Authors: Fergal Keane
In August 1943 Mutaguchi held a war game at his headquarters in Maymyo during which he revealed that he planned to send an entire division to block the road to Dimapur. They would do it by seizing the best defensive position along the route: the lightly defended hill town of Kohima. With Kohima under his control, Mutaguchi would be able to march on to Dimapur and capture the biggest supply base in the region. It would doom the defenders of Imphal and devastate Slim’s plans to invade northern Burma.
In an official recording only to be released three decades after his death, Renya Mutaguchi described his projected invasion of northeastern India as the first step in turning the tide of war in Japan’s favour: ‘The motivation for starting this campaign is nothing but winning the Great Far Eastern War.’ The Imperial headquarters and the Southern Area Army under Count Terauchi hoped for a battle that would drive the British back from the Indian frontier. Japan would then consolidate a new defensive line and sit out the monsoon. Mutaguchi and his acolytes still hoped, with a chronic absence of appreciation of the global situation, for a favourable turn in the war in Europe that might, in conjunction with a Japanese victory in India, force the British into a separate peace and out of the war with Japan.
Mutaguchi’s dream of victory was encouraged by the lobbying of Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the Indian National Army, who assured both Mutaguchi and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo that India would rise in rebellion once his men planted their flag on Indian soil. The ‘March on Delhi’ was bragged about on Tokyo radio and spread as a rumour by Japanese agents eager to foment instability in the Indian Army. In
Defeat into Victory
General Slim speculated that the defeat of British power in India was the ultimate aim of the invasion.
‘Here was the one place where they could stage an offensive that might give them all they hoped,’ he wrote. ‘If it succeeded the
destruction of the British forces in Burma would be the least of its results. China completely isolated would be driven into a separate peace; India, ripe as they thought for revolt against the British, would fall, a glittering prize into their hands … it might indeed, as they proclaimed in exhortations to their troops, change the whole course of the world war.’ Certainly Mutaguchi indulged himself in ‘private speculations’ and, according to one author, even day dreamed about riding a white horse into Delhi. But a Japanese army with a line of communication extending across high mountains over a thousand miles to the docks at Rangoon, and with virtually no air and naval cover, could never have hoped to march deep into India, even with the supplies it captured from the British along the way.
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Neither Tojo, Count Terauchi or the Emperor entertained any thoughts of a ‘March on Delhi’ at this point in the war. By late 1943 defence was the paramount concern and Burma was the western anchor of Japan’s ‘Absolute Defence Sphere’. There would of course be spin-offs. Chiang Kai-shek would be isolated once more in China and the British would be humiliated in the eyes of their Indian subjects and American allies. If the resulting chaos kept the British tied down indefinitely in India so much the better.
On 22 December 1944 Mutaguchi called a conference in Maymyo attended by Lieutenant General Kawabe, who commanded the Burma Area Army, and Major General Ayabe, deputy chief of staff to the commander of Southern Army, Count Terauchi, who controlled operations across South-East Asia. By now the doubters on Mutaguchi’s own staff had been silenced or banished. But he needed
the final go-ahead from Tokyo. Fearful that the British would grasp the initiative and attack first, he pleaded his case with Ayabe. The deputy chief of staff agreed to make the argument for imminent action with Count Terauchi.
A veteran of the great victory over Russia in 1905, the count was well respected in the imperial hierarchy and without his support Mutaguchi might have found himself delayed indefinitely. The Japanese war leadership, focused on the Pacific and the looming threat to the home islands, was, if not reluctant to commit to the Indian offensive, certainly too distracted to give it a high priority. Count Terauchi listened to his vice-chief’s account of the Maymyo war game and agreed to send him on to Tokyo to put Mutaguchi’s case directly to imperial headquarters.
Ayabe was an experienced political operator. He had served in numerous senior staff positions and was posted abroad as military attaché to Poland in the early 1930s, and later as a liaison officer to the Axis powers in Berlin and Rome. Arriving in Tokyo, he found himself cast as persuader-in-chief for Mutaguchi’s adventure. For three days senior staff, including the chief of operations, questioned him closely about the risks of the offensive. Ayabe felt he had made the case well but knew a final decision could only come from Tojo. The deputy chief of staff was on his way back to the airport when he received news that a colonel had been despatched to see Tojo to seek final approval.
