Читать книгу Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 13

The British and Japanese fought each other on the Burman front for forty-six months. Burma thus became the longest single campaign of the Second World War. It cost the Japanese only 2,000 lives to seize this British possession in 1942, but a further 48,662 dead to stay there until 1945. The largest country on the South-East Asian mainland, rich in oil, teak and rubber, Burma had been ruled by a British governor, with only token democratic institutions. Its population of eighteen million included a million Indians, who played a prominent part in commerce and administration. A host of Indian fugitives died in ghastly circumstances during the 1942 British retreat. Burmans had always been hostile to colonial rule. Many acquiesced willingly in occupation by fellow Asians, until they discovered that their new masters were far more brutal than their former ones. By 1944, they had learned to hate the Japanese. They craved independence and, ironically, now looked to the British to secure it for them. Yet Winston Churchill’s government, and its servants in Asia, were confused about political purposes as well as military means. The poems of Kipling, the glories of the Indian Raj, the wealth and prestige which her eastern possessions had brought to Britain, imbued old imperialists, the prime minister notable among them, with passionate sentiment. They yearned to restore the old dispensation. Some younger men recognised that the changes wrought by the war, and especially by Japanese triumphs in 1941-42, were irreversible. They perceived that most Indians were indifferent, or worse, to Britain’s war. The enlightened, however, were not in charge.

The situation was rendered more complex by the involvement of the US. The war with Japan exposed differences between London and Washington more profound than any which afflicted policy in Europe. Americans, from their president to soldiers and airmen who served in the China-Burma-India theatre, were almost universally antipathetic to the British Empire, and resented committing their country’s resources to its resurrection. Where the British regarded Siam as an enemy, ally of the Japanese, from 1942 the US chose to see it merely as an occupied, victim country. This was partly because Washington harboured a conviction, which persisted through 1945, that London cherished imperialistic designs there. Americans shared with the British a commitment to undoing Japanese aggression, but would greatly have preferred not to restore the European powers’ lost possessions to their former owners. So strong was this sentiment that most Americans, including the nation’s leaders, would happily have forsworn British aid to defeat the Japanese, if they could thus have distanced themselves from the cause of imperialism. Only the most compelling global political imperatives persuaded the US to cooperate with the British in the Japanese war. It is hard to overstate the mutual suspicion and indeed antagonism which prevailed between the Western Allies in Asia in 1944-45.

‘I have noted a regrettable lack of any spirit of camaraderie between British and American sections,’ wrote a US diplomat in India, ‘or any evidence of mutual frankness and trust.’ A British diplomat likewise reported: ‘The majority of American officers in this theatre…are pessimistic about the chance of any real Allied cooperation being achieved here, suspicious of British intentions, bitter over many real or fancied grievances, and convinced of the essential bad will and hopeless inefficiency of the Indian administration.’ If the British government was less troubled than it should have been by the deaths of three million Indians in the 1943 Bengal famine, precipitated by the loss of Burma’s rice, those Americans aware of it were appalled. A growing proportion of British signal traffic on Asian matters was marked ‘GUARD’—not to be shown to allies.

‘The Americans [in India]…have rather behaved as an Army of Occupation,’ wrote a senior British officer in December 1943, ‘or if that is too strong, much as we comport ourselves in Egypt vis à vis the Egyptian Army and Government.’ A young British officer of the Indian Army wrote of the distaste for Roosevelt’s people which pervaded his mess: ‘Our anti-Americanism probably stemmed from their reluctance to enter the war against Germany until 1941, their scornful attitude to any other Allied nations’ efforts, and their ability to create huge material and massive air support for their war in the Pacific, while almost grudgingly offering us similar backing. Stories of men losing their wives and girlfriends to American forces in Britain, and films of gum-chewing, jiving, laconic groups of American soldiers and airmen, no doubt led us to the wrong message…We should have understood these things better, but we were young and often intolerant.’

