The Japanese take Rangoon

In 1942 Rangoon, the capital of British Burma, was a city of about half a million inhabitants, the colony’s only large port and the starting point of the route by which American aid flowed to China. On 7 March 1942 the British blew up its port, power station and refineries and abandoned the city, and their columns, which ran into a Japanese roadblock near the village of Taukkyan, escaped encirclement only thanks to an enemy mistake. The next day the Japanese 33rd Division entered an empty Rangoon shrouded in smoke from burning oil. From then on the British, Indian and Burmese troops fought in Burma without a base, with only the stocks they had managed to take with them and no possibility of receiving reinforcements by sea.

Under 9 March, war chronologies record that the Japanese entered Rangoon, which the British had abandoned two days earlier, and that “the Japanese appear to control Java, Burma and New Guinea”. The first part needs to be made more precise: the British army did indeed leave the city on 7 March, but according to Japanese and British sources and most studies, the first Japanese troops – the 215th Infantry Regiment of the 33rd Division – entered Rangoon around noon on 8 March. The date of 9 March is given by some chronicles and popular accounts based on contemporary reports. The second part is an exaggeration.

A port that could not be held

Since the December air raids Rangoon had been emptying. Those who fled were above all Indians, who made up the majority of the inhabitants, ran the trade and worked in the port, and in February, after the loss of Moulmein, the flight turned into an exodus. On 20 February the authorities ordered all inhabitants not needed for the city’s defence and the running of the port to leave, and on 23 February, the day of the disaster at the Sittang, the last merchant ship for India left Rangoon. On 1 March the Governor, Reginald Dorman-Smith, left his residence in Rangoon with his family and went north; the colonial administration was moving to the hill station of Maymyo near Mandalay. The streets were patrolled by men of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Bagot’s 1st Battalion, the Gloucestershire Regiment, who guarded the warehouses, shot looters and prepared installations for demolition.

The blowing of the Sittang bridge on 23 February had cost the 17th Indian Division most of its men and almost all its equipment. Standing between the Japanese and Rangoon now were its remnants, the 7th Armoured Brigade, brought over from Egypt with American M3 Stuart light tanks, which the British called “Honeys”, and a few battalions that had still managed to arrive by sea, including the 63rd Indian Brigade, landed at the beginning of March. The commander in Burma, Lieutenant General Thomas Hutton, had warned as early as February that the city probably could not be held, and wanted to prepare its evacuation. The Commander-in-Chief in India, General Archibald Wavell, under whose command Burma had returned after ABDA was dissolved on 25 February, considered this defeatism. He was counting on reinforcements that were to arrive precisely through Rangoon, above all the Australian 7th Division returning from the Middle East. The Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, fearing for his own country after the fall of Singapore, refused, however, to send it to Burma, despite pressure from Churchill.

Wavell and London decided to change the commander. General Harold Alexander, who in 1940 had commanded the last troops evacuated from Dunkirk, was sent to Burma, and Hutton was to become his chief of staff. Alexander flew into Rangoon on 5 March with Wavell’s order to defend the city. He judged that the first task was to close the gap between the shattered 17th Division, which was holding on in the area of Pegu, about 65 kilometres north-east of Rangoon, and the 1st Burma Division, further north in the Sittang valley, and he ordered an attack.

The battle of Pegu

Lieutenant General Shōjirō Iida’s Japanese Fifteenth Army had two divisions. After crossing the Sittang, Lieutenant General Takeshi Koga’s 55th Division advanced on Pegu, while Lieutenant General Shōzō Sakurai’s 33rd Division, having crossed the river higher up, set off west through the jungle to bypass Rangoon to the north and attack it from the direction of the Prome road. Iida expected the British to defend the city, so speed mattered to him more than closing the ring.

On 6 and 7 March there was fierce fighting at Pegu and in the nearby villages of Payagyi and Hlegu. Squadrons of the 7th Hussars knocked out several Japanese Type 95 light tanks on the road and captured anti-tank guns, but the Japanese infiltrated through gaps in the defence, set up roadblocks and cut off one unit after another. The Pegu garrison, made up of the remnants of the 48th Indian Brigade and tank crews, was surrounded and had to fight its way out. Alexander quickly realised that his troops would not stop the Japanese, who were already bypassing Rangoon to the north, and that if they stayed in the city they would be cut off and destroyed. On 6 March, the day after taking command, he ordered the evacuation of Rangoon and a retreat north into the Irrawaddy valley by the road to Prome.

The burning city

On 7 March the destruction of everything that might be of use to the Japanese began in Rangoon. Sappers and special parties blew up the port installations, wharves, cranes, the power station and the telegraph office. The most spectacular was the destruction of the refineries and tanks of the Burmah Oil Company at Syriam on the opposite bank of the river: columns of black smoke from the burning oil rose over the city, visible from many kilometres away. The last demolition parties and the officials who had stayed in the city to the end left by sea.

For China, the loss of Rangoon meant the closing of the gateway through which almost all foreign aid passed. From the port of Rangoon goods went by rail to Lashio, and from there by lorry along the Burma Road to Kunming. On the wharves and in the warehouses lay Lend-Lease supplies intended for the army of Chiang Kai-shek. According to the US official history, in the final weeks they were being moved north at a rate of up to a thousand tons a day; some were handed over to the British forces, among them 300 Bren light machine guns, 260 jeeps and 683 lorries, and the rest was destroyed by the staff of the American military mission, who burned, among other things, 972 lorries in various stages of assembly and 5,000 tyres. Even so, some of the stocks remained in the city.