The colonel in question was Susumu Nishiura, head of the Bureau of Military Affairs, who would later produce the first account of the war from inside the military hierarchy. His account, ‘Records of Showa War History’, laid bare the incompetence and decadence of the system.
Arriving at Tojo’s home, he was told the prime minister was in his bath. Nishiura spoke to Tojo through a glass partition overlaid with steam. He recorded the following conversation:
Tojo: What’s the matter?
Nishiura: Sir, we urgently want a decision on the Imphal operation.
Tojo: Imphal … yes … How about communications? Have they been properly thought out? Eh? Eh? It’s difficult country towards India you know.
Nishiura: Yes, sir. The whole plan has been gone into in great detail. Tojo: What about Mutaguchi? Are his plans up to schedule? Eh? Has he got any problems?
Nishiura: He is anxious to go ahead, sir.
Tojo: What about air cover? We can’t help him much. Does he realise that?
Nishiura: I take it he does, sir.
Tojo: Now what about the result of pushing our defensive line towards India? What problems is that going to make for us? Eh? Are you sure it will make things better rather than worse? What will happen if the Allies land on the Arakan coast? Has anyone thought of that? Eh? Eh?’
Tojo then climbed out of the bath and towelled himself before subjecting the colonel to a detailed interrogation on the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. Eventually Nishiura was told that the order would be signed. But Tojo warned that 15th Army was not to be ‘too ambitious’. When the order was finally issued a week later, Tojo stressed the defensive nature of the operation. ‘In order to defend Burma the Commander-in-Chief, Southern Army may occupy and secure the vital areas of north-east India in the vicinity of Imphal by defeating the enemy in that area at the opportune time.’ Count Terauchi was warned to keep a tight rein on Mutaguchi. As one Japanese officer put it to Mutaguchi when the latter told him he wanted to die on the Indian frontier, ‘It would no doubt satisfy you to go to Imphal and die there. But Japan might be overthrown in the process.’
Tojo had delayed in approving the operation because he recognised that it was a significant gamble. Yet he reported optimistically to the Emperor that ‘we will achieve the objective before the rainy season which begins in mid-May, defeat the enemy in northern Burma and thoroughly cut the route from India to China’.
As 1943 came to an end two complementary Japanese offensives were being planned. Before Mutaguchi would launch across the Chindwin there would be the diversionary strike in the Arakan. The 55th Division would attack General Christison’s 15 Corps, and would be supported by loud propaganda that they intended to march on Calcutta. While this was underway Mutaguchi’s 15th Army would ready itself to cross the Chindwin and catch Slim unawares, striking the decisive blows at Imphal and Kohima. The British and Indians would be swiftly overwhelmed. On this assumption was disaster built.
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Bushido,
The Way of the Warrior
, was a code originating in the Samurai era which emphasised the virtues of discipline, sacrifice and courage. Every Japanese officer was enjoined to embrace bushido as his guiding principle.
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It should be pointed out that the rescript also emphasised that ‘superiors should never treat their inferiors with contempt or arrogance … making kindness their chief aim’.
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The first election with adult male suffrage in Japan did not take place until 1928. Two years later a right-winger shot the prime minister, and two years after that young naval officers killed his successor. The slide into military rule and international isolation quickened. In 1931 the army, ignoring the Cabinet, staged an incident in Manchuria that led ultimately to Japan’s departure from the League of Nations.
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The coup might have succeeded if Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the rebels claimed to act, had chosen to support the Imperial Way. But he was appalled by the attacks on his most senior advisers and condemned the plotters; martial law was declared and the mutinous officers either committed suicide or were captured and executed. But the 26 February incident boosted the military, which used the instability that followed as an excuse to increase their grip on the levers of power. It was the critical moment after which the march to war in Asia became inevitable. John Toland,
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936–1945
(Pen and Sword, 2005), p. 17.
