The Battle At Sangshak: Prelude to Kohima

By Harry Seaman

This book tells the story of a small, yet significant, battle that was a precursor to the better known battles for Imphal and Kohima.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 30, 1989
• ISBN: 9781473812147

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days.

PART I

PRELUDE

1

The Japanese Tidal Wave

JAPAN’S TIDAL WAVE of conquest, piling up from Pearl Harbor to Singapore, swept the British, Americans and Dutch from their holdings in the Far East in little more than a hundred days of cataclysm. On 20 January, 1942, within a few weeks of their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese burst into Burma. Overwhelming resistance, or rushing round it as a tide floods up between the sandbanks, they reached the head of the Burmese river valleys under the northern arc of mountains, and there they established their front. The force and speed of their coming split the hastily assembled British/Chinese army; the British retreated across the Chindwin River and over the jungle ranges into India, while the Chinese withdrew up the wild gorges of the Salween River into the fastnesses of Yunnan, never to re-emerge.

So Burma was added to Japan’s glittering crown of conquests: Siam, Indo-China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and, all too soon, Singapore. It was indeed ‘the greatest land grab in history’. The Burma Road, China’s last land link with her western allies, was severed; a wedge of mountain and malarial jungle was driven between them.

For the Allies, the military situation was as black as could possibly be imagined. The British Imperial force was stretched to the limit by the war against the Axis. Nearly every item of equipment that could be scraped together had been sent to Singapore. In Burma, to defend a land the size of Germany and with a hundredth of its communications, the British had two divisions, neither of them full-strength or tested in battle. Out of a total force of 50,000 it is estimated that about half were combat troops; 7,000 were British and 20,000 Indian, the rest being raised in Burma largely among the hill tribes. The 17th Indian Division, which met the first impact of the Japanese invasion, had been trained for open warfare in the African deserts, and such transport as it possessed was wheeled and unsuited to jungle tracks. Two of its three brigades had already been diverted to Singapore; they were replaced by others composed of assorted units. This scratch Division was then pitted against the best-trained jungle troops in the world. The air support for this force was entrusted to a few RAF Brewster Buffalos and Blenheims, aided by the dashing American Volunteer Group who happened to be in Rangoon, fitting out for service in China, when the Japanese delivered their blow at Pearl Harbor. The fighter aircraft existing to defend India herself at this period amounted to eight old Mohawk aircraft stationed at Calcutta; not a single bomber squadron was available for operations and no heavy bases existed along the Indo-Burmese border. The armoured elements on hand were some old carriers and armoured cars used for training.

This thin British garrison was strung out to guard the whole of Burma’s eastern frontier, from the Shan states bordering on Indo-China to Victoria Point, 800 miles away at the far end of the Tenasserim coastal strip which stretches down the western shore of the Malay peninsula towards Singapore. The task was impossible, the end inevitable.

On 4 May, 1942, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, Governor of Burma, received orders from Winston Churchill to leave the country; he flew to India in one of the last planes out of Burma. On 20 May Alexander’s army of Burma ceased to exist as a command; his troops were incorporated into IV Corps of India Command based in Imphal, just across the border in the Indian region of Assam.

The whole of Burma had passed to Japan. It was to take another three years, years of dismay and near despair, before a predominantly Indian Army was to turn the tide on the Japanese.

To those who have not experienced living, let alone fighting, in what General Slim called ‘those hellish jungle mountains’, it is difficult to convey the totality of conditions there. Words can paint only an inadequate picture, but without some understanding of the terrain on which the battles of early 1944 were to be fought, any story of the Burma war loses half its meaning.

Back in London, even senior generals who had personal experience of battlefields all around the world could make little sense of reports of the Burma campaign. They could not understand how a battle could be so vital if it was fought at the patrol, platoon and company level. Even closer to the scene of action, perceptions were clouded. Such was the geography of Burma that it made a nonsense of all the conventions of normal infantry warfare. As late as November, 1944, when Slim was writing an interim report for the benefit of the British Chiefs of Staff in London, he found it necessary to preface his remarks with yet another briefing in terms of climate and terrain.

