Sunday 6 December 2015

6th DEC 1944 JAPAN ATTACK INDIA

JAPANESE INVASION OF INDIA
DURING WORLD WAR II


the Wanderling


"Fifteen hundred miles east across the sub-continent edging up along the Burmese border the Japanese launched a three division invasion into India. Quickly outstretching their supply lines and hoping to replenish their local needs by overtaking British, American and Indian garrisons, etc. while their lifelines caught up, didn't happen. For the most part, three months later, met by stronger than expected Allied response and caught in the monsoons, the Japanese were forced into retreat dying of malaria and starving to death --- in the end losing over 80,000 men."

The above quote was written by me. While it is suffice to say it carries a certain amount of validity and integrity within itself, I am certainly not holding myself up as being a master historian on the Japanese invasion of India per se' --- although over time I have done some rather in-depth research on the subject.(see)
Probably the strongest and most important reason behind my initial research into the invasion is because of how it impacted my own life as a young boy. It just so happened that at the exact same time the Japanese launched their attack into India I was traveling in India. My second reason is an unabated personal interest in the A.V.G., the American Volunteer Group, otherwise known as the Flying Tigers, who played a huge role in the early days of the war in Burma --- an unabated interest I garnered primarily through my Stepmother and a woman she knew by the name of Olga Greenlaw. Greenlaw wrote the best book on the Flying Tigers I ever read, titled Lady and the Tigers, a book that I read over and over as a kid all the way up into adulthood. And last, for those who may be so interested, to provide a clearer insight into the events and how even to this day the downstream outflow of those events are still causing ripples --- ripples that are continuing on relative to me and possibly you right now because of a highly Enlightened individual named William Samuel. Samuel was a U.S. Army officer during World War II who had been embedded in the Chinese army, fighting along side Chinese troops throughout most of the conflict. Five years after the end of the war Samuel was called back into the Army to serve in Korea and would, during the throes of battlefield decimation going on all around him, as written in his tome A Soldier's Story, experience a deep Spiritual Awakening not unlike those afforded the ancient classical masters.[1]

In December 1941, nearly a decade before the start of the Korean War, the Japanese invaded Burma with a well armed, well supplied, and well equipped contingent of 35,000 troops backed up by basically unfettered air support. They advanced northward into the interior almost unimpeded, with the capitol, Rangoon, falling March 6-7, 1942. They were also successful in shutting down the Allies' life-line into China, the Burma Road. During that period, on December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor opening the door for the U.S. entry into World War II. Two days later, December 9, 1941, China declared war on Japan.
China, had however, been in a full-scale war with Japan since at least July 1937 when the Japanese claimed they were fired upon by Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. From that the Japanese retaliated by launching an invasion from Manchuria. By November 1937 Shanghai, China's most important sea port fell followed by Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, in December 1937.
On February 4, 1942, close on the heels of the Japanese invasion of Burma and just before the fall of Rangoon, Chiang Kai-shek flew over the Hump on a secret mission into India in an effort to convince British and Indian leaders, military and otherwise, that as soon as Japan solidified their positions in Burma they would be setting their sights on India and anything that could be done in the meantime to impact that solidification adversely would impede or possibly stop any of their designs on India.
True to Chiang's words, soon as 1944 rolled around, with Burma mostly under control, the Japanese began formulating invasion plans which, even in those early stages, had been given a codename, Operation U Go. Part of the U Go plan included soldiers of the Indian National Army joining the Japanese and fighting along side Imperial Army troops as they entered India, with the idea being for Japan to be viewed by the Indian populace more as a liberation force rather than an invasion force. The Indian National Army, whose only reason for existence was to remove the yoke of their British overlords, had been convinced by Japan that by combining forces they could in fact overthrow British and European rule just as the Japanese had, up to that point, all over Asia.
On April 5. 1944, Japanese troops, under the command of Major-General Shigesaburo, with a low-profile assist by the Indian National Army, launched an attack into India against Kohima. However, although initially Japanese advances met a certain amount of success in the early stages, as the opening quote at the top of the page states, in the end it didn't work out so hot.

