The liberation of Rangoon

On 3 May 1945 soldiers of the Indian 26th Division marched into Rangoon, the capital and chief port of Burma. They met no resistance. The Japanese, who had taken the city in March 1942, had left it a few days earlier, leaving behind wrecked wharves, burnt-out warehouses and a population that had been living for a week without any authority at all. The landing, prepared as the most difficult operation of the campaign, turned into the cautious occupation of an empty city.

The fall of Rangoon effectively ended the war for Burma. British, Indian and African troops regained a port through which they could now supply their army, and the Japanese in Burma were split into isolated groups, cut off from Thailand and Malaya. It happened at the last moment: the day before, the first downpours of the monsoon had broken over the coast.

A race against the monsoon

After the capture of Meiktila and the liberation of Mandalay in March 1945, General William Slim’s Fourteenth Army dominated central Burma. Lieutenant General Heitarō Kimura’s Japanese Burma Area Army had lost most of its artillery and vehicles, and its three armies – the 15th, 28th and 33rd – were bled white and scattered. Slim, however, faced an enemy more dangerous than the Japanese: the calendar. When the monsoon arrived in mid-May – as the meteorologists predicted – the dirt roads would turn to mud, the rivers would burst their banks, and supplying two hundred thousand men by air would become almost impossible. The Americans, moreover, had announced that from June they would withdraw their transport aircraft from Burma to China. An army that failed to take a port before the rains would be left in the interior without bread or ammunition.

So in April the Fourteenth Army set off south along two routes. XXXIII Corps advanced down the valley of the Irrawaddy through the Yenangyaung oilfields towards Prome (Pyay), while Lieutenant General Frank Messervy’s IV Corps, with armoured spearheads, raced along the railway and the road in the Sittang valley. During April it covered more than 300 kilometres. On 22–23 April the Indian 5th Division seized the airfields at Toungoo, getting there ahead of the Japanese 15th Army, which was held up by a rising of the Karens, armed and led by the British special operations organisation Force 136. By the end of the month the Indian 17th Division, with the 255th Armoured Brigade, stood outside Pegu, a few dozen kilometres north-east of Rangoon.

Slim did not count on reaching the capital before the rains, however. In March he asked for a return to the plan, shelved in 1944, for a seaborne landing at Rangoon. The plan, called Operation Dracula, envisaged taking the city by a blow from the air and the sea before the land forces reached it from the north. On 2 April the Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia Command, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, ordered Rangoon to be taken by an amphibious assault by 5 May at the latest. The land forces were to be provided by the Indian XV Corps, which during the winter had won bases on the Arakan coast – the port of Akyab (Sittwe) and Ramree Island.

The Japanese leave the city

Rangoon housed the headquarters of the Burma Area Army, but there were no Japanese front-line divisions in the city – only rear-echelon units, naval personnel, hospitals and depots. Kimura’s superior, the commander of the Southern Expeditionary Army Group, Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi, demanded that the city be defended to the last man. Kimura judged that this would mean the pointless destruction of what remained of his forces, and decided to withdraw to Moulmein (Mawlamyine) on the Tenasserim coast. According to accounts cited by the British historian Louis Allen, his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Shin’ichi Tanaka, opposed this, but when Tanaka flew off to the front near Toungoo on 19 April the other officers drew up evacuation orders, and Kimura signed them. The evacuation began on 22–23 April; on 26 April the headquarters left the city, and Kimura himself flew out.

Japan’s allies fled Rangoon along with the army. Ba Maw, head of the Tokyo-dependent government of the State of Burma, left by car eastwards, across the Sittang river; soon afterwards, fearing assassination, he made his way to Japan. Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the Provisional Government of Free India, retreated on foot with the last units, having first arranged lorries for the women’s Rani of Jhansi Regiment. The retreating columns were attacked by Allied aircraft, and on 30 April British destroyers sank, in the Gulf of Martaban, nine of the eleven ships of a convoy evacuating about a thousand soldiers.

From the rear-echelon units stationed in Rangoon, sailors and even hastily mobilised Japanese civilians, the 105th Independent Mixed Brigade was formed under Major General Hideji Matsui. It was sent north to Pegu to cover the retreat. From 27 April Matsui’s improvised units, with mines cobbled together from aircraft bombs, held up the tanks of the 17th Division. On 28 April the Indians cut the road from Pegu to the Sittang, and with it Rangoon’s last land link with Moulmein. On 30 April they attacked the town itself, which was divided by a river whose bridges had been blown. On the morning of 1 May it turned out that the Japanese, on Kimura’s orders, had gone. But that same day the rain came down. Within a few hours the surrounding country was under water, the advance slowed to a walking pace, and Slim put the whole of IV Corps on half rations. Rangoon was still some 65 kilometres away.

