The Japanese take Lashio

Early in the afternoon of 29 April 1942, after a five-hour fight, the Japanese 148th Infantry Regiment took Lashio, a town in the northern Shan States of eastern Burma. It was the birthday of Emperor Hirohito, and the prize was worthy of the occasion. At Lashio the railway from Rangoon ended and the Burma Road began – the highway that wound through the mountains to Kunming in the Chinese province of Yunnan. Since the Japanese had seized the Chinese coast and, in the summer of 1940, forced the closure of the border with Indochina, this had been – apart from the long and less and less used route from the Soviet Union through Xinjiang – the last land route by which aid could reach the government of Chiang Kai-shek. The capture of Lashio cut it for several years. It also sealed the fate of the whole Burma campaign: the Allied forces still holding out in central Burma now had the Japanese deep in their rear.

The road to China

The Burma Road was built in 1937–1938, almost by hand, by – according to the most commonly cited figures – some 200,000 labourers, most of them Chinese. It was about 1,150 kilometres long, crossed the deep gorges of the Salween and the Mekong, and was hard going for lorries even in the dry season. Even so, it became the artery of China’s war. Equipment and fuel arrived by ship at Rangoon, went by rail to Lashio and from there by lorry to Kunming. In the summer of 1940 Britain, under Japanese pressure, closed the road for three months, but it reopened it in October, and from 1941 American supplies under Lend-Lease also flowed along it. That is why the defence of Burma was a matter of life and death for Chiang Kai-shek, and why he sent his best divisions there, placing them under the command of General Joseph Stilwell, who had been his chief of staff since February.

After the fall of Rangoon in March the road had lost its port, but not its importance. Tens of thousands of tonnes of stockpiled supplies still lay in Burma, and hundreds of lorries stood at Lashio. The Allies hoped to hold northern Burma and to send cargoes brought in from India, by air and up the Irrawaddy, onwards along the Burma Road.

The Japanese plan

After taking Toungoo on 30 March, the headquarters of Lieutenant General Shōjirō Iida’s Japanese Fifteenth Army decided to settle the campaign with a single great encirclement. A Chinese document captured at Toungoo stated that the Chinese intended to fight a decisive battle south of Mandalay. The plan issued on 3 April therefore provided for the 33rd Division to advance up the Irrawaddy, the 55th and 18th Divisions to strike at Mandalay, and the 56th Division of Lieutenant General Masao Watanabe, which had disembarked at Rangoon at the end of March, to outflank the whole front from the east and make for Lashio, cutting off the Chinese line of retreat. The division was reinforced with the 14th Tank Regiment, artillery and a large number of lorries, many of them captured from the British; if the weather allowed, Lashio was to be taken by an airborne landing.

The Allies’ eastern flank, the mountains of the Karenni (Kayah) and Shan States, was held by the Chinese Sixth Army of General Gan Lizhu. Its divisions were scattered over hundreds of kilometres: the Temporary 55th Division along the road from Mawchi through Bawlake to Loikaw (Lwaingkaw), the 49th Division at Mong Pan and the 93rd Division at Kengtung near the border with Thailand. The Chinese were kept there by fear of a supposed 50,000-strong Japanese–Thai army in northern Thailand, which in reality did not exist. A British liaison officer pointed out that the army had no reserve, but Gan replied that the dispositions had been fixed by higher authority.

The collapse of the Sixth Army

At the beginning of April the Japanese drove a Chinese company out of Mawchi. At first no one was concerned, because the force seemed small. At Stilwell’s headquarters it was only his chief of intelligence, Colonel Roberts, who noticed that one of the Japanese regiments could not be located, and over a meal he suggested that it was heading for Lashio. Stilwell saw the danger at once, but as late as 21 April his intelligence estimated the Japanese strength in that direction at a reinforced battalion.

For several days the Temporary 55th Division stood idle in its positions on the Htu Chaung stream, suffering from lack of water, while American liaison officers vainly urged Gan to counter-attack. The Japanese used the time to move company after company through the forest parallel to the road. After a frontal attack on 16 April, on 17 April they struck at the flanks along the whole length of the road. On the night of 18/19 April contact with the division was lost; according to the American official history, it simply disintegrated and its men scattered into the hills. The Japanese passed Loikaw and marched north, through Laihka and Loilem, towards Lashio. The road ahead of them was practically open.

