16

 

CBI: Winning the "Forgotten War"

 

 

In the broad sweep of World War II history, the battles of the China-Burma-India theater can seem in retrospect to be an aside, a series of viciously lethal struggles that were only a back eddy to the main conflict. Those who fought there ruefully regarded it as "the forgotten war," the front with the lowest priorities, the arena whose demands of men and materiel were most begrudged.

Yet it seemed inarguable at the time that the Japanese had to be stopped there. The Allies could not assume, early on in the Pacific war, that either Nimitz's island-hopping or MacArthur's climb from New Guinea would succeed. The CBI theater offered an alternative: it could serve as a launching base for the aerial bombardment and ultimate invasion of the Japanese homeland. It was even more essential to deny the Japanese their continuing exploitation of Southeast Asia's boundless natural resources and endless ranks of manpower that could have built them into an unbeatable foe. The farther reaches of the Indian subcontinent must not be opened to them. The glimmering vision of an Asia-Middle East linkup that would put the Axis powers on their way to ruling the world could not be allowed to come to pass. Allied leaders would have seemed irresponsible if they had not believed the CBI war had to be fought—and won.

Nor can the role of CBI's codebreakers* vital in turning defeat into victory, be overlooked. Their contributions, though, were late in coming. Before the war and during its early stages, the British had established an extensive network of intercept stations, direction-finding units and cryptanalytic teams to keep tabs on Japan. But the onslaught of Japanese advances kept the Sigint forces on the run. Some hopped from Hong Kong to Singapore to Ceylon and even to eastern Africa. Others fled to Australia. The British, Australian and Indian intercept and cryptographic teams tried valiantly to regroup in their new locations and did reestablish linkages with Bletchley Park, Cast, Hypo and Op-20-G. However, months passed before Sigint could begin to have much of an impact.

In the meantime, the entire Southeast Asia theater had been a sequence of disasters for the Allies. Before the war, the Japanese had begun their expansion by conquest with the annexing of Manchuria in 1931, the capture of eastern China's major cities and the occupation of the Chinese coast. When the war came, and the Allies wished to support Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army, the only supply line was through China's western back door. Chiang's needs were met by landing supplies at Rangoon, Burma's capital and major seaport, transporting them by rail through Burma and completing the journey to his Kunming wartime capital by truck on the Burma Road, built in 1936-37.

Chiang looked primarily to the U.S. for aid. In 1937 he enlisted Clare Chennault, a flamboyant Great War pilot, to develop an effective Chinese air force. Chennault did so by retraining Chinese fliers, hiring mercenaries wherever he could find them and welding his polyglot band into what was officially called the American Volunteer Group (AVG). The group became far better known as the Flying Tigers from the fact that its U.S.-built planes had winged tigers painted on their tails. Toothy shark faces on the aircrafts' noses also contributed to their lethal appearance. For the first seven months in 1942, at a time when the American public hungered for success stories, Chennault's Tigers racked up impressive headline-grabbing scores against Japan's planes. Because the AVG was a private air force functioning outside official channels, the U.S. reorganized it in July 1942 as the Chinese Air Task Force, still under General Chennault. With an influx of regular U.S. Air Force fliers who volunteered for duty and the arrival of a U.S. bomber squadron, Chennault's Tigers continued to harass the Japanese throughout the war. Eric Sevareid, transferring to China for his CBS reports, wrote that Chennault became "the great American hero to the Chinese" and that his "very face in its grim, scarred belligerence had come to be a symbol of China's resistance."

To help Chiang develop a more professional army, the U.S. sent him an able field commander and trainer who had spent fifteen years in China and spoke the language fluently, General Joseph W. Stilwell. His nickname was "Vinegar Joe," an appropriate label for his no-nonsense, to-hell-with-tact personality. General William Slim, Stilwell's British counterpart in the Burmese command, said of him that "he could be as obstinate as a whole team of mules," but Slim added that when Stilwell "said he would do a thing, he did it," and while others found him impossibly abrasive, "I liked him."

