In the spring of 1942, there were three competing factions in Tokyo: The first, the Japanese Army, wanted to concentrate on the war with China. The second, Admiral Yamamoto and his coterie of naval commanders, wanted to concentrate on the destruction of the American Pacific Fleet, especially the aircraft carriers that escaped Pearl Harbor. And the third, the naval staff officers of the Imperial General Staff, wanted to continue the glorious conquests in the Pacific. The Imperial General Staff believed, not unreasonably, that the American carriers would eventually respond, and then subsequently be dealt with. Yamamoto disagreed, and felt they needed to be dealt with immediately. While the former two factions were busy actually fighting the war, the latter, the naval officers of the Imperial General Staff, like staff officers on overblown and bloated staffs anywhere far from any actual fighting (who have time for careerism, politicking, and pet projects) convinced the Japanese Emperor and Prime Minister Tojo to support further operations in the South and Southwest Pacific against the sage advice of Yamamoto.

The next offensive would be Operation MO – a complicated plan to seize New Guinea, the Eastern Solomon Islands, and eventually raid bases in eastern Australia and capture isolated American possessions in the South Pacific which would provide defense in depth for their main South Pacific naval base at Rabaul, and cut the direct sea lanes between Australia and the US. The attack had two parts. The first was a large naval task force with troop transports to seize Port Moresby on the southeast coast of New Guinea, which would effectively end all Australian resistance on the island. The second was a smaller naval task force to seize Tulagi, a small island off a then unknown larger island named Guadalcanal in the Solomon Island archipelago, as a staging base to seize Fiji, New Caledonia, and American Samoa.

These advances would be far from land based air cover and required a third part: the Kido Butai, Admiral Nagumo’s Carrier Strike Force, in order to prevent disruption by MacArthur’s bombers or Nimitz’ carriers. But the Doolittle Raid changed the dynamics of the faction politics in Tokyo. The Americans had done the unthinkable and struck at the heart of the Empire and threatened the Emperor himself. Yamamoto convinced the Emperor that the American carriers had to be destroyed lest they strike at Japan again (or inflict some other nasty surprise that the Japanese had not foreseen, but he didn’t say something so blasphemous to the Emperor). He had his operation against Midway approved and it became the priority for the Japanese Navy. But Operation MO was already in the final stages of preparation.

The Imperial General Staff, with their outsized influence, managed to get a compromise approved. The sticking point between the two operations was always the Kido Butai. Nagumo’s six carriers had reigned terror over one third of the globe for almost five months. But 24 hour combat operations took its toll. The crews were tired, and more importantly, no amount of Bushido or extolling from their officers could change the fact that the carriers and planes themselves were in desperate need of refit and maintenance. Yamamoto would need the Kido Butai at its peak proficiency to take on Nimitz’ carriers in their own waters. The Imperial General Staff recommended that the “A team” of the Kido Butai, the 1st and 2nd Carrier Divisions consisting of the big fleet carriers Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu return to Japan to refit for the Midway operation, while the “B team”, the 4th and 5th Carriers Divisions consisting of the light carrier Shoho and more modern fleet carriers Shokaku and Zuihkaku sail south to take part in Operation MO in the Coral Sea. The rivalry between the carrier divisions offers a unique insight into the Japanese mentality of the time. Though the light carriers and the Shokaku and Zuihkaku were more modern, they were newer and therefore younger and deserving of less respect than their elders. The best pilots and crew went to the older carriers which were referred to as “the sons of the wives” while the newer ships were referred to as “sons of the concubines”. This also meant that the crews and pilots of the newer ships had to work harder to gain face. So in that light, the General Staff was doing them a favor by letting them participate in MO and then immediately move north to take part in the Midway operation without respite. Of course all of the carriers and their pilots wanted to do this, but Yamamoto understood there was a limit to the military efficacy of honor and determination in modern naval warfare. He wouldn’t permit more than two fleet carriers skip the desperately needed maintenance and refit. The end result was that for the first time in the War in the Pacific, the Kido Butai, the mailed fist of the Japanese Navy, was split into its component parts.

This was exactly what the Americans needed to happen. With Halsey, and the Enterprise and Hornet still returning from the Doolittle Raid, Nimitz only had two carriers left, the Yorktown and the Lexington. (The Saratoga was in drydock after being torpedoed, and the Wasp was delivering fighters to Malta at the ardent behest of Churchill). Unfortunately for the Japanese, American and British codebreakers knew of the Japanese plan and Operation MO was at the tail end of a long supply chain back to the Home Islands. For the first time in the war, the Allies would be able to engage the Japanese fleet with near parity in resources.

American aircraft carriers Yorktown and Lexington under Rear Admiral Frank Fletcher were dispatched to the area. On the morning of 3 May 1942, the Japanese landed on the island of Tulagi and the next day aircraft from the Yorktown savaged the eastern Japanese task force. But the Japanese carriers weren’t there. In fact it was the smallest and least important of the five Japanese task forces lurking nearby. Ship identification was the biggest culprit, and the pilots reported 14 cruisers, destroyers and transport ships sunk, when the actual toll was just a destroyer, a few small gunships, and a freighter. Even worse, this action alerted the Japanese to the presence of the American carriers in the area and the Japanese fleet carriers entered the Coral Sea with the purpose of finding and destroying the targets they missed at Pearl Harbor. For the next two days, air patrols from ADM Fletcher’s aircraft carriers searched the Coral Sea for what he believed to be four Japanese carriers supporting the Port Moresby invasion force and the Japanese did the same for what they thought were two more American carriers in the area.

