Churchill was intensely concerned with the publicity emanating from SEAC; no less than an Air Chief Marshal and hero of the First World War, Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, was in charge of it. As to Mountbatten, “There was never any nonsense about his hiding his light under a bushel,” according to a member of his public-relations staff. He took an intense interest in everything to do with publicity, especially his own. Too much of the wrong kind embarrassed him and too little upset him. He read every public-relations message that came in or went out of Headquarters and redrafted many of them. When he visited the troops he liked to give an impression of “spontaneous vitality.” Printed orders would precede him prescribing procedures in detail, such as that troops were to sit on the ground with their backs to the sun when he addressed them so that they might see him without the sun in their eyes. He would drive up in his jeep, vault nimbly out, jump agilely onto a packing case carefully placed in advance, and deliver “an absolutely first class and apparently impromptu speech—simple, direct and genuinely inspiring. The men loved it.”
He arrived at Taihpa to review the NCAC on March 6 escorted by 16 fighter planes, using up enough aviation gasoline, according to Stilwell, to “keep my campaign going for a week….We had four fighters working on the battle.” In knife-edged, impeccable tan tropical uniform with three rows of campaign ribbons and six-inch gold shoulder bars encrusted with stars, crowns, crossed sword and baton and royal initials, the Supremo was as elegant in the Hukawng as he would have been in Mayfair. “Old Turkey Neck,” as Stilwell called himself, greeted him in GI pants and field jacket without decorations or insignia of rank. He removed these in combat areas because he liked to talk to the men unrecognized, which frequently occurred. Once riding in a jeep wearing his long-visored Chinese soldier’s cap like a hunter’s and holding a carbine across his knees, he passed a group of Marauders of whom one, bitter against anyone on wheels, looked up and growled, “Christ, a goddamn duck-hunter.” A GI belonging to an Engineer unit on the Road was more sympathetic. “Look at that poor old man,” he said, “some draft boards will do anything.” Later when Dorn told Stilwell he ought not to remove his insignia—that the men in that godforsaken area needed to see the Commanding General for their morale, that it gave them a thrill and something to write home about—he thought it over and wore them thereafter.
He and the Supremo managed a personal if not a strategic rapprochement and got along “famously,” as he wrote to Win. He “ate crow” and apologized for not telling Mountbatten about his mission to Washington. This caused him no pain to do since his views had prevailed, and it pleased the Supremo very much.
In Mountbatten’s view Stilwell had “fire in his belly” in his desire to come to grips with the enemy but no understanding of global strategy—the planner’s crown of thorns—and he could not be made to take the least interest in administrative matters. “He is really a grand old warrior,” he reported to Dill, but “only the Trinity” could be in Delhi, Chungking and Burma simultaneously. Because Mountbatten was trying to build a smooth-working happy team, he felt Stilwell’s scathing remarks and unveiled criticisms were disruptive and harmful to the Allied cause. He wanted Stilwell to be eased out of SEAC and his command confined to China while Wedemeyer or Sultan replaced him at Delhi.
Escorted on a tour of the battlefield at Walawbum, he was upset by the smell of the corpses and remarked that sea battle was much cleaner. Regardless of their show of Allied cordiality, the fundamental dichotomy between the two commanders, in style, method and purpose, as in national interests, was felt by everyone in the theater. When Mountbatten a day later on the tour ran a bamboo splinter into his eye and had to be operated on at the 20th General, the version that circulated among the GIs was that Uncle Joe had “busted the Limey in the eye.”
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At this juncture, while the Supreme Commander was hors de combat, the Japanese in a gamble that could have been as devastating in effect as Pearl Harbor, launched their offensive toward Imphal and the Assam-Bengal Railway.
Ever since their surge of conquest in 1942 had netted Burma even sooner than anticipated, Japanese field generals and the Burma Area Command and Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo had been at odds whether to attempt the invasion of India, if only as far as Manipur and Assam, in order to wipe out the base of any possible Allied return. The forbidding, roadless, mountainous, disease-ridden country of Stilwell’s walkout, which the British had so long counted on as a barrier to India, seemed no less so—in the opposite direction—to many of the Japanese. Opponents of the offensive argued it was not feasible to lead an army in strength across the Naga hills or to expect an Allied counteroffensive. The Japanese decided to stay where they were and consolidated gains. But in 1943 the assembling of the Yunnan and Ramgarh divisions, Wingate’s first penetration which appeared to be reconnaissance for a coming offensive, and the growing action from the Assam air bases, all seemed to suggest aggressive Allied intentions and gave force to other arguments in favor of the Imphal campaign.
