So the Indian military and civil order, Kipling and Lord
Curzon’s mighty machines for doing nothing, were finally creaking into action.
The authorities in Delhi, Kandy and London had their eyes fixed on the winter
of 1944 for the start of a major campaign in Assam. As so often in the past,
the Japanese caught them on the back foot. What they thought was mere probing
of the defences in Arakan and on the Manipur border developed into Japan’s last
great offensive in Southeast Asia during March and April 1944. Why did
Mutaguchi and the Japanese high command initiate this incredibly costly attack
just at the time when they were also undertaking the Ichigo offensive against
Chiang Kai Shek in South China? Why did they contemplate a major land push when
they were under intolerable pressure from the US Pacific fleet?
The Japanese themselves saw this as the final throw in
Southeast Asia. They hoped to knock out British India and had been told by
Subhas Bose that once they penetrated the Bengal plains there would be a mass
revolt on a larger scale than in 1942. They seem to have believed that Germany
was about to counter-attack the Allies in Italy and frustrate a potential invasion
over the Channel. If they knocked out Britain and China, they could hope for a
negotiated peace with the Americans. If, instead, they waited until the autumn,
their air power would have dwindled further, their food and raw material
situation would have collapsed and the Allied build-up in India would have
reached its peak. The Japanese plan, as in 1942, was for rapid deep penetration
and they expected the British armies to fall back as they had always done
previously.
There were now also strong political reasons for giving the
commanders in Singapore and Rangoon the go-ahead. In Tokyo the position of
Prime Minister Tojo, the super hawk, was in the balance. The Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere was running into trouble with shortages of essential
commodities, soaring prices and labour problems. On the ground there were signs
of restiveness on the part of the Burma Defence Army and the Indian National
Army. In fact, the BDA was already plotting against the Japanese. Some of its
leaders had approached the British as early as the end of 1943. The Japanese
were already suspicious and a faction within the local military and
intelligence services even took the view that Ba Maw was contemplating
treachery, making a ham-fisted attempt to assassinate him and replace him with
a more compliant character, a prince of the former Burmese royal house. Wiser
counsels prevailed, however, for the last thing the Japanese high command
needed during the assault on India was a political coup in the rear.
The INA remained steadfastly anti-British but officers and
men bridled at being used as a kind of coolie corps by Japanese troops who had
never really taken to them, finding Indian food customs and the long hair of
the Sikh troops, for instance, completely incomprehensible. Subhas Bose himself
knew that this was the critical moment and was putting great pressure on the
Japanese high command. His men were ready. The INA had trained specialists in
sabotage and infiltration in its academy in Penang. Some agents were already in
place across the Indian border. It was now or never. From the moment Bose had
arrived in Rangoon, a large proportion of the city’s remaining Indian residents
had been glowing with pride. The previous November the anniversary of the death
of the last Mughal emperor of India had been celebrated. He had died in exile
in Rangoon where the British sent him in 1859. The chairman of the Burma branch
of the Indian Independence League had vowed to present Netaji, the affectionate
name for Bose, with earth from the emperor’s grave in a silver casket to
accompany him on the march to India.29 Now Indians mobbed the trains packed
with INA troops as they steamed out of the city’s stations to cries of ‘Chalo
Delhi!’ and ‘Azad Hind Zindabad!’ ‘Long Live Free India!’ Preparations were
made for a ‘Netaji week’ from 4 to 10 July to celebrate Subhas Bose’s
assumption of leadership of the freedom movement in East Asia a year earlier.
The commanders of the three armies now facing each other in
the Assam hills intensified the propaganda effort amongst their own troops. How
to keep the civilian population on their side was the key issue. The Japanese
commanders were particularly worried about priests, women and cows. A pamphlet
was produced for Japanese soldiers entitled ‘Everyday Knowledge about India’.
It cautioned them against acts of violence, especially against temples and
priests. The British had been vilified for going into religious buildings with
their boots on. The pamphlet also confidently reported that ‘there is probably
no place in the world where women are more bother’. In other words, the
procurement of ‘comfort women’ in the subcontinent was going to prove a
problem. Above all, soldiers should leave cattle alone, even when hungry.