At the same time most if not all of the above was going on I was a young boy growing up in a southern California beach community. Well before I even reached the age of entering kindergarten my mother's health began to deteriorate, eventually reaching a point that she was unable to care for herself let alone my two brothers and me. At the same time, my father began putting in more and more hours working in order to pay for mounting medical expenses. As my mother's condition continued to go downhill, almost under pure necessity, my father began placing my brothers and me more and more under the care of others. First as needed using day-by-day babysitters, then overnight with grandparents or neighbors, then for whole weekends. One day a childless husband and wife couple who were really good friends with the neighbors next door suggested to my father having one of us boys come live with them until things improved. After thinking it over my father agreed and for whatever reason the couple selected me.
No sooner had I moved in with them and started a new school than the two-week Christmas vacation, or winter recess as they call it now, rolled around and the couple took me, without my father's consent, to India, not returning until sometime around the start of summer --- in the interim missing the whole last half of the school year.
The couple went to India initially to attend a religious convention held December 26-31, 1943, in Adyar, located on the coast of the Indian Ocean near Madras, about 95 miles northeast of Tiruvannamalai. Sometime in the early part of January 1944, after the various convention activities concluded the couple traveled to Tiruvannamalai and the ashram of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, an excursion that grew, planned or unplanned, into an extended stay of several months.
The couple's attendance at the ashram with me in tow, although not pinpointed to a specific arrival of or departure day and date, was duly noted by the foremost chronicler of their visit to India, Ramana adherent C.R. Rajamani. Rajamani, while also speaking of a white-skinned boy he saw in the ashram with the couple, goes on to tell of his own visit to the ashram, of which can be seen, clearly overlapped the same time period the couple was there:

"(I)t may have been December or January. I remember the season was quite cool. The summit of the holy mountain Arunachala was shrouded in dense mist and clouds. The morning air was crisp and pleasant."

The most specific date I have for me being at the ashram comes from a childhood friend of mine by the name of Adam Osborne, the son of Arthur Osborne, a well known and well received author of a number of excellent books on Sri Ramana. As adults, Adam Osborne recounted the following to me, as found in the Osborne link so cited:

"(He) said he remembered me quite well because I was the only anglo boy his age he ever really met in his early years. He said he could not remember if our time together was long or short, if it lasted just days or stretched into weeks, but he did remember, even though he was not doing meditation specifically like I was, the two of us still found time to run all over the place getting in trouble --- even to the point of being admonished by the Maharshi."

The two of us crossed paths as adults one day after not having seen each other since we were both kids. In those days, when he was a kid, he was basically growing up at the ashram and it is there where the two of us met. In reminiscing about our childhood he brought up the fact that the two of us had circumabulated the holy hill of Arunachala together. He said some years before he had been contacted by a man of deep spiritual attainment, the aforementioned William Samuel, hoping that Adam could arrange a meeting with the elder Osborne. Samuel told Adam he and another young boy along with himself and Osborne's mother and a few others had performed Giri Valam, circumambulation of Arunachala. That circumambulation occurred on the night of the full moon, April 1944. In April 1944 the moon was full on Saturday April 8th, and because of Samuel, the very first hard evidence of a specific date for me being at the ashram I ever had.
While I was in India the invasion was still in its infancy, so any long term effects or results of the attack was yet to bear fruit, no matter how bitter. Sometime during that same period, most likely because of concerns over the invasion by the foster couple I was traveling with, I, along with the couple, boarded a ship to England that crossed the Indian Ocean around Africa and on into the Atlantic before eventually making berth in Liverpool.[2]
As the much larger umbrella of war ground on, because it had become more and more difficult for Axis submarines to operate freely in the Atlantic and Pacific as they always had during the early stages of the war, both Japanese and German submarines had increased their numbers in the Indian Ocean, often prowling in the same general area, sometimes overlapping and not always with coordinated efforts. However, if one didn't get you the other would. The Indian Ocean was an extremely dangerous place in those days for ships of all kinds, but especially so for merchant and passenger vessels --- the British motor merchant MV Tulagi for example, which I have written about elsewhere because of it being in the Indian Ocean at the same time I was, being hit by two torpedoes from the German submarine U-532 and going down in 20 seconds. I have no idea how many times the ship I was on came into the periscope crosshairs of a German U-boat or Japanese submarine. However, the whole route of travel from India, around Africa and into the Atlantic on to England was crawling with submarines, every one seeking an easy, vulnerable target.
Using Rajamani's and Samuel's recollections, that put me at the ashram proper from sometime in January to at least early April 1944, but, by all indications, as figured out in MV Tulagi, on my way home onboard a ship in the Indian Ocean toward the end of May, 1944 and most likely back in the states sometime in June, 1944.
Upon my return to the U.S., in that my immediate family in California had apparently dispersed to the four winds following the death of my mother, the foster couple I was traveling with left me unexpectantly and unannounced with a relative of mine in Pennsylvania that didn't know me and who I didn't know. It is not clear how long I was there nor who I was traveling with, but it is known that that late in June of 1944 I somehow left Pennsylvania for Chicago and there boarded the Number 19 Santa Fe Chief headed westbound toward Los Angeles.



