Jitra to Singapore

In a rapid advance, the Imperial Japanese Army overran British positions in northern Malaya, easily breaking through at Jitra, a strongly fortified line of wire entanglements and deep trenches astride the road to Alor Star. It was expected to be held for three months. An impromptu night attack by barely 500 Japanese soldiers drove off the defenders in a matter of hours. Along with 3,000 prisoners came large stores of ammunition, petrol and food. For the rest of the campaign, these frequent bags of supplies were laughingly called “Churchill’s allowance”. To turn British positions, baffling tactics were employed, such as night attacks, encirclement, sudden charges and small boat operations. To maintain the momentum of the advance, Yamashita Tomoyuki ’ s men rode bicycles. Tsuji Masanobu recalls how 

the greatest difficulty . . . was the excessive heat, owing to which the tyres punctured easily. A bicycle repair squad of at least two men was attached to each company, and each squad repaired an average of twenty machines a day. But such repairs were only makeshift. When the enemy was being hotly pursued, and time was pressing, punctured tyres were taken off and bicycles ridden on the rims. Surprisingly enough they ran smoothly on the paved roads, which were in perfect condition. Numbers of bicycles some with tyres and some without, when passing along a road, made a noise resembling a tank. At night when such bicycle units advanced the enemy frequently retreated hurriedly, saying, “Here come the tanks! ” . . . Thanks to Britain’s dear money spent on excellent roads, and to the cheap Japanese bicycles, the assault on Malaya was easy.

And when necessary, the Japanese abandoned pedals and advanced through the jungle, carrying their bicycles on their shoulders. This the British found as disconcerting as attacks from the rear.

It was in fact the jungle that Yamashita Tomoyuki so brilliantly exploited. He realised the potential for outflanking movements when he saw it for the first time near Saigon. His previous posting had been Manzhouguo. Unlike him however, nearly all British senior officers regarded jungle and swampy ground as impenetrable natural obstacles. The shining exception was Ian Stewart, the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Having investigated the problems of fighting under tropical conditions, he took his men on training exercises designed to accustom them to both the advantages and disadvantages of military action in primary as well as secondary jungle. In the process, the Argylls banished any fears they had about plants or animals. “Cross - country movement through the jungle, ” Stewart wrote, “ and living in it for days at a time, not only by large parties but by small groups of three or four officers or NCOs, was practised until the jungle became a friend and not an enemy. ”  

This familiarity saved the Argylls from destruction on several occasions: it also helped inflict an early reverse on the apparently unbeatable Imperial Japanese Army at Grik Road, inland from Penang. There the Japanese were shocked by a counterattack delivered from the jungle on each side of this thoroughfare. As Steward commented: 

One of the arts of rearguard tactics in the jungle is time and space calculation . . . Quite genuinely it is a fascinating game, embodying as it does appreciations of ground, enemy dispositions, and above all the mind and speed of action of the opposing commander. But it is a nervy business, for a commander works with the jungle as a bandage over his eyes; there is no warning of an approaching crisis, and the situation will turn from blue sky to black storm in a minute or two. There are two rules that must never be broken: to hang on desperately to the initiative and to have plans ready and understood by all in anticipation of every eventuality. 

Because the British had neither tanks nor an adequate antitank defence, Stewart ’ s use of the jungle alongside roads was critical in the battles which were fought to slow down the Japanese advance.

At the engagement for the bridge at the River Slim in early January 1942, a disastrous British defeat that sealed the fate of Kuala Lumpur, the Argylls improvised road blocks and threw Molotov cocktails at Japanese medium tanks. While the bottle - bombs proved less effective than those used by the Imperial Japanese Army at Nomonhan, there was no shortage of volunteers for the Molotov cocktail party. Through this encounter the Japanese came to respect the courage of Stewart’s men, who alone on the surrender of Singapore rode to the Changi prisoner - of - war camp. Impressed by their refusal to hand over their transport, Japanese sentries saluted the column as it went into captivity to the sound of bagpipes. Those Argylls who were sent to work in other parts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere often found their distinctive bonnets attracted the attention of Japanese officers. In Thailand a sergeant - major was informed that “Argyll Scotsmen number one fighters ”.

