CHAPTER 8
CHINA-BURMA-INDIA THEATER (1937–1945)
BRITISH BASE AREA
LALAGHAT, INDIA
JUNE 1943
The decision to dissolve Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group and reconstitute it as a regular U.S. Army Air Corps unit wasn’t the result of petty jealousies or a “power grab” by the 14th Air Force, as some claimed at the time. Rather, it was the consequence of a major reorganization in the Allied war effort that British prime minister Winston Churchill had been advocating since shortly after Pearl Harbor.
With England struggling against Hitler in Europe and Africa, the warlords in Tokyo decided that the time was right to “liberate the Asian people” in Burma. Churchill had initially believed that Britain could defend her empire alone, but he soon realized that American help would be essential if the crown were to hold on to its most prized possession in the Far East: India.
By April 1942, the U.S.-British Joint General Staff had hammered out a compromise command arrangement for what they called the China-Burma-India theater. The British would have overall command and the mantle was given to Field Marshal Harold Alexander. General William Slim was the British ground forces commander, and his American counterpart, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek’s senior American advisor, was designated the chief U.S. officer in the region. Even though Stilwell had his headquarters with Chiang Kai-shek in China, both British and U.S. combat forces were intended to operate independently, relying on the combined staff in India for coordination and support.
Though the command-and-control arrangement was less than ideal, it was far from the greatest challenge the new CBI commanders faced. They were all aware that Churchill and Roosevelt had decided that the European campaign was to have first priority for all ships, planes, tanks, troops, and war-fighting matériel. Stilwell also knew that MacArthur, smarting in Australia and anxious to avenge his humiliating withdrawal from the Philippines, would receive the second-highest allocation of those scarce resources. These realities meant that a constant shortage of men and matériel would characterize the entire Allied campaign in the CBI theater.
The new command measures had little effect on the Imperial Army’s relentless advance into Burma. The Japanese 15th Army, commanded by General Shojiro Iida, had four well-supplied, combat-hardened divisions, the 18th, 33rd, 55th, and 56th, supported by more than 400 aircraft. The demoralized British colonial troops and the two understrength Chinese divisions led by Stilwell lacked almost everything and had virtually no air support other than Chennault’s AVG.
General Joseph Stilwell
By 21 April, as the Japanese were preparing for their final offensive in the Philippines, the outnumbered and outgunned British forces in Burma were in full retreat, hacking their way 600 miles through mountainous jungle back into India. Stilwell’s Chinese troops commenced a retreat of their own, fighting their way back into China, arriving emaciated and exhausted after more than a month in the jungle.
By mid-May 1942, the Japanese held all of Burma, were on the attack against Chiang in China, and were threatening India. From this point onward, the Allies’ shortages of conventional combat forces and extraordinary logistics challenges would dictate their strategy and tactics in the region. Their paucity of combat power made it necessary for both the British and the Americans to employ highly irregular warfare techniques and made the CBI theater the venue for some of the most spectacular unconventional operations of World War II.
By their very nature, unconventional operations require leaders with imagination who can “think outside the box” and motivate those they lead to undertake daring action deep in enemy territory against numerically superior adversaries. The British had such a man in Major General Orde C. Wingate. For the Americans it was Major Frank Merrill on the ground and Claire Chennault in the air. The forces that these three men commanded were outnumbered 700 to 1 by the Japanese. Yet between spring 1942 and late 1944, these three leaders and the men they commanded succeeded in inflicting enough damage on the Japanese 15th Army in Burma that it were unable to exploit its initial advantage and launch successful offensives against India to the west or northward against Chiang.
Major General Orde C. Wingate was a maverick in every sense of the word. He had been serving in Palestine when the War Office assigned him to the British campaign to liberate Ethiopia from Mussolini’s Italian Occupation Army in early 1941. Wingate organized a unit of irregulars mounted on horses and camels that he called the Gideon Force. Though his troops made only a modest contribution to the success of the five-month fight, on 5 May Wingate was accorded the honor of riding beside Haile Selassie, the “Lion of Judah,” when the Ethiopian emperor made his triumphal entry into Addis Ababa.