British counter-propaganda had constantly harped on the way in which Japanese
troops had casually slaughtered and eaten any cow they came across in their
passage through Burma. The Japanese took the hint. A document captured later
revealed that Japanese officers had been sent on a special course to learn
about goat breeding preparatory to the advance. Huge numbers of the animals
were rounded up. They were to be the staple food of the army as it advanced
into Assam, ‘to avoid offending the scruples of Indian people’ by eating
cattle. As it turned out, the Japanese infantrymen faced less complex issues of
cuisine as they began their great assault. A captured diary reported of one
feint, ‘We were ordered to withdraw – many dropped out of the ranks due to
weakness from lack of food. We have to chew uncooked rice to satisfy our
hunger. The enemy certainly eat well. I wish I could have a stomach full of
such good food.’
Japanese morale was still high, but it was the morale of
desperation. Captain Shosaku Kameyama of the Japanese 31st Division said that
most of his comrades were aged between twenty and twenty-two. They came from
the devoutly Buddhist Niigata prefecture. He bewailed the fact that most of
these young men were unmarried. They could not become ancestors after death and
were later forgotten by the younger generation. In 1944 they ‘fought for their
country, to save their country. They believed that their country was in a
serious situation. When they left their home town, many schoolchildren and
local people cheered their departure, singing songs and waving flags. This had
greatly impressed the soldiers, who had a strong obligation to their family and
local folk.’ It was this unquestioning belief that, even in the distant jungles
of Burma, they were literally defending their native soil that explains the
almost fanatical bravery and self-sacrifice commented on by so many of their
British and Indian adversaries. It was harder for the British or Indians to
believe that they were doing the same thing. To the British, the enemy of their
homeland was Hitler and even poorly educated Indian soldiers were now deeply
ambivalent about the Raj. For the Allies, the offensive spirit was kept up by
regimental loyalty and, by 1944, by a fierce and cold hatred of the merciless
Japanese.
Alongside the Japanese now stood about 40,000 men of Subhas
Bose’s INA. Its commanders launched a major propaganda offensive too. They told
their men in numerous political talks about British atrocities in India. They
spoke of the bloody suppression of the 1857 rebellion, the massacre at Amritsar
in 1919 and the recent and still unrolling famine in which millions of their
countrymen had starved to death as a result of British neglect. The British
Indian battalions would, they were told, desert the moment they met a truly
Indian army. The British, it was said, were so worried by the unreliability of
their own troops that they had brought in nearly wild West Africans to keep an
eye on them. The commanders knew they had their own vulnerabilities. Subhas
Bose constantly invoked the Mahatma in his messages to the troops and radio
broadcasts. The Congress leaders were national icons even for those who wanted
to liberate India by force of arms. Yet Gandhi and Nehru had persistently
rejected the tactics of the INA, even when they were immured in British jails.
This was because the one opposed violence and the other opposed fascism. Even
before the defeat at Imphal and Kohima, there were signs of fractiousness and
worry amongst the INA commanders. A captured letter from the Officer Commanding,
North India Guerrilla Regiment, to Subhas Bose in April 1944 said that the
troops had set off in high hopes for the liberation of India. When they got to
the front line, the Japanese assigned them to tasks such as road making,
repairing bridges, driving bullocks or, worse, carrying rations for Japanese
soldiers. Often they had to eat Japanese food. Malaria was tightening its grip
in the absence of medicines. The Japanese commander said they would eventually
fight, but he was often being asked ‘Sahib, when the Japs are advancing into
the sacred soil of our motherland, what are we doing sitting in remote corners
of Burma?’ In an ironic recapitulation of the relations between British and
Indian troops, the Japanese refused to salute INA officers.
The British behind the lines began to be jumpy as February
turned to March. There were sporadic acts of sabotage across India. In
districts such as Midnapur in Bengal and the ‘badlands’ of southern Bihar
revolutionary nationalists had gone underground in 1942 to escape arrest. From
here they carried on a stubborn campaign of anti-British propaganda, attacks on
communications and the occasional murder of Indian government officials. On
both the east and west coasts parties of INA special forces had been landed
from Japanese submarines. The Criminal Investigation Department lost sight of
them for days at a time and they found many sympathizers among ordinary people
in bazaars and villages.
