Japanese invasion of Burma

• 1. Introduction

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  The Japanese invasion of Burma began on the 22nd of December 1941, when the 55th Division crossed the Burma frontier. What followed was one of the most consequential campaigns of the Pacific war, a struggle for a colony the British had long treated as a military backwater, unlikely ever to face a serious threat. Within months, an entire army had been routed, a great port city had been set on fire, and somewhere between ten thousand and fifty thousand civilians had died on the roads leading to India. The questions that run through this story are not only military ones. Who were the Burmese fighters who saw Japan as a liberator? Why did the supply route to China make Burma so vital? And how did a commander's decision to blow a bridge before most of his own men had crossed it shape the fall of Rangoon? The answers reach back to three earlier wars in the nineteenth century, and forward to a famine that would kill hundreds of thousands in Bengal.

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• 2. A Colony Under Pressure

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  Burma had been absorbed into the British Empire through three Anglo-Burmese wars fought across the nineteenth century. Under the Government of India Act 1935, it was finally separated from British India and made a distinct colony. Economic development had followed British rule, but it arrived with friction. Indian workers were imported to staff the new industries, and land in the countryside was converted to export-crop plantations or mortgaged to Indian moneylenders. For the majority Bamar community, these changes ate at the fabric of traditional life. Pressure for independence was already building when the war arrived.

  Lieutenant General Thomas Hutton commanded the Burma Army from its headquarters in Rangoon, with only the 17th Indian Infantry Division and the 1st Burma Division under his charge. Help was expected from the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, but it had not yet arrived. The British Indian Army had expanded more than twelvefold from its peacetime strength of 200,000, and by late 1941 most of its units were undertrained and poorly equipped. The battalions of the Burma Rifles that made up much of the 1st Burma Division had originally been raised only for internal security duty, drawing from minority communities such as the Karens. Rapid expansion had flooded them with Bamar recruits and left them short of equipment. Many of these soldiers were openly ambivalent about defending a British colony, and when Japanese pressure mounted, desertion among Bamar troops became widespread.

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• 3. Japan's Strategic Logic

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  Japan entered the war to secure raw materials, especially oil, from the weakly defended European possessions in South-East Asia. Burma sat at the edge of this calculation but mattered for several overlapping reasons. Its oilfields at Yenangyaung, its deposits of cobalt, and its large rice surpluses were attractive on their own terms. Occupying Burma would also shield the flank of the main drive against Malaya and Singapore, and create a buffer protecting whatever territories Japan intended to hold.

  The Burma Road, completed in 1938, gave the campaign an urgency that went beyond resources. The road ran from Lashio, at the end of a railway from Rangoon's port, into the Chinese province of Yunnan. Aid and munitions for Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces had been moving along it for years; cutting that supply line was a core Japanese objective. The Southern Expeditionary Army Group under General Hisaichi Terauchi held overall command of South-East Asian operations. The Fifteenth Army, under Lieutenant General Shojiro Iida, was assigned the Burmese campaign, built around the highly regarded 33rd Division and the 55th Division, though both were briefly weakened by detachments to other operations in the opening weeks.

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• 4. The Thirty Comrades

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  In late 1940, a Burmese student activist named Aung San made contact with a Japanese officer, Suzuki Keiji, in the Chinese city of Amoy and then voyaged to Japan for talks. He and a small group of volunteers, who came to be called the Thirty Comrades, were later given intensive military training on Hainan Island. The Burma Independence Army was officially founded in Bangkok on the 28th of December 1941 with 227 Burmese and 74 Japanese personnel. When it crossed into Burma it numbered 2,300 men.

  As Japanese forces pushed deeper into the country, the BIA expanded rapidly, drawing thousands of Bamar volunteers eager to see British rule end. By the 8th of March, when Japanese forces reached Rangoon, the BIA had grown to between 10,000 and 12,000 soldiers. It would eventually reach somewhere between 18,000 and 23,000. The BIA called the conflict the fourth Anglo-Burmese war, or the war of Burmese Independence. That framing carried real conviction for many who joined it. But Japan's actual intentions were colonial rather than liberatory, and when Tokyo installed a puppet state in Burma, the BIA and the wider Burmese population quickly lost confidence in their new patrons.

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• 5. The Fall of Rangoon

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  The opening moves came fast. By the 23rd of January 1942, according to historian Louis Allen, all three important airstrips in southern Tenasserim, at Tavoy, Mergui, and Victoria Point, were in Japanese hands, allowing fighter cover for every bombing raid on Rangoon. The 16th Indian Infantry Brigade retreated hastily as the 55th Division crossed the Kawkareik Pass. The 2nd Burma Infantry Brigade held Moulmein at the mouth of the Salween, a position almost impossible to defend, with the river, nearly one and a half miles wide, behind it. After being squeezed into a progressively tighter perimeter, the brigade escaped across the river by ferry on the 31st of January, abandoning a large quantity of supplies and equipment. Part of the force had to swim.

  The decisive catastrophe came at the Sittang Bridge. The 17th Indian Division fell back from the Bilin River, repeatedly outflanked and unable to hold any defensive line. As it retreated toward the Sittang crossing in general disorder, Japanese troops infiltrated the bridge itself. Major-General Jackie Smyth ordered the bridge blown on the morning of the 23rd of February 1942, with most of his division still on the enemy-held side. Men swam or crossed on improvised rafts, but almost all their small arms and heavy equipment were lost. Critics later argued that the river itself was not much of an obstacle and that the demolition stranded two brigades while delaying the Japanese capture of Rangoon by ten days at most. Smyth was sacked by the end of February, in any case already seriously ill.

