The British take Maungdaw

On 9 January 1944 units of Major General Harold Briggs’s 5th Indian Infantry Division entered Maungdaw, a small town in northern Arakan on the broad estuary of the Naf River, which separated Burma from Bengal. The Japanese did not defend the town itself. They fell back a few kilometres to the south and east, to the fortified hills around the village of Razabil, which barred the road across the Mayu Range. The capture of Maungdaw was the first clear gain of the second British offensive in Arakan, conducted by Lieutenant General Philip Christison’s XV Corps.

In war chronologies Maungdaw is sometimes described as “a critical port for Allied supply”. That description is an exaggeration. Maungdaw was a small river port with a few jetties, and studies of the campaign usually call it simply a “small port”. The main supplies for the troops on the Burmese frontier came through Calcutta and Chittagong, and those for China by the airlift over the Himalayas. Maungdaw did, however, have real local importance. Small craft from the Bengal coast could reach it through the Naf estuary, relieving the single road – which turned to mud in the rainy season – by which Briggs’s division was supplied. For XV Corps it was therefore an important supply point, but not a port that mattered to the Allied effort in Asia as a whole.

The failure of the first offensive

Arakan is a narrow strip of the Burmese coast on the Bay of Bengal, cut off from the rest of the country by the Arakan Yoma mountains. Its northern part is formed by the Mayu Peninsula. Down it runs a wooded range of hills that separates the coastal plain around Maungdaw from the valley of the Kalapanzin River and the small town of Buthidaung. The two towns were linked by a road that followed the course of a former railway line of 1918 and passed through two tunnels. At the tip of the peninsula lay the island and port of Akyab (Sittwe), with an airfield from which Japanese aircraft could attack Bengal.

After the loss of Burma in the spring of 1942 General Archibald Wavell wanted to show quickly that the Indian Army could go over to the offensive. The objective of the first Arakan offensive, begun in December 1942, was Akyab. In early January 1943 the 14th Indian Division got almost to the end of the peninsula. There it was halted in front of the Japanese bunkers at Donbaik. Successive frontal attacks in February and March broke down under fire from well-concealed positions built of logs and earth. In the spring the Japanese 55th Division counter-attacked. Its units crossed rivers and hills the British had considered impassable and cut off one brigade after another. In May 1943 the British abandoned Buthidaung and Maungdaw and fell back almost to their starting point, on the Indian frontier.

The defeat was more a matter of morale than of territory. The hastily expanded Indian Army had many untrained soldiers, exhausted units were kept too long in the front line, and one divisional headquarters was commanding too many brigades. Malaria put more men out of action than the Japanese did. The myth of the Japanese soldier as an invincible “master of the jungle” spread through the ranks. The commander of Eastern Army, General Noel Irwin, was removed. In the final phase of the campaign operational command in Arakan passed to Lieutenant General William Slim, who built new fighting methods on this experience.

A new army, new methods

In the autumn of 1943 the whole command structure changed. The Quebec Conference decided to create a separate South East Asia Command, and Louis Mountbatten was appointed to head it. Land forces on the Burma front came under General George Giffard’s 11th Army Group, whose main strength was the Fourteenth Army, formed in October 1943 under Slim’s command. Arakan was its southernmost sector.

Slim and his commanders drew several lessons from the first campaign. The divisions underwent long jungle training, with the emphasis on patrolling, night fighting and moving off the roads. Patrolling was also meant to break the myth of Japanese invincibility: small engagements won convinced the soldiers that the enemy could be beaten. Daily doses of mepacrine against malaria were introduced, together with forward treatment centres just behind the front, so that the sick did not have to travel hundreds of kilometres to the rear. Most important was a new tactical principle. A unit cut off by the Japanese was not to withdraw or break out at any cost. It was to dig in in a compact “box” and wait for supplies by air, while the Japanese columns that had outflanked it would themselves be caught between the box and the reserves.

The situation in the air changed too. In 1943 the first Supermarine Spitfire fighters reached India and were moved to the airfields around Chittagong. From December 1943 they began inflicting heavy losses on the Japanese air force over Arakan, and further victories over the bay and the coast gave the Allies the air superiority without which supplying encircled units would have been impossible. This was bound up with the end of Japanese raids on Bengal.

