The Japanese invasion of Burma begins

In the first weeks of the Pacific war British Burma was a second-echelon objective for the Japanese. Malaya, the Philippines and Hong Kong were to fall first, and only then would Lieutenant General Shōjirō Iida’s 15th Army, stationed in Thailand, cross the mountains to the west. Even so, the war reached Burma as early as December 1941: in the middle of the month a Japanese battalion occupied Victoria Point, the southernmost tip of the colony, and on 23 and 25 December bombers of the Japanese Army Air Service attacked Rangoon, the capital and the country’s only major port. The raids killed thousands of people and set off a flight from the city which in the following months grew into an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Indians to India.

War chronologies often record under 11 December that “the Japanese invasion of Burma begins” and under 24 December that “the Japanese bomb Rangoon”. The first entry is premature. Japanese aircraft had been attacking airfields in southern Burma since the first days of the war, but the first step on land was the occupation of Victoria Point (today Kawthaung), which according to most sources took place on 15–16 December. The invasion proper – the 15th Army’s advance from Thailand across the mountains towards Moulmein (Mawlamyine) – did not begin until around 20 January 1942. The second entry shifts the date of the raids: Rangoon was bombed on 23 December and again on Christmas Day, 25 December, not on 24 December.

A colony in the rear of the empire

Burma, conquered by the British in three wars in the 19th century, had for half a century been a province of British India and, from 1937, a separate colony with its own parliament and prime minister, but under the authority of a British governor – in 1941 Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith. The country supplied rice, oil from the fields along the Irrawaddy, teak and metals. Its economy was largely in the hands of newcomers from India: merchants, moneylenders, clerks and dock workers. Indians made up the majority of Rangoon’s inhabitants, and Burmese resentment of them was one of the sources of Burmese nationalism. In the autumn of 1941 Prime Minister U Saw went to London to ask for a promise of dominion status after the war; when Churchill refused, he made contact with the Japanese on his way home, and in January 1942 the British arrested him and interned him in Africa. Meanwhile a group of young radicals from the Thakin movement, among them Aung San, had undergone Japanese military training and were waiting for a chance to return.

The British regarded Burma as a rear area under no threat. There were few troops, and those there were had not been prepared for jungle warfare: the 1st Burma Division, made up largely of recent recruits, a few Indian brigades and a handful of British battalions. In December 1941 the RAF in Burma had a single fighter squadron, No. 67 Squadron, equipped with obsolete Brewster Buffalos and flown largely by New Zealanders. For the first days of the war Burma came under Far East Command in Singapore, which was wholly absorbed in the defence of Malaya; on 12 December it was transferred to the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Archibald Wavell. The commander of the troops in Burma, Lieutenant General Kenneth McLeod, was replaced on 27 December by Lieutenant General Thomas Hutton.

The road to China

Burma’s importance, however, reached far beyond its own borders. Most of the foreign aid for Chiang Kai-shek’s China, which the Japanese had cut off from the sea, travelled from Rangoon by rail to Lashio and from there along the Burma Road across the mountains to Kunming in Yunnan province. The road had been built in 1937–1938 by more than a hundred thousand Chinese labourers, and in 1940 the British, under Japanese pressure, closed it for three months. Once the United States extended Lend-Lease to China, ships carrying weapons, lorries and fuel began arriving in Rangoon. At Mingaladon airfield near Rangoon and at Toungoo, American volunteer pilots of Claire Chennault’s group, formally part of the Chinese air force, trained on P-40 fighters, and from August 1941 they operated as the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later known as the Flying Tigers.

For the Japanese, cutting this route was one of the aims of the war: it was meant to force Chiang to capitulate, or at least to deprive him of the means to go on fighting. Burma was also needed to shield the western flank of their conquests in South-East Asia, as a source of rice and oil, and as a gateway to India, where Tokyo was counting on anti-British feeling.

Victoria Point

Victoria Point lay at the very end of the long, narrow strip of land that Burma extends southwards along the Andaman Sea, opposite the Thai coast. It had an airfield, one of the links in the chain along which British aircraft flew from India to Malaya and Singapore. After the Japanese landings in Thailand it could not be held: on the first day of the war the Japanese had already seized the Thai part of the Kra Isthmus, and in Malaya they were taking one airfield after another. They bombed the airfield at Victoria Point in the first days of December. The small British garrison was withdrawn, and in mid-December – according to most sources on 15–16 December – a battalion of the Japanese 143rd Infantry Regiment, the same regiment that had landed in Thailand on 8 December, crossed the border and occupied Victoria Point without a fight. Japan had taken its first airfield on Burmese soil, and the air link between India and Malaya was severed.

