Before leaving their post at Colombo on the island of Ceylon, the code-breaking crew had tried to avert a naval disaster. On March 28, 1942, they had broken a Japanese naval code foretelling a carrier-based air raid on the harbor at Colombo. Accordingly, Admiral James Somerville, commanding the Royal Navy's Eastern Fleet, heeded the warning and withdrew his ships to their Indian Ocean hideaway in the Maldive Islands. Merchant ships left for a port in India. When two days passed and the raid had not come, however, the admiral decided the codebreakers were wrong and returned his fleet to Colombo. What no one on the Allied side knew was that the Japanese admiral had merely delayed his attack until Easter Sunday, believing he would find the British less alert then. Subsequently Colombo intercepts of plain-language air-to-ground messages warned that enemy aircraft were less than five hundred miles away. Somerville tried to scatter his ships, but there was not time. In this and a further raid the next day, the Japanese sank three cruisers, an aircraft carrier and two destroyers.
At this lowest point in the CBI war, a self-appointed messiah stirred hope. Orde C. Wingate had led irregular forces in North Africa, once bluffing fifteen thousand Italians into surrendering to his own force of less than two thousand. Now he arrived to apply the same audacious tactics in Burma. Wingate was a deliberate eccentric who gloried in wearing grimy uniforms, an ever-present pith helmet and a great bushy beard. He was given to such bizarre behavior as straining his tea, and that of his guests, through his dirty socks. He proposed beating the Japanese by what he called "long-range penetration." He would lead a specially trained infantry brigade far behind enemy lines, where, supplied by air and communicating via radio, his troops would wreak guerrilla-type havoc on the Japanese. The world press fastened onto a new word: Chindits, the name Wingate's outfit acquired. Wingate coined it when he misheard the Burmese word chinthe—the name of the mythical beast that guarded Burmese temples.
During the outfit's first weeks in the jungles the Chindits fulfilled Wingate's expectations and gave newspaper readers throughout the Allied nations a small feast of excitement amid otherwise dreary gruel. They destroyed bridges, sabotaged the Japanese army's supply railroad, attacked outposts and set up ambushes. The raid proved that penetration forces could be supplied by airborne drops. But the toll on the men was too great: the Japanese were too powerful. Wracked by disease more than by bullets, only remnants of Wingate's guerrillas made it out of the jungles and back to safety.
Summing up this first try by the Chindits, Slim wrote in his memoir, "As a military operation the raid had been an expensive failure." Yet he added, "There was a dramatic quality about this raid, which, with the undoubted fact that it had penetrated far behind the Japanese lines and returned, lent itself to presentation as a triumph of British jungle fighting over the Japanese." It gave a lift to the people of Britain and to all the Allies. For the troops in the CBI "it seemed the first ripple in the turning of the tide." Slim judged Wingate's adventure "worth all the hardship and sacrifice his men endured."
It remained for Vinegar Joe, however, to render the final verdict on the first Burma campaign. "I claim we got a hell of a beating," he told a press conference. "We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it."
Stilwell's Drive to "Mitch"
Winston Churchill was not convinced that the tremendous costs of retaking Burma were worth the effort. He foresaw that the replacement for the Burma Road that Stilwell pressed the Allies to undertake was "unlikely to be finished until the need for it had passed." Strategically, Burma was too remote to be of use in the conquest of Japan. As for conducting war there, "one could not choose a worse place for fighting the Japanese."
The Americans, nevertheless, persisted. The Pacific campaigns were proving slow and costly. U.S. leaders thought they still might have to strike at Japan through China. Besides, Chiang's clever, Wellesley-educated wife, Madame Soong Mei-ling, traveled to Washington and charmed FDR into maintaining full support for Chiang and Chennault, and even for Stilwell.
After sixteen months of reorganizing and strategizing by the Allies, the second Burma campaign was ready to begin in October 1943. It would be under the overall command of a new leader, Lord Louis Mountbatten.
