Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  In my own army, too, there were some changes. The 17th Division, which was resting in India at Ranchi, began to change its standard mixed animal and mechanical transport organization for a new one we had invented, in which all the division, except one brigade group, was completely mechanized. The remaining brigade was to be entirely air transportable. To achieve this, all its vehicles were jeeps and its twenty-five-pounder guns were fitted with the narrow ‘Jury’ axle which would allow them to be wheeled in and out of a Dakota aircraft. The scale of baggage, supplies, and ammunition carried was cut down, reliance being placed on quick replenishment by air. Incidentally, this reorganization was only completed in a last-minute rush after the division had rejoined at Imphal. When the 5th Division, having recaptured Kalemyo, was brought back to Kohima, and later Jorhat, to rest, it was reorganized in the same way. These changes were made because I intended, if things went well, to use these two divisions in a very mobile role in Central Burma. Even if, because of maintenance difficulties, it meant substituting them at some stage of the campaign for standard divisions, I believed it would be worth it.

  Another change affected me personally very closely. Steve Irwin, who from the formation of Fourteenth Army had been my Chief of Staff and to whose loyalty, brilliance, and imperturbable common sense I owed so much, was promoted Major-General and left me to be Commandant of the Quetta Staff College. If there he turned out staff officers approaching his own standard of devotion and ability, no man could have served his country better, but, selfishly, I was very sorry to see him go. I was again very fortunate as I was able to get in his place Brigadier ‘Tubby’ Lethbridge, a Sapper who combined the typical clear-headedness of an engineer with a broad humanity that made him a pleasure to work with or under. His sense of humour, which thank Heaven all my principal staff officers have had, and, wonderful to relate, retained, was perhaps more rumbustious than Steve Irwin’s, but equally unquenchable. He entered at once into the partnership with Snelling on which so much, including myself, depended. The experience he had gained during a long visit to the Australian Army in New Guinea made the conditions of our war familiar to him.

  On the 1st October, I had issued orders for the advance over the Chindwin. Throughout the month, while the 11th East African and 5th Indian Divisions were battling to gain Kalemyo, the two corps, 4 and 33, were assembling for the crossing. My own Headquarters moved from Comilla to Imphal, where we set up a joint headquarters with Air Vice-Marshal Vincent’s 221 Group R.A.F. Headquarters.

  4 Corps Headquarters during October returned from India to Imphal, but Scoones, who had stoutly held Imphal, was soon afterwards promoted to a command in India. I was allowed to replace him, at my urgent request, by Frank Messervy from the 7th Division, who had the temperament, sanguine, inspiring, and not too calculating of odds, that I thought would be required for the tasks I designed for 4 Corps. The 19th Indian Division, as yet untried in battle arrived under Major-General Pete Rees and moved up towards the Chindwin in the Tamu–Sittang area. To Messervy’s 4 Corps I had allotted the 7th and 19th Indian. Divisions and 255 Tank Brigade; to Stopford’s 33 Corps, the 2nd British, and 20th Indian Divisions, 268 Brigade and 254 Tank Brigade. 4 Corps I had ordered to break into the Shwebo plain through the Sittaung bridgehead and seize, by an airborne operation it necessary, the Japanese airfields in the Ye-u–Shwebo area. 33 Corps was to cross by the Kalewa bridgehead, when it was in our hands, and advance on Ye-u–Shwebo. If 33 Corps reached this area before 4 Corps, then the latter would be flown in to the captured airstrips. As soon as the two corps made contact, 255 Tank Brigade would be sent through 33 Corps to join 4 Corps. The Lushai Brigade and the newly-arrived 28 East African Brigade would push down the west bank of the Chindwin on Gangaw to protect the right flank of 33 Corps and our main line of communication to the bridgeheads. The 11th East African Division, as soon as 33 Corps had crossed at Kalewa, would be flown out to India.