(please click)


While it is true a lot of what went on in those days relative to me is unclear, the fact that I was on the Chief is well known because around midnight of July 3, 1944, between Flagstaff, Arizona and Williams, on a high speed downhill run and behind schedule, the Chief's locomotive, bearing the Santa Fe #3774, a powerful Baldwin built 4-8-4 Northern with 80 inch drive wheels and clocking out at over 90 miles per hour, hit a marked 55 mph speed limit curve, with the locomotive, derailing and sliding in the dirt on it's side off the tracks for well over 500 feet before coming to a stop. The rest of the 14 car train ended up in various stages of derailment and wreckage on and off the track, some cars remaining upright with two actually staying on the tracks undamaged. The fireman and three passengers were killed. 113 passengers along with 13 train employees injured, among them the severely injured engineer.



(photo courtesy Arizona Republic)

Although I was unhurt, the person or people I was traveling with was among the injured and taken, with me along with them, to either Williams or Flagstaff. Because of the nature of their injuries, whoever I was traveling with was held-up under doctors care for several days, leaving me without direct adult supervision. My grandmother, who had been contacted by the railroad, called my Uncle in Santa Fe. He inturn contacted a nearby tribal spiritual elder to oversee me until someone figured out how to get me to the Los Angeles Union Station and my grandmother's home in California.[3]

In May, 1942, north Burma fell to the Japanese and by May 2, 1942 Japan's 56th Division had captured Nankan on the Chinese Burmese border. Three days later Japanese main forces advancing along the Salween River were stopped in their tracks when, on May 5, 1942, the Chinese destroyed the Huitong Bridge.

"After Burma was occupied by the enemy, in order to prevent the invasion of the Japanese army to the east of the Nujiang River, the Chinese army bombed Huitong Bridge to cut off the unique international road in the southwest area, the Yunnan-Myanmar Highway, and the Tea-Horse Trade Route took on new importance. The materials for the battle supported by overseas Chinese and allied forces including arms and ammunition were brought from India continuously to China by horse caravans."(source)

The Yunnan-Myanmar Highway cited in the above quote was the infamous Burma Road, the Nujiang River is the Salween River.[4] With the loss of Burma and the Burma Road, word went out sometime just before the end of the year 1942 to U.S. Army Lieutenant General Vinegar Joe Stilwell, that cutting a road through Japanese occupied north Burma from the Indian railhead town of Ledo, with plans to link through to the original Burma Road along the Chinese border was an imperative.

"In December the only machinery available for road building was the organizational equipment of the engineer units assigned to the Base. Plans carried to General Stilwell at Chungking contained a list of additional equipment with which the project must be implemented. This list had been taken to the United States by Lt. Col. H. Case Willcox, CE, who was to expedite shipment to the Theater."By the first of January, 1943 the 823rd Engineers, picking up where the British left off on the route toward Fort Hertz, had cut five miles of point on the Road. Point operations moved ahead more rapidly when a substantial amount of the battalion's heavy equipment arrived during the month of January. In addition to working the Road head, operators were also engaged in widening and grading. The 45th Engineers built the main Road from Mile 0 to Mile 4, and were busy operating gravel pits and crushers, logging, transporting gasoline and supplying rations to labor camps."(source)

Well before Stilwell could push the building of the road very far into the jungles and mountains of Burma he had to retake and secure the nearly 500 mile length of occupied territory the road was going to run through. To do so Stilwell used soldiers of the Chinese Expeditionary Army that had been trained at the U.S. Army Chinese Training and Combat Command in Ramgarh, India and made up primarily of members of remnant Chinese army units cut off by the Japanese attack on the Burma Road as well as Chinese soldiers flown in on empty flights returning to India over the Hump. To wit:

"The first trainload of Chinese troops arrived on 17 July 1942. It was composed of troops from the 38th Division, of the 66th Army which had returned from Burma by way of Imphal. It was commanded by Lt. Gen. Sun Lih Hen. It was followed by remnants of the 22nd Division and 5th Corps commanded by Maj. Gen. Liao Yai Shiang. This group had come out of Burma by way of Ledo."(source)