On 7 March the troops, the headquarters of the Burma army, officials and the last refugees set off north along the only road to Prome. The air units that had defended Rangoon to the end from Mingaladon airfield – RAF fighters and the American pilots of the Flying Tigers – moved to airfields further inland, above all to Magwe.

The roadblock at Taukkyan

About 40 kilometres north of Rangoon, at the village of Taukkyan, where the Prome road crossed the road to Pegu, the columns ran into a strong Japanese roadblock. It had been set up by a battalion of Colonel Takanobu Sakuma’s 214th Infantry Regiment, with two 75 mm guns and machine guns sited on the flanks. On 7 March the British attacked it three times: first with tanks of the 7th Hussars and infantry, then with tanks of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment and men of the Gloucestershire Regiment, and finally with two companies of a Frontier Force Rifles battalion. All the attacks were beaten off with heavy losses, and during the night the Japanese counter-attacked and there was hand-to-hand fighting. The whole Burma army, with its commander, its headquarters, the remnants of the 17th Division and the 7th Armoured Brigade, was trapped between the roadblock and the burning city. Alexander considered whether to throw all his forces into an attack in the morning or to break the army up into small groups that would make their own way through the jungle.

On the morning of 8 March the 1st Battalion, 11th Sikh Regiment, which had only just withdrawn from Pegu and had been caught by a Japanese air raid on the way, went in with the bayonet, supported by tanks. The roadblock turned out to be almost empty; the few Japanese who had remained in it fled. Sakuma had orders to cover the march of the 33rd Division only until its main body had crossed the road and bypassed Rangoon to the west. Not knowing that the British were just then abandoning the city, he lifted the roadblock during the night, as ordered, and followed the division. The rear echelon columns drove along the open road until noon, and in the afternoon the fighting units withdrew; the last Sikh rearguard left at six in the evening. According to many historians, had Sakuma stayed where he was, the Japanese could have taken Alexander and most of his army prisoner that day.

The Japanese in Rangoon

Around noon on 8 March the 215th Infantry Regiment of the 33rd Division entered Rangoon from the west. The Japanese, who had been preparing to fight for the city, were astonished to find it empty: no troops, deserted streets, burning refineries and a wrecked port. According to Japanese accounts, General Sakurai himself was also taken by surprise. Following in the army’s wake came units of the Burma Independence Army, formed by Japanese intelligence around Aung San and his comrades from the Thakin movement. With volunteers flocking to it in large numbers, it then numbered some 10,000–12,000 men, and many Burmese welcomed it as a liberator from British rule.

The Japanese quickly got the port working again. As early as the second half of March the 56th Division arrived in Rangoon from the Dutch East Indies, and in April the 18th Division from Malaya; with them came hundreds of captured lorries, which gave the Fifteenth Army a mobility its opponents lacked. A Japanese military administration was set up in Rangoon.

Did the Japanese control Java, Burma and New Guinea?

The popular remark that the Japanese already controlled Java, Burma and New Guinea reflects the mood of early March 1942, but not the actual state of affairs. On Java everything had indeed been decided: after the collapse of the island’s defence the Dutch commander, Lieutenant General Hein ter Poorten, accepted the Japanese demand for capitulation at Kalidjati on 8 March, and on 9 March the Dutch army on the island laid down its arms. In Burma the Japanese had so far taken only the south of the country with Rangoon; the Irrawaddy valley, Mandalay, the oilfields and the Burma Road remained in Allied hands for almost two more months. On New Guinea the Japanese had only on 8 March landed at Lae and Salamaua on the north coast of the eastern part of the island, and two days later American carrier aircraft sank three of their transports there. Port Moresby, the main Australian base on the south coast, remained in Allied hands and the Japanese never managed to take it, while they occupied the Dutch western part of the island only from the end of March and in April.

Its place in the war

The loss of Rangoon decided the outcome of the campaign. Without a port, the army in Burma had no way of receiving reinforcements, ammunition or fuel, since no passable road led into the country from India, and the escape at Taukkyan saved it from annihilation but not from defeat. On 19 March the 1st Burma Division, the 17th Indian Division and the 7th Armoured Brigade were formed into Burma Corps under Lieutenant General William Slim, and the eastern part of the front was taken over by Chinese armies formally commanded by Joseph Stilwell, since February Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff, who arrived in Burma in mid-March. The Japanese, reinforced to four divisions, took the Andaman Islands on 23 March, routed the Chinese in the Shan States in April, captured Lashio on 29 April, cutting the Burma Road, and entered Mandalay on 1 May. In May the remnants of the British forces reached India, and Stilwell walked out through the jungle with his staff.

Behind the army and ahead of it went hundreds of thousands of refugees, mainly Indians, fleeing on foot across the mountains and through the jungle to India. The historian Hugh Tinker estimated that some 400,000 people reached India and that between 10,000 and 50,000 died on the way. China lost its last overland link with the outside world; from then on aid reached it only by air over the Himalayas, and the Burma Railway, built by the Japanese from June 1942 with the labour of prisoners of war and forced labourers, was laid precisely to conquered Burma. In August 1942 the Japanese set up a Burmese civil administration under Ba Maw, and on 1 August 1943 they proclaimed the independence of the State of Burma, in practice dependent on Tokyo. Rangoon remained in Japanese hands for more than three years. The British recovered it at the beginning of May 1945, after a seaborne landing, by which time the Japanese had already withdrawn.