Burma (Japanese)

Japanese-occupied Burma lasted from the invasion of early 1942 to the British reconquest in 1945. Japan's objectives were the Burma Road, which carried supplies to Nationalist China, and the rice and oil of the Irrawaddy. The campaign drove British and Chinese forces out in months, in the longest retreat in British military history. Japan arrived with Burmese allies. The Thirty Comrades, including Aung San, had been trained in Japan and returned with the invading army as the Burma Independence Army. A nominally independent State of Burma was proclaimed in August 1943 under Ba Maw, with a treaty of alliance and no real authority. The reality was occupation. The Burma Railway to Thailand was built with forced labour: some sixty thousand Allied prisoners and perhaps two hundred thousand Asian labourers, of whom around ninety thousand died. Rice exports collapsed and the economy with them. The Kempeitai policed dissent. Disillusion among the Burmese leadership was rapid, and in March 1945 Aung San turned his army against the Japanese and joined the Allied advance. The reconquest was fought through 1944 and 1945 at Imphal, Kohima and down the Irrawaddy, and Japanese losses in Burma exceeded a hundred and forty thousand. The occupation lasted barely three years and settled Burma's future: it destroyed British prestige, armed and organised the nationalists, and made a return to the pre-war colony impossible. Ba Maw had been the first premier under the British constitution before leading the Japanese-sponsored state. The Chindits and Merrill's Marauders fought long-range penetration campaigns behind Japanese lines. Kohima was fought across a district commissioner's tennis court. Japan's defeat in Burma was its largest land defeat of the war.

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