The concurrent Battle of Meiktila and Battle of Mandalay were decisive engagements near the end of the Burma campaign during World War II. Collectively, they are sometimes referred to as the Battle of Central Burma. Despite logistical difficulties, the Allies were able to deploy large armoured and mechanised forces in Central Burma, and also possessed air supremacy. Most of the Japanese forces in Burma were destroyed during the battles, allowing the Allies to later recapture the capital, Rangoon, and reoccupy most of the country with little organised opposition.
Background
Japanese situation
In 1944, the Japanese had sustained several defeats in the mountainous frontier regions of Burma and India. In particular, at the Battle of Imphal and Battle of Kohima, the Japanese Fifteenth Army had suffered disastrous losses, mainly resulting from disease and starvation.
The heavy Japanese defeat prompted them to make sweeping changes among their commanders and senior staff officers in Burma. On 1 September 1944, Lieutenant General Hyotaro Kimura was appointed commander of the Burma Area Army, succeeding Lieutenant General Masakazu Kawabe whose health had broken down. At this stage of the war, the Japanese were in retreat on most fronts and were concentrating their resources for the defence of the homeland. Kimura had formerly been Vice-Minister for War, and had held other posts with responsibility for mobilising Japanese industry for the war effort. It was hoped that he could use the rice fields, factories and oil wells of Burma to make the Japanese forces there logistically self-sufficient.
Lieutenant General Shinichi Tanaka was appointed to be Kimura's Chief of Staff, with day-to-day responsibility for operations. He had formerly commanded the 18th Infantry Division in Northern Burma, and had a reputation for inflexible determination. (In a reversal of roles in the aftermath of the Imphal disaster, the former Chief of Staff of the Burma Area Army, Lieutenant General Eitaro Naka, was transferred to command the 18th Division.)
Japanese losses in Burma and India in 1944 had been catastrophic. They were made up with drafts of conscripts, many of whom were not of the best physical categories. Kimura's staff decreed that their divisions in Burma should have a strength of 10,000 (compared with their paper establishment of nearer 25,000), but most divisions mustered barely half this reduced strength. Furthermore, they lacked anti-tank weapons. To face massed Allied armour, they would be forced to deploy their field artillery in the front line, which would affect their ability to give concentrated fire support to the infantry. Expedients such as lunge mines (an explosive charge on the end of a long pole), or suicide attacks by men wearing explosive charges, were not effective if the enemy tanks were closely supported by infantry.
Other losses handicapped the Japanese. Their 5th Air Division, deployed in Burma, had been reduced to only a few dozen aircraft to face 1,200 Allied aircraft. Their 14th Tank Regiment possessed only 20 tanks.
Kimura accepted that his forces stood little chance against the numerically and materially superior Allies in open terrain. He therefore intended that while the Twenty-Eighth Army defended the coastal Arakan Province, relying on the difficult terrain to slow the Allied advances, and the Thirty-Third Army continued to fight rearguard actions against the American and Chinese forces which were trying to open a land route from India to China, the Fifteenth Army would withdraw behind the Irrawaddy River. He hoped that the Allies would be overstretched trying to overcome this obstacle, perhaps to the point where the Japanese might even attempt a counteroffensive.
Allied situation
The Allied South East Asia Command had begun making plans to reconquer Burma as early as June 1944 (while the Battle of Imphal was still being fought, although its outcome was clear). Three main options were proposed. One was to reoccupy Northern Burma only, to allow the Ledo Road to be completed, thus linking India and China by land. This was rejected, as it could use only a fraction of the available forces and fulfilled only an out-of-date strategic aim. A second option was to capture Rangoon, the capital and main seaport, by a seaborne invasion. This was also impractical, as it would require landing craft and other resources which would not be available until the end of the War in Europe. By default, the plan adopted was for an offensive into Central Burma by the British Fourteenth Army under Lieutenant General William Slim, to reconquer Burma from the north. The operation, originally codenamed Operation Capital, which was intended to capture Mandalay in Central Burma, was renamed Operation Extended Capital to encompass a subsequent pursuit to Rangoon.
In support of Fourteenth Army's offensive, the Indian XV Corps would advance in the coastal province of Arakan. The corps was also ordered to seize or construct airfields on the coast and on islands just offshore, which could be supplied by sea and which would be used as bases from which aircraft would supply Slim's troops. The American-led Northern Combat Area Command, consisting mainly of Chinese troops, would continue its advance to link up with Chinese armies attacking from Yunnan province in south-west China and thus complete the Ledo Road linking China and India. It was hoped that XV Corps and the NCAC would distract as many Japanese forces as possible from the decisive front in Central Burma.
The chief problems which Fourteenth Army would face were logistical. The advancing troops would need to be supplied over crude roads stretching for far greater distances than were ever encountered in Europe. Although expedients such as locally constructed river transport and temporary all-weather coverings for roads (made from coarse hessian sacking material impregnated with bitumen and diesel oil) were to be used, transport aircraft were to be vital for supplying the forward units. Disaster threatened as early as 16 December 1944, when 75 American transport aircraft were abruptly transferred to China, where the Japanese Operation Ichi-Go was threatening American airfields. Although aircraft were hastily transferred from the Mediterranean theatre to replace those despatched to China, continuing threats to deprive Fourteenth Army of the support of American transport aircraft were to be a constant concern for Slim during the forthcoming battles.
