India's War

by Srinath Raghavan

  In retrospect, it is evident that the Japanese offensive on the Imphal Plain began to lose steam from the end of March. By early April, the 4th Corps had concentrated its troops – now amounting to four divisions – on the various approaches leading to Imphal. The Japanese pressed in on the defenders from three sides and managed to cut off the only remaining land route connecting Imphal to India. Contrary to their hopes, though, the isolated 4th Corps did not retreat in panic but stood its ground and fought. As in the Arakan, the defenders cut back their rations and were continually replenished by air. Over 400 British and American planes were employed to sustain the 155,000 men and 11,000 animals in Imphal. From mid-April to the end of June 1944, Allied aircraft flew in 19,000 reinforcements, 13,000 tons of cargo and 835,000 gallons of petrol. They also evacuated 13,000 casualties and 43,000 civilians to India.22 As in the Admin Box, the availability of blood transfusion facilities in Dimapur meant that surgery could be performed on casualties within a few hours. Only the cases deemed most severe were sent back to the base hospitals. The creation of a new Corps Medical Centre proved particularly useful as this was an integrated medical and surgical unit serviced by its own airfield.23

  The Japanese wore themselves out in a string of costly assaults. The Indian formations, for their part, relied heavily on their superiority in artillery, armour and air power to whittle down the attacks. Co-operation between infantry and tanks gave a distinct edge to the Indian units, especially when they launched counter-offensives along the axes leading out of Imphal. Lieutenant Harpratap Singh’s tank troop, for instance, supported the advance of a Gurkha battalion on the Tiddim Road. When the Japanese sprang a well-concealed ambush on the Gurkhas, Harpratap’s tanks trained their fire on the bunker as well as the snipers hidden in the foliage. The Gurkhas had two men injured at the end of the encounter, while fifteen Japanese were found dead.24 Even the units that lacked combat experience demonstrated tactical discipline – a good indicator of their level of training. A company of the 3rd Madras Regiment – a non-martial class infantry unit – was defending a rear area installation that was attacked by a Japanese platoon at the dead of night. The Japanese were unsure of the disposition of the defenders and sought to jitter them by random fire and shouting. ‘We did not open fire as we could not see them’, reported Captain Sethuram. ‘Since we were in bunkers and trenches, their fire did not cause us any harm and as we kept quiet the Japs who came within 100 yards of us moved away.’25

  The fight against the Japanese was brutal by any standards. As a British officer who had also fought in Europe observed, ‘I would go through the whole campaign in Europe again rather than that 7 days in Sangshak [near Imphal]. The tempo and fierceness of fighting did not compare.’26 Part of the reason for the ferocity of the fight was both sides’ belief that the other would give no quarter. The Indians were struck by the brutal methods adopted by the Japanese. During the Battle of the Box, for example, the Japanese briefly captured a field hospital:

  the prisoners were dragged out of the medical inspection room and mown down by automatic weapons fired from a carrier. Others were bayoneted in their beds. A party of twenty who were told, ‘come and get treatment’, were taken to a dried-up watercourse by a Japanese officer and then shot.27

  Such behaviour hardened the attitude of the Indian soldier who wrote home that the ‘Japs are most uncultured and cruel … They have got beastly characteristics. Such a nation should be totally destroyed for the good of the world.’28

  Equally striking to the Indian soldiers was the unwillingness of the Japanese to surrender even in thoroughly hopeless situations. After a fierce battle on the Imphal–Ukhrul road, Subedar Abdur Rauf of the 13th Frontier Force exclaimed: ‘The Japs were like mad men. Their behaviour looked like that – one of them was clinging to one of our mortars with a tight hold whom I had to shoot down.’29 Havildar Baggi Ram of the same unit found a famished, starving and sick Japanese soldier eating grass from his mess tin. Asked to surrender, he wounded himself with a grenade. When Baggi Ram moved towards him, the Japanese soldier lobbed another grenade. The Indian was nimble enough to dodge it, and proceeded to bayonet the dying man.30 Viewing the battle from on high, Slim found that

  we can kill the first 50%, of a Jap formation comparatively easily, because they attack and counter-attack thus giving us the opportunity. It is the second 50%, and especially the last 25%, who cause us our losses and who hold us up. They dig in and have to be literally prized out and killed individually in the bitterest kind of fighting imaginable.31

