by Frank McLynn
The retreat from Tiddim constituted what Slim called a ‘Neapolitan ice of layers’. What he meant by this was that the two Anglo-Indian brigades, 37 and 49, were pressing down from Imphal on to Japanese forces trying to block the road north, who in turn were between the retreating 17 Indian Division and its pursuers.13 There was a fierce battle at Tonzang on 17 March, where the Japanese came off second best, and more heavy fighting from 22–25 March along the high ridges lining the road, with the same result, justifying Yanakida’s complaint that he had not been given the wherewithal to do his job. All the time divisional engineers were blowing up the road behind them in several places, also leaving 400 booby traps and delayed-action demolitions.14 When the rearguard crossed the Manipur bridge on 26 March, blowing it up once they were across, the worst was over. Only skirmishes were necessary thereafter to clear the road to the north, and on 5 April 17 Division arrived on the Imphal plain. Theirs was a fine achievement, but the fact remained that Yanakida had come close to encircling an entire Anglo-Indian division because of initial poor intelligence and dithering. It was an inauspicious start to Slim’s direction of the campaign, but valuable lessons were learned. The RAF had been instrumental in blunting Japanese initiatives, and it was already apparent that the Japanese had seriously underrated this factor. As Slim said: ‘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.’15 One can go further and state with conviction that the encirclement and annihilation of Cowan’s 17 Division would have made Japanese victory at Imphal a moral certainty. The one thing Mutaguchi could not afford was time. Because of the tenuous supply and logistical situation, 24 hours was a long time in his scheme of things. Even more ominous, could he but have read the runes, was that 17 Indian Division had shown no signs of panic. It was clear that 1942 was not going to be repeated. The ludicrous Japanese ideas of effortless superiority and contempt for their foes, as also their voluntarist belief that the moral can always overcome the material, had taken a serious knock.16
There was even heavier fighting in the south-eastern sector, which would develop into one of the main theatres of the entire four-month campaign. Gracey, in charge of 20 Indian Division, had been extremely reluctant to leave his prepared position at Moreh when ordered to do so by Scoones and actually sent in a formal protest.17 When Scoones repeated the order, 20 Division set about a task of mass destruction, slaughtering cattle and burning oil, destroying in all £1 million worth of supplies to prevent them falling into Japanese hands. The division then completed a 38-mile march north-west along the road through Tamu and Tengnoupal before digging in on the Shennam saddle, holding fortified positions overlooking the road between Tengnoupal and the all-important airfield at Palel, just 25 miles from Imphal. Here they would remain for the next two months, as the Japanese tried to force their way through the intricate network of hills and the British counterattacked; the struggle went on in a see-saw fashion, with hills being taken and retaken, changing hands over and over again.18 But now the southern front was stabilised to Slim’s satisfaction. Despite the numerous blunders that disfigured the first month of the Imphal campaign, Slim was always confident he would win in the long run. The enemy, it seemed to him, was playing into his hands. He had long pondered the conundrum about how, with limited manpower, he could ever get a credible army across the Chindwin into Burma. Now the Japanese were coming to him in a context where he could exploit every advantage of aircraft, armour and artillery, while the enemy was weak on logistics and supply. If only he could keep them in the ring until the monsoon came, Slim was confident that he could destroy the whole of Mutaguchi’s 84,000-strong host. He therefore allowed Mutaguchi to advance deep into Manipur province, planning to destroy him on the periphery of Imphal plain.19 His defence was constructed around self-supporting bastions capable of holding out for 10 days, and in the meantime he intended to flood in reinforcements and bring overwhelming force to bear. He had many winds of fortune at his back. The Japanese military culture, with its hatred of defeat, always led its commanders to take risks with logistics, and Mutaguchi was even more of a headstrong gambler than most other knights of bushido; it was entirely plausible that he would push his troops beyond the limit of their endurance.20
