Command Said Myitkyina Couldn’t Be Taken — 1,400 Sick Men Took It in a Morning D

Japan’s best division in Burma rated those mountains impassible in the monsoon. The Americans who crossed them were, by their own medics count, too sick to march. Hold both facts. Both are true. It is midm morning, May 17th, 1944, and the main air strip at Matt Ka, the prize of North Burma, is being taken at a walk. Chinese riflemen of the 150th Regiment move up the runway.

Colonel Charles N. Hunter walks at the head of the column. The men behind him cannot walk in a straight line. Beyond the runway sits the man responsible for this ground, Colonel Fusayasu Maruyama of the 114th Regiment, 18th Division, the division that took Singapore. 19 days earlier, this column stepped onto a trail no one had used in 10 years. The wall was real.

It just never reported in. His garrison knew an attack was coming. So, how was this a complete surprise? The how begins with the man standing on the runway. Hunter has held this strip for under an hour and holding is the whole problem because a prize this size is only worth what you can land on it. Coded warnings went out to headquarters 48 hours ago and again at 24.

So somewhere behind the weather, transport pilots are watching fuel gauges. He watches the wind sock and counts minutes. One man is missing. The force is named for Brigadier General Frank Merrill, and Merrill is not on this field. A heart attack carried him off one battlefield already this spring, and the strain of the coming days will drop him again.

The name on the unit could not make the march. The men who took the strip were the ones no army would have sent west down the Moong Valley. The general whose division shielded this ground had done everything right. Lieutenant General Shinichi Tanaka commanded the 18th division, and his logic was clean. Nobody strikes Mattkina directly while he holds the kamaying to Moong corridor because there is no third way in.

All spring the Americans had beaten at him with one move, the end run. Stillwell’s own word borrowed from American football. Around the line, not through it. Tanaka answered everyone. What he admitted after the war is more interesting. From the battle of Walabum onward, his intelligence section went steadily blind, and good strategic information became almost impossible to get. Consider the spring from his map table.

On that table, the air strip sat behind a wall of rock. What does a good analyst do when the reports stop making sense, and it is not his fault? The reports were failing because of who was carrying the rifles? On paper, they were a regiment. 2,997 volunteers carrying the driest designation the army owned. The 5,37th composite unit provisional.

On their feet, they were a question. Sit with the mileage. 500 mi of Burma already behind them. 5 months of malaria and dysentery before this mission even had a name. Colonel Henry Kenisonson led a third of them, and might Typhus was already inside his column.

There was a promise attached to that airirst strip, too, and we will get to it. I went looking for a Japanese map with impassible stamped across the Kuman Range. There isn’t one to hold. What exists is an Allied report, a trail unused for 10 years, rated impassible, and what Japanese officers conceded after the war. Nobody wrote the word on a map we can touch. They did something stronger. They left the door unwatched.

A trail like that needs an order behind it and the order has a date. On the 21st of April 1944, Stillwell created a task force to seize the Matt Kina strips and called it end run the football play made formal. Why order it at all? His own superiors had answered that in writing.

The staff of Southeast Asia command had told the combined chiefs repeatedly that Matekina probably could not be taken, that if taken, it could not be held, and that if held, it was not worth holding. Taken, held, worth it. Three verdicts, all no. Stillwell ordered the march anyway.

His American unit was down to about 1,400 men of the original roster, so two Chinese regiments would climb beside them. He told Merryill plainly that he was asking more than could fairly be expected and that he had no other option. His diary that week reads like a man pushing in his last chips. One name belongs here before we go on.

The long range idea was Or Windgates and his Chindits paid for it in full by the enemy’s own post-war accounting. They pulled the 53rd Division and half an air division away from the Mfall battle. to see why Stillwell believed those men could do it. Watch what they had already done to Tanaka.

In the first week of March at a village called Wallaboom, the unit code came swung wide through jungle Tanaka’s staff had discounted and came down on the 18th division’s line of communications from behind while Chinese divisions pressed the front. Hold that result for a moment because Tanaka certainly did. His response was not panic. It was professional to the last detail.

Rear guards that broke contact cleanly on night trails. Guns cighted where the valley narrowed. A delaying war run with genuine skill by infantry who had marched down Malaya two years before. His frame made sense because every Allied thrust of the campaign had come down the valleys he was blocking, and the terrain arithmetic said the eastern flank was closed.

But each end run cost him another set of eyes, and after Walabum, the picture arriving at his table grew thinner and later. Meanwhile, the same maneuvers were quietly bankrupting the men who ran them. The ground kept obeying the maps. The men in both directions did not, and sickness was now doing to this American unit what Tanaka could not. That was the war. Tanaka understood. What came next was outside it.