  I was particularly anxious, if possible, to avoid having to seize Shwebo by an airborne operation. I judged it would be attended by considerable risk and would absorb a high proportion of our allotted air-lift, so badly needed for ordinary maintenance. I therefore told the R.A.F. and 4 Corps to reconnoitre closely the northern routes from the Chindwin to the railway, to discover if it seemed possible to move large forces on this axis. The reports were favourable and, on Messervy’s recommendation, I agreed to the whole of the 19th Division being committed to advance by these tracks. At the same time, I instructed him not to engage the 7th Division east of the Chindwin without my permission as I still thought it might have to be flown into the plain.

  The Fourteenth Army offensive began on the 3rd December 1944, when a brigade of the 20th Division led the 33 Corps advance by crossing the Chindwin through the Mawlaik bridgehead, thirty miles north of Kalewa. As this brigade splashed south-eastwards through waterlogged fields, the 11th East African Division was fighting hard to extend its bridgehead at Kalewa. It was not until the 18th that the remainder of the 20th Division were able to follow by that bridgehead. Next day the 2nd Division passed through, moving eastward on Pyingaing, the ‘Pink Gin’ of the Retreat. Almost simultaneously, 4 Corps in the north had begun their advance. On the 4th December, the 19th Division broke out from the Sittaung bridgehead with orders to take Pinlebu, some sixty miles to the east.

  To meet these invading columns, we believed the Japanese had in the river loop four divisions, the 53rd in the Rail Indaw area, where it was opposing the advance of the 36th British Division of N.C.A.C. down the Railway Corridor, the 15th some way south of Indaw, the 31st in Shwebo and north of it, and the 33rd opposite Kalewa. The last three had all been badly smashed in the Imphal battle, but strenuous efforts had been made to re-equip and bring them up to strength. Our intelligence estimated, correctly I believe, that their strengths were now: 15th Division, five to six thousand; 31st Division, eleven thousand; 33rd Division, over six thousand. There were, besides, a number of army units and line of communication troops, giving a probable total in the loop, exclusive of the 53rd Division, of some twenty-five thousand.

  Parallel to the Chindwin and about twenty-five miles to the east of it, running from the north to opposite Kalewa, was a well-defined line of hills from two thousand to two thousand five hundred feet high, the Zibyu Taungdan Range. When the enemy made no serious attempt to hold us in our northern bridgeheads, I expected him to meet us with covering forces on the defiles through this range, while behind it he continued to reconstitute his divisions and to bring in others. I looked for a hard fight on the Zibyu Taungdan.

  The 19th Division made surprisingly rapid progress. Two of its brigades followed a northerly track; the third, one roughly parallel but more to the south. Both routes would pass through the Zibyu Taungdan Range to turn south on Shwebo. This was the first time the division had been in action, but the troops, a high proportion of whom were prewar regulars, advanced with the greatest dash, led literally by their dynamic commander, Pete Rees, known to his British troops as the ‘Pocket Napoleon’, a reference to his size and his success in battle. What he lacked in inches he made up by the miles he advanced. Whether he was hallooing on his troops from the roadside or leading them in his jeep, he was an inspiring divisional commander. The only criticism I made was to point out to him that the best huntsmen did not invariably ride ahead of their hounds.

  On the 12th December, Rees’s headquarters was forty-five miles north-east of Sittaung, on the 16th, he had taken Banmauk, forty-odd miles farther east, and pushed a patrol on to Rail Indaw where it met the 36th Division, thus forming, for the first time, a connected front from the Indian Ocean to China. On the same day his southern column captured Pinlebu. The 19th Division was now well through the Zibyu Taungdan, and, while the Japanese rearguards had fought well, the irresistible rush of our men had swept them away.

