The Second World War

by John Keegan

  THIRTY

  Japan’s Defeat in the South

  In the six months of ‘running wild’ between Pearl Harbor and the expulsion of the British from Burma between December 1941 and May 1942, the Japanese had succeeded in what five other imperial powers – the Spanish, Dutch, British, French and Russians – had previously attempted but failed to achieve: to make themselves masters of all the lands surrounding the seas of China and to link their conquests to a strong central position. Indeed, if China is included among the powers with imperial ambitions in the western Pacific, Japan had exceeded even her achievement. The Chinese had never established more than cultural dominance over Vietnam, and their power had failed altogether to penetrate the rest of Indo-China, the East Indies, Malaya or Burma. In mid-1942 the Japanese had conquered all those lands, were preparing to establish puppet regimes in most of them, were also the overlords of thousands of islands which were terrae incognitae in Peking, and had joined their maritime and peripheral annexations to the broad swathes of mainland territory in Manchuria and China which they had seized since 1931.

  In crude territorial terms the extent of Japanese power even in mid-1944 was one and a half times greater than the area Hitler had controlled at the high tide of his conquests in 1942 – 6 million against 4 million square miles. However, Hitler held down his empire by brute force of manpower, deploying over 300 German and satellite divisions at the battlefront and in the occupied lands. Japan, by contrast, deployed an army only one-sixth the size, with only eleven divisions available for mobile operations. The rest were committed to the interminable, enervating and (apparently) ultimately irresoluble war against Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese hinterland. This state of affairs left Japan in a fundamentally unbalanced strategic position. Though the map represented her situation as strong, since she occupied that ‘central position’ in the theatre of war which all military theorists have argued is the most desirable to hold, logistics pointed to a different conclusion. Intercommunication between many of the Japanese strongholds, particularly southern China, Indo-China and Burma, had always been difficult if not impossible by land because of the mountain chains which define their frontiers. Intercommunication by sea was wearisome and increasingly perilous because of the bold and effective depredations of the American submarine captains. Intercommunication between the Pacific and East Indian islands was menaced both by submarines and by American airpower, land- or carrier-based. Finally the Japanese army in China itself was effectively immobilised by the size of the country, its units committed to pacification or occupation – in which they were assisted by thousands of so-called ‘puppet’ Chinese troops belonging to the bogus government of Wang Ching-wei, set up in 1939 – and only rarely freed to undertake offensive operations against the Chinese armies proper.

  Those armies belonged to two hostile camps, the army of the legitimate Kuomintang government commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, and the communist army of Mao Zedong. By a pre-war truce they had agreed to fight the Japanese instead of each other, but the truce was often broken, while the communist army was certainly more interested in letting Chiang’s troops exhaust themselves in battle with the foreign enemy than in helping them to victory. Their actions were quite unco-ordinated, in any case, for Mao’s base was in the distant north-west, around Yenan in the great bend of the Yellow River beyond the Wall where rivals to the central government had traditionally established themselves, while Chiang had been driven into the deep south, around his emergency capital of Chungking, 500 miles away. Between the two seethed the remnants of the warlord armies which had carved out their territories after the collapse of the empire in 1911; the Japanese made accommodations with them and also recruited from them puppet troops.

  To both the warlord and puppet armies Chiang’s was militarily superior – but only barely so. In 1943 it was theoretically 324 divisions strong and therefore the largest army in the world, but in reality it consisted of only twenty-three properly equipped divisions, and those were small ones of only 10,000 men. For their equipment and supplies, moreover, they depended entirely on the Americans, who in turn depended upon the British to provide them with facilities to fly transport aircraft from India into southern China over ‘the Hump’, the mountain chain 14,000 feet high between Bengal in India and the province of Szechuan. These supplies had previously been delivered via the ‘Burma Road’ from Mandalay; but since the fall of Burma to the Japanese in May 1942 that route was closed. Chiang was dependent on the Americans not only for armament and subsistence but also for training and air support – provided by the few dozen aircraft of General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, originally the ‘American Volunteer Group’ of pilots and machines supplied to China by the United States in 1941. He was, moreover, dependent on the Americans for his armies’ cutting edge, since the most effective element in his command was the American brigade-size 5307th Provisional Regiment, to become famous as Merrill’s Marauders. The man he had accepted as his nominal chief of staff, ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, displayed an impatience with the Chinese that was exceeded in degree only by his rudeness towards the British with whom he was co-operating.

  The Japanese army in China, twenty-five divisions strong, was so successful in keeping Mao pinned in his ‘liberated area’ of the north-west and Chiang backed against the mountains of Burma in the south that for the first two and a half years of the Second World War in the East it was not under an obligation to mount mobile operations. It already controlled the most productive parts of the country, Manchuria and the valleys of the Yellow and Yangtse rivers, as well as enclaves around the ports of the south, Foochow, Amoy, Hong Kong and Canton, together with the key island of Hainan in the South China Sea. It was taking what it wanted from China, particularly rice, coal, metals and Manchurian industrial goods, was scarcely discommoded either by ‘resistance’ – from which any sensible Chinese held aloof – or by the operations of Chiang’s and Mao’s armies and, above all, continued to exercise by its presence in the country all the advantages of occupying the strategic ‘central position’.

