A World at Arms (124 page)

As the American strategy evolved in 1943, it concentrated first on plans to seize Rabaul, plans which had to be drastically modified since the resources to implement them fully were not available.
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In practice, MacArthur, disgrunded about Washington’s inability–refusal as he saw it–to provide him with the forces he asked for, ended up by making a virtue of necessity and developed that strategy of by–passing Japanese garrisons and strongpoints, including Rabaul, which came to characterize much of the American conduct of the war in the Pacific. The allocation of some resources to MacArthur was matched by some for Nimitz’s Central Pacific command so that a double thrust headed for the Philippines, with plans thereafter left open.
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Implementation of the plan for the central Pacific thrust would be
enormously aided by the fact that the warships ordered under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of July 1940 were coming out of the construction yards into the navy during 1943; in this regard, the hopes of the Americans and the apprehensions of the Japanese connected with that great program proved to be well founded.

It could be argued, and was, that a double thrust, which was designed partly by default to accommodate the army–navy rivalry of MacArthur and Nimitz, should have been replaced by one which gave full emphasis to one of the two regardless of the problems posed by the personalities involved; but there was also much to be said for allocating the steadily growing American forces to two axes of advance, which would assist each other by making it increasingly difficult for the Japanese, with their shrinking resources, to block either one with a concentration which could only be attained by opening an enormous gap for the other one to push through. As long as both American advances were commanded by leaders determined to move forward as rapidly as possible, with neither likely to let any such opportunity slip by unexploited, the double thrust was likely to prove a highly effective way to drive back the Japanese–and so it turned out.

All these plans, however, still included one major project which turned out to be more difficult to implement than all the others: keeping China in the war both for political reasons and to provide a base for air attacks on Japan itself as well as on its key shipping lanes.
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And the plans for this always revolved around a campaign in north Burma to reopen the land communications across which China might receive the supplies needed to rebuild her armies and provide bases for the attack on Japan.

In China, the Japanese continued to occupy the ports, major cities, and much of the best agricultural area. There was in early 1942 even a possibility that the Kuomintang (KMT) would split, with War Minister Ho Ying-ch’in turning away from Chiang and responding to peace soundings from the Japanese in order to turn against the Chinese Communists right away rather than after the end of the war.
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The Japanese could never bring themselves to make either Ho or Chiang any substantial offer, but the Chinese armies were in no condition to attempt serious military operations.
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With Chiang having minimal control directly over his own forces and working sometimes closely, often barely, always suspiciously, and never effectively with the regional armies more under warlord control than his own, there could be no Chinese war strategy except to hold on until others, primarily the Americans, defeated Japan.

Little fighting took place between the Nationalist armies and the Japanese in 1943.
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What fighting there was came at the end of the year from a Japanese initiative which was produced by changes elsewhere in
the Pacific War. The losses of shipping to United States submarines led the Japanese to develop a plan in November 1943 for military operations that would enable them to have a land link for railway traffic from north to south China and occupied French Indo-China. There could then be overland carriage for supplies and troops all the way from Korea to Hanoi and from there a connection to the new Thailand-Burma railway, the whole route without dependence on the vulnerable sea lane.
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While opening this north–southland route in China, the Japanese would crush Chiang and seize the majority of the airfields being built for the United States air force to use against the home islands of Japan. How had this latter force come to be a serious threat for the Japanese to worry about?

The American commander in the China-Burma-India theater, General Joseph Stilwell, had the full confidence of Roosevelt, Stimson and Marshall.
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His strategic vision proved to be sound even if his personality–he was not called “Vinegar Joe” for nothing–made him innumerable enemies in high places.
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He never got along with Chiang, whom he despised, or the British, whom he held in almost equally low esteem. Mountbatten was perhaps the sole exception to Stilwell’s poor relations with Allied leaders, and this owed as much to the good sense and forbearance of the former as to the steady and devoted efforts of Field Marshal Dill.
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Stilwell was, furthermore, in a fundamental difference of opinion with his most important American subordinate, General Claire Chennault, the head of the American air force in China. Unlike Stilwell, Chennault was on good terms with Chiang Kai-shek as well as Madame Chiang, who played a major role in policy making in Chungking.