  General Alexander, who had formally superseded Hutton in command, ordered counter-attacks at Pegu, forty miles northeast of Rangoon, but quickly recognized that the city could not be held. On the 7th of March, the Burma Army evacuated Rangoon after a scorched earth plan: the port was destroyed and the oil terminal blown up. As the Allies pulled out, the city was burning. The retreating column then faced a Japanese road block north of the city. Colonel Takanobu Sakuma had been ordered to hold the main road to Prome until the 33rd Division circled around to attack from the west. When the division reached its positions, Sakuma withdrew the block as instructed, not realizing the British were evacuating. Had he left it in place, he might have captured Alexander and much of the Burma Army.

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• 6. Collapse in the North

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  After Rangoon fell, the Allies tried to hold a front in central Burma. The Chinese Expeditionary Force, commanded by Luo Zhuoying and comprising the Fifth Army under Du Yuming along with the Sixth and Sixty-sixth Armies, was expected to anchor a line south of Mandalay. Each Chinese army was roughly comparable to a British division in numbers but carried comparatively little equipment. Burma Corps, formed from the 1st Burma Division, the 17th Indian Division, and the 7th Armoured Brigade, defended the Irrawaddy valley under Lieutenant General William Slim.

  Japan reinforced rather than consolidated. The 18th Division arrived from Malaya and the 56th Division from the Dutch East Indies after Singapore and Java fell. Captured British trucks gave Japanese logistics formations unusual speed, while Japanese aircraft achieved air supremacy after the RAF's radar and radio-intercept units were withdrawn to India. Unopposed Japanese bombers struck almost every major town and city in Allied-held Burma. The 1st Burma Division was trapped in the blazing oilfields at Yenangyaung, which the Allies themselves had demolished. Chinese infantry and British tanks rescued the division in the Battle of Yenangyaung, but it lost nearly all its equipment and cohesion.

  On the eastern front, the Chinese 200th Division delayed the Japanese around Toungoo, but after that town fell, motorised troops of the 56th Division shattered the Chinese Sixth Army in the Karenni States. They then swept north through the Shan States, captured Lashio, and cut the Burma Road. With the entire defensive line effectively gone, the only options were an overland retreat to India or a withdrawal to Yunnan.

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• 7. The Retreat and Its Cost

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  At least 500,000 civilian fugitives reached India. A conservatively estimated 10,000 to 50,000 died on the way. In later months, between 70 and 80 percent of those who had made it to India were afflicted with dysentery, smallpox, malaria, or cholera, and 30 percent were described as desperately ill. Middle-class Indian and mixed-race refugees could often afford passages by ship or plane; ordinary labourers and their families walked.

  On the 26th of April, British, Indian, and Burmese forces joined the civilian movement in a formal retreat. The Japanese sent troops by boat up the Chindwin River to seize the port of Monywa on the night of the 1st and the 2nd of May, attempting to cut off Burma Corps. The hastily reconstituted 1st Burma Division could not retake Monywa but bought time for the rest of the corps to withdraw. At Shwegyin on the 10th of May, as the corps tried to cross to Kalewa on the west bank of the Chindwin by ramshackle ferry, the Japanese tried to trap them in a basin ringed by cliffs. Counter-attacks allowed the troops to escape, but most of the remaining equipment had to be destroyed or abandoned. On the 12th of May, the Japanese occupied Kalewa, having covered 1,500 miles in 127 days and fought 34 battles.

  The American General Joseph Stilwell arrived at Imphal on foot on the 20th of May. The Chinese 38th Division, commanded by Sun Li-jen, fought its way westward across the Chindwin and arrived at Imphal on the 24th of May, substantially intact despite heavy casualties. The remaining Chinese soldiers who had retreated into India, numbering 23,000, were placed under Stilwell's command and sent to camps at Ramgarh in Bihar to recuperate, be re-equipped, and be retrained by American instructors.

  The Chinese Muslim town of Panglong in British Burma was entirely destroyed by Japanese forces during the invasion. Ma Guanggui led a self-defense force for the local Hui community, created under the Kuomintang government. Japanese troops burned Panglong and drove out over 200 Hui households, who fled to Yunnan and Kokang. A Hui writer from Panglong later published an account of the attack in 1998, known as the Panglong Booklet.

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• 8. Edges and Aftershocks

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  In the coastal Arakan Province, elements of the Burma Independence Army reached Akyab Island ahead of the Japanese troops. Their arrival, however, also triggered inter-communal violence between the Buddhist and Muslim populations of the province. The Japanese advance in Arakan stopped just short of the Indian frontier, but the panic it caused among British military and civil authorities around Chittagong produced a premature scorched earth policy, contributing to the Bengal Famine of 1943.

  In the Shan States and Kayah State, the consequences of Thai-Japanese alignment played out separately. Thailand had signed a military alliance with Japan on the 21st of December 1941. By the 21st of March 1942, the Japanese agreed to place those eastern states under Thai control. The leading elements of the Thai Phayap Army crossed into the Shan States on the 10th of May. Three Thai infantry divisions and one cavalry division, supported by the Royal Thai Air Force, captured Kengtung on the 27th of May. On the 12th of July, a Thai division began occupying Kayah State, driving the Chinese 55th Division from Loikaw and taking many prisoners. Thai forces held the region, which they called Saharat Thai Doem, for the remainder of the war, suffering from supply shortages and disease but facing no Allied assault. It was not until December 1944, when the British launched Operation Capital, that the tide turned, leading to the battles at Meiktila and Mandalay in 1945 and the end of the Burma campaign.

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