The British imperial dimension
Readers may have noticed the neglect here of the long and bitter struggle in Burma. The
war in Burma is a tale of great courage on both sides, of the mutual difficulty of surviving
nature as well as the enemy, and of the eventual achievement of military competence by
British and Indian troops, well led by General William J. Slim. The reason for the silence
on Burma thus far is that, despite the see-sawing of military advantage there, and the
eventual fact that the Japanese Army was handed its single largest defeat of the war,
the campaign ultimately was of no strategic significance for the war as a whole. The
only meaning it might have had was for the opening of the Burma Road (from Lashio
in Burma to Kunming in China) for aid to China. However, it became undeniable that
the path to Tokyo could not proceed through China, not even for the purpose of basing
B-29s for the bombardment of the Home Islands. The Japanese Army in China was too
strong, and the Chinese Army too weak and uninterested in fighting the invader. It has to
follow that the Burma campaign lacked significant value for the course and outcome of
the war. But it did have both symbolic and substantive value for the restoration of some
of the prestige of the British Empire. In 1941–2 that prestige had suffered what ultimately
would prove to be terminal damage at Japanese hands. Of course, the Americans were
less than sympathetic to British strategic ideas that appeared motivated more by an
interest in imperial recovery than by calculation of strategic effect upon Japan.
It is only fair to observe that the British in Asia in 1942–5, whatever one’s views on
their empire, did behave in a strategically responsible and rational manner. They
conducted the war for the post-war order that they desired. The main event was the
maritime struggle between Japan and the United States. Britain was too heavily engaged
in Europe and the Middle East to commit other than a small fraction of its forces to Asia.
But with the United States carrying the truly heavy load in the maritime war against
Japan, Britain was at liberty to wage the Asian war that was mandated by the needs of its
failing, indeed failed, empire. Britain paid token obeisance to what it judged to be the
American fantasy of a powerful China, but its prime concern was to save strategically,
and hence politically, what it could from the appalling wreckage of the surrender at
Singapore on 15 January 1942 and the subsequent rout in Burma. As Stalin waged war
in 1944–5 with his eyes firmly fixed on the post-war order, so too did the British in Asia
in the same period.
Box 13.1 provides a terse summary of the more distinctive characteristics of the war and
warfare in Asia–Pacific from 1941 to 1945.
World War II in Asia–Pacific, II 179Box 13.1Characteristics of war and warfare in Asia–Pacific,
1941–5
- It was a war of amphibious manoeuvre in an essentially maritime theatre.
- The distances were so vast, indeed were transoceanic, that any and all con-
siderations of strategy were moot, pending solution to the logistic challenges
(the distance from Yokohama, Tokyo’s port, to San Francisco is 5,530 miles).