The liberation of Mandalay

War chronologies record under 20 March 1945 the liberation of Mandalay by the 19th Indian Infantry Division. The date is correct; it simply needs to be made clear what happened on that day. Major General Thomas Rees’s 19th Division had entered the northern districts of the city as early as 8 March and had taken Mandalay Hill on 11 March after three days of fighting. On 20 March it occupied the last point of resistance – the moated citadel containing the royal palace, which the British called Fort Dufferin. The Japanese garrison had slipped out of it during the night, before any assault took place. The old capital of the Burmese kings, lost by the British on 1 May 1942, returned to their control after less than three years – much of it in ashes.

Two thrusts, one aim

Mandalay was the second-largest city in Burma, a Buddhist centre and a symbol of the Burmese monarchy, which the British had abolished in 1885. For the Japanese its importance was above all a matter of prestige and supply: south of the city lay large depots that could not be removed. In the plan of Lieutenant General William Slim’s Fourteenth Army, the struggle for Mandalay had a special role. Lieutenant General Montagu Stopford’s XXXIII Corps was to strike at the city from the north and west in such a way that the Japanese command would take it for the main objective of the offensive and draw its reserves there – while the real blow, IV Corps’ thrust on Meiktila, fell on the defenders’ rear. During the pursuit to the Irrawaddy the Japanese had already allowed themselves to be deceived, and until the end of February they regarded the fighting around Mandalay as decisive.

The 19th Division – the “Dagger” Division, from its dagger emblem – had crossed the Irrawaddy as early as mid-January at Thabeikkyin and Kyaukmyaung, about 65 kilometres north of the city. For several weeks it beat off counter-attacks there by the Japanese 15th Division, which bled itself white in them and became stretched over a broad front. In the second half of February Rees – a short, energetic Welshman whom his men called the “pocket Napoleon” – led the division out of its bridgeheads and set off southwards along the east bank of the river. By 7 March the leading units had Mandalay Hill, with its pagodas and monasteries, in front of them.

The commander of the Japanese 15th Division, Lieutenant General Seiei Yamamoto, considered the defence of the city pointless and wanted to withdraw southwards. The commander of the Burma Area Army, Lieutenant General Heitarō Kimura, nevertheless ordered Mandalay to be held to the last man: the loss of the old capital would be a blow to Japan’s prestige in the eyes of the Burmese, and the depots on its approaches could not be abandoned.

Mandalay Hill

Mandalay Hill, rising to about 240 metres above sea level on the northern edge of the city and covered with temples, dominated the whole area. The Japanese had turned its pagodas and underground chambers into machine-gun nests. On the night of 8–9 March the 4th Battalion, 4th Gurkha Rifles, led by an officer who had known Mandalay before the war, climbed the slopes and took the defenders by surprise. The next day two companies of one of the division’s British battalions joined them. The fighting was hand to hand, on the stairways and in the corridors of the temples; the last defenders were driven out of the cellars and tunnels by rolling drums of petrol down into them and setting them alight with tracer rounds. By 11 March the hill was in British and Indian hands. Most of the religious buildings survived.

Fort Dufferin

The citadel in the middle of the city proved a harder obstacle. Built in the 1850s by King Mindon, a square of walls about two kilometres along each side, it was surrounded by a moat more than 60 metres wide. The brick walls, three metres thick at the base, were backed on the inside by an earth rampart that absorbed shells. Inside stood the teak palace of the last kings of Burma, which the Japanese were using as storerooms. Medium artillery firing at the walls at close range failed to breach them, and an attack through a railway tunnel near the north-west corner was beaten off. B-25 Mitchell bombers tried to batter down the walls with one-ton bombs dropped from low altitude so that they would skip off the water of the moat; they managed to open a breach only about 4.5 metres wide.

Rees was preparing an assault through the sewers for 21 March. The Japanese forestalled him: on the night of 19–20 March the remnants of the garrison slipped out of the fort – also through the drains, according to British accounts – and withdrew southwards. On 20 March men of the 19th Division entered the deserted citadel and raised the British flag over it. The royal palace no longer existed. It had burned down during the siege, and it has never been established for certain whether it was set alight by Allied shelling and bombing or by the retreating Japanese. Only the mint and the watchtower survived; the palace was rebuilt as a replica only in the 1990s.