Stilwell faced a tough task in trying to shape an effective Chinese army. Chiang's understrength divisions were ridden with corruption and incompetent leadership. The soldiers were low paid, malnourished and ill equipped. American supplies meant for them often ended up on the black market and were likely to be traded to the Japanese. In addition, Chiang himself was never sure which war took precedence, the one against Japan or that against the Chinese Communist armies under Mao Tse-tung, which Chiang's forces had driven into a comer in China's northern mountains. Despite signing an agreement with Mao to fight together against the Japanese, Chiang kept a quarter of his army standing guard against a possible move by the Communists. Stilwell quickly came to have a low regard for the devious Chiang, referring to him privately, and too often publicly, as "Peanut."

In the triumphant takeover of Southeast Asia, the Japanese viewed the capture of Burma as the means to shut off aid to China. Neighboring Siam put up only a five-hour fight before allowing passage to Japanese troops and becoming Japan's ally. The invasion of Burma began on January 31, 1942. Thousands of British, Australian, Dutch and Asian prisoners the Japanese had captured in their conquest of Southeast Asia were condemned to slave labor building the Siam-to-Burma railroad, which was to be Japan's invasion route into India. When the Japanese attacked Rangoon, the British, knowing the port's importance, fought them off for the first two and a half months of 1942. Then the sheer numbers of the Japanese and their dominance in the air forced the British-led troops to retreat northward.

At this point Slim was called in from his previous post in Iraq to take charge of the defense of Burma. Commanding the British, Burmese and Indian divisions of the Fourteenth Army, he joined with Stilwell and his Chinese troops to form a defensive line in central Burma 150 miles north of Rangoon. The Allies' numbers were too few, the Japanese attackers were too well versed in jungle fighting, and their air superiority was too overpowering for the line to hold. In what CBI veteran Louis Allen, in his comprehensive history Burma: The Longest War, has called "the longest retreat in the history of the British Army," Slim's forces withdrew for 900 miles, all the way back into India. The whole of Burma fell under Japanese control. Stilwell, too, escaped to India, arriving with the remains of his command only after a harrowing 140-mile jungle trek. The Burma Road was no longer usable. Supplies to China had to be transported from India by indomitable American fliers ferrying cargo planes over the southern spurs of the Himalayas, which they called "the Hump." So many of their planes went down that the pilots claimed they could plot their course to China by the line of smoking wrecks on the mountainsides.

Before leaving their post at Colombo on the island of Ceylon, the code-breaking crew had tried to avert a naval disaster. On March 28, 1942, they had broken a Japanese naval code foretelling a carrier-based air raid on the harbor at Colombo. Accordingly, Admiral James Somerville, commanding the Royal Navy's Eastern Fleet, heeded the warning and withdrew his ships to their Indian Ocean hideaway in the Maldive Islands. Merchant ships left for a port in India. When two days passed and the raid had not come, however, the admiral decided the codebreakers were wrong and returned his fleet to Colombo. What no one on the Allied side knew was that the Japanese admiral had merely delayed his attack until Easter Sunday, believing he would find the British less alert then. Subsequently Colombo intercepts of plain-language air-to-ground messages warned that enemy aircraft were less than five hundred miles away. Somerville tried to scatter his ships, but there was not time. In this and a further raid the next day, the Japanese sank three cruisers, an aircraft carrier and two destroyers.

At this lowest point in the CBI war, a self-appointed messiah stirred hope. Orde C. Wingate had led irregular forces in North Africa, once bluffing fifteen thousand Italians into surrendering to his own force of less than two thousand. Now he arrived to apply the same audacious tactics in Burma. Wingate was a deliberate eccentric who gloried in wearing grimy uniforms, an ever-present pith helmet and a great bushy beard. He was given to such bizarre behavior as straining his tea, and that of his guests, through his dirty socks. He proposed beating the Japanese by what he called "long-range penetration." He would lead a specially trained infantry brigade far behind enemy lines, where, supplied by air and communicating via radio, his troops would wreak guerrilla-type havoc on the Japanese. The world press fastened onto a new word: Chindits, the name Wingate's outfit acquired. Wingate coined it when he misheard the Burmese word chinthe—the name of the mythical beast that guarded Burmese temples.

