Second World War, The
Page 60
In 1274 and again in 1281 Japan had been under threat of invasion by huge seaborne Mongol armies and on each occasion a typhoon had dispersed the invasion fleet and sunk or dismasted the ships, forcing the survivors to turn back. It was the Japanese version of the Armada legend and the typhoons were referred to as divine winds or kamikaze.After the fall of Saipan in 1944 and the realization that Allied sea power was now such that an inexorable advance towards the Japanese homeland was inevitable, the commander of the Philippines-based First Air Fleet, Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi, suggested the formation of Special Attack Groups that would train pilot volunteers to dive-bomb their aircraft on to Allied ships. The idea was enthusiastically approved by Tokyo and volunteers were called for. There was no shortage of young men willing to give their lives for the emperor, however hopeless the cause might now be, and this applied not only to officers and NCOs from the recognized martial clans – the descendants of the samurai – but conscripted commoners as well. Initial volunteers were already pilots but it was swiftly realized that this was a waste of skill and soon volunteers who had never flown were given a one-week course, sent off in whatever aircraft were still available, as long as they could carry a bomb, and told to aim for the central deck lift (which brings aircraft up to and down from the flight deck) on a carrier and the base of the bridge on other craft. The aircraft that hit but failed to sink the HMAS Australia as she covered the landings on 21 October may have been the first kamikaze, but, even though it did succeed in killing thirty of the Australian cruiser’s crew, this could have been an inadvertent crash rather than a suicide mission. What is not in doubt is that on 25 October there was an attack on the American carriers by six kamikaze and that one of them succeeded in sinking the light carrier USS St Lô.
The Japanese navy having failed to interrupt the landings on Leyte, it was left to 16 Division to inflict as much damage as they could. Good businessmen they may have been, as they were contemptuously referred to by Yamashita when he told them they were on their own, but they were pretty good soldiers too and soon MacArthur was bogged down in a dreary and bloody battle of attrition in the mud, and for a while it looked as if the advance was stalled as the Japanese continued to land reinforcements from fast runs by destroyers at night, another Tokyo Express. By this means they managed to land a further 45,000 troops in total, about twice the number that had been there in the first place, although still outnumbered by the US Sixth Army, but then on 11 November US Navy aircraft caught a large troop convoy from Manila, sinking a number of the transports and drowning around 10,000 soldiers. MacArthur eventually broke the impasse on 7 December by landing a division behind the Japanese at Ormoc, on the same beaches as their own reinforcements had come in on, and on Christmas Day 1944 fighting on Leyte, save for mopping up, was declared over. Mopping up actually went on until May 1945, as small groups of Japanese refused to surrender, but the bulk of the American land and naval forces could now concentrate on MacArthur’s next move – a landing on the main Philippine island of Luzon, after which Nimitz and his island-hoppers would take Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
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In Burma, while Slim was successfully resisting the Japanese attempt to supply themselves by capturing Kohima and Imphal, Stilwell’s Chinese–American force, supported by the Chindits, were attempting to capture the major Japanese communications centre of Myitkyina, defended by Lieutenant-General Tanaka Nobuo’s 18 Division. Stilwell was convinced that the British were not playing their part in Burma – ‘only shadow boxing’ as he put it – while the truth was that Slim’s Fourteenth Army was fully committed at Kohima and the Chindits were supporting an attempt to take Mogaung. Mogaung, the first major town in Burma to be recaptured, was eventually taken by Brigadier ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert’s Chindit Brigade, spearheaded by a spirited charge into the town by a Gurkha battalion on 24 June 1944 that unbalanced the defences of Lieutenant-General Hisashi Takeda’s 53 Division.
The Japanese defence collapsed three days later. Stilwell now ordered Calvert to support his attack on Myitkyina, and, when Calvert refused, more petrol was flung on to the flames of Stilwell’s dislike of the British. Calvert, however, broke through the barrier put up by Stilwell’s staff, who were terrified of their master, and explained to him in person that no Chindit brigade was in any state to help anybody, and cited the medical statistics. Vinegar Joe forgave Calvert, while reserving his right to be rude about the British. The Chindits had in fact been in the field in their second expedition – Operation Thursday – for far longer than even Wingate when alive had thought they could be; John Masters, later a hugely successful writer,* then an officer of the Fourth Gurkha Rifles and in temporary command of one of the Chindit brigades, had his entire force of 2,200 men medically examined and only 118 were pronounced fit for duty – seven British officers, twenty-one British soldiers and ninety Gurkhas. This was fairly typical of the whole force and a product of Wingate’s belief in mind over matter and a complete disregard of hygiene and preventive medicine. Water discipline was bad, rations were far below the minimum calorific value and it was a generally unhealthy environment where 60 per cent of all evacuations were of men with malaria – easily preventable with the issued Mepacrine if the men bothered to take it, which far too often they did not. The Chindits were withdrawn and on 4 August Stilwell’s men captured Myitkyina.