However, neither side had ever faced their adversary’s carriers with their own carriers before. And the limitations of air reconnaissance, radio communications, and sea navigation over great distances against fast moving fleets with their own inherent air cover in variable weather were keenly felt by both sides. Furthermore, each side approached from an unexpected direction: the Japanese from east around the southern tip of the Solomons and not north from Rabaul, and the Americans from the south instead of the east.

For the next few days, both sides flailed about like blindfolded boxers listening to sighting reports from their trainers in the corner. First, the Americans spotted the invasion force but reported it as the striking force with the fleet carriers and launched their full complement of aircraft against the wrong target. Fletcher was livid with the scout when he returned to confirm no carriers but when confronted with his report realized he transmitted the wrong code. Fortunately for the scout, a carrier was spotted nearby but it was only the light carrier Shoho with the invasion’s covering force. The massive strike put eleven torpedoes and six 1000 lb bombs into the poor Shoho, but it was mostly wasted effort as the strike still left the Yorktown and Lexington vulnerable to the Shokaku and Zuikaku prowling nearby. But the Japanese had their own problems with identification: the next day they spotted and sank an oiler and destroyer that Fletcher dispatched away from the fleet to keep them safe, which was reported (and eventually showed up in Japanese newspapers) as an aircraft carrier, a cruiser, and one American and one British battleship sunk. The attack actually flew over Fletcher and his carriers who were obscured by low clouds. On the return trip, the Japanese spotted them, and launched a limited late afternoon attack with their most experienced pilots in which they couldn’t find the Americans. That night they all got lost and ditched. Nine of them even mistook the American carriers for their own and tried to land. The Japanese lost more pilots to the sea in one evening than they had to American guns so far in the war.

That night the two task forces passed within 70 miles of each other in search of their respective foes going opposite directions.

But both sides knew each was close by. The 8th of May would be decisive. The victor would be the one to strike first. But that was not to be the case. On that morning, they both struck simultaneously. Fletcher spotted and heavily damaged the fleet carrier Shokaku, but missed the Zuihkaku in a rain squall just 12 miles away. At almost the same time, the Japanese struck the Lexington and so severely damaged the Yorktown they believed she was sunk. The crew of the Lexington thought they had her damage under control, but leaking fuel fumes ignited when they reached the engine compartments. Over the next six hours, the Lady Lex was wracked by increasingly worse explosions as uncontrollable fires slowly engulfed the beloved ship. She was abandoned that evening. Both sides took heavy aircraft losses but repair crews managed to keep the Yorktown afloat and whatever American planes were left in the air were able to land. The same was not true for the smaller Zuihkaku; Japanese crews had to push aircraft off the deck in order to make room for the Shokaku’s planes. The Americans might have lost more tonnage in ships in the battle, but the Japanese lost many more aircraft, most by their own hand.

With only one wounded carrier remaining, Nimitz ordered Fletcher to withdraw from battle and head for Pearl Harbor for repairs. Both admirals believed there were still three Japanese carriers about (there was only one, the Zuiakaku), and without any way to refuel, the Yorktown would have to severely curtail her ability to maneuver. Fortunately for the Americans, the Japanese commander, ADM Inoue at faraway Rabaul, had taken such heavy losses in aircraft he did not believe he could take Port Moresby without air cover and also withdrew, defaulting victory to the Allies.

For the first time since America entered the war, the Japanese had been stopped. Australia was saved from invasion or eventual death by strangulation. Additionally, the Shokaku and Zuihkaku would be unavailable for the upcoming operations against the American carriers around Midway. The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first naval battle in history in which the opposing ships never actually sighted each other or exchanged direct fire. It would not be the last.

Operation Typhoon, the failed German offensive to capture Moscow in the autumn of 1941, was defeated not only by bad weather and improved Soviet defenses in front of the capital, but also by massive Soviets counterattacks by hundreds of hastily trained, poorly equipped, and poorly led Soviet divisions all along the entire front. The Soviet casualties were enormous, but they relieved the pressure on Moscow, the cultural, economic, communications, and administrative center of the Soviet Union, and forced back the freezing German troops at the tail end of overwhelmed supply lines that stretched thousands of miles. In order to prevent a collapse of the front and the loss of too much hard won territory, and more importantly hard won prestige, Hitler issued the controversial “No Retreat Order”.

The No Retreat Order prevented the collapse of the front but only because the Soviets bit off more than they could chew. The order also placed significant hardship on the German soldiers, particularly those at the forward edges of the battle area. In several places, Germans held strongpoints as the Soviets streamed past. One such was at Demyansk, which controlled the rail line from Moscow to Leningrad. There the front resembled a finger jabbed directly into the Soviet lines. A combination of tenacious German resistance, bad weather, and defensible terrain prevented the Soviet Rzhev-Vyazma Offensive from capturing the vital town. However after a bitter fight the Soviets encircled Demyansk on 8 February 1942 and cut off the II Corps of the German 16th Army.

