The Chindits cross the Irrawaddy

At the turn of February and March 1943 the columns of Brigadier Orde Wingate’s 77th Indian Infantry Brigade, which in February had set out from Imphal behind the Japanese lines, reached the main railway line of northern Burma, linking Mandalay with Myitkyina. War chronologies record under 2 March that the Chindits “continued local attacks in Burma”. This modest entry captures the nature of the expedition well: it was not an offensive but a series of raids by a few hundred men at a time, scattered through the jungle over dozens of kilometres. March 1943 was both the high point and the turning point of the operation, code-named Longcloth by the British: it brought first the Chindits’ greatest successes, then the decision to cross the Irrawaddy, which very nearly ended in disaster, and, at the end of the month, the order to return.

Strikes on the railway

Wingate’s plan provided for the two columns of the southern group, which in February had been deliberately drawing Japanese attention to themselves, to turn east at the beginning of March and cut the railway near Kyaikthin station, while the five columns of the northern group struck at the line further north. During the night of 2–3 March No. 2 Column ran into a Japanese ambush near Kyaikthin and dispersed; most of its men later made their way back to India in small groups. No. 1 Column, on the other hand, managed to blow up the line north of Kyaikthin on 3 March – the first time the Chindits cut the railway.

The two columns of the northern group achieved the most. No. 3 Column was commanded by Major Michael Calvert, a sapper and former instructor at the bush warfare school, and No. 5 Column by Major Bernard Fergusson, an officer of the Black Watch, a Scottish regiment. Both reached the railway in the first days of March. On 6 March Calvert’s men blew up a bridge and the track near Nankan station, beating off a Japanese detachment as they did so, while Fergusson’s parties destroyed the railway bridge at Bonchaung and brought down rock in a nearby gorge, burying the line. Calvert, by his own report, cut the line in several dozen places. Wingate then wanted to strike at the second important line of communication – the railway and road from Mandalay to Lashio, which ran over the viaduct in the Gokteik gorge.

The damage proved temporary. The Japanese repaired the line within days or weeks, and the railway, though cut, played no decisive role at the time, since no major operations were under way in northern Burma. The psychological effect mattered more: for the first time since the defeat of 1942, British and Indian troops had struck deep inside Japanese-held territory and withdrawn without heavy losses.

Across the Irrawaddy

After the attacks on the railway Wingate had to decide what to do next. He could turn back to India, as the Japanese expected, or press on eastwards, across the Irrawaddy. On 8 March Calvert and Fergusson were given freedom of decision, but when No. 1 Column reported by radio that it had crossed the river during the night of 9–10 March, Wingate considered the matter settled. The columns of the northern group crossed the broad river between 10 and 13 March, at and to the south of the Tigyaing landing, in boats captured from or hired from the Burmese. Around 18 March Wingate himself crossed with brigade headquarters and the main body – some 1,200 men in all – near the village of Inywa. Calvert’s and Fergusson’s columns were given a new task: to reach the Gokteik viaduct, more than 200 kilometres away.

The country beyond the Irrawaddy turned out to be a trap. Instead of humid jungle the Chindits found dry, sun-baked forest and scrub, where water was scarce in the dry season. For several days Fergusson’s column obtained water by digging holes in dried-up streambeds and waiting for a little muddy liquid to collect at the bottom. A dense road network, on the other hand, allowed the Japanese to move troops quickly by lorry. The Japanese command sent units of the 18th, 33rd and 56th Divisions against the brigade, which began to trap the Chindits in the triangle between the Irrawaddy, the Shweli river and the road linking the two rivers. The Japanese removed boats from the riverbanks, garrisoned villages and rewarded the inhabitants for information.

Supply from the air worked less and less well. The columns were at the limit of the range of transport aircraft flying from India, and some drops were intercepted by the Japanese or landed in the wrong places. Over the whole expedition Fergusson’s column received food for only about 20 days, although it was in the field for more than three months; on 23 March a drop brought three days’ rations, the next one a single day’s. Cases of malaria and dysentery multiplied. Yet the Chindits could still hit hard: according to British accounts, more than 200 Japanese were killed in an engagement fought by Nos. 7 and 8 Columns on 23 March, for the loss of two British dead – a figure that comes from the Chindits’ own reports and was probably inflated.

The order to return

Around 24 March IV Corps headquarters at Imphal ordered Wingate to bring his columns back to India: so far to the east they could no longer be supplied, and the chances of further success were diminishing by the day. Calvert received the news bitterly – the Gokteik viaduct remained untouched. Wingate sent one more column further east but ordered the rest to concentrate on the Irrawaddy near Inywa. On 27 March brigade headquarters and the columns set off for the river. Mules were killed or abandoned, and equipment that could not be carried was burned.

On 29 March, as the first boats pushed out onto the river near Inywa, the Japanese opened fire from the opposite bank. Wingate called off the crossing. In accordance with a plan prepared in advance, the columns split up into “dispersal groups” of 30–40 men each, which were to find their own way back. Some tried to cross the Irrawaddy at other points; others went north, across the Shweli, into the hills inhabited by the Kachins, who were well disposed towards the British; and some went as far as the Chinese province of Yunnan. At the crossing of the Shweli Fergusson had to leave behind on a sandbank more than forty exhausted soldiers who did not dare to enter the fast-flowing current; most of them were taken prisoner. Wingate himself crossed the Irrawaddy with a small group only on 7 April, several dozen kilometres south of Inywa.

Place in the history of the war

The return took the whole of April. Wingate reached the Chindwin at the end of the month, and individual groups of stragglers were still reaching the British lines in the summer and autumn. Of the roughly 3,000 men who had crossed the Chindwin in February, 818 did not return, and of those who did, some 600 were no longer fit for service. The prisoners were held in the jail in Rangoon; according to researchers of the expedition, of the nearly 250 British Chindits who were captured, about 100 lived to be liberated in May 1945. For a time the brigade ceased to exist as a fighting unit, and almost all the mules had died or been abandoned.

The March raids did not change the situation on the Burma front. The railway was quickly repaired, and the Japanese did not have to draw any significant forces away from other sectors. Yet the expedition had consequences that no one had foreseen. The Japanese realised that the mountain range and the Chindwin river were not an impassable barrier; a champion of an offensive across this barrier was Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the Fifteenth Army from March, who a year later led the Japanese offensive against Imphal and Kohima. On the British side, the experience of March 1943 – with air supply, radio communications and the abandonment of the wounded – led to the building of airstrips for casualty evacuation aircraft and to closer cooperation with the air forces.

Strongest of all, however, was the impression the expedition made in London. In the spring of 1943, after the failure of the British offensive in the Arakan, the press presented the Chindits as soldiers who had beaten the Japanese in the jungle. Winston Churchill took Wingate with him to the Quebec Conference, where he secured approval for a much larger operation. Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, who had agreed to send the brigade in despite the cancellation of a wider offensive, was appointed Viceroy of India in June 1943 and gave up his military command. The second Chindit expedition, involving several brigades flown in partly by glider and transport aircraft, began in March 1944.