A city in ruins

Mandalay suffered twice during the war. On 3 April 1942 Japanese bombers burned down most of the city, and in 1945 Allied air raids and street fighting destroyed further districts, especially around the citadel and the railway station. British soldiers described the city as a waste of burned-out wooden houses from which pagodas rose. The number of civilian victims of the fighting in March 1945 is not known; many inhabitants had left Mandalay back in 1942 or fled to the countryside before the front arrived. For the Burmese it was another stage in a war fought over their country by foreign armies – first the British and Japanese, now the British again.

XXXIII Corps’ advance from the west

At the same time the other divisions of XXXIII Corps broke out of their bridgeheads west of the city. The 20th Indian Division smashed the weakened Japanese 31st Division, and its armoured column, named “Claudecol” after its commander, ranged far to the south, almost to the area of the fighting at Meiktila, before turning north again into the Japanese rear. The British 2nd Division advanced on Mandalay from the west. By the end of March Lieutenant General Shihachi Katamura’s Japanese Fifteenth Army no longer existed as a coherent force: its remnants, without their heavy weapons, were falling back towards the hills of the Shan State to regroup there. At the same time, on 28 March, the Japanese broke off their counter-attacks at Meiktila.

According to figures compiled by the British historian Louis Allen, in the whole battle for central Burma from January to the end of March 1945 the British and Indian forces lost 2,307 killed and 15,888 wounded and missing, and the Japanese 6,513 killed and 6,299 wounded and missing; the Japanese figures are incomplete, and other authors put them much higher.

The Burmese change sides

The fall of Mandalay settled the attitude of the Burmese. The Burma National Army, created by the Japanese and formally subordinate to Ba Maw’s government of the State of Burma, had for months been preparing, under the leadership of Aung San and the clandestine Anti-Fascist Organisation, to turn against the occupier. On 17 March its units paraded in Rangoon before the Japanese commanders and marched out, ostensibly to the front against the British. On 27 March, a week after the capture of Fort Dufferin, the Burma National Army attacked the Japanese. The weakness of its units meant that this had little military significance, but its political significance was enormous: in May Slim, against the wishes of some British colonial officials, recognised Aung San as an ally, which opened his way to the leadership of post-war Burma.

Its place in the war

The capture of Mandalay closed the battle for central Burma. In less than three months the Fourteenth Army had crossed the Irrawaddy, smashed the Japanese Fifteenth Army and inflicted heavy losses on the Thirty-Third Army at Meiktila. The Japanese in central Burma had lost most of their artillery and vehicles and the cohesion of their command; they could no longer stop their opponent before Rangoon. Slim, however, had little time: he had to take the port before the monsoon arrived in May, turning the roads into mud, and the Americans were announcing that they would take back his transport aircraft.

In April IV Corps set off from Meiktila along the railway and the road to Rangoon, and XXXIII Corps down the Irrawaddy valley through the Yenangyaung oilfields. On 1 May paratroopers landed at the mouth of the river below Rangoon, on 2 May the 26th Indian Division was put ashore from the sea in Operation Dracula, and on 3 May troops entered Rangoon, which the Japanese had abandoned a few days earlier. The spearheads of the Fourteenth Army, coming overland from the north, were then near Pegu, a few dozen kilometres north of the city.

For Japan the loss of Mandalay was another link in the chain of defeats in the spring of 1945. In the same weeks the Americans were ending the fighting on Iwo Jima, and in Indochina the Japanese, fearing an Allied landing, overthrew the French administration. For the British the return to Mandalay had a symbolic dimension: it was revenge for the retreat of 1942 and proof that an army composed overwhelmingly of Indian, Gurkha and African soldiers could beat the Japanese in the open field. The same fact was also a reminder that the empire rested on soldiers from the colonies, who after the war would demand independence for their countries: India gained it in August 1947, and Burma in January 1948, outside the Commonwealth.