THE FORGOTTEN WAR
In the jungles, mountains, and plains of China, India, and Burma, American troops waged a tough and lonely war, a war of numbers finally won by time.
British troops had been in no shape to hit back in 1942 when the Japanese mounted an attack down Burma's Arakan coast, rimming the Bay of Bengal. However, the 14th Indian Division of the 1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers set out from India moving southward through malarial swamps and leech-infested creeks, their goal being the Japanese Akyab Island airfields from which the invading Japanese could bomb Calcutta and Chittagong. Torrential rains impeded their progress somewhat, but the cleverly planned defense mounted by the Japanese stopped the 14th in its tracks. Eight months after starting out on their southward campaign the 14th Division was back where it started, a failure that forced a change in leadership.
The British reorganized and retrained their Indian Army and by the fall of 1943 work had begun on four new all-weather roads in northern India, one of them designed to run from Ledo over the Hump through Burma to the Chinese frontier. The Japanese, facing stiff opposition in the Pacific, halted their invasion on the borders of India, convinced their position there was secure for the time. That decision gave the Allies opportunity to mount an offensive against an entrenched, non-moving target.
Brigadier Orde Wingate, leader of Britain's 77th Indian Infantry Brigade created early in 1943, believed a small force of fast-moving guerrillas could seriously hamper Japanese operations in Burma by operating behind enemy lines with supplies dropped from the air. His three thousand men were called Chindits, taken from the Burmese word meaning mythical lion. Their task was to attack Japanese outposts, cut railway lines, and blow up bridges. Their attack took the enemy by surprise, but the Japanese mounted a counterattack that left the Chindit trying to get back to India, weak from hunger, exhaustion, and disease. Wingate did get back to India on April 29, 1943 with two thousand one hundred and eighty-two of his original three thousand men, but only six hundred of those returning were fit to fight again. Although they had gained little in material terms, they had begun to disprove the myth of Japan's invincibility in Burma.
To the north, the Japanese had virtually eaten up China, but they could not digest it. By mid-1942 most of the area they occupied was run by compliant local landlords. Even so, six hundred and twenty thousand Japanese troops were on duty in China. America sought to keep those troops engaged by the Chinese Army to prevent their invading India or joining the battle in the Pacific. The U.S. supplied Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek with money, arms, equipment, and military advice, the latter of which came initially from Major General Joseph W. "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell. Stilwell was appointed in January 1942 to head a military mission as Chiang's Chief of Staff, however there was a definite conflict of interest between Stilwell and Chiang.
The Japanese had driven Chiang deep into west China, where he established headquarters in Chungking. The Chinese armies were disorganized, badly trained, and ill equipped. The Japanese had taken China's arsenals and industrial centers and had cut the Burma Road link to India, causing China's overland supply route to disappear. Work on a new road had begun at Ledo in Assam, India near the 28th parallel in December 1942, a road which was to wind east into Burma, then angle off to the southeast through Myitkyina (pronounced Mitch-in-awe) and Bhano to meet the Burma Road just south of the China-Burma border a bit north of the 24th parallel.
The U.S. Tenth Air Force quickly established a base at Chabua, in Assam, India. One of the most spectacular airlifts of the war began, that of flying materials over the flank of the Himalayas, or "the Hump." It was not an easy flight since some of the mountains ranged twenty thousand feet high and Japanese fighter planes patrolled the area from northern Burma. Yet, air supply to China increased from three thousand seven hundred tons in 1942 to nearly thirty five thousand tons in October 1944 alone. While that was substantial, still it was insufficient to maintain China's army, let alone its population. Those supplies did enable the Flying Tigers' successors, Channault's U.S.- China Air Task Force and the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force, to extend their operations over Chinese air space, somewhat loosening Japan's hold on China.
Chinese military tactics were of the stand and defend variety, rendering them incapable of reconquering their homeland. They critically needed training, which was a significant part of what the U.S. brought to that Theater of the Operations. Chiang's greatest handicap was his obsession with defeating his own Communist countrymen, the Reds. He saw them as a threat greater than Japan. Mao Tse-tung and his followers did little to allay those fears.
Bombs fell on Tokyo in April 1942 when Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle attacked that city with planes operating from the American carrier Hornet. Soon after the bombing attack on Tokyo, the Japanese suspended all-out offensive operations in China and withdrew some men to reinforce their troops in the Pacific theater. But, over half-million Japanese troops were still in China in 1945.
The Japanese thought Doolittle's bombers might have come from the other side of the Hump, where the Flying Tigers were based. The Flying Tigers were a group of about ninety American pilots, men released or retired from the US Army, Navy, and Marines before World War II, who fought as mercenaries for China. Their leader was Colonel Claire Lee Chennault who drilled his men endlessly and devised brilliant tactics enabling their Curtiss P-40 fighters to destroy nearly three hundred Japanese aircraft in just six months when they became part of the U.S.- China Air Task Force.
