Authors: Fergal Keane
Renya Mutaguchi emerged into manhood in a society where parliamentary democracy was still relatively new, and constantly threatened.
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The Japanese military was captive to expansionist ideas, not simply as an expression of historical destiny but as an answer to the more pragmatic issue of limited national resources. Japan imported more than 80 per cent
of its oil from the USA, a humiliating and strategically crippling dependency. If Japan were to meet its destiny as a great world power, an empire in more than name, it would have to expand beyond the portions of China and Korea that it controlled and into the resource-rich nations of South-East Asia. The Japanese military constructed the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as a cover for their new imperialist expansionism. It was a charter to loot the resources of these territories, with even more rapacity and brutality than the incumbent powers.
Renya Mutaguchi joined the army as a teenage cadet in 1908. As a young officer he served with the international expeditionary force dispatched to Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, as military attaché in France, and on active command in China. It was a heady time for young officers like Mutaguchi, as military influence in Japanese society was growing rapidly. Cliques within the military formed secret societies, all pledging devotion to the emperor, all propagating expansionism, but divided, often murderously so, over the exact nature of the state they wished to create.
Tokyo was snowbound on the night of 25 February 1936 as the death squads fanned out across the city. One of their targets was the Lord Privy Seal, the elderly Viscount Makoto Saito, who had spent the evening at a private showing of
Naughty Marietta
, featuring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, in the home of the American ambassador. Within a few hours the old man was dead from an assassin’s bullet. The finance minister, Korekiyo Takahashi, who had resisted a huge rise in the military budget, was lying in his bed when the killers arrived. When an army captain told him he was to receive the
Tenshu
– the ‘punishment of heaven’ – he told him he was an idiot. Minister Takahashi was shot, then disembowelled and his arm hacked off.
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Although he is not mentioned in the contemporary accounts, Renya Mutaguchi came under suspicion as a member of the Imperial Way faction which launched the coup and he was sent away to China to command a regiment. There he made the fortuitous acquaintance of Major General Hideki Tojo, a coming force in the Japanese military, whose advocacy of expansion into China had helped set Japan on its collision course with the USA. The relationship would prove valuable in the years to come. By the time he reached his regiment in Peking, Mutaguchi had a finely developed sense of his destiny. On earth he contented himself with indulgence in women and alcohol – he was a prodigious drinker – and the admiration of sycophantic junior officers. But glory also existed for him as a posthumous ideal. He already inhabited his own glowing obituary.
Later, he would claim his place in history by asserting that he had precipitated the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 by ordering the firing of the first shots at the Chinese in the Marco Polo Bridge incident.
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Whatever the precise truth of Mutaguchi’s claim, he was certainly one of the central instigators of the pivotal act of Japanese aggression towards a gravely weakened Chinese state. Then came the war with the British and his triumph in Malaya. By the time he was appointed to command the 15th Army in March 1943, Renya Mutaguchi yearned for even greater glory and looked to the west, across the Burmese frontier into India, to realise his dream. He longed to exercise a ‘definitive influence’ on the outcome of a war that was daily slipping from Japan’s grasp.
Throughout 1943 there had been steady American gains in the Pacific. There had also been an ominous growth in submarine attacks on Japanese shipping, all of it prompting the emperor to announce in October that the country’s situation was ‘very grave’. Imports of bauxite, the aluminium ore that was vital for building aircraft, were among the worst affected. The shortage of oil, too, had
consequences beyond the restrictions it placed on war industry, for it dramatically reduced the flying time available to train pilots. The young men being rushed through training to replace dead pilots were a poor match for their allied opponents.
Japan’s troops still defended stubbornly, fighting for every inch of ground, and her armies still controlled great swathes of China and the Pacific, as well as South-East Asia. But the problem for Tokyo was brutally simple: with American sea power in the ascendant, the island nation of Japan would soon be cut off from her empire, and the country lacked the industrial capacity to replace its supply aircraft and fighters as quickly as the Americans were shooting them down, or to replace the ships being lost daily to allied attacks.
