Codebreakers Victory (42 page)

Stilwell's assigned task was to clear the Japanese out of northern Burma, an offensive essential to breaking the blockade of China. That Burma Road alternative that Churchill disparaged had been under construction since the autumn of 1942. American engineers were directing the building of a two-way all-weather road leading from Ledo, in India, southeastward into Burma to join up with the Burma Road's upper reaches. If Chiang's armies were to receive the help they needed, a new overland truck route must replace dependence on planes flying the Hump. Also, alongside the Ledo Road the engineers built a pipeline to carry fuel to the B-29 bombers expected to attack the Japanese in eastern Asia and in Japan itself.

To reach his north Burma objectives, Stilwell would have to push for 150 miles through jungles, over mountains and across rivers to capture the rail, air and road hub that the maps named Myitkyina and the Americans called "Mitch."

Trained in India by Americans, the Chinese soldiers had rounded into formidable fighters. As Sevareid described them in his reports from India, "Now husky, well fed, imbued with fighting spirit by the Americans and their own young and able officers . . . they were at least the equal of the Japanese." They offered "a startling contrast with the rest of Chiang's starved and spiritless army."

The Thirty-eighth Chinese Division had not penetrated far into Burma before they encountered stiff opposition. At the same time the Allies in India had been planning their campaign, the Japanese commanders, as decrypts began to verify, had developed their own offensive plans, whose objective was nothing less than to smash the Allied armies in their path and take India. As the ever useful Baron Oshima had radioed to Tokyo—and to Magic codebreakers—Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had told him, "Germany would eagerly welcome a Japanese invasion into the Indian Ocean whereby contact between Europe and Asia might be achieved." Bent on fulfilling their part, the Japanese had been moving troops into north Burma in preparation for their Indian campaign. They met and slowed the advance of Stilwell's Chinese fighters.

Vinegar Joe, however, now had a new source of strength. This was an American combat unit that was to gain fame as "Merrill's Marauders" because it was under the command of Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill. The outfit, trained in India with the Chindits, was only three thousand men strong, but it included veterans of combat duty in the Pacific plus a number of toughs volunteering to avoid guardhouse time.

Stilwell expected more of the Marauders than guerrilla-type missions. In what he called a "left hook," he sent them around the Japanese facing the Chinese attackers and had them take up a position blocking a Japanese retreat. The commander of the Japanese Eighteenth Division threw his full strength against the Marauders, ordering charge after charge. The Americans held firm, piling up Japanese bodies on the approaches to their lines. In the end the Eighteenth had to give up the attack and slip away through the jungles to escape. It was Stilwell's first major victory in Burma—and a tonic for Allied spirits everywhere.

Stilwell's second try at having the Marauders swing around the tenacious Eighteenth was less successful. He planned a two-way hook meant, this time, to bottle up the division and destroy it. The trouble was the terrain the Marauders had to cross. The combination of jungle and mountains made their treks long and exhausting. Short of supplies and water, they fell ill to dysentery and jungle diseases. They did establish a roadblock, but when a Chinese brigade came to their relief, the Chinese let the Eighteenth again escape annihilation.

Even though the Marauders were weary and ill, and had lost their leader to an incapacitating heart attack, Stilwell called on them for yet another desperate mission, this one in response to a captured Japanese document. From this bit of intelligence, Stilwell knew he had to block the attempt by a Japanese battalion to mount their own left hook and outflank the Chinese. The Marauders stationed themselves to stand off the attack, dug in and held on for a week. They were aided by a different kind of intelligence. A Japanese American sergeant, Roy H. Matsumoto, nightly crawled close to the enemy's perimeter and, listening in on their conversations, learned of their plans for the following day. He also learned Japanese intentions by clipping into their telephone lines. In one critical attack, when the first wave of the Japanese had been shot to pieces, Matsumoto yelled "Charge" in Japanese to a follow-up wave, who also rushed into wholesale slaughter. The sergeant's information helped the Marauders turn back the try at encirclement.