These personality issues have to be considered in any examination of strategy in the China-Burma-India theater for three reasons. One was that the scarcity of resources allocated to the theater, which was generally at the bottom of the Allied allocation priority list, meant that each project of whatever size always involved acting at the expense of another; there was never enough for one big operation, to say nothing of several. Secondly, this was a theater in which the relations between allies were made most complicated by the simultaneous presence of enormous distances and terrain difficulties and the greatest divergence of political views. Finally, it had become obvious by 1943 that only those Chinese troops directly trained under Stilwell’s supervision and inspired by his leadership would at least on occasion fight effectively against the Japanese, something they would, however, only do when Chiang allowed or directed it–and this in turn he was prepared to do only under very limited circumstances. Given the fundamental objection of the policy makers in London to any major operation in Burma, American and Chinese insistence that such an operation to open a land route to China was essential,
and the three special complications listed, it is nothing short of a miracle that the Allies were ever able to accomplish anything in this theater.

The basic strategic dilemma was as follows: the low capacity Assam railway, which the British insisted on operating like a minor branch of the Toonerville trolley, could only support a limited air lift of supplies over the rugged mountains to China. The limited air power available could be used either to support land operations in north Burma or expansion of air supply to China. The limited supplies flown by air into China in turn could be utilized to build up the largest possible air force in China or to maintain a smaller air force while building up an effective and properly trained and equipped group of Chinese army divisions. In Stilwell’s eyes, the most sensible thing to do was to open a land route to China over which supplies could be moved by truck and eventually also petroleum products by pipeline, while, in China itself, an effective Chinese land force would be needed to defend the air bases, which were certain to become the object of Japanese land attacks as soon as the planes based on them threatened serious danger to the Japanese. General Chennault, on the other hand, had argued that an air offensive from the bases in China could deliver truly damaging blows to the Japanese without a great offensive in north Burma or the diversion of supplies to a rebuilt Chinese army.
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Chennault had the support of Chiang who was interested in getting the largest possible supplies in by air, was not interested in substantial land operations against the Japanese, saw the centrally controlled air force as a counter to the provincial warlords, and did not believe the British would ever mount a serious offensive anywhere in Burma.

Once the Allies had decided at the second Cairo meeting that they would not launch operation “Buccaneer,” only a small land offensive began in northern Burma in November 1943. The Chinese troops Stilwell had trained fought well and alongside small American forces began to push the Japanese back slowly but effectively, eventually enabling a road to be built connecting to the Old Burma Road in the spring of 1945.
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But long before then, Roosevelt had decided that the only thing to do, in order to keep up Chinese morale, to keep Chiang’s government from total collapse, and to give some sign of support in the face of British unwillingness and inability to act, was to side with Chennault on the allocation of the precious cargo carried by air over the “Hump.”
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Stilwell could do whatever was possible with very limited resources–and would eventually be relieved–but the bulk of American supplies was assigned to developing an air offensive based on China against the Japanese home islands and shipping lanes.

As American intelligence had feared, this led to a Japanese land
ensive to seize the bases from which Chennault’s planes flew
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On April 18, 1944, the Japanese opened their “Ichigo” operation, which quickly broke through the weak Chinese armies. On June 18 they began a second phase in fighting around Ch‘angsha and then in early August at Hengyang.
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In the latter stages of the fighting the Japanese army suffered substantial casualties, but the losses of the Chinese were staggering in numbers and nature. At least 300,000 men were lost, but even more significant was the fact that the Chinese Nationalist armies had suffered a blow from which they never recovered.
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Chiang had no effective control over the provincial armies which were supposed to hold back the Japanese, and he refused to assist those units which fought hard.
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In the military sense, the “Ichigo” operation meant the loss of many of the major United States air bases in China with only a few still out of Japanese reach. On this point, Stilwell’s prediction had proved all too correct. In the political sense, the disastrous defeat of the Nationalist army ended any chance the Kuomintang might have had to rebuild its ties to the people of China.
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The collapse of the Chinese Nationalist forces in the summer of 1944 greatly reduced American interest in the China theater; the approach to Japan clearly would not be able to depend on a major base in China.
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Other approaches and bases would look far more attractive, and this shift helps explain American strategy in the latter part of the Pacific War. Ironically, just as the situation in China was getting dramatically worse, that in Burma was getting equally dramatically better, but only after a crisis caused by a major Japanese offensive into India.