  The Ichi-Go and U-Go offensives

  The Pacific Fleet’s sudden advance into the central Pacific dissipated Japanese complacency. Nimitz’s thrust was aimed like an arrow at the heart of Japan’s central position. Ultimately it threatened their control of the South China Sea – the Pacific ‘Mediterranean’ which washes the shores of China, Thailand, Malaya, the East Indies, Formosa and the Philippines – and that control was essential to Japan’s maintenance of its empire in the ‘Southern Area’. On 25 January 1944, therefore, imperial headquarters in Tokyo issued orders to General Iwane Matsui, the chief of staff in China, to undertake a large-scale offensive. The last offensive in China had occurred in the spring of 1943, when the North China Army had cleared the area west of Peking in Shansi and Hopei provinces. Now the plan was to occupy more territory in the south, with the object of both opening a direct north-south rail route between Peking and Nanking and clearing the south of American airfields in Chiang’s area, from which Chennault’s air force, which had reached a strength of 340 aircraft including strategic bombers, was harassing the Japanese Expeditionary Army throughout China.

  This Ichi-Go offensive was to open on 17 April 1944. Earlier in the year an associated offensive, U-Go, had opened in Burma. Curiously the two Japanese plans were not co-ordinated in time, objectives or aims – except in the general and favoured Japanese aim of confronting the enemy with a complexity of thrusts – whereas the Allied campaigns in southern China and Burma did in fact interconnect. For one thing, Chiang’s armies based on Chungking were dependent on supply via the ‘Hump route’; secondly, Chinese troops, effectively commanded by Stilwell, were operating in southern China with the object of reopening the Burma Road; and, thirdly, Chinese troops were being trained in India as a means to improving the quality of Chiang’s army. Nevertheless imperial headquarters did not order General Renya Mutaguchi, commanding the Fifteenth Army in Burma, to make an attack up the Burma Road to len
d assistance to the Ichi-Go offensive. Instead it directed him to undertake nothing less than a full-scale invasion of India, in an entirely different direction.

  U-Go was an operation to which Mutaguchi was wholeheartedly committed. Between November 1942 and February 1943 his predecessor, Iida, had successfully turned back a British offensive into Burma down the Arakan coast on the Bay of Bengal. A subsequent irregular operation, mounted by the long-range penetration Chindit forces led by their creator, the messianic Orde Wingate, had also been defeated between February and April 1943. However, Mutaguchi had been rightly impressed by the success of Wingate’s troops in penetrating the Japanese front on the mountainous and roadless terrain of the Indo-Burmese frontier. He feared that where Wingate’s tiny penetration force had marched larger Allied armies might follow. He also saw that Wingate’s route was one his own hardy soldiers could take in the opposite direction, as the best means of defending Burma, interrupting the Allied efforts to reopen the Burma Road (on which American engineers were working from a roadhead in India at Ledo), quashing Stilwell’s increasingly intrusive thrusts from southern China, and so indirectly assisting Ichi-Go in China proper.

  Mutaguchi’s offensive spirit was justified by the principle that the best form of defence is attack. South-East Asia Command, which had come into existence on 15 November 1943 with the dynamic Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten at its head, was indeed planning offensives of its own designed to re-establish Allied power in Burma. Among the operations planned was another offensive in the Arakan, a major offensive across the Indo-Burmese border from Assam to the river Chindwin, gateway to the Burmese central plains, two Chinese offensives into north-eastern Burma from the province of Yunnan, one of which was to be mounted by Stilwell’s Chinese troops with the support of Merrill’s Marauders, the other to be a Chindit operation into the Japanese rear at Myitkyina, at which Merrill’s Marauders were going to strike.

  Mutaguchi’s operation was therefore not merely an offensive; it was also a pre-emptive attack. For this operation the whole Burma Area Army, commanded by General Count Terauchi, had been reinforced, in part with troops from Thailand, in part with the 1st Division of the Indian National Army, raised by Subhas Chandra Bose from 40,000 of the 45,000 Indians captured in Malaya and Singapore who had shown themselves sympathetic to his cause. However, Mataguchi’s spoiling attack was itself preceded by another one, for in November 1943 the British had resumed their attempt to penetrate the steamy Arakan. On 4 February, therefore, the Japanese 55th Division was launched into the British lines in the Arakan, with a mission to disrupt the advance. Only with the greatest difficulty was the 55th Division dispersed and driven back to its departure point at the end of the month. Meanwhile the Japanese 18th Division was dealing harshly with Stilwell’s advance towards Myitkyina, behind which Wingate’s second Chindit expedition was due to descend by glider in March.

  It was in a highly disturbed northern Burma, therefore, that Mutaguchi opened his U-Go offensive on 6 March, when his three divisions crossed the Chindwin river to invade India, the 31st heading for Kohima, the 15th and 33rd for Imphal.

