The Arakan and the Chindits

The Arakan offered the Allies the shortest land approach back into Burma, but the coast channelled operations between the Bay of Bengal, tidal creeks and the jungle-covered Mayu Range. The 14th Indian Division advanced from Cox's Bazar on 17 December 1942 and captured the Maungdaw–Buthidaung road within days. The advance then reached Japanese defences around Donbaik, where field works, narrow approaches and poor coordination turned repeated frontal attacks into costly failures. When Japanese reinforcements worked around the Mayu flank in April, formations already stretched along weak communications began to fall back.

The second Arakan offensive began under a different command system. XV Corps under Philip Christison used the 5th and 7th Indian Divisions on the Mayu front, and Fourteenth Army doctrine under William Slim required troops to remain in defended boxes when Japanese columns moved behind them. The Japanese Ha-Go attack in February 1944 isolated the 7th Indian Division and overran its headquarters, but the division regrouped around the administrative area at Sinzweya. Tanks, artillery and infantry held the perimeter while aircraft delivered food, ammunition and medical supplies.

The result altered the tactical assumptions of the Burma war. Japanese operations had repeatedly depended on cutting roads and forcing Allied units to abandon heavy weapons and stores. At the Admin Box the cut road no longer decided the battle because supplies arrived by air and the surrounded formations continued fighting. The Japanese 55th Division withdrew after losses it could not replace, while XV Corps resumed its advance. The same principle—forces operating beyond normal road supply and sustained from the air—also shaped the Chindit experiments farther north.

Orde Wingate organised the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade as columns able to move independently through jungle, carry wireless sets and call for supply drops. Operation Longcloth began from Imphal on 8 February 1943. The northern and southern groups crossed the Chindwin, cut roads and railway lines, demolished bridges and forced Japanese units to search a wide area for them. Air supply removed the need for a continuous road back to India, but navigation, sickness, animal transport and river crossings placed severe limits on how long the columns could remain effective.

The immediate material results were limited. The force damaged railway communications and showed that sizeable Allied units could remain behind Japanese lines, yet it suffered 818 killed, wounded or missing from roughly 3,000 men. Many survivors returned exhausted and sick. Wingate nevertheless gained political and military support for a much larger force, while British commanders drew practical lessons about wireless communication, air drops, jungle movement and casualty evacuation.

The strategic value of the Chindits remained disputed after the war. Their operations diverted Japanese troops and carried a strong morale effect after the defeats of 1942, but long-range penetration consumed transport aircraft, specialised training and fit infantry at a high human cost. The second expedition therefore matters both as an expansion of Wingate’s concept and as a test of how that concept changed once the columns were drawn into prolonged positional fighting.

By 1944 aircraft were carrying more than occasional emergency loads. At the Admin Box, RAF Dakotas dropped supplies into the defended area after the road through the Ngakyedauk Pass had been cut. Royal Armouries records that about 1,600 tons were delivered during the battle. The air bridge allowed the 7th Indian Division to keep its guns, vehicles and wounded inside the perimeter instead of abandoning them in a retreat.

Operation Thursday extended the same logic to insertion. On 5 March 1944 American C-47s towed Waco gliders from Lalaghat to a clearing codenamed Broadway. Thirty-five of the first 61 gliders reached the landing ground, where engineers cleared wrecks and prepared a runway for transport aircraft. Over the following nights men, mules, weapons and stores were flown into strongholds far behind Japanese lines. Light aircraft handled liaison and casualty evacuation while fighters and bombers supported the columns.

Air power did not remove the physical burden of jungle warfare. Once the Chindit brigades left the landing grounds they still depended on mule transport, man-carried weapons, radios and repeated supply drops. The strongholds made concentration possible, but the later battles at White City, Blackpool and Mogaung became increasingly conventional. A force designed to move around Japanese positions was progressively required to seize and hold ground.

The first Arakan campaign exposed weaknesses that had survived the retreat from Burma: inexperienced formations, difficult command arrangements, inadequate jungle preparation and attacks that concentrated against strongpoints without enough tactical flexibility. The failure was followed by changes in leadership and training. Slim’s later policy of holding isolated positions under air supply grew from the wider effort to stop treating Japanese infiltration as an automatic reason to retreat.

Longcloth imposed a different kind of cost. The Chindits lost 818 men killed, wounded or missing from an original force of about 3,000, and many others returned medically unfit. The operation proved some of Wingate’s logistical ideas, but the force did not destroy Japanese communications for long. Its strongest legacy lay in the experience gained and in the decision to create a much larger Special Force for 1944.

Operation Thursday began with spectacular air movement and ended with exhausted brigades fighting for fixed objectives. Wingate was killed in an aircraft crash on 24 March, and command arrangements changed while the Chindits were increasingly placed under Joseph Stilwell’s northern command. At Mogaung, Mike Calvert’s 77th Brigade took the town on 27 June after four weeks of fighting, but the National Army Museum records that about half the brigade had been killed or wounded. The capture was real; so was the question of whether a specialised long-range force should have been used in that kind of battle.

The first and second Arakan campaigns are documented in the British official history, unit histories and later studies such as Louis Allen’s Burma: The Longest War. These sources usually agree on the sequence of the main operations but may group casualty figures differently. The numerical record is therefore kept tied to the formation, battle or source that produced it.

Chindit operations generated an unusually rich paper trail because long-range columns depended on wireless traffic, air supply and detailed post-operation reporting. The National Archives preserves the 1943 operational map, while Chindit war diaries and veteran organisations reconstruct daily movements. Museum captions are especially useful for visual attribution because many official photographs identify the operation, formation and approximate date.

Photographs of jungle campaigns require restraint. A picture labelled “Burma 1944” may identify equipment or a formation but does not prove that it depicts a particular day at Donbaik, Broadway or Mogaung. The event timeline therefore leaves markers without media when the archive record does not support a tight date or location match.