Of course Slim was taking risks himself, of which there were glaring ones. The first was that the withdrawal of 17 and 20 Divisions would affect morale adversely; the second was that the defences of Imphal might not be strong enough to withstand Mutaguchi’s furious onslaught; and the third, most serious of all, was that he would not be able to reinforce 4 Corps fast enough. When nerves of steel and extreme mental toughness were required, one could ask no better than Slim. Although the stress on him was enormous – shuttling in draughty planes between different command centres while suffering from a bad back, and keeping track not just of the multiple foci in the battle for Imphal but also of Operation THURSDAY and the closing stages of the Arakan campaign – he cultivated a surface of perpetual calm and unflappability. He had a favourite saying: ‘Those who matter don’t worry, and those who worry don’t matter.’21 Even at this late stage some highly placed Allied commanders urged that the best way to respond to the enemy onslaught at Imphal was a counterattack across the Chindwin. But Slim considered this advice mere armchair generalship, since he had already considered that option and discounted it. Both the Chindwin scenarios – fighting with all available forces on both banks of the river, or a full-scale invasion of Burma – meant confronting the enemy at its strongest where British lines of communication would be precarious. Only the battle on the Imphal plain allowed Slim to fight on ground of his own choosing, where he could be confident of eventually overwhelming Mutaguchi with hugely superior numbers and armament.22 Nevertheless, he went through some nervous moments in March, when he made three bad errors of judgement: not wishing to act towards Scoones as Noel Irwin had towards him, he refrained from ‘micromanaging’, only to find that Scoones nearly lost 17 Indian Division by his slowness; he completely failed to anticipate an attack in divisional strength on Kohima; and, it turned out, he had left the eastern approach to Kohima uncovered and undefended.23
The last was possibly the most serious mistake. To his everlasting regret, Slim failed to anticipate a thrust by 15 Japanese Division through Ukhrul, Litan and Sangshak. The 15th Division crossed the Chindwin near Thaungdut on the night of 15–16 March as part of Mutaguchi’s second wave, and advanced through the hills ‘like a ball of fire’, making for Sangshak and Litan prior to the attack on Imphal from the east and north. Travelling light and moving fast through the jungle, the Japanese reached Ukhrul late on 18 March, just 50 miles from Imphal. At the same time, 31 Japanese Division crossed the Chindwin in eight columns and spread out like the probing fingers of an extended hand, one column supporting 15 Japanese Division around Ukhrul, another cutting the road to Kohima north of Imphal, another aiming for Jessami, south-east of Kohima.24 The idea was that in the end the hand would close, and all columns would converge to take out Kohima. The thrust near Ukhrul took the British by surprise; no major attack had been expected in this sector, and there were few defences. Since the original defence force in this area, 49 Brigade, had been rushed south to relieve the pressure on 17 Indian Division, Scoones had to order in the 3,000-strong Indian Parachute Regiment as a makeshift defence. The Indian Parachute Regiment and one brigade of 23 Division dug in to defend Ukhrul, but after two days’ hard fighting they were flushed out by the enemy.25 The Anglo-Indian units then re-formed and made another stand at Sangshak, five miles to the south, where from 21 to 26 March ferocious combat took place. The fighting was at very close quarters, with mortars and mountain batteries blasting away virtually at point-blank range.26 There was a terrible bloodbath on 23 March, with the Indian Parachute Brigade, commanded by Tim Hope-Thomson, dug in at a position some 800 yards by 300 in the
crater of an extinct volcano. The Japanese attacked every night in a vain attempt to dislodge them, but events turned their way when a supply drop dumped most of the food and ammunition on the Japanese lines by mistake. The Japanese were very quick to decipher the colour-coding used on the drops (blue for rations, white for water, red for ammunition) and to anticipate likely dropping zones.27 With both sides at last gasp, the Japanese finally captured the water supply, and the remnants of the battered British brigade were ordered to disengage and retreat to Imphal. Despite the defeat and the loss of 600 men, the defenders had bought valuable time that the Japanese could not afford. The reason the reluctant Gracey was told to pull out of his favourite position at Moreh and retreat to the Shennam ridges was that he was in danger of being outflanked by Japanese 15 Division after its victory at Sangshak.28
