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The day after the capture of the airport, General Stilwell arrived, and it was Colonel Hunt who was holding a branch.
The aftermath of a great victory
Failing to capture the city of Myitkyina after easily capturing the airport was destined to be one of Stilwell's most disgraceful mistakes. In fact, Stilwell and his staff did not have any kind of detailed plan for the capture of Myitkyina before planning the surprise attack on the airfield.
In the first 48 hours of everyone's excitement, Stilwell and his men saw only one great victory – and the rest of the world was no different, and the victory over the airport was still significant, despite the endless ordeal ahead.
The most significant impact was the drastic shortening of the Hump route, from May to October 1944, 14,000 sorties of transport planes took off from this airfield, transporting more than 100,000 tons of supplies to China.
A unit of the Chinese Expeditionary Force on the Nu River front.
One of the most striking effects of the Kohima-Imphal Campaign, which was almost at the same time as the capture of Myitkyina airfield, was that Chiang Kai-shek's attitude finally changed, and from early 1944 Roosevelt had been urging Chiang Kai-shek to engage the Chinese Expeditionary Force (i.e., Force Y) stationed in western Yunnan into the northern Burma battlefield. But Chiang Kai-shek was always prevaricating with all sorts of clichés:
China is too weak to carry out a major battle; Once the Chinese Expeditionary Force was used, the Chongqing government would be immediately threatened by the Japanese in East China and the communist forces in Yan'an.
Everyone could see how untenable Chiang Kai-shek's perfunctory words were, and although Commander-in-Chief Chiang had inadvertently been blinded by the fact that the Japanese army in China was about to launch an attack on the Chinese mainland under his rule on an unprecedented scale, the Kuomintang government and the military commanders of the various theaters turned a blind eye to the Japanese army's preparations for war under their noses.
The more than 100,000 Chinese expeditionary force troops stationed on the Nu River, equipped with some American weapons, have formed a 10:1 advantage over the Japanese army on the west bank of the Nu River in terms of numbers; In addition, there were 400,000 Kuomintang descendants against the communist forces led by Mao Zedong.
Marshall, who could not bear it, urged Roosevelt to tell Chiang Kai-shek that the United States would immediately stop supplies unless "Force Y" was immediately put into battle; When Marshall did act, a shocked Chiang Kai-shek finally agreed to the Chinese Expeditionary Force's entry into the war, but he still ordered a delay behind his back—until the news of the victory in the capture of Myitkyina airfield finally took Chiang's foot off the brakes.
Under his command, tens of thousands of high-spirited officers and men of the expeditionary force relied on rubber boats and bamboo rafts to force the crossing of the Nu River in early May 1944, when the 20th Army used 393 canvas inflatable boats and a large number of bamboo rafts, and several divisions crossed the Nu River on a 50-kilometer-wide section of the river at the same time – a feat not seen by the Chinese army in hundreds of years.
The crossing of the river proceeded fairly smoothly, with only one soldier accidentally drowning. The deceased's name was Deng Chao, a native of Hunan, and he was a sergeant squad leader of the 592nd Regiment. He was also the first soldier of the expeditionary force to die in the great counteroffensive in western Yunnan. (Note 1)
Forcibly crossing the Nu River
After forcibly crossing the Nu River, the Chinese army attacking Gaoligong Mountain was blocked by the main force of the Japanese 56th Division, suffering heavy casualties and slow progress; On the 20th, a Japanese intelligence captured from the front showed that the Japanese army was well aware of the offensive plan of the Chinese Expeditionary Force and made corresponding arrangements; The headquarters of the commander of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, which suspected high-level leaks, immediately changed its deployment, with the 20th Group Army (under the jurisdiction of the 53rd and 54th armies) as the right group army and the 2nd Division as the reserve, attacking Tengchong; With the 11th Army (under the jurisdiction of the 2nd, 6th, and 71st armies) as the left group army, it attacked Longling and Mangshi. (Note 2)
The 87th and 88th Divisions of the 71st Army, located on the right flank of the Left Army, captured Zhen'an Street on June 9, but when the main force of the division would attack Longling, the Japanese army squeezed out thousands of reinforcements from Songshan, Tengchong, and Mangshi, and the 71st Army had to retreat to the eastern suburbs on June 16 to confront the Japanese army. Both the eastern and western Chinese armies were locked in bitter battles.
