The capture of Meiktila

Popular chronologies record under 3 March 1945 that the battle of Meiktila in central Burma came to an end: General Slim’s forces had routed the Japanese and the road to Rangoon lay open. The first part of this statement is true – on that day the 17th Indian Infantry Division under Major General David Cowan, supported by the tanks of the 255th Indian Tank Brigade, took the town after four days of fighting. But the battle did not end then; it was only just beginning in earnest. The commander of the Japanese Burma Area Army, Lieutenant General Heitarō Kimura, threw every force he could muster against Meiktila and for almost four weeks besieged the town and its airfields. The Japanese broke off their counter-attacks only on 28 March, and the road south towards Rangoon opened after their withdrawal, at the turn of March and April.

Even so, the capture of Meiktila was the decisive blow of the 1945 Burma campaign. With a single armoured thrust, Lieutenant General William Slim’s Fourteenth Army cut the supply lines of all the Japanese forces fighting on the Irrawaddy and around Mandalay.

A hub behind the front

Meiktila lay about 130 kilometres south of Mandalay, on the flat, dry plain of central Burma, between two lakes that closed off access to the town from the north and south. The railway and the main road from Rangoon to Mandalay ran through Meiktila, roads from the Irrawaddy valley and the Shan Hills met there, and there were airfields around the town. The Japanese had set up their main ammunition, fuel and food depots there, as well as hospitals for the troops fighting in the north. Whoever held Meiktila held the supply lines of the Fifteenth Army defending the Irrawaddy line.

In December 1944, during the pursuit to the Irrawaddy, Slim changed his plan of campaign. Instead of striking at Mandalay with both corps, where Kimura had prepared to defend behind the river, he decided to tie down the main Japanese forces in a fight for the city and meanwhile strike at their rear. Lieutenant General Montagu Stopford’s XXXIII Corps was to force the Irrawaddy north and west of Mandalay. Lieutenant General Frank Messervy’s IV Corps moved secretly south through the Gangaw valley, while a dummy corps headquarters near Sittaung went on sending signals as though IV Corps were still heading for Mandalay. The new plan was named “Extended Capital”.

The crossing at Nyaung-U

Slim wanted both crossings south of Mandalay to begin at the same time, so as to conceal which was the main one. The 20th Indian Division crossed the Irrawaddy west of Mandalay on the night of 12–13 February and for two weeks beat off night counter-attacks by the Japanese 31st Division. The 7th Indian Division’s crossing was delayed by a day for boat repairs; it began on 14 February at Nyaung-U and at Pagan, the old capital of the Burmese kingdom. The river there was more than a kilometre wide. The first wave of a South Lancashire battalion suffered heavy losses when failing boat engines left the men stranded on the water under machine-gun fire. The bank was held here mainly by soldiers of the Indian National Army, which fought on the Japanese side; at Pagan one of its units raised a white flag and Sikh troops took the town without a fight. The bridgehead was held, and Slim later called the operation the longest opposed river crossing in any theatre of the war. The Japanese response was hampered by the fact that Pagan lay on the boundary between their Fifteenth and Twenty-Eighth Armies.

From 17 February the motorised brigades of the 17th Division and the M4 Sherman tanks of the 255th Tank Brigade passed through the bridgehead. The 17th Division – the “Black Cat”, after the emblem on its sleeves – was the most experienced formation in the Fourteenth Army: it had fought in Burma since the first weeks of 1942, retreated to India after the fall of Rangoon and held out at Imphal. Two of its infantry brigades, the 48th and the 63rd, were carried in lorries; the third, the 99th, was readied to be flown in.

The dash to Meiktila

The 17th Division broke out of the bridgehead on 20 February (21 February in some accounts) and in three days reached Taungtha, halfway to Meiktila. The Japanese command was taken completely by surprise. According to accounts cited by the British historian Louis Allen, on 24 February a conference of senior Japanese officers was being held in Meiktila itself, devoted to a counter-attack on the bridgeheads near Mandalay. When an observer on Mount Popa reported that 2,000 vehicles were heading for Meiktila, the staff took it for a mistake and struck off a nought, assuming it was merely a raid. An earlier air report of a long column in the Gangaw valley had likewise been disregarded.

