Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [137]
China could do little; the ground war there was at a stalemate. Millions of people in China died of famine in 1943, and Chiang Kai-shek could do almost nothing about it. The Japanese undertook local offensives called “rice offensives,” designed to procure supplies for themselves and deny them to the already starving Chinese. Relations between General Stilwell and the generalissimo continued to degenerate, and Stilwell was upstaged by American Air Force General Claire Chennault, whose former Flying Tigers had now become part of the Army Air Force. With Chiang supporting him, and later on with backing from Roosevelt too, Chennault managed to upgrade American air operations over China. By the end of 1943 the United States planes dominated Chinese skies and were striking even at Formosa. Things did not go so well on the ground. The earmarking of supplies for the air forces meant that the Chinese armies did without. Chiang was also increasingly preoccupied with the Communist problem and diverted substantial numbers of divisions to a blockade of the Communist-held territories, further reducing his effectiveness against the Japanese.
The British in 1943 launched two Burmese offensives, though relatively little was achieved in either. The earlier of these was called the First Arakan campaign; General Wavell, anxious to restore his troops’ confidence, attacked before he was really ready for it, in January. The Japanese held hard, then counterattacked brutally, employing their usual encircling and infiltration tactics. The result was that the British took heavy losses, and the troops lost rather than gained confidence; they were more convinced than ever that the Japanese were unbeatable in the brush.
The second attempt was rather different. One of Wavell’s brigadiers was a visionary named Orde Wingate; he believed that the counter to Japanese penetration was for the British to penetrate even more deeply into the enemy lines. Organizing a special raiding force known as “Chindits,” Wingate mounted a long-range penetration of the jungle, hoping to interdict Japanese supplies. One of the dicta of the strategic bombing enthusiasts was that the nearer the front the interruption was, the more immediate the result; the farther back, the more profound. Wingate believed the same thing, but the method he proposed to achieve the interruption was different. The Chindits infiltrated Japanese territory in several small columns, then united for operations. They stirred up a hornet’s nest, and the Japanese quickly chased them back out, and nearly a third of the Chindit force, more than a thousand men, were casualties. The Chindit campaign too was therefore regarded as a failure, though it did serve as something of a morale booster. Later in the year there was some hope of British-Chinese cooperation in northern Burma, but it came to nothing, lost in the morass of internal Chinese problems.
Away up in the far north, the Americans retaliated against the Japanese-held islands of Attu and Kiska. Reaching out through the Aleutian chain, they built air bases nearer and nearer to the islands. Eventually, they isolated them by naval action as well, and, in the small battle of the Komandorski Islands an American and a Japanese squadron fought the last of the old-style naval battles, ships against ships with no aircraft around to interfere. In May soldiers of the U. S. Army landed on Attu. The 2,500-man Japanese garrison fought to the bitter end, then launched a suicide charge that finished in a hand-to-hand struggle in the American line; only twenty-nine of the Emperor’s soldiers survived the battle, and in proportion to the forces involved, Attu was bloodier than any battle in the Pacific except Iwo Jima. Later in the year the Japanese slipped away from Kiska, and the Aleutian chain was secure from then on.
In spite of the war