Such feelings were reciprocated. A sheaf of contemporary War Office reports complained of the reluctance of British and US personnel to salute each other. Pollsters put a proposition to Americans at home: ‘The English have often been called oppressors because of the unfair advantage some people think they have taken of their colonial possessions. Do you think there is any truth in this charge?’ Fifty-six per cent of respondents answered: ‘Yes.’ The Office of Strategic Services, the American covert operations organisation whose missions operated out of India into South-East Asia, was rabidly anti-colonialist. OSS officers reported to Washington, entirely accurately, that many Indians thought well of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Nationalist leader assisting the Japanese to raise an ‘Indian National Army’ from the ranks of PoWs to fight against the British. Even the governor of Bengal, Richard Casey, wrote in 1944 that he perceived no enthusiasm for the war among its people: ‘It would be a brave man who would say that the majority of Indians want to remain within the British Commonwealth.’

Some 23,000 young Chinese Nationalists were ‘back-hauled’ by air to India over the Himalayas for American training. They too were bemused and dismayed by their encounters with imperialism. Wen Shan, for instance, walked into Annie’s Bar in Calcutta with a group of comrades, looking for a drink. British soldiers shouted: ‘Out! Out!’ Wen remembered later: ‘We tried to say, “We’re just soldiers like you,” but they would not listen. Once, I saw a British soldier on a Hooghly bridge beating an Indian. This was the way I had seen Japanese soldiers treat Chinese people.’

Wu Guoqing, a twenty-one-year-old interpreter from Chongqing, was thrilled to find that in India he had enough to eat, as he had never done in China. Indeed, he was translated overnight from a poor student into a privileged person with Indian ‘bearers’ to clean his shoes and make his bed, like all Americans in the theatre. Wu recoiled from the poverty, however, which seemed to him worse than that of China, and from British behaviour towards Indians: ‘Some British people even hit them,’ he said wonderingly. ‘They treated them like animals.’ A British tank crewman from London’s east end, John Leyin, was disgusted by the spectacle of two tommies dangling strips of bacon fat from a train window, to taunt starving Indian passers-by. If such behaviour did not represent the entire reality of the Raj, it reflected the impression which it made upon many outsiders, especially American and Chinese, who saw India for the first time in those days.

For months following the expulsion of British forces from Burma in May 1942, they were merely deployed in north-east India to meet the threat of a Japanese invasion. As this peril receded, however, it was replaced by a dilemma about future strategy. Winston Churchill admitted to the British cabinet in April 1943: ‘It could not be said that the [re]conquest of Burma [is] an essential step in the defeat of Japan.’ Yet if this was acknowledged, what were British and Indian forces to do for the rest of the war? After the humiliations inflicted on them in 1941-42, the London government was stubbornly determined to restore by force of arms the prestige of white men in general, and of themselves in particular. If the Asian empire was not to be restored to its former glory, why should British soldiers sacrifice their lives to regain it? Herein lay uncertainties which afflicted strategy throughout the second half of the war, once the initial Japanese tide began to recede. What was Britain’s Far East campaign for? And what would follow victory? No more convincingly than the French or Dutch—the other major colonial powers in Asia, though they contributed nothing significant to the war effort—did the British answer these questions.

In the latter part of 1942 and throughout 1943, Britain’s operations against the Japanese were desultory, even pathetic. Led by feeble commanders against an unflaggingly effective enemy, and with scant support from the government at home, troops failed in a thrust into the Burman coastal region of the Arakan, and were obliged merely to hold their ground in north-east India. Embarrassingly, in the winter of 1943 the operations of six and a half British and Indian divisions were frustrated by just one Japanese formation. Americans like Lt-Gen. Joseph Stilwell, senior US officer in China, became persuaded that the British were no more willing energetically to grapple with the Japanese than were the Chinese armies of Chiang Kai-Shek.

The only marginal success that year owed more to propaganda than substance: Orde Wingate’s ‘Chindit’ guerrilla columns, operating behind the Japanese lines and supplied by air, caught the imagination of the British public and especially of the prime minister, at the cost of losing a third of their number. At one rash moment, Churchill considered making the messianic, unbalanced Wingate C-in-C of Britain’s entire eastern army. Deflected from this notion, instead he promoted the Chindit leader to major-general and authorised resources for him to mount large-scale operations behind the Japanese front in north Burma.