Stay close because in about eight minutes, the sickest column in this theater takes the most important airfield in Burma in a single morning. And the first aircraft to land on it carry exactly the wrong cargo. But the unit that ran those in runs was already dying and one battalion nearly dead on a hilltop called NH Pumga.

In late March, the second battalion was cut off there and surrounded. Picture the perimeter, smaller than the airfield these men had been promised and shrinking. The water inside the line went foul and stayed foul. Dead pack mules bloated in the wet heat close enough that the smell became part of the position and the men held anyway day after day while the other battalions fought back toward them through the same hills.

Merryill went down at the height of the siege and was carried out. The commander subtracted from his own unit while it fought for its life. The relief columns broke through in April. The hill held. The battalion that held it was never whole again. They had just survived the worst fight of their war.

So why is this only the middle of the story? Two weeks after that hilltop, a staff officer arrived at Hunter’s tent with the next idea. Merryill, still flat on his back, sent word that a thrust over the mountains was being contemplated. Hunter put Galahad’s staff on it.

Their study improved the plan and Merrill built the final version around it for Stillwell. Three forces, H under Hunter, his first battalion with the Chinese 150th regiment. K under Kenisonson, the third battalion with the Chinese 88th. M under Colonel George McGee, the survivors of NH Pumga with 300 Kchin fighters beside them. And ahead of everyone went Captain William Laughen and Lieutenant Paul Dunlap.

With 30 catchin rangers of detachment, 101 and 30 local laborers sent to make a trail out of a rumor. What do you promise men who have nothing left to march on? Merryill gathered his battalion commanders and told them what would be done for Galahad when the mission was complete. Evacuation authorized without further order. He believed afterward that many men made the march on that promise alone.

Their advanced party’s reports came back with one recurring line. In places there was no path at all. Behind them came 7,000 men and every mule the theater could spare. K4 stepped off on the 28th of April. H followed 2 days later. The pass was the Nar Cayet. The official history says 6,100 ft.

The men climbing it did not count. The monsoon opened as they climbed. The so-called trail was closer to a catchin footway and 20 pack animals went off the mud ledges into the gorges. On its parallel route, Mforce lost fully half its animals to exhaustion and the drops and kept pace.

Anyway, dysentery was now so constant that men cut the seats out of their fatigues and marched on. This is the part I keep coming back to what the men did to their own uniforms and the fact that nobody ordered it. At a village called Rit Pong, the Chinese 88th fought the columns first real battle of the march. Took the place while the Americans blocked the escape trail and the columns moved on.

The mountains collected their price in officers, too. Kenisonson caught the might typhus on that trail, was evacuated, and died with shocking speed. One of nearly 150 men the disease took hold of. Every man left was counting the same two numbers.

miles remaining to the strip against Krations remaining in the pack. The mountains did everything the estimate promised and the column kept coming. What was left of it bivowak 2 mi from the prize on the night of May 16th and rounded up every civilian who might talk. Kchin informants insisted the garrison was not on alert.

A patrol reported the strip lightly held. Both were right. At 10 the next morning, the attack went in so cleanly that the official history compares it to a demonstration at a service school. The 150th regiment onto the runway. Galahad’s first battalion seizing the ferry crossing at Pamati.

Maroyama had perhaps 700 able-bodied men, two warned battalions in the town, airfield troops on the strips, laborers, and a hospital holding some 300 patients. say the two facts side by side again because they were now standing on the same runway. Professionals defending these mountains had rated them impassible in monsoon.

The men who had just crossed them were by their own medics reckoning unfit to march. Merryill watched one company come up onto the field, hardly a man walking normally. One platoon with the seats cut from their trousers and wrote afterward that they were pitiful but still a splendid sight.

Hunter judged the strip secure and sent the arranged code. The signal that opened the hardest one runway in Burma was the title of a Shakespeare comedy, Merchant of Venice. Two retellings put different clocks on that message. I’m using the official histories. Then the sky delivered. A glider company of the 879th Engineer Aviation Battalion, a battery of 50 caliber anti-aircraft.

Then General Straightmire running the sector’s air forces diverted British anti-aircraft troops of the 69th onto the field the next day. Guns pointed at the sky for men who had abandoned their own airdrop and marched hungry and who needed rifles and food. The record says Marilyn Hunter were sorely disappointed.

Stillwell’s diary and capital letters says, “Will this burn up the limeies?” And Maroyama surprised at 10 was decisive by five. That same evening, his ferry was moving the lead battalion of the 148th across the Irowati and into the town. The signal worked perfectly. The system it triggered had other priorities.