On 22 December the 15th Army headquarters received orders to prepare an advance on Moulmein in southern Burma. For the time being, however, the Japanese forces in Thailand were too weak, since some units had been handed over for the fighting in Malaya and the command’s attention was taken up by other fronts. December in Burma therefore belonged to the air forces.

The raids on Rangoon

On the morning of 23 December several dozen bombers of the Japanese Army Air Service – twin-engined Mitsubishi Ki-21s and lighter Ki-30s – took off from airfields in Thailand and Indochina, escorted by Nakajima Ki-27 fighters. Sources give differing figures, from about 60 to more than 80 bombers. The targets were Mingaladon airfield and central Rangoon with its port; General Michio Sugawara, who planned the raid, hoped that a blow against the densely built-up districts would paralyse the city and shake the loyalty of its population. A dozen or so P-40s of the AVG’s 3rd Squadron, sent to Mingaladon in mid-December, and a dozen or so Buffalos of No. 67 Squadron took off to meet them. According to Japanese records, seven bombers were shot down and an eighth crashed on the way home; one squadron lost five of its fifteen aircraft. The Americans lost four P-40s and two pilots. Both sides, as usual, greatly exaggerated their successes.

The bombs that fell on the city killed, by various estimates, between one and two thousand people; a frequently quoted figure is 1,250 killed and some 600 who later died of their wounds. The city had no shelters, and many residents had gone out into the streets to watch the air battle. The district by the main wharves burned down. Civil defence collapsed because most of its members fled; only the firemen performed well. In the afternoon Governor Dorman-Smith toured streets where bodies still lay uncollected. The port came to a standstill because the dock workers, most of them Indians, left the city, and with them went drivers, servants and small traders. Thousands of people fled to the surrounding villages and forests or set off north towards Prome.

On 25 December the Japanese returned in greater strength – according to American sources with more than 60 bombers and twenty-odd fighters, among them new Nakajima Ki-43s. This time the defence was better prepared. AVG and RAF pilots claimed several dozen aircraft shot down; research based on Japanese records points to far smaller losses, though still painful ones for the attackers. Mingaladon was nonetheless bombed again, and several Buffalos were destroyed on the ground. For the American press, which in December 1941 reported almost nothing but defeats, the battles over Rangoon became one of the few pieces of good news and the beginning of the Flying Tigers legend.

Rangoon survived December, but its life had broken down. The docks worked only with difficulty, and piles of cargo destined for China grew on the wharves. Towards the end of December Wavell flew to Chongqing, where on 23 December he held talks with Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang offered two armies for the defence of Burma, but Wavell, unwilling to hand the country over to the Chinese and faced with the difficulty of supplying them, initially accepted only part of these forces. Chiang took this as an affront, and the dispute over supplies held up in the port and over the role of Chinese troops poisoned relations between the allies for a long time.

Place in the war

The December events in Burma were only a prelude. On 28 December the Burma Independence Army was formed in Bangkok under Japanese patronage, led by Aung San and his comrades. In mid-January 1942 the Japanese took Tavoy (Dawei), and around 20 January the 15th Army set off across the mountains towards Moulmein. After the defeat of the British 17th Indian Division on the Sittang in February, Rangoon was evacuated on 7 March 1942, and at the end of April the Japanese took Lashio and cut the Burma Road. The British, Indians and Chinese withdrew to India and Yunnan in a retreat often described as the longest in the history of the British Army, and for three years China could be supplied only by air over the Himalayas, until a new road from India was opened at the beginning of 1945.

The flight from Rangoon that began after the raid of 23 December turned, in February 1942, into a mass exodus of the Indian, Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese population, who feared both the Japanese and hostile Burmese. The better-off left by ship and by air; the poor walked through the jungle and over the mountains to Assam and Manipur. Estimates speak of several hundred thousand refugees; thousands – according to some researchers, tens of thousands – died on the way from hunger, exhaustion and disease. For British rule in Asia the fall of Burma was, alongside the fall of Singapore, the heaviest blow of the war, and for India it was the first direct contact with the war, one that strengthened anti-British feeling. Retaking Burma took the British more than three years and ended only with the capture of Rangoon in May 1945.