  Unsurprisingly the campaign dragged on despite the onset of the monsoon. Even in early June Mutaguchi was goading his divisional commanders to renew their offensive on Imphal. By the end of the month, the Japanese formations had been drained of up to 70 per cent of their strength and were verging on starvation. On 4 July, the Imperial General Headquarters called off Operation U-Go. Four days later, Mutaguchi ordered the remnants of his army to fall back along the Tiddim Road towards Tamu. The Japanese had suffered their most ignominious land defeat of the war.

  The Fourteenth Army’s operational, logistical and material superiority had tilted the scales of battle in its favour. An important, if overlooked, contribution was made by its local allies: the Nagas, Kukis, Chin and other hill tribes. The Japanese came into the hills professing racial affinity and friendship. ‘We are brothers and sisters’, they declared in English, ‘we belong to the race of small bodied people, the British are well built, they are not our brothers and so we need to help one another.’ Dining with the village elders, the commander of the 31st Division, Major General Sato, said: ‘I eat and drink what you eat and drink, we are brothers and sisters.’ The Japanese promise to build schools, as well as their willingness to pay for food and supplies – albeit in their own currency – went down well with much of the local population. Within a couple of weeks, though, the veneer of politeness was dropped. The Japanese began to compel the people to off-load their stocks of meat and grain – often at gunpoint. Rape may not have been official policy, but it was not random either. Soon, the Nagas were deeply enraged. The Japanese, a Naga recalled, ‘were very cruel to us. They killed our pigs and chicken and they ate our grain. They killed people and they frequently took men away to carry their loads.’32

  Not surprisingly, the hill peoples turned against the occupiers. Not only did they mislead the Japanese forces about British numbers and dispositions, but they actively assisted the Fourteenth Army in its operations. As military intelligence observed in mid-1944, ‘The quantity and quality of operational information received from the local inhabitants has been a major factor in our success to date. A high percentage of successful airstrikes have been the direct result of local information.’33

  The battles of 1944 also brought the Indian army face to face with a new enemy: the Indian National Army. The Japanese had propped up the INA not for its operational capabilities but for its propaganda value. Best placed to assess Bose’s military pretensions, the Japanese sought to avoid deploying the INA in combat. Thus the Bose Brigade of the INA was deployed in the Chin Hills – a relatively inactive sector. Then, too, the men under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Shahnawaz Khan were used to repair lines of communication and fetch supplies for the Japanese troops. When Shahnawaz complained to Bose, the Japanese promised him and his men a combat role but had no intention of fulfilling that promise. Nor could the INA’s field espionage and propaganda units suborn the loyalty of Indian troops as they had done in 1942.34 The fundamental difference, of course, was the operational context. With the Indian army gaining the upper hand over the Japanese, the INA’s propaganda had little impact. As the former governor of Burma, Reginald Dorman-Smith, quipped: ‘Poor old Netaji [Bose], he still slaughters the 7th Indian Division nightly over the radio and is most pained that their imminent surrender never takes place.’35

  Following the launch of the U-Go offensive, Bose plonked himself in Mutaguchi’s headquarters in Maymyo, proffering gratuitous strategic ad
vice and demanding a combat role for his men. On 30 April 1944, the INA’s 1st Division was allowed to attack the Palel airbase near Imphal. The Japanese had relented owing to their impression that the defenders were on the brink of defeat and might surrender to the INA. The raid on the airfield was assigned to a 300-strong group led by Major Pritam Singh. The strike force took the Indians initially by surprise, but was swiftly beaten back.

