The bombing of Mandalay

On 3 April 1942, Good Friday, Japanese bombers attacked Mandalay, the former capital of the Burmese kings and the largest city of central Burma. The first bombs destroyed the city’s fire brigade, and the fire started by high-explosive and incendiary bombs quickly engulfed the wooden buildings. Within a few hours most of the city had burned down: three-fifths of the houses, according to the British official history of the air war, and thousands of inhabitants were killed. The most frequently cited death toll, about 2,000, comes from eyewitness accounts rather than any count, and is an estimate. Most of those who survived abandoned the ruins. Mandalay, which since the fall of Rangoon had been the main rear base of the Allied forces in Burma, ceased to function as a city long before the Japanese entered it.

War chronologies record under 3 April “continuous Japanese air attacks on Mandalay”. This is somewhat imprecise. The city had been bombed before – according to some sources for the first time on 19 February – and was bombed several times afterwards, but it was the raid of 3 April, a single day and a single strike, that destroyed it, and it is this raid that is remembered as the bombing of Mandalay.

City of kings and army base

Mandalay was founded in 1857 by King Mindon of the Konbaung dynasty at the foot of the sacred Mandalay Hill. In the centre of the city stood a citadel with the royal palace, surrounded by a wall and a broad moat. Mandalay was the last capital of independent Burma until 1885, when, after the Third Anglo-Burmese War, the British occupied the city and deported the last king, Thibaw, to India. They renamed the citadel Fort Dufferin and turned it into barracks. In 1942 Mandalay had about 150,000 inhabitants – Burmese, along with many Indians and Chinese – and most of its houses, apart from the brick-built commercial centre, were made of wood and bamboo.

After the fall of Rangoon on 8 March the city became the centre of what remained of British Burma. As early as February military stores had begun to be moved there from the threatened port, and in March the army’s main supply base was set up in the area of Mandalay and Meiktila. The railway from Rangoon to Lashio, where the Burma Road to China began, ran through the city, and near Mandalay lay the only bridge over the Irrawaddy, the great Ava Bridge. In the hill station of Maymyo (today Pyin U Lwin), some 55 kilometres to the east, were the colonial government, which had moved there from Rangoon, and the headquarters of the commander of the British forces, General Harold Alexander. General Joseph Stilwell, since February Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff and commander of the Chinese armies in Burma, also had his headquarters there.

A sky without defence

The Japanese could bomb the towns of central Burma with impunity because in the last days of March Allied air power in the country had ceased to exist. After the evacuation of Rangoon the RAF fighters and the remnants of the American Flying Tigers had moved to the airfield at Magwe on the Irrawaddy, which had neither aircraft shelters nor a proper warning network. On 21 March British Blenheim bombers and Hurricanes attacked Japanese aircraft concentrated on Mingaladon airfield near Rangoon. Retaliation came that same afternoon and the following day: according to the British official history, some 230 Japanese bombers and fighters, coming in waves over 25 hours, destroyed almost everything at Magwe that could still fly. The few surviving RAF aircraft fled to Akyab Island (today Sittwe), where further raids caught up with them on 27 March, and the American pilots withdrew to Loiwing airfield on the Chinese border and to Kunming. From then on the skies over Burma belonged almost exclusively to the aircraft of the Japanese army’s 5th Air Division, reinforced by regiments brought in from Malaya and Java.

On the ground the situation was just as bad. On 30 March, after several days of stubborn defence, the Chinese 200th Division abandoned Toungoo on the Sittang, and on the night of 1–2 April the Japanese took Prome on the Irrawaddy. Stilwell, who had hoped to halt the Japanese at Toungoo and go over to the attack, was learning that the Chinese commanders carried out his orders only when they were confirmed by Chiang Kai-shek. The Allied forces were preparing to defend a line in central Burma, and behind them, in Mandalay, lay the stores, workshops and railway junction on which their supply depended.

