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By Root 1192 0

found themselves isolated, immobilised and starving. A soldier on Bougainville wrote on 14 September 1944: ‘Old friendships dissolve when men are starving. Each man is always trying to satisfy his own hunger. It’s much more frightening than meeting the enemy’s assaults. There is a vicious war going on within our ranks. Can spiritual power degenerate to this?’ American air and naval dominance denied Japan any chance of launching an effective strategic counterstroke. Its soldiers, sailors and airmen still enjoyed many opportunities to die bravely, to inflict suffering and death on their foes and the oppressed subjects of their empire. But the nation’s fate was sealed.

It was rationally unnecessary for the Allies to launch major ground operations in South-East Asia – or, for that matter, the Philippines. If they merely maintained naval blockade and air bombardment, the Japanese people must eventually starve, their oil-deprived war machine would be reduced to impotence. Given the nature of war, democracies and global geopolitics, however, ‘eventually’ was not soon enough. In the spring of 1944, it was taken for granted that Allied forces must attack the Japanese wherever possible. The British had confronted them for two years on the north-east frontier of India without making significant advances, but now at last resources, including large numbers of US transport aircraft, became available to mount an offensive with overwhelming superiority.

Churchill opposed an overland operation to reconquer Burma; Gen. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell complained bitterly to Marshall in July 1944 that ‘[The British] simply do not want to fight in Burma or reopen communications with China.’ This was true. ‘India is not at present a suitable base from which to launch large-scale operations,’ asserted a joint Anglo-American report in the spring of 1944. ‘Her transport system is already overtaxed, her political situation unsatisfactory, and her economic position precarious.’ Australia, said this document, offered far more convenient basing facilities. The British Empire’s soldiers had been repeatedly worsted in jungle warfare; Churchill preferred an amphibious landing in southern Burma, below Rangoon, or better still on the tip of Sumatra, to secure a base from which to retake Malaya. Washington, however, refused to provide assault shipping merely to enable the British – as Roosevelt and his chiefs of staff saw it – to reconquer their eastern empire. Americans no longer took much trouble to salve Churchill’s sensibilities, and made explicit their determination to direct the future course of the eastern war. A US official visiting London said bluntly, ‘It is now our turn to bat in Asia.’ The Americans demanded an overland assault on northern Burma, to reopen the road from India to Chiang Kai-shek’s China.

Chiang declined to commit his own troops to further this objective unless or until the British advanced from Assam. Britain sulkily acceded to American wishes, though both Churchill and his local field commander, Lt. Gen. William Slim, recognised that, win or lose, Fourteenth Army’s operations could contribute little to Japan’s defeat by comparison with America’s Pacific campaign. The initial Allied plan for 1944 called for two of Slim’s divisions to launch a new offensive in the coastal Arakan; two Indian divisions would probe from Assam into northern Burma, while Stilwell directed a thrust south from China to take Myitkyina and reopen the ‘Burma Road’. The latter operation would be supported by the deployment of an expanded Chindit force, six brigades strong, airlifted into northern Burma behind the Japanese front, then supplied by American aircraft.

Yet even as the Allies began to concentrate their forces, the enemy preempted them: two Japanese divisions attacked in the Arakan, to pin down British forces before launching a major offensive into Assam, with Imphal as its principal objective. The operation was recklessly ambitious, now that Indian and British troops were deployed in such strength. Lacking air superiority, with few tanks and guns, it