Following the Japanese defeat in those two great sea battles, Australia's position seemed much more secure and MacArthur began to plan optimistically for an advance to the northern coast of New Guinea. This would be largely undertaken by Australian forces, although American troops would soon join them and they would be supported by the ever-growing numbers of USAAF aircraft under Major-General Kenney. At the end of June, the Australians had a guerrilla company called 'Kangaforce' at Wau, two brigades at Port Moresby, another brigade at Milne Bay where an airstrip was being constructed, and two battalions moving across the Kokoda Trail towards Buna on the north coast, where it was planned to build an airbase which would give the Allies a springboard for further advances along the coast and towards Rabaul. It was hoped to occupy Buna a few days after the landings at Guadalcanal but on 22nd July MacArthur received the rude news that the Japanese had landed 2,000 men a few miles from Buna on the previous night. The Seventeenth Army commander at Rabaul, General Hyakutake, was determined not only to forestall any Allied thrust but to continue with the original scheme to seize Port Moresby, and he had given this task to the South Seas Force under Major-General Horii.
The advance detachment under Colonel Yokoyama which had been landed near Buna was intended to reconnoitre the Kokoda Trail and to establish whether large forces could be moved through the mountains, something the Allies held to be highly impracticable. But the lightly-equipped Japanese soon pushed the Australians back and occupied Kokoda itself on 29th July, a defeat which infuriated MacArthur who had little idea of the actual fighting conditions in New Guinea. Worse seemed likely to follow, for by mid-August Horii had 13,500 men under his command and was moving steadily towards Port Moresby. However, the landing by Nimitz's forces at Guadalcanal distracted the Japanese and compelled them to divide their attention and energies; for the next five months, in fact, the leaders at Rabaul and Tokyo were to dither continually over whether New Guinea or Guadalcanal was the more important theatre. Moreover, the Australian 7th Division was now in Papua, with two brigades at Port Moresby and one at Milne Bay; and this increase in the defence forces began to slow down the Japanese advance. Most important of all, while the Australians benefited from the contraction of their supply lines as they fell back southwards, so correspondingly the enemy thrust lost its impetus as Horii's troops pushed ahead and their logistical problems multiplied.
Nevertheless, there was little sign in August 1942 that the Japanese threat was lessening. Pausing only to get supplies forward, the South Seas Force advanced towards Port Moresby while a smaller contingent prepared to make a flank move by sea against the Allied position at Milne Bay. On the night of 25th–26th August 1,200 Japanese landed from two transports (escorted by two cruisers and three destroyers) and attempted to seize the airbase there. However, even though this force employed a pair of tanks and was built up to a strength of 2,000 men, it was greatly outnumbered by the two Australian brigades and suffered from repeated strafing and bombing attacks by Allied aircraft. The Australians held the airbase and, on the 31st, began to push the raiders back. Five nights later, the remaining Japanese troops were evacuated.
At the same time, though, Horii was urging his main force along the Kokoda Trail and on 17th September it occupied Ioribaiwa, only thirty-two miles from Port Moresby. This news alarmed MacArthur, who asked General Blarney, the Australian C-in-C of the Allied Land forces in the South-West Pacific, to take personal control of the operations in New Guinea and Papua. In fact, MacArthur's fears of losing Port Moresby were as unfounded as his criticisms of the Australian troops were unjust. Because the Japanese supply system was breaking down due to the appalling terrain and to Allied air attacks, Horii could go no further and he was instructed to withdraw on 18th September. His troops were thin on the ground and had scarcely eaten for over a fortnight. Furthermore, there were now two Australian divisions and two American regiments at Port Moresby and against such overwhelming numbers the Japanese were forced to give way.
With the roles now about to be reversed, the Allies in their turn faced a growing logistical problem while the Japanese supply difficulties were correspondingly eased. Horii's troops retreated so swiftly that the Australians reached Templeton's Crossing on 8th October before they encountered much opposition; but this had almost doubled the length of the Australian line of communications. However, Blarney's forces could rely upon the vastly superior Allied air strength: not only did the planes supply the advancing troops but they also transported an American force to Wanigela on the north-east coast, where an airstrip was developed to assist a future coastal thrust. While other American troops moved up the even steeper Kapa Kapa Trail, the Australians, during October, encountered a tenacious Japanese defence as they sought to reach the top of the range at Templeton's Crossing. By 2nd November, though, Kokoda was retaken and the South Seas Force was retreating again in the face of supply difficulties, weakened troops and the strenuous Australian assaults; also important was the fact that the Japanese had now decided to give priority in reinforcement to the Guadalcanal campaign.