During the outfit's first weeks in the jungles the Chindits fulfilled Wingate's expectations and gave newspaper readers throughout the Allied nations a small feast of excitement amid otherwise dreary gruel. They destroyed bridges, sabotaged the Japanese army's supply railroad, attacked outposts and set up ambushes. The raid proved that penetration forces could be supplied by airborne drops. But the toll on the men was too great: the Japanese were too powerful. Wracked by disease more than by bullets, only remnants of Wingate's guerrillas made it out of the jungles and back to safety.

Summing up this first try by the Chindits, Slim wrote in his memoir, "As a military operation the raid had been an expensive failure." Yet he added, "There was a dramatic quality about this raid, which, with the undoubted fact that it had penetrated far behind the Japanese lines and returned, lent itself to presentation as a triumph of British jungle fighting over the Japanese." It gave a lift to the people of Britain and to all the Allies. For the troops in the CBI "it seemed the first ripple in the turning of the tide." Slim judged Wingate's adventure "worth all the hardship and sacrifice his men endured."

It remained for Vinegar Joe, however, to render the final verdict on the first Burma campaign. "I claim we got a hell of a beating," he told a press conference. "We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it."

 

 

Stilwell's Drive to "Mitch"

 

Winston Churchill was not convinced that the tremendous costs of retaking Burma were worth the effort. He foresaw that the replacement for the Burma Road that Stilwell pressed the Allies to undertake was "unlikely to be finished until the need for it had passed." Strategically, Burma was too remote to be of use in the conquest of Japan. As for conducting war there, "one could not choose a worse place for fighting the Japanese."

The Americans, nevertheless, persisted. The Pacific campaigns were proving slow and costly. U.S. leaders thought they still might have to strike at Japan through China. Besides, Chiang's clever, Wellesley-educated wife, Madame Soong Mei-ling, traveled to Washington and charmed FDR into maintaining full support for Chiang and Chennault, and even for Stilwell.

After sixteen months of reorganizing and strategizing by the Allies, the second Burma campaign was ready to begin in October 1943. It would be under the overall command of a new leader, Lord Louis Mountbatten.

By now the cryptologic resources of the Allies were in full interplay. The East African contingent had returned to Colombo for closer surveillance of Japanese naval traffic. Outside New Delhi the British had established "Bletchley Park East," another operation officially identified by a misleadlingly low-key name: the Wireless Experimental Centre. WEC had two Indian intercept and cryptologic outposts, one in Bangalore, in southern India, and the other in Barrackpore, near Calcutta. The latter was specifically assigned to meet the signals intelligence needs of Slim's Fourteenth Army and to operate mobile stations that stayed close to the fighting fronts. Special Liaison Units served Mountbatten, Slim, Stilwell and the U.S. bomber command in China.

In addition, a Tactical Air Intelligence Section at Slim's headquarters intercepted and broke the signals of Japanese aircraft flying into and out of airfields in Burma. The section directed a squadron of U.S. long-range fighters in successes that decimated Japanese planes and gave the Allies air superiority for the coming offensives. The voices of Japan's militarists were, all unbeknownst to them, being overheard and understood by an untiring legion of eavesdroppers.

Forced back to India's eastern border by their earlier defeats, the Allies planned for three main forces to carry out their offensive to retake Burma. One would be Stilwell's American-trained Chinese divisions. The second: Wingate's Chindits, expanded to twenty thousand troops. Third would be Slim's British and Indian armies.

