Japanese Soldiers Thought the British Army Was Finished—Burma Proved Them Wrong

There is a photograph taken on the evening of the 15th of February. [sighs] 9:42 room at the Ford Motor Factory on Bukatima Road on the island of Singapore. There are no explosions in it and no bodies with men in uniform on both sides of it. And it is the single most catastrophic document in the history of the British Army.

Around the table sit a number of men in uniform. Japanese officers upright still, their hands flat on the wood. on the other four British officers and one of them is leaning slightly forward with a pen in his hand. His name is Arthur Ernest Persal. He is 54 years old, a lieutenant general in the British army and he is the general officer commanding Malaya.

He has a long narrow face and prominent front teeth that the cartoonists of the period were never kind about. He fought on the psalm. He was wounded at Delville. He won a military cross, then a distinguished service order, and then a bar to that distinguished service order, which is the army’s way of recording that a man has done the same extraordinary thing twice.

Whatever else can be said about Arthur Perl, and a great deal has been said, he was not a coward. He is signing away 80,000 men. Across the table sits Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, 56 years old, commander of the Japanese 25th Army. He is a big man, broad through the shoulders with a shaved head and a heavy jaw.

70 days earlier, his army came ashore in northern Malaya. 70. In that time, it has moved down the length of the Malay Peninsula, roughly 500 mi of jungle, plantation, and river, and it has arrived here at the southern tip of the British Empire in Asia, and it has taken. Yamashad is worried, and this is the detail that gets lost.

His own staff said so afterwards, and the ammunition returns back them up. Yamashida is worried, and this is the detail that gets lost. His staff said so afterwards, and the ammunition returns back them up. His men are nearly out of artillery shells. The force he brought across the Johor Strait is smaller than the force sitting in front of him considerably smaller.

And if the British realize that if they simply refuse to surrender and fight street by street through Singapore city for another week, he runs out of shells and his entire campaign ends in a siege he cannot win. And Perl says yes. It is the largest capitulation in the history of the British army. It has never been surpassed.

Winston Church 3,000 mi away. We’ll call it the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history. And for once, the Churchillian phrasing is not an exaggeration, but a plain statement of fact. Across the whole Malayan campaign, the British Empire loses somewhere in the region of 130,000 men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.

The Japanese 25th Army loses fewer than 10,000. That is the ratio. That is what the world sees in February 1,942. And in Tokyo, in Rangon, in the officers Japanese army from Manuria to Java, a conclusion is being drawn. It is drawn quickly. It is drawn confidently and it is drawn on the basis of overwhelming evidence. The conclusion is this.

The British soldier does not stand. Cut him off and he retreats. Get behind him and he panics. Put a roadblock across the single road he depends on and he will abandon his guns. Abandon his vehicle looking for a way around. He is brave enough in a line in daylight with his flanks secure.

Take away his flanks and he collapses. This is not racism or not only racism though there was plenty of that on both sides. It is an operational assessment based on 70 days of continuous evidence and it will be reinforced over the following 3 months by a second campaign in which the same thing happens again. The Japanese army in 9,942 believes it understands the British army.

That belief is going to kill somewhere in the region of 180,000 Japanese soldiers 200 mi northwest of Singapore on the day PCAL signs. The second British collapse is already underway. Burma is a country shaped roughly like a diamond with a long tail hanging south. It is bigger than France. Down its spine run rivers. The Irwow, the Sitang, the Chinduin, the Salwin.

All of them running north to south. All of them wide. All of them barriers to an army moving in any direction other than the way the water goes. Between the rivers are mountains covered in jungles so thick that a man can be invisible at 15 paces. On the western edge along the frontier with India, the hills rise into ranges 8 and 9,000 ft high with almost no roads through them at all.

And for five months of every year, from May to October, the southwest monsoon arrives and drops rain on all of it in quantities that are difficult to describe to anyone who has not stood in it. Not tenuous vertical wall of water that turns tracks into rivers, rivers into lakes, and any piece of ground that has been walked on into liquid mud a foot deep.

Sees Victoria Point on the southern tip of Burma in December 1,941. The main invasion by 15th Army crosses from Thailand into Tennisim on the 20th of January 1,942. The British force facing it is Burma Army and it is a force in name, two divisions in theory. The 17th Indian division, most of whose units have been trained for desert warfare in the Middle East and have never seen jungle.

The first Burma division built around Burma rifles battalions whose Burmese soldiers are being asked to fight for a colonial administration that many of them have no particular attachment to and which is visibly losing. There is no realistic air cover. There is one all-weather road running north out of Rangon and Rangon is the port through which every single bullet tin of bully beef gallon of petrol and reinforcement draft must arrive.

If Rangon falls, Burma is finished because there is no other way in. On the 23rd of February [sighs] 9:42, the campaign produces its first catastrophe. The 17th Indian Division is falling back toward a bridge over the Sitang River. It is the only crossing. Japanese infant moving cross country through terrain the British have assumed to be impassible.

Get close to the western end of the bridge, the far side, the safe side. While most of the division is still on the eastern bank, fighting its way toward it. The commander on the spot, a brigadier named Noel Hugh Jones, is presented with an arithmetic problem that has no acceptable answer. If the Japanese take the bridge intact, they have an open road to Rangon and Burma Falls in a fortnight.

If he blows the bridge, he saves Rangon for a while and strands two of his three brigades on the wrong side of a river some 500 yd wide, running fast with the tide. At 5 in the morning, he gives Janeir’s fire the charges. The center spans drop into the water. What follows is the thing the survivors would talk about for the rest of their lives when they talked about it at all.

Thousands of men on the Eastern Bank in darkness and confusion, hearing the explosion and understanding immediately what it meant. Some bills out of bamboo. Some could not swim at all. Men stripped off their equipment and their boots and went into the water and did not come out.

rifles, machine guns, more the entire fighting equipment of two brigades went into the mud on the eastern bank because a man swimming 500 yardds against a tidal current cannot carry a Bren gun. The 17th Indian Division reassembles on the far side with roughly 80 officers and just over 3,000 men out of a formation that should have numbered 8 or 9,000.

It has almost no heavy weapons left. Rangon is abandoned on the 7th of March. The oil installations at Syri are demolished. The port cranes are wrecked. The last ships pull out. And with Rangon gone, the campaign stops being a campaign and becomes something else. And a retreat, once it starts in earnest, has a gravity of its own.

It is at this exact moment, the worst possible moment, when everything that can be lost has already been lost, that a 50-year-old lieutenant general arrives in Burma and is handed the pieces. His name is William Joseph Slim. He was born in Bristol in 1,891 and grew up in Birmingham. And he was not a member of the class that traditionally supplied British generals.

His father was a wholesale iron monger whose business did badly. There was no no Sandhurst as a young gentleman cadet. No private income. He worked as a school teacher in a Birmingham elementary school in one of the poorest districts of the city and then as a clerk for Stewarts and Lloyds, the steel tube manufacturers.

What got him into the army was a technicality and a certain amount of nerve. He attended lectures at the University of Birmingham’s officer training corps, though he was not enrolled as a student there. And when the first world war broke out, the OTC connection was enough to get him a commission. He was wounded badly at Gallipoli in 9,915, he went back.

He won a military cross in Mesopotamia in 9,916 and was wounded there again the following year. Between the wars, he transferred to the Indian army and joined the sixth Girka rifles. And he wrote short stories for magazines under a pen name to make ends meet because a British officer in an Indian regiment without family money was permanently short of it.

