Dr. Robert Lyman discusses the start of the campaign to reconquer Burma from the Japanese led by Lieutenant General Bill Slim and the Fourteenth Army:

Why Burma? Because in Burma in 1945 a series of marvellous military miracles (is there a synonym starting with “m” for concatenation?) engineered by General Bill Slim and his mighty 14th Army, broke the back of the Japanese Burma Area Army and smashed forever Tokyo’s dreams of an empire in South East Asia. 1945 is worth celebrating!

Even today, few people are aware of just how dramatic these events were, and just how spectacular was the victory wrought by the Indian, British, African, US and Chinese forces in the country.

Indeed, at the start of 1945 few people would have predicted the extraordinary outcome of the developing campaign. If Lieutenant General Sir Bill Slim (he had been knighted by General Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy, the previous October, at Imphal) had been asked in January 1945 to describe the situation in Burma at the onset of the next monsoon period in May, I do not believe that in his wildest imaginings he could have conceived that the whole of Burma was about to fall into his hands. After all, his army wasn’t yet fully across the Chindwin. Nearly 800 miles of tough country with few roads lay before him, not the least the entire Burma Area Army under a new commander, General Kimura. The Arakanese coastline needed to be captured too, to allow aircraft to use the vital airfields at Akyab as a stepping stone to Rangoon. Likewise, I’m not sure that he would have imagined that a primary reason for the success of his Army was the work of 12,000 native levies from the Karen Hills, under the leadership of SOE, whose guerrilla activities prevented the Japanese from reaching, reinforcing and defending the key town of Toungoo on the Sittang river. It was the loss of this town, more than any other, which handed Burma to Slim on a plate, and it was SOE and their native Karen guerrillas which made it all possible.

Crossing the Irrawaddy
(Victoria State Archives)

The potential of a Karenni-based resistance raised the possibility, long argued by old Burma hands, of a British armed and trained fifth column operating behind Japanese lines for the purpose of gathering battlefield intelligence and undertaking limited guerrilla action. Slim had long complained about the poor quality of the battlefield intelligence (as opposed to the signals intelligence, about which he was well provided) that he and his Corps commanders received. He was concerned, among other things, about knowing “what was on the other side of the hill”, the product of information provided – where it existed – by effective combat (ground and air) reconnaissance. There was no shortage of organisations attempting to assist in this task – at least twelve – but their coordination was poor and most reported to SEAC or parts of India Command, rather than to 14 Army. Slim dismissed most of these as “private armies” which offered no real help to the task of defeating the enemy on the battlefield. One of the groups, part of Force 136 (i.e. Special Operations Executive, or SOE), which had operated in front of 20 Indian Division along the Chindwin between 1943 and early 1944 under Major Edgar Peacock (and thus known as “P Force”) did sterling work with local Burmese and Karen agents reporting on Japanese activity facing 4 Corps. Persuaded that similar groups working among the Karens in Burma’s eastern hills – an area known as the Karenni States – could achieve significant support for a land offensive in Burma, Slim (to whom Mountbatten transferred responsibility for Force 136 in late 1944 for this purpose) authorised an operation to the Karens. Its task was not merely to undertake intelligence missions watching the road and railways between Mandalay and Rangoon, but to determine whether they would fight. If the Karens were prepared to do so, SOE would be responsible for training and organising them as armed groups able to deliver battlefield intelligence directly in support of the advancing 14 Army. The resulting operation – Character – was so spectacularly successful that it far outweighed what had been achieved by Operation Thursday the previous year in terms of its impact on the course of military operations in pursuit of the strategy to defeat the Japanese in the whole of Burma. It has been strangely forgotten, or ignored, by most historians ever since, drowned out perhaps by the noise made by the drama and heroism of Operation Thursday, the second Chindit expedition. Over the course of Operation Extended Capital some 2,000 British, Indian and Burmese officers and soldiers, along with 1,430 tons of supplies, were dropped into Burma for the purposes of providing intelligence about the Japanese that would be useful for the fighting formations of 14th Army, as well as undertaking limited guerrilla operations. As historian Richard Duckett has observed, this found SOE operating not merely as intelligence gatherers in the traditional sense, but as Special Forces with a defined military mission as part of conventional operations linked directly to a strategic outcome. For Operation Character specifically, about 110 British officers and NCOs and over 100 men of all Burmese ethnicities, dominated interestingly by Burmans (which now also included 3-man Jedburgh Teams) mobilised as many as 12,000 Karens over an area of 7,000 square miles to the anti-Japanese cause. Some 3,000 weapons were dropped into the Karenni States. Operating in five distinct groups (“Walrus”, “Ferret”, “Otter”, “Mongoose” and “Hyena”) the Karen irregulars trained and led by Force 136, waited the moment when 14 Army instructed them to attack.