Abstract
The Imperial Japanese Army experienced its greatest defeat against the British imperial forces at Burma. The final defeat of the IJA during late 1944 and early 1945 was partly possible because of the failed invasion along the Burma–India border which the Japanese high command launched in early 1944. The volume under review portrays in a narrative fashion the story of Japanese advance and ultimately Japanese defeat and retreat, both in the Arakan and in Imphal-Kohima during the four turbulent months from February to May 1944.
The author, Robert Lyman, was an officer of the British army. For some past years he has turned his pen to presenting Field Marshal Bill Slim (the architect of victory over the IJA at Imphal-Kohima) as a ‘heaven born’ general and the ‘father of modern warfare’. Even an admirer of Slim might not agree to such extravagant claims about ‘Montgomery of the Far East’. Nevertheless, Lyman’s biography of Slim and his volume on British military leadership in the Far East are bound to generate controversy. However, the present volume falls far short of previous standards.
In Japan’s Last Bid for Victory, Lyman rightly notes that the Japanese objective during their February–March 1944 campaign was limited: to thwart British preparations along the Assam–Bengal border in order to delay an advance by the British and Indian armies across the Chindwin. So, the subtitle of the book is a misnomer. Neither is Lyman much interested in the military-strategic dimension of the 1944 campaign, nor does the volume make any new contribution in this sphere. The best account of strategic manoeuvres by both the Japanese and the Allies during the HA-GO and ICHI-GO operations remains Louis Allen’s monograph Burma: The Longest War, 1941–1945 (London, J.M. Dent, 1984). In Lyman’s account Slim always remains in the background: encouraging, guiding, and planning for the final, almost predetermined, victory. With regard to Slim’s contribution to the sieges of Imphal-Kohima, Ronald Lewin’s biography (Slim, the Standard Bearer, Leo Cooper, 1976; new edn, Wordsworth, 1999) remains most useful. The Indian National Army (INA/Azad Hind Fauj) makes a cameo appearance in Lyman’s volume. The best account of INA’s role in Burma remains Peter Ward Fay’s The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942–1945 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995).
Lyman’s contribution is to show that the Japanese Arakan offensive and the British-Indian-African counter-offensive, as well as the three IJA divisions’ march towards Imphal-Kohima and the subsequent counter-attack by British-Indian troops, were not gigantic battles as occurred in North Africa, Western Europe, or the Soviet Union. Rather, combat was characterized by a series of disparate small unit actions which occurred along the crests and spurs of jungle-covered razor-shaped cliffs and in the hot and humid, swampy, mosquito-ridden mountainous tracts of Arakan Yoma. Lyman portrays well that the dispersed and confused confrontations (often interrelated) from Kohima in the north up to Akyab in the south (almost 1000 km) characterized jungle warfare along the India–Burma border. Often cut off from communications and supplies, small parties of troops had to fight it out by themselves. So, the big battles were actually junior officers’ games, somewhat similar to modern-day counter-insurgency actions by platoons and squads.
Of course some authors (such as Fergal Keane, Road of Bones: the Siege of Kohima, 1944, London, Harper Press, 2010) have earlier noticed this characterization of the 1944 campaign. However, Lyman brings all the small unit confrontations together in one volume. But, there is a lurking danger. Somewhat like Stephen Ambrose, Lyman takes his source (war diaries of British units and private papers of British officers) too literally. Hence, at times the book reads like ‘blood and glory’ history. The bravery, dash, and elan of British troops (besides air supply) seemed, for Lyman, to be the reason for the British victory over the IJA by the early summer of 1944. This is, to an extent, a throwback to late nineteenth-century Victorian military history traditions as exemplified in modern days by regimental history writing.
To sum up, Lyman’s monograph is of limited value and mostly geared towards the general reader. The book aims to give a general overview of the Burma front in 1944. The bigger question is for future scholars: what new avenues are there in the study of the 1944 campaign? The study of jungle warfare tactics (involving training) and the analysis of the army as an institution, logistics, and so on remain more or less uncharted land. There has been some study in this field by Alan Jeffreys, Graham Dunlop, and others, but still more needs to be done. All scholars doing research on the Second World War in Burma utilize documents from various institutions in Britain: the British Library, National Archives, Liddell-Hart Centre for Military Archives, National Army Museum, Imperial War Museum, Churchill Archives, and Gurkha Museum, Winchester, and so on. Now probably the time has come to use the plethora of materials held at the Ministry of Defence History Section Archives at New Delhi. It is to be noted that about 70 per cent of the troops in Burma were Indians and only the official historians of the Indian Army during the Second World War have used theses archives in New Delhi. Here lies the challenge for future historians.