The positive press coverage of Wingate’s Ethiopian escapade convinced Churchill’s senior officers to overlook the man’s considerable eccentricities and grant his wish to try his Long-Range Penetration (LRP) concepts against the Japanese in Burma. As soon as he arrived in India, Wingate set about recruiting a force of more than 2,500 Burmese and Indian troops led by British officers and NCOs to start operating deep inside Burma. He called them Chindits—and worked them mercilessly, marching them up and down the mountains and teaching them to fight in the jungle and live off the land with minimal supplies.
Major General Orde Wingate led Britain’s Special Forces in Burma.
By February 1943, Wingate believed his men were ready. British HQ gave the green light for 2,800 Chindits to launch an LRP attack into the trackless mountains along the Indo–Burmese border frontier. In a break with traditional warfare doctrine, Wingate sent RAF officers with each of his units to help maintain contact with British aircraft that would parachute supplies to his troops.
For four months, the Chindits, operating hundreds of miles deep inside Burma, cut Japanese communications and supply lines, destroyed railroads, and thoroughly disrupted General Iida’s plans for an attack into India. By the end of April, with the weather deteriorating and his outnumbered, exhausted men suffering from malaria and prolonged exposure in the mountainous jungle, Wingate decided to break contact and hastily withdraw to India before they were surrounded by the Japanese. Though they were closely pursued by the Imperial 15th Army, the withdrawal of the Chindits proceeded in relatively good order, unlike the British rout less than a year before.
When Wingate’s men arrived back in India in June 1943, the LRP operation was deemed to have been a great success—though it had come at the cost of more than 800 British and colonial soldiers killed or missing. But during the course of their hurried withdrawal, Wingate had been compelled to make some agonizing decisions. Lacking any means of evacuating his wounded, he had no choice but to leave them behind rather than slow his entire column and put them all at risk of death or capture.
On several occasions, rather than sacrifice 2,000 still able-bodied men, Wingate gave the sick and wounded extra ammunition, some grenades, water, and a Bible—and left them beside the trail as the others marched away. Often, before the departing troops were out of earshot, they heard the explosions or gunshots from the place where they had left wounded comrades who had chosen not to wait for the Japanese troops to arrive and use them for bayonet practice. Distraught over the inability to evacuate his casualties, Wingate spent the balance of 1943 training replacements, refitting and repairing his battered LRP force, and trying to solve the demoralizing medical evacuation problem.
Wingate wasn’t the only one using the interval to rebuild in India. Stilwell was also utilizing bases along the Indian plain to train Chinese troops. U.S. Army engineers were busy trying to reopen the Burma Road so that Chiang’s forces would no longer have to rely solely on American pilots flying over the Himalayas for resupply. By the winter of 1943–44, with Admiral Louis Mountbatten now in command of the Allied effort in the CBI theater, the British in India and the Americans in China were finally preparing to go on the offensive.
Unfortunately, so were the Japanese. Having consolidated its positions and established puppet regimes in Indochina, Malaya, and the Philippines, Tokyo ordered the commander in Burma, General Renya Mutaguchi, to launch a fresh offensive against India.
The Japanese set a start date of 17 April 1944 for the campaign, code-named Operation Ichi-Go, to commence. British code-breakers intercepted the message, and Mountbatten decided to disrupt Mutaguchi’s plans by sending two LRP columns into Burma. Wingate’s Chindits were to enter from the west and Merrill’s Marauders from the north. For the first time in the CBI theater, gliders and paratroopers would be used to insert forces deep behind enemy lines and Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers—now part of the 14th Air Force and equipped with more than 300 bombers, transports, and fighters—would support the British with “air commando” operations.
The daring plan, approved by Admiral Mountbatten, also solved Wingate’s dilemma of how to evacuate the sick and wounded from deep behind enemy lines. American “air commandos” would bring in equipment to cut landing strips in the jungle from which light aircraft could operate and fly out casualties to hospitals in China or India.