The 10th Army and the remainder of the 16th Army couldn’t break through to the defenders, but Herman Goring assured Hitler that the pocket could be sustained by airlift. The 90,000 trapped men needed at least 300 short tons of supplies daily. The Luftwaffe never approached that number. Nonetheless for two months, the embattled Germans fought off wave after wave of Soviet assaults. In one instance, the German 12th Infantry Division urgently requested ammunition and a livid II Corps supply officer refused, citing that the division was using too much ammunition. The 12th Division commander replied, “You calculations are of no consequence”. The fighting was so fierce that the commander of the SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division, made a direct appeal to Himmler for replacements and material, and for the Luftwaffe to step up the number of sorties, lest his division be annihilated. They were fighting Soviet Guards divisions and it became an ideological imperative that the Totenkopf SS not be destroyed for fear that National Socialism seem inferior to Soviet Communism. (The Soviets awarded “Guards” status to divisions that distinguished themselves in battle and afterward received better pay, supplies, equipment, and replacements as a result.) Despite a maximum effort by Luftwaffe, 2/3rds of the encircled German troops were either dead, wounded, or no longer fit for duty by mid-April.

On 14 April 1942, German attacks to break the siege of the Demyansk Pocket reached the point where the troops inside could attempt to break out. That day, an ad hoc assault group consisting of the SS Totenkopf Division and about a kampfgruppe (an ad hoc battalion to regiment sized battlegroup) from each of the other divisions, attacked towards the German lines and on 21 April, broke through the Soviet encirclement. The Germans would hold Demyansk for another year.

Although the defense of the Demyansk Pocket was successful, it was a near run thing as the Luftwaffe didn’t deliver nearly the supplies needed. It also came at a great cost: all of the German divisions, including the SS, were combat ineffective by the end and would have to be reconstituted in their entirety. The defense was due more to the training, discipline, and quality of the average German soldier and leader than it was to the Luftwaffe’s aerial resupply. Additionally, the Luftwaffe lost nearly 250 JU-52 transport aircraft that weren’t easily replaced. German industry was not on a full war footing in early 1942 and the loss of so many transport aircraft (on top of the loss of so many in Crete in May 1941) was crippling. Nonetheless, the operation was a success, and gave the impression to Goering, and more importantly to Hitler, that encircled troops could be resupplied by air. This was not the case on the Eastern Front. Goering provided well below the bare minimum to the Demyansk Pocket; he would utterly fail trying to resupply another pocket four times its size months later at Stalingrad.

Just after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt demanded a retaliatory strike against Japan. However, the lightning quick losses of the Philippines and Guam precluded the use land based bombers, and US Navy was loathe to sail so close to the Japanese Home Islands with their only significant remaining force in the Pacific: the aircraft carriers that escaped the destruction at Pearl Harbor.
In January 1942, a junior officer on Admiral King’s staff suggested that the Army Air Corps’ newest bomber, the B-25 Mitchell (named after BG Billy Mitchell, an early aviation officer known for doing the impossible while antagonizing the Hell out of his opponents) could be flown off the deck of an aircraft carrier. If so, the bomber’s range would allow the aircraft carriers enough stand off to prevent their interception by the Japanese Navy. The aircraft couldn’t return to the carriers, but would land in China after bombing Japan. The task to work out the details and lead the audacious raid was given to the US Army’s best test pilot, LTC Jimmy Doolittle

Doolittle and 79 other volunteers trained on taking off from a carrier at Eglin air base by painting a carrier deck on the runway and practicing. Doolittle modified the bombers with larger fuel tanks to extend the range and ditched some of the defensive armament. The extended range would allow the bombers to reach friendly airfields in China. In April, while the Japanese Kido Butai was busy raiding targets in the Indian Ocean, Doolttle transferred his bombers to the USS Hornet for their one way trip west to the Orient.

With the deck packed with Army bombers, the Hornet was escorted by Admiral Halsey’s USS Enterprise fresh from raiding Japanese bases in the Central Pacific. On 18 April 1942, the joint task force was spotted by a fishing trawler used by the Japanese as a cheap picket line. The trawler was sunk but not before it got a message away. Doolittle and Halsey decided to launch the strike even though they were still 200 miles from the planned launch point. That meant they would probably not have the fuel necessary to make the Chinese airfields, and would have to bail out or crash land in China.

After a hair raising take off from the Hornet (they had not actually attempted it before, just the painted deck on the strip at Eglin) the 16 B-25s flew without interference for Japan. The Japanese didn’t expect the American task force to launch planes until the next day so did little to prepare for the raiders. Doolittle and his men bombed six targets in Japan against little resistance. The air raid sirens didn’t even go off until well after Doolittle and his raiders departed. Though they did negligible damage, the myth of Japanese invincibility as shattered.

Only a fortuitous tail wind allowed the raiders to even make it to China. Thirteen hours after they took off, fifteen of the crews would bail out or crash land in China, while one crew landed in Vladivostok where they were interred by the Soviets (The Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Japan and was obliged to inter any belligerents that entered its territory and impound their equipment). Most of the crews made it to safety with the help of Chinese peasants and troops though two crews were captured by the Japanese, one of whom was executed to a man. The other crew spent the rest of the war in captivity. When asked about the location of the raid’s origin at a press conference, FDR replied “Shangri-La”, a fictional place in the Himalayas from the popular novel “Lost Horizons”, by James Hilton.

The Japanese immediately launched a series of operations to capture the raiders, and seize Chinese airfields along the unoccupied east coast of the country in order to prevent possible raids against Japan in the future. At least 100,000 Chinese civilians died at the hands of furious Japanese troops in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid.

