Siege of Myitkyina

The Siege of Myitkyina (Japanese: ミイトキーナの戦い) was the struggle for the town of Myitkyina on the upper Irrawaddy, the principal centre of northern Burma, fought from 17 May to 3 August 1944. After a march across the Kumon Range, the Chinese divisions of General Joseph Stilwell and the American long-range unit known as Merrill’s Marauders took the main airfield by surprise, but failed to seize the town on the move. The Japanese garrison, reinforced at night through gaps in the encirclement and across the river, held out for almost three months in trenches and dugouts among paddy fields flooded by the monsoon.

Name and dates

The siege is taken to have begun on 17 May 1944, when at about 10 a.m. the Sino-American combat team of Colonel Charles Hunter struck the main airfield west of the town and received the first transport aircraft that same day. It is taken to have ended on 3 August, when at 3.45 p.m. the task force headquarters declared Myitkyina captured. These are the dates given by the US official history (Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland, Stilwell’s Command Problems). According to Japanese sources, organised resistance by the remnants of the garrison in the suburbs died out only a few days later, around 7 August.

The smaller north airfield remained in Japanese hands until 26–27 July. The US official history dates the death of the commander of the defence, Major General Genzō Mizukami, to 1 August; other sources, Japanese ones among them, give 2, 3 or even 4 August. Stilwell named the strike force sent against Myitkyina END RUN – an American football term for a run round the flank, which he liked to recall from his student days.

Background

After the Japanese conquest of Burma in the spring of 1942 and the closure of the Burma Road, Chiang Kai-shek’s China was supplied almost entirely by air: transports taking off from Assam flew over the high ridges of the eastern Himalayas, which the airmen called “the Hump”. Stilwell, who had himself walked out of Burma in May 1942, believed from the start that China’s land link had to be restored. The plan was to build the Ledo Road from Assam across northern Burma to the old Burma Road, and its key was Myitkyina – a railway and river junction with two airfields, lying at the mouth of the Mogaung valley. Japanese fighters flying from Myitkyina forced the transports crossing the Hump to take a longer, higher and more dangerous route further north.

At the end of 1943 Stilwell, then both Chiang’s chief of staff and deputy to Admiral Louis Mountbatten in South East Asia Command, advanced south from India with two Chinese divisions trained by the Americans at Ramgarh. The December fighting in the Hukawng Valley opened a campaign in which, for the first time in years, the Chinese steadily drove the Japanese back. In February 1944 they were joined by the only American infantry unit in the theatre: the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), codenamed Galahad and commanded by Brigadier General Frank Merrill. Of its 2,997 men – volunteers gathered in answer to an appeal by President Roosevelt, among them veterans of Guadalcanal and New Guinea – about 2,750 entered Burma. The Marauders outflanked the Japanese 18th Division through the jungle and set up blocks in its rear: at Walawbum at the beginning of March, at Shaduzup and Inkangahtawng in the second half of the month, and finally at Nhpum Ga, where they held out surrounded until 9 April. At the end of March Merrill suffered his first heart attack.

At the same time the British special forces of General Orde Wingate – the Chindits – landed by glider and aircraft in central Burma in Operation Thursday to cut the supply lines of the Japanese fighting Stilwell. After Wingate’s death on 24 March their brigades were placed under Stilwell. To the west, from March onwards, the Japanese 15th Army of General Renya Mutaguchi was attacking Imphal and Kohima, which absorbed most of the British reserves and part of the transport aircraft. In mid-May, beyond the Salween, the Chinese Expeditionary Force at last went over to the offensive in western Yunnan, as Stilwell had been urging for months.

Myitkyina lay in the zone of the Japanese 33rd Army of Lieutenant General Masaki Honda. The town was defended by the 114th Infantry Regiment of the 18th Division under Colonel Fusayasu Maruyama, but most of its battalions had been sent to other sectors. According to the US official history, at the moment of the attack there were in Myitkyina and the suburb of Sitapur two understrength battalions, about a hundred men of an airfield battalion, 318 men of labour and service units, and 320 sick in the military hospital – some 700 fit to fight in all. Japanese returns give a similar number of the regiment’s infantry, to whom must be added more than a thousand signallers, engineers, railwaymen and military police.