Stilwell's assigned task was to clear the Japanese out of northern Burma, an offensive essential to breaking the blockade of China. That Burma Road alternative that Churchill disparaged had been under construction since the autumn of 1942. American engineers were directing the building of a two-way all-weather road leading from Ledo, in India, southeastward into Burma to join up with the Burma Road's upper reaches. If Chiang's armies were to receive the help they needed, a new overland truck route must replace dependence on planes flying the Hump. Also, alongside the Ledo Road the engineers built a pipeline to carry fuel to the B-29 bombers expected to attack the Japanese in eastern Asia and in Japan itself.

To reach his north Burma objectives, Stilwell would have to push for 150 miles through jungles, over mountains and across rivers to capture the rail, air and road hub that the maps named Myitkyina and the Americans called "Mitch."

Trained in India by Americans, the Chinese soldiers had rounded into formidable fighters. As Sevareid described them in his reports from India, "Now husky, well fed, imbued with fighting spirit by the Americans and their own young and able officers . . . they were at least the equal of the Japanese." They offered "a startling contrast with the rest of Chiang's starved and spiritless army."

The Thirty-eighth Chinese Division had not penetrated far into Burma before they encountered stiff opposition. At the same time the Allies in India had been planning their campaign, the Japanese commanders, as decrypts began to verify, had developed their own offensive plans, whose objective was nothing less than to smash the Allied armies in their path and take India. As the ever useful Baron Oshima had radioed to Tokyo—and to Magic codebreakers—Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had told him, "Germany would eagerly welcome a Japanese invasion into the Indian Ocean whereby contact between Europe and Asia might be achieved." Bent on fulfilling their part, the Japanese had been moving troops into north Burma in preparation for their Indian campaign. They met and slowed the advance of Stilwell's Chinese fighters.

Vinegar Joe, however, now had a new source of strength. This was an American combat unit that was to gain fame as "Merrill's Marauders" because it was under the command of Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill. The outfit, trained in India with the Chindits, was only three thousand men strong, but it included veterans of combat duty in the Pacific plus a number of toughs volunteering to avoid guardhouse time.

Stilwell expected more of the Marauders than guerrilla-type missions. In what he called a "left hook," he sent them around the Japanese facing the Chinese attackers and had them take up a position blocking a Japanese retreat. The commander of the Japanese Eighteenth Division threw his full strength against the Marauders, ordering charge after charge. The Americans held firm, piling up Japanese bodies on the approaches to their lines. In the end the Eighteenth had to give up the attack and slip away through the jungles to escape. It was Stilwell's first major victory in Burma—and a tonic for Allied spirits everywhere.

Stilwell's second try at having the Marauders swing around the tenacious Eighteenth was less successful. He planned a two-way hook meant, this time, to bottle up the division and destroy it. The trouble was the terrain the Marauders had to cross. The combination of jungle and mountains made their treks long and exhausting. Short of supplies and water, they fell ill to dysentery and jungle diseases. They did establish a roadblock, but when a Chinese brigade came to their relief, the Chinese let the Eighteenth again escape annihilation.

Even though the Marauders were weary and ill, and had lost their leader to an incapacitating heart attack, Stilwell called on them for yet another desperate mission, this one in response to a captured Japanese document. From this bit of intelligence, Stilwell knew he had to block the attempt by a Japanese battalion to mount their own left hook and outflank the Chinese. The Marauders stationed themselves to stand off the attack, dug in and held on for a week. They were aided by a different kind of intelligence. A Japanese American sergeant, Roy H. Matsumoto, nightly crawled close to the enemy's perimeter and, listening in on their conversations, learned of their plans for the following day. He also learned Japanese intentions by clipping into their telephone lines. In one critical attack, when the first wave of the Japanese had been shot to pieces, Matsumoto yelled "Charge" in Japanese to a follow-up wave, who also rushed into wholesale slaughter. The sergeant's information helped the Marauders turn back the try at encirclement.

