The Chinese cross the Salween

On the night of 10/11 May 1944 Chinese engineers pushed rubber boats and rafts made of bamboo and fuel drums into the water and began ferrying infantry across the Salween (in Chinese Nu Jiang – the “Angry River”) in western Yunnan. By midday on 12 May the main body of the first wave was across on the western bank, and that afternoon the first clashes with the Japanese took place in the mountain passes. So began the offensive of General Wei Lihuang’s Chinese Expeditionary Force – in American terminology, “Y Force”. A terse chronology entry states that “large Chinese forces enter northern Burma”. This needs to be made more precise: the Chinese crossed the river on their own territory. The Japanese had occupied the land between the Salween and the Burmese border in May 1942, and its recovery was the first objective of the offensive. The troops from Yunnan reached Burma itself only in the winter of 1944/1945. In northern Burma, meanwhile, a different Chinese army was fighting – General Joseph Stilwell’s India-trained “X Force”, which had been advancing there since the end of 1943.

The army from Yunnan

After the Burma Road was cut in the spring of 1942, the Japanese advanced from Burma as far as the Salween. The retreating Chinese blew up both bridges over the river, and its deep gorge halted the Japanese drive into the interior of China. From then on the front in western Yunnan stood almost still for two years. On the eastern bank, around Baoshan, an army was assembled that was one day to move west to meet Stilwell’s troops coming from India.

In the spring of 1944 the Chinese Expeditionary Force (the name recalled the corps sent to Burma in 1942) consisted of two army groups. The 11th Army Group was commanded by General Song Xilian, the 20th Army Group by General Huo Kuizhang. Together they had twelve divisions, but according to the American official history (Romanus and Sunderland, Stilwell’s Command Problems) these numbered only about 72,000 men, 40 per cent below establishment. The War Ministry in Chongqing did not bring them up to strength, and the soldiers, often pressed into service, were undernourished and sickly. Overall command was held by General Wei Lihuang, one of Chiang Kai-shek’s most experienced commanders.

From 1943 the Yunnan divisions had been trained and supplied by the Americans. By the end of February 1944 each of the five armies had received, among other things, sub-machine guns, mortars, anti-tank rifles, rocket launchers and 75 mm pack howitzers, and American instructor teams were working with most of the divisions. All of this was flown in over the Himalayas, across “the Hump”, so every rifle for Y Force was subtracted from the meagre tonnage also sought by the airmen of General Claire Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force. The American liaison staff with the Chinese army (Y Force Operations Staff, Y-FOS) was headed by Brigadier General Frank Dorn, a long-time associate of Stilwell.

“It is inconceivable to me”

The advance from Yunnan was part of a plan adopted in the autumn of 1943: Stilwell was to push from India towards Myitkyina, the British were to strike from the west, and Wei Lihuang’s army was to cross the Salween and come out to meet them. At the Cairo Conference, however, Chiang Kai-shek made his troops’ participation conditional on a large British–American amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal. When the landing was abandoned after Tehran, the Generalissimo considered himself released from his promise. To successive telegrams from Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the turn of 1943 and 1944, which hinted ever more plainly that further aid depended on the use of Y Force, he replied that China could not move without support from the sea and that the army in Yunnan was not ready.

The situation was changed by the Japanese offensive against Imphal. Stilwell painted it in very dark colours in Washington, and on 3 April 1944 Roosevelt sent Chiang a telegram in a tone he had never used before. He pointed out that the Japanese had moved part of the 56th Division from the Salween front against Stilwell and the Chindits, and wrote that it was inconceivable to him that the Y forces, with their American equipment, should be unable to advance against the weakened Japanese 56th Division, which on the Salween was a mere shell of a division. If those troops were not to be used in the common cause, he added, the whole effort of equipping and training them had been pointless.

Threats followed the words. On 10 April General George Marshall informed Chongqing that if Y Force did not move, Lend-Lease deliveries for it should be stopped. Stilwell’s chief of staff in Chongqing, Major General Thomas Hearn, announced that Y Force’s April tonnage allocation – 734 tons – would be handed over to Chennault’s airmen. According to the American official history, this settled the matter: some of the Chinese generals, led by the Expeditionary Force’s chief of staff, General Xiao Yisu, began to press Chiang, and on 14 April the Minister of War and Chief of the General Staff, He Yingqin, set his seal on the order to cross. In a telegram to Marshall he assured him that the decision had been taken “on Chinese initiative, without the influence of outside pressure”. The Americans received this with relief and restored the full allocations.

He Yingqin attached one more condition: the Americans were to ferry some 50,000 soldiers across the river, provide air support, coordinate the fire of the artillery they had trained and share responsibility for food and ammunition. Dorn believed that the minister was counting on a refusal that would release the Chinese from the operation. He agreed to everything.

The front on the “Angry River”

The terrain over which the offensive was to be fought was among the most difficult of the entire war. Here the Salween flows through a deep gorge cut into mountains rising to some 2,700 metres. The river is seldom more than 60 metres wide, but its current is fast, cold and full of eddies. During the thaw and the monsoon it becomes a torrent that is almost impossible to cross. Beyond it, parallel to the river, runs the Gaoligong Shan range, with passes at about 3,000 metres, and further on the valley of the Shweli. The monsoon was due in a few weeks – the delay since December had cost the Chinese the best season of the year.