But Stilwell was still ninety miles from Mitch. He faced the necessity of stirring the Chinese into exerting more aggressive pressure on the main front. He also had to motivate the Marauders to take on one last grueling mission, despite their being down to half their original numbers and looking for relief rather than further action. The assignment was to make a long eastward swing, code-named End Run, and close in on Myitkyina from a direction the Japanese would least suspect.

To meet the first demand, Stilwell used all his powers of persuasion, flattery and bullying to make the Chinese generals step up their attacks. He walked into the front lines and made himself a visible target, knowing that the Chinese commanders would fear their superiors' wrath if Vinegar Joe was killed. To lessen this chance, they ordered their men forward. "It pays to go up and push," Stilwell wrote in his diary. "At least, it's a coincidence that every time I do, they spurt a bit."

As for the Marauders, he convinced them that there was no one else who could do the job. Also, he increased their numbers by adding two Chinese regiments as well as a band of Burmese guerrillas who were experienced in operating behind Japanese lines.

The drive became a terrible ordeal. Stilwell was forced to send in more Chinese troops and to strip engineers off the Ledo Road project and convert them into infantry. In addition, the monsoon rains arrived early. By late June 1944, however, End Run had succeeded. The airstrip at Mitch had been seized, and after more bitter fighting, so had the town itself. Just as important, the enemy's Eighteenth Division had at last been broken and its remnants sent fleeing to the south. Having the Myitkyina airstrip in Allied hands meant that air transport could avoid the Hump and double the tonnage lifted to China. This development made Churchill's prediction of the needlessness of the Ledo Road almost come true. By the time the road was completed, Stilwell's capture of the Mitch airstrip had brought a far larger flow of supplies to Chiang—forty thousand tons of them in fourteen thousand transport flights—than was moved over the new truck route.

Not that the Generalissimo was inclined to show any gratitude. Instead, still incensed by Stilwell's too freely expressed estimation of him, Chiang pressed for, and in October 1944 succeeded in achieving, Vinegar Joe's recall.

Stilwell had worn so many hats, it took three generals to replace him. The North Central Area Command passed to his subordinate Daniel Sultan. In China, Albert Wedemeyer was chosen to be Chiang's adviser. And Raymond Wheeler became Mountbatten's deputy supreme commander for the Southeast Asia Command.

 

 

Stopping the Japanese at Imphal

 

To the small tales of success that Orde Wingate and his Chindits had achieved in the first Burma campaign, he hoped to add big news in the second. He had more than three times as many troops assigned to him. He also had his own air force, including U.S. planes to supply his behind-the-lines incursions, as well as gliders to carry in his troops. Above all, he had the strong backing of Winston Churchill and even of Franklin Roosevelt. Churchill had invited him to the Quebec Conference, where he had made so strong an impression that the Allied leaders instructed him to appeal to them directly if his immediate superiors were thwarting his plans.

General Slim, in his memoir,
Defeat into Victory,
told of an incident in which, when he denied Wingate's demand that an Indian division be added to his Chindits, the brigadier let him know that he had a loyalty above that to his immediate commander. To whom? Slim asked. "To the Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States," Wingate replied, and added that this was an occasion when he must so appeal. "I pushed a signal pad across my desk to him," Slim wrote, "and told him to go and write his message. He did not take the pad but he left the room. Whether he ever sent the message I do not know, nor did I inquire. Anyhow, that was the last I heard of his demand for the 26th division."

For their part in the campaign, the Chindits were assigned to give extraordinary support to Stilwell's offensive. To do this, they had their gliders towed far to the south, beyond Myitkyina. Landed there, the glider troops established three airstrips while a larger group marched overland to join them. The Chindits eased the pressure on Stilwell's Chinese divisions by cutting the Japanese supply routes and creating other behind-the-lines mayhem. Their planes protected both the Chindits and Stilwell's troops from Japanese air attacks. In a reminiscence, Delhi-stationed code man Alan Stripp told of the "punched-in-solar-plexus anguish" of the Japanese, as revealed in decrypts of their reports of the Chindits' exploits.

In the midst of the operation, Wingate himself was killed in a plane crash. Churchill recorded his distress: "With him a bright flame was extinguished."