Planning began in the summer of 1943, energized by General Mutaguchi, commander of the Japanese Fifteenth Army in Burma, a heavy-bodied, bullet-headed officer with hard eyes and thick lips who fiercely overrode the intractable problem of supply and whose wrath was so feared by his staff that they did not press their doubts. Mutaguchi’s plan allowed his men a month to reach their goal, during which they were to carry enough rice to live on together with what food they could forage and what could be piled in forward dumps. When the month was up they were expected to have captured the British stores at Imphal. According to plan, they would move on Kohima and be in Dimapur astride the railway in time to establish a firm position before the monsoon. To support the effort a road was pushed through to Homalin on the Chindwin, while debate and dispute persisted at Headquarters. It was not until January 19 when the loss of the Taro plain to the NCAC was imminent, presaging the loss of north Burma to the Japanese, that the order to execute the Imphal plan was given.
Although the British knew an attack was forming, and air reconnaissance continually reported signs of enemy movement and had sighted the road to Homalin as well as the assembly of rafts on the Uyu River, nevertheless they were unprepared. Within a week Mutaguchi’s columns had crossed the Chindwin, in another week had scrambled over the mountains to the outskirts of Ukhrul, 35 miles from Imphal, and in the third week, on March 29, they cut the Imphal-Kohima road, leaving Imphal isolated except by air. Radio Tokyo blared the invasion and coming conquest of India, and “Banzai!” resounded through the Empire. Actually the offensive was not intended to go beyond Manipur although its commanders hoped that success would lead it forward.
Genuine and major catastrophe threatened the entire Southeast Asia Command. If, after two years’ preparation and the attainment of air superiority, the British Fourteenth Army fell back now from Imphal leaving the frontier provinces to the enemy, the moral effect on India would have been incalculable, Assam would have been cut off from Calcutta, and retrieval of the will if not the military means to regain the position doubtful. Reacting vigorously to rally the defense, General Slim asked for the immediate return of the division that had been sent to reinforce the Arakan, which meant another call on the services of the ATC. Roosevelt, always nervous about China, had told Mountbatten that he was not to ask for the planes again, but the new emergency was decisive and Mountbatten, emerging from the hospital on March 14, gave the order.
General Sultan asked him the unavoidable question: how was it possible that three Japanese divisions could come through the mountains in sufficient strength to endanger Imphal when the British staff had been claiming for two years that to send an expedition in the opposite direction through the same country was impossible? Mountbatten offered the usual SEAC explanation of resources and logistics and this and that, but the real reason was will. In military as in other human affairs will is what makes things happen. There are circumstances that can modify or nullify it, but for offense or defense its presenc
e is essential and its absence fatal. In India the will to hold was firm, withdrawal was unallowable, and the British fought in that spirit. After the transfer of the division from the Arakan had been completed, the ATC planes were kept in service on the British front for another two and a half months to keep Imphal and the besieged garrison at Kohima alive by air. Together with the RAF they ferried in supplies to 153,000 people and brought out the wounded and noncombatants.
For Stilwell the prospect during the first month of the offensive was appalling. If the British retreated and the Japanese cut the Assam-Bengal Railway, the NCAC would be isolated in Burma, all his effort and his hopes brought to nought, with no outlook but another humiliation and no escape but another walkout, over the Hump itself to China. “This about ruins everything,” he wrote on the first news of the Japanese attack. When in addition it rained that night his sad short summary was “God is mad at me.” He radioed Marshall that now was the time he needed help; the Generalissimo must be made to enter the Y-force.
