Operation Thursday – the second Chindit expedition

On the evening of 5 March 1944 American Douglas C-47 transport aircraft began taking off from Lalaghat airfield in Assam in India, each towing one or two Waco CG-4 gliders. Aboard were men of Brigadier Michael Calvert’s 77th Brigade, and their objective was a clearing in the jungle of northern Burma, far behind the front line, code-named Broadway. So began Operation Thursday, the second expedition of Major General Orde Wingate’s Chindits – an operation in which whole brigades were to be flown in behind enemy lines.

These days are sometimes described as a series of successful Chindit raids in Burma. That is a simplification: that night and in the days that followed the point was not individual raids but the start of a large operation in which nearly ten thousand men were to establish themselves behind Japanese lines for weeks on end.

After the first expedition

The first Chindit expedition, Operation Longcloth of February–April 1943, had suffered heavy losses: of some three thousand men, roughly a third came back fit for further service. Militarily it achieved little, but the publicity was enormous. Winston Churchill took Wingate to the Quebec Conference in August 1943, where the British officer presented his concept of long-range penetration to the chiefs of staff and to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To put it into effect he was given unprecedented resources: promotion to acting major general and six brigades, largely drawn from the disbanded 70th Infantry Division. The whole force was called Special Force and, to mislead enemy intelligence, also the 3rd Indian Infantry Division.

The Americans gave Wingate his own air force. On the orders of General Henry Arnold a unit was formed which in March 1944 took the name 1st Air Commando Group. It was commanded by Colonels Philip Cochran and John Alison, fighter pilots from North Africa and China. The group had its own P-51 Mustang fighters, B-25 Mitchell bombers, transport aircraft, light aircraft for evacuating the wounded, even the first helicopters used in combat – and a hundred and some dozens of gliders. It was Cochran who convinced Wingate that gliders could carry not only supplies but also troops, which changed the whole plan.

The command over Burma had also changed. Since the autumn of 1943 the war against Japan in the region had been directed by Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command, following Mountbatten’s appointment to head SEAC. At the Cairo Conference much was cut from the plans for the 1944 dry season, but Joseph Stilwell’s offensive in northern Burma, with Chindit participation, survived.

Strongholds in the jungle

The second expedition was to look different from the first. The Japanese had stepped up their patrols along the frontier, and a repeat of the infiltration on foot across the Chindwin was unlikely to succeed. Wingate therefore decided to fly in most of his force and to set up fortified bases behind enemy lines – “strongholds” with airstrips, artillery and anti-aircraft guns. Columns were to sally out from them on short raids against roads, bridges and the railway and then return to the shelter of the defences. Supply and the evacuation of the wounded were to be entirely by air.

The aim of the operation was set by a joint directive of 4 February 1944 from General William Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, and General George Stratemeyer, the air commander in the theatre. Above all the Chindits were to support Stilwell’s advance on Myitkyina by cutting the communications of Lieutenant General Shin’ichi Tanaka’s Japanese 18th Division, which was holding out against the Chinese in the Hukawng Valley; they were also to help the Chinese forces from Yunnan cross the Salween and to inflict as much damage as possible on the Japanese in northern Burma. The main hub to be seized was Indaw, a railway station and airfield on the Mandalay–Myitkyina line.

The first to set out was the 16th Brigade of Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, a veteran of Longcloth. It left Ledo in Assam as early as 5 February and marched on foot for many weeks across the mountainous Patkai ranges, where men and mules clambered up steep, sodden tracks. The other brigades – Calvert’s 77th, Brigadier Walter “Joe” Lentaigne’s 111th, the 14th and the 3rd West African Brigade – were to be flown in. The sixth, the 23rd Brigade, remained in reserve.

The night at Broadway

Three landing grounds were chosen: Piccadilly, Broadway and Chowringhee. Wingate had forbidden regular air reconnaissance so as not to give the plan away, but Cochran ordered photographs to be taken at the last moment. With less than an hour to go before take-off it emerged that Piccadilly – the clearing from which the wounded of the first expedition had been flown out in 1943 – was covered with tree trunks. According to Slim’s account, Wingate was shaken, concluded that the operation had been betrayed and that ambushes were waiting at the other landing grounds, and left the decision to him. Slim, in agreement with Calvert, who was ready to fly, ordered the operation to go ahead and the whole 77th Brigade to be sent to Broadway. It later turned out that the timber had been laid out to dry by Burmese teak loggers, not by the Japanese.

The flight over the mountains proved hard. Towing two gliders behind one aircraft overloaded the tugs, tow ropes snapped, and some gliders came down or force-landed while still on the Indian side or near Japanese posts. Of the sixty or so sent towards Broadway that night, between 35 and 37 got there, according to different sources. The clearing turned out to be worse than expected: ditches and logs hidden in the grass smashed undercarriages, and gliders landing later crashed into those already wrecked. About 30 men were killed and more than 30 injured. Yet 539 soldiers reached the ground, together with American engineers and a small amount of construction equipment.

