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committed themselves to a target figure of 30 per cent of their war effort. This compromised the doctrine of Germany First more than the chiefs of staff cared to admit, but reflected the imperative created by American domestic opinion, so much more strongly committed to Japan’s defeat than to that of Germany. US commanders thereafter decided that resource limitations ruled out an early assault on Rabaul. The USAAF was unwilling even to allocate long-range bombers to conduct a major air offensive against Japan’s key base in the south-west Pacific before 1944. The chiefs of staff thus agreed that in 1943 Allied forces would pursue modest objectives: advancing up the Solomons to Bougainville, while MacArthur’s forces addressed the north coast of New Guinea. The latter was an exclusively US Army and Australian operation, though dependent on naval support.

The US Navy and Marine Corps were unfailingly sceptical about southwest Pacific operations, directed towards ultimate recapture of the Philippines. They saw them as a sop to MacArthur’s ego rather than a path to victory. The admirals preferred instead to exploit naval and air power to thrust across the central Pacific through the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana islands, the shortest route to Japan. It was a measure of the United States’s vast wealth that, instead of making a choice between these strategies, a decision was taken to undertake both simultaneously. Thereafter, Nimitz and MacArthur conducted parallel but separate and implicitly competitive campaigns.

The British, meanwhile, addressed themselves once more to Burma. Their retreat had ended in May 1942. In December that year, after the usual seasonal paralysis imposed by the monsoon, Wavell made a first tentative attempt to strike back, committing an Indian division against the port of Akyab, in the Arakan region of Burma facing the Bay of Bengal. Two attempted assaults failed, as did another thrust towards Donbaik in March 1943. The British field commander, Lt. Gen. Noel Irwin, held a reckless press conference at which he sought to explain Allied setbacks by asserting that ‘in Japan the infantryman is the corps d’élite’, while the British ‘put our worst men into the infantry’. It would take years, he said, to train Indian troops to the necessary standard to beat the Japanese. Allied censors smothered publication of his remarks, but they reflected the defeatism, incompetence and incoherence prevailing among British commanders in the East. Churchill minuted the chiefs of staff: ‘I am far from satisfied with the way the Indian campaign is being conducted. The fatal lassitude of the Orient steals over all these commanders.’

Although four million Indian soldiers eventually bore arms for the Allies and substantial British resources were deployed in the subcontinent, the generals were slow to renew effective operations. Churchill fumed about the large forces deployed in north-east India, achieving wretchedly little; he once described the Indian Army as ‘a gigantic system of outdoor relief’ because of the small number of fighting divisions it provided. Some 450,000 mainly Indian troops, along with some British units, confronted 300,000 Japanese holding Burma, but little useful was done to prepare this army for battle. Lt. Dominic Neill of the Gurkhas – Britain’s beloved Nepalese mercenaries – who arrived in India in 1943, said: ‘Neither I nor my Gurkha soldiers received any tactical training whatsoever until we came face to face with the Japanese.’

The only good news from Burma that year was generated by an operation far behind the enemy front, engaging 3,000 British troops led by the eccentric, indeed mentally unstable, Brigadier Orde Wingate. His ‘Chindits’ accomplished little of military value at a cost of 30 per cent losses, but created a highly serviceable propaganda legend. Their survival behind enemy lines, despite appalling sufferings, was held to demonstrate that British soldiers could sustain jungle warfare, a proposition many people had come to doubt. Before the Chindit columns left India, Wingate made it plain