Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  I found Stilwell bitter and Lentaigne indignant, both obviously and very understandably suffering from prolonged strain. One or the troubles was that Stilwell, in his then mood, would not meet Lentaigne and really discuss things with him. There was too much of the Siege of Troy atmosphere, with commanders sulking in their tents. However, with me, Stilwell, after one or two outbursts, was reasonable and explained his charges against the Chindits. I had already seen Lentaigne and heard his version. Stilwell’s orders on the face of it were sound enough and it was quite obvious that the Chindits had not carried all of them out. It was equally clear that in their present state of exhaustion, after the casualties they had suffered and in the rain which made movement so difficult, unless given some chance of reorganization they were physically incapable of doing so. Stilwell replied to this by pointing to his Marauders who, he said, were still operating effectively. Without belittling their efforts, I pointed out that Lentaigne’s men had endured the strain of being actually behind the enemy’s lines for longer periods than Merrill’s and that their incidence of battle casualties, as compared with sick, was much higher. As far as his complaints against Morrisforce on the east of the river were concerned, I told him I thought it was a bit hard to reproach a few hundred men for not doing what thirty thousand had failed to do on the other bank. Finally, looking at me over the top of his glasses, he said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said, ‘See Lentaigne, talk things over with him, give his columns a chance to get out their casualties and reorganize, and keep his force on until Myitkyina falls.’ He agreed, and I returned to headquarters.

  I had hoped that Myitkyina would fall by the middle of June, but at the end of the month it was still apparently as far from capture as ever. It then became obvious that the remains of Special Force were not fit to continue operating throughout the monsoon. Admiral Mountbatten himself this time visited Stilwell and an arrangement was made by which two of Lentaigne’s brigades that had been longest in the field should be medically examined and all unfit men flown out at once—the remainder to operate for a short time further and then follow them. The last of Special Force would remain until the 36th British Division, which was refitting at Shillong in Assam, began to come into Stilwell’s command, when they too would be taken out.

  Actually it would have been wiser to take the whole of the Chindits out then; they had shot their bolt. So, too, for that matter had the Marauders, who a little later packed in completely. Both forces, Chindits and Marauders, had been subjected to intense strain, both had unwisely been promised that their ordeal would be short, and both were asked to do more than was possible.

  On the afternoon of the 3rd August, after a siege of two and a half months, Myitkyina fell. Some days before, Mizukami, the Japanese commander, had ordered what was left of the garrison to break out. He had then committed suicide. Maruyama, the original commander, had again taken over, and under his leadership the Japanese attempted to escape by night on rafts down the river. Most of them were intercepted and killed, but Maruyama himself and a couple of hundred did get away.

  The capture of Myitkyina, so long delayed, marked the complete success of the first stage of Stilwell’s campaign. It was also the largest seizure of enemy-held territory that had yet occurred. Throughout the operations the Allied forces, Chinese, British, and American, had been vastly superior to the Japanese on the ground and in the air, even without including the Chinese Yunnan armies. This superiority was only achieved because the main Japanese forces were held locked in the vital Imphal battle, and any reinforcements they could rake up were fed into that furnace. The Japanese had the advantages of position and communications, but even their desperate courage and defensive skill could not hold back such a numerical preponderance. Yet, when all was said and done, the success of this northern offensive was in the main due to the Ledo Chinese divisions—and that was Stilwell.

  1 In an account of this incident written shortly afterwards, but which I did not see until after his death, Wingate reversed his role and mine. In it he stated that he used these arguments to urge that the fly-in should go on and that I accepted them and agreed. That is not my recollection of his first reactions, nor in accordance with my notes made nearer the time. In any case the point is of little consequence, as whether Wingate persuaded me, or I him, the responsibility for ordering the operation to continue and for all its consequences could not be his, but must be Baldwin’s and mine.

  BOOK IV

  The Tide Turns

  JAPANESE INVASION ROUTES, BURMA 1944

  CHAPTER XIII

  HOW IT WAS PLANNED

  THE great encounter that loomed over the Central Assam front in early 1944, and which was fought out with relentless fury around Imphal and Kohima from March to July in that year, was the first of the two decisive battles of the South-East Asia campaign. Tarauchi, the Japanese Supreme Commander, and Kawabe, their Commander-in-Chief in Burma, both meant it to be decisive—and so did we.

  Their daily mounting shipping losses in the Pacific were beginning to tell on the Japanese. Unless they could score some far-reaching strategic success, their armies, strung out on a vast perimeter of conquest, faced slow strangulation. It was to Burma that their slit eyes turned hopefully. Here was the one place they could stage an offensive that might give them all they hoped. If it succeeded, the destruction of the British forces in Burma would be the least of its results. China, completely isolated, would be driven into a separate peace; India, ripe as they thought for revolt against the British, would fall, a glittering prize, into their hands. They were right in thinking that victory in Assam would resound far beyond that remote jungle land; it might, indeed, as they proclaimed in exhortations to their troops, change the whole course of the world war. Burma, for a space, no longer a sideshow in the global struggle, would hold the centre stage.