Doolittle initially thought the raid was a failure and expected a court marital upon his return. However, his raid was a great boost to the morale of the American people who had seen nothing but Japanese victory in the papers for the last five months. Doolittle was promoted directly to brigadier general, skipping colonel.

The Doolittle Raid convinced the Japanese that in order to protect the home islands, they must lure the American fleet into battle and destroy it. The bait they chose for the trap was Objective A-F: an island at the the extreme northeastern end of the Hawaiian archipelago, Midway.

 

With the closure of the Burma Road by Japanese advances in Southeast Asia, Chiang Kai Shek was cut off from the vital supplies that were needed to keep China in the war. The only way to supply the Chinese until the Burma Road could be reestablished was via air. To this end the US Army Air Corps’ Corps Ferrying Command (the predecessor to today’s Air Mobility Command) created the India-China Ferry from Assam in Eastern India to Kunming in China. 
The 720 mile trip was the last leg of a 14,000 mile journey from the United States. For example if Chiang needed Widget A, it would be loaded in New Orleans, or later Los Angeles, for the two month trip via convoy to Karachi. From there it would take two months across northern India’s primitive road network or by barge on its rivers to Assam where it was loaded onto requisitioned propeller driven DC-3 cargo planes (or C-46/47s in later years). The pilots would then fly the dangerous route over the Naga Hills of Burma, named for the headhunting tribes that inhabited the “hills” that were hills only in comparison to the Himalayan Mountains (most were larger and more jagged than the Rockies) further on. Then it was over the proper Himalayan mountains to Southern China. The harrowing trips with numerous sharp turns were without charts, by dead reckoning, with unpredictable weather, through violent winds at altitudes as high as 15,000 ft above sea level and with no hope rescue if they crashed.

The first India-China ferry flight of two former Pan Am planes on 8 April 1942 was not actually over the specific part of the trip known as, “The Hump”, that would only come in May after the Japanese captured the Myitkyina airfield which forced the route over the Sansuny Range to avoid Interception. Ironically it didn’t carry supplies for China but for America. The flight carried eight thousand gallons of aviation fuel for use by the Doolittle Raiders who were optimistically expected to land on Chinese airfields after their raid on Japan. 
The first month only brought 146 tons to China. But until they stopped in November 1945, the unescorted trips over The Hump brought 685,000 tons of supplies to China at the cost 594 planes lost to crashes or Japanese fighters. That’s at least one missing presumed dead crew every other day for the rest of the war. Chiang Kai Shek attributed their dedication in the face of such adversity as one of the reasons China stayed in the war. By the end of the war, one aircraft was taking off for China from India over the Hump every three minutes.

Though the Allies didn’t know it, Japan had no intention of invading Australia; they did plan on isolating it after the fall of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands though. Their entire strategy depended on the Allies seeking peace before that was necessary. However, in the longer term, they planned on invading India to create a puppet buffer state under Indian Nationalists and a shoe string operation to occupy Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which dominated the Indian Ocean. With the British, Indians, and Chinese on the run in Burma, Indian antiwar demonstrations and rioting, Gandhi’s recent rebuffs of British guarantees of postwar independence (“a postdated check from a failing bank”), the formation of the Indian National Army under the Japanese, and the Japanese hitherto total domination of the sea, this was much more in the realm of the possible than we assume in hindsight.
On 30 March 1942 Adm Nagumo’s Kido Butai launched Operation C to destroy the recently reinforced British Eastern Fleet located at Trincomalee on the east coast of Ceylon. Once that was accomplished, the Japanese were to establish a submarine base on the Vichy French (a Japanese ally) island of Madagascar to interdict supplies to India, Egypt, and the Middle East.
The British, having partially broken the Japanese naval codes, knew of Operation C beforehand and reinforced the British Eastern Fleet with every available ship. Unfortunately, the British ships were mostly obsolete. The Eastern Fleet’s commander, Adm James Sommerville, had five battleships, but four were un-modernized “R” Class ships from the First World War, and the last, the venerable HMS Warspite was modernized but still obsolete. His battleships, designed to fight the German Navy in the North Sea didn’t have the range to operate in the vast distances in the East, so a secret refueling base was established at the Addu atoll in the Indian Ocean. Sommerville also had two modern fleet carriers and an escort carrier, but the fighters and torpedo bombers were also obsolete; they might have been capable of dealing with German and Italian battleships, but they were no match for the carriers’ planes that bombed Pearl Harbor.
Armed with intelligence of the Japanese attack, Sommerville sortied to meet them. Unable to find the Japanese, Somerville dispatched the escort carrier back to Ceylon while he moved to cover his secret base on the Addu atoll which he now (incorrectly) assumed was the first Japanese target. It was probably for the best because it put his most effective ships well out of range when the Japanese did strike.

Nagumo ravaged the Eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. On Easter Sunday, 5 April, he raided Columbo on Ceylon and destroyed the RAF on the ground and sank the ships in the port. On the 6th, 7th and 8th, the Kido Butai struck targets on the east coast of India, and sank any Allied ship within range, 23 merchant ships. On 9 April, he struck Tricomalee and caught the escort carrier, the Hermes, trying to flee whom he promptly sunk along with her escorts. With still no contact with Sommerville’s main force, Nagumo thought it best to retire after a job well done, if not completely finished, just as he had after Pearl Harbor. 

