The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  On 5 March 1944, three Chindit brigades comprising over 9,000 men and 1,000 mules launched Operation Thursday, entering Burma in three separate places, with some landing by glider deep behind Japanese lines. This was far more ambitious than Longcloth had been, and was intended to cut off the Japanese Army of Upper Burma, threatening its rear as it marched towards the Imphal Plain. It was also hoped to cut the communications of the Japanese forces fighting against the Chinese armies in Burma under the effective command of Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff, the American Lieutenant-General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell. A fourth Chindit brigade had already set off the previous month on an exhausting land route from the Naga Hills, across the Chindwin and over precipitous, 6,000-foot mountain ranges.

  Within ten days of its launch, Calvert’s 77th Brigade succeeded in taking Mawlu, cutting Japanese road and rail links and getting his ‘strongholds’ supplied by air. Unfortunately Fergusson’s 16th Brigade, after a fatiguing overland march from Ledo that was to take over a month, was unable to capture the Japanese supply base at Indaw. Wingate’s Order for the Day for 13 March 1944 nonetheless read:

  Our first task is fulfilled. We have inflicted a complete surprise on the enemy. All our columns are inside the enemy’s guts. The time has come to reap the fruit of the advantage we have gained. The enemy will react with violence. We will oppose him with the resolve to conquer our territory of Northern Burma. Let us thank God for the great success He has vouchsafed us and we must press forward with our sword in the enemy’s ribs to expel him from our territory. This is not the moment, when such an advantage has been gained, to count the cost. This is a moment to live in history. It is an enterprise in which every man who takes part may feel proud one day to say ‘I was there.’29

  Tragically, an air crash at Imphal on 24 March killed the forty-one-year-old Wingate, who had possibly been warned by the RAF that sudden rainstorms made flying too dangerous at that time. ‘He died as he had lived,’ concludes one account of his campaigns, ‘ignoring official advice.’ Other accounts vigorously deny this, claiming that the weather and flying conditions were not as treacherous as has been made out. Like much else about his life, his death is surrounded with mystery and controversy.

  On 9 April the Chindits were reinforced by hundreds of extra troops flown in by glider in a daring operation. The conditions they faced were horrendous: monsoon rain that could turn a foxhole into something approaching a Passchendaele trench in minutes; constant attacks of diarrhoea, malaria and any number of other tropical diseases; ingenious booby-traps and the ever present fear of them; highly accurate enemy mortar and sniper-fire; inaccurate maps; leeches; bad communications; reliance on village rumours for intelligence; sick and obstinate mules; low-nutrition food and bad water; mile upon mile of thick jungle in which it could take an hour to cut through 100 yards; the abandonment of the wounded and stragglers. These are the factors in Chindit warfare that crop up time and again in the memoirs of the survivors.30

  George MacDonald Fraser, who was not a Chindit but who did serve in Burma, explained what it was like when two men of his section died in a jungle skirmish:

  There was no outward show of sorrow, no reminiscences or eulogies, no Hollywood heart-searchings or phoney philosophy… It was not callousness or indifference or lack of feeling for two comrades who had been alive that morning and were now names for the war memorial; it was just that there was nothing to be said. It was part of war; men died, more would die, that was past, and what mattered now was the business in hand; those who lived would get on with it. Whatever sorrow was felt, there was no point in talking or brooding about it, much less in making, for form’s sake, a parade of it. Better and healthier to forget it, and look to tomorrow.31

  Much the same would have gone for the Germans, Russians, Americans or Japanese. War is war and its personal, human element has changed remarkably little over the centuries.

  One problem that the Chindits had, as well as the enemy and the terrible conditions, was the fact that the US commander in China, General Stilwell, considered them to be merely ‘shadow-boxing’ and a waste of time and effort. Yet on 27 June, Mike Calvert, by then a brigadier, took Mogaung with his Chindit 77th Special Force Brigade supported by two Chinese battalions. After fighting for Mogaung for an entire month, Calvert’s force, once 800 strong, was down to 230 Gurkhas, 110 1st Lancashire Fusiliers and 1st Battalion the King’s Liverpool Regiment and 180 1st Battalion South Staffordshire men. They nonetheless took the key railway bridge, and thus cut off the Japanese 18th Division fighting against Stilwell.