However, the Chinese Expeditionary Force, which launched a counteroffensive, had successfully pinned down the Japanese 56th Division in western Yunnan from the moment it crossed the Nu River, and the reinforcement order of the 33rd Army Headquarters was greatly reduced, and the Japanese only let the commander of the 56th Infantry Regiment, Major General Minakami Genzo, bring a small number of troops to reinforcements. (Note 3)
Myitkyina's defenses were not as empty as the airfields in the wilderness, and during the more than two years of occupation, like Matsuyama, the Japanese built strong fortifications and stockpiled enough ammunition and forage in this key transportation hub. The Japanese fortifications on the outskirts were dense and hidden; The city is backed by the Irrawaddy River, and all the pillboxes in the city are heavily armed, and all key intersections are covered by crossfire. The most crucial point is that Myitkyina was not completely surrounded by the Chinese and American troops, and the Japanese reinforcements and supplies coming from the direction of Bamo could still infiltrate in.
Defending Myitkyis was Maruyamabo Yasusa, who had only about 700 men under his command in mid-May, but on the one hand he urgently appealed to the newly formed 33rd Army for reinforcements, and at the same time filled the line with all the soldiers who could move.
The first battle is a bitter battle
After the capture of Myitkyina airport, Chinese troops were flown over.
On 17 May, Hunt sent two battalions of the 150th Regiment to launch a tentative assault on Myitkyina, and the operation turned into a disaster; The next day, the Chinese offensive was similarly thrown into disarray. The most widely circulated account is that for two days in succession, the Japanese sent a small number of daredevils to infiltrate the dense forest between the two battalions, and they opened fire on the Chinese troops on both sides at the same time, and the unknown Chinese troops took each other for enemy troops and began to shoot at each other.
On 19 May, an unexpected incident threw the tide of battle even more into chaos, when Brigadier Merrill suffered another heart attack, replacing him with Stilwell's chief of staff, Brigadier General Burtner. It was this arrogant brother who, in the early days of the Battle of the Hukang River Valley, was stubborn and self-serving, causing the 112th Regiment of the New 38th Division to fall into the siege of the superior Japanese army. And his performance next proved that he was a hopeless battlefield commander.
To add insult to injury, out of pride and conceit, Stilwell rejected the British's offer of assistance – the British offered to send the Anglo-Indian 36th Division to fight together, but they refused – because Stilwell did not want to owe the British, whom he looked down upon, believing that the capture of Myitkyis was the Americans' business.
At that time, there were very few American troops left at Myitkyina airport, and the long hours of fighting and injuries left the "raiders" with only a pitiful few hundred, and 80 percent of the remaining American GIs were infected with dysentery, and some of the patients were so badly ill that they had to cut off part of their trousers and replace them with large open crotch trousers to facilitate their release at any time.
Every day, 75-100 "raider" patients are airlifted away. Every day, 15-30 people develop symptoms after contracting the deadly typhus. But Stilwell didn't want to hear the reasons for the tiredness of the "raiders," and he believed that the only reason these American GIs were not good at fighting was that they were lazy, complaining too much, and "cowardly."
He asked the doctors to drive the seriously ill patients from the hospital back to the front line, unless he had a high fever of more than 39°C for three consecutive days, and with the consent of all the doctors. The U.S. 2nd Battalion was so tired that they fainted while fighting on the front line, and their battalion commander fainted three times in quick succession - by the end of May, only 12 men left in the 2nd Battalion could still fight. Only about 200 of the original 3,000 "raiders" can still fight.