He is a heavy set man with a jaw like the front of a bus. He speaks erdo and gurkali. He has commanded troops in East Africa, Iraq, and Syria. And he has been wounded three times. On the 19th of March 1,00 942, Slim takes command of Burmachor Burkors, which is the operational grouping of what is left of the 17th Indian division and the first Burma Division.

Above him is General Sir Herald Alexander, who arrived on the 5th of March and whose first act was to order the evacuation of Rangon. Slim looks at what he has been given. He has two divisions that are divisions in name only, one of which has lost most of its weapons in a river. He has no air support to speak of after the last Allied fighters are withdrawn from Mwe in late March.

He has an ally, Chong Kaishek’s Chinese Expeditionary Force moving down from the north whose command arrangements are a diplomatic maze and whose divisions are considerably smaller than their name suggest. He has a road network that consists of one road. He has a monsoon coming in 8 weeks that will close everything.

and he has an enemy that has just been reinforced to four divisions and is moving faster than he can react. What follows between March and May 1,942 is the longest retreat in the history of the British army. Roughly 900 m from central Burma to the Indian frontier at this matters and it will matter enormously later, so it is worth being precise about it.

Bur does not disintegrate. It fights a series of rear guard actions all the way. At Yanang in the middle of April, the first Burma Division is surrounded by the Japanese 33rd Defar over 100 degrees and is extracted only with the help of the Chinese 38th Division under a divisional commander named Sun Lee Jen.

Before they go, the British demolition teams destroy the Yan oil fields, the largest oil installation in Burma. And the smoke from the burning wells hangs over central Burma for days from 30 m away. A black column standing over the whole retreat like a marker. But it is a defeat and everyone in it knows it is a defeat.

Men march at night to avoid the Japanese aircraft that own the daylight. They march on rations that thin week by week caller appears. Dentry is universal. Malaria takes men down in numbers that begin to exceed the numbers taken down by the enemy. And there are not enough drugs and the men who are too sick to walk have to be carried and there are not enough hands to carry them.

Ahead of the army and mixed into it are the refugees. Hundreds of thousands of Indian civilians, merchants, laborers, clerks and their families, people whose grandparents had come to Burma generations before walking north toward a border most of them have never crossed. Along tracks not designed for the purpose in the heat and then in the rain.

The estimates of how many died on that walk vary widely, and no reliable figure exists. The lowest credible estimates run to tens of thousands. The highest run far beyond that. In the middle of May, the monsoon breaks early, which is the last thing the retreat needs. At Schweian on the east bank of the Chinduin, Burkhorse has to abandon almost everything it has left.

There is a track out of the valley and it will not take vehicles. Guns are destroyed. Lorries are driven into the river. Tanks are set on fire. The Seventh Armored Brigade, which is fought all the way from Rangon, burns its own remaining tanks and walks out. And then the men climb. The Rob goes through the Chin Hills and over the Manipur ridges.

And it goes up thousands of feet on tracks that the rain has turned to grease. They climb in single file. They climb carrying men on stretchers. They arrive at Infl the third week of May with no tentage waiting for them. And they sit down in the mud slim road afterward in a phrase that is stuck because it is honest that they looked like an army and they looked like soldiers and all they had was what they stood up in and their weapons and that they still had their weapons.

Around 13,000 casualties out of a force of some 30,000. Every gun and vehicle of any size gone. Burma gone. the land route to China gone, which is a strategic catastrophe of a different order because it means Chiang Kai-sheks war can now be supplied only by flying transport aircraft over the eastern Himalayas.

But here is the detail that will matter more than any of the others. And it is a detail the Japanese do not register at the time. The British army walked out of Burma. It did not surrender in Burma. There was no second Singapore. And the man who brought it out spent every one of those 900 miles doing something that almost no defeated commander does.

He was taking notes because Slim marching out of Burma in the rain has arrived at a question that his superiors in Delhi and London are conspicuously not asking. The question is not who is to blame. The question is why does this keep working? And the answer he arrives at is uncomfortable because it is not that the Japanese soldier is superhuman.

It is that Japanese tactics are exploiting a specific weakness in the way the British army thinks and that the weakness is not in the men. Here is the Japanese method stripped to its bones. British and Indian units in Burma and 1,942 are roadbound. They have to be. Their supplies come by Lori. Their artillery is towed. Go back by ambulance.

Their orders come along the line of communication. The road is not just how they move. The road is their life support. The Japanese infantryman is not roadbound because he has been trained and equipped not to be. He moves on a lighter ration scale rice, some dried fish, whatever can be obtained locally. His divisional transport includes pack animals and in Burma considerable use of local labor and requisition bullet carts.

He is trained deliberately and specifically to move through terrain that a western staff officer looking at a map would mark as impassible. So the Japanese battalion does not attack the British position from the front. It goes around it through the jungle at night and it establishes a roadblock 2 or three miles behind it.

And that is the whole trick. That is it. Because the moment the road behind a British brigade is cut, an automatic process begins in the mind of every officer in that brigade from the brigadier down to the sub altern. Our supply line is severed. Our wounded cannot be evacuated. Our water resupply is not coming. Therefore, we are surrounded.

Therefore, we must break out to the rear before it is too late. And so, they break out. They abandon the position, which is usually a perfectly good position they could have held. They turn around and attack their own rear to clear the block, which means attacking a prepared enemy over ground of his choosing.

They lose their heavy equipment doing it. They arrive at the next position exhausted and reduced and short of ammunition. And the Japanese who have followed them do exactly the same thing again. Repeat this eight or nine times over 500 miles and you have the Malayan campaign. Repeat it over 900 miles and you have Burma. Slim’s insight, and he was not the only man to have it, but he was the man in a position to act on it.

It was that the Japanese method depended entirely on the reaction, not on the action. The roadblock itself killed almost nobody. The roadblock worked because of what the defender did next, which meant that if the defender did something else, the entire Japanese operational method would fail. And by 1,942, there was a technology that made something else possible.

Transport aircraft feed the surrounded brigade from the sky, and the roadblock behind it means nothing. worse than nothing because the men who built that roadblock marched in light expecting to eat British rations by the end of the week. Reverse the encirclement. Let them surround you. Make the encirclement the trap.

It is one of those ideas that sounds obvious the moment it is said and is fantastically difficult to implement because it requires four things simultaneously. It requires enough transport aircraft which in 1,942 do not exist in the theater. air superiority, at least air parody, which in 1,942 does not exist either. It requires an army disciplined enough to sit still while enemy troops move behind it, which is a psychological demand, not a technical one.

And most of all, it requires the soldiers to believe the aircraft will actually come. The last is the hardest. You cannot order a man to believe something. So, the idea goes into Slimsheaded info in May 1000, 942, and there it sits. cuz the man who has it commands nothing at all. Now we have to leave Slim sitting in the rain and go to the other side because the second half of this story is being written at the same time.

And his logic is exactly as important. In the middle of 1,00 942 taken, Japanese planners in Rangon and Singapore begin looking at the map and asking the obvious next question. What now? There is a proposal for an offensive westward into India. A plan given the designation operation 21. The reasoning behind it is not stupid. India is where any British counter offensive must come from.

India is politically unstable in 1,942. The quit India movement erupts in August of that year and is suppressed with mass arrests. A Japanese advance into Assam and Bengal. The argument run might destabilize British rule entirely and would at minimum push the British so far back that Burma could never be threatened.