But Stilwell was still ninety miles from Mitch. He faced the necessity of stirring the Chinese into exerting more aggressive pressure on the main front. He also had to motivate the Marauders to take on one last grueling mission, despite their being down to half their original numbers and looking for relief rather than further action. The assignment was to make a long eastward swing, code-named End Run, and close in on Myitkyina from a direction the Japanese would least suspect.

To meet the first demand, Stilwell used all his powers of persuasion, flattery and bullying to make the Chinese generals step up their attacks. He walked into the front lines and made himself a visible target, knowing that the Chinese commanders would fear their superiors' wrath if Vinegar Joe was killed. To lessen this chance, they ordered their men forward. "It pays to go up and push," Stilwell wrote in his diary. "At least, it's a coincidence that every time I do, they spurt a bit."

As for the Marauders, he convinced them that there was no one else who could do the job. Also, he increased their numbers by adding two Chinese regiments as well as a band of Burmese guerrillas who were experienced in operating behind Japanese lines.

The drive became a terrible ordeal. Stilwell was forced to send in more Chinese troops and to strip engineers off the Ledo Road project and convert them into infantry. In addition, the monsoon rains arrived early. By late June 1944, however, End Run had succeeded. The airstrip at Mitch had been seized, and after more bitter fighting, so had the town itself. Just as important, the enemy's Eighteenth Division had at last been broken and its remnants sent fleeing to the south. Having the Myitkyina airstrip in Allied hands meant that air transport could avoid the Hump and double the tonnage lifted to China. This development made Churchill's prediction of the needlessness of the Ledo Road almost come true. By the time the road was completed, Stilwell's capture of the Mitch airstrip had brought a far larger flow of supplies to Chiang—forty thousand tons of them in fourteen thousand transport flights—than was moved over the new truck route.

Not that the Generalissimo was inclined to show any gratitude. Instead, still incensed by Stilwell's too freely expressed estimation of him, Chiang pressed for, and in October 1944 succeeded in achieving, Vinegar Joe's recall.

Stilwell had worn so many hats, it took three generals to replace him. The North Central Area Command passed to his subordinate Daniel Sultan. In China, Albert Wedemeyer was chosen to be Chiang's adviser. And Raymond Wheeler became Mountbatten's deputy supreme commander for the Southeast Asia Command.

 

 

Stopping the Japanese at Imphal

 

To the small tales of success that Orde Wingate and his Chindits had achieved in the first Burma campaign, he hoped to add big news in the second. He had more than three times as many troops assigned to him. He also had his own air force, including U.S. planes to supply his behind-the-lines incursions, as well as gliders to carry in his troops. Above all, he had the strong backing of Winston Churchill and even of Franklin Roosevelt. Churchill had invited him to the Quebec Conference, where he had made so strong an impression that the Allied leaders instructed him to appeal to them directly if his immediate superiors were thwarting his plans.

General Slim, in his memoir, Defeat into Victory, told of an incident in which, when he denied Wingate's demand that an Indian division be added to his Chindits, the brigadier let him know that he had a loyalty above that to his immediate commander. To whom? Slim asked. "To the Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States," Wingate replied, and added that this was an occasion when he must so appeal. "I pushed a signal pad across my desk to him," Slim wrote, "and told him to go and write his message. He did not take the pad but he left the room. Whether he ever sent the message I do not know, nor did I inquire. Anyhow, that was the last I heard of his demand for the 26th division."

For their part in the campaign, the Chindits were assigned to give extraordinary support to Stilwell's offensive. To do this, they had their gliders towed far to the south, beyond Myitkyina. Landed there, the glider troops established three airstrips while a larger group marched overland to join them. The Chindits eased the pressure on Stilwell's Chinese divisions by cutting the Japanese supply routes and creating other behind-the-lines mayhem. Their planes protected both the Chindits and Stilwell's troops from Japanese air attacks. In a reminiscence, Delhi-stationed code man Alan Stripp told of the "punched-in-solar-plexus anguish" of the Japanese, as revealed in decrypts of their reports of the Chindits' exploits.

