The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [321]
While these great land and sea battles were taking place further east, General Sir William Slim’s British–Indian army was steadily making progress in expelling the Japanese from Burma. A landing on Akyab Island in the Arakan was scarcely opposed on 3 January 1945, and inland XXXIII Corps was marching towards the Irrawaddy river, while IV Corps was west of the Chindwin. On 23 January the British crossed the Irrawaddy – a river thrice the width of the Rhine in places – as Slim feinted towards Mandalay when all the time his ultimate prize was Rangoon much further south. Four days later the Burma Road to China was cleared. Meiktila was not to fall to the 17th Indian Division until early March, but, when it did, Japanese forces further north were effectively cut off. The 17th – which saw the longest period of continuous action of any British unit in the Second World War, at more than three years – was itself almost cut off in Meiktila by Japanese counter-attacks, but was resupplied from the air. The scale of defeat of the Japanese can be gauged from the fact that whereas the 100 miles from the Irrawaddy to Pyawbwe had taken the Fourteenth Army two months to cover, the next 260 miles down the Rangoon road took only twelve days.
Mandalay fell to the 19th Indian Division on 20 March, after Slim’s brilliant strategy wrong-footed the Japanese on several occasions. ‘Uncle Bill’ Slim was, in the words of one of his veterans, ‘large, heavily built, grim-faced with that hard mouth and bulldog chin; the rakish Gurkha hat was at odds with the slug carbine and untidy trouser bottoms… His delivery was blunt, matter-of-fact, without gestures or mannerisms, only a lack of them.’7 When a British soldier thoughtlessly decorated his jeep with a skull he’d found – assuming it to be Japanese – Slim snapped at him to remove it, and then added gently: ‘It might be one of our chaps, killed on the retreat.’ Slim’s 600-mile retreat out of Burma in 1942, the victory over Operation U-Go at Imphal from April to June 1944 and subsequently the advance down Burma outmanoeuvring the Japanese continually were each masterpieces of the military art. In the endless debate about who was the best battlefield commander of the Western Allies, in which the names of Patton, Bradley, Montgomery and MacArthur continually arise, that of the unassuming but immensely talented William Slim ought to feature much more than it does. Rangoon finally fell on 3 May, allowing the British to look beyond Burma to Malaya.
The US landings on the small but strategically vital island of Iwo Jima, starting on 19 February 1945, also proved that the Japanese had no intention of giving up simply because they could no longer win the conflict. The Americans needed Iwo Jima from which to fly fighter escorts protecting bombers, and as a place to where damaged bombers could return after smashing the Japanese mainland. In order to maximize American losses, the 21,000 defenders permitted 30,000 US Marines to land unopposed on the south-east of the island before they suddenly opened fire after they were ashore. The capture of the island, which was finally completed on 26 March, saw some of the most bitter hand-to-hand fighting of the Pacific War, in which no quarter was given or received, and where the Japanese made a number of suicide attacks by land, sea and air. The Anglo-American Lethbridge Commission, set up to study the tactics and equipment required to defeat Japan, even recommended the use of mustard and phosgene gas against underground enemy positions, and was supported in this by Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, but it was vetoed by President Roosevelt.
At the end of the battle for Iwo Jima, only 212