The Allied effort in Burma during World War II was dominated by strong personalities and hampered by divergent strategic goals. Guided by a coalition of British and Americans, the participants themselves were multiracial, including Indians, Burmese and Chinese. For the Americans, the campaign was closely linked to keeping China in the war through supplies shipped over the Burma Road. The British and the Soviets did not feel that the Chinese could make a significant contribution to the overall effort against Japan, and instead wanted the Burmese campaign to serve as a barrier for India and as a fountainhead for a future Allied drive to force the Japanese from Southeast Asia. Another problem was the American suspicion that the British were striving to preserve their colonial empire at the expense of local nationalism.

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Burma was invaded in December 1941 by a relatively small Japanese contingent of 35,000 men. The initial landing was at Tenasserim, on the Isthmus of Kra, aimed at neutralizing British airfields threatening the Japanese move south into Malaya. However, the goal of the extensive campaign that followed was to cut the vital Burma Road to China. Air attacks on Rangoon—the principal port of entry for Allied supplies—commenced toward the end of December. Japan’s ensuing advance northward into the interior proceeded almost unimpeded to the Sittang River. Rangoon was finally abandoned on March 6, 1942, and after a period of reinforcement, the Japanese succeeded in routing the British. Abandoning Mandalay, British Sir General Harold Alexander was compelled to order a general withdrawal to Assam in India.

The Japanese drive into Burma was foreshadowed by their rapid advance at the beginning of the war. As the British hero of Burma, Lt. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Viscount William Slim, recalled: “The British Empire, with its Indian and Australian comrades, lost Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore. This was the greatest defeat in the history of [the] Empire.”

Burma is a large country. Compared to Europe, it covers more area than France, the Low Countries and much of Germany. To the north and west, it is bordered by the Indian provinces of Assam, East Bengal and Manipur. Farther to the north lies China. Several major rivers run through Burma, including the Irrawaddy, Chindwin and Sittang.

Internal transportation at the time consisted of a limited road and rail network and steamers plying the major rivers. However, in 1941, the most significant route was the Burma Road, which ran from the port of Rangoon through Mandalay, on to Lashio, then across the Chinese border to Kunming. Japanese plans in 1941 had not included any operations beyond the frontier of Burma, which was to become the western bastion of their Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The speed and ease of their victories had, however, produced symptoms of the “victory disease” (underestimation of the enemy), and in August 1942, General Count Hisaichi Terauchi’s Southern Army headquarters in Hanoi ordered the Fifteenth Amy in Burma to plan a limited offensive into Assam. Although this was temporarily abandoned because of American successes in the western Pacific, it was revived when the Japanese reorganized their command structure in Burma in June 1943, which brought an aggressive commanding general, Renya Mutaguchi, to power. Thereafter, two plans of action came into being. The first was to continue westward to the Arakan in southwestern Burma, where the new Japanese Twenty-eighth Army would mount an offensive against the British XV Corps, pinning down Slim’s reserves. The second called for Mutaguchi to proceed with three divisions and destroy the British IV Corps on the plain around Imphal, seizing the great Allied supply depots and depriving the British of their springboard for an offensive to retake Burma.

The British Fourteenth Army, based in eastern India, was to be the military instrument that would oppose this Japanese offensive. Lieutenant General William Slim assumed command in October 1943. He was not a member of the British privileged classes; rather, he was a product of Birmingham University’s Officer Training Corps. Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Slim had been commissioned into the Regular Army as a second lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. During World War I he was wounded at Gallipoli, and while recuperating he discovered that there were periodic openings in the Indian army that allowed officers of limited means to live quite well. He applied and was granted a commission in the West Indian Regiment. Subsequently, he was reassigned to his old regiment, the Warwickshires, and fought with them in Iraq and the Middle East. Finally, in 1922 he joined the Indian army as a captain in the 6th Gurkha Rifles. He later attended the British Army Staff College and served in the Sudan. In 1942, with the Allies’ plight worsening, he returned to India as a major general. In October 1943, he took over the British Fourteenth Army.

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