In the midst of the operation, Wingate himself was killed in a plane crash. Churchill recorded his distress: "With him a bright flame was extinguished."

Both the Chindits and the Marauders were, in Slim's words, "asked to do more than was possible." By August 1944 "they had shot their bolt." Their remnants were withdrawn.

Meanwhile, Slim himself was attempting to carry out his part of the campaign. His own word for his objectives was "modest": to lead his divisions out of India and drive down the India-Burma border to Burma's west coast. For a while the operations of his Fourteenth Army went well. Michael Smith's recently published book The Emperor's Codes has recorded how India-based codebreakers combined with mobile intelligence units to provide Slim's army with the signals intelligence it needed for its invasion of Burma.

Then, at the beginning of February 1944, Slim's divisions began to encounter the same force that had slowed Stilwell's advance: the reinforced Japanese effort to mount their own powerful offensive, their "March to Delhi." While the troops carrying out the Allies' coastal thrust inflicted some setbacks to the Japanese and proved, once again, that the British could defeat the enemy in jungle warfare, Slim soon had to reorganize his divisions to meet the more serious threat of a major Japanese drive into India by pressing up through central Burma.

As Allied decrypts revealed, the Japanese no longer regarded Burma as an aside in their war. Success in Burma could completely isolate China and, it was hoped, drive the Chinese to sue for a separate peace. The Japanese organized Indian and Burmese anti-British armies. Magic decrypts of Oshima's messages revealed how the Burmese rebel Subhas Chandra Bose, who had opposed Gandhi's nonviolent rebellion in favor of an armed one against the British and had fled to exile in Germany, was transported in a German U-boat to Japan as preparation for his leadership of pro-Japanese forces in the CBI theater. The Japanese were encouraged to believe both Burma and India were ripe for revolution and would fall into their hands. As Japanese commanders proclaimed in exhortations to their troops, victory in Burma could change the whole course of the war.

Properly handled, the Burma offensive could ease the supply situation by seizing Allied supplies. The Japanese were so confident in this hope that they sent units of gunners without guns so they could take over captured British artillery.

Faced with this grave new threat, Slim and his commanders drew together a defense line south of the Indian town of Imphal. Slim planned to begin resistance on this new line and then, at the strategic moment, withdraw to the Imphal Plain and there "fight the decisive battle on grounds of our own choosing."

He later admitted that he made not just one "cardinal error," but two. With timing all-important, he allowed the withdrawal decision to be left to his field general. This was wrong, he acknowledged, because he himself was much better informed and in receipt of much more comprehensive intelligence reports. As it was, the withdrawal was delayed too long. The Japanese were able to send roadblocks around the retreating British troops and force them to fight their way through, with serious losses of men and equipment.

Slim's second error was in badly underestimating the capacity of the Japanese. Driven by their desire to capture British supplies, they showed themselves capable of accomplishing the sort of large-scale, long-range infiltration at which the Allies had become adept.

Slim had thought the Japanese would send only a regiment against the town of Kohima, north of Imphal. Copies of the Japanese maps and plans, recovered from a fallen officer's dispatch case, informed him otherwise. The entire Thirty-first Division of the Imperial Fifteenth Army was pressing the attack. Both Kohima and Imphal were quickly surrounded.

The British commanders were acutely aware that if the Japanese overran these strongpoints, their way was clear to strike virtually unopposed into the Indian subcontinent.

In two of the war's more admirable examples of courage, the garrisons held out. At Kohima, wounded men left their hospital beds, took up rifles and joined defenders. The Japanese kept pushing in the perimeter until, at one point, Kohima's no-man's-land consisted of a former swell's tennis court. Air teams dropped food, water and ammunition. The garrisons fought on, from April through May and into June.