The need for a second front on the Salween was now crucial, and Mountbatten, like Wavell waking to his extremity in 1942, was suddenly pleading for the despised Chinese. He asked both the President and Prime Minister to make personal appeals to Chiang Kai-shek with “great urgency.” In reply to Roosevelt’s immediate message, Chiang maintained that China was too weak and her economy too damaged to undertake a major campaign; the Communists threatened to rise in the north and the Japanese were preparing an offensive north of the Yangtze; under these circumstances it was “impossible” to take the offensive from Yunnan. Since Chiang already had 450,000 troops quarantining the Communists, the troops in Yunnan, especially given China’s transportation difficulties, were hardly relevant to that situation. His answer annoyed Roosevelt who could see the positions marked by pins in his map room. He saw only one Japanese division facing the Chinese across the Salween, and was moved to prepare a sharp reply.
Stilwell went on pushing in a renewed effort to get below and envelop the 18th Division. His object now was to get across the Jambu Bum and engage the enemy in the Shaduzup area while he sent another enveloping arm around behind them to cut off their retreat to Kamaing, the central Japanese position in the Mogaung valley. GALAHAD and a regiment of the 38th Division were sent on this errand, involving a march of 85 miles, while Stilwell pressed the Chinese on the frontal route. “Item: it pays to go up to push. At least it’s a coincidence that every time I do, they spurt a bit.”
The 66th Regiment took the Jambu Bum on March 19, his sixty-first birthday. By some miracle in the woods, a large chocolate cake inscribed in icing “Happy Birthday Uncle Joe” graced the occasion, served from a makeshift camp table under tall trees. Wearing an old sweater, Stilwell cut the cake with a bolo knife and handed out pieces to officers and enlisted men as they filed past. His face had changed in two years. In contrast to the hard healthy look at the start of the war, he appeared old and worn with deep lines around mouth and eyes and a white patch in the middle of his hair. He was suffering from a liver ailment but, bent on reaching his goal in time, he refused to be hospitalized. A birthday telegram from Marshall assured him that “your work may well be of historic importance in this war and the future of China” and his staff in Chungking radioed, “You have the admiration, affection and loyalty of every individual in your command.” Roundup published an analysis of CBI’s controversial commander which concluded, “Someday when the war is only a filthy memory the whole story of Stilwell in Asia will be told, the epic of an unpretentious man who went forth sword in hand and slew the dragons of adversity in their dens.”
The dragons were crowding him now. “Japs in UKRUHL. My God,” he wrote on March 23. A plea from Slim urged him “to get Yoke in,” as if he could have done so for the asking, and Intelligence reported a thousand Japanese on the route of GALAHAD’s march (“My nerves are taking a beating”). It was like “the old sinking feeling” in the days after Pearl Harbor. He tried to be patient “at a terrific price in repressed fury and high blood pressure….Some day I expect to burst into a thousand pieces….I’m a worrier and I just can’t help it.” But when others worried about the Imphal offensive he would say, “If the Japs are behind us, we are also behind them.”
Davies came in on his return from Washington to report that AXIOM was licked but he thought “FDR has gone his limit” with regard to the Generalissimo. Stilwell determined to try his own hand. “If I can’t move Peanut the jig is up for the season.” He flew to Chungking on March 27 for a conference with the Generalissimo from which he obtained, if not the Y-force, at least the promise of two divisions to reinforce the NCAC for the final drive on Myitkyina. This promise was kept a month later when the 14th and 50th Divisions were airlifted in a record eight days to Assam where they were armed and refitted and flown to staging areas in Hukawng. Back at the front on March 30 Stilwell found that Merrill, long a sufferer from heart trouble, was so weak that he had to be ordered out over his protests to the Ledo hospital. The weather was now wet five days out of six, and worse, it looked as if the Japanese were about to break through between Imphal and Kohima and reach the road and railway.
Stilwell was in an agonizing position. He could not move ahead without making sure of the rear. He had to find out if the British could hold and he determined on a maneuver of some risk to test the situation. Asking Mountbatten and Slim to meet him at Jorhat, one of the Assam air bases, on April 3, he offered to pull out the 38th Division, of which two regiments were then in reserve, and assign it to Slim to help stem the Japanese advance. Airlift of the 14th and 50th Divisions from China had begun that same day—April 3. Even so, to give up the hardened 38th might have slowed if not halted his entire campaign and cost the hope of taking Myitkyina, but it is doubtful if he expected the British to accept Chinese assistance. He was frequently caustic on the subject of the Indian Army divisions kept to guard India’s Northwest Frontier and his offer may have been conceived as a form of smoking these out. If Slim had accepted the offer, the necessity would have allowed Stilwell no choice, for a Japanese breakthrough behind him would have ended his campaign in any event.