The Allies' second thrust into the Arakan region of Burma coincided with a fierce Japanese offensive, ending with the Japanese being out-fought and out-thought, and their myth of invincibility irrevocably destroyed. Three highly individual Allied forces then focused on northern Burma, and fought to take Myitkyina, a town that was the key Japanese stronghold and air base over the Hump in northern Burma. The three were Stilwell's Chinese troops, Wingate's Chindets, and Merrill's Marauders. All three had been tested almost to destruction. They knew that Myitkyina had to be taken because it lay in the middle of the route planned for the Ledo Road, an absolutely vital supply link that had to be built and maintained for any hope of victory in the India-China-Burma Theater of Operations.
"Vinegar Joe" Stilwell saw the advance on Myitkyina as a headache, but he was committed to pushing through the road which could carry supplies from India to the Chinese army in western China. In late February 1943 his sparsely manned road-building crew got stuck on the India Burma border. The Japanese began an attack northward toward the head of the road, being stopped only about fifty miles south of the road's starting point by Stilwell's Chinese 38th Division. A stalemate ensued until October when new engineers pushed the road along behind the probing 38th Division which was proceeding down the Refugee Trail. When the Japanese counter-attacked, Stilwell showed up in person driving the Chinese troops into aggressive action. As soon as he left, however, the stalemate set in once again.
Stilwell returned in February 1944 with a new card to play: an American independent infantry unit soon to be known as Merrill's Marauders after their leader, Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill. Hardened Pacific war veterans, only three thousand strong, they started a series of actions in March thrusting flanking attacks deep behind enemy lines while the Chinese battled down the Hukawng Valley pushing back the Japanese. Stilwell and Merrill then headed for Myitkyina with about seven thousand men, part Marauders and part Chinese, arriving at that stronghold on May 17, 1944. They were not to rid the area completely of Japanese control until early August.
Meanwhile, Orde Wingate's Chindit expedition into Burma had gotten him promoted to Major General. He and his six brigades, twenty three thousand men, were briefed to support Stilwell's drive. Wingate was supported by a "private air force" consisting of the USAAF Number One Air Commando: twenty-five transport planes; twelve medium bombers; thirty fighter-bombers; one hundred light planes; and two hundred twenty-five gliders. His orders were to draw off enemy forces, prevent reinforcements reaching them, and create havoc behind enemy lines. In the ensuing on-going battle Wingate was killed when his B-25 bomber crashed. His Chindits came under Stilwell's command. Stilwell proved to be a harsh taskmaster, rejecting all requests that the men be relieved. When the second and final Chindit operation was over, the force had lost five thousand killed, wounded or missing.
Stilwell was equally ruthless with the American guerrillas, Merrill's Marauders. By the time Myitkyina airfield had been taken, they were exhausted and sick, Merrill himself having suffered a heart attack. They were down to less than fifteen hundred of their original three thousand men. Unknown to the Allies, the Japanese had maintained supply lines to Myitkyina and also had strengthened their garrison to thirty-five hundred men. Coming against that fresh force, the Marauders suddenly collapsed, some actually falling asleep while firing their weapons.
The original Marauders were reinforced by three Battalions of replacements who arrived shortly after those battle-weary men had fought their way to Myitkyina. The Allies gradually cut off the Japanese supply lines. The town of Myitkyina finally fell on August 3, 1943. The cost had been high on both sides. The Allies lost one thousand forty-four killed and four thousand one hundred forty wounded. Nine hundred and eighty Americans were evacuated sick, including five hundred and seventy Marauders. Ledo Road builders and Hump supply planes moved in immediately to solidify the supply lines between India and China.
In spite of the effort expended to take Myitkyina and build the Ledo Road, China was almost lost to a huge Japanese offensive employing one hundred and fifty thousand men in mid-April 1944. By mid-June a three hundred thousand strong Chinese army was reduced to a fleeting remnant and the Japanese held the Chinese railway system from Peking to Hankow. While the Chinese fought fiercely in spots, the Japanese continued to moved south putting Chiang Kai-shek's capital in Chungking at risk.
Had that city fallen, China would have been out of the war and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers would have been free to fight in Burma or the Pacific. Fortunately for the Allies, Japanese momentum slowed, although a column of troops did push north on the railway from Indochina to link with forces at Lungchow in December, giving control of the railway from Peking into Indochina briefly to the Japanese. The Japanese found themselves spread thin, short of supplies, and facing an increasingly more resolute Chinese army. While the Chinese were not well trained, they did have numbers and were still in the war, although the Japanese persisted in holding China's railways and airfields.
Chiang Kai-shek finally had to agree to what Stilwell had been telling him for years. He had said to stop relying on the United States of America Air Force (USAAF) and to rebuild his own army.
Japan mounted three more campaigns into southern China, finally meeting their first serious defeat in China in March 1945. American successes in the Pacific and a belated declaration of war against Japan by the Soviet Union caused Japan to evacuate from south China on May 9, 1945 virtually putting to an end the China-India-Burma Theater of War. The tenacity of the American jungle fighters, the numbers of Chinese, and enough time had decided the China-India-Burma War, the Forgotten War, in favor of the Allies.