In addition, as Slim's postmortem affirmed, he was saved from his mistakes by the "bullet head" and "unenterprising" nature of Kotoku Sato, the Japanese general directing the siege of Kohima. Sato could have left a small detachment to keep the garrison penned in while he dispatched the bulk of his division to take the vital but lightly protected center of Dimapur and open India to his advance. Instead, he spent his force by senselessly ordering wave after wave of bloody frontal attacks against the defenders. Allen has contested Slim's opinion of the Japanese general, claiming that Sato was "neither stupid nor unenterprising" but was the victim of orders he received from his superiors.

However it was, the staunch defense at Kohima and Imphal by Slim's Fourteenth Army allowed him to implement a new strategy. He had troops at his Arakan command on Burma's west coast that he could transfer to the Imphal-Kohima battles. He thought at first of moving the reinforcements by road and rail. When, however, he learned from his intelligence officers the full extent of the Japanese commitment to that area, he knew the shift must be done by air. He had U.S. and British aircraft at his disposal, most of them C-47 Dakotas. He needed C-46 Commandos from the Hump route—planes each of which could carry a load equivalent to that of thirty Dakotas.

Mountbatten took the initiative and secured the loan of the Hump aircraft. The airborne transfer of the coastal divisions to Imphal, according to Slim, brought the turning point. They arrived just in time, lifted the two sieges in vicious fighting and checked the Japanese short of replenishing themselves from Allied supplies. The Allies' defeat of the Fifteenth Army was aided as much by hunger and disease as by ammunition and bayonets.

The codebreakers' emphatic role in the turnaround was spelled out by Slim in talks with Winterbotham when the Ultra official traveled from Bletchley Park to check up on the CBI situation. "General Slim told me," Winterbotham wrote in The Ultra Secret, "that the intelligence from Ultra about the Japanese forces had been invaluable throughout the campaign, but the real triumph had been the information which led up to the final attack by the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima. It had become very evident from Ultra that the Japanese supply position was desperate and that their attack was being planned to capture the Fourteenth Army supply depots, so as to keep the Japanese army 'in business.'"

Winterbotham also learned that the codebreakers had shown "that the Japanese air force in the area had dwindled so as to be practically useless." The information was put to practical use in two ways. Allied air crews were able to supply the Fourteenth Army from the air without being menaced by Japanese fighters, and the decision to use the Hump cargo planes to fly in a whole division was made with the knowledge that it could be done without enemy interruption.

This time, the BP emissary concluded, "the Japanese retreat was for good."

 

 

The Recapture of Rangoon

 

To keep pressing the attack, Slim drew up new plans. The battles at Imphal-Kohima had crushed Japan's Fifteenth Army. Now he was faced by the Thirty-third Army, which he resolved to smash as well. He sent his troops south toward the cities of Mandalay and Meiktila. However, "it was not Mandalay or Meiktila that we were after," Slim wrote in his memoir, "but the Japanese army."

He devised a grand deception, relying on his Sigint teams to tell him if it was succeeding and whether or not it had been detected.

His scheme was to engineer his own Chindit-style end run penetration to block the Japanese retreat. Alan Stripp's memoir, Codebreaker in the Far East, has detailed the elaborate precautions Slim took in order to keep his encirclement a surprise.

Since the operation was to take place in Burma's dry season, the hundred-mile swing to the west had to avoid revealing itself by plumes of dust kicked up by the advancing men and armor. The construction crews laid a track of asphalt-impregnated dust-gathering hempen cloth at the rate of a mile a day. In the mountains they cantilevered tracks out from the cliff faces. To cross streams they installed seven prefabricated bridges. Teams of elephants were brought in to fell trees, help with the bridge building and collect timber for five hundred river barges used to transport troops and equipment. Drums filled with gasoline were floated on rafts of empty drums lashed together. The RAF prowled the skies to prevent any wandering Japanese plane from spying the end run.