And the Imperial Japanese Army rejects it. This is the first turn of the story that most retellings skip past, and it is one of the most important because it establishes that the Japanese army was not incapable of clear thinking about the problem. In 1,942, it thought clearly. The staff officers who examined Operation 21 looked at the ground between the Chinduan River and the Indian plane, the Naga Hills, the Chin Hills, across the entire axis of advance, crossed by tracks and not roads, impassible to wield transport for 5 months of the year. and they looked at

the tonnage that would have to be moved across it daily to keep three divisions in action and they said no. The logistics were assessed as beyond the capacity of the force available. The plan was shelved. The lesson here is exact and worth holding on to for the rest of this story. The Japanese army knew in 942 that an invasion of India across the Chinuin could not be supplied.

Everything that follows depends on that knowledge being set aside. The man who sets it aside is Lieutenant General Rena Mutaguchi. He is born in Saga Prefecture in 1,888 which makes him 55 and 1,944. He is a graduate of the Army Academy and the Army War College. He is short must stop to strong opinions loudly held and he has a particular kind of reputation in the Japanese officer corps.

A man of fighting spirit who attacks a man whose confidence does not fluctuate. He also has a personal claim on the war itself. On the night of the 7th of July 1,937, Muraguchi was the colonel commanding the Japanese regiment at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Ping when the shooting started that opened the war with China.

Whatever the exact sequence of events that night, and it is still argued over Mudaguchi, was the officer on the spot who chose escalation and he knew it and he regarded the war that followed as in some sense his war. In Malaya, he commanded the 18th division and he was wounded in the fighting there.

And then his division was moved to Burma. In March, 1943, he is appointed to command the 15th Army in Burma, the army responsible for the entire central front facing India across the Chinduin. And here is the strange part, the part that makes the man genuinely difficult to write about. Honestly, when Mutaguchi first encountered the idea of invading India, he opposed it.

He was among those who thought the terrain and the supply problem made it unworkable. What changed his mind was the British. In February 1, 943, an eccentric and abrasive British brigadier named Ord Wingate led a force of some 3,000 men, the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade, who called themselves the Chindits across the Chinwin River into Japanese-held Burma.

They were supplied entirely by airdrop. They marched for weeks behind Japanese lines, blew up sections of the Mandandalay Miatkina railway, and eventually broke into small groups and walked out. The operation was called LongCloth. By any conventional military counting, Longclaw was a failure.

Of roughly 3,000 men who went in, around 2,200 came out, and a substantial proportion of those were so ill or so broken down that they never returned to active service. The damage to the railway was repaired in a matter of days. Nothing of strategic consequence was achieved, but the British press, desperate for any Burma story that was not a retreat, made Windgate a national figure.

And on the other side of the Chinduin, Mutaguchi read the same raid and drew a different conclusion. If 3,000 lightly equipped British troops could cross the Chinduin and move through those hills, then the hills were passable. If they were passable eastward, they were passable westward. The 942 assessment was wrong. The staff officers had been too cautious.

That at least is what Mudiguchi said after the war. Historians have generally accepted it with the caveat that by the time he said it, he had every reason in the world to be pointing at somebody else. This is the mechanism by which a plan that had been correctly rejected on logistical grounds came back to life. Not because the logistics had changed, because a raid had made the terrain look negotiable, and because the man reading the evidence wanted a particular answer.

Mudaguchi begins pushing for an offensive into India. He calls it operation Yugo. Its objective is in the town in the Manipur plane that is the base of the entire British position on that front and the hill station 60 mi to the north through which the only road to Inful passes. Take those two places. Cut the rope. Destroy the British forces in the Manipur plane and the door to India stands open.

His superiors are Nak Kazu Kuwab commanding Burma Area Army above him has reservations. Officers on the Southern Expeditionary Army Group staff have reservations. The same logistical arithmetic that killed Operation 21 is still sitting on the table and it is not improved. Mudiguchi’s answer to the arithmetic is the part that will eventually consume his own army.

And it is worth stating precisely because it is not the answer of a stupid man. It is the answer of a man who has correctly identified how his enemy behaves and has assumed reasonably that his enemy will continue to behave that way. His answer is we do not need to solve the supply problem because the British will solve it for us.

His divisions will carry roughly 3 weeks of rations. They will drive herds of cattle and goats with them as walking food. Within those three weeks, they will reach Info where the British have accumulated the largest supply dumps in eastern India. Food, ammunition, fuel, vehicles stacked in depots across the Manipur plane because Info is the forward base for the eventual reconquest of Burma.

And the British will bearing assumption. That is what the whole plan rests on. They ran in Malaya. They ran in Burma. When the road behind Infl is cut at Kohima, they will do what they have always done, which is fall back westward toward the railheaded Dimmapur and leave their stores behind them because they will not have time to destroy them and they will not consider holding a position that is surrounded.

Mudaguchi is reported to have referred to the operation supply arrangements with grim humor as Churchill rations. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo approves operation Yugo on the 7th of January 1,944. The largest land offensive Japan will mount in the entire war against the Western Allies is authorized on the strength of an assumption about enemy psychology.

Now go back to the British side to 1,943 because there is one more disaster to get through before the story turns and it is the disaster that puts the right man in the right job. In December 1,942, the British launch their first offensive of the Burma campaign. It is not Slim’s operation. This point gets consistently mangled and it is worth being clear about.

The formation responsible is Eastern Army commanded by Lieutenant General Noel Irwin who is 50. Irwin is an officer of considerable personal courage and a temperament that could be described charitably as difficult. He and Slim have history during the retreat from Burma Irwin had been notably curt with him.

Slim account his own records Irwin telling him at one point that he was not impressed with him and Slim replying that he was not very impressed with Irwin either. The plan is an advance down the Mayu Peninsula in the Arkan, the coastal strip of western Burma with the object of taking Akiab Island and its airfield. The formation doing the advancing is the 14th Indian Division under Major General Wilfred Lloyd.

And crucially, Irwin runs the operation directly from Eastern Army headquarters, bypassing the core level. Slim’s 15 core headquarters is deliberately kept out of it. The advance goes well for exactly as long as there is nobody in front of it. Then it reaches the Japanese positions at Dawnbike on the western side of the peninsula and stops.

The Japanese have dug bunkers into the sides of a dry water course of logs and earth several feet thick sighted to cover each other invisible until a man is on top of them. British attacks go in frontal without adequate artillery without armor in the first attempts and are shot down. They go in again. They are shot down again.

Over the first months of 10,00 943, the 14th Indian Division is fed into Donbike brigade by brigade until it is controlling something in the region of nine brigades for a divisional headquarters to handle and it is still not through. In March, the Japanese 55th Division under Lieutenant General Koga counterattacks and they use the method.

They go around the eastern flank through hills the British have assessed as impassible and they come out behind the British line. And in March 1,943, the British army does exactly what it did in 1,942. The sixth brigade is cut off at Inden. Brigade headquarters is overrun in a night attack on the 6th of April, and Brigadier Ronald Caendish is taken prisoner.

He is killed within hours by British shellfire when his own side bombards the position he is being held in. The line unraveled. By May, the British are back where they started in December, having taken around 5,000 casualties, and the monsoon closes the campaign. Slim’s 15 core headquarters is finally brought in during April to try to salvage it, which means Slim inherits the wreck at the point where nothing can be done with it.

And then Irwin signals Delhi requesting that Slim be relieved of his command. What happens instead is that Irwin is relieved. General Sir George Gford replaces him as Eastern Army Commander. And Irwin, to his considerable credit, sends Slim a signal, one of the few genuinely funny things in the history of the Burma campaign.