Sommerville’s Eastern Fleet would be pulled back to Kenya, but their mere existence would prevent further Japanese naval activity in the Indian Ocean in 1942, especially after the upcoming events in the Central and South Pacific in May and June.

In 1534, King Tabinschwehti of the small landlocked Toungoo Kingdom in the Sittang valley conquered his father’s former liege’s liege, the much larger but disunited neighbor to the west, the Hanthawaddy Kingdom. The Hanthawaddy ruled over the lands of the mighty Irrawaddy and Chindwin river basins. The Sittang is a mere stream in comparison but both river valleys dominate each other where they spill into the plains of Central Burma: whoever is strongest in one, inevitably will control both. The Toungoo Empire was Southeast Asia’s largest empire and lasted for 300 years.

Four hundred years later in March 1942, the two river valleys were again in an imminent symbiotic relationship where control of one meant control of both. In the Irrawaddy river valley, the newly minted Burma Corps, consisting of the remains of the 17th Indian Division, the 1st Burma Division, and the 7th Armoured Brigade, attempted to reorganize and rally around its newly promoted commander, LieutGen William Slim, who had just arrived from duty in East Africa and Iraq. Slim attempted to concentrate and rally the Burma Corps at Prome on the Irrawaddy after its narrow escape from Rangoon. The Japanese, who usually only operated with nine or ten days of supply (something Slim learned from a Chinese general, and would make use of over the next few years), had out run their logistics. This provided Slim with an opportunity to regroup, but he had several severe difficulties: Morale in the rear areas was collapsing and the civil government was disintegrating. The combat units were understrength and without hope of replacements. He had no direct line supply to India, while the Japanese were already making good use of the port at Rangoon. All of his units were roadbound, and in any case, lacked any jungle warfare training. The tanks of the 7th Armoured were in desperate need of maintenance. And with the destruction of the RAF on the ground in early March (after the short sighted removal of radar and radio detection equipment back to India), he had no air reconnaissance or intelligence network to speak of. He mitigated this last problem by organizing British and Burmese businessmen into an effective, if static screen line between Prome and Toungoo. Furthermore, the Burma Corps was spread out and its subordinate units, specifically the 1st Burma Division away to the east, were not mutually supporting. The 1st Burma was holding Toungoo until it was relieved by Chinese divisions making their way from Lasio and Yunnan. The relief would take almost the entire month of March.

Chiang Kai Shek knew the Burma Road was his lifeline, and in January sent the Chinese 6th Army (equivalent to an understrength Western corps) to reinforce the British in Burma. They would be part of a larger Expeditionary Force of three Chinese Armies, but the rugged terrain and single road prevented the deployment of the force in mass. That the Chinese even arrived at all in Burma was due to the newly appointed commander of the Chinese in Burma, the American LTG Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell (and to get the lead elements where they were needed most, at Toungoo, Slim used a humorous method by which he had his logisticians place supply dumps farther and farther south on the Mandalay-Tougoo road. The Chinese followed like mice on a  trail of cheese until they were finally in position). The irascible and Anglophobe Stillwell was nominally placed under British command, but he was also Chiang’s Chief of Staff, and routinely used his position to circumvent British orders he didn’t agree with. The unity of command was further diluted by the Chinese’s own Byzantine command structure which featured two other Chinese generals who were peers of Stillwell’s: the commander of the Chinese Expeditionary Force in Burma and the Commander of the Chinese Mission to Burma. So the lone unit that finally arrived in Toungoo, the Chinese 200th Division, had five immediate commanders that they were officially subordinate to: one Brit, one American, and three Chinese, and one that they should have been subordinate to, Slim and the Burma Corps, at least until the rest of the Sixth Army arrived across the mountains and from the north. Nonetheless, the 200th Division was one of the toughest, best equipped, best led, and best trained divisions in the Chinese Nationalist Army. They took over the defense of the Sittang Valley at Toungoo while the 1st Burma slowly made their way to their assembly areas north of Prome.

Slim couldn’t wait for them to concentrate, and needed a victory, even a small one to restore some morale to the Burma Corps. The Japanese managed to resupply quicker than expected, and were reinforced by two divisions released from the successful operations in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Slim ordered the 17th Indian to attack south of Prome. The attacks were mildly successful, especially against hastily formed units of the Burmese Independence Army under Japanese officers. But traitorous Burmese ambushed isolated British units, and the reinforced Japanese launched their own attack despite the limited British counterattacks. The familiar cycle of Japanese roadblock-British counterattack-British withdrawal, which characterized much of the campaign, initiated. The British finally broke back through at the Battle of Shwedaung but in the process of the withdrawal several units were overrun and massacred. The British again saw to the defense of Prome. 

As the British were fighting their way back to Prome, the reinforced Japanese attacked Toungoo. They were in for a rude surprise. The Chinese 200th Division were the only soldiers in Burma that had defeated the Japanese before, and with a week’s preparation were determined to do so again. When the Japanese attacked Toungoo on 20 March, they ran straight into deliberately prepared and well camouflaged defensive positions and were massacred. However, Chinese divisions were understrength compared to their western and Japanese counterparts (only about 9000 troops, of which 3000 are porters) and the weight of numbers began to tell. The convoluted command structure prevented any further Chinese from reaching Toungoo in time. Still, the Chinese fell back to prepared positions inside the ancient walls of the Toungoo Dynasty and made a good fight of it. It looked as if they could hold, at least until Burmese guides brought columns of Japanese through the dense mountainous jungle around the city. The Chinese were forced to withdraw.