Beaten in the Imphal-Kohima battle, the Japanese had retreated to the east side of the Chindwin River and stood ready to repel the Fourteenth Army's attempt to cross it. While they waited, Slim pulled off the second phase of his deception plan. He left a single division of his army there, along with a dummy headquarters and a radio communications unit that whipped up a storm of fake transmissions to suggest the busy traffic of forces readying for the crossing. The other divisions took to the concealed roadway, crossed the Chindwin one hundred miles south of the key town of Mandalay and took positions across the Japanese escape route.

Due to his secret encircling maneuver, the Thirty-third Army disintegrated. Small units tried to escape through the jungle and down the streams, but most of them were hunted down and wiped out.

Combining overland drives with airborne and amphibious assaults, the Allied armies converged on Rangoon. On May 2, 1945, an RAF pilot flying over the city saw a message written by Allied prisoners of war on top of their jail. It read JAPS GONE. The flier landed his plane at a nearby air base and walked into the city center, where he was greeted by the POWs. His cheeky report on the incident claimed that Rangoon had been taken by the RAF.

The Japanese had left the port sabotaged and smashed. Slim marshaled engineers and laborers to repair and reopen it. "They succeeded beyond my hopes," he wrote. "In six weeks we had 3,000 tons a day coming over the patched-up wharves; the maintenance crisis was passed."

 

 

One More Army to Destroy

 

Although the war in Europe was now over and the Allies' climb up the Pacific island ladder far advanced, generals who did not know about the atomic bomb had no choice but to anticipate months, possibly even years, of further warfare in Asia. For the generals of the CBI theater, this meant they still had to defeat another Japanese army, the largely intact Twenty-eighth, cornered in eastern Burma by the Allied victories. The aim of Japanese commanders was to save the army and withdraw it so it could fight again in Malaya, Singapore or even in the homeland. The result was the Battle of the Breakout.

Again, codebreakers and intelligence teams gave the Allies an enormous advantage. Allen has written of Lieutenant General Francis Tuker, who was directing the Allied attack, "Naturally enough, his Intelligence had given him the entire picture on a plate."

The richest intelligence source was, once more, a captured document that gave the Allied leaders the clues they needed to thwart the Japanese and destroy the Twenty-eighth with a minimal expenditure of their own troops. In the foothills northeast of Rangoon, a patrol of Gurkhas ran into a Japanese contingent, killed a number of them and drove off the rest. Among the debris the Japanese left in their retreat was a leather dispatch bag. By the time the Gurkhas found it, it was soaked by the monsoon rains. A British intelligence officer, Lieutenant L. Levy, and a U.S. nisei sergeant, Katsu Tabata, carefully dried the papers from the bag, pieced them together and translated them. They disclosed the Twenty-eighth's breakout plans, including the routes they meant to follow. From that point on it was, as military historian S. W. Kelly noted, "largely a gunners' battle." The Allies massed artillery at main points in the Japanese passage and used metal rather than men to massacre the retreating forces.

Unknowing, disbelieving pockets of Japanese troops were still resisting well after the atomic bombs were dropped and the war ended.

In winning the China-Burma-India war, the Allies did more than stop the march to Delhi. They tied, up the more than 300,000 troops Japan sent there and killed three-fifths of them, allowing only 185,000 to return home. They routed the subservient armies whose victories would have turned Burma and India into Japanese puppet states. They kept China in the war. In so doing, they achieved at least one of the U.S. goals: in the weeks before Hiroshima, U.S. China-based planes did join in the bombing of the Japanese home islands.

As for the codebreakers' contribution to the hard-fought turn toward victory in the CBI, Hugh Denham, a BP-trained analyst who served in India, has told of Louis Mountbatten visiting his unit at war's end and saying of the CBI cryptographic teams that they were "worth ten divisions." Hyperbole, of course, but nonetheless a gratifying commendation for the men and women who spent countless hours, often in unspeakable conditions, to wrest the contents out of the multiple codes used by the Japanese and to read for Allied commanders the minds of their opposing brass.