He tells Slim that he had been sacked and that the only consolation he can offer is that it is not Slim who has been sacked. Slim keeps his job more than keeps it. On the 15th of October, 1,943, a new army is formed for the Burma front and William Slim, 52, is appointed to command it. It is designated the 14th Army.

By the time it is at full strength, it will be the largest army the British Commonwealth fields anywhere in the Second World War. Close to a million men at its peak. And most of the men in it are not British. Remember that. It is going to matter more than anything else in this story and not in the way you would expect.

They will name themselves. Affection. The forgotten army because the newspapers are full of North Africa and then Sicily and then Italy and then in the summer of 10 944 [snorts] is a paragraph on page 5 if it appears at all. Slim takes command of a force that in 20 months has lost Burma, lost the Iraq and been beaten every single time it has met the Japanese army in the field.

And somewhere on the other side of the Chinuin River, a 55-year-old Japanese general is final built on the certainty that this will continue. Both men are right about something. Mudaguchi is right that the British army in Burma has always broken when it is encircled. Slim is right that this is a habit and not a law of nature.

Only one of them has 12 months to do anything about it. The dry season, the campaigning season, the only months in which large formations can move in Burma at all runs from November to May. Whatever Slim is going to change, he has to change it before then. And he has to change it in an army that has been beaten so consistently that its own soldiers have stopped expecting anything else.

The two of them are, without knowing it, about to run the same experiment from opposite ends. One is about to find out whether an army can be taught to stand still. The other is about to find out what happens if it does. There is a story about Slim in the autumn of 10943 that historians of the campaign keep returning to because it is small and unglamorous and it explains more about what happened at Coheima than any account of a battle can.

He is touring the medical arrangements of his new army. He has the sick returns in front of him and the sick returns are a death sentence written in ink. For every man being evacuated to India with a bullet wound, roughly 120 are going back sick. Malaria above all, then dysentery, which in the Assam Hills killed a substantial share of the men who caught it, and for which there was no reliable treatment.

An army does not need to be defeated in battle if it is losing that many men to mosquitoes. It simply evaporates. There is a drug. It is called Meepocrine. The Americans suppresses malaria. If a man takes it every single day without fail, the trouble is that it turns the skin a dull, tastes bitter.

And there is a rumor running through every army in the tropics in 1,00 943 that it makes a man impotent. Soldiers were throwing it away. Officers were not checking. So Slim does something that has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with command. He orders surprise blood tests. Random units no warning.

And he issues an order stating that if any unit’s meocrine discipline is found to be below standard, the commanding officer of that unit will be relieved. He relieves three battalion commanders. That is the whole story. Three men sacked not for losing a battle, but for not making their soldiers swallow a pill.

Word went through the 14th Army in about a week, the way that kind of word always does. And within a matter of months, the malaria rate in his forward divisions had fallen by something in the order of 95%. Think about what that actually means, not as a statistic. As divisions that had been bleeding away 3 and 400 men a week to fever were suddenly keeping them.

When the fighting came in 1,944, the battalions that met the Japanese army were at strengths that no British formation in Burma had held in two years. Slim did not out general Muraguchi with the MPran order. He outlasted him. And in Burma, lasting was the whole game. He built forward treatment to malaria forward treatment units cited close behind the fighting line.

So that a man who went down with fever was treated where he was and returned to his battalion in days rather than being put on a train to Bengal and lost to his unit for 6 months. Sounds like administration. It was administration. It was also the difference between an army that exists and an army that does not. The second thing he changed was harder because you cannot order it.

He had to change what his soldiers believed. Not on parade grounds. He went out to units in the field. And he stood on the bonnet of a jeep or a ration box and he talked to them and he did it hundreds of times over that year. Men who were there described the same thing afterwards over and over that he did not sound like a general.

He sounded like a man explaining a problem to people he expected to help solve it. What he told them had three parts and they were all uncomfortable. First part, the Japanese soldier is very good, not a fanatic to be sneered at, not a jungle superman to be feared. A well-trained, tough, disciplined professional who has beaten us fairly and repeatedly.

And any officer who tells you otherwise is going to get you killed. The second part, we have been beaten because we have been fighting the wrong way. And that is a thing that can be fixed. The third part is the one that landed. And it landed because it was so specific that a man could hold on to it in the dark.

If the Japanese cut the road behind you, you are not surrounded. Stay where you are. Fight where you stand. The supplies will come by air. And when they have exhausted themselves attacking you, we will counterattack and it will be their turn. Every word of that was a promise. And every man hearing it had 2 years of evidence that promises from British headquarters in Burma were not worth much.

So Slim had to make it true before he could make it believed. He had to change what an encircled British position physically was. That meant three practical things. And this is where the rebuilding stops being inspirational and starts being engineering. Air supply. By late 10 943, the theater was beginning to receive Dakotas the C-47 DC3.

With no armament and an extraordinary tolerance for being flown appalling weather by exhausted men, slim staff worked out the tonnages, the drop zone, the pack, the parachute recover, the whole unglamorous science of throwing a division’s daily needs out of the side door of an airplane onto a patch of hillside the size of a football pitch.

And they train the ground troops to receive it, which is a skill air superiority. Without it, transport aircraft are simply targets. Over the winter of 10,00 943 and into 10,00 944 the USAF flying spitfires and hurricanes and later thunderbolts ground down Japanese air strength over the Assam and Iraq fronts. This is one of the least discussed elements of the campaign and it is close to decisive.

By spring 1,944, Japanese aircraft of the battlefield were an occasional nuisance rather than a daily fact of life. And the box that was the tactical answer to the roadblock and it was almost absurdly simple. If a Japanese force gets behind you, you do not turn around and fight your way out. You form an all round defensive perimeter or box with your artillery inside it, your supplies inside it, your wounded inside it, and you sit in it.

Every man in the box fights, including the ones who are not infantry, cooks, drivers, clerks, signalmen, mule handlers. There is no rear area inside a box because a box has no rear. And you wait because the enemy who has just encircled you came in light carrying days of food expecting to capture yours. Slim also in that year, one more piece of luck that was not luck at all, but the product of a great deal of quiet work.

He began to know what the Japanese were going to do. Wireless intercept and traffic analysis in the theater had improved substantially. Patrol activity across the Chinwin increased. Prisoners, though always scarce against an enemy who rarely surrendered, produced material. Through the early months of 1,944, an outline began to assemble at 14th Army headquarters.

Something big was coming. It was coming in the archon first and then that knowledge was worth more than a division. It allowed Slim to plan for the offensive he expected rather than react to the one that arrived. But knowledge is not belief and belief was still the missing item. The 14th Army in early 1000. 944 had been retrained dosed and told a great many encouraging things.

It had not yet stood. The Japanese gave it the chance in February. Operation Hagago opened in the Iraq on the 4th of February 1,944. In Japanese planning terms, a supporting attack designed to pull British reserves south into the coastal strip so that they would not be available in the Manipur plane when Mudaguchi’s main offensive went in a month later.

The Japanese 55th Division did what the Japanese 55th Division had done to the same British formations in the same place a year earlier. Force under Major General Tokataro Sakurai moved at night cross country around the eastern flank of the Seventh Indian Division through hills. The British were not watching closely and came out behind them.

On the morning of the 7th of February, they overran the headquarters of the 7th Indian Division at Lang Sha. Read that again because in 1,00 942 or 1,000 943 that sentence would have been the end of the story. A divisional headquarters gone. The general commanding Frank Messervy, 50, forced out of his own command post in his pajamas, escaping across country with his staff.