Not that the Argylls ’ well - deserved reputation for jungle warfare did much to save Malaya or Singapore. Their capture was a foregone conclusion when British military doctrine firmly held that the jungle was impassable for large numbers of troops and that the situation was therefore overwhelmingly in favour of the defenders. It was on this assumption that the so - called fortress at Singapore had been built. Only a threat from the sea was ever seriously considered before the outbreak of the Pacific War. By the time Arthur Percival appreciated what was happening in Malaya, it was too late to adjust to Japanese methods of attack. Percival ordered the adoption of guerrilla tactics. Formations should reduce their transport as far as possible by sending all vehicles that were not immediately wanted well to the rear.

But as Stewart later commented: “New tactics cannot be learnt in the middle of a battle.” Another reason for Yamashita Tomoyuki ’ s victory was far better intelligence: he even knew the names of all the Argyll officers. The sheer speed of the Japanese advance gave the British commander - in - chief no chance of regrouping his forces for a last stand in southern Malaya, so that in February 1942 Percival was called upon to conduct his last campaign, the defence of Singapore.

The Fighting Retreat of the British in Burma

Burning Burma's Oilfields

 

The only action comparable with the American defence of the Philippines was the fighting retreat of the British in Burma. There the last - minute appointment of William Slim turned a potential rout into a taxing withdrawal. On his arrival in March 1942, it was self - evident that the colony would not be able to offer sustained resistance to the 15th Japanese Army, whose tactics paralleled those used by Yamashita Tomoyuki in Malaya. Disaster first struck the British defenders near the Thai - Burma border. Having been forced back into Burma and evacuated the southern port of Moulmein, a stand was attempted at the River Sittang whose long bridge allowed access to Rangoon. The defeat of the 17th Indian Division on the Sittang was a terrible one, but Wavell ’ s strategy of holding up the Japanese as far away from Rangoon for as long as possible, so that reinforcements could be brought in to defeat them via this port, was militarily sound. It permitted the disembarkation of the 7th Armoured Brigade, originally destined for Malaya.

This strategy was unfortunately compromised by the commander of the 17th Indian Division, the highly decorated Jackie Smyth, who overlooked the possibility of Japanese flanking movements as he withdrew his forces to the Sittang Bridge. To send the whole division and its transport along a broken - down road was bound to be slow, even if the enemy did not interfere. To have left an inadequate guard on the bridge itself was foolhardy. On 21 February, news reached Smyth that large Japanese forces were already ahead of him en route for the Sittang River. Even though he ordered extra troops to hold the vulnerable eastern side of the bridge, as they took up defensive positions there, they could hear the ominous sound of enemy machine - gun fi re. A heavy Japanese attack took place the next day. Smyth got within sight of the bridge, but the failure to establish an effective defence well before the arrival of the Japanese, and the consequent inability to use the approach road, created a serious handicap. The loss of many radios complicated an already confused situation. Some of his troops managed to cross the river by boat, and Smyth set up his headquarters on the other side. Many others were still on the east bank when the order was given to demolish the bridge’ s central spans on 23 February. Up to the explosion, the Japanese actually thought that they were getting the worst of the fighting. Now they knew that although they could no longer capture the bridge intact, they had won the battle. Appreciating that the defeat meant the loss of Rangoon as well as southern Burma, Wavell sent Smyth home on retirement leave. In a matter of days, William Slim was called in and ordered to salvage what he could.

As the Japanese advanced northwards, Slim fought a series of well - conducted delaying actions. One of them, at Kokkogwa, north of Prome, ended in an unusual humiliation for the Japanese, who were so shaken by the experience that they failed to recover their dead, always a shameful omission. Already the new commander was sowing the seeds of a British recovery in the interest he showed in jungle warfare. He allowed Michael Calvert to raid Japanese lines with his locally trained guerrillas and was pleased to learn that the daring major, after an initial disagreement, got on well with Orde Wingate, Wavell ’s favourite. The meeting of these two enthusiasts for irregular tactics was to lead to the formation of the famous Chindits. Racing the Japanese and the monsoon, Slim led his battered troops into India with mixed feelings. He had shared their hardships, even sporting a beard like that of so many of his men until he noticed the hairs were coming out white. Thirteen thousand had been killed or wounded against a Japanese total of 4,000. He recalls how on the last day of the thousand - kilometre retreat:

I stood on a bank beside the road and watched the rearguard march into India. All of them, British, Indian, and Gurkha, were gaunt and ragged as scarecrows. Yet, as they trudged behind their surviving officers in groups pitifully small, they still carried their arms and kept their ranks, they were still recognizable as fighting units. They might look like scarecrows, but they looked like soldiers too.