Wingate was killed in a crash during the March 1944 fly-in. The Chindits’ subsequent operations, like those of so many World War II special forces, cost much blood and produced notable feats of heroism, but achieved little. Wingate’s death came as a relief to many senior officers, not least Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, who regarded the Chindits as a distraction. Beyond such theatricals, more than two years were allowed to elapse between the ejection of the British from Burma in 1942, and their return across the Chindwin river. Stilwell’s scorn for British pusillanimity was justified, insofar as Churchill opposed an overland campaign to regain Burma. The prime minister had seen British and Indian forces worsted in jungle fighting in 1942. He dreaded another torrid slogging match on terrain that seemed unfavourable to Western armies.

Against the implacable opposition of his chiefs of staff, who were prepared to resign on the issue, Churchill pressed for an amphibious assault on the great Dutch island of Sumatra, a concept which he rashly compared with his disastrous 1915 Dardanelles campaign ‘in its promise of decisive consequences’. As late as March 1944 he revived the Sumatran scheme, causing the exasperated Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial general staff, to write: ‘I began to wonder whether I was in Alice in Wonderland.’ If a Sumatran operation was not feasible, the prime minister urged landing troops from the sea below Rangoon.

Churchill’s lobbying for a grand South-East Asian amphibious adventure was futile, because Americans owned all the relevant shipping. They would commit their assets only to objectives favoured in Washington, which emphatically did not include Sumatra or Rangoon. Churchill fumed, on 5 May 1944: ‘The American method of trying to force particular policies, of the withholding or giving of certain weapons, such as carrying airplanes or LSTs [Landing Ships, Tank], in theatres where the command belongs by right of overwhelming numbers to us, must be…strongly protested against.’ By this stage of the war, however, Washington’s control of Western Allied strategy had become almost absolute. ‘The hard fact is that the Americans have got us by the short hairs,’ wrote a senior British officer. ‘We can’t do anything in this theatre, amphibious or otherwise, without material assistance from them…So if they don’t approve, they don’t provide.’

Washington dismissed a British request for two US divisions to join operations in Burma. The Canberra government likewise rejected a proposal that two Australian divisions in New Guinea should be transferred to British command in South-East Asia. If the British wanted to recapture Burma, they must do so with their own resources. ‘If our operations formed merely a part of the great American advance,’ cabinet minister Oliver Lyttelton warned the British chiefs of staff in March 1944, ‘we should be swamped. It [is] essential that we should be able to say to our own possessions in the Far East that we had liberated them by our own efforts.’

Thus, the British government knew that a campaign to retake Burma would be difficult, and would not bring the defeat of Japan a day closer. But an army must march, British and Indian soldiers must die, so that Churchill’s people were seen to pay their share of the price for victory in the Far East. Burma would be attacked overland from the north, because only the north interested Washington. Through its jungles and mountains ran a long, tenuous thread, the only land route by which American supplies could be shipped to China from India. Japanese troops occupied a vital section of this ‘Burma Road’. If they could be dispossessed, northern Burma liberated, then the US could pursue its fantastically ambitious plans to provide Chiang Kai-Shek’s armies with the means to become major participants in the war. At huge cost and despite chronic British scepticism, the road was being driven seven hundred miles north from India and south from China by 17,000 American engineers led by the brilliant US Maj.-Gen. Lewis Pike.

From Churchill downwards, the British rejected the notion that China could ever play a part in the war remotely commensurate with the resources which the US lavished upon her. When Roosevelt urged that a nation of 425 million people could not be ignored, the prime minister snorted famously and contemptuously: ‘Four hundred and twenty-five million pigtails!’ Slim, commanding Britain’s Fourteenth Army deployed in north-east India, had some respect for Stilwell, but never shared the American’s belief that the Chinese could decisively influence the war against Japan. ‘I did not hold two articles of his faith,’ the British general wrote later. ‘I doubted the overwhelming war-winning value of this road and…I believed the American amphibious strategy in the Pacific…would bring much quicker results than an overland advance across Asia with a Chinese army yet to be formed.’

If Britain could withhold respect for China, however, it could not deny this to the US. Some 240,000 American engineer and air force personnel were labouring in northern India and southern China to create and sustain the air and land links to which the US government attached such importance. Washington indulged Britain’s commitment to retake Burma only in pursuit of its own China ambitions. A million Indian labourers were deployed to create road, rail and airfield facilities to support a full-scale British offensive. Churchill still railed against what he perceived as the waste of it all. How could India, with more than two million soldiers, deploy as few as ten divisions against nine Japanese on the Burma frontier? ‘It is indeed a disgrace, that so feeble an army is the most that can be produced from the enormous expense entailed.’ In truth, an embarrassing number of Indian Army units were deployed on internal security duties. Churchill wanted Britain’s eastern army to be profitably employed, but deplored the fact that ‘we are about to plunge about in the jungles of Burma, engaging the Japanese under conditions…still unfavourable to us, with the objective of building a pipeline or increasing the discharge over the “hump” [the Himalayan route to China]’.

