The end of the Burma campaign

On 20 May 1942 the British IV Corps, whose headquarters was at Imphal, the capital of the Indian princely state of Manipur, took command of all the units that had come out of Burma. Lieutenant General William Slim’s Burma Corps ceased to exist, and the command of General Harold Alexander, who had led all British forces in Burma since March, came to an end. The day before, 19 May, the last rearguard, the 63rd Indian Brigade, had reached Tamu on the Indian border. On the same day, 20 May, General Joseph Stilwell walked into Imphal with his party. Behind them, beyond the mountains and the jungle, the whole of British Burma, from Rangoon to Myitkyina, was in Japanese hands.

War chronologies usually record the end of the Japanese conquest of Burma under this date and call it a military disaster. The verdict is accurate; the date is a convention. No fortress fell on 20 May and no surrender was signed; it was the day on which the British command in Burma was formally dissolved. Fighting continued on both sides of that date. The Japanese halted on the Chindwin and went no further, the Thai army, allied to them, took Kengtung in the eastern Shan States on 27 May, and Chinese divisions were still fighting their way through northern Burma to Yunnan and India in June and July. The far north of the country, the Kachin hills around Fort Hertz, never came under Japanese occupation.

The race for Shwegyin

After the fighting for Mandalay and Monywa at the beginning of May, Slim’s corps had only one way out: the track from Ye-U through dry jungle to the landing stage at Shwegyin on the Chindwin, from where river steamers carried the men a few kilometres upstream to Kalewa. From Kalewa a road – in truth more of a cart track – ran up the Kabaw Valley to Tamu on the Indian border and on over the mountains to Imphal. The track to Shwegyin had been laid out in haste; it crossed countless dry stream beds on flimsy bridges, and Alexander later wrote that anyone seeing it for the first time would hardly believe that an army with motor transport could pass along it. The engineers improved it enough for one to do so.

It was a race against two opponents at once. The Japanese 213th Infantry Regiment of the 33rd Division was coming up the Chindwin by boat from Alon to take Kalewa before the British. Alexander had a boom laid across the river at Gaundi, covered by Royal Marines, and asked the command in India for air attacks on the Japanese boats; on 3, 4 and 5 May bombers delayed the Japanese advance, but on 5 May Japanese aircraft smashed the boom. The second opponent was the monsoon, which any day now would turn the streams into torrents and the tracks into mud. On 3 May the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Archibald Wavell, instructed Alexander to withdraw the corps to the Tamu area as quickly as possible, since it could not be supplied at Kalewa.

Everything had to pass through Shwegyin: soldiers, wounded, guns, lorries, tanks and, with them, thousands of refugees. Six river steamers were available, each able to take about 600 men but only two lorries and two jeeps. From the outset, therefore, it was clear that most of the equipment would be left on the bank. On 7 May Japanese aircraft bombed the landing stage, and from then on the Indian and Burmese crews worked only at night, while the river suddenly rose and flooded the jetties. On the night of 8–9 May the 13th Brigade crossed, and the following night the 63rd Brigade and the tank crews of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, who had first destroyed their vehicles. The 1st Burma Brigade went north by a roundabout track to cross the Chindwin higher up, while the 2nd Burma Brigade, cut off on the western bank of the Irrawaddy, marched by night down the valley of the Myittha; in fourteen days it covered some 350 kilometres and on 12 May reached the outposts near Kalemyo.

The battle in the Basin

On the morning of 10 May there remained on the eastern bank the headquarters of the 7th Armoured Brigade, the 48th Indian Brigade with supporting units, and part of a battalion of Jats. The landing stage at Shwegyin lay in a small bay, which the track reached through a hollow half a mile long surrounded by steep, wooded hills – the soldiers called it the Basin. Tanks, guns, lorries and dumps stood crammed into it, and alongside them waited the wounded and the refugees. The day before, a Japanese battalion had landed a dozen or so kilometres downstream and approached through the jungle by night. A patrol that saw it could not report, because the batteries of its wireless set had run down.

