, who had withdrawn intact before them, now broke all contact and, leaving only a few scattered detachments to watch them, transferred their forces south directly to oppose the Fourteenth Army or into the Shan Hills to threaten its flank. When the Chinese halted, some two thousand five hundred local tribesmen under American officers took over responsibility for the safety of the Stilwell road against possible marauders.

  From now on, the Chinese for all practical purposes, ceased to take any part in the Burma War. To me, of course, this was most disappointing, as I had hoped that a Chinese push towards Loilem would have engaged at least some enemy and helped to protect my very vulnerable left flank. However, there seemed to be nothing that I, or apparently anyone else, could do about it, except to remember our motto, ‘God helps those who help themselves’, and to get on with the war without the Chinese. So with little hope of help on either of my flanks, I continued the main battle.

  When, in the last days of February 1945, 4 Corps gripped Meiktila in a stranglehold, the divisions of 33 Corps were poised in their bridgeheads along the Irrawaddy to the north and west of Mandalay ready to strike. The 19th Division, forty miles north of the city, after its struggle, first to hold and then to extend its bridgeheads, was straining at the leash for a dash down the east bank on Mandalay. The 20th Division, fighting without pause, had a deep, firmly held eight-mile stretch of the southern shore of the river, forty miles west of Mandalay, in which it was collecting to break out. The 2nd British Division had been left almost unmolested in the last gained bridgehead, some twenty-five miles west of Mandalay, and was now drawing up its tail across the river.

  The crisis of the great battle was at hand. Kimura’s gaze was fixed on Mandalay and its neighbourhood, his troops faced north and were marching hard to meet us there, yet he could not fail within a few days, perhaps hours, to awake to the danger behind him at Meiktila. When he did, I must prevent him, as far as I could, from reinforcing that area until Messervy had firmly established 4 Corps across the Japanese rear—the anvil to meet the hammer from the north. To do this, Kimura, just as he began to realize what the loss of Meiktila meant to him, must be struck about Mandalay till he reeled, so that he could detach forces from there only at grave peril to his Irrawaddy line. Then as disruption spread outward from Meiktila, 33 Corps must be loosed in an all-out offensive to the south—the hammer to the anvil. It was not Mandalay or Meiktila that we were after but the Japanese army, and that thought had to be firmly emplanted in the mind of every man of the Fourteenth Army.

  On the 27th February, an A.L.F.S.E.A. Operation Instruction was issued directing Fourteenth Army to:

  (i) Destroy the Japanese forces in the Mandalay area.

  (ii) Seize Rangoon before the monsoon.

  As orders, based on the Fourteenth Army Operation Instruction of the 19th December 1944, to achieve these objects had already been given to corps two months previously, no changes in our plans or dispositions were necessary. Operations continued at an increasing tempo.

  Rees’s 19th Division was the first to be slipped. On the 26th February one of its brigades (64) broke out from the Kyaukmy-aung bridgehead and bit into the foothills to the east, gaining elbow room for the second brigade (62), which next day thrust through the Japanese lines on the river bank. The two brigades then drove south, like a rush of waters over a broken dam. The enemy were swept away, leaving a few crumbling islets of resistance, to be engulfed later, as the third brigade (98) raced from the northern Thabeikyin bridgehead to catch up with the rest of the division. By the 3rd March, the 19th Division was in tankable country; on the 4th, Rees was able to report that the wretched 15th Japanese Division, that had been first shattered at Imphal, then bled white again in the attacks on his bridgeheads, had now disintegrated and was incapable of further organized resistance. Leap-frogging his brigades, next day he crossed the Chaungmagyi River, eighteen miles north of Mandalay and the last natural obstacle before the city. The Japanese had prepared strong positions about Madaya, just south of the Chaungmagyi, where the railway from Mandalay ended, but a motorized column of Rees’s men swept into their trenches with or before the enemy trying to occupy them, and went on to clear the town in street fighting. As Mandalay was approached, opposition stiffened but was still unco-ordinated, and, by dawn on the 8th March, one brigade (64) was fighting two miles east of Mandalay Cantonment, while another (98) with its motorized column had reached the northern outskirts of the city. Japanese resistance outside Mandalay was now reduced to small parties, roaming the countryside with little knowledge of what was happening around them, but in two places the defence was still strong and well organized—on Mandalay Hill and in the city itself at Fort Dufferin.