Allied operations in South-East Asia were nominally subordinate to the supreme commander of South-East Asia Command (SEAC), Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. ‘The interests in this theatre are overwhelmingly British,’ growled Churchill to the combined chiefs of staff when he imposed his protégé’s appointment in September 1943. Mountbatten’s meteoric elevation, from destroyer flotilla commander in 1941 to British Chief of Combined Operations and then to SEAC at the age of forty-two, reflected the prime minister’s enthusiasm for officers who looked the part of heroes. ‘A remarkable and complex character,’ Gen. Henry Pownall, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, wrote of his boss. ‘There are so many paradoxes…his charm of manner…is one of his greatest assets; many is the time that I have gone in to him to have a really good showdown…he would apologise, promise to mend his ways—and then soon afterwards go and do the same thing again! [He] has great drive and initiative…He is however apt to leap before he looks…His meetings are overlong because he likes talking…And he likes a good big audience to hear what he has to say.’

Mountbatten’s many critics, who included Britain’s service chiefs, regarded him as a poseur with a streak of vulgarity, promoted far beyond his talents on the strength of fluency, film-star good looks, and his relationship to the royal family. He was King George VI’s cousin, and never for long allowed anyone to be unaware of it. Famously thickskinned save where his own interests were at stake, of boundless ambition and limited intellect, his grand title as supreme commander meant little, for he was denied executive direction of either armies or fleets. The extravagant staffing of his headquarters in the sublime setting of the botanical gardens at Kandy, Ceylon, promoted derision.

Mountbatten was prone to follies. There was a 1943 episode in Quebec, where he fired a revolver at a chiefs of staffs’ meeting to demonstrate the strength of ‘pycrete’ as a material for a fanciful plan to build artificial iceberg aircraft carriers. The bullet ricocheted, narrowly missing the top brass of the Grand Alliance. Brooke fumed when Mountbatten solicited each of the commanders present for a souvenir tunic button: ‘I only quote this story, as an example of the trivial matters…that were apt to occupy Dicky’s thoughts at times when the heart of the problem facing him should have absorbed him entirely.’ Mountbatten, however, endured endless disappointments and changes of strategy without losing heart. Once, when a scheme which he favoured was briefly approved, though it was evident to his staff that it would never be executed, Pownall wrote pityingly: ‘Mountbatten is in the seventh heaven of delight. He is so very simple-minded.’ ‘Dicky’ was not a great man, but like many prominent actors in the dramas of the Second World War, he strove manfully to do his part in great events. He possessed two virtues which justified his appointment. First, he was a considerable diplomat. He liked Americans, as so many British officers did not, and had a sincere respect for Asians and their aspirations. And the glamour of his presence, in a theatre where so many British soldiers felt neglected by their own nation, did wonders for morale. Almost every man who saw Mountbatten descend from a plane to visit them, in dazzling naval whites or jungle greens, was cheered by the experience.

As supreme commander, Mountbatten floundered when he sought to exercise authority, but distinguished himself as an ambassador and figurehead. Both he and his wife Edwina had a gift for regal informality. Peter d’Cunha of the Royal Indian Navy was once at his post in the wireless office of a patrol boat anchored in a creek off the Arakan, immersed in music from Radio Ceylon. Suddenly a pair of hands removed his headset. He turned in astonishment to perceive Mountbatten, who held it to his own ears for a moment. He then asked the operator’s name, and said: ‘You seem to be very fond of English music.’ The supreme commander replaced the phones on d’Cunha’s head and departed, saying: ‘Enjoy yourself; but just be a little bit alert. You never know who’s coming!’ The young man loved it, of course.