  I had, a week before, begun to suspect that I had misread the Japanese commander’s intention. Now I realized I had. If he had meant to fight in the Shwebo plain, he wou
ld undoubtedly have held on to these hills with more determination. Since the beginning of the month, too, I had been getting reports, confirmed by air reconnaissance, that the general direction of Japanese movement in the river loop was back across the Irrawaddy, not forward. Then, too, the defensive positions captured by the 19th Division in the defiles did not seem designed for prolonged resistance, but for delay only. We had surprised the enemy by the speed with which we had mounted our offensive over the Chindwin, and by its strength and swiftness. It was borne in upon me that, either because of this, or because I had all along mistaken the enemy’s intention, he was not going to do what I had expected—fight a major battle north of the Irrawaddy. It looked as if this battle, like so many of mine, was not going to start quite as I intended. It was time for me to use a little of that flexibility of mind that I had so often urged on my subordinates.

  The fact that the first foundation on which I had built my plan had collapsed was, to say the least, disconcerting. The idea of crowding the whole of Fourteenth Army into the river loop, if the enemy were not going to wait for me there, was obviously not a good one. It could only lead to frontal assaults across the Irrawaddy, with the whole Japanese army free to dispose itself in superior force to resist, or, if we did get over, to attack us in our inevitably weakened state. My object remained the destruction of the Japanese army; I could never achieve it that way. Luckily, 4 Corps had only one division committed across the Chindwin, so I still retained fluidity; but any major alteration, to be effective, must be quick, and would in any case throw a terrific burden on the administrative staffs. The first thing to do was to discover, or at least re-estimate, what was now the Japanese intention.

  After the Imphal battle, there had been a great shake up in the Japanese High Command. A number of senior officers besides the Commander-in-Chief, Kawabe, had been removed. I knew that Kimura had replaced him, but, partly through wishful thinking and partly through lack of information about the new man, I had concluded he would have much the same characteristics and faults as his predecessor. In this I was wrong. General Kimura was to prove himself a commander with a much higher degree of realism and moral courage. An artilleryman, regarded with some justification as one of the most brilliant officers of the Japanese Army, Kimura was transferred straight from Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo to Burma. Within a fortnight of his arrival he had completely recast the plans for the defence of Central Burma. About the time Kimura took over, the Japanese forces in Burma were, to the best of our knowledge, organized in three armies, or, as we should have called them, corps:

  (i) Twenty-Eighth Army, under Lieut.-General Sakurai, already well known to us, was responsible for the Arakan front and, although we only learnt this later, the Irrawaddy Valley, up to the Yenangyaung oilfields. It had the 54th and 55th Divisions and the newly raised 72nd Independent Mobile Brigade.

  (ii) Fifteenth Army, under Lieut.-General Katamura (late commander of the 54th Division, who had replaced Mutaguchi, removed) consisted of the 15th, 31st and 33rd Divisions and, we thought, 24th Independent Mobile Brigade. It was responsible for the Central front, including the Railway Corridor.

  (iii) Thirty-Third Army, under Lieut.-General Honda, which held the North-eastern front, facing N.C.A.C. and the Yunnan Chinese, had consisted originally of the 18th and 56th Divisions, but we had also identified in this area units of the 53rd and 2nd Divisions. We were not sure if these divisions were complete in the area.

  (iv) Burma Army Area Reserve, we thought to be the 49th Division in South Burma, about Pegu.

  Kimura decided he could not, in their present state, risk the three battered divisions from Imphal in a battle in the open plain. He therefore ordered a gradual withdrawal behind the Irrawaddy, leaving only light covering forces behind to delay our advance, while he prepared for what he called the ‘Battle of the Irrawaddy Shore’. In that battle, by concentrating his maximum strength against the Fourteenth Army, he hoped, not without reason, to cripple us as we struggled to cross the river, and then, with the help of the monsoon, to destroy us as we limped back to the Chindwin. As part of his preparations, he reduced the Thirty-Third Army considerably by sending the 2nd Division back to Meiktila and transferring the 53rd to Fifteenth Army. He also removed 24 Independent Brigade to Moulmein. The 2nd Division and 24 Brigade came into his General Reserve which up to now had contained only the 49th Division. This Reserve could be moved north again by rail or road when required, and served as a precaution against possible British amphibious operations in Southern Burma. Later, Marshal Tarauchi ordered the removal of the 2nd Division to Indo-China and it was en route when our offensive across the Irrawaddy developed. It was an inexplicable order and Tarauchi must have reproached himself for it. Kimura was able to make these reductions in his Thirty-Third Army and in the Railway Corridor, as he intended in the north-east to remain completely on the defensive and, if forced, to withdraw slowly before the advance of our 36th Division, Sultan’s Chinese, and the Yunnan Force.