Only on 26 February did the Japanese grasp the scale of the threat and begin to fortify the town. Its garrison numbered about 4,000 men: most of the 168th Infantry Regiment of the 49th Division, anti-aircraft gunners, rear-echelon troops and wounded men from the hospitals, who were also drafted into the defence. That same day the 17th Division seized the airstrip at Thabutkon, about 30 kilometres north-west of Meiktila; the 99th Brigade was flown in there, and fuel for the tanks was dropped by parachute.

On 28 February the division attacked Meiktila from all sides. The 63rd Brigade set up a roadblock to the south-west to cut the garrison off from reinforcements and attacked from the west; the 48th Brigade advanced from the north along the Thabutkon road and was held up for a time in front of a fortified monastery on the edge of the town. The 255th Tank Brigade, with two infantry battalions and self-propelled guns, swung round in a wide arc, seized the airfields to the east and struck at the town from the south-east. It was supported by most of the divisional artillery and by the fighter-bombers of No. 221 Group RAF – Hurricanes and Thunderbolts – called in by controllers attached to the troops.

On 1 March Slim and Messervy flew in to Cowan’s headquarters and watched the fighting, fearing that the Japanese would hold out for weeks. In his memoirs Slim described how two platoons of Gurkhas from the 1/7th battalion, supported by a single tank, took a line of bunkers in a few minutes for the loss of only a few men. The defenders lacked anti-tank weapons. The Japanese soldiers fought in their trenches and cellars to the last; some sat in holes with 250-kilogram aircraft bombs, ready to strike the fuse when a tank passed over their hiding place – most of them were shot before they could do so. The Japanese artillery fired over open sights from the front line, which allowed it to knock out several tanks but did not stop any of the attacking brigades.

By 3 March the town was in British and Indian hands; the last pockets of resistance in the area were eliminated over the next two days. According to British accounts some 2,000 Japanese soldiers died in Meiktila and only a few dozen were taken prisoner; the rest of the garrison was killed, committed suicide or broke out. The 17th Division’s losses were many times smaller. With the town came the airfields, the depots and the hub through which the supplies of the Japanese Fifteenth and Thirty-Third Armies passed.

The besiegers besieged

Kimura understood that the loss of Meiktila meant his forces around Mandalay were cut off, and he ordered the town to be retaken at any cost. He sent against it Lieutenant General Eitarō Naka’s 18th Division, brought down from the north, the 49th Division coming up from the south, regiments detached from the 33rd and 53rd Divisions and an artillery group – in all, according to Allen, about 12,000 men and 70 guns, mostly from units already worn down by earlier fighting. In Meiktila the 17th Division numbered about 15,000 men, nearly 100 tanks and 70 guns. Cut off from the bridgehead at Nyaung-U, because the Japanese had severed the road to the west, it could rely only on supply by air.

Cowan did not wait passively. Every day his columns of tanks and motorised infantry sallied out of the town, broke up Japanese concentrations in the surrounding villages and returned at night. The Japanese divisions had no communications with one another, often lacked even maps, and attacked one after another instead of together. The first attacks by the 18th Division from the north and west collapsed with heavy losses. From 12 March the Japanese struck at the airfields east of the town through which supplies came in. Even so, from 15 March the 9th Brigade of the 5th Indian Division was flown into Meiktila under fire. On 18 March Cowan halted transport landings, and from then on supplies were dropped by parachute, while the wounded were flown out by light aircraft from a smaller strip. That day Lieutenant Karamjeet Singh Judge of the 4/15th Punjab battalion was killed leading infantry and tanks against Japanese bunkers; he was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.