Such cooperation was relatively rare in the CBI theater. It was no secret that Chiang Kai-shek and the acerbic “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell all but hated each other. Nor did Stilwell make any pretense of getting along with Chennault. Nonetheless, after being pressured by General Hap Arnold in Washington, he gave his grudging approval to Mountbatten’s plan. The concept of using gliders and light aircraft to support LRP operations was the brainchild of two brilliant young aviators, Lieutenant Colonels Phil Cochran and John Alison. Because heavy transport aircraft would never be able to take off from the rough-cut airstrips carved out of the jungle, Cochran and Alison proposed using American-built CG-4A Waco gliders to ferry men and matériel behind enemy lines. Thousands of the CG-4A gliders were being built for use in World War II. Designed for a one-way trip into combat, the plywood and fabric craft were inexpensive to construct, could be towed to the vicinity of their landing sites by conventional transports, and required only a clearing in which to land. But they also needed incredibly daring pilots and crews to fly missions in them.
The Waco CG-4A glider
Cochran and Alison also convinced Hap Arnold that the air commandos would need an allocation of tiny, single-engine, Stinson L-5 aircraft to use as air ambulances. They had run some tests and confirmed that the little planes could carry one ambulatory patient and one litter patient from the bare-bones landing strips built by the air commandos.
General Arnold approved the Cochran-Alison air support plan and convinced Stilwell to go along with it. Alison recalled Arnold’s admiration for Wingate: “This man walks into Burma, and it takes him six weeks to get into position to where he can really hurt the Japanese. When he gets there, his men are tired, many of them have malaria, and a lot of them are sick. Some of them are wounded—some killed.” The plan Wingate’s subordinates had developed would move the irregular troops into place in just a few hours by air. Arnold then told the two young officers, “I don’t want them to walk. I’m going to give you everything you need to do it. Now... which one of you is gonna go?”
After briefly thinking about it, Arnold dispatched both Alison and Cochran as “co-commanders” to India to oversee the delivery of equipment, the assembly of the Waco gliders, and the training of the 523 American pilots and aircrews who volunteered to join the 1st Air Commandos. The two men were uniquely suited to the task.
Alison had already proven himself a skilled pilot, a gifted flight instructor, and a resourceful staff officer. He was already an ace, having shot down more than five enemy aircraft while flying with British and Russian pilots that he’d helped train.
Alison’s close friend Lt. Colonel Phil Cochran was the epitome of the suave and daring fighter pilot. Milton Caniff, creator of the Terry and the Pirates comic strip, fashioned Terry’s flight instructor after Cochran. He wasn’t just a great fighter pilot; he was also a charismatic leader who instilled confidence in the men he led.
Charles Turner served with Alison and Cochran as one of the Waco glider pilots in the 1st Air Commandos. Sergeant Raymond Bluthardt was an Army engineer who helped cut airstrips and build roads deep inside Burma during Operation Thursday—the largest unconventional warfare campaign in the CBI theater.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN ALISON, USAAF
Forward HQ 1st Air Commandos
Allied Expeditionary Air Base
250 Miles Inside Japanese-Controlled Burma
5 March 1944
Phil Cochran and I started out as co-commanders, but after about a month, it was so confusing I said, “Look, Phil, let’s just go back and be regular soldiers. You’re the ranking officer; I’m your deputy, let’s get this job done.” So then we considered what tools were available. We had the option of using either gliders or paratroopers. We used paratroopers as pathfinders to mark landing sites, but needed a way to take in an airborne engineer company, scrapers, and carry-alls. So we decided that we should use gliders, to get the troops and heavier equipment in so they could then make airfields for transports that could deliver the rest of the troops and their equipment. General Arnold gave us thirty P-51s, fifteen B-25s, thirty C-47s, a hundred L-5s to use as ambulance planes, and almost a hundred cargo gliders.
