The Japanese take Moulmein

On 31 January 1942 the last soldiers of the British garrison of Moulmein (today Mawlamyine) crossed the broad estuary of the Salween by river steamer to Martaban, and units of the Japanese 55th Division entered the town. Moulmein was the third-largest town in British Burma, the port and administrative centre of its southern part, with an airfield from which the RAF could cover the approaches to the capital. Its fall, after only ten days of the offensive proper, closed the first stage of the Japanese conquest of Burma. The Japanese were now only some 160 kilometres in a straight line from Rangoon, with two rivers in between, the Bilin and the Sittang.

War chronologies record under 31 January that the Japanese took the port of Moulmein and “now threaten Rangoon, and Singapore as well”. The date agrees with the sources: the fighting for the town took place on the night of 30–31 January, and the garrison withdrew during 31 January. On the same day the last British units on the Malay Peninsula crossed to Singapore Island, so both of Britain’s great bases in South-East Asia came within the enemy’s direct reach at the same time.

Across the mountains from Thailand

Japanese plans provided for Burma to be conquered by Lieutenant General Shōjirō Iida’s Fifteenth Army, made up of the 33rd and 55th Divisions. At the start of the war its task was to secure Thailand, and for several weeks both divisions were under strength, as some of their units were fighting elsewhere. In December 1941 the war reached Burma only at its farthest extremity and in the air: a detachment of the 55th Division occupied Victoria Point, and bombers of the Japanese Army Air Force attacked Rangoon. On 22 December Lieutenant General Takeshi Koga’s 55th Division was ordered to cross the border and take Moulmein.

Between Thailand and Burma lay the jungle-clad Tenasserim hills, crossed only by tracks and a single poor road, from Raheng (today Tak) via Mae Sot and the pass near Kawkareik towards Moulmein. The Japanese decided to go that way with light equipment, using pack horses and elephants instead of lorries. The British believed that large forces could not cross these hills, and that assumption proved fatal, just as it had in Malaya. With the Japanese marched Burmese nationalists of the Burma Independence Army, formed at the end of December in Bangkok around Aung San and his comrades. According to Japanese accounts they helped as guides and obtained food from the local population, which allowed troops marching without adequate supplies to keep up the pace.

The south fell first. A detachment of the 55th Division crossed the border at the beginning of January and on 19 January took Tavoy (today Dawei) and its airfield, overcoming the resistance of a small garrison. The British decided that Mergui, today Myeik, lying further south, could not be held, and evacuated it by sea on 22 January. According to the historian Louis Allen, by 23 January all three important airfields of southern Tanintharyi, the former province of Tenasserim – Tavoy, Mergui and Victoria Point – were in Japanese hands, and from then on fighters could escort every raid on Rangoon. The colony had lost the chain of airfields linking it to Malaya.

The defenders

The British forces in Burma had been commanded since 27 December 1941 by Lieutenant General Thomas Hutton, and from 15 January 1942 Burma came under the new Allied ABDA command of General Archibald Wavell, created as a result of the Arcadia Conference and preoccupied above all with the defence of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Hutton had at his disposal the 1st Burma Division, made up mainly of battalions of the Burma Rifles, recruited from the national minorities, especially the Karens, and expanded in haste, and Major General John Smyth’s 17th Indian Division; Smyth had won the Victoria Cross in the First World War. Smyth’s division was in essence a patchwork of units: two of its original brigades had been sent to Malaya, where one of them, the 45th Brigade, had been destroyed on the Muar. In Burma Smyth commanded the 16th and 46th Indian Brigades and the 2nd Burma Brigade, which had been attached to him. Most of the soldiers were inadequately trained, prepared for war in the desert or on India’s North-West Frontier rather than in the jungle, and their transport depended on lorries tied to the few roads.

