Pre-war situation
Before the Second World War broke out, Burma was part of the British Empire, having been progressively occupied and annexed following three Anglo-Burmese Wars in the nineteenth century. Initially governed as part of British India, Burma was formed into a separate colony under the Government of India Act 1935. Under British rule, there had been substantial economic development but the majority Burman community was becoming increasingly restive. Among their concerns was the importation of Indian workers to provide a labour force for many of the new industries, and the erosion of traditional society in the countryside as land was used for plantations of export crops or became mortgaged to Indian moneylenders. Pressure for independence was growing. When Burma came under attack, the Burmans were unwilling to contribute to the defence of the British establishment, and many readily joined movements which aided the Japanese.
British plans for the defence of British Far Eastern possessions involved the construction of airfields linking Singapore and with India. These plans had not taken into account the fact that Britain was also at war with Germany, and when Japan entered the war, the forces needed to defend these possessions were not available. Burma had been regarded as a military "backwater", unlikely to be subjected to Japanese threat .
Lieutenant General Thomas Hutton, the commander of ''Burma Army'' with its headquarters in Rangoon had only the and to defend the country, although help was expected from the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek. During the war, the British Indian Army expanded more than twelve-fold from its peacetime strength of 200,000 but in late 1941 this expansion meant that most units lacked training and equipment. In most cases, Indian units were trained and equipped for operations in the campaign or the North West Frontier of India, rather than jungles. The Burma Rifles units had also expanded rapidly, and were short of equipment and consisted mainly of new recruits.
Japanese Plans
Japan entered the war primarily to obtain raw materials, especially oil, from European possessions in South East Asia which were weakly defended because of the war in Europe. Their plans involved an attack on Burma partly because of Burma's own natural resources , but also to protect the flank of their main attack against Malaya and Singapore and provide a buffer zone to protect the territories they intended to occupy.
An additional factor was the Burma Road completed in 1938, which linked Lashio at the end of a railway from the port of with the Chinese province of Yunnan. This newly-completed link was being used to move aid and munitions to the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek which had been fighting the Japanese for several years. The Japanese naturally wished to cut this link.
The under Lieutenant General Shojiro Iida was assigned the mission of attacking the southern Burmese province of . It consisted initially of the highly regarded and the . They would attack from northern Thailand, which had signed a treaty of friendship with Japan on December 21, 1941. Thai troops would aid in the invasions of Burma and Malaya.
Initial Japanese successes
Japanese capture of Rangoon
The first Japanese attack against Victoria Point, almost the most southerly point of Burma in mid-January 1942, was expected and not contested. The second attack was a small probing raid directed at a police station in southern Tenasserim, which was repulsed. The Japanese 143 Infantry Regiment then launched overland attacks on the airfields at Tavoy and Mergui in Tenasserim. The airfields were difficult to defend and reinforce but Burma Army HQ had been ordered to hold these outposts because of their importance to the defence of Malaya. The Japanese forced their way over the steep jungle-covered Tenasserim Range, and attacked Tavoy on January 18. The defenders, the 3rd and 6th battalions of the Burma Rifles, were overwhelmed and forced to evacuate the town in disorder. Mergui was evacuated before it was attacked.
Rangoon was initially defended relatively successfully against Japanease and Thai air raids, with the small RAF forces reinforced by a squadron of the American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers. But the majority of the airfields were between Rangoon and the Axis advance so, as the Japanese gained use of the airfields in Tenasserim, the amount of warning the Rangoon airfields could get of attack decreased, and they became more and more untenable.
On January 22, 1942 the Japanese 55th Division began the main attack westward from Rahaeng in Thailand across the Kawkareik Pass. The 16th Indian Infantry Brigade of the Indian 17th Division guarding this approach retreated hastily westward. The Japanese division advanced to at the mouth of the Salween River which was garrisoned by the 2nd Burma Brigade. The position was almost impossible to defend, and had the , almost a mile and a half wide, behind it. 2nd Burma Brigade was squeezed into a progressively tighter perimeter, and eventually retreated over river by ferry on January 31 after abandoning a large amount of supplies and equipment. Part of the force was left behind in Moulmein and had to swim the river.
The Sittang Bridge
The Indian 17th Division fell back northward. They attempted to hold the Bilin River and other fallback lines as they did so, but had too few troops to avoid being continually outflanked. The Division eventually retreated toward the bridge over the Sittang River in general disorder. The retreat was delayed by incidents such as a vehicle breaking through the bridge deck, air attacks and Japanese and Thai harassment. Japanese parties infiltrated to the bridge itself. The defence of the bridge was poorly organised and, fearing that it would fall intact into Japanese and Thai hands, the division's commander ordered it to be blown up on February 22 with most of the division stranded on the enemy-held side. Many of the men made their way across the river by swimming or on improvised rafts, but had to abandon all their equipment.
The Fall of Rangoon
Though the Sittang River was in theory a strong defensive position, the disaster at the bridge left the Allied forces too weak to hold it. General , the commander-in-chief of the , nevertheless ordered Rangoon to be held. He was expecting substantial reinforcements from the Middle East, including an Australian infantry division. On February 28, he formally relieved Hutton , and on the following day he effectively sacked Smyth, who was in any case very ill. Meanwhile, many Burmese colonial soldiers were deserting.