C-47 towing two Waco gliders
Somebody suggested that we try snatching the glider’s tether with a moving C-47. American Aviation of Wilmington, Delaware, had developed the technique for picking up mail sacks in the West Virginia mountains. They had devised a level-winding reel that had an automatic brake and you could adjust the tension. At the end of this line we put a loop of nylon rope that had a catch just like a big fishhook.
We decided to try it and set up poles to hold the glider’s tether up off the ground. The C-47 would skim overhead trailing its hook, grab the tether, and snatch that glider right off the ground. For anyone sitting in the glider, it was quite an experience. The C-47 pilot would open the throttles, the winding reel would play out, and gradually the tension would tighten and the glider is off like it was shot off a catapult!
The night we went in, 250 miles behind the lines, we couldn’t use one of the two landing sites, so all the gliders had to land at the same zone. Because we had twice as many gliders landing as we’d planned for, some of the gliders on the second wave crashed into gliders from the first wave that were still on the zone. We had a number of dead and injured—we didn’t know the exact count then, but in the dark things looked bad.
I was lucky; my glider didn’t hit a log or a ditch or anything. We had eight assault gliders [in our unit], and I think that my glider was the fourth to hit the field. The men got out, and started to fan across the landing area to see if there was any enemy opposition. Thank God there wasn’t. Anyway, we got all our people in.
The next morning we got up and looked out at all the wrecked gliders and learned that our commander and some airborne engineers had been killed in the landing.
Well, that didn’t stop these soldiers. In about twelve hours we had cleared a runway. We had lights, we had a generator. We set up a control tower on top of one of the wrecked gliders.
By radio Phil Cochran asked, “When can you take your first airplanes?”
I said, “Just as soon as it gets dark. But send them in one at a time, slowly at first.” I looked up just at dark, and here are five or six airplanes. We got ’em in, and we got ’em out—about 500 men and I don’t even know how many mules—that first night. The next morning, they were on their way through the jungle to fight the Japanese.
LIEUTENANT CHARLES TURNER, US ARMY
GLIDER PILOT
Expeditionary Air Base
250 Miles Inside Japanese-Controlled Burma
5 March 1944
In the glider program they sent us through, we were flying Piper Cubs. We were trained to kill the engine and make dead-stick landings. They taught us to do that in both daylight and night. And we did that for hours on end. And then they moved us into the big transport gliders.
These cargo gliders that we trained on in India had an eighty-three-foot wingspread, carried fifteen to seventeen troops, and weighed approximately 3,600 pounds. Our payload was about the same. At that weight they flew well but the landing speed was fast, around seventy to seventy-five miles an hour or more.
They were stunning to sit in and to think you were expected to fly’em. But after a few takeoffs and landings, and a few flights, they flew very well. It was easy to control, and was not a tricky airplane to fly at all. The tricky part of it was your judgment, in anticipating your altitude and your airspeed to the point of the landing. You have to arrive at the proper altitude and the proper speed at the proper point, every time, or you’re a casualty. A glider pilot has only his decision-making process. I think the idea that a glider was named the “flying coffin” emanated from the fact that there were numerous accidents, early on.
We had to assemble all of our gliders, a hundred of them, in India. And all the pilots pitched in, along with the mechanics, to put those gliders together.
Operation Thursday relied on the gliders to penetrate behind enemy lines and put the men and matériel into position. They dropped the pathfinders in by parachute. But they wouldn’t have equipment to build a landing strip capable of taking transports by hand. That would have been impossible. With the gliders we were able to bring in jeeps, mules, horses, anti-tank guns, bulldozers, tractors, and scrapers. And with that equipment we built a strip on which we could land eighty or ninety C-47s a night. Now, paratroopers couldn’t have done that in months—if ever. So the gliders were the only way to get men and matériel in to the right spot, at the same time, in reasonable safety with minimal losses. They calculated that our losses might be as high as 40 percent. Thankfully, they were not nearly that high.
