The Burma Campaign by Frank McLynn

Author:Frank McLynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

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Even as Operation THURSDAY began and the campaign in the Arakan continued, simultaneously the Japanese opened a massive offensive in what would prove to be a four-month battle, the Stalingrad of the East. Slim knew that the enemy was planning a great push that they hoped would take them to Delhi, but his intelligence indicated that the battle would be joined on or around 15 March 1944. In fact the Japanese made their move a week earlier. Although Slim’s sources were far superior to those of his opponents, whose approach both to intelligence-gathering and its analysis was embarrassingly amateurish, they were, by the standards of the war in Europe, woefully inadequate. Slim sometimes made coded references to the fact that, unlike Montgomery, he was not given access to ULTRA and the other advanced cipher-cracking techniques.1 Reliant mainly on human intelligence, he faced the problem that the various espionage agencies were almost more interested in stealing a march on each other than fighting the enemy. A major obstacle to clarity was the very plethora of agencies: the American fledgling organisation the OSS (forerunner of the CIA); Force 126, responsible for organising guerrilla bands in the enemy’s rear; other irregulars known as V-Force, Z-Force and Detachment 101, which were part intelligence-gathering and part guerrilla; the Indian branch of MI6, known as the Inter-Services Liaison Committee; and especially D Division, the deception branch. There was much duplication of effort, mutual jealousy and a host of abortive or pointless ‘operations’; indeed, there was little point in planting double agents or sowing disinformation when the Japanese army paid no attention to reports from its own spies and secret police.2

Slim’s intelligence, reliable on the enemy’s strength and resources, was less so on the intentions of its commanders. Nonetheless, it was obvious that the first target for the Japanese must be Imphal, for this was the key position in Manipur province, on the border with Burma; its capture would allow them to break into the Brahmaputra valley, cut all communications with Ledo, and thus end all prospects of Allied operations in Burma or China.3 The town of Imphal was now a busy complex of army camps, tarmac roads, cottage hospitals, supply dumps, ordnance depots and engineer parks; some said the 600 square miles of the plain was like a gigantic campsite, but especially vulnerable to land attack, since it was surrounded on all sides by high ground. The geography of Imphal was peculiarly difficult. The great plain, 30 miles long and 20 miles wide, at an elevation of 2,600 feet, was surrounded by jungle-clad mountains: to the north-east were the Naga hills, with summits as high as 5,000 feet, while to the south were the even loftier Chin hills, with peaks between 6,000 and 9,000 feet.4 The terrain made Imphal difficult to supply, for there were only two roads between Manipur and Assam, only one of which was all-weather. To the north, a road ran through high passes for 148 miles to the key railway terminal at Dimapur via the mountain village of Kohima in the Naga hills.

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