Throughout November the rout continued and General Horii himself was drowned when trying to cross the Kumusi river. Moreover, when the Japanese attempted to hold that line, their front was quickly broken (on the 12th) by air and ground attacks—the dropping of bridging materials revealed once again the Allied aerial superiority and its advantages. As the Australians advanced into the Dobodura plain, where they hastily constructed airfields, the Japanese were retreating to the area around Buna which they determined to hold. By this time, they were also threatened by the Americans on their left flank, for the regiment at Wanigela had moved in small coastal craft to Pongani, where the 32nd US Division set up its headquarters and where another airstrip was built. This force was joined by that which had staggered over the Kapa Kapa Trail, and together they pressed along the coast towards Buna. By the end of November, however, the Japanese were conducting a ferocious defence of the Buna-Gona area, and many of the inexperienced American as well as Australian troops were cracking under the strain of jungle fighting and malaria, much to MacArthur's disgust. Lieutenant-General Eichelberger was despatched to restore American morale by sacking tired officers and was ordered 'to take Buna, or not come back alive similar instructions were sent out to the Australian troops, but it is difficult to say if they had much effect. Much more important was the fact that the 32nd US Division was brought up to full strength, while the exhausted brigades of the 7th Australian Division were replaced by those of the 6th.
These fresh troops took Gona on 9th December, while Allied air power prevented any reinforcement of the Japanese position by sea. Nevertheless, every important centre was contested bitterly and even the use of tanks did not over-awe the defenders, who were determined to fight to the last man. Eventually, however, they had to crack and the Allies took Buna and its surrounds by 3rd January 1943; by the 18th, Sanananda had also been taken and all the Japanese wiped out. In the entire campaign, they probably lost about 12,000 men against the total Allied battle losses of 3,000. Many more were hit by disease.
The protracted struggle along the Kokoda Trail to Buna was a triumph for the Allies in two other ways. First of all, it provided a great morale boost by breaking the myth of the Japanese soldiers' invincibility; Australian and American troops could fight just as ferociously, and could endure the jungle conditions too. Secondly, it demonstrated the viability and value of air supply to ground forces in the jungle, without which the battles might have had a different ending. Now this arm could be developed and applied to gain fresh victories. What had begun as a desperate move to protect Australia had ended with the opening of limitless offensive possibilities ahead.
The same could not be said of the campaign in Burma between the spring of 1942 and that of 1943. Having been humiliatingly bundled out of South-East Asia, the British were keen to gain revenge and restore their troops' good opinion of themselves by pushing the Japanese back from the borders of India; but the practical difficulties in the way of this ambition were enormous. At the bottom of it all was the fact that the crucial region of Assam and Bengal had never at any time been planned as a military base area. The road and railway system was old, haphazard and disorganised, continually interrupted by floods and always short of engineers and equipment. The new construction problems were immense: ports, roads, railways, telegraph and phone systems, supply, ordnance and ammunition depots, hospitals and barracks had either to be greatly enlarged or built from scratch, and clearly not all of this could be done at once—over a million men were engaged in building the 220 new airfields alone. Supplies of virtually every commodity were scarce, not only because India came low down the list of Allied priorities, but also because the shipping allocation was totally inadequate.
These were the physical problems; the human ones were equally formidable. India Command under Wavell possessed a large number of ill-equipped, poorly-trained divisions as a result of the great expansion of the Indian Army. It would take some time to turn these into forces capable of meeting the Japanese on their own terms. In addition, the authorities also had to look after, and supply, about 400,000 civilian refugees from Burma, the 30,000 Chinese troops and the 33,000 men of Burcorps. There were administrative and military troubles on the North-West Frontier and, most important of all, there was the civil unrest throughout the summer of 1942 after the Cripps Mission had failed to satisfy the Indian Congress leaders. Wavell had to deploy fifty-seven infantry battalions to quell riots and keep the peace—which held back the training of the army, and further depressed morale.