Sit with that sequencing because the whole siege is inside it. Who wins the next race? The transports or the ferry? That race should never have been close. Now the dates in order because the order is the story. May 17th, 5:00 in the evening, the ferry is running. May 18th, the 150th is sent into the town at noon.

Its first try, the previous afternoon, had gone down a wrong road toward the suburb of Sitapore, and in a maze of smoke and identical streets. Its battalions lose direction, fire into each other, and drive themselves back out. May 20th, the same regiment fights through to the railroad yards, is stopped and is withdrawn, carrying 671 casualties since the campaign opened.

Grant those soldiers their due green troops in their first city, and they went in twice. One of them, Yuguang Kai, a bodyguard to General Pon Yukun of the 50th Division, remembered the airfield attack as flawless and remembered the strange English phrase that went out to Stillwell when it was done. May 31st about 2500 Japanese are inside the town and Galahad’s second battalion has 12 men standing. Now cross the river and look back from the Japanese side.

The headquarters defending Maykina had filed the attacking force at 30,000 men and assumed replacements were arriving to match every casualty it inflicted. So concede the enemy his point because he had one. The mountains did to this unit exactly what his engineers would have promised. And the maps were never wrong about the rock, only in both directions now about the men on it. Both headquarters believed a number. Both numbers were wrong.

The numbers were wrong because two chains of command were guessing at each other in the dark and neither was a single thing. On the Allied side, task force intelligence set the garrison at 300 on May 18th and 500 by mid June. gross undercounts and the officer over those estimates was Colonel Joseph Stillwell, the commanding general’s son.

On the Japanese side, the decision did not belong to Maroyama. It belonged to the 33rd Army. A headquarters stood up only weeks earlier under Lieutenant General Masaki Honda, wedged between Tanaka’s dying division and General Masakazu Kowab’s Burma Area Army, which had bet the theater on Mal. Tanaka’s postwar complaint was precise.

The new army could not decide whether the 53rd division belonged at Kamaying or Mitkina. So for the crucial weeks it went properly to neither. Honda inspected the 18th on May 27th, judged it stronger than he had feared, never wavered that Matt Kina must be held to the last and committed the 53rd to relieve it.

A combat team under Colonel Asano was actually on the road when the threat to Moong forced its recall. what that summer read like from inside the Japanese line survives on paper. On the 7th of June on the Kamaying front, the commander of the 56th Infantry Regiment radioed his division a farewell that ended. I believe this will be our final parting.

Outside the town, the besieures lived on about 2 days reserve, everything by air. The army’s own historians reached for one comparison. Casino fought on a shoestring. Picture the strip after dark in the monsoon. Mud, lamplight, and every round of tomorrow arriving by parachute or transport wheel. While one army wrote farewells, the other went looking through hospital wards.

The enemy could not explain this unit. Its own headquarters no longer had to. The hunt through the wards is documented, and it is the ugliest paper in this story. Staff officers from Stillwell’s headquarters walked hospital hallways looking for any marauder whose fever read under 103°. Under that line, a man could be passed fit at the ward door and flown back to the fight, and some were re-evacuated within days at the forward medic’s insistence, too sick to stand a watch. A thermometer had become the standard of duty. The blame was later placed on doctors reading the order too zealously, which is its own kind of admission. Remember the promise from the mountain evacuation when the mission was complete. The strip had fallen. The siege redefined complete. Some men now knew that runway twice from a stretcher. Once leaving, once landing back. The arithmetic behind the

desperation was real. Evacuations running 75 to 100 a day. 15 to 30 men daily reporting typhus symptoms. Four men in five with dysentery. Two battalions of combat engineers pushed in as riflemen and green replacements flown into a siege for their first day of war. In late May, with Stillwell on the field, Hunter handed him a letter stating that Galahad was being treated unfairly and that the command was discriminating against it in favor of the Chinese. I think the letter was fair. I can also see why no headquarters ever forgives the man who writes it. Stillwell’s diary. Four words. Galahad is just shot. Here is the spine again. Third layer. Now the Japanese had misread these men in one direction. The theat’s own intelligence in another. And the third headquarters to get them wrong was their own. The enemy had run out of explanations. Their own army had run out of patience. Inside

the town, the general sent to die was reading his orders very carefully. Major General Genu Mizakami, commander of the 56th Division’s infantry group, had come up from the Salwine with his staff. The lead battalion of the 148th and two guns taking command over Maroyama’s garrison.

