The Japanese army invaded Burma in December 1941. It began only a few days after the surprise bomb attack at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii devastated the US fleet and signaled the expansion of the conflict across the Pacific and through Southeast Asia.
Depleted by the need to fight on fronts closer to home during World War II, few British and Indian army units had been left to defend the colony. They were, however, later joined by Chinese forces loyal to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).
Rangoon, then the capital of Burma, fell to the Japanese in March 1942. Thailand had entered into an alliance with Japan and its troops supported the invasion.
The retreating British and Indian soldiers managed to break out to the north and in May, after the failure to halt the Japanese onslaught, a general evacuation of Burma was ordered.
“We got a hell of a beating,” General Joseph Stilwell, the US lieutenant general and chief of staff of allied armies in that region, told a press conference in Delhi on May 26, 1942, just days after he had marched out of Burma on foot, through the jungle, with his staff of 117 men and women. “We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out why it happened and go back and retake it.”
It was just months since he assumed command.
The Japanese army, which had launched attacks across the border into India but were heavily defeated by British and Indian forces at the Battles of Imphal and Kohima, close to the border with Burma, in 1944, was finally driven out of Burma in 1945.
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