After the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, the Japanese escalated from regional aggression to a sweeping armed conquest of virtually all Asia. With bewildering speed, Japanese forces overran the Philippines, occupied French Indochina and Thailand, fought their way down the Malay Peninsula to overwhelm the British bastion of Singapore, and seized the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in World War II magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Japanese armies then thrust into the southern tail of Burma and smashed north. The direct but wide-fronted advance from Thailand was an indirect approach to their major objective on the Asiatic mainland: the reduction of resistance in China by denying it Allied support. Rangoon, the Burmese capital, was the port of entry for Anglo-American supplies to China, by way of the Burma Road.

At the same time, the Japanese move was shrewdly designed to complete the conquest of the western gateway to the Pacific and establish a barrier across the main routes by which any overland British or American offensive might be attempted. On March 8, 1942, Rangoon fell, and within two months British forces were driven out of Burma, over the mountains and back into India. General Joseph Stilwell, chief of staff of Allied forces and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek’s right-hand man, put it bluntly: ‘We got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma, and it’s humiliating as hell. We’ve got to go back in there and take it back.’

Burma had abundant oil, tungsten and manganese to fuel the Japanese war machine and was the world’s leading exporter of rice. The one remaining effective point of contact between China and the Allied world was Burma.

But in the early months of 1942 orthodox military action in Burma was out of the question. The Americans were reeling from Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Philippines. The British were in disarray throughout Asia. The Chinese were rent with dissension and disunity between Nationalists and Communists, between military commanders and outlaw warlords. Thus it fell to a clandestine operation created by America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), code-named Detachment 101, to begin the long struggle to regain Burma.

Forerunner of the modern Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the OSS was a new agency on the scene, having become operational on July 11, 1941, as the Coordinator of Information (COI). COI was empowered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ‘collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security, and to carry out such supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing of information for national security not now available to the government.’ Shorn of bureaucratese, the agency’s mission was espionage and counterespionage.

COI was a civilian agency in the executive branch reporting directly to Roosevelt. It was modeled after England’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was headed by a World War I hero and genuine rakehell, the irascible, bombastic and charismatic ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan.

By June 1942, COI was placed under the direction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff so its activities could be better coordinated with the war effort, and the agency was renamed the OSS.

Detachment 101 was the brainchild of Millard Preston Goodfellow, a former Brooklyn newspaper publisher and Boy’s Club executive. As part of OSS activities, he prepared staff studies for intelligence and irregular warfare operations in Asia. Strategically located Burma was given special study. The OSS proposed a guerrilla operation to Stilwell and at first was turned down cold by the general. Stilwell, an orthodox officer, was not alone in his rigid opposition to guerrilla activities. General Douglas MacArthur would not permit the OSS to work in any area commanded by him during the war.

After continued entreaties from Goodfellow and Donovan, Stilwell reluctantly approved an OSS operation in Burma, particularly after they agreed to his choice as commander of the unit, Carl Eifler. Eifler was an army major and former border patrol officer who matched Donovan in girth and loudness, if not in fame. Donovan told him that he was to head the first American unit ever assembled to conduct guerrilla warfare, espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines. On April 14, 1942, Detachment 101 of the OSS was activated, although Stilwell was still skeptical about Detachment 101. He gave Eifler 90 days to get an intelligence and guerrilla warfare operation started behind the lines in Burma. ‘All I want to hear are booms from the jungle,’ he told Eifler.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to