Although the Australian Division never arrived in Burma, some reinforcements including the British 7th Armoured Brigade had landed in Rangoon. Alexander ordered counter-attacks but soon realised that there was no hope of defending the city. On March 7, the military evacuated Rangoon after implementing what they described as a "scorched earth" plan for denial. The port was destroyed and the oil terminal was blown up. As the Allies departed, the city was on fire. The remnants of Burma Army faced encirclement as they retreated north, but broke through a Japanese roadblock due to an error on the part of the Japanese commander. Colonel Takanobu Sakuma had been ordered to block the main road north from Rangoon while the main body of the 33rd Division circled round the city to attack from the west. Not realising that the British were evacuating the city, he withdrew the road block once the division had reached its intended positions. Otherwise, the Japanese might have captured General Alexander and much of the rest of Burma Army.
Japanese advance to the Indian frontier
After the fall of Rangoon, the Allies decided to make a stand in the north of the country . It was hoped that the Chinese Expeditionary Force in Burma, consisting of the Fifth, Sixth and Sixty-sixth Armies, each with approximately the strength of a British division but with comparatively little equipment, could hold a front running through central Burma. Supplies were not immediately a problem, as much war material had been evacuated from Rangoon, rice was plentiful and the oilfields in central Burma were still intact, but only the recapture of Rangoon would allow the Allies to hold Burma indefinitely.
The Allies hoped that the Japanese advance would slow down; instead, it gained speed. The Japanese reinforced their two divisions in Burma with one transferred from and another transferred from the Dutch East Indies after the fall of Singapore and Java. They also brought in large numbers of captured British trucks and other vehicles, which allowed them to move supplies rapidly using Southern Burma's road network, and also use Motorized infantry columns, particularly against the Chinese forces. The Allies were also harassed by the rapidly expanding and were hampered by large numbers of refugees and the progressive breakdown of the civil government in the areas they held. The Royal Air Force operating from were crippled by the withdrawal of the radar and radio-intercept units to India and the Japanese soon gained supremacy in the air.
The British had created Burma Corps, to relieve Burma Army of the responsibility of conducting day-to-day operations. Its commander, Lieutenant General William Slim, tried to mount a counter-offensive on the western part of the front, but the troops were repeatedly outflanked and forced to fight their way out of encirclement. The Corps was gradually pushed northward towards Mandalay. 1st Burma Division was encircled and trapped in the blazing oilfields at Yenangyaung, and although it was rescued by Chinese infantry and British tanks in the Battle of Yenangyaung, it lost almost all its equipment and its cohesion. Meanwhile in the Battle of Yunnan-Burma Road, the Chinese held up the Japanese for a time around , but after its fall the road was open for motorized troops of the to shatter the Chinese Sixth Army to the east in the Karenni States and advance to the north through the Shan States to capture Lashio, outflanking the Allied defensive lines and cutting off the Chinese armies from Yunnan. With the effective collapse of the entire defensive line, there was little choice left other than an overland retreat to India or to Yunnan.
The Allied retreat
The retreat was conducted in horrible circumstances. Starving refugees, disorganised stragglers, and the sick and wounded clogged the primitive roads and tracks leading to India. Burma Corps retreated to Manipur in India. Most of the Corps's remaining equipment could not be ferried across the Chindwin River and was lost at Kalewa, although the troops escaped a Japanese attempt to trap them at Shwegyin east of the river. The Corps managed to make it most of the way to Imphal, in Manipur just before the monsoon broke in May, 1942. There, they found themselves living out in the open under the torrential monsoon rains in extremely unhealthy circumstances. The army and civil authorities in India were very slow to respond to the needs of the troops and civilian refugees.
The British Civil Government of Burma fell back to Myitkyina in Northern Burma, accompanied by many British, Anglo-Indian and Indian civilians. The Governor and the most influential civilians were flown out from Myitkyina Airfield, together with some of the sick and injured. The majority of the refugees and some of the Chinese troops committed by Chiang Kai-shek were forced to make their way from Myitkyina to India via the unhealthy Hukawng Valley and the precipitous forested Patkai Range. Many died on the way, and when they reached India, there were several instances of the civil authorities allowing white and Eurasian civilians to continue while preventing Indians from proceeding, effectively condemning many to death. By contrast, many private individuals did their best to provide aid.
The Chinese troops who also retreated via the Hukawng Valley route subsisted largely by looting, further increasing the misery of the refugees. The Chinese 38th Division however, fought its way westward across the Chindwin, arriving in India substantially intact although with heavy casualties. Many other Chinese troops tried to return to Yunnan through remote mountainous forests and many died on the way.
The Chinese soldiers who had retreated into India were put under the command of the American General Joseph Stilwell, who had also made his way to India on foot. After recuperating they were re-equipped and retrained by American instructors.
Thai army enters Burma
In accordance with the Thai military alliance with Japan that was signed on December 21, 1941, the leading elements of the Thai Phayap Army crossed the border into the Shan States on May 10, 1942. At one time in the past the area had been part of the Ayutthaya kingdom. The boundary between the Japanese and Thai operations was generally the Salween. However, that area south of the Shan States known as Karenni States was specifically retained under Japanese control.
Three Thai infantry and one cavalry division, spearheaded by armoured reconnaissance groups and supported by the , started their advance on May 10, and engaged the retreating Chinese 93rd Division. Kengtung, the main objective, was captured on May 27. Renewed offensives in June and November drove the Chinese back into Yunnan.
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