On 12 March Kimura gave command at Meiktila to Lieutenant General Masaki Honda, commander of the Thirty-Third Army, but his headquarters, lacking signal units of its own, took over control only on 18 March and was unable to coordinate the divisions’ operations. On 22 March the Japanese attacked using a captured British tank; the attack was beaten off. Meanwhile the 7th Indian Division and a motorised brigade of the 5th Division coming up behind it were clearing the Mount Popa area of Japanese and Indian National Army troops, and from 18 to 22 March they fought for the river port of Myingyan, which was quickly brought back into use for supply barges.

On 28 March Kimura’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Shin’ichi Tanaka, met Honda at Thirty-Third Army headquarters. According to Japanese accounts cited by Allen, the army staff estimated that some 50 enemy tanks had been destroyed, but at a cost of 2,500 killed and wounded and 50 guns – the army had only 20 left. Tanaka took responsibility upon himself and ordered the fight for Meiktila to be broken off. The Japanese withdrew at the turn of March and April, by which time there was nothing left to save at Mandalay.

A war waged from the air

The battle of Meiktila would have been impossible without air supply. British and American transport squadrons, flying mainly C-47s, delivered ammunition, fuel, food and reinforcements to the 17th Division and flew out the wounded. Japanese air power in Burma was by then too weak to interfere. The weakness of this system was that most of the transport aircraft belonged to the Americans, who could withdraw them to China at any moment. The Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia Command, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, pressed Washington and London to keep the aircraft in Burma; he obtained permission to use them until early June 1945 at the latest. That was why Slim had to take Rangoon before the monsoon – and why every day of the siege of Meiktila mattered so much to him.

What really happened on 3 March

The popular description therefore compresses events by four weeks. What ended on 3 March was the fight for the town itself, not the battle of Meiktila; that went on until 28 March, and British historiography combines it with the fighting for Mandalay into a single Battle of Meiktila and Mandalay, waged from the Irrawaddy crossings in January to the end of March. Nor was the “road to Rangoon” open on 3 March: the 17th Division was itself cut off at the time and supplied by air, and the pursuit southwards began only in April, after the Japanese had withdrawn from around the town. The assessment of the day’s significance, on the other hand, is accurate – with the fall of Meiktila the Japanese defence of central Burma lost its base and never regained it before the end of the war.

Its place in the war

The thrust to Meiktila is regarded as Slim’s finest operation and one of the best examples of operational manoeuvre in the whole war in the Far East. An army that three years earlier had fled Burma on foot through the jungle, and a year earlier had defended itself in encirclement at Imphal, now outmanoeuvred its opponent, surprised him and forced him to fight on its own terms. The Japanese, who at Imphal and Kohima had themselves tried to cut off British garrisons and lost because those garrisons were supplied from the air, found themselves at Meiktila in the reverse position: besieging an enemy that had air superiority, tanks and supply by aircraft.

By throwing divisions from around Mandalay and from the north against Meiktila, Kimura weakened the defence of the Irrawaddy line. On 20 March the 19th Indian Division took Fort Dufferin in Mandalay, and at the turn of March and April the remnants of the Japanese Fifteenth Army were falling back in disorder towards the Shan Hills. On 27 March Aung San’s Burma National Army turned against the Japanese. In April IV Corps set out from Meiktila along the railway and road to Rangoon, and XXXIII Corps down the Irrawaddy valley; on 3 May 1945, in the last days before the monsoon, the Allies entered Rangoon, which had been taken from the sea in Operation Dracula after the Japanese had abandoned it.

On the same day that Meiktila fell, at the other end of the war against Japan, the Americans ended the Battle of Manila. Both campaigns – in the Philippines and in Burma – were stripping Japan of its conquests of 1942, although the outcome of the war was being decided elsewhere: in the Pacific, where the fighting for Iwo Jima was under way, and in the air over Japanese cities. For the British and the Indians, however, the reconquest of Burma had political significance: it restored the prestige lost in 1942, before it was yet decided what would become of that prestige in a post-war world in which India and Burma gained independence within three years.