War Stories II (31 page)

By nightfall on 6 March 1944, at the end of just twenty-four hours on the ground, the 1st Air Commandos had succeeded in establishing an advanced air base deep inside enemy-held territory in the Burmese highlands. Back in India, at Hailakand, they had fighter planes and ambulance aircraft standing by. Ten miles away, at Lalaghat, were the C-47s that had towed the
sixty-three gliders—two at a time—into Burma. Both sets of aircraft were designated for direct support of Wingate's troops on the ground in Japanese-held territory.

By penetrating 250 miles deep into Japanese-held territory in a matter of hours, Wingate had achieved tactical surprise. Though the high-risk venture had resulted in fifty-seven casualties, the transports that then landed at Broadway—and other Expeditionary airfields like Blackpool and Aberdeen—made it possible to insert nearly 9,000 men and a remarkable amount of matériel deep behind enemy lines. Those who arrived by glider that first night survived what amounted to a crash landing, and yet, the men of the 1st Air Commandos were still able to construct the first of several airstrips, which would serve as logistics bases and medical evacuation sites for Chindit casualties.

Though the overall effort was successful, not everything went according to plan. Wingate had wanted to build two airstrips that he had dubbed Broadway and Picadilly. But on 4 March, the day before the operation was to commence, reconnaissance photos of the proposed landing sites showed that the enemy had strewn huge teak logs all across the field code-named Picadilly. The glider pilots were concerned that none of the gliders could make it in safely. After reviewing the options, it was decided at the last minute to abandon a landing at Picadilly.

There were no visible obstacles at the Broadway site, so all sixty-three gliders employed the night of 5 March were ordered to land there. This decision doubled the number of Wacos landing at Broadway and caused the problems that Alison and Turner experienced with gliders landing on top of one another. The result was that only thirty-seven of the sixty-three gliders attempting to land made it intact. Twenty-four men were killed and another thirty-three were injured, many seriously.

Despite the casualties, men, mules, and tiny bulldozers went to work. When darkness fell on 6 March, Broadway had
a usable runway!
Later that night, there were also lights, provided by a generator. The first C-47 transports—flying ammunition, anti-aircraft batteries, and security troops to protect the base from Japanese attack—landed without incident after dark.
By dawn of the second day, more than 500 additional troops had been delivered and all the injured from the glider crashes had been evacuated.

Within the first week, C-47s were able to deliver aviation fuel in fifty-five-gallon drums to Broadway, and P-40 fighters soon followed. Positioning fighters forward in Burma permitted the P-40s to provide fighter escort for the B-25s launched out of India. The effect was almost instantaneous. With fighter cover from Broadway, B-25s could now go after the big Japanese airbase at Shwebo, which was immediately targeted. The first American raid on the base—by B-25s escorted by Broadway-based P-40s—caught the Japanese air force completely by surprise. Sixty enemy planes were destroyed on the ground. Another mission by Allied planes did even more damage to the Japanese air base two days later.

Wingate's Chindits, supported by the 1st Air Commandos and Chennault's Flying Tigers, were able to pursue a far more aggressive campaign in 1944 than they had a year earlier. With Broadway secured as a “rear” base, the Air Commandos and Chindits forged deeper into the Burmese jungle, hacking out additional airstrips as they advanced through the inhospitable terrain.

Wingate's deep penetration operation was certainly not the decisive factor in the eventual defeat of Mutaguchi's campaign to invade India—that credit surely goes to General William Slim and his 14th Army. They bore the brunt of the Japanese attack along the border and withstood Mutaguchi's offensive against Imphal and Kohima, two of the biggest engagements in the CBI theater.

But it is also evident from postwar records of the Japanese 15th Army that Wingate's LRP force, along with the proper air support, became just what the Allies had hoped it would be—a disruptive thorn in Mutaguchi's side. Within two weeks they succeeded in cutting the Mandalay-to-Myitky-ina railroad—the main Japanese logistics route that the Imperial Army had built with POW slave labor.

Wingate was well aware that the railroad his irregulars had seized was one of several in Burma that the Japanese were constructing with slave labor provided by Allied prisoners of war. When he was planning the March 1944 Chindit operation into Burma, one of the missions he assigned his officers
was to be prepared to use their LRP units to rescue any Allied prisoners within their zone of action. Unfortunately for men like Private Kyle Thompson, a Texas National Guardsman captured in the opening days of the war, Wingate's Chindits never got close enough to rescue him or his long-suffering mates toiling and dying in the Burmese jungle building railroads for the Japanese military.