As Slim’s Fourteenth Army and Stilwell’s Chinese–American force consolidated their front and mopped up preparatory to the next move, there was considerable debate between Mountbatten, GHQ India, Churchill, and the British and American Chiefs of Staff as to what that next move should be. While all agreed that the liberation (or recapture) of Burma was a priority, the British wanted to avoid a long struggle southwards (Operation Capital), preferring instead an air- and seaborne operation to capture Rangoon (Operation Dracula), thus cutting off the Japanese forces in Northern Burma and forcing their withdrawal or leaving them unsupported to be mopped up in limited actions. The Americans, opposed to any strategy that might risk communications with China, favoured Capital, particularly when it became clear that the resources to carry out Dracula did not exist and would not until after the 1945 monsoon. In the event, Mountbatten was instructed to proceed with Capital but to keep Dracula under review in case an early collapse of Germany should allow assets to be withdrawn from the European theatre and shifted to the Far East. A major problem, even without Dracula, was manpower. Many of the British units in 11th Army Group were seriously under-strength, particularly the infantry battalions, and it was clear that the reinforcement system could not keep pace with losses, particularly in view of the high casualties in the European theatre, which had priority, and the recently changed rules about repatriation whereby a British soldier previously entitled to be posted back to the UK after five years in the Far East was now due back after three years and eight months. Fourteenth Army had 134 infantry battalions of which fifty-five were Indian, thirty-one British (including four Royal Marine Commandos), thirty West African, fifteen Gurkha, two Rhodesian and one Nepali, and there was a shortfall of 10,000 British soldiers, mainly in those thirty-one battalions. A further complication was the perceived need for airborne and parachute troops for the Burma campaign which the War Office had made plain could not be supplied from the Middle East as had originally been hoped.
The solution arrived at was to reduce the troops on the North-West Frontier and those allocated to internal security in India, disband a number of light anti-aircraft and anti-tank regiments of the Royal Artillery and send the men to the infantry (which must have delighted them), and also disband the Chindits. This last drew some harrumphing from Wingate’s apostles but in truth the achievements of their previous expedition did not justify the losses, and with the vast increase in Allied air power, more field and mountain artillery and a huge improvement in the standards of the ordinary infantry, there really was no role for them any more, and the manpower shortage was a convenient excuse to get rid of them. These measures brought the British battali
ons up to something approaching their authorized establishment and allowed the formation of an Indian airborne division of two brigades, each with one British, one Indian and one Gurkha battalion.
Changes came farther up the chain of command too. General Sir George Giffard, the commander of 11th Army Group, had always had a difficult relationship with the Supreme Allied Commander, Mountbatten, who thought Giffard was too cautious and constantly tried to interfere in matters properly the responsibility of the army group commander. Mountbatten sacked him, replacing him with Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese, lately Commander Eighth Army in Italy. Leese, aping his patron Montgomery, arrived with a plethora of thirty staff officers from Eighth Army to replace the staff at 11th Army Group, who of course knew and were known by the staffs and commanders lower down. It was something that Slim had never done and never would do and it was not a happy handover: Giffard was held in high regard as the man who had rebuilt the army after the early defeats, and the appearance of senior staff officers who had no experience of the Far East and were unable to converse with Indian troops was not welcome. Leese too was taken aback by the opulence of Mountbatten’s headquarters in Ceylon, which had by now swollen to over 7,000 bodies, many of whom seemed to have been selected on grounds of breeding and ability to make small talk at cocktail parties rather than for any military qualities. Another difficulty with the command arrangements was the position of Stilwell, whose Northern Area Combat Command of American and Chinese troops was at least nominally part of 11th Army Group, although as he also held the posts of Commanding General China Burma India (commander of all American troops in those countries), Deputy Supreme Commander South-East Asia (under Mountbatten) and Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-shek, he was a very difficult chap to pin down and consistently refused to accept orders from the army group commander but only direct from Mountbatten. When Leese was selected to replace Giffard, Mountbatten argued strongly that the appointment must be agreed by the American Chiefs of Staff and Stilwell first. The CIGS in London demurred: this was a British appointment and not subject to the approval of anyone else. Mountbatten feared another outburst of disobedience by Stilwell, but in the event it was Chiang who cut the knot.
The relationship between Chiang and Stilwell had been on a knife edge for some time. Stilwell regarded Chiang as ungrateful, corrupt, incompetent and far more interested in his own political power than in fighting the Japanese, and in this Stilwell was unquestionably right. Chiang resented the fact that Stilwell would not involve himself in Chinese political skulduggery nor obey Chiang’s orders when they were patent lunacy. He was suspicious of the two Chinese armies that had been trained in India and were not under his own, Chiang’s, direct influence, and in October he asked Roosevelt to recall Stilwell as he had lost confidence in him. Stilwell returned to the United States on 27 October 1944 and his responsibilities were now divided between his erstwhile deputy, Major-General Daniel I. Sultan, who was promoted to lieutenant-general and took over the Northern Area Combat command and had no difficulty in taking orders from the army group commander, and by Lieutenant-General Albert C. Wedemeyer, until now Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, who became Chief of Staff to Chiang and was in turn replaced by Lieutenant-General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, rusticated from Europe as one of the scapegoats for the Arnhem disaster. Then, in November, the command structure changed with the setting up of Allied Forces South-East Asia instead of 11th Army Group. AFSEA, under Leese, would take direct command from Slim of XV Corps in the Arakan and Slim’s lines of communication, which would allow Slim and Fourteenth Army to concentrate on the reconquest of central Burma without having to worry about the Arakan or their rear.