Twenty-four hours before the mission was launched, we were called into a meeting and given photographs of the landing sites, and told where they were, and the tow plane pilots were briefed. The gliders were all ready, the towropes—or tethers as they were called—were laid out. We stood by for the troops to be loaded. We were going into Burma.
They used a double tow to enable one airplane to tow two gliders and get twice the load to the target. It was very difficult on the airplane and on the glider pilots. At night it was particularly hard because we glider pilots couldn’t see each other, the tow plane, or the towrope.
The tow plane flew over at about twenty to thirty feet off the ground and snatched the glider off the ground. The glider ran about 150 to 200 feet, max, on the ground before it was airborne. The reel on the tow plane would pay out the cable like a fishing reel, so that the G-force would not break the cable. For those of us in the glider it was like being shot out of a cannon. We went from zero to 120 miles per hour, in about 200 feet.
The visibility at night is bad. It’s not like landing at an airport. We were totally at the mercy of what’s in front of us. There could be enemy troops all around the landing field. Anything can happen, and most everything that can happen is bad.
The landing was normal, for a glider overloaded 20 or 30 percent. I estimate that my landing speed was somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety miles an hour. And when landing a glider, in order to stop it fast, we put the nose over on the ground by pushing the stick forward. Then, if there’s uneven ground, the nose breaks and dirt comes boiling into the cockpit with you. We landed fast and hard. I ran the length of the field, and I was next-to-the-last glider in. I put my glider in between two gliders that landed ahead of me. The last glider came over me, very fast; he had cut loose way too late and he made a 180-degree turn. His wing caught a big tree and he went straight into the ground with the equipment, the engineers, and the bulldozer. It killed them instantly.
We knew the danger that was there. But I think most glider pilots would agree that while glider flying was dangerous, in the total analysis, it was worthwhile.
SERGEANT RAYMOND BLUTHARDT, US ARMY
Expeditionary Air Base
250 Miles Inside Japanese-Controlled Burma
5 March 1944
I was drafted into the Army and reported to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. That was the induction center. Then I was assigned to the 1877th Airborne Engineers, Company C, at Westover Field in Massachusetts. They said we were going to be an airborne unit. I asked, “What’s an airborne unit?”
It was cold when we got to Massachusetts, and when they issued our gear they gave us parachutes. We hung them over the foot of our beds and every one of us, for three months, had to take it down to the hangar, unfold it, hang it up, and dry it for three days. Then we would have to repack it. The funny thing is, after we got to India, we never saw another parachute.
After Massachusetts, they took us for more training in New Jersey, and from there we made a twenty-eight-day trip on the USS America, sailing first to Rio de Janeiro, where we stayed one night and took on supplies. Then we took off for Cape Town, South Africa.
Eventually we arrived at Lalaghat, India, a British air base not far from the border with Burma. It was a grass-field landing strip. They put us on the backside of this base, and that’s where we learned how to make runways. When we finished that training, they picked Company C of the 1877th and made us the 900th Expeditionary Engineers and told us we would be involved in some special project and that we would be over there probably a year. We were there for three years.
After a while, they brought in a whole bunch of Waco gliders—and lined them up, two gliders behind each C-47. Inside some gliders were Clark bulldozers. They had six-inch tracks and thirty-seven-inch blades, and were gasoline-operated. The only men on my glider were the pilot, copilot Paul Johnson, a bulldozer, and me.
About an hour out, the window on my side just blew out and it got pretty cold. We didn’t realize until we got over the Himalayas that the Japanese had control of that area. You could see their campfires all along the way. And every once in a while we could see a tracer bullet go past. But we never got hit.
Then the C-47 pilot cut us loose. We circled the landing site a few times and then came down. My CO was killed there. His glider didn’t make it past the trees. He, the pilot, and seventeen British troops were on that glider, and all were killed. When my glider came in, we hit the grass and the wheels washed out from under us. We slid toward the jungle and dove right into it.
