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Thread: The Forgotten War

  1. #1
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default The Forgotten War

    In the spirit of the ‘Forgotten Battles’ topic, I’d like to expand this into the Forgotten War…the CBI or China, Burma, India.

    If anyone knows what a Chindit was, or where the port city of Diego Suarez was located, or can name even a handful of generals for the Japanese, British, or Chinese, then you probably know more than most.

    Casualties in this theatre amounted into the millions, billions of dollars, yen, and British pounds were spent here, and there were several large, but subtle effects the CBI had on the course of WW II, yet only the most die-hard readers will know the why’s. This thread is a small attempt to test the knowledge of orgah’s here, and perhaps generate some interesting discussion.

    Hopefully, the names of generals like Shinroku Hata, Hisaichi Terauchi, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and Rikichi Ando (whose unauthorized excursion into Indochina sparked the US trade embargo in July 1941) for the Japanese, Louis Mountbatten, William Slim, A.E. Percival, Orde Wingate, and Archibald Wavell for the British, Joseph (Vinegar Joe) Stillwell, and Claire Chennault for the US, and the familiar Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung will come to be a bit more familiar.

    I’ll open with a section from the Harper-Collins Atlas of the Second World War, and provide a few links you might find enjoyable. Part I will focus on Burma, Part 2 on China, as they are distinctly separate, yet related, theatres.

    PART 1 [from Harper-Collins]

    Until 1941, the defense of Burma ranked below that of the West Indies in the list of British priorities. Burma possessed little strategic importance and relatively few natural resources apart from rice. The Japanese occupation of southern Indo-China in July 1941, however, presented Burma with a real external threat, but the higher claim of Malaya and Singapore on military resources meant that in December 1941 the military establishment in Burma consisted of a few combat aircraft and the equivalent of one division.

    For Japan, Burma’s occupation would sever the Chinese Nationalist’s main line of communication with the outside world (via Lashio and Rangoon) and would provide defense in depth to the southern resources area. The Japanese high command thus ear-marked the 15th Army for operations in Burma after the occupation of Siam was complete.

    The 15th Army, with just one regiment under command, occupied the Kra Isthmus between Prachaub and Nakhorn on 8 December, to secure the rear and the lines of communication of the 25th Army as it advanced into Malaya. Victoria Point airfield was secured on 16 December, but it was not until then that the 15th Army began operations in earnest. Airfields at Tavoy and Mergui were secured and from them Japanese fighters were able to escort bomber raids on southern Burma for the first time. By the end of January the port of Rangoon had been brought to a standstill.

    The main Japanese effort was made, however, on the Raheng-Moulmein track. The 15th Army had two half-strength divisions under command when it crossed the border on 20 January, but these possessed superiority of numbers over a defense divided between Tenasserim and the Shan States, and which was committed to defending Burma east of the Salween. Despite the arrival at Rangoon of four brigades in the six weeks before the city’s fall, the destruction of the 17th Indian Division doomed the capital, and with it any British hope of holding Burma.

    It had been the original Japanese intention to secure Rangoon and then advance into central Burma and with the end of the other campaigns in southeast Asia the Japanese were able to move the equivalent of three divisions by sea to Burma within seven weeks of the capture of Rangoon. The 15th Army quickly developed its offensives in the Irrawaddy Siitang valleys, despite the presence there of Chinese forces (which were dispersed, equivalent to no more than a division and, on the Siitang, were not mutually supporting). The first crucial clash around Toungoo was won by the Japanese. Critically, the Japanese secured the bridge over the Siitang intact and were able to develop an offensive through the mountains which resulted in the capture of Lashio on 28 April. Four days later the Japanese secured Mandalay and with it control of central and northern Burma.

    The formal decision to abandon Burma was not taken until 25 April, by which time the withdrawal was threatened as much by the approach of the monsoon as the advancing Japanese. In the first week of May the last British formations in Burma, plus one Chinese division, abandoned the lower Chindwin and began the trek to Imphal, whilst the remainder of the 5th Chinese Army withdrew into northern Burma and thence to either Assam or northern Yunnan. Parts of the 6th Chinese Army contrived to remain in the eastern Shan States, but on the 66th Army’s front the Japanese advanced into Yunnan and established themselves on the Salween, where they were to remain until late 1944.