Operation Dracula

The British knew from radio intercepts that Kimura’s headquarters had left Rangoon, but they could not be sure that the city would not be defended – in February and March the Japanese had fought for Manila for a month, reducing it to ruins. The convoys carrying Major General Henry Chambers’s Indian 26th Division sailed from Akyab and Ramree between 27 and 30 April. The landing was covered by Royal Navy escort carriers, cruisers and destroyers, while Vice Admiral Harold Walker’s 3rd Battle Squadron – with HMS Queen Elizabeth and the French battleship Richelieu – shelled the Nicobar and Andaman Islands as a diversion.

On the morning of 1 May American and British bombers struck positions south of the city, and American C-47s dropped a composite Gurkha parachute battalion from the Indian 50th Parachute Brigade – about 700 men – at Elephant Point, at the mouth of the Rangoon River. The paratroopers wiped out a handful of Japanese soldiers, left behind as a rearguard or forgotten in the confusion of the evacuation, and seized the batteries commanding the entrance to the river. Their heaviest losses, about thirty men, were caused by their own side’s bombs. Behind them minesweepers began clearing the channel. In the early hours of 2 May landing craft put the first units of the 26th Division ashore on both banks of the river – on one of the last days on which the surf still allowed a landing from the beach.

“Japs gone”

Even before the first soldiers reached the suburbs, the matter had been settled from the air. On 2 May a reconnaissance Mosquito flew over Rangoon, captained – according to RAF accounts – by the commanding officer of No. 110 Squadron, Wing Commander A. E. Saunders. The crew saw no Japanese in the city, but on the roof of the jail they saw, painted in huge letters, the words “Japs gone. Extract digit” – RAF slang for “get a move on”. It had been painted by Allied prisoners of war who, after their guards had left, had come under the command of a captured airman, Wing Commander Lionel Hudson. Saunders landed on the cratered airfield at Mingaladon, damaging his tail wheel so that he could not take off again. The airmen walked to the jail, where they found about a thousand former prisoners, and then commandeered a boat in the port and sailed downriver to meet the landing craft with the news that the city was empty.

On 3 May units of the 26th Division entered Rangoon and occupied the port. They found a city devastated by three years of occupation and Allied air raids: wrecked wharves and streets full of rubbish. Looting had been going on since the Japanese left; the retreating occupiers had set fire to the jail with Burmese prisoners inside, and many inhabitants had earlier fled from the Kempeitai military police. Gangs of robbers roamed the suburbs, and disease was spreading. The British were greeted with relief – if not everywhere as liberators, then as those who would restore order and bring food.

Some 5,000–6,000 soldiers of the Indian National Army under Major General A. D. Loganathan had remained in the city. Bose had left them behind to protect the Indian community from robbery and violence. Loganathan had no intention of fighting and handed over to the British both his men and responsibility for public order. The surrender at Rangoon marked the effective end of Bose’s army in Burma; its remnants withdrew to Malaya and laid down their arms in August. The trial of Indian National Army officers in Delhi later became one of the spurs to the independence movement in India.

On 6 May, at Hlegu, about 45 kilometres north of Rangoon, the spearheads of the 26th Division met the 17th Division, which was wading through flooded fields from Pegu. In the west XXXIII Corps took Prome at the beginning of May. From then on the Fourteenth Army and the other Allied forces in Burma had a secure supply route through the port.

Burmese on the Allied side

The Burmese themselves played an important part in the last weeks of fighting. The Burma National Army, created under Japanese patronage, rose in arms under Aung San on 27 March 1945 against the occupiers with whom it had collaborated since 1942. Its units and the guerrillas of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League harried the retreating Japanese columns. The British regarded their new allies with suspicion: the Governor of Burma and some of the staffs saw Aung San as a collaborator, even a criminal. Mountbatten and Slim, who wanted peace in the rear, chose to come to terms. In mid-May Aung San met Slim at Meiktila, and on 23 June his army, renamed the Patriotic Burmese Forces, marched in a joint victory parade in Rangoon.

Place in the war

The capture of Rangoon was the last great objective of a campaign that the Japanese had begun in January 1942 and that in 1944, at Imphal and Kohima, had brought them one of the heaviest land defeats in the history of their army. Since December 1944 the Fourteenth Army had travelled from the Chindwin to the sea; the city whose loss in 1942 had cut Burma off from India, and China off from Western supplies, returned to British hands almost without a shot being fired. The Japanese, who in May still had tens of thousands of soldiers in the Pegu Yoma hills and in Tenasserim, no longer had any chance of regaining the initiative. In July and early August their 28th Army, breaking out eastwards across the Sittang, suffered losses in the last battle of the campaign that historians put at more than ten thousand killed.

For Mountbatten, Rangoon was a springboard for the next step – Operation Zipper, a landing in Malaya and an advance on Singapore planned for the end of the summer. It never took place, because Japan surrendered in August. The recapture of Burma did, however, open the way to its independence. The decay of British authority and the strength of Aung San’s movement meant that London could no longer simply return to the pre-war order; on 4 January 1948 Burma became an independent republic, outside the Commonwealth. Aung San himself did not live to see it – he was assassinated in July 1947.