The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  By mid-May the Chindits were in considerable disarray. Fearing even more powerful attacks, Masters flew up to see Lentaigne and complained bitterly that Brodie and 14 Brigade seemed to have vanished into thin air. White City had been abandoned 13 days earlier, so where were Brodie and 14 Brigade? Already the factionalism within the Chindits was becoming more bitter. It was no longer a question of pro-Wingate and anti-Wingate cadres, but brigade against brigade, with each one seeming not to cooperate with the next one. Lentaigne lamely said that he understood the stress that all Chindit units were under and suggested that if Masters found the pressure of the enemy at Blackpool too great, he should simply pull out. After the relative success story of Broadway and White City, Blackpool was proving a disappointment. The monsoon, thick churning mud and the gradual build-up of Japanese forces with heavy artillery were all making the position untenable. A further attack on 17 May was beaten off, but then came a more sustained one a week later. Short of food and ammunition, Masters had no choice but to pull out, but the order to withdraw was given late, when the Japanese had already occupied positions forward of the stronghold, so that the retreating Chindits took terrible losses.72 Masters decided to head back towards the ‘Aberdeen’ area, and after a three-day march they made contact with the Nigerians and regrouped, now 2,000 strong. By this time everyone was exasperated by the continued non-appearance of 14 Brigade, and Masters was angry with Lentaigne also for his supposed indifference.73 The Kilkenny cats syndrome in Special Force was now threatening to tear the Chindits apart. Everyone was exhausted, morale was low, and even Cochran’s pilots were starting to complain about the nonstop operations.74 If the leadership from Lentaigne was weak, that from Stilwell was worse and verged on indifference. He had never wanted the Chindits under his wing in the first place, fearing that the Limeys would be insubordinate. He also disagreed with Lentaigne’s dispositions, particularly the order to abandon White City, curiously concurring with Calvert on this point if on no other. He also feared that if all the Special Force brigades moved north towards him, as Lentaigne had ordered, they would simply drag Honda’s 33 Division in their wake while he already had his hands full with Tanaka’s 18 Division.75

  In any case, Stilwell’s attention was now elsewhere, focused on the epic trek by the Marauders towards Myitkyina, the key objective of the entire campaign. If he could take Myitkyina and improve its airfield to all-weather status, the Hump cargoes would be dramatically improved. Moreover, building a road and pipeline from Myitkyina to Bhamo would see an eventual link-up with the old Burma road to Kunming and Chungking. Meanwhile the main Chinese force would advance down the Mogaung valley to Kamaing, which Tanaka had orders to hold on to at all costs. Although he had only one division against five similar Chinese formations, he hoped to be reinforced by Japanese 53rd Division, at which point he would counterattack. Sadly for him, the high command assigned him just two extra battalions, which meant his main hope for the defence was the monsoon itself. It did not occur to the Japanese that Stilwell would attempt a wide flank march on Myitkyina, because the steep Kumon mountains barred the way and even the Kachins declared them uncrossable.76 Yet this was precisely Stilwell’s intention. As he had earlier told Slim, the secret was to be kept from Mountbatten, and early in May he received implicit backing from Washington for his independent action. On 4 May the US Joint Chiefs of Staff decided they would land on Formosa, the Philippines and the Chinese mainland, thus highlighting the importance of Myitkyina to the wider US strategy and meaning that Stilwell had implicit consent to sideline Mountbatten and SEAC.77 Nimitz, Spruance and all the best naval minds had wanted to bypass the Philippines but MacArthur, who had rashly promised ‘I shall return’ when he left the islands ignominiously in 1942, had his ‘face’ to save. Confronted with a blizzard of rhetoric about MacArthur’s ‘sacred obligations … redemption of seventeen million people … blood on his soul’, etc., FDR gave in and let him have his way, partly in fear that the general might otherwise resign and challenge him in the 1944 presidential election.78 Stilwell accordingly prepared his assault force. Although the Marauders were in poor shape after the gruelling campaigns of the previous three months, he assured them that he needed just one final effort to take the airfield at Myitkyina, after which they would enjoy a well-deserved furlough. Only 1,400 Marauders were now effective, and Stilwell proposed that they march in the vanguard of 4,000 Chinese troops, using 600 Kachin rangers as their eyes and ears. Already his man-management was attracting adverse comment. While he lauded and cajoled the Chinese, he refused to praise the heroic members of Galahad force, mindful of General Pershing’s dictum that American troops should always fight without being wheedled, coaxed or cosseted. His coldness and insouciance were the beginning of an alienation between him and the Marauders that would end in their hating him.79