Though “obviously bitter and disappointed he made no criticisms and uttered no reproaches,” according to Slim, while Slim himself, in his rather too noble account, realizing that advance now was Stilwell’s great opportunity, rose to the occasion and refused the offer. In fact, to have called on the Chinese to help defend British positions in India would have been almost as damaging as to lose those positions to the Japanese. Though “nervous and concerned” as he appeared to Stilwell, Slim was confident he could stop the Japanese and he guaranteed that NCAC’s line of communications would not be interrupted for more than ten days. The battle for Imphal would be decisive, he said, and promised the British would not lose.
Enormously relieved, Stilwell returned to headquarters at Shaduzup, assembled a conference of the major Chinese and American officers, and ordered “Speed to Kamaing.” Thirty miles beyond Kamaing lay the railroad running through Mogaung and Myitkyina along the edge of the broad Irrawaddy valley. To prevent the NCAC from reaching the railroad the Japanese had orders to hold Kamaing at all costs. When two battalions of GALAHAD emerged on March 23 from a grueling march and several skirmishes with the Japanese, to block the road behind the enemy at Inkangahtawng about 20 miles above Kamaing, they were counterattacked and forced back into the hills. Taking up a hilltop position at Nphum Ga they held it through eleven days of savage siege until the Japanese, threatened from behind by the advance of the Chinese plus the third battalion of GALAHAD, themselves withdrew on April 8. Once more the net had not closed.
To the south the Chindits’ operations were effectively preventing attack on Stilwell’s flank. On March 24 Wingate was killed when his plane crashed into a mountainside. At his last meeting with Slim shortly before his death he had turned back from the door as he was about to leave and said, “You are the only senior officer in Southeast Asia who doesn’t wish me dead!” His loss
drained much of the effectiveness of the LRP force. “He had created it, inspired, defended it, given it confidence,” Slim wrote. “It was the offspring of his vivid imagination and ruthless energy. It had no other parent.” One of the brigade commanders, Brigadier William Lentaigne, with whom Stilwell was to enter into strenuous quarrel, was named to succeed Wingate, and in consideration of the fact that NCAC was diverting Japanese strength from Imphal, the Chindits were given the sole task of supporting Stilwell’s operations and placed under his overall command. “If it had not been for NCAC,” in the opinion of Colonel George Demetriadi, Slim’s liaison officer with Stilwell, “the Japs would have succeeded at Imphal.”
In the continuing effort to close in on Kamaing, Sun and Liao were unmistakably dragging their feet, on orders, as Stilwell was now sure, from Chiang Kai-shek. Repeatedly his own orders to advance were not obeyed and Chinese officers of the tank corps informed Colonel Brown that Liao was not going to attack until the Generalissimo thought it was safe and gave permission. Confronted by Stilwell on this issue, Liao admitted that the Generalissimo communicated with him directly but had ordered him to obey Stilwell “even when I’m wrong.” Liao continued to stall nevertheless, convincing Stilwell that Chiang, with a wary eye on Imphal, was ordering caution.
Stilwell’s absence was causing mounting confusion and irritation at various headquarters. The air was thick with radio messages to and from and between Chungking, Kunming and Delhi. Sultan told Stilwell that none of his deputies could take intelligent action and pleaded for a conference in Assam where he could make known his intentions and “put us all on the same beam.” Stilwell summoned them to a conference at Mainkwan instead. Listening to the rain and counting the days, he would not leave for fear of relaxing pressures for a day. Alone of all commanders, Allied or enemy in any theater on any front, he could not count on field commanders who would carry out his directions as a matter of course. Obedience to orders depends in the end on fear of sanctions, and Sun and Liao were well aware that it was from Chiang Kai-shek not Stilwell that sanctions would flow.