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By Root 1297 0

miles of Rangoon, BDA units suddenly attacked Japanese positions. Many Burmese welcomed the opportunity for revenge on a people they had welcomed as liberators in 1942, but who had since become their oppressors. One of them, Maung Maung, wrote: ‘Partisans, young men from villages, left their homes to march with us. We ate the food that the villagers offered us, wooed their daughters, brought danger to their doors and took their sons with us.’ This was a romanticised view of a tardy and cynical switch of allegiance, comparable with the conduct of many French people in the summer of 1944; but it helped to create a legend which Burma’s nationalists would later find serviceable.

By 29 April the British were at Pegu, fifty miles from Rangoon, amid torrential rain, harbinger of the coming monsoon. On the south coast, an Indian division staged the amphibious assault Churchill had always wanted, and pushed forward to the capital against slight resistance. The Japanese army was shattered, and had lost almost all its guns and vehicles. It maintained isolated pockets of resistance to the end of the war, but faced slaughter as shattered units sought to break through Slim’s army, which was finally deployed along the Sittang river to cut off their escape into Siam. In the last months, the British suffered only a few hundred casualties, while the 1945 Burma campaign cost their enemies 80,000 dead.

But the main business of closing the ring on Japan was meanwhile being done in the Pacific. On the morning of 19 February, three US Marine divisions began to land on Iwo Jima, an island pimple 3,000 miles west of Pearl Harbor and less than seven hundred south of Japan. An American watching the pre-landing bombardment said: ‘We all figured nothing could live through that, and the carrier planes were giving it hell, too.’ But the defenders were well prepared and deeply dug in. Carnage was severe – proportionately worse than that on D-Day: at nightfall, 30,000 Marines were ashore, but 566 were already dead or dying. The living trudged through volcanic ash up to their knees, in a moonscape devoid of cover; a rainstorm worsened their plight. Marine Joseph Raspilair wrote: ‘In all my life I do not think I have been as miserable as I was that night. All you could do was lay in the water and wait for morning so you could get out of the hole.’ Weeks of painful fighting followed. Cpl. George Wayman, a bazooka man, was in such pain from wounds as he lay for hours in a shellhole that he felt tempted to draw his bayonet and kill himself; he was eventually evacuated only after hours exposed to the Japanese fire that pounded the Marine perimeter.

Replacements trudged forward to reinforce line units, where many were hit before even learning the names of their comrades. Lt. Patrick Caruso kidded one such young man about being under age; soon afterwards the boy was killed, after just two hours on the island, without unslinging his rifle from his shoulder or glimpsing the enemy. The defenders’ ingenuity seemed boundless: a Marine was amazed to see a hillside suddenly open before his eyes, to reveal three Japanese pushing out a field gun. It fired three rounds, then was dragged back into the cave. Mortars eventually destroyed the gun, but a hundred such positions had to be taken out before the defences were overwhelmed. Officers learned to discourage men from seeking souvenirs, which the Japanese often booby-trapped. ‘The best souvenir you can take home is yourself,’ a laconic Marine commander told his company.

By 27 March, when Iwo Jima was secured, the Americans had suffered 24,000 casualties, including 7,184 dead, to capture an island one-third the size of Manhattan. Its airfields proved useful to B-29s returning from missions damaged or short of fuel, but they were little used for offensive operations. Geographically, Iwo Jima seemed a significant landmark on the way to Japan; but strategically, like so many hard-won objectives in every campaign, it is hard to argue that its seizure was worthwhile – the Marianas were vastly more important. The US Navy