  In mid-May, the Bose Brigade was redeployed to Kohima. Its most successful act was to plant an Indian flag in the town – even as the battle was going against the Japanese. In the subsequent offensives launched by the Fourteenth Army, the INA suffered heavily alongside the Japanese. Casualties also mounted during the withdrawal of July 1944 – an order that was made without any pretence of consultation with Bose. Numbers are difficult to ascertain, but it appears that of the 9,000 INA soldiers deployed in the campaign of 1944, about 1,000 were killed or wounded, between 2,000 and 3,000 died due to sickness and starvation, and some 700 men, including officers, surrendered.36 The British continued to regard Bose as a political threat, but as a fighting force the INA was no match for the Indian army.

  Imphal and Kohima have rightly been described by their official historian as the decisive battles of the war in South-East Asia. Yet, even as these battles were being fought to their deadly denouement, the Allies continued to debate the course ahead. In early June 1944, the combined chiefs of staff instructed Mountbatten to plan the campaign for 1944–45 with a view to preserving the air link to China and to eventually developing overland communication with China. Within this remit, he was asked to press advantages against the enemy. Meeting Mountbatten a month later, Slim said that a full-scale offensive could be launched on 1 November – provided he had at his disposal all the forces available to him for the battle of Imphal. As Slim would write later,

  A year ago I would not have looked at the proposal. Even now it was not so much our advantage in the air, in armour, in greater mobility in the open, which gave me confidence to go on with my plan, but the spirit of my troops, my trust in their experienced commanders and in the high fighting value and hardihood of them all.37

  Mountbatten and his staff developed two plans that could fit well with the combined chiefs’ directive and the operational situation. The first, ‘Capital’, was for an advance to the general line Pakokku–Mandalay–Lashio in order to deny the Japanese access to northern Burma. The second, ‘Dracula’, was for the capture of Rangoon by an amphibious and airborne operation and for movement northwards to secure the Pegu area. Both the plans committed SEAC to the recapture of all of Burma. Churchill, as ever, was unenthusiastic about getting back into Burma. He was willing to support ‘Dracula’ as the least bad option, but would not contemplate movement northwards from Rangoon. It would be better, he felt, to swing eastwards after taking Rangoon. The British chiefs agreed that ‘Capital’ would be ‘a slow and costly process that we are most unwilling to contemplate’. Operations in northern Burma should be the minimum necessary to pin down the Japanese, while ‘Dracula’ was undertaken.38

  Commanders in SEAC, however, insisted that the Japanese had been decisively defeated and had lost heavily in men and material. The Fourteenth Army was pursuing them to the Chindwin and making excellent progress. It would be unwise to limit the extent or scope of the pursuit, else the Japanese would have the time to regroup and go on the offensive. On 13 September 1944, Mountbatten cabled the British chiefs that he was most anxious to carry out both the operations. To stop pursuing a beaten enemy not only would be misunderstood by the Americans, but would be most damaging to the excellent morale of the Fourteenth Army. Three days later, the combined chiefs sent a directive to Mountbatten, with the approval of Churchill and Roosevelt, stating that his objective was the ‘recapture of all Burma at the earliest date’. Approval was granted for the stages of Operation Capital necessary to secure the overland link to China. Operation Dracula should be launched by 15 March 1945 and certainly before the monsoon set in.

  In thinking through these operations, British military planners assessed that the India Base would be almost three-quarters complete by the end of 1944 and would be able fully to meet all operational requirements by March/April 1945. The improvements in communication to Assam and eastern Bengal had produced very satisfactory results. The overall capacity of the Assam rail and river line of communication had reached 6,470 tons a day and was expected to touch 9,400 tons a day. This was about 2,000 tons more than the target set the previous year.39 The laying of fuel pipelines had also helped ease the load. By late 1944, an American-built 6-inch pipeline from Calcutta to Tinsukia in Assam (750 miles) was operational. As was a British-Indian 6-inch pipeline from Bombay to Bhusaval in central India (300 miles) and a 4-inch pipeline from Chandranathpur to Manipur Road. And the construction of more pipelines was underway. In 1944, an average of 75,000 tons of petroleum products were being moved every month over the Assam lines of communication. It was expected that by June 1945, the figure would stand at 200,000 tons.40 Beyond the Imphal Plain, the Fourteenth Army planned for logistical support by constructing an all-weather two-way road down the Kabaw Valley to Kalewa. This would be supplemented by airlifts from the airfields in Imphal.