Yet Mountbatten could do nothing to undo his Command’s absolute dependence upon an American vision. Pownall wrote bitterly in his diary in February 1944: ‘If…we are relegated to mucking about in Burma, they may as well wind up this unlucky SE Asia Command, leave here if you like a few figureheads, a good deception staff and plenty of press men to write it up.’ If we recall Slim’s scepticism about Stilwell’s hopes for the Chinese—the British general’s declared belief that the American advance across the Pacific would defeat Japan without an Asian land campaign—these strictures applied with equal force to anything which a British army might do in South-East Asia. Britain’s field commander understood as clearly as her prime minister that the new Burma campaign would be launched to restore imperial prestige and to indulge American fantasies about China, not because British action could contribute substantially to victory over Japan.

In 1944, however, before the British could launch their grand offensive, the Japanese had one more throw to make. With extraordinary boldness, Tokyo’s commanders embarked on an operation to seize the positions of Imphal and Kohima in north-east India. Even the Japanese at their most optimistic did not at this juncture suppose that they could conquer the country. Rather, they sought to frustrate the British advance into Burma. More fancifully, they hoped to precipitate a popular revolt against the Raj by showcasing during their advance units of the so-called Indian National Army, recruited from prisoners-of-war.

The Japanese high command’s approach to the Imphal assault was recklessly insouciant. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi of 15th Army, whose concept it was, sacked his chief of staff for suggesting that the operation was impossible, mainly because of the difficulties of moving men and supplies in Assam, the wettest place on earth, with an annual rainfall that sometimes attained eight hundred inches. Mutaguchi, fifty-six years old, was a scion of an old but now somewhat diminished southern family. Like many Japanese generals self-consciously virile, he never wearied of proclaiming his enthusiasm for women and combat. He was an ambitious political soldier, prominent among those who had precipitated war in China. Belligerence, together with connections in high places, won him promotion to army command.

Mutaguchi found himself largely dependent on bullocks to move stores and munitions across some of the worst terrain in the world. Experiment showed that a laden beast could travel just eight miles a day. The Japanese army’s supply line into Assam would be extraordinarily tenuous. A staff colonel was dispatched to Tokyo to secure endorsement for the operation from prime minister Tojo. A preposterous discussion took place while Tojo splashed in his bath. ‘Imphal…yes,’ said the prime minister, who had never displayed much interest in Mutaguchi’s front. Japanese generals had a droll saying: ‘I’ve upset Tojo—it’s probably Burma for me.’ They called the place ‘jigoku’—‘hell’. Now, the prime minister demanded: ‘How about communications? Have they been properly thought out? Eh? Eh? It’s difficult country towards India, you know. What about air cover? We can’t help him much. Does he realise that? Are you sure it will make things better rather than worse? What’ll happen if the Allies land on the Arakan coast? Has anyone thought of that? Eh? Eh?’ Mutaguchi’s staff colonel outlined the plan while Tojo stood naked before him. At last, the prime minister said: ‘Tell Kawabe’—commander of the Burma Area Army and Mutaguchi’s superior—‘not to be too ambitious.’ Then he signed the Imphal operation order.

The battle which ensued became one of the British and Indian armies’ proudest memories of the war, and decided the fate of Japanese arms in South-East Asia. Slim had expected an attack, but was caught off-balance by its speed and energy. Japanese forces first hit the British in the Arakan coastal belt in February 1944, then moved the following month against Imphal and Kohima. The early weeks of the struggle were touch and go. ‘The whole time I had been in the theatre,’ wrote a cynical British officer, ‘the campaign had been conducted in an extremely leisurely manner by both sides. The only time I [saw] either protagonist hurry [was] when the Japs were heading for Imphal.’ Mutaguchi risked everything to move men fast through heavy country to gain surprise, and almost cut off an Indian division. The Japanese were successful in breaking land links to the British positions.

However, though the British faced Japanese troops on every side, the besiegers were in far more precarious condition than the besieged. Through the months of desperate fighting which followed, Slim’s men held almost all the cards. Their numbers were much superior—albeit not locally at Kohima—and supported by tanks and artillery such as the Japanese were unable to deploy. They possessed command of the skies, and sufficient transport planes to achieve a feat unthinkable earlier in the campaign—the air supply of Imphal and Kohima. British and Indian troops were notably better trained and equipped for jungle warfare than in the past. They defeated the Japanese Arakan thrust so quickly that Slim, with the help of American aircraft secured by Mountbatten’s intercession, was able to shift two divisions from that front to reinforce Imphal and Kohima.

