Burma was a keystone on the strategic map of Southeast Asia. With China to the north, Thailand to the east, and India, the crown jewel of the British Empire, to the west, it was a crossroads of hugely important centers of gravity in the geopolitics of East Asia.
For China, Burma was a lifeline. In 1937, with major Chinese ports under Japanese control, China, in cooperation with Burma, began building the Burma Road, a 700-mile, largely unpaved highway that ran across the rugged mountains of northern Burma, connecting Burma’s port of Rangoon with the Chinese city of Kunming, by way of the Burmese city of Lashio. Utilizing the labor of an estimated 200,000 workers, the Burma Road had opened in 1938. Most of China’s military supplies came via this precarious thoroughfare.
For Thailand, Burma was a buffer between itself and the British center of gravity in India. For the British, Burma was India’s doorstep. For these reasons, Burma was of utmost importance strategically to all three.
Japan’s desire to occupy this Southeast Asian keystone was directly associated with Burma’s importance to China and the British Empire. There was some petroleum production at Yenangyaung in central Burma, but by comparison to that of the Dutch East Indies, Burma’s oil fields were inconsequential. Japan wanted Burma the way a chess player desires to place a particular piece on a particular square. The value of Burma was not inherent, but lay in its position relative to other squares on the board.
Because of their ongoing war with China, the Japanese wished to cut the Burma Road supply route. Britain feared that Burma, if captured by the Japanese, would be a stepping stone for an invasion of India itself. A few weeks earlier, such a prospect had been absurd. However, after Tomoyuki Yamashita’s apparently effortless conquest of impregnable Singapore, this could not be ruled out. In Allied circles, there was a great and genuine fear that the Germans would capture the Suez Canal and drive eastward across Iraq and Iran – where Axis sympathies ran high – and link up with the Japanese somewhere in India, where anti-British sympathies simmered.
In the propaganda of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, when mention was made of “Asia for Asiatics,” Indians were included. In the manual given to IJA troops, Read This Alone: And The War Can Be Won, mention was made about the liberation of “350 million Indians ruled by 500,000 British,” and the independence movement in India was sufficiently robust that the British worried about what would happen if the Japanese crossed into India branding themselves as liberators. Once a backwater to regional affairs, Burma was suddenly a precious regional crux.
Throughout the centuries, Burma had evolved and dissolved, alternating between empires and disparate warring states with blurred borders. It is named for the Bamar people, who are the dominant ethnic group (around seven out of ten) in the country. The name “Myanmar,” in use officially since 1989, though not universally recognized, is also derived from the term Bamar. In the late nineteenth century, as the French were assembling their own colonial domain in neighboring Indochina, the British invaded Burma in a series of wars, absorbing it into their empire by 1886.
Originally a governor’s province of British India, Burma was detached in 1937 as a distinct entity, administered by a separate colonial government. Rangoon, the Burmese administrative center, had been the fourth largest city in British India – after Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi – with a prewar population of 400,000.
As a figurehead prime minister for Burma, the British picked Dr Ba Maw, a Burma-born, French-educated attorney and legal scholar. As a strong advocate of Burmese independence, Ba became hard to control and a thorn in the side of the British colonial administrators. He was removed by them in 1939, and was jailed for sedition in 1940 for opposing British participation in World War II.
When 1942 began, Lieutenant General Shojiro Iida’s IJA 15th Army, which had taken control of Thailand in one day on December 8, was on that country’s border with Burma. It was comprised of the 33rd Division under Lieutenant General Shozo Sakurai, and the 55th Division, commanded by Lieutenant General Hiroshi Takeuchi.
Opposing them was the British Burma Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Thomas Hutton, a former staff officer with Britain’s General Headquarters India. Within his command, Hutton had elements of the 7th Armoured Brigade, the “Desert Rats,” who had recently relocated from North Africa. They were equipped with American-made M3 Stuart light tanks, which were known to the British unofficially as “Honeys.” This gave the defenders of Burma an edge that was unavailable to British forces in Malaya. While equipped with Bren gun carriers, the troops defending Malaya had no tanks with which to face the Japanese armor.
In addition to several British regiments, Hutton also had two divisions under his command, the 1st Burma Division and the 17th Indian Infantry Division, both of which consisted mainly of Indian troops, including regiments of the highly regarded Gurkha Rifles. As with most Indian divisions, the officers were mainly British. The 1st Burma had once included Burmese troops, but most had been mustered out before the war and were concentrated in military police units. Even the division’s core regiment, the Burma Rifles, was mostly Indian. The division was later redesignated as the 39th Indian Infantry Division. In the back of Hutton’s mind, he expected to rely on the support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Army. Chiang did not want to see his tenuous Burma Road lifeline snipped, and Hutton assumed he would fight to protect it.
All four of the divisions which faced one another across the Thailand–Burma border in January 1942 were understrength. Those under Hutton’s command were poorly trained and poorly equipped, while Iida’s divisions, though well equipped, suffered from having had units detached to support ongoing operations elsewhere.
Just as Iida’s 15th Army was a subsidiary of General Count Hisaichi Terauchi’s Southern Expeditionary Army Group, headquartered in Saigon, the Burma Army was a subsidiary of General Archibald Wavell’s British India Command, headquartered in New Delhi.