Up in Simla, Dorman-Smith idled away his exile, taking his
dachshunds for walks. He continued to argue with officers of South East Asia
Command about the role of civilians in the reconstruction of Burma. He listened
to INA propaganda broadcasts. In his letters to his wife, he ridiculed the
‘March on Delhi’: ‘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.’ As S. A. Ayer, Bose’s minister of information,
recorded afterwards, Netaji, who also had a stout sense of humour, listened to
the British broadcasts out of Delhi with equal amusement. British morale was
boosted by ‘Wingate’s stout show’. Dorman-Smith was referring to the Chindits’
second great campaign to strike behind the Japanese lines with gliders, a
campaign which saw the death of Wingate himself in a plane crash on 24 March.
Here and there, though, there was a note of concern; as Dorman-Smith wrote to
his wife, ‘it may be that your old pal Bose’s propaganda is having a bit of an
effect’. On 23 March as the Japanese push on Imphal developed, Dorman-Smith and
the deskbound military became increasingly concerned. An ‘anxious time’ was
coming.
The British stepped up the propaganda effort. ‘Old Burma
hands’ recruited from Steel Brothers and other major firms toured the British
regiments giving them pep talks. There was little need to stress the
hatefulness of the Japanese enemy to these troops. But the attitude to be
adopted to the Burmese when the breakthrough finally came was a more touchy
question in view of the constant barrage of denunciation directed against them
since 1942. In their briefings to the troops, the old hands gave little
quarter. According to one, the Burmese were close to ‘primitive savagery’ and
this had been demonstrated by their treatment of Indian coolies in 1942. Other
morale-building talks urged that though there were very large numbers of ‘bad
hats’ in the country, these were concentrated in a few particular places.
Shwebo north of Mandalay was one black spot, for here the Burmese kings had
sent their most troublesome subjects into exile. The Delta had always harboured
‘bad hats’ too. Here the British had encountered the fiercest opposition in
1886 and 1930 – 31, and they were likely to do so again. All the same, a pep
talk opined, ‘the average Burman will be found to be a gentleman if treated as
such’. Another improving talk warned British troops against constipation and
consequent hypochondria. It added: ‘half our trouble with the natives is due to
their remaining constipated for several days without asking for medicines’.
Perhaps this was just a conceit, but the writer’s tendency to equate native
political problems with bowel complaints was a bad augury for the future.
Within a year these same old Burma hands were to be in action against the
Japanese alongside the Burmese fighters they now denounced as ‘quislings’ and
‘fascists’. For some of them, the mental leap would be too great.
Among Indian troops, morale was rising. Indian officers were
taking over the ‘josh groups’ or regimental chat sessions. This was a new
breed, better educated and more independent than the old corps of native
officers. They felt on a par with the British and began to convey a new
confidence to the troops. The soldiers began to put memories of Arakan behind
them. Increasingly, they were being taught to fight as thinking men rather than
automata. Commanders of the Indian divisions, notably Frank Messervy, built on
Auchinleck’s new training programmes for Indian soldiers at base camp. Units
held regular post mortems on the fighting, discussing ways to counter Japanese
jungle warfare tactics and teaching individual soldiers to think independently.
General Slim, shrewd as ever, sensed the change and spent much more time
talking to the Indian and Gurkha soldiers. He began his campaign ‘not so much
like a general and more like a parliamentary candidate’ trying to get the ear
of his electors, ‘except that I never made a promise’. Speaking to groups of
soldiers and officers along the front and in base camps, Slim came to think
that Indian troops responded even better than British troops to appeals on
abstract grounds to religion and patriotism.
On 15 April 1944 Mountbatten moved his headquarters from the
‘marble palaces’ and intrigue of Delhi to the bashas (hutments) of Kandy in
Ceylon, which he insisted were nearer the front. His aim was to counter the
‘forgotten army’ feeling that particularly affected British troops immobilized
for months in the dust or rains of India or stuck in the mud and malaria of
Assam. The army’s propaganda and entertainment wing had a good time targeting
this. ‘Laugh with SEAC’ printed a little poem, ‘Sticking it out in Delhi’,
which summed up the sense of boredom. It began:
Fighting the Nazis from Delhi,
Fighting the Japs from Kashmir,
Exiled from England, we feel you should know,
The way we are taking it here.