The division decapitated, cut the formula, executing exactly as designed. Messervy is a useful man to know in this story. Regular Indian army Hudson’s horse, a cavalryman. He had commanded the fourth Indian division and then the seventh armored division in the western desert. And he had been captured by the Germans there in 1,00 942 and had escaped by passing himself off as a private soldier. Batman and walking away.

He was not a man who regarded the loss of his headquarters as the end of a battle. He and his staff made their way northeast on foot to a place called Senzua. Syna was a roughly circular clearing in the jungle about a thousand yards across ringed by and it happened to contain the division’s administrative area the ammunition dump, the ration dump, the fuel, the ordinance workshop, the main dressing station full of wounded men.

It was in the ordinary run of things the softest target on the battlefield, the place where the fighting troops were not. Messervie took command there and made it the box. What was inside the admin box as it became no listing because it is not what you would choose. Two squadrons of the 25th draons with Lee tanks, some field and mountain artillery, a West Yorkshire battalion, and then in overwhelming numbers, the men of the service corps clerks, storemen, cook, mule drivers, medical orderlys, ordinance mechanics, men whose

rifles had been drawn and cleaned and never fired in anger. They were given the perimeter. Everyone was given a piece of the perimeter. around them. Three separate British and Indian held their own positions and did not withdraw. That was the order and they obeyed it. And overhead from the 6th of February onward, the Dakotas came.

This is the image to hold. Men in a jungle clearing dug into shallow and above them a stream of unarmed transport aircraft coming in low and slow over the ridges, dropping parachutes and colors coated by contents. One color for ammunition, one for medical stores, and the parachutes drifting down into a perimeter under fire while men run out into the open to drag them in.

Around 700 tons of supplies went into the Iraq boxes by air over the course of that battle. The Japanese could not understand it. Their entire operational assumption was that a cut road meant a dying force. Instead, the road was cut and the force was being fed from the sky and was not going anywhere at all. The fighting inside the admin box was as ugly as anything in the campaign.

Japanese infantry attacked at night repeatedly and got inside the perimeter more than once. The ammunition dump was hit and burned for two days, exploding in the middle of the position. The perimeter was so small that Japanese machine guns could sweep across it from ridge to ridge, and the British 25 pounders were firing over open sights at ranges where the gunners could see the men they were killing.

And on the night of the 7th of February, the thing happened that removed any remaining ambiguity about what kind of fight this was going to be. Japanese troops overran the main dressing station. There were wounded men in it lying on stretchers and there were doctors and orderlys with them.

The Japanese took the position and they killed the patients where they lay and they shot a number of the medical officers. Some estimates put the dead at around 35 others higher. A handful of men survived by hiding under bodies or by crawling out through the scrub in the dark. The news of it went round the perimeter within hours and it went round the 14th Army within days.

Whatever thought any man in that box might have had about the possibility of surrender ended that night. There was nothing on the other side of the wire to surrender to. The admin box held for 18 days. Sakurai’s force, which had come in with rations for around 10 days on the assumption that it would be eating British food by then, began to starve inside a week.

His men had captured the dumps at Lang Shang, but they had not captured Senoa, and Senoa was where the food was. By the 24th of February, the relief column of the 26th Indian Division fought its way through the Nakidok Pass and the siege was over. By the end of the month, the Japanese and the Iraq were withdrawing and they were withdrawing Hungary.

Hago cost the Japanese in the region of 5,000 casualties out of a force of roughly 8,000 engaged. It achieved nothing. Worse than nothing, the British reserves it was designed to draw south were flown north again to Inville in March and Dakotas in a matter of days. But the number that mattered was not the casualty figure.

The number that mattered was one. One Japanese encirclement executed cor against the same division on the same ground with the same method that had worked every time for two years and it had failed. Slim’s promise had been tested and had held. The aircraft had that came. The box held the counterattack came. Every man in the 14th Army now knew someone who had been in the arkan.

5 weeks later, Mudaguchi launched the main offensive on the assumption that none of this had happened. Operation Yugo began on the night of the 7th and 8th of March. 1,944 when the Japanese 33rd division crossed the Chinduin in the south. Over the following week, the 15th and 31st divisions crossed further north.

85,000 fighting men in total with something over 50,000 support and labor troops behind them, moving west into the mountains on foot. They drove cattle with them. That is not a colorful detail. It is the supply plan. herds of oxen and goat walking rash driven up mountain tracks alongside the infantry [clears throat] to be slaughtered as the columns advanced.

A significant number of the animals fell off the tracks or died before they could be eaten. Each man carried on average around 3 weeks of food. 3 weeks that was the entire margin. Mudaguchi split his force into three thrusts. The 33rd division under Lieutenant General Mtoso Yanaga would come up from the south to cut the Tidim road and destroy the 17th Indian division.

The 15th division under Lieutenant General Masafumi Yamuchi would strike the infl plane from the northeast. And the 31st division under Lieutenant General Koku Sato 51 would march northwest, seize Kohima, then cut the single road running from the rail head down. Kohima was the throat of the whole British position. One road, take Kohima and Infla severed from India.

Sad’s orders were to take Kohima and hold it. That was all. Muraguchi expected it to take him a matter of days. There was already something wrong between those two men and it is going to matter enormously. So it is worth naming now. S Koku and Mudiguchi Rena belonged to opposite factions in the pre-war Japanese army.

Sado to the Imperial Way faction, Mudiguchi to the control faction. Sad careers had been shaped by that Diguchi. S had opposed the entire concept of Yugo. He is recorded as telling his divisional officers before they crossed the Chinuin that the plan would fail and that they would be starved to death in the mountains. He then marched his division over those mountains anyway because he was a professional officer of the Imperial Japanese Army and he had been given an order.

Remember that he said it in 10 weeks it is going to matter more than anything else in this story. Slim’s intelligence had told him an offensive was coming. What Slim got wrong and he wrote afterwards without any attempt to dress it up that he got it wrong was the scale of the northern thrust. He expected a regiment at Kohima, perhaps a reinforced regiment, something in the order of three or 4 thousand men, because the logistical assessment on on the British side said that the Naga Hills could not support more than that.

Sad came with 15,000. The British had made the same terrain calculation the Japanese staff had made in 1,000, 942, and had reached the same answer. And S was in the process of demonstrating that the answer was wrong, that a Japanese division could in fact be pushed across those mountains.

if you were willing to accept that it might not be able to get back. The other thing Slim got wrong was timing. The 17th Indian Division on the Tidim Road far to the south was ordered back to the Infil plane later than it should have been and it had to fight its way through Japanese roadblocks for 2 weeks to get there.

It very nearly did not. In itself was closed off by the end of March. Around 150,000 men, the fighting troops of fourth corps under Lieutenant General Jeffrey Skoon, 50, plus the enormous administrative tale of a forward base were surrounded in the Manipur plane. And Slim, having been surprised, made the decision that defined him.

He did not order a withdrawal to protect the road. He accepted encircled, ordered it supplied entirely by air, and set about the business of feeding it. The Infel ran from April to June. Transport aircraft were pulled from other commands, including controversially from the hump route supplying China. Something in the region of 19,000 tons of supplies and 12,000 reinforcement casualties.

And a large number of non-combatants came out. That Aguchi’s plan required the British at IML to run. The British at did not run because they they did not have to. But all of it depended on Cohima because the airfields the Dakotas were flying from were in the Brahmautra Valley and the base and rail head they drew from was Dimmapur and between Dimapur and everything to the south sat one small hill station on a ridge and slim had 446 men in it.

Kohima in April 1,944 was a place of no military significance whatsoever until the exact moment it became the most important ground in Asia. sat at around 5,000 ft on a saddle of ground where the road from Dimmapur crossed a ridge before running south to Imol. It was a hill station, a place where colonial officials went to escape the heat of the plains.

