The Chinese in the Hukawng Valley

At ten in the morning on 28 December 1943 three battalions of the Chinese 38th Division attacked Japanese strongpoints on the Tarung River near the village of Yupbang Ga, on the northern edge of the Hukawng Valley in Burma. After several hours of hand-to-hand fighting the Chinese had taken most of the defences covering the crossing, and the next morning they wiped out another pocket of resistance. It was the second and larger attack in the area, following a successful skirmish on Christmas Eve. These are the battles behind the laconic chronicle entry that “in Burma, Chinese troops are having some success against the Japanese”. It was the Chinese army’s first serious success in Burma since the defeat of 1942, and the real beginning of the campaign that in 1944 was to reopen the land route to China.

The army from Ramgarh

After the retreat from Burma in the spring of 1942 the remnants of two Chinese divisions made their way to India: the 38th Division of General Sun Liren and the 22nd Division of General Liao Yaoxiang. The American General Joseph Stilwell made them the nucleus of a new army. At the camp at Ramgarh in the province of Bihar, the soldiers – topped up with recruits flown in from China – received American training, American weapons, artillery and equipment, and were regularly fed and paid, which was by no means the rule in the Chinese army. So was born the Chinese Army in India, known in American terminology as “X Force”, whose field commander (Chih Hui Pu) was Stilwell, with day-to-day direction in the hands of his deputy, Brigadier General Haydon Boatner.

The army’s objective was northern Burma. Since the fall of the Burma Road China had been supplied only by air over the Himalayas, across the so-called “Hump”. Stilwell wanted to break through from Assam in India by way of the Hukawng and Mogaung valleys to Myitkyina – a railway and air hub whose capture would shorten the route over the Hump and allow a new road to be linked to the old Burmese road network. Behind the troops came the engineers building the Ledo Road, which ran from Ledo in Assam over the Pangsau Pass in the Patkai Hills down to Shingbwiyang, the first settlement in the valley. From 17 October 1943 construction was directed by Colonel Lewis A. Pick, an engineer known for his plans to regulate the Missouri; more than ten thousand American soldiers worked on it, most of them in African American engineer battalions, together with tens of thousands of local labourers.

The encircled battalions

At the end of October 1943, as the rainy season ended, the 112th Regiment of the 38th Division came down from the mountains into the Hukawng Valley. Its task was to screen the road builders by occupying the line of the Tarung and Tanai rivers – which meet a few kilometres south-west of Yupbang Ga – before the bulldozers reached them. Stilwell’s staff assumed that there were no significant Japanese forces north of Kamaing. They were wrong: the Chinese battalions ran into forward detachments of the 55th and 56th Regiments of the Japanese 18th Division under General Shin’ichi Tanaka, veterans of the conquest of Malaya and Singapore. The Japanese used their favourite manoeuvre, encirclement. The 1st Battalion was pinned down at Yupbang Ga, the 2nd Battalion near Sharaw Ga and the 3rd Battalion far to the south-west, on the Taro plain. All three, supplied by air drops, were unable to break out for several weeks.

The stalemate also had a political background. On 30 November, on the way back from the Cairo Conference, Chiang Kai-shek and his wife visited the headquarters of the Chinese Army in India. The Generalissimo advised against becoming involved in a major battle and against crossing the Tarung–Tanai line before February, when the British were to advance in the south and the Chinese from Yunnan. A few days later these assumptions fell apart: after the Tehran Conference Roosevelt and Churchill abandoned an amphibious landing in the Bay of Bengal, and Chiang had made the offensive of his Yunnan forces conditional on that operation. Even so, the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff upheld the order to take northern Burma in the spring of 1944. Stilwell, since October deputy to Lord Mountbatten in the new SEAC command, decided to lead the attack in person.

The first relief attempt, made by Sun on 15 December, failed. The 1st Battalion of the 114th Regiment, supported by an artillery battery, sent out only a cautious patrol after a short bombardment; when a surviving Japanese machine gun opened up, the Chinese fell back, and the Japanese strengthened their positions.

Stilwell at Shingbwiyang

On 21 December Stilwell arrived at Shingbwiyang and took direct command. For two days he studied the ground with Sun and the staffs. Between the bend of the Tanai and the Tarung lay a small, enclosed area whose only exits were the fords at Yupbang Ga and Ningbyen to the east and the Kantau ford to the south – the last of which the Japanese had left unguarded. Stilwell demanded that instead of small manoeuvres by individual companies the Chinese should strike hard in the centre, at Yupbang Ga, relieve the encircled battalion, and send a regiment round the Japanese left flank by way of Kantau.

At ten o’clock on 24 December, after an accurate artillery bombardment – in places the two sides were only about thirty metres apart – the 1st Battalion of the 114th Regiment went into the attack. The Japanese defended themselves stubbornly and counter-attacked. In the afternoon a detachment under Major Peng Keli worked round their right flank; at 3.15 p.m. the Chinese linked up with the encircled battalion, and the next morning the last strongpoint of this group was eliminated. According to the American official history this first victory made an enormous impression on the men of the 38th Division, many of them recruits who had only heard of its exploits in 1942.