Sticking it out at the Cecil,
Doing our bit for the War,
Going through hell at Maiden’s Hotel,
Where they stop serving lunch at four.
The previous autumn, Mountbatten had recruited Frank Owen of
the London Evening Standard to run South East Asia Command’s propaganda
newspaper, the Phoenix. Its editor, ‘Supremo’ said, would hold ‘by far the most
important job that a lieutenant has ever held in the army’. Mountbatten tried
to instil into the troops, by way of Owen’s editorials, a sense that Kandy
represented a new beginning. Later in 1944, the two arch-propagandists began to
work on the Americans. Owen tried to cajole Frank Capra, the Hollywood film
director, to put a better gloss on British and Indian troops in one of his
films of jungle warfare. By the end of the year plans were afoot to produce a
joint Anglo-American forces magazine for SEAC.
In a sense, the more difficult propaganda war for the
British was inside India itself. Starvation continued in some parts of Bengal.
Perversely, a return to relative agricultural prosperity in the Punjab
discouraged enlistment there. A huge and apparently accidental explosion ripped
apart the Bombay dockyards at the beginning of April. Indian labour fled into
the hinterland, anticipating Japanese bombing. The enemy advance into Arakan
raised memories of 1942 and their propaganda was believed even when Kohima’s
capture was announced more than once in their broadcasts. To cap it all, there
was a serious shortage of coal in eastern India, labour was scarce and the
Indian merchant classes were rattled. Yet somehow the Allied victories in
Europe meant that morale never plummeted as low as it had done two years
before. Officials noted that bank deposits outweighed withdrawals by two to
one. The opposite had been the case in 1942. The political situation remained
deadlocked with the Congress leadership still languishing in jail. But the
Muslim League was now becoming more and more positive on the issue of
recruitment, hoping to cut the ground out from under the ruling Unionist Party
ministry in the Punjab. The communists were also very active in promoting
recruitment and countering Congress propaganda against the war. In the long
run, they told would-be recruits, the real battle would soon be against
imperialism and capitalism.
Where the two armies encountered each other, the propaganda
war between the Indian army and the INA was as sharp as the fighting. INA
commissars lectured Indian army POWs with stories of British atrocities and won
some of them over. A young Gurkha of the INA Bahadur Group infiltrated British
lines. On capture he wept copiously in front of the commanding officer and said
he was a refugee and had lost both of his parents at the hands of the Burmese.
The officer believed him, gave him a certificate of good conduct and set him
free. He continued spying for the INA. Other INA men made contact with former
supporters of Bose’s Forward Bloc as they moved into Assam and began to hatch
plans for a general rising in the event of a Japanese breakthrough.
But these local political successes were offset by the grave
situation of Axis forces even before the advance on Imphal ground to a halt.
The Japanese had finally tested their logistical capabilities to destruction.
Less and less food was coming up from the Burmese plains. Soldiers in both the
armies were living on tiny parcels of rice supplemented with roots. INA troops
were fed with Japanese food to which many were allergic. Disease was now
rampant among Indian and Japanese soldiers as the supply of medicines dwindled
to nothing. This was at the very time when the Allied armies were beginning to
get the benefit of wartime advances in tropical medicines made in Canada and
the United States. In 1942 disease rates in the British and Indian armies had
been over 20 per cent during the flight from Burma. By June 1944, they had
fallen to 6 per cent. Still, morale among the INA seems to have held up well.
Bose remained invincible in his optimism, announcing that the march on Delhi was
making slow but steady progress even as the Japanese began to withdraw from the
Assam front. British intelligence itself reported that the INA was still
overwhelmingly anti-British. It was also reported, though, that relations
between the INA and the Japanese had begun to sour further. The Japanese
commanders were dubious of the INA’s tenacity as a fighting force. This was
probably unreasonable as the INA were never properly supplied and remained
dependent on captured British arms and ammunition which were now harder to come
by.
The first test came once again in Arakan. Japanese forces
began to probe and push against the positions to which the British had been
forced back during the dismal fighting of the previous spring. Their aim was to
direct attention away from Mutaguchi’s forces which were now building up for
their push on Imphal. The assault began on 6 February 1944, about three weeks
before the great U-Go offensive to the north. Japanese forces moved north and
began to encircle the British HQ of Lieutenant-General Messervy at Launggyuang.