Course: the march across the Kumon Range and the capture of the airfield

At the end of April Stilwell decided that the time had come to strike. On 21 April he formed the END RUN force. Galahad was down to about 1,400 men, so it was combined with Chinese troops into three columns: H (Colonel Charles Hunter – Galahad’s 1st Battalion and the Chinese 150th Regiment of the 50th Division, with an artillery battery), K (Colonel Henry Kinnison – the 3rd Battalion and the 88th Regiment of the 30th Division) and M (Lieutenant Colonel George McGee – the 2nd Battalion and about 300 guerrillas of the Kachin, or Jingpo, people). Merrill took command once more, although he had still not fully recovered. Stilwell admitted that he was asking more of the unit than could fairly be expected, and allowed Merrill to begin evacuating Galahad as soon as the task was done. The men understood this as a promise of rest once Myitkyina had been taken.

K Force set off on 28 April and H Force on 30 April. The route led over the Naura Hkyet pass at a height of about 1,860 metres; it was more a Kachin footpath than a road, and in many places had to be hacked out. In the downpours mules and horses fell into ravines – M Force lost half its animals. At the village of Ritpong K Force ran into the Japanese on 5 May; the village was taken only on 9 May, which allowed H Force to get ahead of K. At Tingkrukawng K Force was halted and, on Merrill’s orders, fell back onto H Force’s trail. Kinnison contracted scrub typhus (tsutsugamushi fever), carried by mite larvae, and died within a few days; according to the official history, 149 men of Galahad caught the disease during the march and the siege.

On the evening of 16 May H Force reached the river near the village of Namkwi, some three kilometres from the main airfield. Hunter’s men detained the local inhabitants so that no one could warn the Japanese. At 10 a.m. on 17 May the Chinese 150th Regiment attacked the runway, while the Americans seized the Irrawaddy ferry landing at Pamati. The attack, in the words of the official history, went “like a demonstration at a service school”. When Hunter judged that the strip was securely in his hands, he sent the agreed signal MERCHANT OF VENICE, meaning that the airfield was in Allied hands and fit for landing. In the afternoon gliders brought in a company of the 879th Airborne Engineer Battalion, an anti-aircraft battery and a battalion of the Chinese 89th Regiment. The next day, contrary to what Merrill and Hunter had arranged, the air commander, General George Stratemeyer, sent British anti-aircraft artillery to the airfield first instead of infantry and supplies.

Stilwell was triumphant. “Will this burn up the Limeys!” he wrote in his diary. Mountbatten learned of the plan of attack only by chance, and Winston Churchill cabled the admiral to ask whether he had expected an attack on Myitkyina. The US official history called the capture of the airfield the high point of Stilwell’s career and the climax of the campaign in northern Burma. Impressed by it, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, in a directive to Mountbatten of 2 June 1944, made holding Myitkyina and supporting the airlift to China a priority.

Course: the failed assaults on the town

The chance of taking the town quickly was thrown away in the first few days. On the afternoon of 17 May two battalions of the 150th Regiment advanced on Myitkyina, but took the wrong road and turned towards Sitapur; when they came under fire they lost their bearings and began fighting each other. Around midday on 18 May the regiment tried again and once more, amid confusion and fire from its own side, withdrew from the town. On 20 May it reached the station and the railway sidings, but was stopped by heavy fire and had to be pulled back – since the start of the campaign it had lost 671 men. According to Japanese sources, a Chinese colonel and two battalion commanders were killed on the very first day. On 18 May the task force’s intelligence put the garrison at 300 men, and as late as mid-June at 500 – what the US official history calls a gross underestimate.