  The organization of the army in India had been changed several times to meet the requirements of fighting the Japanese in the jungle. By early 1944, there were no fewer than five different types of infantry divisions under SEAC: the Indian light division, the Indian (A&MT) division, with higher or lower scales of motor transport; the 36th Indian Division comprising two brigades of four battalions each organized for amphibious operations; and the 2nd British Division, also geared for an amphibious role. However, the operations of early 1944 underscored the difficulty and wastefulness of sustaining such differently set up infantry divisions. So, in May 1944, GHQ India and SEAC drew up an organization for a standard infantry division that would at once be capable of fighting in the jungle, of being moved by air and of conducting amphibious operations. The new division would consist of three brigades of three battalions each, a reconnaissance and a machine-gun battalion. The divisional artillery would include two field regiments, one mountain and one anti-tank regiment. Mechanical transport would be reduced. In addition to first-line mules – as in the A&MT divisions – three animal transport companies would be provided to each division.41

  SEAC also reviewed the problems faced in providing air support and air supply during the recent campaign. In order to improve ground-air co-operation, two RAF groups were recast as mobile groups, each with a main headquarters designed to combine with the headquarters of the appropriate army formation fighting ahead of it. The formation of such flexible land-air headquarters would prove very useful as the Fourteenth Army moved on the offensive. Changes were also made to improve the air supply systems. Special staff sections dealing with air supply were established down the chain of command to ensure better co-ordination during the coming offensive campaign.

  The Fourteenth Army also continued to hone its combat skills by learning and passing on the lessons of the recent campaigns as well as by realistic training. Three types of reports were prepared by the Fourteenth Army: a weekly summary of operations with lessons learnt; detailed reports on recent operations; and periodic liaison letters. The main conduit for transmission of learning from the front to other units remained the Army in India Training Manuals. The July 1944 AITM discussed at length the preliminary lessons of fighting in the Arakan and Assam. The September 1944 AITM expanded on these and also underlined the importance of co-operation in combined-arms and joint land-air operations. The divisions that had fought in 1944 prepared their own pamphlets pointing out the lessons learnt. ‘Our doctrine has proved to be sound’, noted the 20th Indian Division’s Battle Instruction for Jungle Fighting, ‘but we have learnt many lessons.’ The Fourteenth Army also began to prepare for the change in character and tempo of operations once they sloped down to the plains of central Burma. In early October, divisional commanders and oth
er senior officers attended a training exercise at the new Tactical Training Centre in Dehra Dun. Over three days they deliberated on how an Indian infantry division should conduct pursuit and offensive operations, including in open terrain.42

  Captain Gul Hassan Khan was sent to a jungle warfare school at Sevoke in north Bengal. ‘It was by far the toughest thing I have ever been through’, recalled the man who would later lead the Pakistan army.

  Instead of training for the jungle it would have been beneficial for those who were destined to enter hell! It started in a novel fashion too – we had to walk to the school from the nearest railway station, thirteen miles away, lugging the kit we had been instructed to bring with us. We were kept on the hop day and night and it was dangerous business because live bullets were flying around … A British officer, my basha-mate, remarked: ‘If my grandmother were to see me here, she would burst into tears!’43

  Slim’s assessment was correct: his troops were ready to attack in November.

  The 4th Corps’ leading division crossed the Chindwin at Sittaung on 19 November 1944. The other two divisions crept up the Kabaw Valley. The 19th Indian Division, led by Major General Peter Rees, discovered that the razor-back, thickly forested but trackless hills were mostly undefended. Despite its lack of combat experience the division passed through the area swiftly and stealthily, covering 140 miles in four weeks. By this time, the 20th Division of the 33rd Corps was also advancing beyond the Chindwin. On 24 December, the 33rd Corps captured Pynigaing in the face of stern Japanese resistance. Kaduma fell six days later. By the end of 1944, the corps was on the Shwebo Plain.