HardThrasher
Published 8 Jun 2026The Road to Rangoon Ep1: Hammer & A Hard Place — The Battle for Burma Begins By the start of the monsoon rains in 1944, British and Indian forces of General Sir William “Bill” Slim’s XIVth Army had been pegged back inside India. Five months later, after the battles of Imphal and Kohima, the Fourteenth Army had not only retaken the ground it had lost, but inflicted catastrophic losses on the Imperial Japanese Army.
The question was: what now? There would be no more forces coming from Europe, no additional fire power or support, and apparently no belief in the men by the Imperial General Staff in London or the US Army high command in Washington. Could the DUKE forces push into Burma through monsoon rains, jungle, mountains, disease, impossible supply lines and against an enemy willing to die for each yard of ground? Could Slim, Mountbatten, Oliver Leese, the US-led Northern Combat Area Command — NCAC — turn victory in India into the reconquest of Burma?
In this opening episode of “The Road to Rangoon”, we begin the story of the epic advance that would throw the Imperial Japanese Army out of Burma (modern day Myanmar) and become familiar with some of the places, names and concepts that will shape our story.
We look at the geography of Burma and eastern India, the aftermath of Imphal and Kohima, the state of the Japanese Burma Area Army under General Kimura Heitarō, the role of XIVth Army, XV Corps and NCAC, and the Allied plans that became Operation ROMULUS, Operation CAPITAL, Operation DRACULA and EXTENDED CAPITAL. This is the story of how the Burma Campaign moved from defence to attack — and how Slim planned one of the most ambitious offensives of the Second World War.
1. Slim, William. Defeat Into Victory: (Pan Military Classics Series) (p. 441). Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition.
2. Saburo Ienaga, Japan’s Last War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 147.
3. Slim, (p. 460).
4. Slim, (p. 460).
5. CAC, File 3/2, Slim Papers.
6. Lyman, Robert. A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain: 1941–45 (p.255) Osprey Press.
7. Grant, Neil. The Bren Gun (p. 19). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
8. McLynn, Frank. The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph 1942-45 (p. 377). Random House. Kindle Edition – although somewhat hilariously, as with so much of McLynn’s work, he actually misspells it and is slightly opaque on dates. I was, I believe, the 4th August when Kimura took over.
9. Lyman, Robert. The Reconquest of Burma 1944-45: From Operation Capital to the Sittang Bend (p.20) Osprey Publishing.
10. Kite, Ben. Undaunted: Britain and the Commonwealth’s War in the Air 1939-45 Vol 2. (p.219-223), Helion Publishing.
11. McLynn, (p. 107).
12. McLynn, (p. 303).
13. Lyman, Robert. A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain: 1941–45 (Location 8200). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
14. Bowsher, Jack. Thunder Run Meiktila 1945: The greatest combined arms manoeuvre battle of WW2 (p. 58). Chiselbury. Kindle Edition.
15. Slim, (p. 483).
16. McLynn, (p. 368).
17. Slim, (p. 470).
18. Bowsher, (p. 66).
June 9, 2026
Road to Rangoon, Ep. 1 – Slim’s Hammer and Anvil
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