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…1944 Burma–India Campaigns

"American-born lieutenant Scott Gilmore, serving with the 8th Gurkha Rifles in the February 1944 siege known as the Battle of the Admin Box, reflected on the reasons the besieged forces defeated the Japanese. "Air supply had been the foundation for success, as it was to be for the rest of the war in this theater," he wrote. "That trusty warhorse of the Burma fighting, the C-47 Dakota, has been called the ‘new wonder weapon' of those times. So it was. We infantry came to feel great affection for it."1

This battle was one of a series of clashes along the 500-mile India–Burma border during the first eight months of 1944. While US Lt Gen Joseph W. Stilwell's Chinese and American forces fought their way from India to Myitkyina, Burma, British Maj Gen Orde Wingate's Chindits marched and flew into Burma for a campaign against the Japanese rear, lasting from March to August. Meanwhile, Japanese armies launched two major offensives against British general William Slim's Fourteenth Army in India. The first one came in February, resulting in defeat in the Arakan at the Battle of the Admin Box. The next month the Japanese undertook a major invasion of India that failed after months of fighting at Imphal and Kohima, India. These operations collectively involved thousands of troops maneuvering in some of the toughest terrain in the world, in an area the size of Pennsylvania…"

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