The capture of Myitkyina

At 3.45 p.m. on 3 August 1944 the headquarters of the Sino-American task force at Myitkyina reported that the town had been taken. This brought to an end a siege that had lasted since 17 May – the day on which General Joseph Stilwell’s troops had seized the airfield outside the town by surprise but failed to break into Myitkyina itself on the move. For 78 days a few thousand Japanese soldiers, cut off from their main forces and supplied only by boat across the Irrawaddy, had pinned down three Chinese divisions, American engineers and the remnants of a famous long-range unit – Merrill’s Marauders.

The final assault was essentially the occupation of positions that the defenders had for the most part already abandoned. The Japanese commander, Major General Genzō Mizukami, had a few days earlier allowed the remnants of the garrison to cross by night to the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy, and had himself – on 1 August, according to the American official history – taken his own life. The capture of Myitkyina concluded Stilwell’s campaign in northern Burma, begun in the autumn of 1943 in the Hukawng Valley, and gave the Allies the most important communications hub between India and China.

The town at stake

Myitkyina, the main town of northern Burma, lay on the upper Irrawaddy, at the mouth of the Mogaung valley, at the end of the railway line from Mandalay. It had two airfields and a river landing. For the Allies it was the key to two undertakings at once. First, transport aircraft flying from Assam to Kunming over the high ridges of the Himalayas – the route known as “the Hump” – could fly a lower and shorter route from Myitkyina, with no fear of the Japanese fighters which had until then attacked the airlift from the local airfield. Second, the Ledo Road, under construction since 1942 from Ledo in India through the jungles and mountains of northern Burma to the old Burma Road, was to pass through Myitkyina. The land route connected to it was to restore to Chiang Kai-shek’s China the supplies that had been cut off in 1942, when the Japanese occupied Burma.

Stilwell, who was at the same time Chiang’s chief of staff, commander of American forces in the China–Burma–India theatre and deputy to Admiral Louis Mountbatten in South East Asia Command, had from the outset regarded Myitkyina as the objective of the whole campaign. Throughout the winter and spring of 1944 his Chinese divisions, trained and equipped in India, pushed the Japanese 18th Division down the Hukawng and Mogaung valleys, while Merrill’s Marauders outflanked it through the jungle. In May, after a three-week march across the Kumon mountains, the strike force came out directly onto the airfield outside Myitkyina.

A siege that was meant to last a few days

The seizure of the airfield on 17 May was one of the boldest moves of the war in Burma, but the success was not exploited. The Chinese 150th Regiment, sent against the town that same afternoon, took the wrong road, and over the following days its battalions, coming under fire among the buildings of the suburbs, began fighting each other. According to the American official history, there were at that time only about 700 Japanese soldiers fit for combat in Myitkyina. Before the Allies could gather their forces, the Japanese command had managed to reinforce the garrison. The core of the defence was Colonel Fusayasu Maruyama’s 114th Infantry Regiment of the 18th Division, and command was taken over by Major General Genzō Mizukami, sent from the 56th Division, who was given the task of holding the town for at least three months. Over the whole course of the siege, according to the official history, at least 4,600 Japanese fought in Myitkyina, with about 3,500 at any one time at the peak.

The besiegers were exhausted. Merrill’s Marauders – the American 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), code-named Galahad – were dwindling day by day after three months of marching and fighting in the jungle, ravaged by dysentery, malaria and scrub typhus. By the end of May one of their battalions was down to a dozen or so men fit to fight. Stilwell threw at the town everything he could fly in: two engineer battalions, the 209th and 236th, which had until then been building the Ledo Road, fresh replacements dubbed “New Galahad” and convalescents from the hospitals. The Chinese assaults of 31 May and 3 June gained ground measured in metres, and two regiments lost 320 men in the second of them.

The Japanese defended themselves in a dense network of shelters and firing positions among gardens, railway embankments and ruins, and at night they kept open a ferry across the Irrawaddy, by which ammunition and replacements were brought in and the wounded sent out. From 26 June command at Myitkyina was held by Brigadier General Theodore Wessels, who introduced daily training of the units and rotation between the front line and reserve. In mid-July fresh Chinese regiments arrived, including units of the 14th Division flown in from India, and on 12 July the first large assault was preceded by a bombing raid by 39 B-25 bombers. Progress remained slow, but the garrison was bleeding to death: by mid-July, according to American estimates, it had lost 790 killed and 1,180 wounded.

The fate of Myitkyina was also being decided elsewhere. On 26 June the British Chindits of Colonel Michael Calvert’s 77th Brigade, supported by the Chinese 114th Regiment of the 38th Division, took Mogaung, a railway junction west of the town, cutting the garrison off from its rear on that side. East of the Irrawaddy, Chinese armies from Yunnan had been attacking across the Salween since May, when they crossed the river, pinning down the Japanese 56th Division. And on 22 June, with the end of the siege of Imphal, the Japanese offensive against India collapsed – the Fifteenth Army could no longer come to Myitkyina’s aid.

