The first Chindit expedition

On 8 February 1943 long columns of soldiers and laden mules marched out of Imphal, the capital of Manipur in India, towards the Burmese border. Some three thousand men of the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade, led by Brigadier Orde Wingate, were to cross the Chindwin, vanish into the jungle and operate for weeks behind Japanese lines, supplied entirely from the air. So began Operation Longcloth, the first expedition of the troops who went down in history as the Chindits. Although many chronologies already describe Wingate as a general at this point, in February 1943 he was still a brigadier; he was promoted to major general only in September.

After the defeat in Burma

In the spring of 1942, in the course of the Burma campaign, the Japanese drove the British and Chinese out of almost all of Burma. After the longest retreat in the history of the British Army, the remnants of the forces of Generals Harold Alexander and William Slim reached India in May, bringing about the end of the Burma campaign. The Japanese army had acquired a reputation for invincibility in the jungle: its infantry outflanked British positions along side tracks, cut the roads and forced the defenders to flee. Morale in India was low, and the winter offensive in the Arakan, begun in December 1942, was bogging down in front of Japanese bunkers.

The Commander-in-Chief in India, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, knew Wingate from the Middle East. In 1941 this unruly artillery officer had commanded the troops in Ethiopia who, as Gideon Force, escorted Emperor Haile Selassie I through Gojjam province all the way to Addis Ababa. In March 1942 Wavell brought him to Burma in the hope that he would organise guerrilla operations there. It was already too late for that, but within a few weeks Wingate had toured the front and returned to Delhi with a fully formed concept.

The idea of long-range penetration

Wingate called it “long range penetration”. Instead of small sabotage parties he wanted to send strong columns of regular troops, several hundred men each, behind enemy lines. They were to move on foot through jungle and mountains, carrying their heavy equipment on mules, avoid clashes with larger forces and strike at lines of communication: bridges, railways, depots and outposts. The key was supply by air drop. Each column was assigned an RAF officer with a wireless set, who called in transport aircraft with food, ammunition and medicine and, if necessary, combat aircraft to take the place of the columns’ artillery. In this way Wingate adopted the method the Japanese had used with such success in Malaya and Burma, but added an element they lacked: command of the air and radio.

Wavell gave him the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade. In the summer of 1942 Wingate trained it in the jungles of central India, around Jhansi and Saugor, deliberately during the monsoon. The brigade was a haphazard mixture: the 13th Battalion of the King’s Regiment (Liverpool), made up largely of older reservists; the newly raised 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Gurkha Rifles; the 2nd Battalion of the Burma Rifles, cobbled together from the remnants of Burmese units that had crossed into India; and No. 142 Commando Company, which included men from the former Bush Warfare School at Maymyo. Disease, especially malaria and dysentery, eliminated a large proportion of the soldiers during training, and they had to be replaced.

Instead of battalions, columns were formed – originally eight, in the end seven – of some 300–370 men each, with mules carrying mortars, heavy machine guns, wireless sets and supplies. Every soldier carried more than 30 kilograms: weapons, ammunition, grenades, a machete or kukri and rations for seven days. The columns formed two groups, Southern and Northern, under brigade headquarters. Wingate derived the name “Chindits” from the Burmese word “chinthe”, the mythical lion whose statues guard the entrances to Burmese pagodas.

An expedition without an offensive

The Chindit raid had originally been meant to accompany a broader offensive: an advance by the British IV Corps from Imphal and a Chinese thrust from Yunnan being prepared by General Joseph Stilwell. At the turn of 1942 and 1943 these plans collapsed for lack of troops, transport and roads. Wavell could have cancelled Wingate’s expedition too, but after talking with him in Imphal in early February he agreed to let it go ahead. The brigade was ready, and holding it back risked destroying its spirit; above all, though, the expedition was to test in practice whether long-range penetration was possible at all, and incidentally to hinder any Japanese attack on northern Burma. Wavell personally saw the troops off before they set out.

The columns left Imphal on 8 February (some biographies of Wingate give a date a few days later, linked to the departure of his headquarters) and headed across the border mountains towards the Chindwin. The Southern Group crossed the river at Auktaung on the night of 13–14 February, and the main force, the Northern Group with Wingate, at Tonhe on 14–15 February. The southern columns deliberately took supply drops in broad daylight, and one of the officers played the part of a British general: the aim was to convince the Japanese that the main thrust was coming from the south. The first skirmishes with Japanese patrols came a few days after the crossing.