A race the Chinese lost

Stilwell responded with an order: “First priority: plug the gap at Loikaw!” The Chinese 200th Division, the heroes of the defence of Toungoo, was turned back from the road to Yenangyaung, where the oilfields were then burning, and thrown eastwards. Meanwhile the Japanese had managed to take Taunggyi, the capital of the Shan States. On the morning of 25 April Stilwell found the Chinese units halted in front of the first Japanese outposts and personally ordered an attack; the commander of the Chinese forces in Burma, General Luo Zhuoying, promised the soldiers a reward of 50,000 rupees for taking the town. Late in the afternoon of 25 April (some sources give 24 April) Taunggyi was retaken from a small Japanese garrison, and on 29 April the 200th Division reached Loilem. By then it was too late: the Japanese were long since further north.

Other attempts failed. The Chinese 49th Division, which had closed on the Japanese from the east, was forbidden to attack by the commander of the Sixth Army on 23 April and ordered to withdraw; its commander, General Peng Bisheng, considered open disobedience for three hours but in the end complied. Of the three divisions of the Chinese Sixty-Sixth Army, which was only just entering Burma, the 28th Division, sent on 22 April to the roads south of Lashio, was on the night of 28/29 April strung out along the railway from Maymyo (Pyin Oo Lwin) to the approaches of the town, while the leading regiment of the 29th Division entered Lashio on the very day it fell. Stilwell could not move troops, because the Chinese authorities at Lashio, who had some 850 lorries from American deliveries at their disposal, sent 22 in answer to his request for 150. On 24 and 25 April pilots of the American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers, strafed Japanese columns on the roads and set many fuel tankers on fire, but owing to faulty information about the positions of the troops they also attacked Chinese units.

The fall of Lashio

On 29 April the Japanese column stood before Lashio. Two Chinese battalions blocked the roads south of the town, and the American Colonel Haydon Boatner had the bridges blown, but this delayed the Japanese by only a few hours. After five hours of fighting the 148th Regiment entered the town, followed by a second regiment of the division. The Americans and British destroyed what they could and flew out as many women and children as possible; even so, according to the American official history, 44,000 tonnes of Chinese military supplies fell into the victors’ hands. The Chinese recovered some of them three years later.

The fall of the town came as no surprise to the commanders. On 25 April, after a conference with Stilwell, General Harold Alexander, commander of the British forces in Burma, ordered a withdrawal to the north bank of the Irrawaddy, and on 26 April he concluded that Lashio would fall any day. On that same day, 29 April, Alexander, Stilwell and Luo Zhuoying decided to try to hold a line from Kalewa through Katha to Bhamo and, if that failed, to withdraw the British to India. In the rear chaos was already setting in: lorries of the Chinese Fifth Army were driving through Lashio to China without Stilwell’s orders, passing soldiers of the Sixty-Sixth Army who were only now marching into Burma.

Place in the war

The capture of Lashio decided the campaign. On the night of 30 April/1 May the British blew up the Ava Bridge over the Irrawaddy near Mandalay, and on 1 May the Japanese entered the ruins of the city. From Lashio the motorised columns of the 56th Division pushed on: one eastwards along the Burma Road until, in the first days of May, it was halted at the Salween gorge on Chinese territory, where the Chinese had blown the bridge; the other northwards towards Bhamo (Banmaw) and Myitkyina, which was taken on 8 May. The Chinese divisions, cut off from home, fought their way through the jungle to Yunnan or to India, losing thousands of men, and in May Stilwell and his staff walked out to India.

China was now blockaded by land and sea. Its only link with the outside world was the airlift over the eastern Himalayas, which the airmen called “the Hump”. The first flight took place on 8 April 1942 from Dinjan airfield in Assam; two aircraft carried fuel for the bombers that were to land in China after the raid on Japan. The beginnings were modest: according to US Army Air Forces figures, a little over 800 tonnes of cargo were flown in during the first two months. Only in 1943–1945 did the airlift grow to a size that allowed a total of some 650,000 tonnes to be carried, at the cost of hundreds of crashed aircraft. To restore the land link, the Americans began building the Ledo Road from Assam across northern Burma; the first convoy reached Kunming along it only at the beginning of 1945.

The cutting of the Burma Road also had political consequences. Chiang Kai-shek blamed the British and Stilwell for the defeat; Stilwell blamed the Chinese generals and Chiang himself, who had issued orders from Chongqing over his head. The dispute over how to recover Burma and how much aid China deserved poisoned Sino-American relations until Stilwell’s recall in 1944. Lashio returned to Allied hands in March 1945.