Some authorities claim that Sangshak bought a vital five days that ensured that Kohima was besieged just too late. Certainly it was a taster for things to come, a bloody curtain-raiser to the later terrible battles at Kohima and Shennam. When the Japanese took the volcano, what they found stunned them: ‘The hill was an appalling sight. The charred ruins of the missionary church looked down on the burned grass and the few trees. Discarded weapons lay everywhere, and scattered shell fragments. The white bodies of British troops lay with the brown and black bodies of the dead Indians, exposed to the sun or lying in heaps in foxholes; corpses with bellies scooped out, or headless, among the mules swelling and heaving with putrefaction.’29 On the British side, at headquarters there was dismay among many senior officers about Scoones’s overall handling of the first weeks of the campaign, for it was felt that the defeat at Sangshak compounded his earlier errors at Tiddim and that the two failures together could have been decisive. As always, Slim defended Scoones and praised his coolness, but Ouvry Roberts was bitter, feeling that Scoones was a congenital slowcoach; others thought Scoones tired after four years of continuous service and temperamentally unsuited to crisis management.30 In any case, he had his hands full with Gracey, who, having complained about the withdrawal from Moreh, put in a further protest when he was asked to send reinforcements to Sangshak. Not relishing yet another march, Gracey asked rhetorically how men fighting their own Verdun could be expected to help in the Imphal plain also. Scoones replied with some acerbity that if the Japanese succeeded in penetrating the Imphal plain, Gracey’s defence at the ‘Verdun’ on Shennam ridge would become irrelevant.31
Slim and Scoones also erred in their assessment of Japanese intentions in the far north. They had not spotted the importance in Japanese thinking of the village of Imphal, set at 5,000 feet on a loop of the Dimapur–Imphal road. Slim, reasonably enough, thought that the seizure of Kohima would be attempted only in conjunction with the much more important target of Dimapur, a huge supply dump on the Ledo–Imphal line, that hub around which Allied activity revolved. If Dimapur fell, the province of Manipur would be indefensible, the Brahmaputra valley interdicted, Stilwell cut off and all overland supply to China at an end. To everyone’s surprise, the Japanese decided to aim for Kohima instead of Dimapur and to invest it with an entire division, not just the single regiment Slim was expecting.32 Slim thought this a fatuous decision by the commander of 31 Japanese Division, General Sato Kotoku, and even asked the RAF not to bomb his headquarters as he wanted to keep such a prize moron in play as his opponent. ‘It never struck him that he could inflict terrible damage on us without taking Kohima at all.’33 More sober judgement underscores that Sato did his best with an impossible brief. The decision not just to mask Kohima and aim for Dimapur – the logical one – was ruled out because the commander-in-chief in Burma, Lieutenant General Kawabe Mazakazu, did not trust Mutaguchi and suspected him (rightly) of harbouring megalomaniac designs to invade India. Operation U-GO had been ‘sold’ to Tokyo in the first place on the basis that it was a pre-emptive strike to disable 14th Army and make it unable to invade Burma. In Kawabe’s view, an attack on Kohima was still within the permissible ambit of a ‘defensive’ strike, whereas an assault on Dimapur could only be construed as a genuine offensive against Assam and India.34 The reason for the attack on Kohima in divisional strength thus in the end went back to the long-running feud between the two different cliques in the Japanese army. Sato and Mutaguchi were actually old enemies. In the 1930s Sato belonged to the Tosei-Ha or ‘Control’ faction in the army, which believed in collaboration with politicians and capitalists. Mutaguchi, on the other hand, belonged to the Kodo-Ha or ‘Imperial Way’ faction, which was anti-Communist, revolutionary and proto-fascist, prepared to assassinate politicians and businessmen if they stood in the way. Sato was convinced that Mutaguchi wanted to use the Imphal campaign to pursue his own fanatical dreams, and was not prepared to sacrifice his men needlessly for such a cause.35