  On 28 April the 6,000-strong assault force set out for Myitkyina under the command of Frank Merrill, who had made a miraculous (it turned out to be temporary) recovery from his heart attack. The going was every bit as difficult as the Kachins had predicted. The Marauders and Chinese slogged over precipitous slopes in the monsoon rains, regularly losing mules and their loads as they toppled over cliff edges into deep gorges or simply sank down dead with exhaustion. The Marauders later claimed that dealing with the mules was far more onerous than fighting the enemy. Climbing up to 6,000 feet, then descending, then ascending again often in the teeth of bitterly cold winds, they eliminated small Japanese garrisons in mountain villages as they went. Clambering and crawling, often on hands and knees, they painstakingly cut steps into the steepest, muddiest ascents. With constant heavy rain, they sometimes made no more than four or five miles all day. Two of the teams ran out of rations and had to wait at prearranged clearings for an airdrop. Still the Marauders plodded on, sustained by the thought that after a short battle they would all be going home.80 They had one great advantage that the Chindits never had, in the shape of a good number of Nisei (Japanese-American) soldiers who knew the language and OSS operatives who were able to tap Tanaka’s phones and learn his battle plans. This was yet another example of the overwhelming Allied superiority over the Japanese in intelligence of all kinds – signals, disinformation, espionage.81 Finally, on 14 May, Merrill sent Stilwell the signal that they were 48 hours from their target; the Kachins had reported that there were no more than 700 Japanese at Myitkyina and they were totally unprepared. The 24-hour codeword STRAWBERRY SUNDAE was transmitted on 15 May, and then, two days later, the codeword Stilwell had been waiting for – IN THE RING – which meant that the attack was starting. The Marauders launched their assault on the airfield at 10 a.m. on 17 May, and 50 minutes later it was entirely in their hands. The jubilant codeword MERCHANT OF VENICE was sent. Stilwell enjoyed an ecstatic moment of triumph. ‘Will this burn up the Limeys!’ he wrote jubilantly in his diary.82 Next morning he arrived at the airstrip with 12 reporters. He and Merrill hugged each other with joy before Stilwell departed, confident that the town itself would fall within hours.

  Yet this was to be the classic case of hubris followed by nemesis. The seizure of the airfield should have been followed by the fall of Myitkyina itself, but the town proceeded to hold out for another 10 weeks, even though in the first few days they did have just 700 men to pit against Merrill’s nominal strength of 6,000. As so often happens, several things went wrong at once. Most of the Marauders were no longer battleworthy, many of them suffering from scrub typhus, foot rot, jungle sores and dysentery – ‘a pitiful but splendid sight’, as Merrill called them,83 and those who were still effective took the line that their task was over: they had taken the airfield and were now due furlough as promised. Merrill therefore sent the Chinese troops to take the town, but this operation turned into fiasco when two of their battalions ended up fighting a pitched battle with each other on the 18th and did exactly the same thing next day, with the additional refinement that a third battalion joined in. When it turned out that no detailed plans of any kind had been made to take Myi
tkyina town, Merrill called for reinforcements urgently. Instead of infantry, Stilwell sent engineers and anti-aircraft guns, reasoning that the essential thing was to hold the airfield.84 With Stilwell ignoring his pleas and the Chinese engaging in fratricide, Merrill succumbed to another heart attack on the 19th. His place was taken by Brigadier General Hayden Boatner, Stilwell’s chief of staff, who turned out to be a hopeless field commander. Worst of all, Stilwell was offered the fresh troops of the British 36th Division, but pigheadedly turned down the offer, as he did not want to be beholden to the Limeys; Myitkyina, in his view, had to be an all-American operation.85 Stilwell would hear no excuses about how exhausted the Marauders were; in his view their failure meant they were lazy, disaffected or ‘yellow’ – one of his perennial obsessions. He insisted on rousting out the seriously ill from hospital and getting them back on the front line, and pressed his engineers into combat roles, at which they proved useless.86 Another piece of ‘treachery’ (in his view) was that one of his most talented officers, Colonel Charles Hunter, braved his wrath by sending in a hard-hitting report stressing that the Marauders were at the end of their tether and particularly disillusioned by the favouritism shown by Stilwell’s officers to the Chinese.87 While all this was going on, General Maruyama, leading the defence in Myitkyina, was building up his strength; within a week, reinforcements from 56 Division on the Salween front had arrived to swell his numbers to 3,000, and shortly afterwards another detachment pushed the tally up to 4,500.