    The Japanese presence in most of Burma preoccupied British strategy in the East until 1944. Supplies to Nationalist forces in China were disrupted, but the incipient threat to India was never realized, although an assault on Ceylon and other ports signposted disruption of shipping in the Indian Ocean and caused fears of Japanese designs on Madagascar.
    The most complete site I've ever found on the CBI:

    http://cbi-theater.home.comcast.net/.../cbi_home.html

    And a second from the US perspective:

    http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/...ime/index.html

    The China theatre to follow..........
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 02-23-2011 at 22:33.
    High Plains Drifter

  2. #2
    Needs more flowers Moderator drone's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    My grandfather was in the US Army Air Force in the CBI campaign. Flew bombers and cargo over the Hump all the time. He gave me a bunch of stuff a couple of years ago, I'll have to see what I can dig up. Some pretty wild stories, the theater was low priority and a lot of ingenuity/scrounging/jury-rigging was needed to get by day to day.
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    Bureaucratically Efficient Senior Member TinCow's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    I read a very decent book a while ago on the region called, appropriately, Forgotten Wars. It starts with the lead up to the independence wars, including Southeast Asian involvement in WW2, but continues on afterwards with the various wars and conflicts that continued in the late 40s and 50s as the nations broke away from British and French control. A recommended read for someone interested in this topic.


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    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    Some pretty wild stories
    Like this one?


    http://cbi-theater-4.home.comcast.ne...y/ourtime.html
    High Plains Drifter

  5. #5

    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    Fascinating stuff! Thanks for sharing, ReluctantSamurai.

    This is one area of the war that I would like to learn more about, specifically the composition and performance of the Japanese forces. Except for a few special units, they seem to come off as highly motivated but poor soldiers.

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    Needs more flowers Moderator drone's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    Found a book of my grandfather's, I think he took the rest of the stuff (medals/unit patches/etc.) back to show the folks in his new retirement community. The book is China Airlift: The Hump (ISBN #0-87833-316-9). He was there from '44 to the end of the war. 10th AAF, 7th Bomb Group, 9th Squadron.

    The strangest story he told me was about the Chinese. They would bring in coolies to work on the airfields, and they were always superstitious about demons following them. So to get rid of them they would run in front of moving vehicles in an attempt to shed their pursuers. This included planes on takeoff and landing...
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    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    This is one area of the war that I would like to learn more about, specifically the composition and performance of the Japanese forces.
    I'm getting my post prepared for the "China" part of the CBI, and I've got some links that will probably address that....

    @ Drone

    The first link I posted has a ton of great stories like that.....fun stuff to read!
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 02-24-2011 at 14:24.
    High Plains Drifter

  8. #8
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    Well, it appears that the CBI indeed lives up to its name as the Forgotten War. Even Nathan B. Forrest gets more of a draw

    Anyway, the delayed Part 2 China Theatre

    [Once again from the Harper-Collins Atlas of the Second World War]

    The nature of the China theatre between 1939 and 1945 was dominated by the fact that in 1937 and 1938 the Japanese overran virtually the whole of China that was worth occupying and, apart from a series of coastal operations in the south in 1941, thereafter their basic stance in China was defensive. This left three main parties to struggle for power in China. The Kuomintang (KMT) regime of Chiang Kai-shek, the communists of Mao Tse-tung, and the Japanese. Without the means to bring the KMT regime to the peace table by further military victories, the Japanese were to be led into Indo-China, and thence into the Pacific war, in their attempt to ensure the isolation of Chungking, yet at the same time the Japanese authorities would not invest the puppet regime at Nanking (nor its Peking rival) with power sufficient to allow it to present itself as a credible alternative to the Kuomintang. For its part, the latter increasingly adopted a passive policy towards the Japanese forces of occupation to the extent that American liaison teams coming to China before the outbreak of the Pacific war were shocked to find that ‘special undeclared peace’ prevailed in much of the country and that a flourishing trade existed across no-man’s land: indeed, it was one standing American grievance that throughout the war the Japanese outbid the United States for Kuomintang-supplied tungsten.

