The Myitkyina airfield

In mid-May 1944, after a three-week march across the Kumon Range, the American and Chinese troops of General Joseph Stilwell emerged in the rear of the Japanese garrison at Myitkyina, the principal town of northern Burma, on the Irrawaddy. On the morning of 17 May they took the main airfield, a few kilometres west of the town, by surprise, and transport aircraft began landing there the same day. War chronologies record that on 18 May “the Allies take the airfields at Myitkyina, while the fight for the town itself will last almost three more months”; this needs two qualifications. The airfield fell a day earlier, on 17 May – by 18 May further reinforcements were already landing and the first attempt was being made on the town. And only one airfield was taken: the second, smaller airstrip north of Myitkyina remained in Japanese hands until 26 July. The second half of the statement, however, is accurate – the town did not fall until 3 August 1944.

Why Myitkyina

Since the spring of 1942, when the Japanese cut the Burma Road, Chiang Kai-shek’s China had been supplied by air alone – from Assam over the eastern ranges of the Himalayas to Kunming, along the route airmen called “the Hump”. Transport aircraft had to give Myitkyina a wide berth, because Japanese fighters flew from its airfield. Taking the town therefore mattered twice over: it would allow a shorter, lower route to China, and it would open the way for the Ledo Road, being built from Ledo in India, which beyond Myitkyina could join the old Burmese road network. Myitkyina was also the terminus of the railway from Mandalay and the most important Japanese supply hub in the north of the country.

Stilwell, who two years earlier had led the remnants of his staff out of Burma on foot, regarded the capture of Myitkyina as the objective of the entire campaign. From the end of 1943 his Chinese divisions, trained and equipped by the Americans at Ramgarh in India, had been advancing through the Hukawng Valley, and from February 1944 they were supported by an American long-range penetration unit – the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), codenamed Galahad and known as Merrill’s Marauders after its commander, Brigadier General Frank Merrill. In March the British Chindits landed behind Japanese lines in Operation Thursday. Their creator, Major General Orde Wingate, was killed on 24 March, and in April his brigades came under Stilwell’s command.

The British, including the Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia Command, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, were sceptical of the campaign. They believed the effort put into a road to China would not pay off, and in the spring of 1944 their attention was wholly absorbed by the Japanese offensive against Imphal and Kohima. Stilwell, who distrusted his allies, did not coordinate his plan with them; he issued his orders directly to the Chinese and Americans under his command.

The march across the Kumon Range

The plan, which Stilwell jokingly codenamed End Run (from American football, which he had played in his youth), was approved at the end of April. After heavy fighting in the Hukawng Valley and the defence of Nhpum Ga hill, of nearly three thousand Marauders some 1,400 were left fit to march. They were therefore combined with Chinese regiments into three task forces: H under Colonel Charles Hunter (1st Battalion of Galahad and the Chinese 150th Regiment of the 50th Division), K under Colonel Henry Kinnison (3rd Battalion and the 88th Regiment of the 30th Division) and M under Colonel George McGee (2nd Battalion and about 300 Kachin guerrillas). Instead of advancing along the Mogaung valley, where the Japanese expected them, the columns were to cross the Kumon Range eastwards by the Naura Hkyet pass, at about 1,900 m, and then turn south towards Myitkyina. Stilwell admitted to Merrill that he was asking more of the exhausted unit than could fairly be expected, and promised that once the task was done Galahad would be withdrawn.

K Force set out on 28 April, H Force on 30 April. In many places the route over the mountains was no more than a Kachin footpath, and in some there was none at all; mules slid off the sodden slopes into ravines. The men, who already had several hundred kilometres of jungle marching behind them and had lived almost entirely on K rations for weeks, suffered from dysentery, malaria and skin ulcers. At Ritpong a Japanese outpost held up K Force for several days – the Chinese took the village on 9 May – and at Tingkrukawng Kinnison’s column ran into stiff resistance and had to turn back to follow Hunter’s route. Kinnison himself fell ill with mite-borne scrub typhus and died after evacuation. H Force, by contrast, passed unnoticed and on 16 May reached the river near the village of Namkwi, on the railway from Mogaung, about three kilometres from the airfield. The soldiers detained the local inhabitants so that no one could warn the garrison.

The capture of the airfield on 17 May

Reconnaissance and Kachin informants reported that the airfield was lightly guarded. Hunter set the attack for 10 a.m. on 17 May: the 150th Regiment was to take the runway and the Americans the ferry landing on the Irrawaddy at Pamati. According to the US official history (Charles Romanus and Riley Sunderland, Stilwell’s Command Problems), the attack went off “like a demonstration at a military school” – the Japanese knew Myitkyina was in danger, but the blow itself took them completely by surprise. The garrison commander, Colonel Fusayasu Maruyama, had in the town and the suburb of Sitapur two under-strength battalions of the 114th Regiment of the 18th Division, about a hundred men of an airfield battalion, several hundred service troops and more than three hundred sick in hospital – at the moment of the attack no more than about 700 fit to fight.