The front, more than 150 kilometres long, was held by Lieutenant General Yūzō Matsuyama’s Japanese 56th Division, a veteran of the conquest of Burma in 1942, with its headquarters at Mangshi on the Burma Road. From April 1944 it came under the newly formed 33rd Army of Lieutenant General Masaki Honda, responsible for the whole of northern Burma. Its 148th Regiment turned the thick-walled old town of Tengchong into a fortress; the 113th Regiment fortified Mount Song Shan, which dominated the destroyed Huitong bridge and the first kilometres of the Burma Road west of the river; and a strong garrison stood at Longling, where tracks branched off the road to the north and south. Weaker detachments and patrols guarded the passes and crossings. The division, however, was overstretched and weakened by the dispatch of part of its forces against Stilwell and the Chindits (Operation Thursday).

General Wei Lihuang’s plan was to strike first at the flanks of the Japanese front and only then at its centre. The 20th Army Group was to cross north of the Burma Road, pass through the passes of the Gaoligong Shan into the Shweli valley and advance on Tengchong. The 11th Army Group was to pin down the Japanese on the road and in the south, around the village of Pingga. The first objective of the offensive was Tengchong, the second Longling. Their capture would split the Japanese positions in Yunnan and open the routes to Myitkyina and Bhamo. Chiang Kai-shek, who fixed the date of the attack by telephone on 27 April, demanded success from his commanders – “or else…”. On 9 May Dorn reported to Stilwell that the crossings would take place on the night of 10/11 May and that the Chinese expected to reach Myitkyina before him.

The crossing

The crossing was what the Chinese feared most – Japanese machine guns and artillery could turn the river into an impassable barrier. It turned out, however, that the Japanese had no intention of defending the banks. From intercepted and decrypted Chinese signals and from the move of Wei Lihuang’s headquarters they knew that the attack was close, but they had placed their main line of defence on the mountain crest, a dozen or so kilometres west of the river. Only patrols were left at the crossings.

For weeks American engineers had been training Chinese pioneers to handle rubber boats on rough water, and airmen had taken aerial photographs of terrain for which there were no accurate maps. On the night of 10/11 May the reinforced 115th Regiment of the New 39th Division crossed unopposed a few kilometres above the destroyed Huiren bridge, on the shortest route from Baoshan to Tengchong. It met heavier fire only in the morning. On the night of 11/12 May the main forces of the 20th Army Group crossed the river: the 198th Division near the Mamian Pass, and three regiments of the 36th Division and the 346th Regiment of the 116th Division at the Mengka crossing. The engineers, supervised by a dozen or so Americans, ferried men back and forth throughout the moonlit night and until midday. The current was so strong that four oarsmen could carry only four soldiers with their equipment at a time. Mules and guns went over on larger ferries made of drums. In the south, near Pingga, the 76th Division of the 2nd Army and the 88th Division of the 71st Army each sent across one reinforced regiment, and several companies of the 9th Division had slipped across to the far bank before the day of the attack to interfere with Japanese patrols. Everywhere the fighting began only once the Chinese were already on the other bank.

The first clash came on the afternoon of 12 May at the Mamian Pass. A battalion of the 198th Division took several Japanese bunkers and part of the trenches, but during the night the Japanese of the 2nd Battalion, 148th Regiment, crept up silently from a neighbouring ridge and at dawn almost wiped it out. The Chinese battalion commander was killed, as was Second Lieutenant Kirk Schaible, the first Y-FOS liaison officer to fall in the campaign. Chinese reinforcements restored the situation and on 13 May resistance there ceased. The Chinese got a supply line across the river working only on 29 May, when a footbridge for men and pack animals was repaired. Until then they were supplied and kept in contact mainly by light L-5 liaison aircraft, landing on a strip cut by engineers into the mountainside, and by air drops.

Place in the war

A smooth crossing did not mean a swift victory. As early as the second half of May the 20th Army Group’s advance stalled in the passes of the Gaoligong Shan, where small Japanese garrisons in fortified posts cost the Chinese heavy losses, and American liaison officers complained of a lack of cooperation between artillery and infantry. At the end of May Wei Lihuang, seeing that Matsuyama had drawn troops from the south, sent the rest of the 71st Army across the river as well, to strike at Longling and besiege Song Shan. The Japanese abandoned Jiangju in the Shweli valley only on 22 June. The monsoon arrived, and the 56th Division, reinforced by part of the 2nd Division, began to counter-attack.

The sieges were the bloodiest part. The garrison of Song Shan, a mountain honeycombed with tunnels and bunkers, held out from June until 7 September 1944 and perished almost to a man. Tengchong fell on 13–14 September after a siege of several weeks and house-to-house fighting that reduced the old town to ruins. In both strongholds the Chinese and Americans found victims of the Japanese “comfort station” system – Korean and Japanese women forced into prostitution, some of whom died in the last days of the fighting. The Chinese took Longling on 3 November, Mangshi on 20 November and, on 20 January 1945, Wanding on the border. On 27 January 1945, near Mong Yu and Muse, the troops from Yunnan linked up with the forces coming from India, and on 4 February the first convoy of lorries from Ledo reached Kunming. The new route, named the Stilwell Road at Chiang’s suggestion, operated for only a few months before the end of the war, however, and never carried as much as went over the Hump.

The Salween offensive coincided with the Japanese Operation Ichi-Go, which in May and June 1944 was smashing Chiang’s armies in Henan and Hunan. The Generalissimo looked ever less favourably on tying down his best-armed divisions in Yunnan, and in September threatened to pull them back across the river unless Stilwell advanced on Bhamo. The dispute over Y Force became one strand of a crisis that – as a year earlier – called Stilwell’s position into question, this time with success: in October 1944 Roosevelt recalled him from China. For all its cost and slowness, the crossing of 11–12 May opened one of the few victorious campaigns of the war in which the Chinese army recaptured a substantial area of its own country from the Japanese and brought about the reopening of the land route to China.