On 29 March the Japanese cut the Kohima–Imphal road. By the end of March Kohima was cut off and Imphal itself under grave threat. Slim had always considered that superior airpower gave him potentially the drop hand at Imphal, but this depended on his actually being given the planes he needed. With the second Japanese wave not yet lauched, on 14 March Slim requested Mountbatten to divert aircraft from the Hump to fly in reinforcements; specifically, he needed 260 Dakota sorties to get the three brigades (9, 123 and 161) of 5 India Division transferred from the Arakan front to Imphal, and he therefore asked for 30 C-47s for the period 18 March–20 April. This was Mountbatten’s finest hour, when he demonstrated that he could be both tough and decisive.36 In February he had asked Washington for 36 DC-3s to cover the emergency in Arakan. FDR gave him 20 C-47s as an emergency measure but expressly warned he was not to ask for any more in the immediate future. Nothing daunted, Mountbatten diverted 30 Hump aircraft to fly in 5 Indian Division from Arakan to Imphal (though he had no authority to do so), then followed this up on 25 March by asking the Combined Chiefs of Staff for another 40 planes.37 Predictably this was refused, but four days later the Chief recanted under pressure from Churchill and sent the transports, though they were notionally transferred from the Mediterranean theatre; it was stipulated that the loan of the aircraft would run out on 15 June. There had already been contingency planning to transport an entire division by Dakota, and now the plan was triumphantly carried out. It took 758 sorties to transfer two of the brigades of 5 Indian Division to Imphal and one to Dimapur.38 By 29 March the entire 5 Indian Division had been flown in from Arakan. Mutaguchi had completely underrated the capacity of Allied aircraft to switch entire divisions from one theatre to another. With the first part of the air campaign a success, Slim switched the transports to the supply of Imphal. Five hundred tons a day were dropped – or 150 planeloads, necessitating up to five sorties a day for the air crews, as there were other calls on the transports. Until his reinforcements were fully in place, Scoones cut the ration at Imphal by one-third and sent most non-combatants back to India on returning aircraft.39
In this initial phase of the battle for Imphal, both Slim and Mountbatten began to lose confidence in Giffard, who struck them as either unwilling or unable to supply Imphal with what was needed. Even before the Japanese attack, on 5 March, Slim had asked for an extra division to cover Dimapur and Kohima, but Giffard worried about whether the railway could take the strain of transporting 33 Corps from India. Instead Slim was fobbed off with two battalions of 50 Indian Parachute Regiment and a promise of two divisions from 11 Army Group Reserve if it became necessary. He noted with acerbity that this ‘was by no means what I asked for’ and on 27 March formally requested that 2 British Division be sent to Dimapur.40 He and Mountbatten became increasingly concerned by Pownall’s slowness and lack of urgency, and Slim’s previous good opinion evaporated. Mountbatten had already been irritated by Giffard’s refusal to yield military precedence to him as supreme commander, and the Imphal crisis brought the latent conflict to a head. Pownall agreed with his boss that Giffard was complacent, arrogant and useless.41 In May, as the struggle for Imphal still raged, Mountbatten tried to persuade Giffard to re
sign on grounds of ill-health; when he refused, Mountbatten summarily fired him. Since a suitable replacement could not be found quickly, the absurd situation developed where the dismissed Giffard was asked to stay on as a stopgap. Surprisingly, he accepted, and Slim found him far more useful in this ancillary role than when he had been a superior officer.42 With Giffard sidelined, Slim and Mountbatten were able to plan the battle more effectively. The basic plan that 4 Corps would hold at Imphal under Scoones while 33 Corps (comprising 2 British Division plus the 5th and 7th Indian Divisions, which had been flown in from Arakan), under the command of General Montagu Stopford, would advance to the relief of Kohima and Dimapur. Even here there were some problems, for Stopford worried that if too many of his troops were thrown in to defend Kohima, there might be nothing left with which to defend the more important Dimapur. Slim agreed that this was a risk, but argued that the tougher a fight Sato had at Kohima, the more time the British would have to arrive at Dimapur. Slim appointed Major General R.P.L. Ranking to the immediate command at Kohima, with orders to hand over to Stopford and 33 Corps when they arrived in April.43