    KMT acquiescence in Japanese occupation of much of China was primarily the result of Chiang’s calculation that Japan’s ultimate defeat was assured and that the Japanese would be forced to relinquish their holdings in China by the Allies. Moreover, KMT strength had to be preserved in readiness for a resumption of the struggle with the Communists. Communist policy was no more than a mirror image of that of Chungking. The co-operation between the two factions established as a result of the Sian Incident was little more than nominal: the period between 1940 and 1945 was marked by many clashes between the Communists and the KMT. These soon badly compromised Communist offensive power and forced the Communists to attempt to reconsolidate their position in Yenan rather than actively pursue operations against either of their enemies.

    The limited offensive power of all three parties in effect led to the observation of de-facto truces between the Japanese and each of the Chinese factions, though these were punctuated by periodic rice raids and by a series of ferocious pacification operations in which the Japanese adopted policies of widespread slaughter and destruction. But the main threat of these various accommodations was presented by the American determination to develop China as an active theatre of military and air operations as a complement to the US naval and amphibious efforts in the Pacific. A Chinese army of 90 divisions was raised for large-scale offensive operations and air bases developed in south-east China for a bombing campaign of the Japanese Home Islands.

    Practical difficulties of supplying China from India on the scale needed to realize these intentions, and Chungking’s procrastination in meeting American expectations, ultimately led to the trimming of American aims with the result that the strategic air offensive came to represent the main American undertaking. In the event, however, this policy produced the very situation that the air effort was supposed to forestall: a general Japanese offensive (Operation Ichi-Go) throughout southern China aimed at eliminating the air bases from which the US bombers were to attack Japan.

    This Japanese effort, the last major Japanese offensive effort of the war, began in April 1944 with the clearing of that part of Honan that had remained in KMT hands since 1938: the collapse of KMT resistance in the province led to massacres of fleeing nationalist troops by an enraged and deserted peasantry. Thereafter the main Japanese effort across the middle Yangtze began on 27 May and over the next six months various converging Japanese offensives slowly resulted in linking up existing holdings. By late November, the Japanese were able to claim the establishment of uninterrupted overland communications between Singapore and Manchuria: the elimination of US air bases throughout southern China was all but completed at the same time. However, the decision to capture the Marianas had freed the Americans of the need for air bases in China, and whatever gains the Japanese had made were illusory. By spring of 1945, the Japanese had begun to withdraw from their recent conquests as a result of belated awareness of over-extension and the need to consolidate their positions in northern China and Manchuria: as they did so they were followed, usually at a respectful distance, by KMT and Communist forces seeking to steal a march on one another in anticipation of the resumption of the “real” war.
    Some links:

    Chindits:http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_vi...SOBOX=1&REC=10

    IJA tactics:http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/documen...PTR=2864&REC=7

    The Salween campaign:http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_vi...SOBOX=1&REC=19

    Merrill's Marauders:http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_vi...SOBOX=1&REC=17

    General William Slim:http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_vi...SOBOX=1&REC=13

    The Chinese role in Burma:http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_vi...SOBOX=1&REC=11

    And China theatre ops:http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_vi...SOBOX=1&REC=10
    High Plains Drifter

  9. #9

    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    I've been reading more about Operation Ichi-Go since your post. It is amazing that the Japanese were able to launch such an operation so late in the war and achieve a decisive, if somewhat meaningless, victory. They even utilized armor in a meaningful way. I wonder if it can be attributed more to Japanese martial abilities compared to their Chinese rivals or intentional KMT ceding of ground. During the Battle of Central Henan at least, the Chinese seemed to have offered real resistance.

  10. #10
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Forgotten War

    As you pointed out, most of those gains were meaningless. The main purpose of the offensive was to eliminate US airbases for the B29's, but once the Marianas fell, those bases in China would've fallen out of use anyways.

    The last two links above go into some detail concerning KMT and Communist army operations, but for the most part, Chinese forces were poorly equipped in terms of firepower (artillery, armor, bombers) and both factions figured the Allies would defeat the Japanese anyway, so they rarely offered resistance...preferring to bide their time until the Japanese were forced to leave or surrender, when they could then resume fighting the "real" enemy.........each other
    High Plains Drifter

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