There were two big trees there and the fuselage of our glider went right between them. Our wings stopped us, and the ropes on the bulldozer broke and it ripped the front of the glider open. The pilot and I ended up upside down but we were okay.
Since we were there to get a runway built, we just got to work on that grassy, bumpy field. We had started out with four bulldozers, three graders, two carry-alls, scrapers, and two jeeps. All we had were the two jeeps, one Clark bulldozer, one carry-all trailer, and a scraper to skim that grass off, level the field, and push it out of the way. There was buffalo grass out in the middle of it, probably six or eight inches deep.
We used air-driven chain saws to cut down the trees at one end of the runway for a better approach. Then we cleared the dead timber and took our little Clark bulldozer, picked up the dirt in the carry-all, and dragged it behind the tractor to take the debris away. Then we had the men tramp the dirt down good and tight so it wouldn’t be a problem for the transports when they landed and took off.
It wasn’t too difficult, except where crashed gliders had to be pushed off the runway and into the jungle. That was about the worst. It took a lot of time for our equipment to get that stuff out of there. And we had just one day, working as soon as daylight broke till dusk, before the first plane came in. Everything worked fine, even though there were just a few of us to get the runway done.
We just had that one day but we had trained for it. And when you’ve got a bunch of guys who know what to do, you just do it. It’s something we had to do and we did it.
I wouldn’t take a million dollars for the experience, and I wouldn’t give ten cents to go through it again.
ALLIED AIR BASE
1ST AIR COMMANDOS
LALAGHAT, INDIA
5 AUGUST 1944
By nightfall on 6 March 1944, at the end of just twenty-four hours on the ground, the 1st Air Commandos had succeeded in establishing an advanced air base deep inside enemy-held territory in the Burmese highlands. Back in India, at Hailakand, they had fighter planes and ambulance aircraft standing by. Ten miles away, at Lalaghat, were the C-47s that had towed the sixty-three gliders—two at a time—into Burma. Both sets of aircraft were designated for direct support of Wingate’s troops on the ground in Japanese-held territory.
By penetrating 250 miles deep into Japanese-held territory in a matter of hours, Wingate had achieved tactical surprise. Though the high-risk venture had resulted in fifty-seven casualties, the transports that then landed at Broadway—and other Expeditionary airfields like Blackpool and Aberdeen—made it possible to insert nearly 9,000 men and a remarkable amount of matériel deep behind enemy lines. Those who arrived by glider that first night survived what amounted to a crash landing, and yet, the men of the 1st Air Commandos were still able to construct the first of several airstrips, which would serve as logistics bases and medical evacuation sites for Chindit casualties.
Though the overall effort was successful, not everything went according to plan. Wingate had wanted to build two airstrips that he had dubbed Broadway and Picadilly. But on 4 March, the day before the operation was to commence, reconnaissance photos of the proposed landing sites showed that the enemy had strewn huge teak logs all across the field code-named Picadilly. The glider pilots were concerned that none of the gliders could make it in safely. After reviewing the options, it was decided at the last minute to abandon a landing at Picadilly.
There were no visible obstacles at the Broadway site, so all sixty-three gliders employed the night of 5 March were ordered to land there. This decision doubled the number of Wacos landing at Broadway and caused the problems that Alison and Turner experienced with gliders landing on top of one another. The result was that only thirty-seven of the sixty-three gliders attempting to land made it intact. Twenty-four men were killed and another thirty-three were injured, many seriously.
Despite the casualties, men, mules, and tiny bulldozers went to work. When darkness fell on 6 March, Broadway had a usable runway! Later that night, there were also lights, provided by a generator. The first C-47 transports—flying ammunition, anti-aircraft batteries, and security troops to protect the base from Japanese attack—landed without incident after dark. By dawn of the second day, more than 500 additional troops had been delivered and all the injured from the glider crashes had been evacuated.