  Acts of individual bravery were commonplace. One case was that of Captain Jim Blaker of the 3rd Battalion 9th Gurkha Rifles who had taken more than five hours to climb up to the summit of Point 2171 outside Kamaing, only to find it ringed with mortars and machine guns, which scattered his small force back into the thick jungle. ‘Come on C Company!’ cried Blaker, who charged forward until hit in the stomach by machine-gun bullets. ‘I’m going to die,’ he called out as he expired. ‘Take the position!’32 The Gurkhas rose as one with fixed bayonets and kukri knives and captured the hillside. (They did not have the strength afterwards to bury him and his dead comrades, however, and three months later a Graves Registration Unit found tall bamboo growing through their skeletons, by which time Blaker had been awarded the Victoria Cross.)

  The human cost of the Chindit operations was very high, but after the war Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the Japanese Fifteenth Army in northern Burma in 1943, stated that: ‘The Chindit invasions did not stop our plans to attack [India], but they did have a decisive effect on these operations and they drew off the whole of 53rd Division and parts of 15th Division, one regiment of which would have turned the tables at [the coming battle of] Kohima.’ Disgracefully, the Official History, written by Major-General S. W. Kirby, who shared the High Command’s distaste for Wingate, published only the part of that sentence up to the first comma.

  The last Chindits left Burma on 27 August 1944. Half were admitted to hospital on their return, but after rest and special diets the formation – once reinforced – began training for its third operation before it was officially disbanded in February 1945. The Chindits left an example of human endurance extraordinary even for a conflict such as the Second World War.

  Western accounts of the war often minimize, to the point of sometimes ignoring it altogether, the experience of China, despite the fact that fifteen million of those who died in the conflict – a full 30 per cent – were Chinese. It was the Chinese who held down half of Japan’s fighting strength throughout the war, and around 70 per cent of the effort was undertaken by the Kuomintang (Nationalist) forces under their generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, based at Chunking. By contrast the Communists under Mao Zedong were, as Max Hastings has put it, at best merely ‘an irritant’ to Japan.33 The Chinese experience of war was terrible: in the great starvation caused by the Japanese, Chinese people ‘hunted ants, devoured tree roots, ate mud’. In December 1937 the Japanese Army massacred 200,000 civilians and raped a further 20,000 women after the fall of Nanking. Yet the Chinese somehow stayed in the war, with the result that Japan had to divert vast forces to fighting in the interior of China, which she could otherwise have dedicated to the invasion of India, or Australia, or both.

  China had been at war with Japan since 1937, and in the two years after the fall of Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, that December the Japanese established control across much of China’s eastern seaboard, including many of her industrial centres. Russian support for the Kuomintang ended with the Russo-Japanese neutrality pact of April 1941, Japanese air superiority was near total, and the Communists would attack Chiang’s forces as readily as Japan’s. The Nationalists therefore fought a hand-to-mouth campaign until significant support began arriving from the United States after Pearl Harbor. Even then, the fall of Burma in 1942 meant that the overland route for supplies was cut off, and they instead had to be flown over the Hump of the Himalayas. Afte
r Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, US warplanes were withdrawn from Chiang, even though he was desperate for them. In any Allied allocation list, the Chinese, who had been forced back into Yunnan province by 1943, always seemed to come at the bottom.

  It was, as so often and over so many theatres in the war, to be air power that made the difference, in this case the China Air Task Force (USAAF Fourteenth Air Force) under Major-General Claire L. Chennault. With the ear of FDR but having to fight running administrative battles against General Stilwell, Chennault achieved much in China, albeit with minimal resources stretched to capacity and beyond. At the end of the war, Chiang was badly positioned to take on the Communists, but he had done the Allies a great – and largely unreciprocated – service by tying down more than one million Japanese soldiers for four years, who therefore could not be used elsewhere. The Chinese had not defeated the Japanese by August 1945, but they had remained in the field, which for a country the size of China was all that was necessary to force the Japanese to expend huge resources trying to defeat them.