On January 3, 1944, Mountbatten had written to Brooke about the bad effects on morale in his theater of the repeated cancelling of operations after the hopes of the troops had been raised by the prospect of major offensives.
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The Japanese were about to force the South East Asia Command to fix its internal feuds and fight the real enemy.
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On January 7, Imperial General Headquarters issued to General Kawabe Mazakazu, the Burma area commander, orders for an offensive into India. His troops were to seize the area around Imphal and the adjacent portions of northeast India.
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The military aim was to defend control of Burma and simultaneously isolate China by taking a large portion of Manipour and Assam provinces, thus cutting the railway which was essential for the “Hump” air route to China, Stilwell’s north Burma
campaign and any British overland thrust into Burma itself. The political aim was to try for a general uprising against British control in India. For this purpose, Subhas Chandra Bose, who had arrived in Tokyo in June 1943, where he had impressed the Japanese leaders including Tojo, rebuilt the collaborationist Indian ,National Army and for months been urging a big push into India, was attached to the rear of Kawabe’s army and allowed to drag his soldiers into the disaster for which they soon headed.
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Whatever the political possibilities for a major revolt in India might have been in 1942, they had vanished by 1944. Not only had the Allied military presence in India been strengthened, but the reputation of the Japanese as cruel conquerors who were interested in enslaving, not liberating, the former colonial subjects of European powers had spread widely. Though it was not known in India at the time, the fact that the Japanese reinforcements for the operation had come on the “Death railway,” built over ground soaked with the blood of thousands of slave laborers, symbolized the political character of the last great Japanese military offensive in Southeast Asia.

If the political effort was a complete fizzle, the military side created first two major crises for the Allies and then a total rout for the Japanese. They had attacked first near the coast and there cut off the British 14th Army’s 7th Indian Division. The latter, however, held on grimly in February and March, nourished from the air by supplies dropped by British air supply flights as well as planes temporarily diverted with American consent from the “Hump.” If this threat had been halted decisively by the end of March-and the myth of Japanese invincibility shattered in the process–the situation of the British and Indian troops further north was soon more difficult and even desperate.

On March 12, 1944, the Japanese 15th Army launched its “U-Go” offensive toward Imphal and Kohima with the intention of seizing these towns as a base for a subsequent attack to cut the Assam railway at Dimapur, a mere thirty miles northwest of Kohima. The British and Indian soldiers fought bravely and desperately, allowing themselves to be cut off and surrounded rather than either simply retreating, and continued to fight instead of surrendering when surrounded. Additional troops were flown in and again supplied by air. Mountbatten and the 14th Army commander, General Slim, had changed their soldiers’ attitudes; air supply had altered their opportunities for holding on if they were so inclined. With the complicated Allied command structure functioning more effectively than the direct involvement of the British Chiefs of Staff in London and the United States Joint Chief of Staff in Washington might have led one to expect, the necessary transport planes were
scraped together from all over to support the 14th Army and the isolated garrisons, enable 14th Army to relieve Kohima and Imphal, and in the process administer a crushing defeat on the Japanese.
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Although the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London was terribly worried and, on June 1, saw “disaster staring us in the face,”
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the adequately supported British troops beat back the invading Japanese in the following weeks. It was the latter who endured disaster because they not only suffered a humiliating defeat in battle but proved incapable of evacuating their starving and beaten army across the mountain ranges into Burma.