Finally, the British were led by their ablest field commander of the war. Bill Slim—no one called him William—was born in Bristol in 1888, younger son of a hardware wholesaler whose business failed. The boy grew up in difficult circumstances. He always wanted to be a soldier, but spent the years before the First World War first as a pupil teacher, then as a clerk in a steel business. He wangled his way into Birmingham University Officers’ Training Corps, and thence to a commission in 1914. He survived the bloodbath of Gallipoli, which killed or wounded more than half his battalion. Slim transferred to the Gurkhas and was serving with them when hit in the lung. In Mesopotamia he was wounded again by shrapnel and won a Military Cross. He finished the war as an Indian Army major.

Broad and burly, with a heavy jaw and much solid common sense, between the wars he advanced steadily in rank, assuaging financial embarrassment by the somewhat unexpected means of writing magazine stories under the pseudonym of Anthony Mills. It was Slim’s misfortune to command Burcorps, the British force in Burma, during the disastrous retreat of 1942. It was generally acknowledged that he bore no personal responsibility for that defeat, but he himself liked to tell a story of his later return to Burma. One night he slipped unnoticed into Fourteenth Army’s operations room, to perceive two staff officers standing before the map, one pointing confidently and proclaiming: ‘Uncle Bill will fight a battle there.’ The other figure demanded why. ‘Because he always fights a battle going in where he took a licking coming out!’

In contrast to almost every other outstanding commander of the war, Slim was a disarmingly normal human being, possessed of notable self-knowledge. He was without pretension, devoted to his wife Aileen, their family and the Indian Army. His calm, robust style of leadership and concern for the interests of his men won the admiration of all who served under him. ‘Slim is a grand man to work for—he has the makings of a really great commander,’ enthused his chief of staff, Brig. John Lethbridge, in a 1944 letter to his wife. A soldier wrote of Slim: ‘His appearance was plain enough: large, heavily built, grim-faced with that hard mouth and bulldog chin; the rakish Gurkha hat was at odds with the slung carbine and untidy trouser bottoms; he might have been a yard foreman who had become managing director, or a prosperous farmer who’d boxed in his youth.’

An Indian artillery officer told a typical ‘Uncle Bill’ story. Suddenly summoned to order a full regimental shoot, the gunner dashed into his command post, knocking aside a big stranger who impeded his passage. Emerging shortly afterwards, he recognised his army commander, and began to stammer an apology for treating him so brusquely. ‘Don’t bother about that, my boy!’ said Slim cheerfully. ‘If everybody worked like you, we’d get to Rangoon a lot sooner!’ The only people who seemed doubtful of Slim’s merits were his superiors. Churchill never warmed to this bluff, understated officer, fighting a campaign with which the prime minister had no sympathy. Throughout Slim’s career as commander of Fourteenth Army there were attempts to ‘unstick’ him, even in his final glory days. His blunt honesty, lack of bombast and unwillingness to play courtier did him few favours in the corridors of power. Only his soldiers never wavered in their devotion.

In a lecture to the officers of 10th Indian Division, which he led earlier in the war, Slim voiced some of his thoughts about command: ‘We make the best plans we can, gentlemen, and train our wills to hold steadfastly to them in the face of adversity, and yet to be flexible enough to change them when events show them to be unsound, or to take advantage of an opportunity that unfolds during the battle itself. But in the end every important battle develops to a point where there is no real control by senior commanders. Each soldier feels himself to be alone…The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen.’

So it was through the bloody spring and early summer of 1944. On the plain at Imphal, and in the soaring Naga Hills where Kohima stood, British, Indian and Japanese troops struggled for mastery. ‘The scenery was superb,’ wrote one of the defenders, ‘the Highlands without heather, the Yorkshire fells without their stone villages, all on a colossal scale which made our trucks look very puny…On such an immense landscape, it felt like defending the Alps with a platoon.’ Ammunition consumption was prodigious. One battalion, 3/10th Gurkhas, expended 3,700 grenades in a single day’s clashes. The Japanese, short of artillery support, likewise used showers of grenades to cover their attacks. Three British brigadiers died at Kohima. The tennis court of the former district officer’s bungalow became the scene of some of the most brutal fighting of the war. Slowly, steadily, superior firepower told. Allied aircraft pounded the overstretched Japanese supply line. As well as losing ground, Mutaguchi’s soldiers began to starve.