In early June, the 33rd Army took control of the battle and freed Tanaka for Kamaying. The order over Mizukami was to defend Mayetkina to the death. His own order gave it shape. hold the town at least three months and the country around it 30 days more. His logistics were one river. Through the gaps in the Allied ring, he ran a regular ferry across the Iawati.

Supplies in, individual replacements in, one boatload at a time, a rowing schedule set against a runway, while the garrison sick took places in the earthworks. His supply line, plainly put, was OS. None of this redeems the empire he served or the war it was losing. It explains one perimeter held with skill for 78 days. Then the dates close in.

July 26th, Galahad’s third battalion takes the north airfield and the ring seals. On or about the 1st of August with the main body of his garrison slipped out and away down river, Mizukami stays inside the perimeter and takes his own life. The letter of to the death satisfied by one man. The order survives in paraphrase. What he did next needed no translation. On the 3rd of August, the town is secured and fewer than 200 prisoners are taken. Hold the view from the Japanese bank a moment longer.

78 days bought with everything there was. 7 days after the town fell, the unit that had taken its airfield was abolished on paper. On the 10th of August, the 5307th was dissolved without even a formation. No bugle, no parade. It ended as a routing slip.

Lieutenant Samuel Wilson, who had led a recon platoon of the first battalion over those mountains, counted about a 100 combat effective men left by that date and added in his words that 99 of them were not very effective. Wilson himself went out carrying a leg wound, malaria, dysentery, and typhus. Of the six men in his typhus ward, he was the one who lived.

Merryill was gone again. The second heart attack had come within days of the capture. Kenisonson was already in the ground before the town he marched forever fell. So state the two facts one last time and answer them. Japan’s best division rated those mountains impassible in monsoon and the Americans who crossed them were medically unfit to march. The answer was never a mystery.

It was catching trails, supply falling out of the sky, and a command willing to spend a unit down to zero. And the reason three professional headquarters could not explain it. A doctrine that trusted terrain to stand guard, a phantom army of 30,000 and a command seam that would not choose. Both sides were right about the mountains.

Only one side had priced the men. Who files the afteraction report when the unit that fought the action no longer exists? What survives instead of a formation is paperwork? And the paperwork is stranger than the legend. Hunter explained after the war exactly how the count of the enemy broke.

Every Japanese soldier killed or captured had carried his name and unit written in India ink on the fly of his breaches. Read the ink and you could map the garrison. In June, the bodies began arriving without it, and no one could say whether a dead man belonged to a unit already tallied or a new one entirely.

When the ink stopped, the counting stopped with it. That is how professionals on both sides lost track of the same battle. Hunter’s verdict on his own men ran four words. Sick men have no morale. And by the accounts that survive, when he was relieved, he went home by ship. The better ending here would be Maroyama’s own account of that last night in the town. I looked. There isn’t one I can verify.

So, take the closest thing to his voice that exists. His regiment’s own ledger. Nearly 3,000 of the 114th dead or dead of disease. Some 1,800 wounded, barely a hundred taken alive. Three armies kept three ledgers of this battle, and the totals disagree. The ground they were counting is the same ground.

That ground earned out. By October, the strip had logged some 14,000 transport flights, moving more than 40,000 tons across country, once rated unreachable. The paperwork ended. The argument didn’t. The argument moved into slower institutions and it moved in dated steps. That same August, the survivors were folded into the 475th Infantry.

In June 1954, the 475th became the 75th Infantry. And from that regiment descends today’s 75th Ranger Regiment, which is why the six colors of the Marauder combat teams sit on the flash of every RERS’s beret. Every member of the 5,37th received the Bronze Star. Then came 76 years of mostly quiet until Congress passed the act awarding the unit the Congressional Gold Medal on the 22nd of September 2020 with the ceremony following in 2022 78 years after the dissolution.

Russell Hamler took his medal at 97 an old man handed an answer that arrived a lifetime late and said one thing worth keeping. I would like to see them outlaw wars. He died the day after Christmas 2023 at 99. The last living man of the original roster, the final signature on a story about sick men and impassible mountains with both facts true.

And one thing from May of 1944 is still in daily use. The thing still in use is the reason any of this happened. Fly to Mitka today and you land at Mitkana airport. The same field the Japanese army seized in May of 1942. The same field that changed hands on the 17th of May 1944 with the Irowati running past where the ferry once worked the dark.

An aircraft settles onto it the way the first overloaded transport did onto ground that three armies measured and mismeasured. The maps of this place still hold. It is only the men they never managed to measure. So tell me, did anyone in your family serve in the CBI in Burma or India or over the hump?