At around 5.45 a.m. on 10 May the Japanese attacked. They took a hill overlooking the landing stage and made the jetty unusable. Three steamers nevertheless managed to come in under a cliff a few hundred metres upstream and take all the wounded to Kalewa. A Gurkha counter-attack at 2 p.m. failed to retake the hill, and the Japanese were receiving reinforcements. The commander of the 17th Division, Major General David Cowan, decided to withdraw on foot along a steep track running up the eastern bank. At 5 p.m. the guns and mortars began firing off the rest of their ammunition, and at about 8 p.m. they fired a last concentrated bombardment and fell silent a quarter of an hour later. The covering troops withdrew, and the tanks, lorries, guns and dumps in the Basin were set ablaze. The Japanese did not pursue. No one knew it at the time, but this was the last battle of the campaign. On the Chindwin the 7th Armoured Brigade lost the last of the tanks that had covered the whole retreat since February; according to some accounts only one reached India.

Through the Kabaw Valley in the rain

On 12 May the Japanese took Kalewa. That same day the first heavy monsoon rains fell. The British official history states that Alexander got his army out by a hair’s breadth and that another week of fighting east of the Chindwin might have ended in complete disaster. The Japanese went no further. Their task was to conquer Burma, not to invade India, and in the rainy season they could not have supplied troops in the mountains in any case.

The British, meanwhile, marched west. The 48th Brigade and a battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment went up the Chindwin by steamer on the night of 11–12 May, scuttled the boats at Sittaung and set off on foot for Tamu. The main body of the 17th Division marched up the Kabaw Valley, notorious as one of the most malarial places in Asia, in pouring rain, carrying the wounded and sick on stretchers and mules. They reached Tamu on 17 May, the last of them, the 63rd Brigade, on 19 May. Malaria and dysentery took a heavy toll of men exhausted by months of retreat. Almost none of the equipment was saved: of 48 field, mountain and anti-tank guns, 28 reached India, and of all the corps’s tanks and vehicles only about 50 lorries and 30 jeeps.

Slim stood by the road as the last soldiers entered India. In his memoirs he recalled that they were gaunt and ragged as scarecrows, yet still marched in formation, with their weapons, behind their officers, and still looked like soldiers. He also wrote bitterly of the reception they met in India: units that had survived the retreat had to bivouac in the open on the hillsides for their first days, in the pouring rain. In the same book he admitted that the Allies had been outmanoeuvred and beaten in Burma, and he did not rate his own generalship highly. Wavell reported to Winston Churchill that Alexander had performed a great feat in bringing the army out of Burma.

The fate of the Chinese

The Chinese armies that had entered Burma in March to defend the Burma Road came out of it in disarray. After the fall of Lashio and the Japanese capture of Bhamo and, on 8 May, Myitkyina, the roads to Yunnan were closed. Chiang Kai-shek issued orders from Chongqing that could not keep pace with events. The 96th Division slipped past the Japanese, reached Fort Hertz in the far north and from there crossed the mountains into China. The 200th Division, fighting its way east, ran into an ambush, and its commander, General Dai Anlan, died of his wounds on 26 May. The remnants of the 22nd Division and the headquarters of General Du Yuming’s 5th Army turned north-west into the Hukawng Valley and the Patkai hills; they reached Ledo in Assam only at the end of July, losing thousands of men to hunger and disease on the way.

The best showing in the campaign was made by General Sun Liren’s 38th Division, which formed the rearguard of the Chinese retreat. Defying Chiang’s order to make for Myitkyina, Sun led it west over the mountains to the Chindwin. On 11 May it ran into the Japanese at Paungbyin; two regiments crossed the river and reached Imphal on 24 May, while the third, the 113th Regiment, crossed the Chindwin on the night of 30–31 May after rearguard fighting. Stilwell himself, cut off from the troops he was supposed to command, abandoned his vehicles and led a party of more than a hundred people on foot through the jungle and mountains to India; they reached Imphal on 20 May.