28 December: the three-battalion attack

The Christmas Eve victory had not, however, cleared the crossing. Between the relieved battalion and the river at least two companies of the 2nd Battalion of the Japanese 55th Regiment were still holding out with machine guns – in three strongpoints about three hundred metres from the bank and three more on the river itself. Three battalions were sent to destroy them: the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 114th Regiment and the relieved 1st Battalion of the 112th Regiment, supported by two batteries.

The attack went in from the north at ten o’clock on 28 December. At about 2.30 p.m. the 1st Battalion of the 112th Regiment on the right broke through behind the three outer Japanese strongpoints and took one of the fortified positions on the river. On the left an outer strongpoint fell at about 2 p.m., but it turned out to be linked to its neighbour by tunnels through which the Japanese moved freely from one to the other. The deadlock was broken only when the attackers bypassed this complex and pushed straight through to the river – at which point the defenders abandoned their outer positions. At the same time the 1st Battalion of the 114th Regiment took another, somewhat isolated strongpoint on the bank. A Japanese night counter-attack from one of the last two fortified positions broke down, and the position itself was taken on the morning of 29 December. The shattered Japanese companies scattered into small groups that kept up the fight in the undergrowth for several days; the Americans recorded “fire from all directions”.

The last Japanese strongpoint on the Tarung held out until 13 January 1944, inflicting painful losses on the Chinese with mines. But the success of 28 December decided the fate of the whole sector: having lost their positions at Yupbang Ga, the Japanese could no longer hold on further north, and on 31 December units of the 113th Regiment relieved the encircled battalion at Sharaw Ga. The Tarung line was in Chinese hands. The outflanking move through the Kantau ford on which Stilwell had counted, however, stalled – the Chinese companies crossed the river but dug in and went no further, which Stilwell took with great irritation.

The balance and how each side saw it

By the end of 1943 the fighting had cost the 38th Division, according to the American official history, 315 killed (17 officers and 298 men) and 429 wounded; the 112th Regiment suffered the heaviest losses. In his notes Stilwell listed the Chinese mistakes: dispersal of forces, piecemeal action, extreme caution and slowness, “fear of imaginary dangers”, poor reconnaissance and a dread of outflanking the enemy. He was nevertheless pleased – for the first time Chinese troops trained in India had beaten Japanese veterans in open battle.

It made an impression on the enemy too. Post-war Japanese accounts, quoted by American historians, record that the unexpected tenacity of the Chinese at Yupbang Ga convinced the Japanese that they were facing a far better and better-armed force than the one they had fought for years in China. Tanaka had in fact intended to go over to the offensive himself with two regiments, but in mid-December he was held back by the commander of the Fifteenth Army, General Renya Mutaguchi, who was already preparing an offensive against Imphal and did not want to give up the 18th Division’s transport.

Behind the front the road was growing. On 27 December Colonel Pick opened the military road to Shingbwiyang, and the first convoy arrived there the same day – a few days ahead of the deadline Stilwell had set. Supplies, until then almost entirely dropped from the air, could now come in by lorry, and a depot, an airfield and a hospital were set up at Shingbwiyang.

Significance

The engagements at Yupbang Ga were small by the standards of the war – a few battalions took part – but they opened the campaign in northern Burma. Elsewhere on the Burma front, too, nothing had yet been decided: the British XV Corps was advancing slowly in the Arakan, Allied air forces were continuing the raids on Rangoon begun in November, and the Japanese were preparing their own offensive against India.

In the first months of 1944 Stilwell’s Chinese divisions, reinforced by the American long-range unit of General Frank Merrill (“Merrill’s Marauders”), took Maingkwan and Walawbum, driving the 18th Division out of the Hukawng Valley, and in March the Chindits of General Orde Wingate were flown in behind the Japanese lines. The Japanese offensive against Imphal and Kohima, launched by Mutaguchi in March, ended in defeat in the summer. On 17 May 1944 Chinese and American troops seized the airfield at Myitkyina by surprise; the town itself fell on 3 August after a long siege. The Ledo Road, joined to the old Burma Road, let the first convoy through to China in January 1945; Chiang Kai-shek then named it the Stilwell Road, although Stilwell himself had been recalled from China in October 1944 at Chiang’s demand.

For the Chinese army the December fighting in the Hukawng Valley meant more than the fords it won. It showed that the Chinese soldier, if trained, equipped and regularly supplied, could beat the Japanese – the very thing Stilwell had been arguing since 1942 in his disputes with Chiang Kai-shek and Chennault. The same 38th Division, from 1944 part of the New 1st Army under Sun Liren, fought its way through the whole of northern Burma until it linked up with the forces from Yunnan at the beginning of 1945.