The Battle of Yenangyaung

On 15 April 1942 the commander of Burma Corps, Lieutenant General William Slim, gave the order to destroy the oilfields at Yenangyaung, the largest source of oil in Burma. Sappers and employees of the Burmah Oil Company blew up and set fire to wells, tanks and installations, and a cloud of black smoke hung over the valley of the Irrawaddy. The Japanese 33rd Division, which had been breaking through the British positions to the south for several days, did not capture the fields intact, but it trapped 1st Burma Division among the burning wells. On 16–19 April the division fought to break out of the encirclement in searing heat and without water, and it survived thanks to its own breakout and to an attack by a Chinese regiment of General Sun Liren’s 38th Division. In China the battle is remembered as a great victory; in Britain, as one of the hardest episodes of the retreat from Burma.

War chronologies record the Japanese capture of Migyaungye under 12 April and the start of the destruction of the oilfield installations by the troops of Burma Corps under 15 April. Both dates are correct. The Japanese took Migyaungye, a village on the Irrawaddy on the right wing of the British line, on 12 April. As for the destruction of the fields, the sources differ by a few hours: according to the British official history Slim gave the signal for the demolitions at one in the afternoon of 15 April and the work was completed on the afternoon of 16 April; the American official history states that the burning began at one in the morning of 15 April. The actual fighting for Yenangyaung lasted from 16 to 19 April.

The line from Minhla to Taungdwingyi

After the fall of Rangoon the Allied forces tried to hold central Burma. Burma Corps (Burcorps), formed in March from 1st Burma Division, 17th Indian Division and 7th Armoured Brigade, defended the Irrawaddy valley, while the Chinese armies, formally commanded by General Joseph Stilwell, since February Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff, stood in the Sittang valley and the Shan States. After the loss of Prome (Pyay) at the beginning of April, the commander of British forces in Burma, General Harold Alexander, decided to make a stand on a line running from Minhla on the Irrawaddy through Taungdwingyi to Pyinmana and Loikaw. Slim’s corps was given a sector some 65 kilometres long, too long for two weakened divisions. On 6 April at Maymyo Chiang Kai-shek promised Alexander a Chinese division for the defence of Taungdwingyi, but a few days later he withdrew the promise, and Slim had to hold the front without reserves.

Behind the line lay the oilfields at Yenangyaung and smaller ones at Chauk. The oil extracted there and processed in the local refinery had been the only fuel for the Allies in Burma since the British blew up the refineries near Rangoon. For the Japanese the fields were one of the objectives of the campaign. The line was manned on 8 April: 2nd Burma Brigade stood at Minhla on the west bank of the river, Major General Bruce Scott’s 1st Burma Division with 7th Armoured Brigade held the road from Migyaungye on the Irrawaddy to Kokkogwa, and 17th Indian Division defended Taungdwingyi. In the dry season, in the sun-scorched Dry Zone of central Burma, the disposition of troops depended above all on where there was water.

Migyaungye and Kokkogwa

Lieutenant General Shōzō Sakurai’s Japanese 33rd Division, the same that had taken Rangoon in March, moved north from Allanmyo on 9 and 10 April. The plan was simple and had been tried many times before: the 215th Infantry Regiment was to pin the British down at Kokkogwa, the 213th Regiment to advance along the east bank of the Irrawaddy on Magwe, and Colonel Takanobu Sakuma’s 214th Regiment to outflank the British positions through the dry hills and come out at the ford over the Pin Chaung stream north of Yenangyaung, cutting the line of retreat.

On the night of 11–12 April, during a thunderstorm, the Japanese struck 48th Indian Brigade at Kokkogwa and penetrated deep into its positions. The brigade threw them back with a counter-attack and the following night withstood another assault. On the right wing things went worse. 1st Burma Brigade, sent east from Migyaungye to strike the Japanese in the flank, failed to find the enemy, and meanwhile strong Japanese forces came up along the river. On 12 April they took Migyaungye before reinforcements could return there, and an attempt to retake the village at dawn on 13 April failed. The corps’ right flank was exposed. Slim withdrew 1st Burma Division behind the Yin Chaung stream, where there was still water, and on 14 April a battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry was surrounded at Myingun and fought its way out with only about 150 men left.

The burning fields

The destruction of the oilfields had long been prepared, but oil had to be extracted until the last moment, since without it the troops could not move. That is why the signal was given only on 15 April, when the Japanese were already a few dozen kilometres from the wells. Wells, pumps, tanks and the refinery were blown up; the stores holding millions of gallons of oil turned, as the British official history puts it, into a single sea of fire. The column of smoke was visible for many kilometres, and the burning oil lit up the surrounding country at night for several days afterwards.