  Kawabe, knowing this, concentrated all his efforts on a great break-through in Assam. To him, the fighting in Arakan was subsidiary; its chief object was to absorb our reserves and thus prevent their use at the vital centre. On the Northern front he was determined to use only the barest forces necessary to slow up the Chinese advances from Ledo and Yunnan. Here he could afford to yield ground because, if he won in the centre, the north would automatically fall to him.

  For us, too, it was our great chance. With landing craft and shipping unavailable, we should have to re-enter Burma overland from the north. We were, in fact, planning to do so. Yet the topography of the country was so terribly against us and so limited were the forces we could maintain through the mountains, that any such invasion must be a gamble unless we could first wear down the Japanese strength. I wanted a battle before we went into Burma, and I was as eager as Kawabe to make it a decisive one.

  At the beginning of 1944, Lieut.-General Scoones was commanding 4 Corps on the Assam front. He was an informed, thoughtful soldier with a clear mind of the analytical type. My staff sometimes complained that he produced lengthy appreciations in which all factors and courses of action were conscientiously considered. I always pointed out that these appreciations could be re-read after the event and found uncannily accurate. A general whose appreciations can stand this test is not perhaps as rare as a politician whose speeches can equally bear re-reading, but such far-sightedness is one of the foundations of real generalship and it not too common a gift. Scoones had, too, a steadiness in crisis that was, for the battle he was to fight, an invaluable quality.

  In accordance with the current overall plans for the theatre, he had been given the task of preparing for an advance into Burma. His 4 Corps, of three Indian divisions, had for several months been gradually pushing forward to dominate the wide hill area from the Kabaw Valley, up which we had staggered in the 1942 retreat, to the Chin Hills, some one hundred and fifty miles south of Imphal. Under cover of this broad arc, roads were being built, supplies collected, and all preparations made for a limited offensive across the Chindwin River. The whole layout of 4 Corps area and the dispositions of its fighting fo
rmations were designed with the idea of our taking the offensive.

  The Imphal plain, some forty by twenty miles in extent, is the only considerable oasis of flat ground in the great sweep of mountains between India and Burma. It lies roughly equi-distant from the Brahmaputra Valley and the plains of Central Burma, a natural half-way house and staging place for any great military movement in either direction between India and Burma. The aspect of the Imphal plain had greatly changed since we had sought there in vain for rest and shelter after the Retreat. Instead of the dripping trees, sodden ground, bombed-out buildings, and muddy tracks that had greeted us, there were now orderly basha camps, hutted hospitals, supply dumps, ordnance depots, engineer parks, and wide tarmac roads. Camps of every kind and sort were dotted over the six hundred square miles of the plain, but most were clustered round the villages of Imphal itself and Palel, twenty-five miles south. These administrative establishments had all been sited, as was natural, in the most suitable and accessible spots for their various purposes, with the idea of protection from the air by dispersion, but with no thought of defence against attack by land. As a result they were spread over large areas and were almost invariably overlooked by high ground at point-blank range. In these camps, and scattered along the roads leading north into India and south into Burma, were some sixty or seventy thousand Indian non-combatants, mostly labour. The sprawling railhead base that had been hacked out of the jungle at Dimapur, a hundred and thirty miles north of Imphal, was similarly laid out and manned. As long as our intentions remained offensive and those of the Japanese defensive, Imphal and Dimapur were suitably organized; should the roles be reversed, these widespread bases would become a terrible embarrassment.

  Our whole situation on this Central front had another grave tactical disadvantage. Our only line of communication was the road our engineers had so magnificently built from railhead at Dimapur up the hill to Kohima, and on to Imphal. This now forked and we were laboriously extending the two prongs, one down the valley of the Manipur River and the other into the Kabaw Valley. All of these roads ran of necessity north and south, parallel to the Japanese front, and at no great distance from it. They, thus, whether we took the offensive or remained on the defensive, exposed a classic military weakness to an enemy peculiarly fitted and experienced to exploit it to the full.

  The three divisions of 4 Corps were deployed with two forward, one at the end of each of the roads to the south: the 17th Division, veterans of the Retreat, on the right about Tiddim in the Chin Hills; the 20th Division, whom I had had in Ranchi, on the left in the Palel–Tamu area. Between these two were eighty-odd miles of jungle mountains. This gap, in spite of the wild country, was, of course, a danger, but the corps had a frontage of some two hundred and fifty miles to watch and guard. Instead of trying to hold a continuous line, Scoones had therefore wisely decided to keep one division, the 23rd at this time, concentrated about Imphal as a striking force. The rotation of divisions between front line and reserve that this enabled him to carry out had excellent results on training and morale. In 4 Corps, also, was 254 Indian Tank Brigade, of two regiments only, one of which, a British unit, was equipped with Lee-Grants, the other an Indian one, with Stuarts. Both these types of tanks were already obsolete, but the Lee-Grant, if well handled, could meet the Japanese medium tanks on equal terms. The Stuart, however, was a light tank, limited tactically both on paddy fields and in jungle, which it was unfair to pit against the enemy mediums. But Cinderella was still at the bottom of all priority lists.