  In January 1944 the Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo authorized Operation U-Go, a Japanese invasion of India under the command of Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi, hoping to forestall General Slim’s own advance into Burma, to close the Burma Road to China and, through the use of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, possibly to spark off a revolt against British rule in India. Of the 316,700 Japanese troops in Burma in March 1944, three divisions – the 33rd, 15th and 31st – were earmarked for the task, along with the (anti-British) Indian National Army, numbering more than 100,000 troops in all.34 Owing to a lack of supplies and a relative weakness in air power, Mutaguchi depended on surprise and an early capture of the gigantic arms, food and ammunition depot at Imphal, the capital of the Manipur province. From there he hoped to march via the village of Kohima to capture Dimapur, which boasted a vast supply dump (11 miles by 1 in size) on the Ledo-to-Calcutta railway, and which was therefore the key to British India. Certainly, Slim would not be able to recapture Burma without the stores at Dimapur.

  Slim’s plans to capture Akyab in December 1942 had failed, as had an attack on Donbaik in March 1943, and for all its splendid effect on morale Operation Longcloth could not affect the course of the struggle in Burma. In September 1943 South-East Asia Command (SEAC) had been founded with Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten as its supreme commander, and the following month Slim’s Fourteenth Army, comprising Britons, Indians, Burmese, Chinese, Chins, Gurkhas, Kachins, Karens, Nagas and troops from British East Africa and British West Africa, was also set up. The intention for 1944 was for Lieutenant-General Philip Christison to take Akyab with XV Corps, Stilwell’s Northern Combat Command to take Myitkyina, and Lieutenant-General Geoffrey Scoones’ Central Front to take Tiddim. Before any of that could happen, however, the U-Go offensive had to be repulsed. Although Slim was expecting an attack, he did not think it would come with such speed and force and as early as it did. The Japanese Burma Area Army attacked in the Arakan in February 1944, but was defeated by the 5th and 7th Divisions, which were airlifted to Imphal on 19 March. They got back just in time, because it turned out that the Japanese were only 30 miles from the town. On 7 March 1944 the Japanese unleashed Operation U-Go: their 33rd Division struck in the south, a week later the 15th Division crossed the Chindwin river in the centre and the 31st Division, under Lieutenant-General Sato Kotuku, in the north. Slim ordered the 17th and 20th Divisions to hold the Imphal perimeter, while the 5th and 23rd fought on the Imphal Plain.

  Because of the mountainous Naga Hill region in the north, with jungle paths and narrow ridges 8,000 feet high, Slim assumed that Sato would have to try to capture Kohima with only a regiment; in fact on 5 April the entire 31st Division arrived there, after marching 160 miles in twenty days, bringing large numbers of animals both for food and for carrying arms and ammunition over passes and ravines and through jungles. Kohima was considered the key to Imphal 80 miles to the south, Imphal to Dimapur and Dimapur the key to British India itself, which is why it was soon to see, in the writer Compton Mackenzie’s view, ‘fighting as desperate as any in recorded history’.35

  At 17.00 hours on 5 April, Colonel Hugh Richards of the 1st Assam Regiment, some of whose rear details were stationed at Kohima, was informed by a Naga tribesman that the Japanese were approaching along the road from Imphal, and there was no time to waste if he wanted to defend the town. Sure enough, Major-General Shigesaburo Miyazaki of the 58th Infantry Regiment was approaching, his pet monkey Chibi on his shoulder, having cut the Dimapur–Imphal road that morning (the Kohima–Imphal road was to be cut soon afterwards).36 Kohima, a village 5,000 feet above sea level surrounded by peaks 10,000 feet high to the west and 8,000 feet to the north and east, has been described as ‘an ocean of peaks and ridges crossed by bridle paths’.37 Richards had been trying to fortify the place for a month, stymied by a quartermaster in Dimapur who would not release barbed wire to him as there was an administrative regulation forbidding its use in the Naga Hills.

