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Wingate was killed in a crash during the March 1944 fly-in. The Chindits’ subsequent operations, like those of so many World War II special forces, cost much blood and produced notable feats of heroism, but achieved little. Wingate’s death came as a relief to many senior officers, not least Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, who regarded the Chindits as a distraction. Beyond such theatricals, more than two years were allowed to elapse between the ejection of the British from Burma in 1942 and their return across the Chindwin River. Stilwell’s scorn for British pusillanimity was justified, insofar as Churchill opposed an overland campaign to regain Burma. The prime minister had seen British and Indian forces worsted in jungle fighting in 1942. He dreaded another torrid slogging match on terrain that seemed unfavourable to Western armies.

Against the implacable opposition of his chiefs of staff, who were prepared to resign on the issue, Churchill pressed for an amphibious assault on the great Dutch island of Sumatra, a concept which he rashly compared with his disastrous 1915 Dardanelles campaign “in its promise of decisive consequences.” As late as March 1944 he revived the Sumatran scheme, causing the exasperated Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, to write: “I began to wonder101 whether I was in Alice in Wonderland.” If a Sumatran operation was not feasible, the prime minister urged landing troops from the sea below Rangoon.

Churchill’s lobbying for a grand South-East Asian amphibious adventure was futile, because Americans owned all the relevant shipping. They would commit their assets only to objectives favoured in Washington, which emphatically did not include Sumatra or Rangoon. Churchill fumed, on 5 May 1944: “The American method102 of trying to force particular policies, of the withholding or giving of certain weapons, such as carrying airplanes or LSTs [Landing Ships, Tank], in theatres where the command belongs by right of overwhelming numbers to us, must be…strongly protested against.” By this stage of the war, however, Washington’s control of Western Allied strategy had become almost absolute. “The hard fact is103 that the Americans have got us by the short hairs,” wrote a senior British officer. “We can’t do anything in this theatre, amphibious or otherwise, without material assistance from them…So if they don’t approve, they don’t provide.”

Washington dismissed a British request for two U.S. divisions to join operations in Burma. The Canberra government likewise rejected a proposal that two Australian divisions in New Guinea should be transferred to British command in South-East Asia. If the British wanted to recapture Burma, they must do so with their own resources. “If our operations formed merely104 a part of the great American advance,” cabinet minister Oliver Lyttelton warned the British chiefs of staff in March 1944, “we should be swamped. It [is] essential that we should be able to say to our own possessions in the Far East that we had liberated them by our own efforts.”

Thus, the British government knew that a campaign to retake Burma would be difficult, and would not bring the defeat of Japan a day closer. But an army must march, British and Indian soldiers must die, so that Churchill’s people were seen to pay their share of the price for victory in the Far East. Burma would be attacked overland from the north, because only the north interested Washington. Through its jungles and mountains ran a long, tenuous thread, the only land route by which American supplies could be shipped to China from India. Japanese troops occupied a vital section of this “Burma Road.” If they could be dispossessed, northern Burma liberated, then the U.S. could pursue its fantastically ambitious plans to provide Chiang Kai-shek’s armies with the means to become major participants in the war. At huge cost and despite chronic British scepticism, the road was being driven seven hundred miles north from India and south from