In the second half of February the columns struggled through the jungle-covered Zibyu Taungdan range, between the Chindwin and the valley along which the main railway of northern Burma runs from Mandalay to Myitkyina. Popular chronologies date the Chindits’ cutting of this line to 18 February. In fact the columns were still on the march that day; the first demolitions of the track came at the beginning of March. According to some accounts, one of the Southern Group’s columns destroyed the track near Kyaikthin around 3 March, and on 6 March Major Michael Calvert’s No. 3 Column blew up a bridge and the track at Nankan, while Major Bernard Fergusson’s No. 5 Column brought down a bridge and blocked the gorge at Bonchaung. Calvert, a former instructor at the Bush Warfare School, cut the line in several dozen places, according to British accounts. The railway, however, was repaired within days or weeks.

Not everyone fared so well. Two columns ran into Japanese ambushes, broke up and for the most part returned to India. In accordance with Wingate’s orders, wounded and sick men who could not be carried were left in Burmese villages, at the mercy of the inhabitants and the Japanese. Supply drops were flown by Lockheed Hudson and Douglas Dakota aircraft of No. 31 Squadron RAF, operating from the airfield at Agartala in eastern Bengal.

Beyond the Irrawaddy

After his successes on the railway Wingate decided to push further east. In mid-March most of the columns crossed the Irrawaddy. This proved a mistake. The country beyond the river was dry, hot and short of water, and a dense road network allowed the Japanese to move troops quickly by lorry and tighten the ring around the Chindits. The supply aircraft were approaching the limit of their range, and Japanese patrols were increasingly intercepting the drops. In the end forces from three Japanese divisions – the 18th, 33rd and 56th – were sent against the brigade, though not in their entirety. The exhausted, hungry and sick soldiers were pushed into the bend between the Irrawaddy and the Shweli.

At the end of March, on the instructions of the command in India, Wingate ordered a withdrawal. Because the Japanese were watching the riverbanks and seizing boats, the columns split into small parties, which had to find their own way back to India. The return crossing of the Irrawaddy was the hardest moment of the whole expedition; during one attempt a large part of a column came under Japanese fire and was scattered. Some parties went north into the Kachin country, others all the way to China, from where they were flown back. Wingate himself reached the Chindwin with his party at the end of April. Stragglers were still reaching the British lines in the summer and autumn of 1943.

The balance

The expedition lasted about three months, and depending on the column its men covered between about 1,200 and 1,600 kilometres. The price was high. According to the most frequently cited figures, of some 3,000 men who crossed the Chindwin, 818 did not return – they were killed, died of exhaustion and disease, or were taken prisoner; of the 2,182 who came back, about 600 were so debilitated that they were no longer fit for front-line service. The brigade thus lost about a third of its strength and practically ceased to exist as a fighting unit. Most of the mules were lost as well. The men taken prisoner mostly ended up in Rangoon jail, where many of them died of starvation and disease.

The military results were modest. The Mandalay–Myitkyina railway was cut only briefly, and Japanese plans for the coming months did not change significantly. Many Indian Army officers believed that the losses had not been worth the result, and Wingate’s report, full of sharp attacks on his subordinates and superiors, made him new enemies. At the same time the expedition provided valuable experience: it proved that large units could operate in the jungle for weeks supplied solely from the air and that British and Indian soldiers could fight the Japanese effectively on their own ground, and it showed the importance of evacuating the wounded by air and of radio contact with the air force.

Significance

Its propaganda value turned out to matter most. In May 1943, after a string of defeats in the Far East, the British and American press portrayed the Chindits as men who had beaten the Japanese in the jungle. Wingate’s report, passed on by his supporters in London, reached Winston Churchill. The Prime Minister, an enthusiast for unconventional operations, summoned the brigadier to London and in August took him to the Quebec Conference. There Wingate won the Combined Chiefs of Staff over to his concept and was rewarded with promotion to major general, six brigades and American air support. The Americans also formed a long-range unit of their own on the Chindit model, later known as Merrill’s Marauders. The second, much larger Chindit expedition, partly flown in by glider and transport aircraft, began in March 1944; during it, on 24 March 1944, Wingate was killed in an air crash.

The expedition also had a consequence the British had not foreseen. The Japanese realised that the mountains and jungle of the India–Burma border were not as impassable as they had believed. This influenced the thinking of General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the 18th Division and from March 1943 of the Fifteenth Army, who began to press for an offensive against India. The result was the Japanese drive on Imphal and Kohima in 1944, which ended in disaster at the Battle of Imphal and opened the way for the British to reconquer Burma. Historians still argue over how much the Chindit expeditions really achieved and whether they justified their cost. Yet for the soldiers in India the first expedition remained proof that after years of retreat it was possible to go on the attack.