On the same day Bruce Scott decided to stay another twenty-four hours on the Yin Chaung, because his soldiers were exhausted and Slim wanted to gain time for the expected Chinese attack. The decision proved fatal. Sakuma’s 214th Regiment was meanwhile working its way, unnoticed, round the division’s left flank. At one in the morning of 16 April the Japanese attacked on the Yin Chaung and the division began to fall back on Yenangyaung, and that same night Sakuma set up roadblocks on the road north of the Pin Chaung, seized the ford and broke into the burning town from the north, pushing its small garrison, the 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, back to its southern edge. 1st Burma Division, some 7,000 men including ancillary units, was cut off.

The pocket on the Pin Chaung

The country around Yenangyaung was barren, cut by deep, dry ravines, without shade. The temperature reached 45 degrees, water was short, and the ford over the Pin Chaung, the only way out north for vehicles, was held by the Japanese.

Meanwhile help was approaching from north of Yenangyaung. The Chinese 38th Division, part of the 66th Army, which had only just entered Burma, was meant to defend the Mandalay area, but Alexander and Stilwell agreed to place it under Slim’s command. On 16 April its 113th Regiment under Colonel Liu Fangwu reached Kyaukpadaung, and on 17 April Slim gave it its task in person: together with the tanks of 7th Armoured Brigade, which had earlier crossed to the north bank of the Pin Chaung, it was to attack the Japanese roadblocks from the north. The Chinese had neither artillery nor tanks, so the British gave them their M3 Stuart light tanks and a battery of field guns. General Sun Liren himself took command, a graduate of the American Virginia Military Institute who spoke good English; the British who fought alongside him considered him the ablest of the Chinese commanders in Burma.

At dawn on 18 April both sides attacked at once. 1st Burma Division tried to break through to the north across the hills and the village of Twingon, but its exhausted, parched battalions were held up in front of the Japanese positions; two companies of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers that reached the Pin Chaung mistook the Japanese for Chinese and were taken prisoner. The Chinese from the north cleared part of the stream bank but did not reach the ford. Bruce Scott asked for permission to abandon his vehicles and break out across country, but Slim ordered him to wait for a renewed Chinese attack. The division spent the night encircled, without water, under mortar fire; soldiers began to die of exhaustion.

On the morning of 19 April further attacks on the ford failed, and a false report that the Japanese were already in Kyaukpadaung led to the recall of the British units that had got across the Pin Chaung. In the afternoon the tanks found an unguarded dirt track to the east. Bruce Scott set off along it with the whole division, but when the vehicles bogged down in sand he ordered them to be abandoned and the guns disabled. The soldiers crossed the Pin Chaung some two and a half kilometres north-east of Twingon, carrying the wounded on the tanks, and in the evening reached the road to Kyaukpadaung. At roughly the same time the Chinese renewed their attack, crossed the stream, took Twingon in the evening and freed the British who had been captured the day before. On 20 April, supported by British tanks, they broke into Yenangyaung, but with the whole Japanese 33rd Division approaching, Sun withdrew north during the night.

Two versions of one battle

The British official history stresses that 1st Burma Division got out of the encirclement largely by its own efforts, and that the Chinese attack came too late to help it directly. The American official history, on the other hand, acknowledges that it was the Chinese attack that forced the Japanese to shift their forces and opened the gap through which the division escaped. In China and Taiwan the battle is called the “great victory at Yenangyaung”: according to Chinese tradition the 113th Regiment, some 1,100 men strong, saved more than 7,000 British troops and freed about 500 prisoners, missionaries and journalists. The figure of 7,000 corresponds to the strength of the whole encircled division, and British sources do not credit its survival to the Chinese alone. The value of the Chinese help was, however, recognised by Slim, who spoke highly of Sun and his soldiers in his memoirs. In Chinese tradition the battle is regarded as the first victory of the Chinese Expeditionary Force outside the country’s borders.

For 1st Burma Division there was no victory. It lost about a fifth of its men, almost all its vehicles, most of its anti-aircraft guns and mortars, and eight field guns. The Japanese did not capture the oilfields intact, but their 214th Regiment, pushed far into the enemy’s rear, dealt the corps a heavy blow.

Place in the war

The loss of Yenangyaung settled the question of defending central Burma. The Allies had lost Rangoon, and now their only source of fuel as well; as the British historian Louis Allen put it, the question was no longer whether to withdraw, but where to. In the east, meanwhile, the Japanese 56th Division was smashing the Chinese 6th Army in the Shan States and driving north. On 25 April Alexander and Stilwell decided to withdraw from central Burma; on 29 April the Japanese took Lashio and cut the Burma Road; on 30 April the Ava Bridge near Mandalay was blown; and in May Slim’s corps reached India. Sun Liren’s Chinese 38th Division was the only Chinese formation to withdraw to India in good order, and it became the core of the Chinese forces trained there by the Americans.

The destruction of the oilfields also had a long epilogue. After the war the Burmah Oil Company claimed compensation from the British government for property destroyed on the authorities’ orders at Rangoon and Yenangyaung. In 1964 the House of Lords found in its favour, but in 1965 Parliament passed the War Damage Act, which retrospectively excluded such claims. The fields at Yenangyaung returned to British hands in April 1945.