The advance on Maungdaw

XV Corps moved off slowly in November 1943. On the coastal plain west of the Mayu Range advanced Briggs’s 5th Indian Division – veterans of the fighting in East Africa and the Western Desert. In the Kalapanzin valley, east of the hills, came the 7th Indian Division of Major General Frank Messervy. Further east still, in the valley of the Kaladan River, the 81st West African Division was advancing, supplied entirely by air. The 7th Division’s engineers rebuilt a narrow track across the hills, the Ngakyedauk Pass (which the soldiers called “Okeydoke”), into a road able to take lorries and tanks. At its eastern end, near Sinzweya, a large corps supply base was set up.

Facing them was the Japanese 55th Division (commanded by Lieutenant General Tadashi Hanaya), part of the Twenty-Eighth Army (Lieutenant General Shōzō Sakurai). Most of its battalions were concentrated in the Mayu area as a group under Major General Tokutarō Sakurai. The Japanese did not intend to defend every village. Their line was anchored on fortifications around Razabil, in the area of the tunnels and at Buthidaung, where bunkers dug into steep hills formed – as the British wrote – a “fortress”.

The advance gathered pace in December, and on 9 January 1944 the 5th Division took Maungdaw. Northern Arakan, inhabited mostly by Muslims, had in 1942, after the British withdrawal, gone through bloody clashes between Muslims and Arakanese Buddhists, which split the region into separate zones. From now on boats carrying supplies could reach the front through the Naf estuary.

In front of Razabil

The capture of Maungdaw did not open the way further. The next objectives were the tunnels and Buthidaung, and access to them was barred by Japanese positions around Razabil and a hill the British named “the Tortoise” after its shape. Until the end of January the 5th Division prepared its attack: artillery was brought up, along with M3 Lee tanks of the 25th Dragoons, and aircraft bombed the hills. The first attacks on Razabil at the end of the month failed. The Japanese bunkers, covered with a thick layer of logs and earth, withstood the bombardment, and their garrisons returned to their positions as soon as the fire lifted. At the same time, at the other end of the Burma front, in northern Burma, Joseph Stilwell’s Chinese divisions were moving slowly deeper into the Hukawng Valley.

The British did not yet know that the Japanese were preparing a blow of their own. Burma Area Army headquarters was planning a great offensive for the spring of 1944 against Imphal and Kohima in India (Operation U-Go). Before it began, it wanted to tie down the British reserves in Arakan. That was the purpose of the 55th Division’s attack, code-named Ha-Go.

What came next

At the beginning of February 1944 Tokutarō Sakurai’s group infiltrated the scattered lines of the 7th Division, outflanked them from the north and on 6 February attacked its headquarters. Messervy fought his way through with part of his staff to the base at Sinzweya. So began the battle of the “Admin Box” – a supply base defended by cooks, drivers, engineers and hastily summoned units, with tank support. In line with the new principle, the encircled units did not withdraw. From 11 February RAF and USAAF Douglas C-47 Dakota transports dropped them ammunition and food. According to figures given in British studies they flew 714 sorties and dropped about 2,300 tons of supplies. The Japanese had counted on capturing stores, and it was they who began to starve. By 23 February the battle had been decided, and on 26 February Sakurai called off the operation. The British counted about 5,000 Japanese dead on the battlefield. Allied losses were higher in absolute numbers, but for the first time in this war British and Indian troops had beaten off a major Japanese offensive and held the field.

In March 1944 the 5th Division finally took Razabil and the Tortoise, and the 7th Division Buthidaung. The tunnels were taken at the beginning of April by the British 36th Division. By then, however, attention had shifted to the north. The Japanese offensive against Imphal and Kohima began in March, and the 5th and 7th Indian Divisions were flown out of Arakan to the new front. Akyab, the objective of both Arakan campaigns, remained in Japanese hands until January 1945.

The capture of Maungdaw was thus a small success, but it opened a campaign in which Slim’s army tested its new methods for the first time: training, the fight against malaria, air superiority and the supply of encircled units by air. A few months later the same methods decided the Japanese defeat at Imphal and Kohima, the Japanese army’s greatest defeat on land up to that time, and opened the way for the Allies to reconquer Burma in 1945. Arakan itself remained a secondary front, and as for the description “critical port”, Maungdaw mattered above all for the supply of the one corps that was fighting there.