The Fourteenth Army was supported by 221 Group RAF, which operated B-25 Mitchell bombers, Hawker Hurricane and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters and long-range Bristol Beaufighter fighter-bombers. They could also call upon the B-24 Liberator heavy bombers of the Far Eastern Strategic Air Force. The most important aspect of air support was probably the Combat Cargo Task Force, which included both British and American squadrons of transport aircraft, in particular the ubiquitous C47. Fourteenth Army required 7,000 sorties by transport aircraft every day during the maximum intensity of the fighting.
Most of Slim's divisions were on a mixed Animal and Mechanical Transport establishment, which allowed them to operate in difficult terrain but restricted their tactical speed of movement to that of marching men or mules. In anticipation of fighting in the open country of Central Burma, Slim reorganised two of his divisions (Indian 5th Division and Indian 17th Division) as partly Motorized infantry and partly Airportable infantry formations.
At this stage of the war, few British infantry reinforcements were available. In spite of expedients such as drafting anti-aircraft gunners into infantry units, the strength of Fourteenth Army's British formations and of the British units in its Indian formations was dropping, and Indian and Gurkha units were increasingly to bear the brunt of the actions which followed.
Intelligence
In the coming campaign, both the Allies and Japanese were to suffer from lack of intelligence about the enemy, and make incorrect assumptions about their opponent's intentions.
The Allies had undisputed air superiority. In addition to the results of aerial reconnaissance, they also received reports from behind enemy lines from the reconnaissance units V Force and Z Force and the resistance liaison organisation Force 136. However, they lacked the detailed information available to commanders in Europe through Ultra radio intercepts. Japanese radio security was good; rather than cipher machines such as the Enigma machine, which the Ultra operation was able to decipher on a large scale, they used "code books and then extremely tough enciphering methods to conceal the coded text..." Japanese formation headquarters also sent far less compromising radio traffic than their German (or Allied) counterparts. Only near the end of the battle, when the Japanese signal and staff arrangements largely collapsed, did the Allies gain significant signals intelligence. Also, the Allied armies in the field had too few Japanese linguists, to translate intercepted messages and captured documents.
On the other hand, the Japanese were almost blind. They had very few aircraft with which to fly air reconnaissance missions, and they would receive little information from the Burmese population which was becoming disillusioned and restive under Japanese military control. Some formations had set up their own intelligence organisations; for example, Twenty-Eighth Army had created a branch of the Hikari Kikan, known as Hayate Tai, whose agents lived deep under cover in the frontier regions of Burma and in some of the remoter regions of Southern Burma. However, these agents could not acquire or report information quickly enough to be tactically useful in a fast-moving mechanised battle.
Campaign
As the monsoon season ended in late 1944, the Fourteenth Army had established two bridgeheads across the Chindwin River, using prefabricated Bailey bridges. Based on past Japanese actions, Slim assumed that the Japanese would fight in the Shwebo Plain, as far forward as possible between the Chindwin and Irrawaddy Rivers. On 29 November, Indian 19th Division launched British IV Corps' attack from the northern bridgeheads at Sittaung and Mawlaik, and on 4 December, Indian 20th Division under Indian XXXIII Corps attacked out of the southern bridgehead at Kalewa.
Both divisions made rapid progress, with little opposition. The 19th Division in particular, under Major General "Pete" Rees was approaching the vital rail centre of Indaw, 80 miles (130 km) east of Sittaung, after only five days. Slim realised at this point that his earlier assumption that the Japanese would fight forward of the Irrawaddy was incorrect. As only one of IV Corps' divisions had so far been committed, he was able to make major changes to his original plan. The 19th Division was transferred to XXXIII Corps, which was to continue to clear the Shwebo plain and attack towards Mandalay. The remainder of IV Corps, strengthened by Fourteenth Army's reserve divisions, was switched from the army's left flank to its right. Its task was now to advance down the Gangaw Valley west of the Chindwin, cross the Irrawaddy near Pakokku and seize the vital logistic and communication centre of Meiktila by a rapid armoured thrust. By seizing Meiktila he would strangle all supplies going north towards Mandalay and hasten the end of that battle and consequently the recapture of the whole of Burma. To persuade the Japanese that IV Corps was still advancing on Mandalay, a dummy corps HQ was set up near Sittaung. All radio traffic to 19th Division was relayed through this installation.
To allow the main body of their divisions to retreat across the Irrawaddy, the Japanese had left rearguards in several towns in the Shwebo Plain. During January, the Indian 19th Division and British 2nd Division cleared Shwebo, while the Indian 20th Division had a hard battle to take Monywa, a major river port on the east bank of the Chindwin. The Japanese rearguards were largely destroyed. The Japanese also retained a foothold in the Sagaing hills, north of the Irrawaddy near Mandalay.