The Japanese take Mandalay

On 1 May 1942 units of Lieutenant General Shōjirō Iida’s Japanese Fifteenth Army entered Mandalay, the former capital of the Burmese kings and the largest city of central Burma. They fought no battle for it. The last British and Chinese troops had crossed to the north bank of the Irrawaddy the day before, and at midnight on 30 April/1 May sappers blew up the great Ava Bridge behind them, the only bridge over the river. The conquerors found ruins: most of the city had already burned in April, after the Japanese air raid on Good Friday, and most of its inhabitants had left. At dawn on the same day, about a hundred kilometres to the west, a Japanese battalion crossed the Chindwin and took the river port of Monywa. This blow was more dangerous than the occupation of abandoned Mandalay, because it placed the Japanese close to the only road by which the British Burma Corps could withdraw to India.

War chronologies usually record that the troops of the Fifteenth Army took Mandalay and Monywa, “securing the western end of the Burma Road”. That account needs correcting. The Burma Road began at Lashio, the terminus of the railway from Rangoon, and it was Lashio, taken by the Japanese on 29 April, that formed its western end. Mandalay was a railway junction on that line and the Allies’ main base in central Burma, while Monywa, lying west of the Irrawaddy, had nothing to do with the road to China. Its capture had a different purpose: to cut the British line of retreat to India.

Withdrawal behind the Irrawaddy

After the Battle of Yenangyaung and the destruction of the Chinese Sixth Army in the Shan States, the Allies no longer had the means to defend central Burma. On 25 April the commander of the British forces in Burma, General Harold Alexander, met the commander of Burma Corps, Lieutenant General William Slim, and General Joseph Stilwell, who formally commanded the Chinese armies in Burma, at Kyaukse. They decided to withdraw all forces behind the Irrawaddy. Slim’s corps was then to retire up the Chindwin valley towards India, and the Chinese Fifth Army northwards to Yunnan or, if that route were closed, also to India.

The withdrawal was covered at Kyaukse, on the road from the south to Mandalay, by the 48th Indian Brigade with the tanks of the 7th Hussars. On the evening of 28 April the Japanese 18th Division of Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi arrived there. All night the Japanese attacked the positions of two Gurkha battalions and were thrown back every time; on the morning of 29 April the brigade counter-attacked and inflicted heavy losses on them. Only when the enemy began to work round the flanks of the little town did the brigade withdraw, blowing the bridges behind it. The British official history judges this rearguard action to have been exceptionally successful: the Japanese were held at small cost, and the brigade was able to cross the Irrawaddy undisturbed. On the night of 29/30 April it crossed the Ava Bridge.

The Ava Bridge, named after the old royal capital of Ava a dozen or so kilometres south-west of Mandalay, was the pride of British Burma. Opened in 1934, it carried both road and railway across the Irrawaddy; for decades to come it was the only bridge over the river. On 30 April the 63rd Indian Brigade held a bridgehead in front of it while the last Chinese units crossed the river. The Chinese 22nd Division, one of whose regiments was still fighting in the south, was withdrawing through Mandalay to the crossing at Singu. After dark the last soldiers crossed, and at midnight the bridge was blown; two great spans fell into the river. With this the British official history closes its chapter on the loss of central Burma.

Mandalay in Japanese hands

According to Japanese studies, the units that entered Mandalay on 1 May belonged to the 18th Division, the same one that had clashed with the British at Kyaukse the day before. The Japanese found a city that had been dead for weeks. According to the British official history of the air war, the raid of 3 April had destroyed three-fifths of the houses, and further bombing and fires had completed the work. Everything possible had been removed or destroyed at the supply base the Allies had set up here after the loss of Rangoon. The moated Fort Dufferin, with the wooden palace of the last rulers of the Konbaung dynasty, survived. The Japanese turned it into their headquarters and depot.

With Mandalay the Japanese gained the whole valley of the middle Irrawaddy and the country’s most important communications hub. From here railway lines ran to Lashio, to Myitkyina in the north and to Ye-u in the west, and the steamers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company plied the river. Yet they had not won what mattered most to them. Iida’s plan had envisaged destroying the Allied forces in the great loop of the Irrawaddy south of the city. Those forces escaped across the river in time, so on 26 April Iida changed his orders: his four divisions were to strike wide and deep into the enemy’s rear and cut all his lines of retreat. After taking Lashio, the 56th Division turned towards Bhamo (Banmaw) and Myitkyina; the 18th Division was to clear the Chinese from the Shan States; the 55th Division was to advance north through Mandalay; and the 33rd Division of Lieutenant General Shōzō Sakurai was to make for Monywa and Shwebo.

The thrust at Monywa

The 33rd Division set out from the Yenangyaung area on 26 April. Part of its force advanced along the east bank of the Irrawaddy, the 215th Infantry Regiment travelled by lorry along the west bank of the Chindwin, and an infantry battalion and an engineer battalion sailed upriver in captured boats and landing barges. On 28 April the Japanese took Myingyan and Pakokku; on the evening of 30 April the advance guard of the 215th Regiment reached the west bank opposite Monywa, and the boats arrived there before dawn on 1 May, having met no resistance on the way.