The climate is horrendous, particularly in the northern zone where the rainfall is heavy and constant for the five months of the monsoon. Born every year in May, in the Bay of Bengal, this cyclonic circulation flows towards the mountains of the Indo-Burmese border. Variations in intensity of rainfall are governed by the angle at which the clouds strike the mountains: most of the rain falls on the windward slopes. Charapungy in Assam, just across the border, has some 600 inches of rain a year, making it the wettest place on earth. At Shillong, only a few miles away but on the opposite side of the range, the annual rainfall is less than sixty inches. Along with the monsoon came the malaria season, for the country is plagued by the mosquito as well as a variety of diseases: any visitor to Assam is likely to fall prey to dengue fever, scrub typhus, cholera, scabies, yaws, sprue and every known form of dysentery, as well as the less serious but infuriating ‘Naga sore’ caused by pulling off leeches and leaving their heads in one’s flesh. It was the fate of the British, once they had lost Burma, to be mainly in the pestilent hills that broke up the monsoon clouds or on the windward side of them. The southern zone, around the valley of the lower Irrawaddy, is much drier and healthier; this was the main base of the Japanese power in Burma.

Perhaps Nature’s meanest trick in the mountain wilderness, played impartially on friend and foe alike, was her capricious supply of water. For the five monsoon months, the rains soaked everything and everyone; for the rest of the year, though freely available in the valleys, water became an increasingly precious commodity in the hill villages. The meagre springs, overflowing by the end of the monsoon in September, would almost have dried up by the following spring when the rains were due to start their cycle afresh. There was usually enough for the needs of the local inhabitants, but the supply was hopelessly inadequate for troops in battle, and both sides were going to suffer grievously from dehydration.

Most of the northern campaign took place in a great series of wild mountain ranges, almost as high as the Swiss Alps, breaking out in a chaos of jumbled spurs and knife-edge ridges, all cloaked in a blanket of blue-green jungle: thick woodland at the peaks and dense tropical jungle in the valley depths. For most of Burma is an extension of the mountain mass of Central Asia that men call ‘the roof of the world’, with the Himalayas forming a natural barrier to the north.

Shaped like a hand with a long forefinger pointing south, Burma is split up into ranges and deeply divided by river valleys—principally the Chindwin, the Irrawaddy and the Salween, all running roughly north-south to empty into the Bay of Bengal. Rangoon, the capital, stands on the delta of the Irrawaddy. Communication with the rest of the country depends on the river system as much as the railways and the road, particularly in those days when many roads were little better than goat tracks across the ridges, often blocked by landslides caused by the monsoon rains. Again, it was the Japanese who had the better half of the bargain, for land communications in the south were far easier than in the north.

By contrast with the Japanese, living off the surrounding rice fields and travelling along easier routes, the Allied troops had to be supplied from distant Indian bases, often with rations dropped by air. On the Indian side of the border ran a railway but so far away that it could only be tapped effectively at three points: Chittagong in the south, Ledo in the north, and Dimapur in between. Moreover, between these three military railheads and the main Allied base at Calcutta, the line had to cross either the lower Ganges or the Brahmaputra, and neither river was bridged: all men and supplies had to be detrained, ferried across or shipped downstream for many miles, and then re-entrained on the far bank. The crossings were half a mile wide, and during the monsoon the flooded rivers could rise by thirty feet or more. From the railhead onward the Eastern Army had to build roads through swamp and forest, along precipices winding 8,000 feet up into the clouds, hacked out largely by hand in a few desperate months.

But the Japanese success was due to more than good luck. Their infantry was probably the finest in the world, the product of a social structure of near-feudal traditionalism and an inborn respect for order and discipline that was conducive to the training of soldiers. Add to this the remarkable indifference to death in battle displayed by all the Japanese fighting services, and a capacity for physical endurance unthinkable in western armies, and it can readily be understood why Japanese service chiefs took superiority in performance for granted and incorporated it in their planning as a matter of course.

In the face of such superior forces the Allies needed not only a change in tactics, but also a change in thinking at the highest political levels. Disagreements over strategy had contributed to the fall of Burma, and would continue to cause friction. Indeed, in no other theatre of war between 1939 and 1945 was there such disharmony between allies.