Meanwhile the Japanese won the race for reinforcements. As early as the evening of 17 May Maruyama brought across the Irrawaddy the main body of a battalion of the 148th Regiment of the 56th Division, and further men slipped through the gaps in the Allied ring at night. At the end of May the infantry commander of the 56th Division, Major General Genzō Mizukami, arrived from the Salween front, took command and ordered that Myitkyina be held for at least three months, to keep the Allies out of central Burma. By 31 May there were about 2,500 Japanese in the town, together with several hundred sick and wounded. According to the official history, at least 4,600 Japanese fought in Myitkyina over the whole course of the siege, with about 3,500 at any one time at its peak. Mizukami kept up a regular ferry across the Irrawaddy, by which supplies and replacements were brought in at night and the wounded taken out.

On the Allied side, Galahad was falling apart. After three months of marching on K rations, Merrill’s men were suffering from dysentery, malaria, scrub typhus and skin ulcers; in one platoon men with diarrhoea had cut away the seats of their trousers so that they could go on fighting. On 19 May Merrill suffered a second heart attack and was evacuated. On 22 May command of the newly formed Myitkyina Task Force passed to Colonel John McCammon. The Chinese of the 30th and 50th Divisions were joined by the 42nd Regiment of the 14th Division – three divisions in a single force made command more difficult still. The assault of 25 May achieved nothing. On 27 May at Charpate McGee’s men were falling asleep in the middle of the fighting, and McGee himself fainted three times while directing the battle from an aid station. On 30 May Stilwell replaced the sick McCammon with Brigadier General Haydon Boatner, one of his closest associates in the headquarters of the Chinese forces in India and northern Burma.

By the end of May Galahad’s 2nd Battalion had twelve men fit to fight, and the Chinese 150th Regiment numbered 600. Between 26 May and 1 June the Americans flew into Myitkyina everyone who could hold a rifle: two engineer battalions (the 209th and 236th), which until then had been building the Ledo Road; newly arrived replacements known as “New Galahad”; and convalescents from Galahad’s hospitals. Stilwell ordered every Marauder fit for duty to be sent back to the front. The doctors were subjected, as the official history put it, to “very strong moral pressure, just short of a formal order”. Of one group of 200 men, ten had to be sent straight back to hospital. The Army’s Inspector General later found that broken promises of rest and physical exhaustion had led, around 1 June, to an “almost complete collapse of morale” in most of the unit. As early as 27 May Hunter had handed Stilwell a letter accusing the command, and Boatner in particular, of favouring the Chinese at the expense of the Americans.

The engineers and New Galahad, thrown into battle without preparation, suffered heavy losses in ambushes. On 1 June a company of the 236th Battalion took the village of Namkwi, but instead of digging in it stopped to rest and was driven out by a counter-attack. The assaults by the Chinese regiments on 31 May and 3 June – in the latter two Chinese regiments lost 320 men – brought gains measured in yards. The raised road embankments above the flooded paddy fields made ready-made defensive ramparts, and the monsoon turned the semicircle of swamp north of the town into an impassable obstacle. From 2 June the Chinese began to sap towards the Japanese positions “in eighteenth-century fashion”. An attack launched on 10 June produced, by 17 June, no more than the cutting of the road to the ferry at Maingna, the capture of a sawmill by the river with the help of flamethrowers, and a few hundred metres of ground. Stilwell ordered the infantry assaults to stop, and from 18 June sapping and patrols became the main method.

Course: Mogaung and the July fighting

In time the American commanders began to fear that it would be the Japanese who seized the initiative. The airfield, the only source of supply, lay about 1,400 metres from the Japanese lines, and Boatner’s headquarters a kilometre and a half. The task force lived entirely on air transport; on 20 May it had three days’ food, and at the end of May American rations ran out. A dozen or so damaged transports stood on the runway. According to the official history, a determined attack by the garrison or by the Japanese 53rd Division, a regiment of which was at one point supposed to come to the relief of the besieged, could at that time have swept away the defenders of the airfield. Myitkyina was, as Romanus and Sunderland wrote, “a Cassino on a shoestring”: the Allied infantry had to force machine guns and earthworks reminiscent of the Western Front of 1914–1918, without tanks, with at most fourteen guns and twelve P-40 fighters of the 88th Fighter Squadron.