The fall of Toungoo to a superior force made Prome and the lower Irrawaddy Valley untenable, as the Hanthawaddy belatedly found out 400 years before. Slim and the Burma Corps retreated further north up the valley where hopefully they could form another defensive line around Mandalay with the Chinese coming over the mountains from Yunnan. But Burma widens significantly after the Prome-Toungoo bottleneck (such as it is) and the successful prospects for such a feat were drastically diminished.

It was almost as if the British went back in time: a year ago German U-boats and surface raiders sank merchant ships faster than they could be replaced and nearly forced the British into submission. In March 1942, it was happening again. With America’s entry into the war, the German Navy had another “Happy Time”. The Americans refused to put inter-city shipping along the Eastern Seaboard and the Caribbean into convoys before a committee review was completed by the US Navy on the hard learned and freely given British convoy experience. As the Americans flailed about with ineffectual “Hunter/Killer” groups, a surprisingly small number of U-boats were massacring isolated merchantmen against the backdrop of a well-lit US mainland. Churchill was back to counting down the months until the population of the British Isles was starved into submission.

Eleven months before, toward the end of the first “Happy Time”, the German battleship Bismarck broke out into the Atlantic. Only by the luck, specifically a one-in-a-million torpedo drop from an ancient and obsolete biplane, did the Royal Navy manage to slow the Bismarck down before she reached the safety of the French coast. And even then the Bismarck was more than a match for the battleships of the British Home Fleet, who nearly couldn’t sink the crippled ship despite their best efforts. The Admiralty didn’t want to go through that again, but in the winter of 1942, feared they would have to: the Bismarck’s sister ship, the Tirpitz, became operational and was spotted in Norway.

Bismarck didn’t sink any convoys, but still caused significant damage to the Atlantic shipping by its presence alone, mostly through convoy reroutes and delays. If the Tirpitz broke out, and actually sank some merchantmen, it could break the British before the full weight of America’s industry could be brought to bear. Before the Bismarck was sunk, it was heading to the French port of St Nazaire. The drydock there was built for the luxury liner Normandie and was the only drydock large enough on the Atlantic seaboard where the Bismarck could be repaired. The Tirpitz would require the same facilities. If the Normandie drydock was destroyed, the Tirpitz would have to return to Germany for repairs. If it was in the Atlantic that meant via the English Channel or around Scotland, and the British learned their lessons from the Channel Dash. If the drydock at St Nazaire were somehow disabled, the chance of the Germans unleashing the Tirpitz into the Atlantic would be significantly reduced, if not gone altogether. (They wouldn’t risk it. The Tirpitz was the last battleship Germany produced, plans for more were scrapped in mid-1941).

But the Normandie drydock was notoriously difficult to damage, much less destroy. The RAF ruled out bombing it, the bombers weren’t accurate enough. The battleships of the Home Fleet were tied up around Norway protecting Arctic convoys and preventing the Tirpitz from breaking out in the first place. Even if they headed south to bombard the drydock, St Nazaire was six miles up the Loire Estuary, and the Luftwaffe and shore batteries would have their way with them before they could get accurate fire on the target. They couldn’t afford further battleship losses to airpower; the experience of the Prince of Wales and Repulse was too fresh in everyone’s mind. Finally, a submarine couldn’t get close enough; the estuary was very shallow, except for a narrow channel that was dredged deep enough for ships to navigate up the river. But it was blocked by numerous anti-torpedo and anti-submarine nets. The mission was turned over to Vice Adm Lord Louis Mountbatten, the commander of the Combined Operations Headquarters to figure out.

The Combined Operations Headquarters was the British joint headquarters responsible for commando operations against mainland Europe and was comprised of the best from all branches of the British military. They determined that if commandos could approach up the Loire undetected they could carry enough explosives to destroy the drydock facilities, such as the pump house, power station, and wheel house, but something larger was needed to damage the massive 350 ton gates. They were so large the British referred to them as “caissons”. One ingenious planner suggested the use of a small ship packed with explosives to ram them.

The Royal Navy balked at the inevitable loss of one of their precious convoy escorts, but the thought of the Tirpitz in the Atlantic overruled those fears. The ship chosen was the HMS Campbeltown, the obsolete former USS Buchanan which was given to Great Britain by the United States in 1940 in the “Destroyers for Bases” agreement. The Campbeltown was a “four stacker” destroyer and over twelve days in mid-March, was significantly modified to look like a German “Mowe” class torpedo boat, at least at a glance… in the dark… by a German sentry that didn’t know any better. She was stripped of all excess weight, fitted with additional armor to protect the commandos and crew on board from the shore batteries, and packed with four and a half tons of explosives set in concrete, fitted with a timed fuses.

The plan called for the Campbeltown and an accompanying fleet of small craft to infiltrate up the Loire Estuary to St Nazaire where the disguised destroyer would ram the gates to the drydock, commandos would disembark and destroy the facilities, and then they would load onto the remaining small craft and escape. The planners didn’t expect them to succeed, but it had to be tried. Since the majority of the force was from the Royal Navy, the operational commander was Cdr Robert “Red” Ryder. To accompany the Campbeltown, Ryder had one motor torpedo boat, which would launch its torpedoes into the gate if the Campbeltown was incapacitated, one motor gun boat, which would serve as the floating headquarters, and 16 mahogany motor launches to carry the rest of the commandos.