  The failure to take Myitkyina town after the walkover victory at the airfield turned into one of Stilwell’s greatest humiliations. But in the first heady 48 hours he saw only a great victory, as did the rest of the world. Mountbatten was stupefied to learn of the Marauders’ exploit when he did not even know Stilwell was aiming at Myitkyina, and his fury deepened when a signal arrived from Churchill demanding to know how ‘the Americans by a brilliant feat have landed us in Myitkyina’.88 Mountbatten had to suppress his anger and send Stilwell a congratulatory order of the day: ‘By the boldness of your leadership you have taken an enemy completely by surprise and achieved an outstanding success by seizing the Myitkyina airfield.’ After describing the crossing of the Kumon mountains as ‘a feat which will live in military history’, he tried to rationalise his own humiliation by claiming that the Chindit destruction of Japanese communications had made the exploit possible – a tall story, as he must have known. Mountbatten also used one of his most cherished ploys: taking the credit for all the bright ideas and great achievements of his generals. He wrote to his daughter: ‘Isn’t the news of the capture of Myitkyina airfield great? It is one of my most interesting fronts, commanded by my deputy General Stilwell.’89 Despite the tribulations to come, the operation had momentous consequences. Long-term, it shortened the Hump route. Between May and October 1944, 14,000 transport planes took off from the airfield bearing 40,000 tons of supplies to China.90 Any thought of a seaborne invasion of Sumatra was permanently shelved, making Mountbatten’s move to Kandy an even more absurd and unnecessary extravagance. And the convergence of Myitkyina with the victory at Kohima-Imphal meant that Slim would go on to greater things – an interesting historical irony in light of the fact that the overland Allied invasion of central and southern Burma was about to be shelved permanently until the Japanese launched U-GO. Possibly the greatest beneficiary of all these fluke occurrences was Mountbatten. The man who had no interest in crossing the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy and instead wanted to nibble round the edges with amphibious operations ended up as Earl Mountbatten of Burma, as if he had masterminded the entire operation from the beginning.91

  One of the most dramatic impacts of the congruence of Myitkyina and Kohima-Imphal was on the attitude of Chiang Kai-shek. Since the beginning of the year FDR had been pressing Chiang hard to commit Y-force, which still languished in idleness on the Chinese side of the border. The generalissimo gave his now-clichéd answer: that China was too weak to undertake a major campaign, being at once under threat from the Japanese in the east of the country and the Communists in the north.92 Even Roosevelt could see that this was disingenuous, since in addition to outnumbering the Japanese along the Salween front by about ten to one, the generalissimo had 400,000 troops facing Mao’s Communists. Faced by blatant mendacity, he sent back a dusty reply. Marshall urged him to go further and tell Chiang that unless Y-force was sent into action, Lend-Lease would be cut off immediately. As ever, this was a psychological bridge too far for FDR. When he received another bland message from Chungking, he sent Chiang his sharpest message yet, but still stopping short of the ‘or else no Lend-Lease’ proviso Marshall wanted. Chiang predictably took FDR’s reproof as loss of ‘face’ and did not reply. Roosevelt then took Marshall off the leash, and the President’s chief of staff finally sent the rocket he had always wanted to deliver to Chungking.93 Shocked into action, Chiang with much fanfare ordered Y-force into action, but delayed it behind the scenes. Yet when the British