As the battle developed, something unusual happened. Rather than retreat, the
British held their ground. Their Spitfires knocked the Japanese fighters out of
the sky. Ammunition, medical supplies, food and even Frank Owen’s newspaper
SEAC were parachuted to the British strongpoint at Sinzweya. Tanks and heavy
artillery, in which the British were now overwhelmingly superior, turned the
course of the battle in their favour. By 26 February the Japanese offensive had
been broken. For the first time a British and Indian force had met and
decisively defeated a major Japanese offensive, leaving 5,000 of the enemy dead
on the field. The army, gloomy and apprehensive as it had been a mere nine
months earlier during Irwin’s watch, had now massively improved morale.
There was something else. On 7 February a Japanese assault
had entered one of the field hospitals. They massacred the Indian and British
medical team and bayoneted the wounded in their beds. News of this and other
similar atrocities spread along the whole eastern front. British, Indian and
African troops began to loathe the Japanese with a hatred almost unparalleled
in modern warfare. Thereafter, Allied soldiers often casually killed any
Japanese they encountered without the slightest compunction. Hatred of the
enemy appears to have become one of the great causes of the Allied army, a more
potent force by far than loyalty to the king-emperor. Indian troops extended
this hatred even to their former comrades of the INA. When they encountered
them in battle, Indian troops shot INA men in large numbers, to the relief of
British intelligence officers.
The next major event to unroll on the Burma front was Orde
Wingate’s second Chindit expedition, Operation Thursday. Its purpose was not so
much to help the British push into central Burma but to cut off the Japanese
forces in the north of the country and relieve pressure on the Chinese under
Stilwell to the north. Popular with Churchill and Mountbatten, Wingate had
dramatically built up his forces since the previous year, even though some
senior officers worried about the diversion of men from the main battle front.
Thursday drew on more than 10,000 combat troops, supported by US commandos and
equipment. This large force was deployed by means of glider drops far into
north Burma, around Indaw. The campaign proceeded at a slower pace after
Wingate himself died in an air accident early in the operation. Mountbatten
paid tribute to ‘one of the most forceful and dynamic personalities this war
has produced’. The results of the operation remain a matter of controversy in
the military-history literature. Yet there seems no question that the sudden
appearance of such a large Allied force at his rear disrupted Mutaguchi’s plans
and unnerved his commanders, even though he initially dismissed the attack as a
sideshow. The disruption of Japanese communications and battle plans in the
north also significantly aided Stilwell’s advance on Myitkyina later in the
year, though he, too, was highly sceptical of Thursday. Most important,
perhaps, was the psychological effect of the expedition on British and Japanese
morale. Once again, Wingate had created a morale-boosting legend precisely at
the time when the British were under maximum pressure. The Japanese never
entirely regained the advantage of surprise and flexibility which had served
them so well early in the war. Over the next two years, they were constantly
looking over their shoulders, fearing attacks by the Chindits and other Allied
special forces.
The Arakan attack was the curtain raiser to the far more
massive battle that unfolded a few weeks later to the north. Imphal and Kohima
were, for the British, the defining land battles of the war in the East.
Mutaguchi planned a typical two-pronged attack. One thrust was to the south on
Imphal. The northern advance was intended to drive through Kohima and
ultimately encircle the massive base being built up at Dimapur, where David
Atkins and his transport corps had met its Waterloo the previous year. The Japanese
attack on Kohima almost succeeded. On 17 April the garrison of 2,000 men nearly
fell. This would have been another terrible blow to British morale and
prestige, but the garrison was initially relieved on 19 April. According to Ba
Maw, Bose had an Indian governor and even a new Free India currency ready for
the captured strong-points. Ba Maw added that a joint INA-Japanese advance was
delayed by wrangling between the two sides over who should take the credit.
Bose wanted to raise the Indian flag while the Japanese wanted the first towns
to fall in British India as a gift for the Emperor Hirohito on his forty-third
sides over who should take the credit. Bose wanted to raise the Indian flag
while the Japanese wanted the first towns to fall in British India as a gift
for the Emperor Hirohito on his forty-third birthday.
In the end, though, it was military factors which saved the
day for the British. The British had tanks in the sector and the Japanese did
not. This can be attributed to the huge improvement in both land and sea
communications that had occurred on the Allied side since the previous spring.