The Burma Campaign 1942–45

Burma was to be the theatre of the longest continuous British campaign, from 1941 to 1945 – fought in varying terrain of jungle, mountains, plains and wide rivers. By May 1942, the Japanese occupied almost the entirety of this British colony, and granted it nominal independence in August 1943. The British, having been forced back into Assam, had to build up resources from scratch, and the process was very slow, with priority given to other theatres. Unrest in India after the failure of the Cripps mission in 1942 to agree a timetable for independence and the arrest of many Indian Congress Party leaders, including Gandhi, also impeded the building up of forces, and gave the Japanese scope to create an Indian National Army out of troops captured in Malaya and commanded by Subhas Chandra Bose.

The British finally took the offensive in Arakan in December 1942, attempting to take Akyab and Donbaik, but failed, and guerrilla operations under Brigadier Wingate (the ‘Chindits’) achieved only limited success, though boosting British morale in India. The British retained the ambition to recapture Burma, largely by the coastal route, but through 1943 did not have the means to do so. The American view was that any campaign in Burma should be directed towards improving the situation for China, and not part of a strategy to put the British back into their colonies in South-East Asia. South-East Asia Command (SEAC) was formed in November 1943 to resolve some of these issues, and did provide some central direction. More importantly, the British and Indian forces were commanded by General Slim, one of the best British generals of the war, who was slowly able to rebuild morale and forge an offensive fighting force, the 14th Army. Most of his soldiers were Indians, though there were Kerens, Ghurkas, West Africans and other ethnicities, as well as British.

The Japanese reorganised their forces in Burma, and planned their own offensive to interdict the new supply routes to China and ultimately to disrupt British rule in India. The Japanese offensive began on 3 February 1944 with Operation Ha-Go, designed to hold British reserves in Arakan. Improved tactics and supply enabled the British and Indian forces to resist the Japanese assault in the Battle of the Admin Box. US General Stilwell sent his irregular ‘Merrill’s Marauders’ behind Japanese lines around Myitkyina, matched by operations by the Chindits on the central front. However, the main Japanese assault commanded by Mitaguchi opened on 7 March, Operation U-Go; the start of the invasion of India. They achieved some surprise, but 14th Army’s new tactics and improved morale meant that they held their positions on the crucial roads that led into India. Surrounded at Imphal and Kohima, Indian and British forces fought an epic struggle with the Japanese and Bose’s Indians through the monsoon season. The troops were at very close quarters: at Kohima, there was fighting for months across the district commissioner’s tennis court. The Allies were supplied from the air in a massive operation; the Japanese forces were not, and 14th Army was finally able to force Mitaguchi’s 15th Army into retreat on 4 July. It was the largest defeat ever suffered by the Japanese Army: of 85,000 soldiers, 53,000 were casualties (30,000 killed).

Further north, the Allied offensive was able to continue unaffected by U-Go, but the Japanese held out against Stilwell at Myitkyina for two months until 1 August, though the Chinese captured the airfield in May allowing despatch of supplies to and from China. Chinese forces also drove southwards from Yunnan to open the Burma Road, but the Ichi-Go offensive in China (Map 42) caused Jiang to remove his support from Stilwell’s plans for further operations into Burma.

The British pressed forward their advance: by October, 14th Army had crossed the Chindwin river and was approaching Mandalay and Meiktila. The Chinese captured Wanting in January 1945, re-opening the Ledo Road. Tough fighting in the swamps and river country of the coastal region in January and February (the ‘Chaung War’), led to the capture by the British and Indians of Meiktila on 4 March. An amphibious landing directed at Rangoon had long been planned; this finally took place as Operation Dracula on 3 May, and Rangoon was entered by 4th Corps on 6 May, 1945, effectively bringing an end to the campaign, though the Japanese forces remaining in Burma did not surrender until 28 August. It had always been something of a side-show for the Americans and Chinese, but for the British it was a vital campaign if they were to regain control of their empire and some of their prestige as an imperial power. For some Indians it was a war of national defence against the Japanese, who had shown themselves to be unsympathetic liberators, while for others in Bose’s army, it was the opportunity to free India from British rule – the latter were decimated as a fighting force at Kohima and Imphal. The British planned further amphibious operations to regain Malaya and to attack Sumatra, but they had not come anywhere near fruition when the Japanese surrendered, and it was that event that enabled the British to re-enter their other South-East Asian colonies. Ironically, disarmed Japanese troops were to be used in the months following to maintain internal order as the British struggled to re-assert their authority against people that no longer held them in any kind of awe.