Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [220]
THIRTEEN
The Road past Mandalay
JAPAN’S 1944 DISASTERS in Assam and Burma prompted a wholesale sacking and replacement of its generals. The new commander-in-chief, Gen. Hoyotaro Kimura, set about painstakingly rebuilding his forces in readiness to meet the British Fourteenth Army, advancing south-eastwards. He offered no challenge to Slim’s crossings of the Chindwin in November and December. As the British advanced, they encountered pitiful relics of their 1942 defeat: a column of thirty-eight Stuart tanks, blown up when they could not be evacuated, together with scores of rusted civilian vehicles, some still occupied by skeletons. Slim snapped at a man who decorated his jeep with a skull, telling him to take it off: “It might be one of our chaps592, killed on the retreat.” In northern Burma, shortly before Christmas men of 19th Indian Division joined hands with advanced elements of Stilwell’s Chinese divisions at Banmaux. By the end of January, the Burma Road into China was at last open all the way to Kunming, and the first truck convoys of supplies began to move north. To acute British dismay, Chiang Kai-shek, having gained what he wanted from the campaign, ordered his Nationalist divisions back to their homeland, leaving Slim’s forces to pursue unaided the advance towards Rangoon.
It seemed to the Japanese inevitable that the invaders would now drive south towards Mandalay, that city of temples beside the Irrawaddy, a lyrical rendezvous in British imperial folklore. Kimura’s plan was to allow the British deep into Burma, where their lines of communications would become extended, while his own remained short. He then intended that the ten divisions of his 15th and 33rd Armies would smash Slim’s forces as they sought to cross the Irrawaddy north of Mandalay.
Unfortunately for Kimura, however, Slim anticipated his foe’s intention. In addition to notable powers of generalship, the British commander also possessed the luxury of strength, not only in infantry numbers but also in overwhelmingly superior air, artillery and armoured forces. He was able to support his advance with supplies air-dropped on an unprecedented scale, a facility which went far to counter the difficulties of terrain. Most of the Japanese formations, by contrast, lacked half their men and were desperately short of guns. Slim dispatched one British corps to make a noisy feint in the north—19th Division crossed the Irrawaddy at Thaneikkyin on 11 January 1945. This was where Kimura expected an assault, and the Japanese launched exactly the big counter-attack Slim wanted to provoke. Next, the British XXXIII Corps staged another demonstration north-west of Mandalay, before beginning river crossings at Ngazun on 12 February. This prompted Kimura to commit the bulk of his forces. Yet all the northerly activity masked Slim’s real purpose: to push another corps across the Irrawaddy fifty miles to the south-west at Pakokku, and then drive east to the vital road junction of Meiktila, far behind Kimura’s front, cutting off most of the Japanese formations in Burma from their supply lines. By St. Valentine’s Day 1945, the southerly British force, IV Corps, had secured an Irrawaddy bridgehead against negligible opposition, and was poised to launch the decisive coup of the campaign, the seizure of Meiktila.
A soldier of 17th Indian Division, George MacDonald Fraser, wrote wryly of Operation Cloak, Slim’s deception to confuse the Japanese: “He confused 9 Section593, too; we dug in at no fewer than three different positions in as many hours, Grandarse lost his upper dentures on a sandbank, little Nixon disturbed a nest of black scorpions in the dark…the general feeling was that the blame for the whole operation