  These tiny places in the high hills of Assam had been centres of the tea-growing industry before the war. They provided no facilities for the basing of the large British-Indian army which now occupied the front and were poorly connected by road to the rest of India. Moreover, General William Slim, commanding the British Fourteenth Army, was preparing to go over to the offensive and was not in a position to receive attack. The Fourteenth Army, under his inspired leadership, had been transformed from the low state it had reached after the agonising retreat from Burma in the spring of 1942 and the humiliating withdrawal from the Arakan eight months later. It had not yet, however, fought a full-scale battle against Japanese troops at the peak of their aggression.

  Slim had nevertheless scented a Japanese offensive in the offing and was not wholly surprised by it. He therefore persuaded Mountbatten to coax sufficient air transport out of the Americans to fly the 5th Indian Division, one of the most experienced in the British-Indian forces, up from the Arakan front between 19 and 29 March, and he himself sent forward supplies and reinforcements from the resources he had been gathering for his own offensive to the defenders on the border. He also gave his subordinate commanders strict instructions not to withdraw without permission from higher authority. Since the British defenders stood fast at the key points on the mountainous Indo-Burmese frontier, without attempting to defend its whole length, the Japanese succeeded in their object of encircling Imphal and Kohima, but could not take possession of the frontier roads that lead down into the Indian plain. Kohima was surrounded on 4 April, Imphal the following day. The fighting that ensued was among the most bitter of the war, as the two sides battled it out often at ranges no wider than the tennis court of the district commissioner’s abandoned residence which formed part of no man’s land on Kohima ridge. The British were supplied by airlift erratically at Kohima, rather more regularly at Imphal. The Japanese were not supplied at all; diseased and emaciated, they persisted in their attacks even after the coming of the monsoon. On 22 June, however, after over eighty days of siege, Imphal was relieved, and four days later Mutaguchi was forced to suggest to Terauchi that the Fifteenth Army ought now to retreat. In early July imperial headquarters gave its approval, and the survivors struggled off down roads liquefied by the tropical rains to cross the river Chindwin and return to the Burmese plains. Only 20,000 of the 85,000 who had begun the invasion of India remained standing; over half the casualties had succumbed to disease. The 1st Division of the Indian National Army, mistrusted as turncoats and therefore mistreated by the Japanese commanders, had ceased to exist.

  The focus of the fighting in Burma now shifted to the north-eastern front, where the Japanese were holding their own with tenacity against both Stilwell and the Chindits; Slim meanwhile began to prepare the Fourteenth Army for its delayed offensive across the Chindwin to recover Mandalay and Rangoon. However, with the defeat of Mutaguchi’s U-Go offensive, Burma itself ceased to be a major preoccupation of imperial headquarters. Though the Ichi-Go offensive was proceeding satisfactorily in southern China – so much so that the American government had begun to entertain fears of Chiang Kai-shek’s imminent collapse – the situation in the southern and (more critically) central Pacific continued to worsen. In New Guinea, the fall of the Vogelkop peninsula in July was followed by the capture of the island of Morotai, midway between New Guinea and the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, on 15 September; the fall of Guam and Saipan was followed, also on 15 September, by the invasion of Peleliu, in the Palau islands, the closest point to the Philippines the Americans had yet reached on the central Pacific front. The invasion of the Philippines, which gave access to China, Indo-China and Japan itself, was now at hand.

  A timetable for the Leyte landings

  The extent and rapidity of MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s success had, however, so surprised the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their planners in Washington that the exact nature of the invasion was now once again a matter for debate. As in the European theatre, where in 1943 the chiefs of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander Designate had laid down a timetable for the advance to the German border which the actual pace of events then overtook with unanticipated speed, all sorts of operations which had once seemed important now faded into insignificance. In Europe events had made irrelevant the capture of the Atlantic ports, as points of supply from the United States for an American army fighting in central France, as well as the invasion of southern France. In the Pacific it was the capture of ports on the south China coast to supply Chennault’s air bases, the invasion of Formosa and the occupation of the southern Philippines island of Mindanao that lost their significance. Two of these projects cancelled themselves. The success of Ichi-Go in southern China had led to the loss of most of Chennault’s airfields near the coast, thereby making the capture of nearby ports irrelevant; and the invasion of Formosa, an island twice the size of Hawaii and def
ended by the highest sea cliffs in the world, was calculated to require so many troops that it could not be undertaken until the war in Europe was over. The attack on Mindanao was abandoned on 13 September after Halsey’s carriers encountered only light resistance in the area. He urged instead that a landing be made first in Leyte, in the centre of the archipelago, and that the troops proceed thereafter to the northernmost island, Luzon, in December, two months ahead of schedule. As this timetable suited MacArthur, who thought the approach of the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral King, over-ponderous, it carried his support. The debate had run between president, Joint Chiefs of Staff and operational commanders since 26 July; it was ended on 15 September, when the joint chiefs authorised MacArthur to begin landings on Leyte on 20 October.