Both the Chindits and the Marauders were, in Slim's words, "asked to do more than was possible." By August 1944 "they had shot their bolt." Their remnants were withdrawn.

Meanwhile, Slim himself was attempting to carry out his part of the campaign. His own word for his objectives was "modest": to lead his divisions out of India and drive down the India-Burma border to Burma's west coast. For a while the operations of his Fourteenth Army went well. Michael Smith's recently published book
The Emperor's Codes
has recorded how India-based codebreakers combined with mobile intelligence units to provide Slim's army with the signals intelligence it needed for its invasion of Burma.

Then, at the beginning of February 1944, Slim's divisions began to encounter the same force that had slowed Stilwell's advance: the reinforced Japanese effort to mount their own powerful offensive, their "March to Delhi." While the troops carrying out the Allies' coastal thrust inflicted some setbacks to the Japanese and proved, once again, that the British could defeat the enemy in jungle warfare, Slim soon had to reorganize his divisions to meet the more serious threat of a major Japanese drive into India by pressing up through central Burma.

As Allied decrypts revealed, the Japanese no longer regarded Burma as an aside in their war. Success in Burma could completely isolate China and, it was hoped, drive the Chinese to sue for a separate peace. The Japanese organized Indian and Burmese anti-British armies. Magic decrypts of Oshima's messages revealed how the Burmese rebel Subhas Chandra Bose, who had opposed Gandhi's nonviolent rebellion in favor of an armed one against the British and had fled to exile in Germany, was transported in a German U-boat to Japan as preparation for his leadership of pro-Japanese forces in the CBI theater. The Japanese were encouraged to believe both Burma and India were ripe for revolution and would fall into their hands. As Japanese commanders proclaimed in exhortations to their troops, victory in Burma could change the whole course of the war.

Properly handled, the Burma offensive could ease the supply situation by seizing Allied supplies. The Japanese were so confident in this hope that they sent units of gunners without guns so they could take over captured British artillery.

Faced with this grave new threat, Slim and his commanders drew together a defense line south of the Indian town of Imphal. Slim planned to begin resistance on this new line and then, at the strategic moment, withdraw to the Imphal Plain and there "fight the decisive battle on grounds of our own choosing."

He later admitted that he made not just one "cardinal error," but two. With timing all-important, he allowed the withdrawal decision to be left to his field general. This was wrong, he acknowledged, because he himself was much better informed and in receipt of much more comprehensive intelligence reports. As it was, the withdrawal was delayed too long. The Japanese were able to send roadblocks around the retreating British troops and force them to fight their way through, with serious losses of men and equipment.

Slim's second error was in badly underestimating the capacity of the Japanese. Driven by their desire to capture British supplies, they showed themselves capable of accomplishing the sort of large-scale, long-range infiltration at which the Allies had become adept.

Slim had thought the Japanese would send only a regiment against the town of Kohima, north of Imphal. Copies of the Japanese maps and plans, recovered from a fallen officer's dispatch case, informed him otherwise. The entire Thirty-first Division of the Imperial Fifteenth Army was pressing the attack. Both Kohima and Imphal were quickly surrounded.

The British commanders were acutely aware that if the Japanese overran these strongpoints, their way was clear to strike virtually unopposed into the Indian subcontinent.

In two of the war's more admirable examples of courage, the garrisons held out. At Kohima, wounded men left their hospital beds, took up rifles and joined defenders. The Japanese kept pushing in the perimeter until, at one point, Kohima's no-man's-land consisted of a former swell's tennis court. Air teams dropped food, water and ammunition. The garrisons fought on, from April through May and into June.

In addition, as Slim's postmortem affirmed, he was saved from his mistakes by the "bullet head" and "unenterprising" nature of Kotoku Sato, the Japanese general directing the siege of Kohima. Sato could have left a small detachment to keep the garrison penned in while he dispatched the bulk of his division to take the vital but lightly protected center of Dimapur and open India to his advance. Instead, he spent his force by senselessly ordering wave after wave of bloody frontal attacks against the defenders. Allen has contested Slim's opinion of the Japanese general, claiming that Sato was "neither stupid nor unenterprising" but was the victim of orders he received from his superiors.