The war in Burma has been dismissed by some as a strategic sideshow, in the sense that winning or losing was not decisive in ending the conflict. This began with the ‘Germany First’ policy agreed between Roosevelt and Churchill at the Arcadia Conference in Washington at the end of 1941. Thereafter it was to prove the orphan child of Allied strategy, the product of humiliation in 1942, never fully to obtain a pre-eminent status in Allied planning or in the minds of historians subsequently. Churchill gave it a cursory reference in his history of the Second World War, confining the “forgotten” status soldiers grumbled about (and later wore as a badge of honour) during fighting.
In the volume entitled Closing the Ring, Churchill gave the 1944 campaign at Kohima and Imphal, which saw the dramatic curtailing of Japanese plans to invade India, less than a page. The “sepoy general” (the phrase was originally Napoleon’s, about Wellington) who commanded the army that secured remarkable victories in 1944 and 1945 – Lieutenant General ‘Uncle Bill’ Slim – wasn’t even mentioned.
Nor was the name of his Army, the 14th. Remarkable given the Burma Campaign was the longest fought by Allied armies and, in 1945, provided the largest army group ever assembled by the Commonwealth and its friends. In April 1945, the number of Allied service personnel in South East Asia Command totalled 1,304,126, including nearly 300,000 Americans. But the Churchill government had been apprehensive about the political consequences of defeat at Kohima and Imphal in 1944. The fact they did not trumpet the victory was also partly political.
The less said about anything connected with India, given Roosevelt’s public hostility to the British Empire, the better. So was the Burma Campaign really so peripheral in the defeat of Japan – most effectively achieved by the US Navy and Marine Corps and the B-29, especially the ones called Enola Gay and Bockscar, and the remarkable, epoch-defining and history-changing devices nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man?
No. The war in the Far East did contribute significantly to the defeat of Japan. First, Burma unexpectedly became, in 1942, the locus for the defence of India. The campaign retained China in the fight, and allowed Allied (and US) strategic imperatives regarding China to be fulfilled, as well as allowing India’s vast potential of human and material resources to be used in the Allied war effort.
Third, the Burma Campaign contributed significantly to the destruction of Japanese military power across Asia and the Pacific. It was in Assam and Burma in 1944 and 1945 that the Japanese suffered their greatest losses in the Second World War, together with a succession of humiliating defeats, losing by their own admission a total of 185,149 killed – nearly 13 times British-Indian losses, in the period between March 1944 and May 1945. This allowed the Allies to manage the narrative of defeat among the Japanese.
Demonstrating that their armies had been militarily defeated removed any post hoc arguments that Japan had fallen merely as a result of the A-bomb. Defeating the Imperial Japanese Army so decisively was important for removing any residual sense in Japanese minds of the power of militarism. Fourth, it proved the military effectiveness of the transformation among the armies in India after 1943, especially in the Indian Army itself.
The extraordinary story was that of India transforming itself to take responsibility for its own defence. It did so spectacularly, and established itself as the guardian of its future. This created a new, powerful national army able to serve a new nation on the verge of independence. This was distinct from the old, pre-1939 Indian Army, which had existed merely to serve British – rather than Indian – interests.
Finally, the Burma Campaign provided the opportunity for the Indian Army to play a decisive role in defeating the forces of militarism, building a strong historic narrative in the memory of the new nations that would emerge from partition in 1947.