  Mandalay Hill is a great rock rising abruptly from the plain to nearly eight hundred feet and dominating the whole northeastern quarter of the city. Its steep sides are covered with temples and pagodas, now honeycombed for machine-guns, well supplied, and heavily garrisoned. Throughout the day and night of the 9th March, the fiercest hand-to-hand fighting went on, as a Gurkha battalion stormed up the slopes and bombed and tommy-gunned their way into the concrete buildings. Next day two companies of a British battalion joined them, and the bitter fighting went on. The Japanese stood to the end, until the last defenders, holding out in cellars, were destroyed by petrol rolled down in drums and ignited by tracer bullets. It was not until the 11th March that the hill was complete
ly in our hands. When, shortly afterwards, I visited it, the blackened marks of fire and the sights and stench of carnage were only too obvious, while distant bumps and bangs and the nearer rattle of machine-guns showed that the clearing of the city was still going on. Through all this noise and the clatter of men clearing a battlefield, came a strange sound—singing. I followed it. There was General Rees, his uniform sweat-soaked and dirty, his distinguishing red scarf rumpled round his neck, his bush hat at a jaunty angle, his arm beating time, surrounded by a group of Assamese soldiers whom he was vigorously leading in the singing of Welsh missionary hymns. The fact that he sang in Welsh and they in Khasi only added to the harmony. I looked on admiringly. My generals had character. Their men knew them and they knew their men.

  The other Japanese stronghold, Fort Dufferin in Mandalay City, was a great rectangular, walled enclosure, containing one and a quarter square miles of parkland, dotted with official residences, barracks, and other buildings including the fantastic, teak-built Royal Palace of Theebaw, the last Burmese king, its upturned eaves rich with carving, vermilion, and gilding. The crenellated, twenty-foot-high outer walls of the fort were faced with thick brickwork and backed by earth embankments seventy feet wide at their base. All round lay the moat, over two hundred feet wide, water filled and studded with lotus—a picturesque but hampering weed. Fort Dufferin, an immense edition of the toy fortress I used to play with as a boy, manned by Japanese, was a very formidable object to a lightly equipped army in a hurry.

  For the next few days, Rees’s battalions fought their way street by street through the city, suffering heavily, especially in officers, from snipers, until on the 15th the Fort was completely surrounded. The attack on Fort Dufferin might well have been a scene from the Siege of Delhi in the Indian Mutiny. Medium guns were brought up within five hundred yards to breach the walls, rafts and scaling ladders prepared, storming parties detailed, and an attempt made to enter through the great pipes that ran into the moat. On the night of the 16th March, in attacks on the northwest and north-east corners of the Fort, ‘Forlorn Hopes’ were repulsed by heavy automatic fire, and our men withdrew, after most gallantly rescuing their wounded. On the 18th and 19th, four separate attempts to cross the moat failed. Such attacks threatened to become expensive, so a more modern aspect was given to the siege by aircraft attacks on the walls. The interior of the Fort had been bombed on the 13th, and serious attempts to breach the walls with 500-pound bombs began on the 16th. The bombs, like the 5.5-inch shells, only damaged the outer face; the great bank of earth behind was unbreached. Recourse was then had to skip bombing, when Mitchell bombers, flying low, tried to drop 2,000-pound bombs on the waters of the moat so that they would bounce into the walls. After several days of these attacks a small breach some fifteen feet wide, up which troops might scramble was made, but the assault would have been hazardous and certainly costly. I was, therefore, against it, as we could now by-pass the Fort, and its eventual capture was inevitable, more indeed a matter of news value than military advantage. I was prepared to wait.