The actual raid would be carried out by 265 men mostly from 2 Commando led by LtCol Charles Newman, though his superiors wanted to give experience to picked men from other units so men from six other commandos were attached (Operation Chariot was The Big Show, and everyone wanted in on it. The decision would significantly affect commando operations for the rest of 1942). While the Campbeltown was being modified, Newman and his men conducted rigorous rehearsals on the battleship King George V’s drydock in Southhampton. On 25 March they had a final rehearsal against a company of the Home Guard acting as the German defenders. The rehearsal was a disaster, and the elderly gentlemen of the Home Guard massacred the commandos. The operation was almost called off. If a company of old men could defeat the raid, how would they fare against the brigade of German infantry that was St Nazaire’s garrison? But the tide and moon meant they had to execute now, or they would have to wait a month before they could try again. Lord Mountbatten felt they could do the job, but doubted they could get back out. He had actually written them off, feeling that the objective was worth the lives of 611 of the British military’s best men. Operation Chariot was a “go”.

Just after midnight on 28 March 1942, Ryder’s small flotilla of wooden boats and iron men, and one very explosive tin can, entered the Loire Estuary for the long six mile trip under the noses of the Germans to the Normandie Drydock at St Nazaire.

Just before midnight 35 RAF bombers appeared over St Nazaire, on France’s west coast. Lord Mountbatten, the commander of Combined Operations, asked for 100 bombers, but Bomber Command couldn’t give more “without prejudicing ongoing operations”. The RAF mission commander was told simply to “create a diversion”, but not for what. He assumed the diversion was for another bombing raid, not for a small raiding force who was just about to enter the Loire Estuary. The bombardiers were told specifically not to bomb their usual target, the submarine pens in the basin of the port, so the bombers flew in circles over the town, and dropped a single bomb every minute or so, (to reduce civilian casualties in the surrounding area. Bomber Command still cared about civilian casualties at this point in the war) just to let Germans know they were there. All they did was alert the Germans that something was up. At 0100, the garrison commander declared, “Some deviltry is afoot”.

That “deviltry” was in the form of 265 commandos and 346 Royal Navy sailors aboard a destroyer converted into a floating bomb, the HMS Campbeltown, and 18 small wooden craft. Their mission: destroy the Normandie Drydock at St. Nazaire.

The Campbeltown’s hasty modifications to look like a German torpedo boat worked to a point. More importantly, they worked in conjunction with a stolen code book, which gave LtCdr Stephen Beattie, the captain of the Campbeltown, the correct challenge and password, which he blinked to any inquisitive German battery on shore as they sped past.

The Campbeltown was significantly lightened specifically so it didn’t have to follow the dredged channel which was too close to the northern shore. Nonetheless the Loire Estuary was only ten feet deep in many places, even at high tide. This was expected by the navigator, who, using a Loire pilot’s stolen depth chart and maps, plotted a meticulously detailed route up the estuary using a stop watch. However, he planned the run with the expectation of a constant speed of 14 kts, and LtCdr Beattie kept increasing the speed, so he had to redo calculations on the fly. (French Loire pilots would later say the run was a most impressive display of seamanship on the part of the navigator. Tom Clancy would use this as the basis for the “trench run” scene in “Hunt for Red October”, “Too fast, Vasily… too fast”). The Campbeltown struck and powered through more than one sand bar.

The Campbeltown continued on its nerve wracking journey up the Estuary passing dozens of guns ranging from quad 20mm anti-aircraft guns to massive 170mm ship cannon meant to deal with battleships, cruisers, and destroyers just like her. She bluffed her way past three coastal artillery batteries without incident. On two more occasions, the Germans opened fire on the speeding ship, only to be assuaged by frantic blinking of “friendly fire”. The raiders had made it 4 ½ of the six miles up the Loire Estuary without casualties. Unfortunately, about 2000 meters out the gig was up.

The garrison commander correctly surmised the form of deviltry once he’d been informed of the mystery ship, and ordered the shore batteries to ignore the blinking and open fire. Searchlights immediately illuminated the river, and were soon joined by the multitude of dual purpose anti-aircraft guns who were equally as deadly against ships and wooden boats as they were against bombers attempting to destroy the submarine pens. And they were much more accurate against the former.

Tracers of all types crisscrossed the estuary. Beattie, no longer willing to play the part of a German ship, lowered the Kriegsmarine ensign and ran up the Royal Navy’s battle ensign. The Campbeltown would either go down or ram the gate under her own colours. He ordered flank speed, a face melting 22 kts an hour, and raced for the lock gates of the drydock. It took the small fleet seven long minutes to get there.

It was seven minutes of Hell. The wooden motor launches were particularly vulnerable, especially with the exposed extra unarmored long range fuel tanks fitted on them specifically for this mission. Any accurate fire what-so-ever set them aflame and forced their crews of ten sailors and fifteen heavily laden commando passengers to jump into the oily flaming river if they weren’t killed in the inevitable explosion. Even so, the Campbeltown was the focus of most of the fire, and dozens of sailors and commandos on the deck were wounded or killed. LieutCol Newman, later commented “The weight of fire caught one’s breath. Her sides seemed to be alive with bursting shells.”