"Merrill's Marauders" waiting to retreat
Taking advantage of the fact that the Sino-American coalition forces did not completely encircle the city, the Japanese army transferred a large number of reinforcements from the direction of Bamo, and reinforced them before the encirclement was formed, and the number of Japanese guards in Myitkyina increased to 3,500 men within a week.
On 19 May, the increasingly frustrated 150th Regiment launched another attack on the outlying positions of the Japanese army, and the Japanese army engaged in a fierce confrontation with the Chinese army with its strong fortifications, and the city of Myitkyina was less than 4 kilometers from the airport, from which you could see the straight streets of the walled city and the white-roofed houses scattered under the trees.
Shells from both sides exploded in the woods, and Chinese soldiers cautiously jumped from one tree to another with their submachine guns in hand, and bullets fired from the low Japanese pillboxes occasionally hit an unfortunate soldier. The offensive formation could no longer be maintained, and the 3rd Battalion of the 150th Regiment had been stretched out into a linear formation, outflanking from the west, and after fierce hand-to-hand combat, the 150th Regiment finally captured the railway station in the center of the city.
The good times did not last long, and it didn't take long for the dense Japanese artillery shells to fall around the station, and the American liaison officers who followed the attack in the confusion did not know where to go, and the military radio station was also ineffective because of water or bullets, and the 150th Regiment was now unable to contact the command or call for aircraft and rear artillery support, and when these officers and men ran out of ammunition, they had to retreat back to the airfield.
Taking advantage of the situation, the Japanese army took advantage of the counterattack and grabbed all the lost forward positions.
The American officers at the airport panicked and hurriedly arranged transport planes to rush over the 42nd Regiment of the 14th Division of the Chinese Army in the rear.
War correspondents hiding under a wrecked transport plane.
At this time, it was already the rainy season, and the heavy rain every night turned the battlefield into a swamp, and the Chinese officers and soldiers could only put their parachutes on tree branches at night, dig a circle of useless drainage ditches in the sleeping places, wrap themselves in military blankets and barely rest, and when they got up the next morning, everyone had their equipment as if they had soaked in the river for a few minutes before scooping it up.
The dense clouds in the sky during the rainy season make the tactical air support that the US Army Air Force is proud of unable to be dispatched frequently, and the heavy artillery of the Chinese army has not yet been delivered, and they only have 75mm light howitzers in their hands, although the ammunition is more than that of the Japanese army, but it is still far from enough to be used for urban fortification.
The battle on the outskirts of Myitkyina seemed to have returned to the days of World War I, with both sides occupying fixed positions, both lacking heavy artillery, and similarly, neither Chinese nor Japanese armies had armoured units. The raid finally turned into a war of attrition.
The long battle of the rainy season
An expeditionary soldier eating, he uses captured Japanese flags as aprons and mouth wipes.
The captured Myitkyina airfield was turned into an offensive base, where Chinese troops assembled, restocked, rested, and then set foot on the battlefield a few kilometers away, where planes took off and landed every day, bringing in supplies and reinforcements, and transporting the wounded to the rear – this was not easy to do in June during the rainy season, when the rain curtain made the visibility over the airport almost zero, but the transport planes still managed to bring soldiers and supplies to Myitkyina, and in the words of an American officer on the front, they seemed to be " With his sense of smell, he found his way to the battlefield".
Stilwell was in a hurry, but because of the mistakes of the American intelligence services, they seriously underestimated the number of Japanese defenders, and as a result, despite the new regimental reinforcements, the Chinese army was unable to defeat the enemy who had consolidated its defense.
On May 25, the 88th and 89th regiments of the new 30th Division continued to attack the Japanese outlying positions under the cover of artillery fire for a day, and only barely advanced the battle line by 300 meters; On the 28th, the 88th Regiment, supported by two US battalions, attacked the airfield in the northern suburbs, which was also slow. The battle at Myitkyina was a tug-of-war.