By now the cryptologic resources of the Allies were in full interplay. The East African contingent had returned to Colombo for closer surveillance of Japanese naval traffic. Outside New Delhi the British had established "Bletchley Park East," another operation officially identified by a misleadlingly low-key name: the Wireless Experimental Centre. WEC had two Indian intercept and cryptologic outposts, one in Bangalore, in southern India, and the other in Barrackpore, near Calcutta. The latter was specifically assigned to meet the signals intelligence needs of Slim's Fourteenth Army and to operate mobile stations that stayed close to the fighting fronts. Special Liaison Units served Mountbatten, Slim, Stilwell and the U.S. bomber command in China.
In addition, a Tactical Air Intelligence Section at Slim's headquarters intercepted and broke the signals of Japanese aircraft flying into and out of airfields in Burma. The section directed a squadron of U.S. long-range fighters in successes that decimated Japanese planes and gave the Allies air superiority for the coming offensives. The voices of Japan's militarists were, all unbeknownst to them, being overheard and understood by an untiring legion of eavesdroppers.
Forced back to India's eastern border by their earlier defeats, the Allies planned for three main forces to carry out their offensive to retake Burma. One would be Stilwell's American-trained Chinese divisions. The second: Wingate's Chindits, expanded to twenty thousand troops. Third would be Slim's British and Indian armies.
Stilwell's assigned task was to clear the Japanese out of northern Burma, an offensive essential to breaking the blockade of China. That Burma Road alternative that Churchill disparaged had been under construction since the autumn of 1942. American engineers were directing the building of a two-way all-weather road leading from Ledo, in India, southeastward into Burma to join up with the Burma Road's upper reaches. If Chiang's armies were to receive the help they needed, a new overland truck route must replace dependence on planes flying the Hump. Also, alongside the Ledo Road the engineers built a pipeline to carry fuel to the B-29 bombers expected to attack the Japanese in eastern Asia and in Japan itself.
To reach his north Burma objectives, Stilwell would have to push for 150 miles through jungles, over mountains and across rivers to capture the rail, air and road hub that the maps named Myitkyina and the Americans called "Mitch."
Trained in India by Americans, the Chinese soldiers had rounded into formidable fighters. As Sevareid described them in his reports from India, "Now husky, well fed, imbued with fighting spirit by the Americans and their own young and able officers . . . they were at least the equal of the Japanese." They offered "a startling contrast with the rest of Chiang's starved and spiritless army."
The Thirty-eighth Chinese Division had not penetrated far into Burma before they encountered stiff opposition. At the same time the Allies in India had been planning their campaign, the Japanese commanders, as decrypts began to verify, had developed their own offensive plans, whose objective was nothing less than to smash the Allied armies in their path and take India. As the ever useful Baron Oshima had radioed to Tokyo—and to Magic codebreakers—Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had told him, "Germany would eagerly welcome a Japanese invasion into the Indian Ocean whereby contact between Europe and Asia might be achieved." Bent on fulfilling their part, the Japanese had been moving troops into north Burma in preparation for their Indian campaign. They met and slowed the advance of Stilwell's Chinese fighters.
Vinegar Joe, however, now had a new source of strength. This was an American combat unit that was to gain fame as "Merrill's Marauders" because it was under the command of Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill. The outfit, trained in India with the Chindits, was only three thousand men strong, but it included veterans of combat duty i
n the Pacific plus a number of toughs volunteering to avoid guardhouse time.
Stilwell expected more of the Marauders than guerrilla-type missions. In what he called a "left hook," he sent them around the Japanese facing the Chinese attackers and had them take up a position blocking a Japanese retreat. The commander of the Japanese Eighteenth Division threw his full strength against the Marauders, ordering charge after charge. The Americans held firm, piling up Japanese bodies on the approaches to their lines. In the end the Eighteenth had to give up the attack and slip away through the jungles to escape. It was Stilwell's first major victory in Burma—and a tonic for Allied spirits everywhere.