Good Friday

The raid of 3 April struck a defenceless city. Mandalay had no anti-aircraft guns and no fighter cover, and its fire services were weak and already depleted by earlier raids. The Japanese bombers dropped high-explosive and incendiary bombs. According to the British official history of the air war, one of the first sticks destroyed the fire-fighting equipment, so there was nothing with which to put out the fires. In the hot, dry season before the monsoon the fire leapt from roof to roof and engulfed whole blocks of wooden houses. In Burma it was said afterwards that a city which had taken a thousand years to build burned down in an hour; in fact Mandalay was then not even a hundred years old, but the saying conveys the scale of the destruction well.

The number of victims is not known precisely. British air historians write that within a few hours bombs and fire destroyed three-fifths of the houses and that “thousands” of inhabitants were killed by the explosions or burned to death. The American journalist Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life, who arrived in Mandalay a few days after the raid, described a city in which every house had burned or was still smouldering, and spoke of some 2,000 bodies in the ruins of brick, plaster and corrugated iron. Corpses lay in the streets and floated in the green water of the moat around the citadel, which itself survived. The figure of 2,000 dead later passed into most accounts, but it should be treated as an approximation: no one counted the victims, and many people, especially refugees from the south who were camping in the city, were not registered anywhere.

The destruction fell above all on the civilian population. The bombs decided nothing in military terms, although they damaged the railway and the depots, and the Allied forces felt the destruction of the city through which supplies for the front passed in the weeks that followed.

Flight

The most serious consequence of the raid was the flight of the inhabitants. The British official history of the war against Japan describes what happened after every heavy raid on the towns of central Burma: the population moved out en masse into the jungle and the surrounding villages, and railwaymen and the crews of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company’s vessels, which carried people and cargo on the river, abandoned their posts. The police disintegrated, power stations and waterworks stopped working, and disease – above all cholera – and lawlessness spread. In April the same fate befell Meiktila, Thazi, Pyinmana, Maymyo, Lashio and Taunggyi; some of these towns were almost completely destroyed. For an army that needed railways, landing stages and labourers it was a severe blow.

Mandalay also became one of the main stages of the great flight to India. From the very first raids on Rangoon in December 1941, those fleeing Burma were above all Indians, who ran the colony’s trade, worked in the ports and on the railways, and were viewed with hostility by many Burmese. The authorities reserved ships and aircraft first for Europeans and Anglo-Indians, so most had to go on foot. Tens of thousands of people set out from Mandalay and the surrounding area, across the crossings of the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin, via Kalewa and Tamu to Imphal in Indian Manipur, and further north through mountains and jungle to Assam. According to the British official history, some 190,000 refugees reached Imphal by the Tamu route, about 100,000 crossed the Arakan mountains to the coast, and in all, including those evacuated by sea and air, some 400,000 people reached India. Many thousands did not. The British historian Hugh Tinker, author of a study of this exodus, and later researchers estimate the number who died of hunger, exhaustion and disease at 10,000–50,000, and some accounts give even more.

Place in the war

The raid on Mandalay was to Burma what the bombing of cities was to Europe: a blow against the civilian population that destroyed the army’s rear base, paralysed the administration and drove people from their homes. It also showed what the loss of air superiority meant. From the end of March Japanese aircraft saw every movement of the Allied forces and attacked columns on the roads and vessels on the Irrawaddy, while the defenders had neither fighters nor air reconnaissance.

In April the British and Chinese forces still tried to hold central Burma. In the middle of the month the Japanese struck at the oilfields near Yenangyaung, while in the east their 56th Division routed the Chinese 6th Army in the Shan States and on 29 April took Lashio, cutting the Burma Road. On the night of 30 April–1 May the British blew up the Ava Bridge behind them, and on 1 May the Japanese entered the ruined, deserted city of Mandalay. In May the remnants of the British army withdrew to India, and Stilwell walked out through the jungle with his staff.

Mandalay remained in Japanese hands until March 1945. The citadel, which the Japanese had turned into a depot and strongpoint, burned during the fighting for the city, and with it the wooden palace of the Burmese kings, which had survived the raid of 1942. The present palace is a reconstruction from the 1990s.