Within the first week, C-47s were able to deliver aviation fuel in fifty-five-gallon drums to Broadway, and P-40 fighters soon followed. Positioning fighters forward in Burma permitted the P-40s to provide fighter escort for the B-25s launched out of India. The effect was almost instantaneous. With fighter cover from Broadway, B-25s could now go after the big Japanese airbase at Shwebo, which was immediately targeted. The first American raid on the base—by B-25s escorted by Broadway-based P-40s—caught the Japanese air force completely by surprise. Sixty enemy planes were destroyed on the ground. Another mission by Allied planes did even more damage to the Japanese air base two days later.
Wingate’s Chindits, supported by the 1st Air Commandos and Chennault’s Flying Tigers, were able to pursue a far more aggressive campaign in 1944 than they had a year earlier. With Broadway secured as a “rear” base, the Air Commandos and Chindits forged deeper into the Burmese jungle, hacking out additional airstrips as they advanced through the inhospitable terrain.
Wingate’s deep penetration operation was certainly not the decisive factor in the eventual defeat of Mutaguchi’s campaign to invade India—that credit surely goes to General William Slim and his 14th Army. They bore the brunt of the Japanese attack along the border and withstood Mutaguchi’s offensive against Imphal and Kohima, two of the biggest engagements in the CBI theater.
But it is also evident from postwar records of the Japanese 15th Army that Wingate’s LRP force, along with the proper air support, became just what the Allies had hoped it would be—a disruptive thorn in Mutaguchi’s side. Within two weeks they succeeded in cutting the Mandalay-to-Myitky-ina railroad—the main Japanese logistics route that the Imperial Army had built with POW slave labor.
Wingate was well aware that the railroad his irregulars had seized was one of several in Burma that the Japanese were constructing with slave labor provided by Allied prisoners of war. When he was planning the March 1944 Chindit operation into Burma, one of the missions he assigned his officers was to be prepared to use their LRP units to rescue any Allied prisoners within their zone of action. Unfortunately for men like Private Kyle Thompson, a Texas National Guardsman captured in the opening days of the war, Wingate’s Chindits never got close enough to rescue him or his long-suffering mates toiling and dying in the Burmese jungle building railroads for the Japanese military.
PRIVATE KYLE THOMPSON,
TEXAS NATIONAL GUARD
Japanese POW Work Camp Kilo 80, Burma
Autumn 1944
In October 1940, my National Guard unit in Wichita Falls, Texas, started training to go overseas. In November 1941, my battalion was sent to the West Coast and we sailed out of San Francisco the day after Thanksgiving. We went through Pearl Harbor on Sunday, a week before it was bombed on 7 December. We were supposed to go to the Philippines but got sent to Java instead, because Manila was already under attack.
After Singapore fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, we pretty well figured Java was next, because they were invading Borneo, Sumatra, Bali, and the other islands around us. During the night of 28 February and the early hours of 1 March they landed on Java with at least 50,000 very experienced, well-equipped, first-class soldiers. The Japanese army was a tremendous fighting force. It was their duty to fight to the death and it was against their principles to be captured.
We were badly outnumbered and had been retreating for several days when we dug in around a big bamboo grove. The next morning a Dutch officer drove up and talked to our commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Thorpe, and informed him that the Dutch government had surrendered to the Japanese, and that we were all prisoners of war. I don’t know, how do you describe something like that? We were stunned, frightened, and had no concept of what lay ahead.
We just disappeared when the Japanese captured Java. Back home they started referring to us as the Lost Battalion. Once the Dutch surrendered we had no way to communicate with anyone.
The Japanese came and loaded us on a train, and they started screaming, poking at us with bayonets and loaded rifles. It was something out of a nightmare. And it went downhill from there. The Japanese beat us and punished us excessively. I have no idea of the total number of times I was beaten by the Japanese guards—sometimes by rifle butt, sometimes with a bamboo pole. But maybe they were trying to toughen us up for what was coming.
In early March 1943, we got to our first work camp in Burma, at the end of a rail line. They made us start working from there, southeastward, through the Burma jungles.