The Chinese army and the remaining American forces formed an arc along the 15-kilometer frontal front, with the Irrawaddy River and the combined forces of China and the United States surrounding the Japanese defenders in the middle, and the Chinese army, which had the advantage in numbers and supplies, made an all-out attack on the front, initially in small villages and hills 5 kilometers from the city, and even by the terrible standards of the Burmese battlefield, the siege of Myitkyina was one of the bloodiest and most brutal battles.
Soldiers on both sides, who were generally no more than 40 meters away from heavy rain and woods, often faced the enemy by the time they spotted it, and as in the islands of the Pacific, the Japanese were engaged in desperate suicidal combat, with their snipers and side-firing points tightly hidden in the jungle inflicting heavy casualties on the attacking Chinese troops.
A transport plane takes off from the side of the wrecked plane.
All Allied troops in Myitkyina, whether Chinese, Americans, or a handful of Indian soldiers, had a red cloth sewn on their left shoulder, without which they risked being shot as enemy soldiers. The first thing that all the officers and soldiers who had just arrived did was to go and get a piece of red cloth first.
At night, small units of the Japanese army would infiltrate the defense line from the woods and shoot indiscriminately at tents and other targets in the airfield, and the sound of rain would cover their movements. It is no wonder that the defense line of the Chinese army is less than 1,000 meters deep, and at such a small distance, it is crammed with front-line troops and reserves, headquarters and rear organs. As for the supply line, it floats in the sky, and the devil can't reach it.
After the tug-of-war on the outlying positions, the freed Japanese defenders bombarded the airfield with mortars every day, which was the deadliest attack, under the shelling of the Japanese army, the transportation of the airfield was often interrupted, and every time the plane took off and landed it was like gambling, as a result, the number of supplies plummeted, and at worst, only one day's supplies remained.
The situation in the field hospital was just as bad as it was at the front, it was a bamboo shed with a few tarpaulins, but it was equipped with all kinds of surgical equipment and operating tables. The wounded soldiers were sent over in a steady stream on stretchers, and many of them could only be placed on the muddy ground outside, and more often there were puddles of water, which could be submerged to the calves...
Field ambulance point on the edge of the airfield.
At the height of the crisis in early June, it seemed as if the Japanese were about to retake the airfield - it was entirely possible for the Japanese to sweep the airfield with a suicidal charge from the Admiral Mizumi's troops.
Stilwell summoned General Hu Su and General Pan Yukun, who commanded the 30th and 50th Divisions, and told them that "under no circumstances should they take a step back." In this situation, to lose the secret branch is to fall short.
The "raiders" who were still being held on the battlefield by Stilwell were left with only one framework, and according to the contract, they were supposed to leave the battlefield after capturing Myitkyina airfield. But as Allied commander, Stilwell felt that he could not withdraw the Americans, leaving only the Chinese and British to continue fighting.
Stilwell, who had no American troops at hand, had no choice but to send two road-building engineer battalions to the front, although these people were nominally called "combat engineers", but these road construction workers in military uniforms did not even touch their guns after walking out of the new barracks, and everyone can imagine their performance on the battlefield and casualties.
The good news is that a force of 2,600 American volunteers, many of whom are stationed in the Panama Canal and familiar with the jungle environment, have arrived in India, eager to get away from the tedium of guarding the canal. These former truck drivers, military police, and gunners were hastily transported from Mumbai to Ramgarh, where they were airlifted to Myitkyina after a week of so-so training, where they were mixed into the "Galahad" ("marauders") forces – and they were transported into a terrible world of torrential rain and mud.
The bad news, however, was that a large number of recruits were hopeless, with at least 50 doctors judging as irreparably anti-social, and others "in many cases terrified of the Japanese." Many of the "soldiers" of the four battalions had not used any weapons since they left the boot camp, and many of them had only learned how to load their rifles and aim and shoot them for the first time on planes flying to Myitkyina. Most had not met each other or their superior officers three days before their departure from the United States.
