British troops check out their location in the Burmese jungle.

100,000 strong Japanese army crossed the Chindwin River on an 80-mile front in central Burma. The Japanese goal was nothing less than the invasion of India where they hoped to find a population ready to rise up against their British rulers.

The speed of the advance surprised the British. They retreated in some disorder into the Indian state of Assam. By early April resistance was centred around Imphal - where three divisions of the British IV Corps were surrounded - and Kohima.
Up till then an unimportant little hill town, Kohima became a key position in the defence of India. Its capture would open the way to Dimapour and the cutting of the Assam railway, supply lifeline for the Allies on the Burma front On 5 April 1944 the Japanese besieged Kohima and a bloody battle ensued.
In the course of April, the battle swung this way and that. Allied air power hit the Japanese supply lines and the enemy commander, over-confident of being able to capture supplies, realised he did not have sufficient material to sustain his assault. On 20 April Kohima was relieved. But the Japanese didn't retreat. Instead it was now the turn of the British to try and dislodge their enemy from strong positions on the surrounding hilltops.

The Burma - India frontier, scene of a major Japanese offensive in March-April 1944. Kohima (not shown) is about 70 miles north of Imphal.
 

Amidst the many headlines of the free world's newspapers in the early months of 1944, news from the Far East was constant but rarely prominent.

A war was being waged in the Jungles, mountains and plains of Burma and Assam but it was of a nature perhaps too alien and too far away to really hold the interest of most folks on the Home Front Unless, of course, they knew of someone serving there or who had, perhaps, been made a prisoner of war of the Japanese in the opening period of the war.

British civilians still faced the occasional air raid but what the war meant to most was the sight of the vast, military build-up of men and equipment in preparation for the Allied invasion of mainland Europe. The British Fourteenth Army on the Burmese - Indian border under its Australian commander, General William Slim, even at the time
considered themselves 'forgotten', a feeling which still persists amongst surviving veterans some 60 years on.

The colours of the Old Comrades Association of the famous Chindits who fought in Burma 1942-1944. The name 'Chindits' was derived from 'Chinthe', a mythical dragon that guards Burmese temples and which is depicted in the centre of the colours.

British, American and Chinese offensives in south and north Burma in the opening months of 1944 met with considerable success. In what was called the Second Arakan Campaign, the Fourteenth Army had relieved the Seventh Indian Division and gone on to all but annihilate the Japanese forces who had encircled them. A slow advance on Akyab on Burma's Bay of Bengal coast was resumed.

Then in late February, the first American ground combat unit arrived with General 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell in the north of Burma. This was an infantry regiment destined to go down in history as Merrill's Marauders, from the name of its commander; Frank D Merrill. His 3000 men were to be used in an encircling role, whilst their Chinese allies battered the Japanese in frontal assaults.

During March and into April the strategy worked well, Japanese General Sinichi Tanaka was forced into a series of rapid withdrawals. The American and Chinese efforts were sustained by air by US transports flying from bases in north eastern India.

Then, unexpectedly both Stilwell's forces in the north and the Fourteenth Army in south and central Burma found their own sources of supply - and indeed their own existence - under threat when a