Meanwhile, at the front Fourteenth Army was now poised along the River Chindwin, and Northern Area Combat Command augmented by the British 36 Division was preparing to push south from Myitkyina. In order to supply the advance, roads were being built but this needed an enormous engineering effort in the monsoon weather and it was not unusual for a vehicle convoy to cover but five miles a day along corduroy* tracks, while railways to accommodate ‘jeep trains’† were also being built. Even with these prodigious efforts to build roads and railways,the whole army could not be supplied by road once it advanced, but Allied air power would now allow at least one division to be supplied by air, and airstrips were being developed and stores stockpiled at Imphal to support the move. Once the monsoon was over, it was intended that most casualty evacuation would also be by air.
There were changes in the Japanese command structure too. Lieutenant-General Masakazu Kawabe, Commander Burma Area Army, had ordered his Fifteenth Army to hold along the Chindwin after its disastrous attack on Kohima and Imphal. Starving and riddled with disease, it was in no state to do this and Kawabe, suffering from amoebic dysentery, was relieved and replaced by Lieutenant-General Heitaro Kimura, who was left in no doubt by Field Marshal Terauchi that he could expect no reinforcements, no evacuation of the wounded and no supplies, but must live off the country. Kimura accepted the impossibility of holding the Chindwin and ordered his units to pull back behind the Irrawaddy, calculating that Slim would make for Mandalay, and as he did so the Japanese could sally out from behind the Irrawaddy and cut the British lines of communications, and then, if the British did not retreat, starve them to death or surrender. While this was what Kimura assured his superiors he was going to do, he was well aware that the most he could hope for was to delay the Allies as long as he could and to sell every Japanese soldier’s life as dearly as possible.
Slim’s plan, made before he knew of the Japanese withdrawal to the Irrawaddy, was to push two spearheads across the Chindwin and destroy the Japanese forces between the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy, after which he would advance on Mandalay and link up with Sultan’s Chinese–Americans as they advanced from the north. Once Slim realized that Japanese troops were being pulled out of the Arakan to defend behind the Irrawaddy, he knew that his plans would have to change as, instead of meeting and defeating the Japanese south of Mandalay and taking the port of Rangoon before the 1945 monsoon arrived, he would have to switch his thrust east and might well have insufficient logistic support to keep all his divisions in the field. By pushing the 19 Indian Division across the Chindwin, Fourteenth Army linked up with the Americans on 16 December 1944 at Indaw. Northern Burma was now secure and the clearance of Central and Southern Burma could begin.
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Stalin had promised that the Red Army would mount a major offensive in coordination with the Allied landing in Normandy, and on 22 June, once he was quite sure that the Allies were actually ashore and were not in danger of being driven back into the sea, he launched Operation Bagration,* pitting 2.5 million men supported by 5,000 tanks, 30,000 artillery pieces, over 2,000 Katyushas, 70,000 troop-carrying vehicles and 5,000 aircraft against Field Marshal Busch’s Army Group Centre. Busch was holding a frontage of 400 miles in a bulge around Minsk with 580,000 men in four armies: Third Panzer, Fourth, Ninth and Second. Less than half the men were infantry and they had 9,500 artillery pieces and 900 tanks and were supported by 775 aircraft, of which around a third were operational at any one time. A clever piece of Russian disinformation had convinced German intelligence that the forthcoming offensive would be directed against Army Group North Ukraine, to the south, and most of the armour had been sent there. Not only did the Russians outnumber the Germans in men, guns, aircraft and tanks, but they would use against them their very own tactics, something the Red Army could not have done even a year previously. Now with American four-wheel-drive Lend-Lease trucks, vastly improved standards of training, better communications and, perhaps above all, Hitler’s refusal to allow the German army to fight a battle the way its generals wanted to, the Soviets were confident that they could inflict a shattering defeat and push the Germans back into East Prussia, the Baltic States and Poland. In the north, First Baltic and Third Byelorussian Fronts, coordinated by Marshal Zhukov, would drive deep into and behind the German positions; in the south, coordinated
by Marshal Vasilevsky, the First Byelorussian Front would also penetrate the German front while the Second Byelorussian Front would pin the Germans frontally. The northern and southern pincers would link up at Minsk, and the encircled Germans would be destroyed in detail. It was a hugely ambitious plan, but, with the improved transport and Soviet tank and artillery factories in full production, the Russians were now not only able to outnumber the Germans in everything but also to move faster than they could. The concentration of artillery that the Russians brought to bear could reduce any stretch of countryside to a cratered wasteland, collapse any dugout and smash any city to heaps of rubble.