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Japanese forces stationed in China under an international agreement provoked a confrontation by staging night manoeuvres on 7 July 1937. After a dispute with the Chinese over the alleged kidnapping of a Japanese soldier during the operation the Japanese opened fire on Chinese positions. The soldier was later found unharmed.
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Major General Charles Orde Wingate (1903–1944) has remained as divisive a figure after his death as he was in his lifetime. His ideas for long-range penetration operations behind enemy lines, and the use of air power to deploy and supply these troops, foreshadowed the special operations forces of today. Perhaps his most important achievement was in boosting public and troop morale with his first Chindit expedition in 1943. Coming after the humiliation of the retreat from Burma and the failed first Arakan offensive, the image of the British forces surprising the Japanese behind their own lines was a morale and propaganda coup. It also inadvertently hastened the Japanese to disaster by convincing them that they could send large forces of men across the mountains into India. They did not appreciate the appalling human cost of Wingate’s operations or the extent to which he increasingly depended on the diversion of huge air resources to deploy and supply his troops. Of the 3,000 Chindits who entered Burma on the first expedition, one thousand never returned and a further six hundred were too ravaged by illness to ever fight again. On the second Chindit expedition – ‘Operation Thursday’ – a force of some 12,000 men sustained 944 dead, 2,434 wounded and 452 missing. Wingate was killed on 24 March,1944 when his plane crashed near Imphal.
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The Japanese plan for a ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ approved by the Cabinet in 1940 made no mention of India, nor did the Japanese officials who outlined the Empire’s territorial ambitions in their discussions with Germany ever suggest such a conquest. When the British conducted an inquiry in 1948 and interviewed fourteen top ranking Japanese officers, it concluded that ‘a search of all the available records failed to reveal any documents which would provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not the Japanese government entertained concrete plans for the invasion of India by the Japanese Army.’ (Cited p. 142,
The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Burma
, Julian Thompson, Sidgwick and Jackson, 2002.)
Across the Arakan, in the camps of the British and Indian troops of 15 Corps, and in the tunnels and bunkers of the Japanese, a sense of expectation was spreading as the two armies scouted out each other’s positions, uncertain when the other would strike. The 4th West Kents arrived in early November after sailing across the Bay of Bengal and marching for seven days to reach Chota Maunghnama, a coastal fishing village on the fringe of Japanese-occupied territory. The heat on the march would suck the energy from the fittest of men after a couple of hours. Vehicles passing them on the road threw up clouds of dust, covering the troops who responded with shouts and curses. In places locals were sent out to douse the dust with gallons of water; this was intended to prevent rising clouds of dust that could betray their presence to Japanese aircraft. ‘Despite their efforts,’ Ray Street recalled, ‘dust rose everywhere, but we weren’t attacked.’
After a day of this Colonel Laverty issued an order that all marching would be done at night. Accordingly, the column swapped the dust for the attentions of the Arakan’s plentiful mosquitoes, which descended in malign clouds after nightfall. The advance into Burma had its moments of comedy. In the middle of one night the column collided with a long mule train coming in the other direction. Men and animals became entangled in the darkness and the strict order of silence was quickly forgotten amid a welter of curses and slaps. From their camp near Chota Maunghnama, the troops began patrolling the surrounding territory, a mix of jungle, swamp and hillocks, or ‘pimples’, as the troops called them. Laverty was preoccupied with
creating an an anti-infiltration force that could respond quickly to any Japanese attempt to sneak around the back of his units.
An Australian brigadier who had fought the Japanese in New Guinea was brought in to lecture on tactics. Ray Street learned to move silently through the jungle, with anything that might rattle – a water bottle, ammunition pouch, or weapon – carefully secured. The men made their bivouacs away from streams and rivers where the populations of leeches and insects were most numerous. Still, one sergeant made the mistake of falling asleep beside a stream and became covered with leeches. An officer wrote that he died from loss of blood, although septicaemia from one of the wounds is another possible explanation.