On the bright side, air superiority, which was essential to protect India, cover any advance into Burma and ensure continued supplies to China, was assured to the British after the Japanese despatched most of their planes to the South-West Pacific in May 1942. It was true that many of the thirty-one RAF and RIAF squadrons were required for reconnaissance duties or the defence of Ceylon, but an ever-increasing number of modern aircraft were being sent to North-East India. A far larger problem was that of Wavell's relations with Chiang Kai-Shek, who had been urging a large-scale invasion of Burma from both India and China, together with a sea-borne attack upon Rangoon. While the British also desired an offensive, they were unable to provide the naval forces necessary to cover the Rangoon operation and to prevent the Japanese from reinforcing that port; and at this, the Generalissimo angrily abandoned his scheme, believing that Wavell was not really trying.
In fact, Wavell was attempting to carry out an operation which was within the capacity of his forces and was not dependent upon naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean, He had in mind a limited thrust to recover the Arakan region, which would be a necessary prerequisite for the recon-quest of the rest of Burma; but even this scheme was abandoned because it involved a sea-borne invasion against the vital airbases around Akyab and because it proved impossible to persuade the Chinese to stage a divisionary operation from Yunnan. What Wavell was left with, therefore, was the rump of a rump of the original idea he had discussed with Chiang Kai-Shek. But any operation was better than none at all, both to obtain fighting practice and to bolster British prestige.
In the last three months of 1942, the 14th Indian Division moved slowly down the Mayu peninsula towards Akyab Island, periodically stopping when the rains were heavy or the commanders felt cautious. Little opposition was offered at first by the few Japanese troops but the Fifteenth Army Commander, General Iida, recognised the growing threat to the Akyab airfields and sent Lieutenant-General Koga's 55th Division to Arakan with orders to eliminate it. Fighting with exemplary tenacity, Koga's leading battalions brought the British advance to a halt by the end of January. By this time the 14th Indian Division, decimated by malaria and not well trained in jungle combat in the first place, was clearly flagging but Wavell insisted that the thrust should be maintained. Within a few weeks, however, Koga had brought up his reinforcements and on 18th March 1943 the Japanese seized Htizwe. They then proceeded to force their way up the Kalapazin valley to Zedidaung, thereby uncovering the flank of the British positions down the Mayu peninsula. This counter-move continued even when the tired 14th Indian Division was replaced by the 26th Indian; and by 6th April the Japanese had struck west across the Mayu river and captured Indin.
Koga's regiments then pressed northwards, hoping to take the line Maungdaw-Buthidaung by May (when the monsoon season would begin) thereby dislocating any British plans for an advance during the dry season of 1942–43. On 14th April the situation was so bad that Slim himself, then commander of the XV Indian Corps, flew in to direct the British forces in Arakan; but he was so shocked to see the fall in morale which the retreat, the climate, malaria and the heavy losses incurred by frontal attacks upon well-defended enemy positions had caused, that he quickly abandoned any offensive schemes. He planned for a gradual retreat to the Maungdaw-Buthidaung line or even back to the Cox's Bazar region, where the open scrubland would give him a better chance to utilise his armour and artillery than in the dense jungles and swamps of the Mayu peninsula.
On the night of 6th–7th May the Japanese took Buthidaung and then put such pressure upon the British defenders of the Tunnels and Maungdaw that these places were given up too. At this point, as Slim's troops were moving back towards the prepared defences around Cox's Bazar, the Japanese decided to dig in for the wet season. The British were therefore left occupying the line Nhila—Bawli Bazar—Goppe Bazar, approximately the same position as they had held eight months earlier. While the attempt to capture Akyab may have dislocated a Japanese plan to move into northern Assam and thus might not have been an absolute failure in strategic terms, it had certainly been a depressing operation, conducted by inexperienced troops and indecisive commanders, and urged on by Wavell, who still underestimated the difficulties of fighting the Japanese in the jungle. Churchill, then about to meet the Americans for the Trident conference, considered that the whole affair had been a wash-out and it seems clear that Wavell's being 'kicked upstairs' to be Viceroy of India a few months later was due to the failure in Arakan.