There was a deputy commissioner’s bungalow with a garden and in the garden there was a clay tennis court. There was a hospital. There were terrace gardens on the slopes below the bungalow cut into the hillside in steps. The deputy commissioner was a civilian named Charles Pausy, 50, who had served in the Great War, had lived and worked among the Naga people for 20 years.

spoke their languages and was trusted by them to a degree that the British administration elsewhere in India could only have envied. When the Japanese came, Py did not leave. He stayed in his bungalow through the siege on the front line in the middle of it. And the Naga villagers, who owed the British Empire nothing at all, carried ammunition and water up the hill under fire, brought out wounded men on stretchers over mountain tracks, and provided the intelligence that told the British where Japanese columns were.

Nagas were killed doing it. They kept doing it. The garrison that assembled at Kohima in the first days of April was not a garrison in any proper sense. It was whatever happened to be within reach. The fourth battalion of the Royal West Kent regiment, roughly 446 men ordered up from Dimapur at the last possible moment by Major General Robert Ranking.

Arriving on the 5th of April, literally hours before the road was cut. Their commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel John Ldy. Men of the Asam Regiment, a young Indian army regiment raised in thousand 941 who had already fought a delaying action at Jasami and Carosome by time. The Assam rifles, a paramilitary frontier force, some Burma regiment troops, Indian general duty companies, convolescence from the hospital, non-combatants of every description.

Something like 1500 men of whom perhaps a thousand were armed and able to fight. Overall command fell to Colonel Hugh Richards, a 50-year-old officer who had been posted to a Chinda training role and had in effect been given a garrison nobody expected to have to defend. Against the Msado’s 31st division, 15,000 men. The Japanese cut the road on the 4th of April.

The siege proper began on the 6th. What happened over the next 13 days at Kohima is one of the few actions in the Second World War that soldiers of other armies hearing about it afterwards found difficult to believe. The perimeter started small and got smaller. every day a little less ground. The garrison was pushed back off jail hill, off detail hill, off the field supply until by the middle of April the entire defended area was down to something in the region of 350 yards across a space you could walk over in 4 minutes. If anyone had been

able to walk over it, which they could not cuz every yard of it was under observation and fire. There was one water point, a small spring balloons were laid on it. Water came up at night in cans carried by men who sometimes did not come back. Later water was dropped by parachute and inner tubes and jerkens and a proportion of the drops fell outside the perimeter into Japanese hand and could be watched from the trenches.

The wounded were laid in the open on the terrace slopes below the bungalow because there was nowhere covered to put them. They were shelled where they lay. Men were wounded in the trenches, carried down to the terraces, wounded again on the terraces, and carried nowhere because there was nowhere. The assistant director of medical services later described conditions that had no parallel in his experience.

And for almost the entire siege, the front line ran across Charles Pauly’s tennis court. That is not a figure of speech. It is a survey line. Japanese positions on one side of the court, British on the other, at a distance of roughly 20 to 30 yards. close enough to throw grenades by hand, which both sides did continuous for nearly two weeks.

Close enough that men on each side could hear the other side talking. The bungalow behind the court changed hands more than once. The Japanese attacked at night, which was their doctrine and their strength. They came up the slopes in the dark, shouting, and the defenders held fire until they could see shapes and then fired at ranges of a few yards.

In the mornings, the wire was full of dead men, and the following night more came. A British officer who was there is the thing he could never get out of his memory. The dead of both sides lying unburied on ground too swept by to bury anyone on in the heat for two weeks. By the middle of April, the Royal West Kents were down to a fraction of their strength.

Companies were commanded by lieutenants and platoon by corporals. Ammunition was counted. Air drops came in and a portion of them landed in Japanese lines because the perimeter was too small a target. And here is the point at which the story turns. And it turns not in the British trenches, but in the Japanese headquarters. Because Sato’s division was also dying, the march over the mountains had eaten almost the whole of his margin.

His men arrived at Kohima with days of food left, not weeks. And everything after that depended on capturing British stores. They took the field supply depot at Kohima on the 8th of April. It was not enough. It was never going to be enough for 15,000 men. S began signaling Mudaguchi for supplies almost immediately.

He signaled again and again. Mudaguchi’s 15th Army had no supplies to send because the whole basis of 15th Army’s plan was that it would not need to send any. There was no depot behind Sato. There was no road. There was a mountain range and a monsoon coming. The relief force was already moving. The British second division under Major General John Grover, a regular British division shipped from the United Kingdom, had been rushed forward from Dimapper and it fought its way down the road from the north against Japanese blocking positions. It reached

the tennis court area on the 18th of April and over the 18th and 19th the surviving garrison was relieved. The Royal West Kents walked out. Of the walked in on the 5th of April, a large proportion did not. They had held for 13 days against odds of roughly 10 to1. And here is the detail that tells you what Kohima actually cost the Japanese.

And it is the most important sentence in this part of the story. The relief of the garrison on the 18th of April did not end the battle at Kohima. The battle at Kohima went on for another two months. Casato’s division was still there. Dug into the ridge and it had to be removed hill by hill. Garrison hill kook field supply deep d I snaga village ardura spur and fighting through May in the opening range that has been compared by men who saw to the western front.

Bunkers taken with grenades with flamethrowers and with tanks winched up slopes at angles no tank is designed for. The tennis court itself was finally cleared on the 13th of May when an M3 medium 49th Regiment, Royal Armored Corps, was winched up onto the court and fired into the Japanese bunkers at point blank range.

2 months for a hill station with a tennis court on it. And through all of it, Sado kept signaling and Mutaguchi kept ordering him to attack and nothing came. The men of the 31st division were eating grass and lizards. They were dying of dysentery in their bunkers. They had no artillery ammunition worth speaking of. Sad’s medical officers were reporting that a large proportion of the division was no longer fit to fight.

Somewhere in the second half of May, the tone of Sato signals to 15th Army changed. They stopped being requests. What he did next no Japanese divisional commander was supposed to be capable of doing. There is a moment in every campaign where the fighting stops deciding the outcome and something else takes over at Kohima. That moment came in the last week of May 1000 944.

And it did not happen in a trench. It happened in a signals tent in the hills east of the ridge between two Japanese generals who had hated each other since before the war began. Kotoku Sato, 51 years old, commanding the 31st division of the Imperial Japanese Army, had been asking for food for 7 weeks. He had asked politely at first in the correct form through the correct channels. Then he had asked directly.

Then he had begun sending signals that no divisional commander in the Japanese army sent to his army commander because they were not requests anymore. told 15th Army headquarters that his division had received nothing, not reduced supply, nothing. He told them that his men were eating grass.

He told them the division would be destroyed where it stood and that the responsibility would not be his. Mudaguchi’s replies came back ordering him to attack. Attack with what was the question Sado had stopped bothering to ask. His division had crossed the Chinwin with roughly 15,000 men and three weeks of rations. It was now the end of week 11.

His artillery had a handful of shells per gun, and the tracks behind him, the tracks he had come in on, the ones no wheeled vehicle had ever used, were dissolving into mud and running water. His medical officers were reporting men dying in their bunkers of dysentery and starvation without a shot fired at them. And in front of him grinding forward hill by hill was the British second division and the 7th Indian division and the 33rd Indian brigade with 10 with artillery that never seemed to run out with aircraft overhead every day the cloud

allowed. On the 25th of May Sado signaled 15th Army that unless supplies arrived he would withdraw Had his division to a position where he could feed it. He was not asking permission. He was giving notice. Mudaguchi refused. Categorically Kohima was to be held. And on the 31st of May 1,944, Lieutenant General Kotokus Sado ordered the 31st Division to abandon Kohima and March East.