  Of course, the full extent of these alterations in Japanese plans and organization was not known to me for a long time, but the 19th Division’s advance had brought us the usual harvest of captured Japanese diaries, letters, and orders. From these and air reports we could piece together, reasonably accurately, what the enemy intended. My suspicions were confirmed; it was obvious that, wisely, they had decided to fight behind, instead of in front of, the Irrawaddy. My problem was now to cross the river first and defeat them afterwards—a much harder one than to defeat them and then cross.

  My staff and I, before preparing our original plan, had naturally studied several alternatives. Amongst them had been a project to pass a considerable force up the Gangaw Valley to seize a bridgehead over the Irrawaddy near Pakokku and then, striking east, appear south of Mandalay. This idea I had discarded because I was sure the Japanese would remain north of Mandalay and I should require 4 Corps there if I were to defeat their main force. The route to Pakokku was long and most difficult, but, after some hard thinking, I reverted to this scheme in a modified form.

  My new plan, the details of which were worked out in record time by my devoted staff, labouring day and night, had as its intention the destruction of the main Japanese forces in the area Mandalay–Thazi–Chauk–Myingyan. It was based on 33 Corps, with the 19th Division transferred to it, forcing crossings of the river north and west of Mandalay, thus drawing towards itself the greatest possible concentration of Kimura’s divisions. Meanwhile 4 Corps, moving secretly south up the Gangaw Valley, would suddenly appear at Pakokku, seize a crossing, and, without pause, strike violently with armoured and airborne forces at Meiktila.

  Meiktila, with Thazi twelve miles to the east, was the main administrative centre of the Japanese Fifteenth and Thirty-Third Armies. In this area were their chief supply bases, ammunition dumps, hospitals, and depots. There were also five or six airfields. Road and rail routes from the south-east and west converged on Meiktila and Thazi, to spread out again to the north like the extended fingers of a hand, whose wrist was Meiktila. Crush that wrist, no blood would flow through the fingers, the whole hand would be paralysed, and the Japanese armies on the arc from the Salween to the Irrawaddy would begin to wither. If we took Meiktila while Kimura was deeply engaged along the Irrawaddy about Mandalay, he would be compelled to detach large forces to clear his vital communications. This should give me not only the major battle I desired, but the chance to repeat our old hammer and anvil tactics: 33 Corps the hammer from the north against the anvil of 4 Corps at Meiktila—and the Japanese between.

  Time was pressing. The more units of 4 Corps that crossed the Chindwin, the more difficult it would be to get the corps on to its new axis. At a table outside Messervy’s caravan, near Tamu, I explained my new plan to both corps commanders. At this conference I made clear my intention that the forthcoming battle would be followed by a dash south to take Rangoon before the monsoon. This project, the taking of Rangoon, had been in all our minds at Fourteenth Army Headquar
ters for some time, and a good deal of examination and planning for its achievement had been carried out. It was first issued to subordinate formations in the Operation Instruction issued on the 19th December, after our meeting. In it I gave as my intention:

  (i) In conjunction with N.C.A.C., to destroy the enemy forces in Burma.

  (ii) To advance to the line Henzada–Nyaunglebin.

  (iii) To seize any opportunity to advance from that line and capture a South Burma port.