  Defending the village perched on a ridge and soon completely surrounded by over 6,000 Japanese under Sato were 500 men of the 4th Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel John ‘Danny’ Laverty, some platoons of the Assam Rifles and Shere Regiment, a small detachment from the 1st Assam Regiment and some recruits from the Royal Nepalese Army, numbering around a thousand in total.38 The 1,500 non-combatant civilians proved a problem: although the tiny area the British Commonwealth forces were defending – effectively a triangle 700 by 900 by 1,100 yards – was well supplied with food and ammunition, the Japanese cut off its water supply early on in the siege, so that water had to be severely rationed. Despite his formidable advantage in numbers at Kohima, Sato had little faith in the success of U-Go in general. On the eve of his attack, he drank a glass of champagne with his divisional officers, telling them: ‘I’ll take this opportunity, gentlemen, of making something quite clear to you. Miracles apart, every one of you is likely to lose his life in this operation. It isn’t simply a question of the enemy’s bullets. You must be prepared for death by starvation in these mountain fastnesses.’39 The Japanese obviously did pep-talks differently.

  What happened next rates with the great sieges of British history, such as that of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu War. The Japanese, having taken positions above Kohima, bombarded the force inside the perimeter at dusk every day from 6 April onwards, before attempting to overrun it night after night. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting took place, with the Japanese capturing more and more of the village as the dreadful fortnight wore on. Every building in the village – the General Hospital, Garrison Hill, the Kuki Piquet, the Field Supply Depot (FSD) and its bakeries, the Kohima Club, the Detail Issue Store and the District Commissioner’s bungalow – became a scene of death and destruction, as some held out and others were captured by countless determined Japanese assaults. Water had to be dropped in by parachute, and the defenders felt desperate when supplies fell on Japanese positions instead, so small was the perimeter target area. They felt even worse when ammunition originally intended for them was used to bombard them.40

  Scenes of great heroism on both sides were commonplace, though none perhaps outdone by the nineteen-year-old Lance-Corporal John Harman of D Company of the 4th Royal West Kents, who almost single-handedly cleared the tactically vital FSD bakeries of Japanese, taking direct part in the killing of forty-four Japanese, and winning a posthumous Victoria Cross in a series of feats that almost defy belief.41 ‘The actions were hand-to-hand combat, fierce and ruthless, by filthy, bedraggled, worn-out men, whose lungs were rarely free of the noxious smell of decaying corpses inside and outside the perimeter. Once the circle had closed, the wounded could not be evacuated, and were often wounded again as they lay, helpless, in the restricted space available to the frantically overworked medical officers.’42

  With front lines sometimes only 15 yards from each other, as close as anything seen in the Great Wa
r, at one point fierce fighting took place across District Commissioner Charles Pawsey’s tennis court which lay between the rubble of the Kohima Club and his destroyed bungalow.43 ‘Where tennis balls had been idly lobbed by the few Europeans in more placid times,’ wrote Louis Allen, who served in intelligence in South-East Asia during the war, ‘grenades whizzed back and forth across the width of the court.’ It was true that 161st Brigade, part of the 5th Indian Division at Jotsama, kept up counter-battery fire against the Japanese shelling Kohima, but Sato had cut the road link at Zubza, which was only 36 miles from Dimapur, so reinforcement was impossible. The most dangerous moment of them all came on the night of 17 April, when the Japanese stormed the Kuki Piquet, thereby getting between Garrison Hill and the FSD, threatening at any moment to cut the perimeter in half, thus splitting the garrison. Richards had run out of reserves, and he and his men resolutely if fatalistically awaited the coup de grâce expected at dawn. Yet as the Indian Official History of the war states, ‘The final vicious assault did not come.’44 The Japanese, as exhausted and as hungry as the defenders, failed to press home the attack.