The Battlefields of Imphal

The Second World War and North East India

Hemant Singh Katoch

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138193345
• eBook ISBN: 9781317274018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

In 1944, the British Fourteenth Army and the Japanese Fifteenth Army clashed around the town of Imphal, Manipur, in North East India in what has since been described as one of the greatest battles of the Second World War. Over 200, 000 soldiers from several nations fought in the hills and valley of Manipur on the India–Burma (Myanmar) frontier.

This book is the first systematic mapping of the main scenes of the fighting in the critical Battle of Imphal. It connects the present with the past and links what exists today in Manipur with what happened there in 1944. The events were transformative for this little-known place and connected it with the wider world in an unparalleled way. By drawing on oral testimonies, written accounts and archival material, this book revisits the old battlefields and tells the untold story of a place and people that were perhaps the most affected by the Second World War in India. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of military history, especially the Second World War, defence and strategic studies, area studies, and North East India.

1
North East India

The canvas to the Second World War

The retreat from Burma

After attacking Pearl Harbour in December 1941, the Japanese moved swiftly across South East Asia, capturing huge swathes of territory. European colonial territories in the region fell like dominoes, and the British were particularly badly hit. In the first quarter of 1942, Malaya fell and, to the shock and dismay of the Allies, so did ‘Fortress’ Singapore. Burma was next on the radar of the Japanese as it was from here – via the fabled Burma Road – that Allied supplies were being sent overland to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in China. The Japanese had been locked in war with the Chinese since 1937, and shutting down the Burma Road was high on their list of priorities in the region.

The British were routed in Burma in 1942. The colonial administration was utterly ill prepared for war, and senior civilian officials in Rangoon escaped the swiftly advancing Japanese by the skin of their teeth. The (British-led) Burma Army was chased, outflanked and attacked by its opponent along the length of the country. It retreated 900 miles (nearly 1,500 km) northwards over a period of four months, a withdrawal that only ended once it crossed the Chindwin River and entered Moreh in Manipur from Tamu. It was the longest retreat in British military history.

Humiliating as the retreat of the military may have been, it paled in comparison to the disaster that befell hundreds of thousands of Indians in Burma as they fled. Described as the largest mass migration in history until then, it is estimated that some 600,000 people fled from Burma to India in 1942.¹ The majority of these were labourers, coolies and dockyard workers who had migrated from India to work under British-ruled Burma over the decades. Their concentration in the labour force, coupled with the economic dominance of Indian merchants and traders in the country, had caused deep resentment among the Burmese. This resentment had boiled over into anti-Indian riots in the 1930s, and so the Indians were especially fearful of what might happen to them once the British rulers left. They voted with their feet in 1942. The exodus was an unmitigated disaster, and tens of thousands are said to have lost their lives in the desperate and chaotic scramble to reach India. Once the sea routes were cut off, Manipur and Assam were the main entry points into India over land for many of those fleeing Burma.

Fortunately for the British, the Japanese stopped their advance east of the Chindwin River in mid-1942. Nothing would have been able to stop them if they had pressed into India at the time. Mirroring their counterparts in Burma, the British in India were also woefully unprepared to resist a Japanese offensive. To the extent that an Axis power was ever even expected to attack New Delhi, the assumed route – by Germany, for example – was one that every other invader of India had taken since time immemorial: from the north-west, via Afghanistan. No one had really thought it could be the Japanese who would approach India from the east and that too at such speed.

But the Japanese did not press on beyond the Chindwin River in mid-1942. They had already overreached and had enough newly acquired territory to consolidate their hold over. They had succeeded in their main objective in Burma: to cut off the Burma Road as a supply route into China. They also had more to worry about in the Pacific with the Americans and their navy than to bother with the British who had hastily retreated into India. More practically, the monsoon rains had set in, which made the mountainous border between India and Burma, treacherous and difficult terrain at the best of times, a seemingly insurmountable barrier to cross.

This last point is significant. Through 1942 and the first half of 1943, the view that the high, jungle-clad hills² on the border would not allow a large-scale movement of forces across into India prevailed among the Japanese. This would come to be looked at afresh only later in 1943 after the British, under Orde Wingate, mounted the first Chindit expedition. Until then, however, the two sides settled in and began to consider their next moves, the Japanese in Burma and the British and the Americans across the border in what has since come to be known as North East India.

The North East in focus

North East India today consists of seven states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. More recently, Sikkim has also begun to be counted as part of the region. During the Second World War, there was only the composite province of Assam, whose hilly parts had not yet been sliced off to form different entities, and the princely states of Tripura and Manipur. To the extent that there was any infrastructure in the region at all, it was geared to support the main British economic interests, such as tea and oil.