In fact, the only obvious bright spot in the Burma-India theatre in this period was the successful launching of the first Chindit operation, led by its originator, Orde Wingate. He had obtained support both in London and from Wavell for the idea of sending Long-Range Penetration Groups into the Burmese jungle, where they would attack Japanese communications and outposts and generally cause disruption out of all proportion to their size. With this in mind, the 77th Indian Brigade was completely reorganised for this task, since the Chindits (so called after a mythological Oriental beast, half lion, half eagle) needed to be better jungle fighters than the Japanese, needed many experts in demolitions and signals, and needed to develop good air-ground cooperation. Although pack animals were used for their journeys through the jungle the Chindits also called upon the resources of the RAF to provide supplies by air.
While Wavell hoped to employ the Chindits in a strategical role, i.e. during or prior to a general offensive, he gave way to Wingate's urgings that they should be allowed an early operation in order to gain experience and information, to upset any Japanese offensive plans and to boost British morale. On the night of 14th–15th February 1943 therefore, two groups of Chindits secretly crossed the Chindwin river and moved further eastwards. They then split into various smaller detachments, the northern group of 2,200 men and 800 mules dividing into five columns, and the southern group of 1,000 men and 250 mules into two columns. By mid-March, they were across the Irrawaddy attacking Japanese outposts, cutting railway lines, blowing up bridges and ambushing roads. Realising belatedly the size of this operation, the Japanese deployed nearly two divisions in the region between the Shweli and Irrawaddy rivers; and this pressure, together with physical difficulties, forced most of the columns to re-cross the Irrawaddy. By mid-April, they were back in India, having lost around 1,000 men and most of their equipment during their 1,500 mile trek.
The first Chindit operation had little direct strategic effect upon the war as a whole, and Japanese casualties and damage were really very small; but the fact that British troops had penetrated enemy-held territory, roamed around for two months and then returned, was important and did boost morale. Valuable experience was gained, particularly with respect to air supply, which was already seen as the key to any future advance into Burma by regular or irregular forces. In the long run, it was important in causing the new Japanese Fifteenth Army commander, General Mutagachi to believe that the Chindwin was not a safe barrier and that the British were contemplating an attack across it in force. To unbalance such a move, Mutagachi was to consider going on the offensive himself. In reality, Wavell still faced so many administrative and supply difficulties that any large-scale thrust into Burma after the monsoon season was extremely doubtful. By April 1943, the British had abandoned another scheme for a future sea-borne invasion of Rangoon (operation 'Anakim') and were also realising the impracticability of the seizure of Sumatra (operation 'Culverin'). All that could be hoped for was a small advance in the north towards opening the route to China, where the military situation remained bleak for the Allies.
Ever since the Japanese seizure of northern Burma in May 1942, China had been completely cut off from her western allies, an isolation which Chiang Kai-Shek keenly felt. Over a million Japanese soldiers were en-engaged in China, and since 1937 they had pushed the ill-equipped Nationalist and Communist forces well inland. On the other hand, there had been a virtual cessation in this fighting after Pearl Harbor, since Japan was compelled to devote more and more attention to other foes in her southern operations. To the American political interest in keeping China as a power factor in the Far East was now added a very pressing military reason; for in the face of the Japanese onslaught in the Pacific it was imperative to keep as many divisions of the China Expeditionary Force bogged down as possible, thus preventing them from being transferred to New Guinea or the Solomons. Yet, given the geographical difficulties, there was little that could be done to increase the Chinese fighting capacity apart from increasing the flow of supplies flown over 'the hump' by the India-China Ferry Command.
Thus in the second half of 1942 and throughout 1943 there existed a military stalemate in the China theatre. The Japanese were content to maintain their existing positions; the Chinese were content to carry out small-scale guerrilla operations. Stilwell, the Generalissimo's Chief of Staff, concentrated his energies upon the re-training and re-equipping of the Chinese army and was pressing for an increase in the air supplies. But because of this inaction, and because there seemed to be no possibility of an early reopening of the Burma Road by British and Chinese ground forces, more and more attention was being given to General Chennault's plans to build up a strong bomber force with which to attack Japan. Since the flow of military supplies to China was severely limited in any case, this meant that Stilwell and Chennault quarrelled over priority; and this lasted even after Roosevelt's decision in favour of Chennault in March 1943. Because of all these factors, therefore, no startling changes or advances were likely to occur in the China theatre in the near future.
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