  During and after the 1943 monsoon, in a series of patrol clashes and minor actions, we had steadily expanded the territory under our control in the Tamu area. The Kabaw Valley was re-entered; the Chindwin reached and crossed by patrols. Roads were being pushed forward as fast as our meagre resources in excavating machinery permitted and reconnaissances for the eventual offensive being carried out. All was going well here.

  It was on the 17th Division front at Tiddim that the more serious encounters had occurred. When we withdrew from Burma in 1942 we left behind in their native hills a small force of Chin Levies with British officers. Here they had held a lone outpost of the Empire until detachments of the 17th Division, advancing again, had reached Tiddim in the December of that year. The whole country is a chaos of jungle-matted, knife-edged ridges, running up to peaks of over eight thousand feet, split by precipitous valleys and pierced from the Indian side only by the fantastic mountain road from Imphal that the troops themselves had built. Here, since May 1943, the 17th Division, at the end of its hundred and sixty miles of precarious road, had fought a small-scale but none the less bitter private war against its old opponents, the Japanese 33rd Division. They were, as of old, well matched, taking it in turns to ambush, raid, attack, and counter-attack one another. For the small forces engaged, casualties were heavy on both sides and the results attained small. The Japanese had up to February 1944 undoubtedly had the better of it. They had not only stopped the 17th Division from pushing on to its goal, the Chindwin at Kalewa, but had forced our troops back to some ten miles south of Tiddim. In January 1944, when the Japanese were preparing their final offensive that was to change the face of the war, our dispositions, on the front they had selected for the decisive blow, were thus two widely separated divisions forward at Tamu and Tiddim and a third many miles behind in Imphal.

  We knew the offensive was coming, for throughout January and February, besides the general reinforcement of the Burma theatre by fresh Japanese formations, there were increasing local indications on 4 Corps front. I had not at my disposal the sources of information of the enemy’s intentions that some more fortunate commanders in other theatres were able to invoke. We depended almost entirely on the intelligence gathered by our fighting patrols, and the superiority we had developed in this form of activity now paid a high dividend. In spite of the fact that our patrols were finding it more difficult to cross the Chind-win, the newly arrived 15th Japanese Division was identified along the river.

  Enemy activity and strength all along 4 Corps front were noticeably increasing. Documents, diaries, marked maps, and even operation orders taken from Japanese killed in these patrol clashes were being brought in almost daily. We had luck and a good haul of documents in one or two bold raids on minor headquarters. All these clues, painstakingly fitted into the mosaic of our intelligence at Corps and Army Headquarters, began to give us a general picture of the enemy’s intentions. In spite of our air superiority, the nature of the country and the Japanese habit of moving by night limited the value of air reconnaissance. We did, however, get three very significant items of news from this source. Our pilots reported that the enemy were developing the roads towards the Chindwin from Central Burma. Then they saw large numbers of logs being collected at various places on the east bank of the river and many camouflaged rafts concealed in the lower reaches of the Uyu River opposite Homalin, due east of Imphal. Equally significant, they located great herds of cattle, each several hundreds in number, south of the Uyu and near Thaungdut on the Chindwin. We knew that the Japanese had seized all cattle belonging to the local inhabitants, and it was evident that these herds were being driven to the river as supplies for considerable forces. Our ‘V’ Force agents also brought us stories of the massing of transport, mechanical and animal, even of elephants.

  Piecing all this together with our intelligence staffs, Scoones, whom I visited frequently at this time, and I were agreed that the offensive against him would be delivered by the Japanese Fifteenth Army under Lieut.-General Mutaguchi, with, as a start, three Japanese divisions, the 15th, 31st, and 33rd, an I.N.A. Division, a tank regiment, and other troops. There might be another division, not yet identified, in reserve. It was clear that the Japanese objectives would be, first, to capture Imphal, and second, to break through to the Brahmaputra Valley so as to cut off the Northern front and disrupt the air supply to China. We thought that they would follow their usual tactics of trying to isolate forward formations and then destroy them in detail. We
expected they would attempt with a reinforced division to get behind both our 17th Division astride the Tiddim–Imphal road and our 20th Division on the Tamu–Palel road. At the same time other Japanese columns amounting to some two divisions would, crossing the Chindwin near Homalin and Thaungdut, make for Imphal via Ukhrul. A Japanese regiment (three battalions) would, we foresaw, make for Kohima to cut the main Imphal–Dimapur road and threaten the Dimapur base. We calculated the offensive would begin about the 15th March. This was what we expected and, broadly speaking, our forecast proved accurate. The problem was: What should we do to meet it? It was obvious that we could not rely on the present dispositions of 4 Corps, designed as they were entirely for an offensive of our own. The two forward divisions were an invitation to destruction in detail. We could not, as we did in Arakan, tell them to stand fast, although cut off, and we would supply them by air. The second half of the Arakan pattern for victory—the relieving force—was, if not absent, at least not large enough. Our third division could go to the help of only one of the forward divisions and in doing so would leave Imphal wide open to the enemy. There remained three broad alternatives: