Inferno - Max Hastings [398]
Thereafter, some 40,000 tons of supplies and equipment were flown to Myitkyina, for onward shipment to China. These deliveries could do little to remedy the infirmity of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, which remained incapable of inflicting much harm on the Japanese, and chiefly enriched the Nationalist warlords who stole most of the matériel before it reached their troops. Though the Japanese paid a heavy price for sustaining their occupation of eastern China throughout the war, committing a million soldiers to control its vastnesses, they had little difficulty in defeating barefoot, half-starved Nationalist troops wherever they fought them. Mao Tse-tung’s communist forces in the north enjoyed some success in persuading Westerners that they were engaging the Japanese more effectively, but in reality Mao conserved his strength for the looming domestic struggle for control of China.
An Indian formation crossed the Irrawaddy north of Mandalay in mid-January. During the following month, three divisions staged the main crossing west of Sagaing, much farther south. The river was a mile wide, and the British wholly lacked the engineering and amphibious resources Eisenhower’s armies deployed in Europe. But, with most Japanese forces committed farther north, they secured a bridgehead by dogged improvisation and some striking displays of courage. The ruins of Mandalay fell to the British on 20 March. This was an important symbolic victory, but Kimura was already falling back to fight the critical battle at Meiktila.
The nationalist leader Aung San’s Japanese-sponsored Burma Defence Army (BDA) prepared to change sides. Some British officers resisted the notion of providing arms to his nine battalions, fearing these would soon be used against themselves. However, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Allied supreme commander in Southeast Asia, overruled them and ordered SOE officers to work with the BDA, saying, “We shall be doing no more than has been done in Italy, Romania, Hungary and Finland.” Aung San met Slim, apologising for his inability to speak English. The general responded with characteristic courtesy that the embarrassment was on his side, for being unable to speak Burmese. They agreed to fight together, and on 27 March, when Slim’s army was within a hundred 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, a 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 sustained isolated pockets of resistance to the end of the war, but faced slaughter as broken units sought to break through