The breakthrough came from the west. After the Chindits’ 111th Brigade abandoned the “Blackpool” block on the railway, Stilwell sent Brigadier Michael Calvert’s 77th Brigade against Mogaung, a railway junction west of Myitkyina. Between 22 and 26 June the Chindits, supported by the Chinese 114th Regiment of the 38th Division, took the town; both sides claimed the victory. The fall of Mogaung freed the besiegers from the threat of a blow from the west, opened the way for Chinese reinforcements moving along the railway, and cut the Japanese off from one of the two bases from which supplies reached Myitkyina – the other remained Bhamo on the Irrawaddy. The exhausted Chindit brigades were withdrawn to India soon afterwards, amid mutual accusations of bad faith between their commanders and Stilwell.

On 25 June Boatner went down with a recurrence of malaria, and on 26 June command at Myitkyina passed to Brigadier General Theodore Wessels, until then a staff officer under Mountbatten and before that an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. On 29 June Hunter took command of all American troops at Myitkyina. Wessels toured the units to rebuild morale, and from 7 July introduced daily training – eight hours in reserve, four in the front line. Even so, New Galahad was still paying for its inexperience: at the end of June one of its companies, going to the aid of a Chinese battalion wedged into the Japanese positions, was caught in an ambush and never recovered.

Wessels’s first big assault, on 12 July, was preceded by a bombardment by 39 B-25 bombers of the Tenth Air Force. Co-operation with the air force failed – according to the official history, about 40 per cent of the bombs fell on American positions north of Sitapur – and once again the attack gained only a few hundred metres. Even so, the ring was tightening. By mid-July, by American estimates, the garrison had lost 790 killed and 1,180 wounded; many of the wounded returned to their posts. In the second half of July fresh Chinese regiments arrived, and on 15 July the British 36th Division began landing at the airfield, though Stilwell sent it not to Myitkyina but south, along the railway from Mogaung.

At this time 33rd Army headquarters sent an order to Myitkyina: “General Mizukami will defend Myitkyina to the death.” According to the account of one of the army’s staff officers, cited in Japanese literature, it was drafted by Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who refused to let the words “General Mizukami” be changed to “the Mizukami detachment” – so the order bound the commander personally, not his men. On 23 July Kachin guerrillas of the American OSS Detachment 101 attacked rafts carrying Japanese wounded whom the garrison was floating downstream on the Irrawaddy. It was the first clear sign that the defence was weakening. On 26 and 27 July the 3rd Battalion of New Galahad waded through the swamps north of the town and took the north airfield, which the Japanese had held since the beginning of the siege.

Course: the last days

At the end of July Colonel Maruyama asked to withdraw what was left of his regiment. Mizukami, who intended to fight to the end, agreed. According to Japanese sources, he concealed the personal “defend to the death” order from his subordinates and instructed Maruyama to break out with the survivors across the Irrawaddy towards Bhamo. The crossing began on the moonlit nights at the beginning of August. Mizukami himself shot himself once the last boats had pushed off from the bank; the US official history gives the date as 1 August, other sources a few days later. He was posthumously promoted to lieutenant general. Japanese tradition presents his suicide as a literal fulfilment of the order which made it possible to save the rest of his men.

The Allies did not know of Mizukami’s death, but they could see ever more clearly that the defence was weakening. On 29–31 July their units drove deeper and deeper into the Japanese positions. Wessels prepared a final assault on a plan put forward by the commander of the Chinese 50th Division, General Pan Yukun: fifteen heavily armed sections were to infiltrate the Japanese lines at night and strike from the rear at the moment of the main attack. At 3 a.m. on 3 August, when the moon had set and a storm had broken, the assault party moved off; at dawn the 50th Division went over to the attack, followed by further regiments. The resistance of the Japanese rearguards was quickly broken, and at 3.45 p.m. Myitkyina was declared taken.