Stilwell's second try at having the Marauders swing around the tenacious Eighteenth was less successful. He planned a two-way hook meant, this time, to bottle up the division and destroy it. The trouble was the terrain the Marauders had to cross. The combination of jungle and mountains made their treks long and exhausting. Short of supplies and water, they fell ill to dysentery and jungle diseases. They did establish a roadblock, but when a Chinese brigade came to their relief, the Chinese let the Eighteenth again escape annihilation.
Even though the Marauders were weary and ill, and had lost their leader to an incapacitating heart attack, Stilwell called on them for yet another desperate mission, this one in response to a captured Japanese document. From this bit of intelligence, Stilwell knew he had to block the attempt by a Japanese battalion to mount their own left hook and outflank the Chinese. The Marauders stationed themselves to stand off the attack, dug in and held on for a week. They were aided by a different kind of intelligence. A Japanese American sergeant, Roy H. Matsumoto, nightly crawled close to the enemy's perimeter and, listening in on their conversations, learned of their plans for the following day. He also learned Japanese intentions by clipping into their telephone lines. In one critical attack, when the first wave of the Japanese had been shot to pieces, Matsumoto yelled "Charge" in Japanese to a follow-up wave, who also rushed into wholesale slaughter. The sergeant's information helped the Marauders turn back the try at encirclement.
But Stilwell was still ninety miles from Mitch. He faced the necessity of stirring the Chinese into exerting more aggressive pressure on the main front. He also had to motivate the Marauders to take on one last grueling mission, despite their being down to half their original numbers and looking for relief rather than further action. The assignment was to make a long eastward swing, code-named End Run, and close in on Myitkyina from a direction the Japanese would least suspect.
To meet the first demand, Stilwell used all his powers of persuasion, flattery and bullying to make the Chinese generals step up their attacks. He walked into the front lines and made himself a visible target, knowing that the Chinese commanders would fear their superiors' wrath if Vinegar Joe was killed. To lessen this chance, they ordered their men forward. "It pays to go up and push," Stilwell wrote in his diary. "At least, it's a coincidence that every time I do, they spurt a bit."
As for the Marauders, he convinced them that there was no one else who could do the job. Also, he increased their numbers by adding two Chinese regiments as well as a band of Burmese guerrillas who were experienced in operating behind Japanese lines.
The drive became a terrible ordeal. Stilwell was forced to send in more Chinese troops and to strip engineers off the Ledo Road project and convert them into infantry. In addition, the monsoon rains arrived early. By late June 1944, however, End Run had succeeded. The airstrip at Mitch had been seized, and after more bitter fighting, so had the town itself. Just as important, the enemy's Eighteenth Division had at last been broken and its remnants sent fleeing to the south. Having the Myitkyina airstrip in Allied hands meant that air transport could avoid the Hump and double the tonnage lifted to China. This development made Churchill's prediction of the needlessness of the Ledo Road almost come true. By the time the road was completed, Stilwell's capture of the Mitch airstrip had brought a far larger flow of supplies to Chiang—forty thousand tons of them in fourteen thousand transport flights—than was moved over the new truck route.
Not that the Generalissimo was inclined to show any gratitude. Instead, still incensed by Stilwell's too freely expressed estimation of him, Chiang pressed for, and in October 1944 succeeded in achieving, Vinegar Joe's recall.
Stilwell had worn so many hats, it took three generals to replace him. The North Central Area Command passed to his subordinate Daniel Sultan. In China, Albert Wedemeyer was chosen to be Chiang's adviser. And Raymond Wheeler became Mountbatten's deputy supreme commander for the Southeast Asia Command.
Stopping the Japanese at Imphal
To the small tales of success that Orde Wingate and his Chindits had achieved in the first Burma campaign, he hoped to add big news in the second. He had more than three times as many troops assigned to him. He also had his own air force, including U.S. planes to supply his behind-the-lines incursions, as well as gliders to carry in his troops. Above all, he had the strong backing of Winston Churchill and even of Franklin Roosevelt. Churchill had invited him to the Quebec Conference, where he had made so strong an impression that the Allied leaders instructed him to appeal to them directly if his immediate superiors were thwarting his plans.