Under the cover of darkness, on the night of May 11, 1944, after more than a two-year ordeal of fully armed Japanese and lesser-so Chinese troops facing each other over the Salween River, the Chinese Expeditionary Army mounted a full-scale river crossing counter-offensive. On the first day 40,000 troops crossed the river using nearly 400 American supplied rubber boats and countless handmade bamboo rafts. In the next few days 60,000 more troops and thousands of pack animals carrying supplies crossed the river. The counter-offensive was successful and the Japanese troops retreated, most to their Songshan base. One month before the Japanese had thrown a major thrust of combatants westward into India, now behind them a major contingency of well trained and well armed Chinese troops were positioning themselves to come in on their less defendable and more open rear as well as cutting off their supply lines.

Which brings us back again to the previously mentioned William Samuel, the man, who in conversation with Adam Osborne was able to pinpoint the most specific date ever for me being at the Ramana ashram, April 8, 1944. InA Soldier's Story Samuel, speaking of himself while in the military during World War II and well before his Enlightenment experience unfolded during the Korean War, writes:

"I was, after all, a captain of infantry in two long wars. I lived with Chinese infantry troops in the field for nearly three years---subsisting with them, nearly starving with them. The few American soldiers in China had very little support from the United States during World War II. We were at the end of the world's longest supply line, and anything that reached us from home had been flown over Japanese occupied countries, over the great Himalayan Mountains into Kunming, thence to be trucked and packed in by animals to us, wherever we might be."

Thus said, the question is, what was Samuel doing at the Ramana ashram in the first place, especially so on the 8th of April 1944? If you remember from the above, it was only three short days before, on April 5, 1944, that Japanese troops under the command of Major-General Shigesaburo launched their major cross-border offensive into India against Kohima. Seems odd, with such high profile goings-on that Samuel, a fully commissioned officer in the U.S. Army who, up to that point had spent his whole military career embedded with Chinese troops in China, would be able to be at the ashram during such a crucial time.
And it's not like the Allied military commanders in the field didn't know. On February 5, 1944, two months prior to the major offensive, the Japanese put into motion what was actually a diversionary attack against India codenamed Ha-Go. The plan was to have a division from the Japanese 28th Army cross into the Arakan and attract Allied reserves from Assam while creating the impression that the Japanese planned to attack Bengal through Chittagong.
During the two month period between the diversionary attack and the actual attack against India, if not sooner, it is my belief that William Samuel came over the Hump on one of the empty return flights either on his own or on the bequest of those in command. Most likely initially, regarding the return to China of the Chinese Expeditionary Forces trained at the U.S. Army Chinese Training and Combat Command in Ramgarh, India, offering insight into what to expect in a combined effort garnered from his years of experience and expertise as an American fighting the Japanese alongside Chinese troops.
General Stilwell and his British/India command counterparts, fearing an onslaught of a potentially major Japanese offensive into India, began to scrape together as much military countermeasures as they possibly engender. One was the XXXIII Indian Corps, formed in Bangalore south India on August, 15 1942, originally assembled and trained to stop Japanese amphibious operations along the Indian coastline. Suddenly they had to shift gears from water tactics to jungle tactics. Enter William Samuel. In that Samuel had all kinds of actual hands on experience fighting along side the Chinese against the Japanese in virtually the same kind of environment the XXXIII Corps would encounter once deployed, most likely powers that be dispatched Samuel to provide the Corp command with all the relevant information he could in the short time he had available to him. Interestingly enough, the XXXIII Corps headquarters in Bangalore, south India, was not more than 120 miles northwest of Tiruvannamalai and the Ramana ashram. For Samuel, who had been slogging through China for two or three years, over 2000 miles from Bangalore or more, just thinking about it was most likely to much to bear.