Good roads were few and far between. To get from Delhi or Calcutta to the region, there was a single, rickety railway line; there was no railway bridge over the Brahmaputra River, so passengers and cargo had to cross the river by ferry. The railway line resumed on the eastern bank of the river, and its main branch passed via Dimapur – also known as ‘Manipur Road’ as it was the railway head for Manipur – at the base of the Naga Hills and continued on to the tea gardens around Dibrugarh and the coal mines of Ledo in the far east of Assam.

This infrastructure, or its lack thereof, was to come under severe strain – and into sharp focus – once the Japanese arrived in Burma in 1942, and the Allies began to plot their return to that country soon thereafter. It became clear to the Allies that this region was crucial to any push back against the Japanese next door. It was also likely to be the route of a future Japanese attack on India. Dealing with either required a dramatic improvement in the North East’s infrastructure.

Some would say that the Americans and the British probably did not agree on much else about the way forward. For the Americans, their main aim for Burma was to restore the supply line to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in China, lost by the cutting off of the Burma Road. In the immediate future, they felt that this could be done by constructing a network of airfields around Dibrugarh in eastern Assam from where supplies could be flown over the Himalayas to Kunming in China’s Yunnan province. This became known as the ‘Hump’ route (with the Himalayas being the ‘Hump’) and involved some of the most dangerous flying conditions in the world.

The Americans also started work on a land-based option. This was what later became famous as the Stilwell Road (or Ledo Road), named after the top American commander in the region they called China–Burma–India. General Stilwell believed that a road could be carved through the extreme terrain of northern Burma to connect up with a part of the old Burma Road. Stilwell and the Americans believed that all Allied resources, including any military moves on the ground into Burma, should be devoted to further this objective in the north. Washington was not particularly interested in retaking Rangoon or, for that matter, helping the British regain control of any of their lost colonial possessions in South East Asia.

For the British, northern Burma was not the primary concern. Rather, it was more about how Rangoon could be retaken, by attacking over land or via amphibious assault. Support for and the prospects of an overland invasion of Burma dipped ever lower as time went on. The cause was not helped by the failure by March 1943 of a British offensive launched at the end of the previous year in Burma’s western coastal belt known as the Arakan (today called Rakhine State). British prime minister Winston Churchill, to the extent that he saw it useful to recover Burma at all (he would much rather go for Singapore and beyond), favoured an amphibious route, but this was not feasible due to the lack of sufficient numbers of landing craft.

Whatever may have been Allied differences on how best to tackle the Japanese in Burma, they recognised the strategic importance of North East India to this theatre of war. Any push back into Burma – or Japanese attack on India – would come this way. This was therefore a period of great transformation for the region. Indeed, the Second World War (from 1942 to 1945) gave the region the greatest burst of infrastructure activity in such a short period it has ever seen. Airfields were built, roads were constructed or upgraded and the capacity of the sole railway supply route expanded. The infrastructure built or improved upon in the North East during the Second World War continues to hold the region in good stead to this day. Airports are the best example: whether it is Dimapur or Mohanbari in Dibrugarh or Kumbhirgram in Silchar or Tulihal in Imphal, most of the present-day airports in North East India were constructed between 1942 and 1944. On their part, as 1943 progressed, the Japanese would soon start to pay particular attention to Imphal, the capital of Manipur.

Manipur

During the Second World War, Manipur was one of only two princely states in the North East. The other was what is today known as Tripura, for which Agartala is the capital. They were both ruled by Maharajas but were under British sovereignty. To Manipur’s east and south-east lay Burma; on all other sides it was surrounded by what was then Assam. This included the Naga Hills to the north, which is today the state of Nagaland, with Kohima as its capital. To the south-west were the Lushai Hills, which is now Mizoram, with Aizawl as its capital. The town of Silchar lay beyond the high hills to the west of Imphal.

Manipur is spread out over an area of around 22,000 square kilometres in the eastern corner of India. At the heart of Manipur is a small, oval-shaped valley – the Imphal Valley – which makes up some ten percent of its area. The Imphal Valley is at an altitude of some 2,600 feet above sea level (approximately 790 metres). The city of Imphal is at its northern end, while the Loktak Lake takes up a large part of its southern half. Hills cover the rest of the state. The majority ethnic group in Manipur is the Meiteis, who are predominantly Hindu; some Meiteis are also followers of Sanamahism, the indigenous religion that predates Hinduism. The rest of the population consists mainly of Christian tribes, of which the Nagas and Kukis are the largest, as well as Muslims.