The refugees

The most terrible aspect of the defeat was the flight of the civilian population. Before the war some million Indians lived in Burma, and in Rangoon they made up the majority of the inhabitants; they were labourers, traders, clerks and moneylenders. They feared both the Japanese and the Burmese nationalists, who saw them as an instrument of colonial exploitation. According to the most commonly cited estimates, between 400,000 and 500,000 people reached India: through Arakan, through Manipur and finally through the Hukawng Valley and the passes of the Patkai hills. The poor went on foot, often without food, in the heat and, from mid-May, in torrential rain, amid malaria, dysentery and cholera. How many died on the way is unknown; cautious estimates speak of 10,000–50,000, and some researchers give higher figures.

The retreating army fed the refugees and gave them lifts when it could, and before the last airfields were lost British and American aircraft flew some 8,600 people out of Burma, according to the official history, including 2,600 wounded. After that they dropped food to the columns in the mountains. The memory of the exodus also has a darker side, however: on the evacuation routes Europeans and Anglo-Indians were often let through first while Indians were held back, which in India was seen as an expression of the empire’s racial hierarchy.

The reckoning

According to the British official history, British and Indian troops lost 10,036 men in the campaign, of whom 3,670 were killed and wounded and 6,366 missing; Burmese units lost 363 killed and wounded and 3,064 missing, most of them deserters who had gone home. That made 13,463 men in all. Drawing on Japanese data, the official history gives Japanese losses as 4,597 killed and wounded. Chinese losses are poorly known: Western historians estimate them at about 40,000 men out of roughly 95,000 sent to Burma, while Chinese studies give higher figures; most died not in battle but during the retreat through the jungle. In the air losses were almost equal: according to the official history the Allies lost 116 aircraft and the Japanese 117.

In military terms the campaign was an unmitigated defeat for the Allies. Lieutenant General Shōjirō Iida’s Japanese 15th Army, with four divisions at its peak, conquered in four months a country larger than France, cut the Burma Road and reached the borders of India. According to the British official history, the army in Burma covered almost 1,600 kilometres in that time, in the longest retreat in the history of the British Army, without losing its cohesion. By their own reckoning the Japanese advanced some 2,400 kilometres from the Thai border to Kalewa in 127 days and fought 34 battles on the way.

Place in the war

The Japanese had closed the western side of their sphere of conquest. They gained Burmese rice, oil from the wrecked fields at Yenangyaung, which took a long time to restore, and a shield for Malaya and Thailand. In Burma itself they left behind a ruined country, in which, during the British withdrawal and the first weeks of occupation, Burmese volunteers marching with the Japanese clashed bloodily with the Karen and other minorities. According to Japanese sources, on 13 May the Japanese military police found the former prime minister Ba Maw, who had escaped from a British prison at Mogok. On 1 August 1942 he became head of the Burmese central administration, and on 1 August 1943 Japan proclaimed the independence of the State of Burma under his rule – an independence that was largely a sham. Aung San, who had returned to the country with the Japanese, went over to the Allies with his army in 1945.

For China the loss of Burma meant almost complete isolation. From then on aid could reach it only by air, from Assam to Kunming over the Himalayas. Stilwell, who told journalists in Delhi on 25 May that the Allies had taken “a hell of a beating” in Burma, resolved to retake it. From the Chinese soldiers who had come through to India he formed, at the Ramgarh camp in Bihar, divisions trained and armed by the Americans; from December 1942 a new road to China was built over the mountains from Ledo.

The British began thinking about a return as early as May. The first attempts – the Arakan offensive in the winter of 1942–1943 and Orde Wingate’s Chindit raid of February–April 1943 – brought disappointment or chiefly a boost to morale. In August 1942 Alexander left for the Middle East, where he took command of the British forces. Slim, who had brought the corps out of Burma, drew lessons from the defeat: the army had to learn to live and fight in the jungle, not to fear encirclement, and to be supplied from the air. In 1944 his Fourteenth Army smashed the Japanese offensive at Imphal and Kohima, on the very hills down which the columns of the beaten Burma Corps had come in May 1942, and in May 1945, three years after the defeat, it entered Rangoon.