An animal-based Japanese army was quite suddenly facing a mechanized British
Indian one. Another key factor was the formidable fighting power of the revitalized
Indian element of the army. It was Punjabis and Gurkhas, in particular, the men
of the 5th, 17th and 23rd Indian divisions, who came to the rescue of the
embattled garrisons. These troops were better fed, better led by the hardened
elite of Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers and better directed as a result of
effective unit-based propaganda work. Once the Kohima garrison had been rescued
the British battled to retake the Kohima area throughout April and May.
Eventually, in June, the Japanese offensive began to crumble and their troops,
out of food and ammunition, began to fall back southward towards Imphal. There
were, of course, many episodes of British heroism and grit, notably the battle
on the Kohima tennis court in May where, for instance, Sergeant J. Waterhouse
of B Squadron, 149 Tank Regiment, kept dozens of attackers at bay. After the
battles of April 1944, however, the British army began to use Indian troops to
stiffen the morale of the British in particular circumstances, reversing a
generations-old practice of the Indian army at war. Here, on India’s
jungle-clad eastern frontier as much as in Whitehall or the Congress Working
Committee, the Raj really came to an end.
Imphal showed the Allies using another of their decisive
advantages: air power. In the first two weeks of April the Japanese attack on
the southerly strong-point was as fierce as it was anywhere during the whole
war. The Japanese wanted to neutralize the local airfields and push on towards
the Indian plains where they hoped to spark off a popular revolt. With
Mutaguchi in personal command, massive and well-trained forces were available.
Again, the garrison held its ground. This time the air drop was on an equally
massive scale. Against resistance from some American officers, Mountbatten
diverted US transport planes from supplying Chiang Kai Shek over the Hump to
China. With the garrison consolidated by parachute drops in brigade strength,
tanks again switched the battle in the Allies’ favour. Lacking food and
ammunition and decimated by cholera and malaria, the Japanese attacks began to
slacken by the third week of April. In late June the siege of Imphal was
raised.
The Japanese had no transport aircraft and few mechanical vehicles by this time. Instead, they mobilized the animal power of north Burma and the hills on a scale unprecedented since the time of the old Burmese kings. They also brought their own horses. In Operation Imphal 12,000 horses and mules, 30,000 oxen and more than 1,000 elephants crossed the Chindwin. The scale of animal fatality was colossal. During the campaign Japanese horses survived only fifty-five days on average and mules seventy-three days. All the horses and mules had died by August and the cattle had also perished or been eaten. Only the elephants survived.
While Imphal and Kohima suddenly awakened the world to the
titanic scale of the military conflict in mainland Asia, the other front in
Arakan burst further into life. Here the British had even more ground to make
up in terms of morale and self-esteem. SEAC, keeping up pressure on the
Japanese command in Akyab, sent in a mixed division of men from Hyderabad in
the south and from the North West Frontier during early 1944. It was supported
by the motor launches of the Royal Indian Navy, moving up and down the Naf
river with supplies. The air force, too, was much more in evidence than it had
been the previous year. This allowed British troops to hold out and fight back
when surrounded by the Japanese because they could be supplied from the air.
The aim in this third Arakan campaign was straightforwardly to kill as many
Japanese as possible.
Gaining territory in Arakan was very difficult because of the intricate nature of the waterlogged plain and its paddy fields and the low hills of the interior. The planners had already decided that the push into Burma by land had to go over the northern mountains. By contrast, the Arakan fighting was a war of attrition during the monsoon season. The British river craft and artillery were not much better than they had been in the previous year. Conditions remained appalling. One officer recorded his memories: ‘leeches in the jungle, chaungs [paddy field streams] in spate that he had to cross with ropes; socks that shrank because they were never dry; the whiskers that grew overnight on his boots and the fungus that grew on his binoculars’. Eastward in the drier, higher land a fierce battle raged along tunnelled railway lines that were the only route down into Burma. The Japanese were dug into individual foxholes and kept up a random mortar fire on the bashas or temporary hutments built by the Allied troops. These were constructed out of dripping tarpaulins and rusting sheets of corrugated iron. In this climate and terrain, wounds turned septic within hours and as many as eight men were needed to carry a single casualty over many miles.