With the fall of Singapore in February 1942, that fortress on which so much reliance had been placed, British policy concerning the defence of her Far Eastern Empire had collapsed. In any case, Britain had more immediate worries at home, where she was facing the very real threat of invasion by Germany. So, now that the Americans were in the war, London was looking to them to restrain Japanese expansion in the east. The Americans agreed, up to a point. In their eyes, the priority was to help free the Chinese from the Japanese oppressor; as they saw it, it was no part of their duty to help restore Burma to the British Imperial power. The Chinese, under the chaotic administration of the self-styled Generalissimo of the Nationalist Government, Chiang Kai-shek, then based in Chungking, were fit only for fighting among themselves. The Indians, meanwhile, were stepping up their fight for independence from Britain.

It was back in the 1930s that America had begun to take an interest in China. Her commercial stake there was small, but the potential market for her goods and services immeasurable; to the American collective conscience there was also the genuine appeal of a nation suffering under the heel of an aggressive invader. Thus far American perceptions had clarity: where they fell down was in the deference and status they accorded to Chiang Kai-shek. Here, they thought, was the secure ruler of a united nation, bursting with manpower and lacking only the sinews of war; with a little American support Chiang’s armies would engage the Japanese invader in a great patriotic war of rehabilitation that would end with China as a great power – duly grateful to the Americans. This fantasy was fuelled by the China lobby in Washington, ably orchestrated by Madame Chiang, who was more or less permanently resident there. Yet this was the root cause of all the Anglo-American differences over Burma. Following a visit to Washington in 1942, Churchill was to write scathingly about their ’wholly unreal scale of values, which accorded China about an equal fighting power with the British Empire and rated the Chinese armies as a factor to be mentioned in the same breath as the armies of Russia’.

The British had no such illusions about Chiang. They saw him as a senior warlord, temporarily in the ascendancy in his tiny toehold in China. They judged, rightly, that while Britian and America were at war with Japan, Chiang would be perfectly happy to see them get on with it, contributing promises and exhortations in exchange for gold and material, preferably the gold—not in order to pay his army to fight the common enemy, as Washington supposed, but to buy off those minor warlords who could best contribute to his own survival.

Chiang was to try the patience even of General Joseph Stilwell, prime sinophile and Roosevelt’s personal representative at Chungking. In 1942 Chiang gave Stilwell control of the Chinese army in Burma; but on one occasion at least the Chinese commanders demanded a bribe of 15,000 rupees before agreeing to attack. No doubt aware of the friction between the Americans and the British, and possibly hoping to play one of his allies off against the other, Chiang also gave Alexander control of the Chinese army. It would seem, however, that the British Army Commander did not carry that sort of money around in loose change; certainly there is no record of any Chinese unit ever actually fighting under British command.

But the truth is that Britain was to become increasingly reliant on the Americans in all aspects of the war against Japan. Throughout 1942, in the Mediterranean theatre at least, the British managed to impose their own strategic concepts on their late-come and inexperienced ally. With every month that passed, however, the accelerating contribution from the powerhouse across the Atlantic tilted the balance of power between the two major allies ever more steadily in favour of America. The Americans wanted an overland campaign in the east, and concentrated their efforts in Assam towards their objective of helping China. Churchill and the War Cabinet in London preferred an amphibious alternative, using air and sea transport to launch an offensive at Rangoon – thus avoiding a head-on confrontation with the Japanese in the great mountain ranges of Burma.

If the fall of Singapore, with its devastating blow to British pride and influence, had caused alarm and despondency in London, in India the news only added momentum to the calls for self-government. Emboldened by the declining prestige of the Raj, and adapting Gandhi’s slogan of ‘Quit India’ to a war cry, the Indian Congress Party moved rapidly to a confrontation with the British Government. In August, 1942, serious and widespread disturbances broke out; riots, arson, and looting led to a death toll of hundreds in many provincial centres of India. The violence was quickly suppressed, which further alienated many of the more prosperous and better