The British build-up in the Arakan, and Slim’s wider preparations in India, had been observed. Japanese spies in India reported the arrival of thousands of new troops and the assembling of forces in the north-eastern border areas; they reported the increase in the number and quality of allied aircraft in the region, and the road-building programme near the frontier. Three Chinese divisions under the American General Joseph Stilwell were threatening the north of Burma.
If Burma were to be lost, followed by the collapse of Malaya and Singapore, the humiliation could fatally undermine the grip of the militarists on the direction of the war. It would also remove from Japanese control supplies of Burmese oil, rubber, timber and metals, and, if the British kept marching, it could ultimately threaten the vital oil reserves in the conquered Dutch East Indies. Defeat in Burma might also free hundreds of thousands of allied and Chinese troops for action elsewhere, including China, where the Americans wanted to advance to airbases closer to the Japanese mainland. If the war had been launched in the name of expanding Japanese power into Asia and securing essential resources, how could this reverse be explained to the people of Japan? Even to a man as dismissive of the public will as prime minister Hideki Tojo it would have been a tall order.
The idea of attacking the Indian frontier was not new. In fact, the British had been expecting such an assault since they were driven out
of Burma in 1942. Then the Japanese had considered a plan to march into Assam and east Bengal, with the twin aims of defeating the British land forces and severing the air link that kept Chiang Kai-shek’s troops supplied in China. The so-called Plan 21 led to the issuing of an order ‘to attack and secure important strategic areas in north-east Assam state and the Chittagong area and to facilitate the air operation … to cut the air supply route to Chiang Kai-shek’.
Plan 21 was allowed to slip into abeyance, however, not least because Mutaguchi, among others, believed it was impossible to send anything larger than patrol-sized groups across the mountains into India. But in February 1943 imperial headquarters, fearful of a British offensive, came up with a new proposal. Using the careful phraseology ‘When the general situation permits’, the plan called for a thrust into east Bengal or Assam.
In the same month Brigadier Orde Wingate led a force of more than 3,000 men, seven columns divided into two groups, with mules to carry supplies, deep behind Japanese lines, where they remained until April, carrying out ambushes and attacks on rail lines.
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The Chindits, named after a lion-like creature of Burmese mythology, unsettled the imperial command, which believed that ‘these operations were … a reconnaissance in force prior to a large scale counter-offensive’.
But if imperial headquarters regarded the Chindit incursion with dismay, Mutaguchi saw it as a piece of vital intelligence. Wingate had
proved that the impossible – in this case the crossing of the mountains between India and Burma – could be achieved. If Wingate could do it coming east, then what was to stop Mutaguchi going west? But the Chindits had survived for as long as they had because the allies were able to drop supplies at key points on their route, and they had done this with limited opposition from Japanese aircraft. In the jungle hills of the north-east the army that could be supplied was the army that would win. As he contemplated invasion, Mutaguchi relegated this vital element of his plans.
In early May 1943 fishermen along the banks of the Chindwin encountered a Japanese patrol mounted on elephants and led by a friendly and inquisitive officer. This Japanese had none of the arrogance that was typical of his rank. He spoke to the local Burmese in a respectful tone, asking them about the movement of British troops in the area. Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara was a rising star who specialised in fomenting trouble for the British by recruiting nationalist groups. Mutaguchi had dispatched him along the Chindwin in the wake of the Chindit incursion with instructions to find out what the British were up to. Were they were merely conducting a reconnaissance, or were they the advance guard of a major offensive? Along the way Fujiwara claimed to have captured more than three hundred British prisoners, most of them men who were either lost or too sick to continue and had, according to the Chindit rule, been left behind. Many Japanese officers would have tortured and executed them. But Fujiwara needed intelligence and apparently the men were well treated. Certainly no war crimes charges were later laid against him.