187 Japanese were taken prisoner, most of them sick and wounded. Among them were also civilians, including Korean women forced into prostitution in military brothels – the so-called comfort women. The report of the US Office of War Information on the interrogation of twenty of them, detained near Myitkyina in August 1944, is today one of the most frequently cited documents on that system. Maruyama broke through to the east bank of the Irrawaddy with about 600 men and, according to Japanese sources, reached Bhamo by mid-September.

Losses

The US official history gives the direct Allied losses at Myitkyina as follows: the Chinese, 972 killed, 3,184 wounded and 188 sick; the Americans, 272 killed, 955 wounded and 980 evacuated sick (570 of them from Galahad). The American figures cover all US units that fought at Myitkyina, not only the Marauders. Romanus and Sunderland note that some of the Chinese counted as killed may have deserted, and that some died in the fratricidal fighting of the first days. The small number of sick among the Chinese was due, in their view, to the habit of drinking only boiled water and eating only cooked food. The engineer battalions suffered exceptionally high losses – the 209th Battalion lost 41 per cent of its strength.

Japanese losses are known less precisely. American estimates of 9 August spoke of about 4,000 killed; Japanese sources give about 2,100 dead, including Mizukami. 187 men were taken prisoner, and about 600 escaped with Maruyama.

Galahad’s balance sheet was devastating. By 4 June the unit had 93 killed in action, 30 dead from other causes, 293 wounded and 8 missing, but disease put far more men out of action: 503 cases of amoebic dysentery, 149 of scrub typhus, 296 of malaria, 72 nervous breakdowns and 950 others. On 10 August 1944, a week after the fall of the town, the 5307th Composite Unit was disbanded; of its original 2,997 men, 130 remained fit for combat. Of the roughly 2,750 who had entered Burma, only two had never been sent to hospital with wounds or serious illness.

Significance

The capture of Myitkyina brought to a close Stilwell’s campaign in northern Burma, which had been under way since the autumn of 1943. In half a year his Chinese divisions had advanced about 800 kilometres and defeated seven Japanese regiments, among them units of the 18th Division, which had taken part in the capture of Singapore in 1942. For a Chinese army that had for years been losing to the Japanese, this was proof that well-trained, well-equipped and regularly supplied Chinese infantry could beat them. The Japanese, for their part, held Myitkyina long enough for the 18th Division to withdraw from the Mogaung valley and for the front in central Burma to gain time.

The airlift to China felt the victory soonest. From the capture of the airfield on 17 May the transports could fly over the Hump by a lower and safer southern route, free of the threat of Japanese fighters. According to the official history, the tonnage carried to China rose from 13,686 tons in May to 18,235 in June and 25,454 in July, and from May to October 1944 some 14,000 transport aircraft carrying more than 40,000 tons of cargo landed at the Myitkyina airfields. The town became a supply base for the builders of the Ledo Road and of the pipeline to China.

The siege also carried a high political and human price. The long struggle for a town whose garrison had been underestimated, and the fate of Galahad – the only American infantry unit in the China–Burma–India theatre – led to an inquiry by the Army’s Inspector General and to sharp accusations against Stilwell, which Colonel Hunter was still repeating after the war. The Marauders received the Distinguished Unit Citation, and their remnants were absorbed into the 475th Infantry Regiment, which fought in northern Burma as part of the Mars Task Force until February 1945; the 75th Ranger Regiment traces its lineage from it. Merrill returned to staff duties after his recovery, while in Japan Mizukami became the symbol of a commander who gave his life to save his men.

For Stilwell, Myitkyina was the peak of his career. In August 1944 he received his fourth star, but in the autumn, in a dispute with Chiang Kai-shek over command of the Chinese army, he was recalled from China. The offensive in Burma went on without him: in December 1944 the Chinese took Bhamo, and in January 1945 the forces advancing from India linked up with the Chinese Expeditionary Force coming from beyond the Salween. At the beginning of February 1945 the first truck convoy drove along the new road to Kunming – Chiang named it the Stilwell Road.