Eagle Against the Sun by Ronald H. Spector

Author:Ronald H. Spector
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

* * *

* See Chapter 7.

SIXTEEN

The Road to Myitkyina

No sooner had the Casablanca Conference adjourned than the ANAKIM plan began to unravel. In Delhi to confer on the project, General Arnold found Wavell’s operational plan not so much a plan as “several pages of well-written paragraphs telling why the mission could not be accomplished.”1

Moving on to Chungking, Arnold received the generalissimo’s reluctant assent to the Burma operation; but what Chiang really wanted was an independent army air force for China under General Chennault, a vast increase in supplies flown over the Hump, and five hundred more planes by November. In a letter to President Roosevelt, carried to the U.S. by Arnold, the generalissimo spent one paragraph on the Burma campaign and the remainder on his demands for more air power.2

In Washington the generalissimo’s demands found a sympathetic audience in the president and his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins. Perhaps a shift of emphasis to air operations might be more rewarding than a slow and costly ground campaign. That view appeared to be confirmed by the outcome of the limited British ground offensive in Burma, launched at the end of 1942.

To boost morale and to show that they were still in the war, the British had mounted an attack into the Arakan, the narrow coastal strip of west Burma. Their goal was to capture Akyab Island, which had airfields that would be valuable for the support of future operations against Rangoon. Holding the island would also strengthen the air defense of Calcutta.3 The area was lightly held. British plans were to send a reinforced division down the coast, while other troops advanced by short, amphibious hooks and a commando force swung in from the east. However, landing craft were unavailable—and the commandos were needed elsewhere. So the 14th Indian Division, under Major General W. L. Lloyd, was sent down the ninety miles to Akyab, plodding through mud and rice paddies flanked by jungle covered hills.

After a slow start the advance went well—until the 14th reached the towns of Donbaik and Rathedung, only ten miles from Akyab. Here the British and Indian troops became acquainted for the first time with Japanese log and earth bunkers, already unhappily familiar to the Allied troops in Papua, and here they were held up for a month while the Japanese brought in reinforcements.4

Then the Japanese took their turn at counterattack, moving right across the jungle ridges which the British had thought impassable, striking at the division’s rear and flank, and sending the British reeling back to the north. Now the tired, badly shaken Indian and British troops—many of them inexperienced and incompletely trained—began to crack. Many of “the troops that had been in action for the past weeks,” recalled General William Slim, hastily called in to take command, “were fought out and could not be relied on to hold anything . . . [They] were untrained for the jungle and feared it more than they did the enemy.”5 By May the Anglo-Indian troops were back where they had started—exhausted, racked by malaria, with morale at an all-time low.

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