The width of the front was too much for these forces. Smyth believed that, given the enemy’s superiority, he should concentrate the division behind the rivers, on the line of the Bilin or the Sittang, and give battle there. Wavell and Hutton, under pressure from London, wanted to defend as much of the country as possible and not to yield ground to the Japanese without a fight, all the more so as supplies for Chiang Kai-shek’s China passed through Rangoon and reinforcements were arriving by sea from India and the Middle East. Wavell, who held a low opinion of the Japanese army, underestimated the threat in the view of many historians. On 23 January Hutton, against Smyth’s opinion, ordered Moulmein to be held at all costs.

Kawkareik

The main body of the 55th Division crossed the border around 20 January and on 22 January attacked along the road through the pass near Kawkareik. It was defended by Brigadier J. K. Jones’s 16th Indian Brigade, strung out over a long stretch and easy to outflank. The Japanese infantry moved through the jungle around its positions and threatened the road in its rear. The brigade withdrew in haste and lost a large part of its vehicles and equipment in the retreat. The 17th Division learned, as the troops in Malaya had before it, that the enemy did not keep to the roads and that a position that could not be closed off on both sides was a trap. Meanwhile Japanese bombers were attacking Moulmein, for the first time as early as 17 January, and the local population began to leave the town.

Further north the 33rd Division was advancing through the hills towards Pa-an (Ba-an) on the middle Salween, so as to turn the river line from the north. The Japanese were thus operating in two columns, and the British did not know exactly where their main forces were.

The battle for the town

Moulmein lay on the eastern shore of the Salween estuary, some two and a half kilometres wide at that point, and behind the defenders there was nothing but water. The town was surrounded by hills and sprawling suburbs; the defensive perimeter was more than ten kilometres long. It was held by the 2nd Burma Brigade – several battalions of the Burma Rifles reinforced by a battalion of Indian infantry – under Brigadier Ekin, to whom Smyth had entrusted the defence of the town. The only way out was by the river steamers and ferries plying to Martaban on the western shore.

The Japanese approached Moulmein on 30 January and attacked from several directions on the night of 30–31 January. According to British accounts, the attackers numbered some 8,000 men. The perimeter shrank rapidly, and some of the Burmese battalions, made up of inexperienced recruits, could not withstand the night attacks. Ekin reported that he would be unable to hold the position by day and was given permission to withdraw. On the morning of 31 January the crossing to the western shore began, carried out under fire and in haste. The brigade abandoned much equipment and many stores; some of the soldiers who failed to reach the boats swam the river or were taken prisoner. According to British figures the brigade lost more than 600 men, most of them missing, and the morale of the Burma Rifles battalions was seriously shaken. The same day the 55th Division occupied the town.

Place in the war

The loss of Moulmein sealed the fate of Rangoon sooner than anyone in London had expected. The British still tried to defend the line of the Salween, but on the night of 11–12 February the Japanese crossed at Pa-an and attacked at Kuzeik, and on 14–19 February they drove the 17th Division from the line of the Bilin. On 23 February, fearing that the Japanese would capture the bridge over the Sittang intact, Smyth ordered it blown, although most of his division was still on the far side; many soldiers swam the river, abandoning almost all their weapons. Hutton, regarded as a defeatist, handed over command to General Harold Alexander, and Smyth, ill and blamed for the defeat, was recalled. On 7 March the British evacuated Rangoon, and on 8 March the Japanese entered it. At the end of April, after taking Lashio, they cut the road to China, and the British, Indian and Chinese forces withdrew to India and Yunnan.

Moulmein became the Japanese base for the whole Burma campaign. As early as 1942 the Burmese section of the Burma Railway, built by Allied prisoners of war and Asian forced labourers, set out from Thanbyuzayat near the town towards the Thai section of the same line. The town remained in Japanese hands until the end of the war; in April 1945 the headquarters of the Japanese army in Burma moved there, fleeing Rangoon ahead of the British offensive. The fall of Moulmein, often described as having opened the road to Rangoon for the Japanese, was thus the beginning of a retreat that took the British all the way back to the Indian frontier, and at the same time the first step in a Japanese expansion towards India that was halted only in 1944 at Imphal and Kohima.