When Hunter judged the airfield secure, he sent the agreed signal, “Merchant of Venice”, which meant that the airlift of supplies and reinforcements could begin. The runway was in good condition. Still on 17 May, before the weather broke, gliders landed with a company of the US 879th Airborne Engineer Battalion, an anti-aircraft battery and C-47 aircraft brought in a battalion of the Chinese 89th Regiment. On 18 May, to the dismay of Merrill and Hunter, the air commander, General George Stratemeyer, sent British anti-aircraft artillery instead of the promised infantry and ammunition; the same day the rest of the 89th Regiment and a heavy mortar company arrived, and on 19 May a battalion of the 42nd Regiment of the Chinese 14th Division. Stilwell himself also flew in to the airfield.

Stilwell was in seventh heaven. On 17 May he wrote in his diary in capital letters: “WILL THIS BURN UP THE LIMEYS!” He was not wrong: Winston Churchill cabled Mountbatten to ask whether he had expected the stroke, and Mountbatten had to admit that he had heard of the plan only in passing. The British surprise influenced the dispute over strategy in South-East Asia – a Combined Chiefs of Staff directive of 2 June 1944 recognised holding the Mogaung–Myitkyina area as part of developing the air link to China.

Failed attacks on the town

The chance to take Myitkyina on the run was lost within a few days. On 18 May Stilwell’s staff intelligence put the number of Japanese in the town at a mere three hundred. On the afternoon of 17 May two battalions of the 150th Regiment had already moved on the town, but they took the wrong road, turned towards Sitapur and, under fire from Japanese riflemen, lost their bearings and began shooting at each other. Around noon the next day the regiment renewed the attack – and once again, amid fighting between its own sub-units, withdrew from the town. The attack of 20 May brought the Chinese to the railway station, where heavy fire stopped them; the 150th Regiment, which had lost 671 men since the start of the campaign, had to be withdrawn. Matters were not helped by the fact that the Chinese units at Myitkyina came from three different divisions.

K and M Forces, which on hearing of the airfield’s capture had given up waiting for a food drop and set off for Myitkyina, arrived in a pitiful state. Merrill recalled after the war that hardly anyone was walking normally, and that one platoon, plagued by dysentery, had cut away the seats of their uniform trousers so that they could fight. In these days Merrill suffered another heart attack and was evacuated. Hunter took over command, and the exhausted Galahad, instead of the promised withdrawal, remained in the line in the monsoon downpours. More and more men went down with dysentery, malaria and scrub typhus – by the end of the siege all American units at Myitkyina had lost, according to the US Army official history, 272 killed, 955 wounded and 980 evacuated sick. The bitterness of soldiers who felt that Stilwell had broken his promise to them and that his staff kept the sick at the front later led to the Hunter report and an investigation by the Army Inspector General.

Mizukami’s garrison

The Japanese quickly made use of the time their attackers had given them. As early as the evening of 17 May Maruyama brought in a battalion of the 148th Regiment of the 56th Division from across the Irrawaddy, and further units slipped through gaps in the ring around the town at night. From the Salween front, where the Yunnan Chinese had been attacking the 56th Division since 11 May, came the division’s infantry commander, Major General Genzō Mizukami. He took command and was ordered to hold Myitkyina; he himself ordered that the town be defended for at least three months. By the end of May the garrison had grown to about 2,500 men plus several hundred sick, and over the whole siege, according to Romanus and Sunderland, at least 4,600 Japanese fought in it. Until mid-June Allied intelligence estimated their number at a few hundred, while the Japanese believed they were besieged by thirty thousand men.

Place in the war

The capture of the Myitkyina airfield was, as Romanus and Sunderland write, the high point of Stilwell’s career and the culmination of the campaign in northern Burma: in half a year his troops had advanced several hundred kilometres into the country and beaten several Japanese regiments, among them the victors of Singapore. The town itself, however, proved a hard nut to crack. Throughout June and July the Chinese, the remnants of Galahad, hastily sent and poorly trained American replacements and engineers pulled off road building fought a gruelling positional battle in rain and mud. Command at Myitkyina passed on 30 May to Brigadier General Haydon Boatner, and at the end of June to Brigadier General Theodore Wessels. Michael Calvert’s Chindits of the 77th Brigade, together with the Chinese, took Mogaung on 26 June, cutting the garrison off from the west, and on 26 July the Americans captured the northern airstrip.

At the end of July Maruyama asked for permission to withdraw his regiment. Mizukami, who had orders to hold the town to the last, agreed, issued orders for an evacuation across the Irrawaddy and, according to the US official history, committed suicide on 1 August (some publications give 2 or 3 August). On the afternoon of 3 August 1944 Myitkyina was declared taken. Maruyama led out about 600 men; 187 Japanese were captured, most of them sick and wounded; according to a US intelligence estimate of 9 August about 4,000 defenders had been killed. The Chinese lost 972 killed and 3,184 wounded. Galahad, of whose original strength about two hundred men were still at the front when the town fell, was disbanded on 10 August.

The airfield quickly proved its worth: from May to October 1944 some 14,000 transport aircraft landed there with more than 40,000 tons of cargo, and transports flying to China could take a shorter and lower route. The extension of the Ledo Road was carried through Myitkyina – at the beginning of 1945, after northern Burma had been cleared and a junction made with the forces advancing from Yunnan, the first convoy reached Kunming along it. Stilwell did not see this in theatre: in October 1944, after his final break with Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt recalled him from China.