The executor of all of William Samuel's papers and published works, Sandy Jones, has pretty much taken what I have presented from Adam Osborne regarding the April 1944 full moon phase and Samuel being at the Ramana ashram at the same time and run with it --- in many cases, for reasons unknown, not so much Sandy, but others picking up on her comments, conveniently leaving mention of me out of the picture as the originating source for the information. As well, others have not fully embraced my thesis, questioning my reasoning regarding China, India, Ramana et al. However, Sandy Jones, who is familiar with most if not all of the ins-and-outs of William Samuel probably better than anyone, has a vast fund of knowledge regarding him to draw from. An example is her written transcript from a video of Samuel. He had had a stroke 10 days before the filming of the seminar and for some who were unfamiliar with Samuel and all his subtle innuendos he was found to be difficult to understand --- so Sandy transcribed it into the written word so people could follow along reading the transcript as Samuel spoke. In that seminar-come-transcription Samuel himself mentions the following:

"So I went to the back woods of China, flew the Hump. And there, I had as an interpreter, a most wonderful man, he was a Taoist Master.""This is the backwoods of China, this is the Yu Nan Province, barely over the Hump from India"(see)

Of course the "Hump" he speaks of is the formidable border of the mighty Himalayas that separates India from China. He also mentions he may have at the time, only held the military rank of second lieutenant.[5]

For those on the fence, the doubters and others, I am however, like Sandy Jones, not simply a rube. Twenty years almost to the day after Samuel's visit to the ashram, found me in much the same circumstances and not far from much the same areas as Samuel operated in during World War II, re the following from the source so cited:

"(A) number of cross-border forays from surrounding areas were put into place requiring the use of a number of covert ground teams inserted into rather remote and primitive conditions. Each team member and their equipment was Sheep Dipped and all teams embedded with specially trained communication personnel, each heavily blanketed with security clearances, versed in Morse code and the non-conventional expertise to build from scratch and use, if necessary, easily disposable spark-gap transmitters and QRP transmitters, along with foxhole radios and crystal set receivers. Several select members of those ground teams, all who were taught to travel light, eat indigenous foods, and leave no tracks, were soon appropriated for other duties."(source)

Although I never met or talked to Samuel personally beyond my childhood years at the ashram, that is, both of us as adults that I am willing to admit to, it is from my own similar experiences in the military as well as what I have come to know about him generally and the circumstances he found himself in specifically, that I figure Samuel was most likely much closer philosophically --- and in his actions --- to General Joseph Stilwell when it came to executing and following military rules and regulations.[6] It is known Samuel arrived at the Ramana ashram for at least one possibly two week stay in April 1944, but how he actually arranged to do so, at least officially, during such a critical time is not known. Military-wise, nobody on the India side of the Himalayas really knew him, nor was anybody he was coming in contact with remotely in his direct chain of command. If he simply improvised a circuitous route back to his old haunts in China on his own who would have been the wiser?
While it is true, after leaving China and arriving on Indian soil it is questionable if Samuel came into contact with anybody that was specifically in his direct chain of military command, he did however, in the broader spectrum of things, fall under General Stilwell and the umbrella of the China Burma India Theater of Operations (CBI). If he officially secured a leave authorization of some type from the American command structure in India before going to Bangalore, or if while in Bangalore he created one out of whole cloth using paperwork somehow granted through the gratuitous nature of some pencil pushing behind a desk XXXIII Corps British military bureaucrat in khaki shorts and a pith helmet or not is not known either. Personally, since it was Samuel, I fall into the improvised a circuitous route back to his old haunts in China camp. Like I say, who would know? The thing is, leave, even under the circumstances, although seeming unlikely, was not totally unheard of. On the same day the Japanese launched their invasion into India, Captain Jimmy Evans, a British officer assigned to a battalion of Gurkha soldiers serving right in the heart of the Japanese major offensive, was on leave, away from his regiment:

"I heard ‘Japs invade India’ or however they put it, and then they’d come right round and cut us off at Kohima. So my whole division up in the Chinn Hills had to withdraw to Imphal, a masterly operation. They knew all about being cut off by Japanese roadblocks and they fought the whole way back, and the Japs had thought we’d behave the same way as in the Burma retreat, but it was a battle the whole way. And by the time we got to Imphal, or they got to Imphal, 17 Division was all intact, all its vehicles – got the whole lot. The Japanese then were at the end of a very long line of communication with this muddy road to bring stuff up."(source)

More than likely, considering the timing and unfolding of events, the greatest need for Samuel and his personal strengths on the battlefield would be targeted for one full month AFTER being at the ashram --- not so much so the earlier British and Indian vs. Japanese battle at Imphal and Kohima --- but the May 11, 1944 Chinese Expeditionary Army crossing with 60,000 men over the Salween River in rubber rafts. There is no reason to believe that U.S. Army Captain William Samuel (actually most likely a lieutenant at the time), whose usual stomping grounds had, before moving west, been on the east side of the Himalayas, would not be able to finagle a little much needed R & R prior to early May.[7]



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