Stop on that date because in the history of the Imperial Japanese Army, there is almost nothing else like it. This was an army in which officers killed themselves over failures that other armies would have handled with a reprimand. An army in which the surrender of a position was frequently answered with a final charge rather than a withdrawal.

An army whose entire disciplinary culture was built on the absolute unquestionable authority of the superior officer and a divisional commander in contact with the enemy disobeyed a direct order from his army commander and pulled 15,000 men off an objective the emperor’s headquarters had authorized. He did it in writing. He signaled 15th Army that Coha was being abandoned and that he was taking the responsibility.

He is reported to have told his staff that the tactical ability of 15th Army headquarters lay below that of cadets. There is no version of this in which Sato is a hero. He was a commander in an army of occupation in a war of aggression whose division had killed a great many men who had done nothing to it.

But there is a version in which he is something rarer than a hero and harder to look away from a professional who has finally understood that the plan is a fantasy, that the men above him will not admit it, and that if he obeys, every one of his soldiers will die on a hillside for nothing. He chose his division over his career and over the entire apparatus of obedience that had made him.

The 31st division began walking east on the 1st of June. Mudaguchi’s response was to relieve Sado of command and to begin the process of having him court marshaled and this is the second turn and it is the one that says more about the state of the Japanese army in Burma than any casualty figure. The court marshall never happened.

It was quietly abandoned because a court marshal is a proceeding with evidence and testimony and Sodto had made it extremely clear that his defense would consist of one argument. that 15th Army had sent an army into the mountains of Assam with three weeks of food and no means of resupplying it on the assumption that the British would run away and that when the British did not run away, 15th Army had ordered its divisions to starve in place rather than admit the plan had failed.

That defense would have been made under oath on the record with the supply returns attached. So instead of trying him, the army declared that Sado was mentally unfit, that he had suffered a breakdown, that the whole affair was a medical matter rather than a command matter. He was never given another command. He never accepted the finding, insisting he had been sane and [clears throat] correct.

And the record indicates he was both. Think about what it means that an army would rather label a general insane than let him explain himself in open court. That is not a defeat on a battlefield. That is an institution that knows it has done something it cannot defend and is protecting itself from its own paperwork.

By the beginning of June, all three of Mudaguchi’s divisional commanders were gone or going. Lieutenant General Matso Yanagida of the 33rd Division in the south had been in open conflict with Muraguchi for weeks over the pace of his advance and the state of his men. He was relieved in May. Lieutenant General Masafumi Yamamui Division northeast of Infall was dying of tuberculosis while commanding in the field. He was relieved in June.

He died in August and Sodto was gone. Three divisions, three commanders removed in a matter of weeks by an army commander who could not accept that the problem was the plan. Murudiguchi himself was still insisting on the offensive into the third week of June. Still ordering attacks on Info by formations that were down to a fraction of their strength and had no ammunition to attack with.

The road to Info was reopened on the 22nd of June 1,944 when troops advancing south from Kima met troops pushing north from the Infol plane at milestone 109. The road had been closed since the end of March, 85 days, and for every one of them, Infall had been fed from the air. On the 3rd of July, Imperial General Headquarters formally canceled Operation Yugo and then the retreat began.

And the retreat was worse than the battle. There is a phrase the survivors used, and it is not a phrase invented by a British propagandist or a documentary narrator. It is what the Japanese soldiers called the track themselves, Hakotskaido, the road of bones. It ran east from the Assam Hills down to the Chinduin through mountains in the height of the monsoon.

The men walking it had been on starvation rations for months before they started. They had dysentery, berry, berry, and tropical ulcers that would not close in the wet. Many had no way their rifles because they could not carry them. The rain did not stop, not for hours, for weeks. Tracks became rivers.

Men who sat down to rest did not get up. Men who fell in the mud sometimes could not be pulled out of it by comrades who had no strength left to pull. The wounded and the sick who could not walk were left. That is the plain fact of it. In some cases, they were left with a grenade. Japanese accounts of that retreat describe walking for a constant presence on both sides, men sitting against trees in the attitude of resting, men lying where they had gone down, remains that the rain and the maggots had already reduced.

The name was literal. It was a road you could follow by the bones on it. Behind them came the 14th Army pushing because Slim had no intention of letting them reassemble. Now, the numbers, and these numbers deserve to be said slowly, Operation Yugo committed roughly 85,000 Japanese fighting troops. Japanese casualties came to somewhere in the region of 55,000.

Of those around 30,000 were dead. And of those 30,000 dead, the majority, the clear majority did not die in combat. They died of starvation and disease on the tracks and in the bunkers because a plan had been approved on the assumption that the enemy would run away. British and Indian casualties across and Coha came to roughly 17,000.

It was at that point the largest defeat the Japanese army had ever suffered on land. Not the largest in Burma, largest in the history of the Imperial Japanese Army. Three divisions destroyed as fighting formations. Strategic initiative in Burma since January 1,942 gone permanently and irretrievably. Murudiguchi was relieved of command of 15th Army at the end of August 1,944.

His superior Lieutenant General Masakazu Kaburma Area Army was relieved at the same time. Murudaguchi lived until 1,966. He spent the post-war decades arguing that Yugo had been sound, that he had been let down by subordinates that Sodto had betrayed him. Almost nobody who had been in Burma agreed with him.

Now, most tellings of this story stop here because Infil and Kohima are the dramatic part. But if you stop here, you miss the thing that actually answers the question this whole story is built on. Because a defensive victory, however extraordinary, does not by itself prove an army has changed. Armies win defensive battles by luck and by terrain all the time.

What proves it is what the 14th Army did next. Because in the year that followed, Slim took the army that had run 900 mi in 1,00 942 and used a do to the Japanese offensively at speed over the same ground. Exactly what the Japanese had done to the British 3 years earlier. 14th Army crossed the Chinwin in December 1,944. Slim’s plan was to bring the Japanese Burma area army to battle in the open on the Schwebo plane northwest of Mandalay where he had armor and air power and they had neither.

It was a good plan and it was based on the reasonable assumption that the Japanese would defend forward of the Irowati river. They did not. In one of the better pieces of general ship on the Chanocide in the whole campaign, Lieutenant General Hayotaro Kimura, who had taken over Burma area army, withdrew behind the Irati.

He gave up the Schwebo plane without a fight. He intended to let the British cross a river 3/4 of a mile to a mile wide, catch them strung out on the far bank with their supply line stretched over a mountain range behind them, and destroy them there. Kamura Kai’s own admission thoroughly surprised. His entire plan had just evaporated.

And then he did something that very few commanders in the war did well and almost none did quick. He threw the plan away and built a new one. In the field with two core already moving, the new plan was called extended capital. It is one of the great deceptions of the Second World War and almost nobody has ever heard of it. Would continue to advance on Manderlay from the northwest openly, noisily, as Kamura expected.

It would cross the irati north of the city. It would look like the entire 14th army and meanwhile for core an entire core with armor would disappear. It would turn southwest off the expected a and move roughly 300 m down the Ganga Valley through country the Japanese regarded as impassible for a mechanized force in total wireless silence using a dummy headquarters transmitting on fifth core frequencies from the north so that Japanese signals intelligence would continue to place it where it was not.

at the end of that march would cross the Irowati far to the south and drive east to a place called Mike. Mike Tilla was not a prize. It was a throat supplying the entire Japanese army facing Manderlay ran through Mike Tilla. It’s hospital. Cut Mike Tilla and the Japanese forces at Mandandalay would be an army with no artery to be resupplied, unable to be reinforced, unable to withdraw as a formed body.