General Slim, in his memoir, Defeat into Victory, told of an incident in which, when he denied Wingate's demand that an Indian division be added to his Chindits, the brigadier let him know that he had a loyalty above that to his immediate commander. To whom? Slim asked. "To the Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States," Wingate replied, and added that this was an occasion when he must so appeal. "I pushed a signal pad across my desk to him," Slim wrote, "and told him to go and write his message. He did not take the pad but he left the room. Whether he ever sent the message I do not know, nor did I inquire. Anyhow, that was the last I heard of his demand for the 26th division."
For their part in the campaign, the Chindits were assigned to give extraordinary support to Stilwell's offensive. To do this, they had their gliders towed far to the south, beyond Myitkyina. Landed there, the glider troops established three airstrips while a larger group marched overland to join them. The Chindits eased the pressure on Stilwell's Chinese divisions by cutting the Japanese supply routes and creating other behind-the-lines mayhem. Their planes protected both the Chindits and Stilwell's troops from Japanese air attacks. In a reminiscence, Delhi-stationed code man Alan Stripp told of the "punched-in-solar-plexus anguish" of the Japanese, as revealed in decrypts of their reports of the Chindits' exploits.
In the midst of the operation, Wingate himself was killed in a plane crash. Churchill recorded his distress: "With him a bright flame was extinguished."
Both the Chindits and the Marauders were, in Slim's words, "asked to do more than was possible." By August 1944 "they had shot their bolt." Their remnants were withdrawn.
Meanwhile, Slim himself was attempting to carry out his part of the campaign. His own word for his objectives was "modest": to lead his divisions out of India and drive down the India-Burma border to Burma's west coast. For a while the operations of his Fourteenth Army went well. Michael Smith's recently published book The Emperor's Codes has recorded how India-based codebreakers combined with mobile intelligence units to provide Slim's army with the signals intelligence it needed for its invasion of Burma.
Then, at the beginning of February 1944, Slim's divisions began to encounter the same force that had slowed Stilwell's advance: the reinforced Japanese effort to mount their own powerful offensive, their "March to Delhi." While the troops carrying out the Allies' coastal thrust inflicted some setbacks to the Japanese and proved, once again, that the British could defeat the enemy in jungle warfare, Slim soon had to reorganize his divisions to meet the more serious threat of a major Japanese drive into India by pressing up through central Burma.
As Allied decrypts revealed, the Japanese no longer regarded Burma as an aside in their war. Success in Burma could completely isolate China and, it was hop
ed, drive the Chinese to sue for a separate peace. The Japanese organized Indian and Burmese anti-British armies. Magic decrypts of Oshima's messages revealed how the Burmese rebel Subhas Chandra Bose, who had opposed Gandhi's nonviolent rebellion in favor of an armed one against the British and had fled to exile in Germany, was transported in a German U-boat to Japan as preparation for his leadership of pro-Japanese forces in the CBI theater. The Japanese were encouraged to believe both Burma and India were ripe for revolution and would fall into their hands. As Japanese commanders proclaimed in exhortations to their troops, victory in Burma could change the whole course of the war.
Properly handled, the Burma offensive could ease the supply situation by seizing Allied supplies. The Japanese were so confident in this hope that they sent units of gunners without guns so they could take over captured British artillery.
Faced with this grave new threat, Slim and his commanders drew together a defense line south of the Indian town of Imphal. Slim planned to begin resistance on this new line and then, at the strategic moment, withdraw to the Imphal Plain and there "fight the decisive battle on grounds of our own choosing."
He later admitted that he made not just one "cardinal error," but two. With timing all-important, he allowed the withdrawal decision to be left to his field general. This was wrong, he acknowledged, because he himself was much better informed and in receipt of much more comprehensive intelligence reports. As it was, the withdrawal was delayed too long. The Japanese were able to send roadblocks around the retreating British troops and force them to fight their way through, with serious losses of men and equipment.
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