The road to India was within the Japanese Imperial Army's grasp, but at Imphal and Kohima, the Japanese advance was not just halted, it was broken. Their columns had fought, bled, and died to reach the gates of British India, but when the final shots were fired, they had nothing left. Their supply lines had collapsed. Their men were starving. Their dream of conquest had been reduced to corpses rotting in the jungle mud. With this failure, the last serious threat to British rule in India vanished. Japan would never again mount an offensive of this scale in the region. The invasion had been more than blunted, it had been crushed, and with it, the fate of the war in Southeast Asia was sealed.
Imphal. March 15 - May 31, 1944.
Japanese Forces: ~ 85,000 troops, and 7,000 Indian Nationalist Army Auxiliaries.
British and Indian Forces: ~ 120,000 troops.
Additional Reading and Episode Research:
- Slim, Sir William. Defeat into Victory.
- Evans, Sir Geoffrey. Imphal: Crisis in Burma (History of the Second World War by Pitt, Barrie).
- Turnbull, Patrick. Imphal-Kohima, 1944.
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