Precisely and deliberately a roadblock. It was the Japanese method at core scale by the army. That method had been used to destroy in 1000 942. The march took weeks. A cores of tens of thousands of vehicles moved down a valley on a track that engineers were building in front of them as they went in silence and the Japanese did not detect it.

4 core crossed the Irowati at Nyangu on the 14th of February 10945. The British official history calls it the widest opposed river crossing attempted anywhere in the war. It was carried out with insufficient boats, many of them with unreliable outboard motors by men who had rehearsed on rivers a fraction of the width.

Then the armor came ashore and turned east and moved fast across dry open in the way armor is supposed to move and had almost never been able to move in Burma. Mike Tilla was reached at the end of February. The town was defended by roughly 3 to 4,000 men, a substantial number of them from hospitals, sick and wounded soldiers issued with rifles and put into buildings because there was nobody else.

They fought to the end. Almost none surrendered and the 255th Indian Tank Brigade cleared the town building by building. Mike Tilla fell on the 3rd of March 1,945 and at Mandandalay Kimura’s army stopped being an army. Kimura understood the disaster immediately and threw everything he could scrape together into recapturing Mike Tilla through most of March. The counterattacks failed.

They failed in part because the Japanese formations attacking Mike Tilla were themselves being supplied through Mike Tilla. Mandandalay was taken on the 20th of March 945 when the Girkas and the Royal Birkshshire and the men of the 19th Indian division finished clearing Fort Duffren and Mandalay Hill. Everything after that was pursuit.

The 14th Army now had to reach Rangon 400 m south before the monsoon broke in May because once the rains came, the roads would close and an army halted in the rains in central Burma with a long air supply line would be in serious difficulty. They covered the distance in about 6 weeks. Armored columns running down the road in railway corridors, bypassing resistance, refueling from airdrops, moving at a pace that would have been respectable in France.

Rangon fell on the 3rd of May, 1,945. When the Seaburn force of Operation Dracula came up the river and the airborne troops came in, they found the Japanese had already gone. Allied prisoners left behind in Rangon jail had painted a message on the roof for the reconnaissance aircraft. A Royal Air Force officer, Wing Commander Saunders, landed at Mingaladin airfield and walked into the city to confirm it was empty.

Japanese resistance in Burma continued for another three months in scattered pockets. In July, the remnants of the Japanese 28th Army trapped west of the Sitang River attempted to break out eastward across the Sitang bend in the monsoon flood. It was a massacre. Of roughly 17,000 who attempted it, something in the order of 10,000 died.

Many drowned in a river and flood under artillery and air attack. That was the last significant action of the Burma campaign. Three and a half years later, crossing in almost exactly the way it had begun at the Satang in February 1000, 942, but with the positions reversed. Absolutely. So the question this whole story was built on, did Japanese soldiers fear the British army more than any other enemy? The honest answer is that no such thing can be measured and any narrator who tells you otherwise is selling something. Japanese officers had

enormous respect for the Red Army after Kalen Gol in 1993. Japanese soldiers on Pacific islands feared American firepower in a way that has its own extensive literature. But there is a narrower claim and it’s documented and it is in some ways more disturbing than the sweeping one. The Imperial Japanese Army had a method.

It was a very good method. It had beaten the British in Malaya in Burma in the first Arakan. It rested on a single assumption about the enemy’s mind that a Western army with its supply line cut would retreat. The 14th Army was the force that broke that assumption, not by outshooting the Japanese, though eventually it did.

By refusing to do the one thing the entire Japanese plan required it to do. And when the method failed, the Japanese army in Burma had nothing behind it. No logistical reserve, no fallback plan, no mechanism for a commander to say out loud that the operation was impossible without being declared insane. That is the fear worth understanding.

Not fear of the British soldier as an individual. Fear of an enemy who had learned to do the unexpected thing in an army that had made the unexpected thing unthinkable. Now, the part that gets left out of nearly every version of this story and should not be. The 14th Army was not in the main British. At its peak, it numbered close to a million men.

The largest army the British Commonwealth put into the field anywhere in the war. The overwhelming majority of its fighting strength came from the Indian army, Punjabi, Musulman, Seikhs, Dograss, Jats, Rajputs, [sighs] [gasps] Kuma. There were Girka battalions from Nepal men who were not British subjects and never had been.

There were the 81st and 82nd West African Divisions Nigerians, Gold Coasters, Sierra Leonins, Gambians who fought in the Arakan and the Cabal Valley. There was the 11th East African Division. There were British battalions among them, good ones, and they were a minority. The men who held the ridge were the fourth Royal West Kents, the Assam Regiment, the Assam rifle, and Naga villagers who carried their ammunition and their wounded.

And there is a reason this matters beyond fairness. Japan’s political strategy in Burma rested on the belief that Indian soldiers would not fight for the British. India in 1,942 was a country in open political revolt against British rule. Japan raised the Indian National Army from Indian prisoners of war taken Singapore and Sububas Chandra Bose led it and elements of it fought alongside the Japanese atol.

The strategy assumed the 14th army would come apart along the lines of empire. It did not come apart. The Indian divisions at Imal and Kohima and Mike Tilla fought as well as any formations in any Allied army in the world. And many of the men in them had no love whatever for the British Empire and intended to see it ended and did see it ended 2 years later.

The thing that Japan believed would destroy the 14th Army was the thing that made it unbreakable. Then everybody went home. The 14th Army had called itself the Forgotten Army since 1,943. It’s a joke that was not really a joke and it turned out to be exactly right. The war in Europe ended on the 8th of May, 1,9455 days after Rangon fell.

The newspapers were full of Berlin. 3 months later, the Pacific War ended with the atomic bombs and the Soviet invasion of Manuria, and the newspapers were full of that. Burham back to Britain to a country that had followed Normandy day by day and could not have found infil on a map. The Indian soldiers went home to a subcontinent that was 2 years from partition and had other things on its mind.

and the veterans of the 14th Army found themselves in the new India, New Pakistan. Having fought for the wrong side of a history that was about to be rewritten, the West Africans went home to colonies where nobody in authority had any intention of thanking them, Slim was made a field marshal. He became chief of the Imperial General Staff and later Governor General of Australia.

He wrote a book about the campaign called defeat into victory and it is still 70 years on. One of the very few books by a senior commander of that war that soldiers of other nations read to learn how to think. He never claimed the victory was his. The book is largely a catalog of his own errors examined honestly and that is precisely why it lasted.

The Japanese survivors went home to a destroyed country. Many of the men who had walked the road of bones never spoke about it. Saddok unfit died in 10 959 still insisting he had been right to save what was left of his division and at Kohima on the ridge where the tennis court was there is a cemetery it is looked after still and is very quiet and it holds the graves of well over a thousand men from Britain from P from Nepal from a lying on the ground they held at the entrance there is a stone it carries 14 words adapted by an officer of the second division from a line

written by the classist John Maxwell Edmunds after the first world war. When you go home, tell them of us and say, “For your tomorrow, we gave our today. The tennis court is still there. It has been kept. You can stand on it now.” A small thing, an ordinary rectangle of ground on a hillside in northeast India, and it takes about 20 seconds to walk from one end of it to the other.

In the spring of 1,944, that was the distance between two armies. And it took five weeks to cross it.