The fact that these four battalions were thrown into the hard battles of the rainy season was a complete disaster: some of the engineer units scattered under enemy fire, leaving their wounded behind. On one occasion, Japanese soldiers dressed in Chinese uniforms waved to a company of replenished American infantry, and the rookies foolishly approached the Japanese and were knocked down by Japanese machine guns.
In order to escape the battlefield, some soldiers deliberately stopped taking their medication so that they could contract malaria; A couple of guys shot themselves and broke their toes.
Battlefield surgery
The offensive can only count on the Chinese army. In the pouring rain for several days, the officers and soldiers of the Chinese army stationed in India were covered in mud and water, stumbling in the muddy jungle and continuing to attack, 20 meters, 30 meters, this is the daily advance distance, the Chinese troops who lacked heavy firepower and tank support suffered heavy casualties, even if the 42nd Regiment of the 14th Division joined the battle in early June, the Japanese strong fortress was still difficult to break through.
The Japanese reinforcements were working day and night in the heavy rain, and the commander of the 33rd Army, Honda Masasai, had already ordered the 53rd Division to advance to Myitkyina, and Major General Minakami Genzo of the 56th Division had already led his men into the city and took over the post of commander-in-chief of operations. The Japanese army was strongly supported by 4 mountain guns, 2 field guns and nearly 2,000 men.
The US transport plane unit has intensified its efforts to transport artillery and supplies to the airfield, and the officers and men at the front are also trying to compress the Japanese positions, but they have to pay heavy casualties for every few tens of meters advanced -- by 9 June, the casualties of the Chinese officers and men on the Myitkyina battlefield had reached as many as 1,867, and this was still under the condition that firepower, numbers, supplies, and air power were all superior.
In desperation, Chinese officers and soldiers began to work in tunnels in muddy water, trying to use these tunnels to counteract the threat of Japanese concealed fortifications and uproot Japanese strongholds, but the progress of this was very slow.
As if he felt that Stilwell's pressure was not enough, he had to fly to Chongqing in early June to meet with Commander-in-Chief Chiang. As the Japanese launched a campaign to open up the lines of communication on the mainland, the situation on the Chinese battlefield began to deteriorate dramatically, and Chiang Kai-shek began to chant Chennault's absurd suggestion that the air force could win for him and defend the air bases, and demanded that the Fourteenth Air Force be given more planes, supplies, and fuel—as if Stilwell had these things in his hands.
After two days in Chongqing, Stilwell had to rush back to Myanmar to face the endless "troubles, troubles, troubles" again...
American soldiers guarding supplies at the airport.
Note 1: According to Dong Sixun, commander of the engineer company of the 198th Division of the 54th Army, which transported troops across the river from Menggu Ferry at that time, recalled:
At that time, the engineer company pulled a steel cable on the river in advance, Deng Chao's squad crossed the river by boat from the steel cable, the boat line gradually sloped down under the impetus of the current, and was about to pass under the steel cable, Deng Chao was worried that the steel cable would be scraped by the soldiers if it hung too low, so he got up and pushed a hand, but because the river flow was too fast, the boat quickly swept over the steel cable, and Deng Chao grabbed the steel cable and hung it on the river. After that, the platoon commander sent several empty boats to rescue him, but as soon as the boat arrived there, it flashed, and finally Deng Chao fell to the river due to physical exhaustion, and was swept away by the rapids in an instant.
Note 2: It was not until 1969 that this mystery was unraveled in the official journal of the War History compiled by the Defense Research Institute of the Japanese Defense Agency: in mid-February 1944, a Chinese military plane was lost due to dense fog and made a forced landing in Tengchong. At that time, a Chinese major officer was captured, and a new code book and the staffing table of the Chinese Expeditionary Force were seized.
According to the history of the Japanese army, "after that, it was quite easy to decipher the code, and it was also very helpful for combat guidance." The scope of reporting has reached as far as Kunming and Chongqing".
Note 3: This is the commander of the three infantry wings in the division of the Japanese army's three-unit system, with the rank of major general, equivalent to the rank of brigade commander.
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