To the fury of the Japanese general, on 19 June, after eighty-five days, Kotuku Sato, his subordinate divisional commander at Kohima, abandoned the assault and began to fall back. The monsoon, which struck with exceptional force, reduced the tracks behind the Japanese front to mudbaths. ‘Despair became rife,’ said Iwaichi Fujiwara, a staff intelligence colonel. ‘The food situation was desperate. Officers and men had almost exhausted their strength after continuous and heavy fighting for weeks in the rain, poorly fed…The road dissolved into mud, the rivers flooded, and it was hard to move on foot, never mind in a vehicle…Almost every officer and man was suffering from malaria, while amoebic dysentery and beriberi were commonplace.’

Still the Japanese army commander would not abandon Imphal. When Sato, back from Kohima, reported to Mutaguchi’s headquarters on 12 July, a senior staff officer coldly offered him a short sword covered with a white cloth. Sato, however, felt more disposed to kill his superior than himself. He declared contemptuously: ‘15th Army’s staff possess less tactical understanding than cadets.’ He recognised, as Mutaguchi would not, that the Japanese forces should have acknowledged failure and fallen back before the monsoon broke. Japanese often spoke scornfully of the long and cumbersome British logistic ‘tail’. Now they discovered the cost of themselves having no ‘tail’ at all.

Mutaguchi’s hapless soldiers fought on at Imphal, being driven back yard by yard with crippling losses. Their commander’s behaviour became increasingly eccentric. Having ordered a clearing made beside his headquarters in the jungle, he implanted decorated bamboos at the four points of the compass, and each morning approached these, calling on the eight hundred myriad gods of Japan for aid. His supplications were in vain. On 18 July the general bowed to the inevitable, and ordered a retreat. His ruined army began to fall back towards the Chindwin river, into Burma, Slim’s vanguards pressing on their rear. ‘One battle is much like another to those who fight them,’ observed Captain Raymond Cooper of the Border Regiment, who was wounded at Imphal. This is indeed true. But the consequences of Imphal and Kohima far transcended any British achievement in the Far East since December 1941.

The campaign was a catastrophe for the Japanese. Of 85,000 fighting soldiers committed, 53,000 became casualties, five divisions were destroyed, two more badly mauled. At least 30,000 men died, along with 17,000 mules, bullocks and pack ponies, both sides’ indispensable beasts of burden. The Indian National Army, in British eyes traitors, collapsed when exposed to action, and surrendered wherever Slim’s soldiers would indulge them. Fourteenth Army suffered 17,000 casualties, but its spirits soared. ‘We knew we had won a great victory,’ said Derek Horsford, commanding a Gurkha battalion at the age of twenty-seven. ‘We were chasing Japanese up and down thousand-foot hills, finding everywhere their dead and abandoned weapons and equipment.’ An eyewitness with Fourteenth Army, advancing in the enemy’s wake, wrote:

The air was thick with the smell of their dead. The sick and wounded were left behind in hundreds…We saw dead Japs all along the road, some in their stockinged feet, and where the hills were highest and most exhausting, they lay huddled in groups. They carried only a mess-tin, steel helmet and rifle. Some lay as though asleep, while others were twisted and broken by the bombs which had rained down on them. Five hundred dead lay in the ruins of Tamu. The pagoda was choked with wounded and dying. They had crawled here, in front of the four tall and golden images, to die. Hand grenades littered the altar. In the centre of the temple was a dais, and carved into this was a perfectly symmetrical pattern on the foot of Buddha. It was littered with blood-soaked bandages and Japanese field-postcards.

No men in this war can have been reduced to such a terrible condition. I saw two prisoners who were revived with hot tea. They were tiny men with matted hair which stood up like a golliwog’s. One of them put his head in his hands and cried like a child. It was a disgrace for him to be alive. [Some Japanese] killed themselves where they stood with their own grenades…lousy, half-mad from hunger and explosions, and deserted by their officers. This is a picture of a shattered army…These small men with the savage hearts and the hands that can paint exquisite water-colours in the diaries which they leave lying in the red mud.