From the prisoners Fujiwara learned of the existence of Orde Wingate and of his epic trek across mountains and rivers. A less gifted intelligence officer might have concluded that the ragged prisoners he had interrogated were symbols of another British failure. But on the long trek back to Maymyo by elephant, mule and foot, Fujiwara reached a different conclusion. When he went to see Mutaguchi at 15th Army headquarters he told his boss that he
detected a new spirit in the British army – a reading that Mutaguchi, fatefully, chose to ignore.
The following month Fujiwara was back in the field, this time accompanied by fourteen spy-school graduates with whom he reconnoitred likely crossing points for a Japanese invasion of northeastern India. He came back with the news that a crossing was possible in the dry season and that enough food was available on the Japanese side of the Chindwin to sustain an invasion force. What he could not say was what conditions were like on the other side of the river. How much food was available? What was the attitude of the local tribes? Most crucially of all, he could not vouch for conditions in the mountains once the monsoon descended. Fujiwara nonetheless remained enthusiastic about a dry-season offensive. Even if he had entertained serious doubts he would have been given short shrift by Mutaguchi.
There was no room for troublemakers at Mutaguchi’s headquarters. When his chief of staff, Major General Obata, made clear his view that the invasion could not succeed because of problems of supply, disease and topography, he was sacked and replaced by the sycophantic Major General Kunomura, the man whose jealous rage over a geisha girl would lead him to assault a fellow officer. Mutaguchi surrounded himself with men whose agreement he could count on. With no dissenting voices left on his own staff, he turned his attention to bullying those further up the chain of command into agreement.
In late June 1943 Mutaguchi addressed a conference of senior officers in Rangoon. But instead of allowing the debate on an offensive to take its course, he tried to bounce those present into swift agreement by presenting his own ready-made plan for the invasion of north-east India. It included, most controversially, proposals to move beyond establishing a new defensive line and to break through into the plains of Assam. The ever-obliging Kunomura was given the job of presenting the plan, but was quickly savaged and put in his place by a furious officer who accused him of trying to pre-empt the conference.
Mutaguchi also ran into opposition from sceptical senior officers, including a brother of the emperor, Prince Takeda, who did not believe the 15th Army could be supplied in India and reported this view to imperial headquarters when he returned to Tokyo. Mutaguchi planned for his men to survive by capturing British supplies, an idea described by another officer as trying to ‘skin the racoon before you caught him’. However, Mutaguchi had the benefit of influential supporters and propitious circumstances. A nation facing defeat always runs the risk of becoming captive to desperate adventures. Japan needed a victory and Mutaguchi’s strike against British India offered the best hope. His superior, Lieutenant General Mazakazu Kawabe, was an old colleague from China days and ensured that his subordinate’s plans for India were not swept aside. The sceptics were told to have faith. Kawabe would keep an eye on Mutaguchi and any final decision would be his.
Kawabe is a man one might have expected to exercise restraint. He was in many respects the antithesis of his junior: cautious and famously abstemious, he was a moral puritan where Mutaguchi was a glutton. In appearance Kawabe was bespectacled, short and thin, with a twirling moustache. Perhaps he saw in Mutaguchi a virility and hunger for success that he knew to be conspicuously lacking in himself, confiding to his diary at the end of June 1943: ‘I love that man’s enthusiasm. You can’t help admiring his almost religious fervour.’ In the end, the imperative of success carried the day for Mutaguchi. With strict provisos that he was to make a detailed examination of the supply situation, and to keep to the remit of a limited operation to establish a new defensive line, Mutaguchi was told to start planning his offensive.
The bulk of his forces would be directed against Imphal, where the British 4 Corps was based and where there were several important airfields and vast supplies of fuel and ammunition. If Slim was to mount his offensive against Burma from Assam, Imphal would be the launching pad. The three divisions of 4 Corps were all separated from each other, with the majority of forces deployed close to the frontier. This made them vulnerable to being cut off and encircled. Once a
siege was under way the defenders of Imphal would have to rely on the road to the base at Dimapur for food supplies. Cut this road, Mutaguchi believed, and Imphal could be starved into submission.