We were taken out in work parties of 100 or 200 men. A few weeks later, 368 survivors of the USS Houston, an American cruiser that had been sunk off of the Java coast, joined us. The Japanese rounded up the sailors who made it to shore. When the Houston survivors joined us, it brought us to about 900 American POWs. All of us were put to work on building this railroad through the jungle.
We called it the Siam Death Railway. Now, where we were made to work, it was a 260-mile stretch of total jungle. There were no towns, villages, or people.
I was put to work on the crew that was preparing the rail bed. Our job was to make a railroad bed level by filling, digging, breaching streams, and carrying dirt and rock.
The only tools we had to build this railroad were picks and shovels, and bamboo baskets and poles for carrying dirt. There was no machinery, nothing like a bulldozer. We didn’t even have wheelbarrows.
They gave us each a quota of one cubic meter of dirt to be moved each day. Later, because we got behind schedule, they upped that to two cubic meters of dirt daily.
The Japanese needed this railroad because they were mired down in northern Burma fighting the British. The Japanese were in dire need of an overland route to bring up troops and supplies.
We heard about British troops out there in the jungle. And we kept hoping that they would come to get us.
We never had enough food; we were always just on the verge of starving to death. We had to work up to eighteen hours a day, in rain, in mud and muck, and after a few months, the tropical diseases began to take hold of us.
I had a huge ulcer on my right leg and the leg bone was exposed in two places. I was flat on my back for nearly six months. All of my friends thought I was going to die. I got sent back to Kilo 80 Camp, and was there about two or three months.
It was a miserable, miserable existence. I’d get up before daylight, have a little cup of rice for breakfast, march out to the work site under the Japanese guards, where I’d work all day long until dark. And then, if we hadn’t completed the task that the Japanese thought that we should have, we’d have to build bonfires so we could have light to work in the dark.
It was an excruciatingly hard, cruel work; it was slave labor. Death became more common than life, and for many of the guys who didn’t make it, death was more or less the route that they chose. It was easier to die than it was to live. But I had faith in my country and my God. I started out in a section crew of thirty-six guys. In less than a year, thirty-four of’em were dead.
It all ended on 16 August 1945, the day after Japan surrendered. They had just moved me again—this time from Tarakan to another railroad work camp. The Japanese camp commander ordered all prisoners to assemble in front of our compounds. He got up on a box and in broken English announced to us that the war was over, that Japan had surrendered.
AFTER ACTION REPORT
1ST AIR COMMANDOS
14 AUGUST 2004
It was tragic that Wingate’s Chindits were never assigned a specific rescue mission for POW slaves consigned to work on the Japanese military rail system in Burma. There were times when LRP units were fewer than twenty-five miles from some of the 60,000 enslaved Allied prisoners of war building that infamous 260-mile-long railroad. In addition to the American, British, and Dutch POWs, the Japanese also conscripted 200,000 young Burmese men to work on the rail line—making the ratio simple: 1,000 slaves for every mile of track. At the completion of this particular rail line, 16,000 Allied POWs and 100,000 civilians were dead. Four hundred and forty-six men died on every mile of the Imperial Army’s Railway of Death from every conceivable cause: malnutrition, overwork, disease, dehydration, torture, and in some cases, brutal execution.
Former POW Kyle Thompson survived, but he cannot forget. He says, “I was nineteen when we were captured, I had my twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third birthdays as a prisoner. So a pretty good part of my young life was sacrificed on the altar of the Japanese Imperial Army.
“After the war, many who survived being POW slave laborers of the Japanese asked for compensation from Japan because the Germans were paying reparations to their slave laborers. Our group included survivors from the Philippine Islands and the Bataan Death March and civilian internees, and we got together and filed lawsuits against the Japanese industries that used us as slave laborers without compensation during World War II. Interestingly enough, some of the big Japanese industries that exist today were involved in it. Yet our own government opposes this. The State Department, when the suit was heard in federal court, came out and sided with the Japanese. It’s disappointing.”