Lethbridge, Slim’s chief of staff, wrote home:

The Jap retreat must have been worse than Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The whole jungle stinks of corruption. I counted twenty-five dead Japs on the side of the road, between two successive milestones. There must have been hundreds more who had crawled away into the jungle to die. In some places there are Jap lorries, with skeletons sitting in the drivers’ seats, and a staff car with four skeletons in it. All these Japs had simply died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. I have never seen troops in such good heart as our people…I’m so delighted that the British Army has at last come into its own again, and shown the world how we can wage war. I really don’t see how the old Hun can last much longer. Once we’ve finished him, we’ll simply knock the hide off these little yellow swine.

On the Japanese line of retreat, correspondent Masanori Ito approached Renya Mutaguchi, architect of his army’s disaster. ‘He seemed tired out,’ wrote Ito, who noticed that the general was shamelessly sipping rice gruel, even as starving survivors of his army stumbled past. ‘You want a statement?’ Mutaguchi growled. ‘I have killed thousands of my men. I should not go back across the Chindwin alive.’ Mutaguchi did not kill himself, however, and lived to be sacked a few months later. Of all the Imperial Army’s commanders, he had become the most detested and scorned by his own officers and men.

‘Sometimes it is impossible to carry out very difficult orders, but even though the command recognise this, they will not admit their mistake until every man has died trying to carry them out,’ a Japanese officer prisoner told his British captors. ‘The unreasoning obedience of men in carrying out idiotic orders is pitiful to behold. It was often impossible for me to give the actual orders—sometimes I only passed on half of them. “We get all the fighting but none of the food—why?” No one dared say this, but everybody thought it.’

In the autumn of 1944, as Fourteenth Army began its own advance towards the Chindwin river and Burma, at first the Japanese could deploy only four very weak divisions, totalling some 20,000 men, against Slim’s six, plus two independent brigades—a British ration strength of 260,000 men. In the north, Chinese divisions under Stilwell were making sluggish progress towards the clearance of the Burma Road between India and China. The only significant achievement of the second Chindit expedition was to assist the capture of Myitkyina, a vital link on the route, which finally fell on 3 August. It required the efforts of three Chinese divisions, aided by the American ‘Merrill’s Marauders’, together with several thousand Chindits, to achieve this success against the weak, poorly-equipped Japanese 18th Division. But the prospect now beckoned of opening the China passage.

Slim’s invaders were supported by forty-eight fighter and bomber squadrons and a total of 4,600 aircraft in the theatre, many of them American transports. The Japanese had just sixty-six planes. Though they were able to reinforce their ground forces before spring, the scene was set for Fourteenth Army to commence its recapture of Burma. Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Gen. Henry Pownall, perceived an urgency about this task. Like others of his time, place and nation, he saw Britain engaged in a race between the recapture of her Asian colonies and American victory in the Pacific. If the British lost the contest, if they failed to secure physical possession before the Japanese flag came down, the Union flag might never again fly over this great region: ‘There’s not much time to lose. The Yanks are going to have Japan beat by Xmas 1945. We have got a lot of cleaning-up to do by then. The Yanks are not going to wait for us (no reason why they should) but we really don’t want our Far Eastern Empire…handed back to us entirely by American single-handed victory. So we aim at all Burma by next summer and Malaya not too long afterwards.’

The twin battles of Imphal and Kohima had been essential, to halt the Japanese advance westwards. British victory had crippled the fighting power of the enemy on the Burman front, where Japan no longer possessed resources to frustrate any significant Allied purpose. Slim’s chief foes were now terrain, disease, weather, logistics. Mountbatten supported an important decision: to keep fighting through the monsoon, when in the past all significant operations were halted. Thereafter, Slim was called upon to move a modern Western army across hundreds of miles of the most inhospitable country in the world, devoid of road communications, to redeem the humiliations which Britain had suffered in 1941-42, and to keep alive a dream of empire which thoughtful men knew to be doomed. Churchill badly wanted to retrieve Burma and Malaya, but was determined, he told the chiefs of staff in September 1944, ‘that the minimum of effort should be employed in this disease-ridden country’. Here was a prospect rich in pathos, tragedy or absurdity according to viewpoint. As so often in wars, brave men were to do fine and hard things in pursuit of a national illusion.