relieved Kohima on 20 April, he was genuinely impressed and gave the nod to his commanders to proceed in earnest but slowly – festina lente, to adopt the famous slogan of the emperor Augustus. It was only when the sensational news of the seizure of Myitkyina airfield came in in the third week of May that the generalissimo finally took his foot off the brake. Y-force turned out to be 115,000 men short of the official complement; Chiang promised 95,000 replacements, but only 23,000 arrived.94 Nonetheless, General Wei Li-huang was eager to see action after so much enforced idleness. Going much faster than in the generalissimo’s original timetable, he directed the crossing by 32,000 Chinese troops on rubber boats and bamboo rafts of the 60-foot-deep Salween, a maelstrom of treacherous whirlpools. One Chinese observer claimed that such an exploit had not been achieved by Chinese armies in 1,000 years.95 Once over the gorges and into the 10,000-foot Kaoliikung mountains – another range considered impassable – they swiftly overran the totally unprepared Japanese outposts. Elated, they pressed on along a spur of the Himalayas and took Lungling on 10 June, only to be driven out a week later by a fierce enemy counterattack. There ensued a two-month struggle for Lungling, a crucial objective if the land route from Burma to China was to be opened.96 Now both Y-force and X-force at Myitkyina were bogged down.

  Hard pressed in Myitkyina as Japanese reinforcements built up, Stilwell asked Lentaigne to relieve the pressure by ordering Calvert to take Mogaung. Tanaka’s original thinking had been to hold the 30-mile stretch betwen Kamaing and Mogaung as long as possible, reasoning that as long as his 18 Division was blocking Stilwell’s advance in the Mogaung valley, there could be no attack on Myitkyina. His tactics were to hold Kamaing until the monsoon, when he hoped the elements would do his job for him and the enemy forces would be trapped in flooded valleys. By mid-June the monsoon rainfall would be one inch a day and tanks would be unable to move. All the time he was walking a tightrope, as his men were on one-eighth rice rations and his guns limited to four rounds a day.97 This smoke-and-mirrors act was to some extent duplicated in Calvert’s 77 Brigade, though unlike the Japanese, they received airdrops. However, Tanaka’s carefully laid plans began to unravel when the Marauders arrived at Myitkyina like a thunderbolt. On 27 May Lentaigne signalled Calvert to take Mogaung; ‘Mad Mike’ replied that he hoped to have completed the job by 5 June. This was no more than a pious hope. From the very beginning of his trek to Mogaung, Calvert ran into far heavier resistance than expected. In ferocious fighting to seize the Mogaung bridge, the Chindits were at first thrown back, losing 130 killed and wounded, and prevailed only by calling up massive air strikes.98 When Major Archie Wavell, the viceroy’s son, was not flown out immediately when wounded, as ordered, a furious Lentaigne threatened Calvert with dismissal.99 But Calvert had more pressing problems than another row with Lentaigne. His own men in 77 Brigade were suffering grievously in the chaos of the monsoon. Men soaked and shivering slithered through mud; packs doubled their weight in the wet; the rain made jungle tracks impassable and the mists made it easy for units to get los
t: one detachment was said to have spent three days crawling around in mud before finding itself back where it started. The monsoon had a multiplier effect on diseases, especially malaria and dysentery, but the Chindits found the worst enemy was scrub typhus, which killed large numbers of both Special Force and the West African brigade; even those who survived the horrible malady were often left with such severe depression that they committed suicide soon after ‘recovering’.100