The up armored bridge was particularly targeted, and helmsman after helmsman fell wounded or killed. Eventually the helm was taken by Lt Nigel Tibbets, the brilliant explosives expert who fitted the 4 ½ tonnes of amatol into Campeltown’s hull. He was on the ship to make sure it exploded and found himself steering the ship under the unflappable Beattie. After a near miss of a lighthouse caused by the glare of the searchlights, Beattie calmly told the crew to “Stand ready to ram”, and at 0134 on 28 March 1942, the Campbeltown smashed into the southern lock gate of the massive Normandie Drydock. She crumpled 36 feet of her bow and was pointed slightly up, as if the ship tried to climb over. Tibbets’ amatol was placed directly above the gate. A smiling Beattie quipped, “Well there we are, four minutes late”.

Now was the time for Newman’s commandos to spring into action. Only 113 of the 265 were able to jump off the Campbeltown or land from the motor launches, the rest were either dead, too wounded to move, or drowning and burning to death in the river. Assault teams cleared antiaircraft positions and German defenders. Bren crews ran off to hold choke points against the overwhelming numbers of German troops converging on the area. And demolition teams, most of whom carried just a pistol and 90 lbs of explosives, raced off to the power stations, winch houses, and the all-important pumping station.

After clearing the defenders from each of the objectives, the commandos set their charges in the darkness with the cool efficiency of those who had rehearsed the task hundreds of times, which they had on the accurate mock ups in Southhampton. In the pump house, two severely wounded commandos had just 90 seconds to scale forty feet of scaffold stairs in the pitch black before they were killed by their own explosives. They made it with mere seconds to spare.

In just 25 minutes, all of the secondary objectives were destroyed, to include a German harbor patrol ship whose crew was so terrified of the commandos’ assault, they scuttled it to keep it from being captured. But the 25 minutes was too long for the remaining motor launches waiting at the Old Mole for the commandos. The guns of the wooden boats pounded the Germans, but they got much worse in return. Those that remained had to escape lest they were sunk. In any case, a particularly stubborn German pillbox on the quay itself separated the commandos from the flaming hell at its end. There would be no escape by sea.

About 70 remaining commandos rallied around Newman at the near end of the Mole. He gave them the bad news, and that they were to break up and head for neutral Spain, 350 miles to the south. They were not to surrender while they still had ammunition, and that the commando’s signature dagger was considered “ammunition”. They fought their way into the town and then split up. But by this time nearly 4000 Germans swarmed the area. One by one the small teams of commandos were killed or captured in small vicious fights, sometimes in alleys, sometimes in gardens, sometimes in basements, and sometimes in fields far away from St. Nazaire. Despite it all, six commandos made it to Spain and safety without being captured. Three more would escape and make it there later in the year.

Seven motor launches covered in blood and packed with wounded eventually limped back to the Atlantic. There they found their covering force of two British destroyers at the tail end of a successful engagement with four much larger German destroyers. The awaiting destroyers loaded up the survivors and sailed back to England.

Four other motor launches attempted to sail back to England on their own. Three would make it, despite incessant Luftwaffe attacks. The fourth ran into a much larger German torpedo boat. The men of the motor launch refused to surrender and even tried to board the German boat. One gunner kept up accurate fire for the entire hour long engagement despite being wounded 23 times. Once the fight came to its inevitable conclusion the impressed German captain sailed back to St Nazaire and found the highest ranking British officer he could find. He told him about the gunner’s exploits and demanded they he be given the Victoria Cross. The astonished Brit told him to write it up and after he recovered and escaped he would submit it. The astonished officer was Newman.

Both Newman and Beattie had been captured while trying to escape and were being held fairly close to the Campbeltown, which had not yet exploded. The damaged facilities would render the drydock unusable for months, maybe even a year, but it could still be repaired. The ship still hadn’t exploded at 1030, three and half hours after it was supposed to go off. By this time it was crawling with German engineers and souvenir hunters, even some officers with their French mistresses. All of the prisoners knew of the bomb, and couldn’t say anything lest the Germans find it and figure out a way to diffuse it. Those prisoners near the gates and clearly within the blast radius should have gotten Oscars for their fine acting, “They couldn’t look pleased that Germans were all over the ship. They couldn’t look quizzical as to why it hadn’t exploded yet. And they couldn’t look afraid because it could explode at that very second.”

Around noon, a German interrogator who spoke excellent English admonished Beattie for underestimating the strength of the gates and thinking that the flimsy ship would ever permanently damage them. At that moment, the Campbeltown exploded, the gates destroyed, and the flooding waters pushed the remains of the ship into the now useless drydock. Beatty commented, “Perhaps we didn’t underestimate the targets”.

No one knows why the Campeltown didn’t explode until much later than planned. At least one British officer was taken into the ship. Legend has it that he set off the unreliable, unpredictable, and sensitive acid fuses. The official history is that the notorious fuses just took longer to burn through due to the impact. But in any case, whomever the Germans took inside had to have giant stones to show them about the ticking time bomb, without alerting them.

Of the 611 raiders, 168 were killed and 215 were captured. The Normandie drydock wouldn’t be repaired until 1947, two years after the end of the war. The Tirpitz never ventured into the Atlantic. In fact, it never ventured anywhere, it was too precious to German prestige to risk in action. The Tirpitz was ingloriously sunk in a Norwegian fjord by a bombing raid in November 1944, without having sunk anything. Despite the losses, Winston Churchill would call Operation Chariot, the Raid on St. Nazaire, “The Greatest Raid of All.”