Mizukami’s order

In July the headquarters of Lieutenant General Masaki Honda’s Japanese Thirty-Third Army sent an order to Myitkyina: “General Mizukami is to defend Myitkyina to the death.” According to Japanese accounts, the wording was pushed through by an army staff officer, Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who refused to allow “General Mizukami” to be replaced by “the Mizukami detachment”. The order thus bound the commander personally, not his soldiers.

At the end of July, when the northern airfield had already been in the hands of New Galahad since 26–27 July and ammunition and food were running out, Colonel Maruyama asked for permission to withdraw the remnants of his regiment. Mizukami granted it. According to Japanese sources, he kept the personal order from his subordinates and instructed Maruyama to break out with the survivors across the Irrawaddy towards Bhamo. On dark nights at the beginning of August boats and rafts carried the sick, the wounded and the last combat-capable units to the eastern bank; only rearguards remained in the town. Mizukami himself, as the crossing was coming to an end, shot himself on the riverbank. The American official history – Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland, Stilwell’s Command Problems – gives the date as 1 August; other accounts, Japanese ones among them, speak of 2, 3 or even 4 August. He was posthumously promoted to lieutenant general, and Japanese tradition presents his death as a literal fulfilment of the order which allowed the others to be saved.

The last assault on 3 August

The Allies did not know of the Japanese commander’s death, but they could see that the defence was weakening. On 29–31 July their units drove ever deeper into the Japanese positions. Wessels prepared the final attack on the basis of an idea from the commander of the Chinese 50th Division, General Pan Yukun: fifteen heavily armed sections were to infiltrate between the Japanese positions 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 over the town, the assault detachment set off. Towards dawn the 50th Division attacked, followed by the regiments of the 14th Division and the remaining units. The Japanese rearguards held out for a few more hours, but at 3.45 p.m. Myitkyina was declared taken. According to Japanese sources, scattered groups in the suburbs kept up resistance for several more days, until about 7 August.

A total of 187 Japanese were taken prisoner, most of them sick and wounded. Among those detained around the town were also civilians, including Korean women forced into prostitution in military brothels, the so-called comfort women; the report of the American Office of War Information on the interrogation of twenty of them is now one of the most frequently cited documents on that system. Colonel Maruyama broke through with about 600 men to the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy and, according to Japanese sources, reached Bhamo by mid-September.

The balance

The American official history gives the 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 because of illness, among them 570 Galahad soldiers. Japanese losses are known less precisely: American estimates of 9 August spoke of about 4,000 killed, while Japanese sources give about 2,100 dead, including Mizukami.

Merrill’s Marauders felt the siege most severely. On 10 August 1944, a week after the fall of the town, the 5307th Composite Unit was disbanded; of the fewer than 3,000 soldiers who had set out from India in February, about 130 remained fit for combat. The survivors and replacements became part of the new 475th Infantry Regiment, which together with other units formed the American Mars Brigade. Around the fate of Galahad – thrown into battle beyond its strength and evacuated too late – accusations against Stilwell and his staff grew up in the United States which long cast a shadow over assessments of the whole campaign.

Stilwell himself meanwhile reaped the fruits of victory: he received his fourth general’s star, dated 1 August 1944, becoming one of only a handful of full generals in the US Army. Since the autumn of 1943 his India-trained Chinese divisions had covered several hundred kilometres from Ledo to Myitkyina and shattered the Japanese 18th Division – the same division that had taken Singapore in 1942. For Stilwell this was proof that the Chinese soldier, well trained, supplied and led, could defeat the Japanese; he had been repeating this argument to Chiang Kai-shek and Washington for two years.

Place in the war

The fall of Myitkyina sealed the fate of northern Burma. The airfield, captured in May and secure from August onwards, became the main base of the airlift to China: according to the official history, between May and October 1944 some 14,000 transport aircraft landed at the Myitkyina airfields with more than 40,000 tons of cargo, and aircraft flying the Hump could from then on use a lower and shorter southern route. The town also became a base for the builders of the Ledo Road and of the pipeline that ran alongside it.

The political fruits of victory proved short-lived for Stilwell. In the summer of 1944 the Japanese Operation Ichi-Go was shattering Chinese armies in central and southern China, and Washington was pressing Chiang Kai-shek to hand Stilwell command of the entire Chinese army. The dispute ended in October 1944 with Stilwell’s recall from the China–Burma–India theatre. In the autumn the Chinese divisions from Myitkyina moved south; in December they took Bhamo, and in January 1945 they linked up with the armies advancing from the Salween. At the beginning of February 1945 the first truck convoy reached Kunming along the Ledo Road; Chiang then named it the Stilwell Road.

For the Japanese, the loss of Myitkyina, together with the defeat at Imphal and Kohima, meant the end of their plans to hold Burma as a forward area from which they could threaten India and cut China off. In 1945, in the offensive of General William Slim’s British Fourteenth Army into central Burma and the Sino-American advance from the north, the Japanese forces lost Mandalay and, in May, Rangoon. The land route to China, for which the whole campaign had been fought, was opened too late, however, to play the role in the war against Japan that had been ascribed to it in 1942: until the end of the war most supplies for China still arrived by air.