Overhead, the IJAAF possessed considerable strength and the use of bases in Thailand, as well as Indochina. On the opposite side, elements of Britain’s RAF had deployed to Rangoon, but these were much smaller than the RAF force in Malaya and Singapore, which had been so badly outclassed by the Japanese. However, the RAF was augmented by the American Volunteer Group (AVG), three squadrons of American fighter pilots who had been surreptitiously recruited on orders from President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 before the United States entered World War II. Known as the “Flying Tigers,” their mission was to fly against the Japanese in support of Nationalist China. They were American military pilots who had resigned their commissions in order to fly as civilians as part of one of World War II’s most famous “black ops.” Between them, the RAF and the AVG managed to impede the initial IJA air raids against Rangoon.
During its initial offensive phase in December 1941, the IJA had not so much invaded Burma, as probed its frontiers, specifically in the Tenasserim (now Tanintharyi) region, an area of steep coastal hills which parallels the long and very narrow “tail” of Burma that extends along the coast south of Rangoon, sandwiched between the Andaman Sea and western Thailand. Because it could be resupplied only by air and sea, this strip was especially vulnerable to a mechanized overland attack from Thailand.
A month later, the Japanese took Victoria Point (now Kawthaung), at the southern tip of Burma, which was more symbolic than anything. The British chose not to defend it. On January 18, Hiroshi Takeuchi, commander of the 55th Division, sent his 143rd Infantry Regiment across the Tenasserim hills to capture airfields at Mergui (now Myeik) and Tavoy (now Dawei). Two battalions of the Burma Rifles put up a spirited defense before being pushed aside at Tavoy, but Mergui, like Victoria Point, was left undefended.
The main Japanese invasion of Burma by the main force of Iida’s 15th Army came on January 22, with the objective – obvious on both sides – being the capture of Rangoon. Takeuchi’s 55th Division was to drive due westward to attack Rangoon from the east, while Sakurai’s 33rd Division would circle to the north to flank Rangoon and attack from the west.
The distance from the Thai border was a bit less than 150 miles as the crow flies, with the notable terrain features being a series of rivers flowing southward out of central Burma. In the order that they would be confronted by the Japanese, they were the Thaungyin (now Moei), which demarcated the Thai border; the Salween, a parallel tributary of the Thaungyin; the Bilin; the Sittang (now Sittaung); and the Pegu (now Bago). The Irrawaddy, Burma’s greatest river and navigable highway of commerce, parallels the other rivers farther west, passing through Rangoon itself. On paper, the broad Sittang was perceived by the strategic planners on both sides as the key defensive point between Thailand and Rangoon.
Hutton’s strategy consisted of opposing Takeuchi at each river crossing with his outnumbered and inexperienced Indian soldiers, while hoping that the Chinese would soon intervene in strength. His first line of defense on the rivers would be the 17th Infantry Division, which was under the command of Brigadier (acting Major General) John George “Jackie” Smyth, who had earned a Victoria Cross for bravery in action in World War I.
The first battle took place at the point where the Salween flows into the Thaungyin, but it was little more than a holding action. The problem of defending river crossings is that the defenders have the river to their backs. In this instance, abandoning irreplaceable supplies, they retreated by boat on January 31, coincidentally at about the same time that the defenders of Malaya were retreating across the Johor Strait. The Japanese, having prepared in advance with small boats for river crossings, were hot on their tails.
After a two-day holding action at the narrow and indefensible Bilin River, Smyth withdrew the defenders from the jaws of encirclement, and they retreated under cover of darkness to the Sittang. At the time, Smyth was accompanied by Brigadier David Tennant “Punch” Cowan, a staff officer from Rangoon, whom he sent back to Hutton’s headquarters to request permission to withdraw most of his troops and heavy equipment across the Sittang. He considered this to be the safest way to meet Takeuchi’s assault.
Hutton initially refused, though he later relented and allowed for a partial withdrawal to the west bank. In the meantime, Smyth was faced with the impossible task of organizing a defense of both the east bank of the Sittang River, and the metal railway bridge which crossed it – while the 17th Division had its back to the river.
Elements of Takeuchi’s 214th and 215th Regiments caught up to Smyth’s men by February 19, and in the ensuing battle, the Indians fought bravely, despite being frequently outflanked on the eastern bank of the river, and being under constant air attack. The Japanese troops even managed to penetrate as far as the bridge. One of Smyth’s big worries by this time was that the Japanese might use an airborne assault, as they had in the Dutch East Indies, to land paratroopers in his rear on the west bank.
Smyth knew that allowing Takeuchi to capture the bridge intact would hasten the IJA advance on Rangoon considerably, so he found himself with a “rock and a hard place conundrum.” The bridge would have to be destroyed. The only question was when.
Jackie Smyth blew the Sittang River Bridge at dawn on February 23. It turned out to be a bad choice, but in all fairness, there were no good choices available. Two brigades from the 17th Division, the 16th and 46th – over half of the division’s total strength – were trapped on the east side of the river, but Smyth assumed that the IJA would own the bridge before they could make it across, so down it went. Many of the stranded troops finally made it across the river, but in so doing, they abandoned piles of heavy equipment, supplies, and even their small arms.
On March 1, after he learned of the debacle on the Sittang, General Archibald Wavell, the Allied theater commander who headed both the British India Command and the newly formed ABDA Command, sacked both Smyth and Hutton. Punch Cowan succeeded Smyth, taking command of a 17th Division which was now depleted to a mere 40 percent of its authorized strength. Replacing Hutton was recently knighted General Sir Harold Alexander, late of the Southern Command in England itself, who relocated to Rangoon to command the defense of Burma.
Less well defended than Singapore, Rangoon, like Manila two months earlier, hung at the mouth of the Irrawaddy River like low-hanging fruit.