During the night Calvert sent the pre-arranged signal for trouble, but by morning his men and the American engineers, with hand tools and small bulldozers, had levelled the strip well enough for the first Dakotas to land on it on the evening of 6 March. The following night, 6–7 March, gliders landed without difficulty at Chowringhee, east of the Irrawaddy, from where the columns of the 111th Brigade set out.

The airlift

Over the following week the transports flew some six hundred sorties and carried about 9,000 men, more than a thousand mules and horses, field and anti-aircraft guns and tons of supplies behind Japanese lines. Chowringhee was abandoned as soon as the fly-in was complete, whereas Broadway became a permanent base with a garrison, artillery and, from 12 to 17 March, even a small detachment of Spitfire fighters from No. 81 Squadron RAF. The Japanese air force discovered the base and on 17 March destroyed most of them on the ground.

The columns went into action. Calvert led part of the 77th Brigade west and on 16 March, near Mawlu, on the main railway and road leading to the Japanese northern front, established a second stronghold – White City, named after the white supply parachutes that hung in the trees. The block cut the only railway supplying Tanaka’s troops. The Japanese repeatedly assaulted the position, and the fighting was hand to hand – with bayonets, Gurkha kukris and swords. The 111th Brigade laid ambushes and road blocks south of Indaw, though the part of its force that had landed at Chowringhee took a long time to cross the Irrawaddy. Beyond the river a detachment was also at work recruiting volunteers among the Kachins, who had long been hostile to the Japanese.

In the second half of March Fergusson’s brigade reached the Meza valley north of Indaw and set up the Aberdeen base there, to which the 14th Brigade was flown in. Exhausted by a march of several hundred kilometres, it was then to attack Indaw – an attack which, launched on 24 March after changes of plan and without reconnaissance, broke down.

Air power was the key to everything. Light L-1 and L-5 aircraft landed on makeshift jungle strips and took out the wounded, who on the first expedition had had to be left to the mercy of the enemy. The Mustangs and Mitchells of the 1st Air Commando attacked Japanese airfields, bridges and depots, and in April a Sikorsky R-4 helicopter took part for the first time in history in a rescue operation behind enemy lines.

Against the background of the Japanese offensive

Operation Thursday began just as the Japanese were completing preparations for their own great offensive. In February they had already attacked in the Arakan, where the British had shortly before taken Maungdaw, and Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi’s Fifteenth Army was preparing to cross the Chindwin and march on Imphal and Kohima. The Chindit fly-in did not change these plans: Mutaguchi believed that their operations in his rear would not stop the thrust into India and did not intend to divert the forces earmarked for the offensive against them; the fight against the Chindits was entrusted to other formations, including the 24th Independent Mixed Brigade and later the 53rd Division. In this situation the British command increasingly considered using the Chindits not in support of Stilwell but in the defence of Manipur itself, which as early as March became a source of disputes between Wingate, Slim and Stilwell.

Its place in the war

Operation Thursday was one of the largest Allied airborne operations before the invasion of Normandy and – as historians of the American air forces stress – the first in which whole brigades were landed behind enemy lines and supplied for months entirely by air. Its creator did not live to see its end: on 24 March 1944 Wingate was killed when a B-25 crashed in the mountains of Manipur. Lentaigne took command of Special Force, and in April the increasingly exhausted Chindits were placed under Stilwell. They abandoned White City and Broadway and moved north to support the advance on Mogaung and Myitkyina directly; after heavy fighting at Blackpool in May, Calvert’s 77th Brigade took Mogaung in June, and Myitkyina fell at the beginning of August. The last Chindits left Burma at the end of August 1944, worn down more by malaria, dysentery and malnutrition than by the enemy. Some units were pushed beyond all limits of endurance – in July, of the more than two thousand men of the 111th Brigade, only about a hundred and twenty were judged fit for service.

Assessments of the operation remain disputed. Its critics, among them Slim and the British official history, believed that Special Force had swallowed up the best soldiers and enormous air resources that would have achieved more in an ordinary division, and that the Japanese army, which depended little on elaborate supply lines, was not as vulnerable to having them cut as Wingate supposed. Its defenders point out that the blocks hampered the supply of the 18th Division fighting Stilwell and tied down substantial Japanese forces. Mutaguchi himself said after the war that the Chindits had drawn off the whole 53rd Division and part of the 15th Division, “one regiment of which would have tipped the scales at Kohima”. One thing is beyond dispute: Operation Thursday showed that air power could carry the war deep into the jungle, and the experience of the 1st Air Commando – gliders, casualty evacuation from the battlefield and the first helicopters – was put to use in the remaining years of the war and long after it.