Monywa was almost defenceless. It was held by about 150 men of a battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, reduced to tatters by the campaign, and part of an improvised Royal Marines detachment that patrolled the rivers in boats. A few kilometres to the south-east, at Ma-U, was the headquarters of Major General Bruce Scott’s 1st Burma Division, whose brigades were only now marching in that direction. At Alon some 2,400 clerks and servants of the army headquarters, which was being disbanded, were waiting with their families for steamers to Kalewa. On the evening of 30 April the Japanese opened fire from the west bank with machine guns, mortars and field guns. At about 5 a.m. on 1 May they attacked Scott’s headquarters, which fought its way through to Chaung, saving the most important documents. At dawn the Japanese battalion crossed the river and drove the small garrison out of the town. This is the sequence of events given by the British official history; some studies, including certain general accounts of the campaign, state that the Japanese took Monywa only on the night of 1/2 May.

Some accounts state that the 1st Burma Division was cut off at Monywa. That is an exaggeration: the division was not cut off, although its headquarters was taken by surprise and its communications disrupted. Slim, who on the evening of 30 April had formed the impression that Monywa had already fallen, regarded the situation as deadly dangerous. From Monywa a road led to Ye-u, where the only track to the Chindwin crossing at Shwegyin and Kalewa, and on to India, began. With their boats, the Japanese could also sail straight up the river to Kalewa and close the crossing. Slim threw everything he had to hand against Monywa: the 1st Burma Division, the 63rd Brigade brought by rail from the Ava Bridge, and the tanks of the 7th Armoured Brigade. On 1 May the 63rd Brigade reached Ma-U, but it did not break into the town.

On 2 May Scott attacked with two brigades. The 13th Brigade reached the railway station from the east and the 63rd Brigade the outskirts, but the Japanese defended themselves fiercely. In the afternoon the 13th Brigade received, by radio and in clear, an order to withdraw to Alon, and carried it out. Neither army nor corps headquarters had issued such an order; the official history considers it most likely to have been a ruse by Japanese wireless operators. In the evening Scott broke off the attack and bypassed the town to Alon. Monywa remained in Japanese hands, but the aim had been achieved: for two days the corps held the road to Ye-u, and on 3 May it began the last stage of its retreat. From then on it was a race against the Japanese sailing up the Chindwin – and against the monsoon.

The commanders’ last meeting

On the evening of 1 May Alexander and Stilwell met at Ye-u. In view of the situation at Monywa they decided to speed up the withdrawal from the Irrawaddy. Stilwell released the 7th Armoured Brigade, which had been supporting the Chinese 38th Division of General Sun Liren, and announced that he would withdraw the Chinese Fifth Army to the Katha area and then perhaps to India. It was their last meeting of the campaign. Soon afterwards Stilwell’s radio broke down and the two commanders lost contact with each other.

The Chinese armies that had come to Burma to defend the Burma Road were breaking up into groups taking different routes. On 4 May Chiang Kai-shek ordered the 22nd and 96th Divisions, covered by the 38th Division, to withdraw by rail and on foot towards Myitkyina, unaware that the Japanese 56th Division would get there first. It took Bhamo at the beginning of May and Myitkyina on 8 May. Earlier, on 3 May, Sun Liren had visited Alexander and unofficially asked that his division be allowed to withdraw to India with the British; Alexander, fearing the political consequences of exposing the Chinese rearguard, refused. Over the following weeks the Chinese divisions fought their way through the jungle northwards to Yunnan or across the mountains to India, losing thousands of men.

Meanwhile the British followed the track from Ye-u to Shwegyin, taking with them about 2,300 sick and wounded and thousands of refugees, many of whom the soldiers fed and gave lifts to. The airfield at Shwebo, from which the wounded were still being evacuated by air, was bombed, and on 6 May Japanese aircraft destroyed three of the five machines being loaded with wounded on the airfield at Myitkyina. From then on the only way to India was overland.

Place in the war

The capture of Mandalay and Monywa opened the last chapter of the conquest of Burma. Mandalay, abandoned and burned, was no longer a base for the Allies, but its loss meant that the Japanese controlled the whole Irrawaddy valley, from Rangoon to Myitkyina. The thrust at Monywa demonstrated once again what had given the Japanese the advantage since the beginning of the campaign: boldness, speed and skill in outflanking the enemy – here by way of a river that the British regarded as their line of retreat. Slim’s corps slipped out of the trap, but at the cost of abandoning almost all its heavy equipment. On 10 May the Japanese attacked the mass of soldiers, wounded and refugees waiting in the basin at Shwegyin for the ferries to Kalewa, and on 12 May they took Kalewa. At the same time the first downpours of the monsoon fell, turning the tracks into mud. The last units of the corps reached Tamu on the Indian frontier in the second half of May.

Stilwell, cut off from Myitkyina, abandoned his vehicles and led his staff on foot through the jungle and mountains to India. For China, which had already lost Lashio, the loss of Mandalay and northern Burma meant that it would be cut off from its allies’ aid by land for a long time; all that remained was the airlift over the Himalayas. The Japanese held Mandalay until March 1945. It was then retaken by the 19th Indian Division of Slim’s Fourteenth Army – the same general who in May 1942 had led a beaten corps out of Burma. Fort Dufferin burned in that fighting, together with the palace that had survived the bombing of 1942.