The fertile Imphal Valley has always been the most densely populated part of Manipur. A majority of the state’s population lives there, including almost all of the Meiteis. The Nagas and Kukis, for the most part, live in the surrounding hills. Compared to the rest of India, Manipur and Imphal have always been thinly peopled. In 1941, the population of the state stood at just over 512,000 people.³ Of this, some 343,000 lived in the Imphal Valley, while over 168,000 lived in the hills.⁴ The population of Imphal was around 110,000. Following the tumultuous events of 1942, it was to Imphal that thousands of soldiers in the form of the Indian Army’s 4 Corps were despatched in 1943 to prepare for an eventual return to Burma. The choice of Imphal and Manipur boiled down to geography. As then General Slim clearly explained:

The Imphal plain, some forty by twenty miles in extent, is the only considerable oasis of flat ground in the great sweep of mountains between India and Burma. It lies roughly equidistant from the Brahmaputra Valley and the plains of Central Burma, a natural halfway house and staging place for any great military movement in either direction between India and Burma.⁵

Operation Longcloth: the Chindits

Importantly, it was from Imphal that the British major general Orde Wingate launched his first Chindit expedition, Operation Longcloth, in February 1943. The town served as the expedition’s base and as Wingate’s headquarters at the time. The expedition involved sending some 3,000 men in long-range penetration groups deep into Japanese-held Burma, with the objective of disrupting their communication and supply lines. The efficacy and military impact of the Chindits and their two expeditions (the second was in 1944) are the subject of much controversy and bitterness to this day. There are two things that most military historians agree on about the consequences of Operation Longcloth, however. One was that its publicity as a success undeniably and crucially raised British morale in a theatre of war that had seen nothing but defeat until then, most recently with the first Arakan operation.

Second, and what was entirely unforeseen, was its impact on Japanese thinking on the feasibility of attacking India from Burma in strength. Or to put it more bluntly, Operation Longcloth helped precipitate the great battles of Imphal and Kohima of 1944. It did so by influencing the thought process of the Japanese general Mutaguchi Renya in Burma who, until then, had believed the terrain of the India–Burma frontier to not be conducive to the launch of large-scale military offensives. The sheer audacity of Operation Longcloth and the fact that it could be carried out by several thousand men convinced Mutaguchi that the same could very well be done by the Japanese and, in his view, with much greater success. Once of the opinion that this was possible, the ambitious and powerful general went about systematically persuading his superiors of the merits of such an offensive.

Mutaguchi’s arguments were helped by an apprehension among the Japanese that Operation Longcloth could soon be followed up by a broader Allied offensive into central Burma along the same route. This had to be prevented, if possible. His views also chimed well with those being put forth by Subhash Chandra Bose. The man who is known to most Indians today by the honorific ‘Netaji’ arrived in Asia from Germany in early May 1943. Within a few months, he had taken over the reins of the Indian National Army (INA) that had been originally formed from thousands of Indian prisoners of war of the Indian Army captured by the Japanese in 1942. As the Japanese military leadership considered an offensive into India, Bose offered the INA’s support and active participation in such a move. He argued that the INA, made up of Indians of all faiths and with its aim of militarily liberating the homeland from British rule, would be welcomed by ordinary Indians on its ‘March to Delhi’, once it had broken through across the border into India from Burma, that is. He thus strove – and succeeded – to have his INA men be involved as an independent military unit in any Japanese operation into India. Mutaguchi’s persistence also paid off, and Tokyo gave the approval for a strike on India, centred on capturing Imphal.

The Japanese Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) issued Army Directive No. 1776 on 7 January 1944, which stated:

In order to defend Burma the Commander-in-Chief, Southern Army, may occupy and secure the vital areas of north-eastern India, in the vicinity of Imphal, by defeating the enemy in that area at an opportune time.⁶

In line with the IGHQ directive, Southern Army issued the following order to Burma Area Army, under which came Mutaguchi’s Fifteenth Army: ‘To destroy the enemy at Imphal and establish strong defensive positions covering Kohima and Imphal before the coming of the rainy season.’⁷

These remarks by a Japanese soldier from the book Forgotten Voi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction: a truly forgotten tale
• 1 North East India: the canvas to the Second World War
• 2 Manipur: on the front lines
• 3 Imphal 1944: the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Armies clash
• 4 The battlefields: hub and spokes
• 5 Battlefield tourism: ideas for the future
• Conclusion: the ‘greatest’ battle
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index